ODDLY for someone who makes a living writing speeches, what I found most exhilarating about the Thanksgiving-week conference of Republican governors was the complete absence of prepared texts, Teleprompters, or other signs of self-conscious performance. These are the props of big government, and it was nice for once to find an air of naturalness, with people too busy getting things done to worry much about appearances.
Gone, too, were the usual interminable discussions of “streamlining strategies” for this or that program. Gone were the tedious policy specialists with their “paradigms” of newer, smarter, better big government. Much of the talk focused on “unfunded mandates.” But the question was not, “Where do we get the funds?” It was, “Where does the Federal Government get off mandating things in the first place?” Governors as different as William Weld of Massachusetts, Kirk Fordice of Mississippi, and John Engler of Michigan seemed to agree on the appropriate paradigm: limited government, defined powers, taciturn leadership, and sovereign states.
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