In 1986, a local TV reporter questioned Gov. William O’Neill about his leadership style during a debate. Heading into his second full term, the wrap on O’Neill was he never set goals; he simply took it as it came and reacted to events of the day.
As O’Neill tried his best to answer the question the reporter kept interrupting him with the taunt, “The leadership question, the leadership question, answer the leadership question.”
The fact is the job of governor is at least 50 percent reacting to things you have no control over. Every day there are 50,000 state employees, most of whom you will never meet, doing jobs you will never have a need to understand. At any moment one of them could do something, or fail to do something, with the result ending up on your desk.
Then there’s your own team to worry about. It was also Gov. O’Neill who said, “When running for re-election it’s not your opponents who hurt you, it’s your friends.” You never know what bone headed move an over zealous loyalist will pull in an effort to help. The intentions may be good, but the execution is often wrong.
When not reacting to events, the rest of your time can be spent pursuing your own agenda. The same can be said for the legislature, where a great deal of energy goes into simply rounding up the party caucuses to get them to vote as a block.
Excitable Utterances
Acknowledging that office holders can’t always set the agenda, there is a disturbing trend in state government to over react to events of the day. Almost any high profile event gets an immediate response. The formation of a task force, legislative hearings, calls for investigations and resignations and bold declarations that something “will never happen again.”
The agenda is set not by the leaders we elect, but by the news media. The most powerful people in state government these days appear to be the publishers of the state’s newspapers.
Two recent examples include the reaction to the latest truck crash on Avon Mountain and the still evolving reaction to the murders of three members of the Petit family in Cheshire.
In the last three years there have been two dramatic accidents involving trucks on Avon Mountain. After the latest crash, there were immediate calls for a ban on truck traffic on the heavily traveled road. Fine, but obviously such a ban creates other problems and obviously the problem is not necessarily the hill, it’s the brakes. The solution is not banning trucks, it’s increasing truck inspections.
Convictions
The hasty reaction to the Petit murders included calls for the dissolution of the parole board and tougher sentences to keep convicts in jail longer. Lost in the rush to appear to be “leading” is the memory of what happened when a similar over reaction led to the abolishment of the ethics commission. We have had an ethics commission in name only ever since.
It took legislative hearings for the corrections commissioner to bring lawmakers back to earth and face the fact that increasing penalties and eliminating parole will lead to prison over-crowding and the need for new prison construction. She put a minimum price tag at about $220 million for two facilities.
It is one thing to react quickly in a crisis, it’s another to be reactionary on issues that require thought before action. It’s not a sin to take some time to consider your next step. Instead of feeling compelled to have a policy solution for every question, it would be refreshing to hear an office holder tell the press, “I’m not sure how we should address that, let me get back to you in a few days.”
Dean Pagani is a former gubernatorial advisor. He is V.P. of Public Affairs for Cashman and Katz Integrated Communications in Glastonbury.