Tag Archives: Larry Hogan

2014 Governor's Race

Fiscal Fantasy

 The Second Gubernatorial Debate

Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Larry Hogan has an opening with genuine discontent about taxes. He has certainly pressed it home virtually to the exclusion of all other issues.

Tax Cuts for You, Tax Cuts for Me

Hogan has put out the idea of a panoply of tax cuts. At a forum in a Baltimore populated by retirees, his idea of eliminating all taxes on retirement income was unsurprisingly popular among this demographic that votes at very high rates.

He also wants to lower taxes on corporations as part of an effort to improve the State’s business climate along with cutting back income taxes more broadly. Since he repeatedly talks about repealing all tax increases that occurred over the past eight years, that means that the gas tax and the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fee (a.k.a. the “flush” tax) should also go.

But Before We Even Get to Tax Cuts

However, before engaging in any new tax cuts or spending, the next governor will have to deal with a major revenue shortfall. Tax revenues are often hard to predict. While the federal deficit has declined rapidly, Maryland will need to close a gap of $405 million in order to balance its budget.

Illusory Plan to Pay for Them

Hogan promises we can have it all by cutting “$1.75 billion in waste and abuse that we have identified.” Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse has a long history as the savior of politicians who want to cut taxes or increase spending without making tough choices. Just recall the Grace Commission report 30 years ago.

Hogan has now dusted off this strategy. Except that his figure is woefully inaccurate–inflated by a minimum of $843 million— as a review of just a portion of Hogan’s claims by the Baltimore Sun revealed. Sloppy math, such as a misplaced decimal point, undermines the Hogan meme that as “just a small businessman” who will watch our pennies carefully.

Even more embarrassing is that another error to the tune of $285 million relied on collecting more in property taxes–not exactly the theme of his campaign–but also on the assumption of tax rates of 100%. My guess is that not what they were going for when they unveiled their plan.

Hogan’s campaign concedes that the Sun‘s report is correct, as  Campaign Spokesman Adam Dubitsky creditably acknowledged. (Smart: admit the mistake, move on, and pivot back to the campaign’s core message.)

And the Costs are Unknown

Hogan doesn’t know the cost of all of the various tax cuts that he has proposed. However, the Washington Post reported that a nonpartisan analysis revealed that the cut in retirement taxes alone would cost the State over $1 billion in revenue.

Incredibly, despite the welter of promises, Hogan simply hasn’t looked into it. As Dubitsky explained to the Post, “It’s not going to be until we dive into the budget after we win the election.” An amazing admission about the leader of Change Maryland who just said in a debate “I don’t want to over promise and under deliver.”

Since Hogan promises so much but there is little on the table in the way of real cuts, I worry that they may fall on the state’s universities–not just in terms of tuition but also in other funding that has been vital to its steady positive trajectory. And my view is that any pro-business economic strategy has to rely both on continuing that movement and taking better advantage of it.

Hogan 2.0?

Speaking with Dubitsky and listening to Hogan in the debate, one also perceives a more reasonable version of Hogan. Dubitsky told me that Hogan is committed to maintaining the State’s AAA bond rating and getting the fiscal house in order before moving forward with tax cuts. Makes sense to me.

Certainly, working to make Maryland more attractive to business is  a perfectly reasonable goal, as is the idea of restructuring state government to improve efficiency and focus it on future challenges. But so far, all Marylanders have received is theme and message without an iota of content.

Avoiding specifics may well be the way to go in a campaign–too many Democrats get bogged down in the specifics of plans. Anyone remember the endless and pointless 2008 debates between Obama and Clinton about who had the better health care plan?

Even just the outlines of an approach and concrete examples backed up by facts would put meat on the bones and provide badly needed credibility. Even more welcome would be if Hogan would stick to not over promising by ceasing to hand out impossible tax cuts like lollipops on the campaign trail.

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2014 Governor's Race, polls

Brown Expands Lead in CBS/NYT/YouGov Poll

CBS/NYT/YouGov has good news for Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown. According to their poll, Brown leads Larry Hogan by 55-38 among likely voters, including leaners.

Inside the Survey

This poll, conducted September 20-October 1, reveals nice improvement for Brown. Their previous survey in the field from August 18-September 2 had Brown ahead by 51-37 among likely voters. So Brown is up 4 points and further above 50%, while Hogan is up only 1 point and still below 40%.

According to this survey, Brown’s improvement is due entirely to increased support among white voters. While Brown remains at 80% among black voters, he has increased his white support from 37% to 42%. And he still has room to grow among African-American voters.

The gender gap remains cavernous in the recent survey with Brown up 65-27 among women and Hogan up 52-44 among men. While Hogan needs stronger numbers in both groups, the poll indicates that he must make major improvement among women in order to be competitive on Election Day.

The breakdown by party identification reveals the strength of the Democrats. Brown is down 7-93 among Republicans and 37-52 among Independents. But it just doesn’t matter because he is up 86-6 among his fellow Democrats who compose one-half of likely voters according to the survey.

Reading the Tea Leaves

The key question raised by the survey is why did the Lieutenant Governor promise not to raise taxes in the recent debate. Even if it is the top issue for voters, a candidate leading 55-38 doesn’t need to bind his own hands.

Internal polling for the Brown campaign may show a much smaller lead over Hogan–even smaller than the 9 point lead in the recent Washington Post poll. While some Democrats exude confidence, there are also significant rumblings of concern around the State.

Alternatively, it may suggest that a Brown-Ulman Administration would veer away from the course charted by the O’Malley-Brown Administration in terms of tax and economic policy. A surprise to those who see Gov. Brown merely as O’Malley 2.0. Taking taxes off the table forces Brown either to curtail his progressive agenda or restructure State government to accomplish it.

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Governor

Looks Like We Have a Governor’s Race

Though we tend to assume that Maryland is a rollover for the Democrats, and often is, gubernatorial elections have been surprisingly competitive since Gov. William Donald Schaefer, whose goal was to win all the votes rather than only most of them, left the Mansion in 1994.

Gov. Parris Glendening barely beat Del. Ellen Sauerbrey, who earned the sobriquet Ellen Sourgrapes when she refused to concede defeat after seeing her claims of fraud evaporate, in 1994. Glendening won by a more convincing 10% in their 1998 rematch.

Republican Rep. Bob Ehrlich had his revenge on the Democrats for redistricting him out of his congressional seat when he ran for governor in 2002 and beat Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. But Ehrlich, memorably nicknamed “Bobby Haircut” by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, was a one-term wonder.

Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley defeated Ehrlich in for reelection in 2006 by over 6 points. Even though it was great year for Democrats, Ehrlich was the only Republican governor to lose. Ehrlich came back for a rematch but it was no “Return of the King.” O’Malley defeated him by an even greater 14%, although 2010 was a terrible year for Democrats.

In short, though the Democrats have dominated gubernatorial contests–Ehrlich was the first GOP governor since Agnew became the accidental governor–Republicans have run good candidates and viable gubernatorial campaigns even as the state has trended inexorably towards the Democrats in virtually all other elections.

Lieutenant Governor has not been a great launching pad for gubernatorial campaigns since the office was created in 1970. Blair Lee III lost the Democratic primary to Harry Hughes in 1978. Melvin Steinberg lost the Democratic primary to Glendening in 1994. Townsend lost the general election in 2002. (Michael Steele has not run for governor but lost his bid for the U.S. Senate in 2006.)

This year, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown hopes to break the curse by becoming the first Lieutenant Governor to become governor since the office was created in 1970. Certainly, Brown won the primary convincingly in the face of serious opposition.

Despite expectations of a relatively easy campaign, Maryland has a real contest this year. Larry Hogan is serious politico if only because he says “I am not a professional politician” despite having been Ehrlich’s appointments secretary and founding “Change Maryland” as a vehicle for his gubernatorial ambitions. (Sidenote: Would you hire a doctor or plumber who put up a shingle proclaiming “I am not a professional” to get your business?)

Another inkling of a real campaign and that the internal polls may be closer than the recent 9 points reported in the Washington Post is that Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown felt it necessary to make a startling promise not to raise taxes even as Hogan faces his own problems regarding “error riddled” identification of government waste that he plans to eliminate.

Next up: an examination of the claims and promises of both the Hogan and Brown campaigns.

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2014 Elections, Governor

Hogan Campaign Jumped into the GOP Cul-de-Sac

Despite Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Larry Hogan’s effort to turn attention away from social questions such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights, his campaign is turning out to be the perfect illustration of Republican demographic and policy problems.

The Washington Post recently highlighted Hogan’s call for tax cuts targeted at the elderly:

Speaking at a retirement community along with his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, Mr. Hogan said that once he gets spending under control, his administration would “completely eliminate state income taxes for pensions and retirement income.”

As is disappointingly customary for too many Republican candidates, he made no mention of the spending reductions needed to pay for these tax cuts that just happen to be popular with the high-turnout elderly electorate:

We’d like to report that, along with his blockbuster tax cut proposal, Mr. Hogan released detailed projections showing how much revenue it would cost the state and which programs he would target for commensurate spending reductions. But we can’t, because he didn’t.

Hogan’s choices mirror directly the current state of the national Republican coalition, and the surprisingly non-conservative, irresponsible policy cul-de-sac that follows from their imperative to cater to it. David Frum explained it well in a must-read article in Foreign Affairs:

Republicans have come to rely more and more on the votes of the elderly, the most government-dependent segment of the population — a serious complication for a party committed to reducing government. . . .

What boomers mean when they call themselves conservative is that they have begun to demand massive cutbacks to spending programs that do not directly benefit them. Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. Not surprisingly, then, boomers say they want no change at all to the Medicare and Social Security benefits they have begun to qualify for.

Boomers’ conservatism is founded on their apprehension that there’s not enough to go around — and on their conviction that what little resources there are should accrue to them. . . . It might seem paradoxical that people on Medicare, or soon to qualify for it, would oppose a further expansion of the government’s role in health care, but it actually makes perfect sense: boomer conservatives fear that government in the age of Obama will serve somebody else’s interests at the expense of their own.

Republicans have responded to boomers’ fears by reinventing themselves as defenders of the fiscal status quo for older Americans — and only older Americans. . . . [T]he GOP has rejected changes to retirement programs that might in any way impinge on current beneficiaries. The various budget plans Republicans produced in the run-up to the 2012 election all exempted Americans over age 55 from any changes to either Social Security or Medicare.

So Republicans like Hogan have become defenders of the elderly at the expense of other generations. Indeed, Hogan’s proposal is essentially a direct transfer from non-retired people who will get fewer services but still pay the same taxes to the elderly who would pay significantly less tax in Hogan’s imagined Maryland. Not a great deal for most Marylanders.

There is unquestionably an opening for a candidate to argue that Marylanders are too highly taxed and that regulation prone Democrats have stifled economic growth that is vital to employment and our State’s long-term success. But Hogan thus far has yet to make an argument in a remotely realistic or coherent way that suggests a conservative vision or way forward.

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marriage equality

So More on Hogan and Marriage Equality

Normally, I don’t like to multi-post on the same story on the same day unless there is breaking news but this story seems worth an exception. Early this morning, I posted a story stating that GOP Gov Candidate Larry Hogan had changed his position on marriage equality after the primary. It turns out that was incorrect: he opposed trying to overturn the will of the people.

However, there is really more to the story than that simple narrative that the Hogan campaign would like to propagate. Hogan has no clear public position on the core issue. In response to the Baltimore Sun, he refused to state whether he personally supports marriage equality legislation, sidestepping the question by neatly saying that the referendum decided the matter. Elsewhere, he has stated that he “was” a supporter of “traditional marriage” and supported civil unions for same-sex couples but also would not state how he voted in the referendum.

Politically sensible as I outlined earlier but not exactly a profile in courage–and there were Republicans willing to take a stand in favor of marriage equality in the legislature.

And it also obfuscates the well-known truth in the halls of Annapolis that many Republican legislators don’t give a whit whether same-sex couples can marry and that many who voted against it actually personally favored the legislation (and knew marriage equality was an inevitability) but feared their primary election constituency.

Though I welcome Hogan’s desire to place his focus elsewhere, the dissimulation by Republicans like Hogan who seek to be viable statewide on their personal beliefs is a bit wearying–and must be even more so for him as he will have to continue to adjust his position with rapidly changing public opinion. It also seems fair to ask how someone who refuses to say how he voted on a key issue is going to lead the State on others in the future.

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marriage equality

Error in Hogan Story

The previous story indicated that Hogan had changed his position on marriage equality after the primary based on recent stories in the press that indicated that Hogan’s position was new. RedMaryland kindly pointed out that I was wrong on this one. While Hogan certainly did not advertise his position, he took his position against fighting the law since it was approved by the people in the referendum before the Republican primary. I hate not getting it right as much as the next guy, so have changed the story to be more accurate.

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Governor, marriage equality

Hogan Evolves on Marriage Equality

Republican Gubernatorial Nominee Larry Hogan let it be known first to the Washington Post and then to News Channel 8 that he wants to take marriage equality off the table in this year’s election:

Hogan said on News Talk with Bruce DePuyt on News Channel 8 in response to a question about whether he voted for the state’s same-sex marriage law in a 2012 referendum on it that he was “originally for civil unions.”

“I was a supporter of traditional marriage,” he told DePuyt. “It’s an issue that I fully understand. The voters have made their decision. I support their decision and will uphold the law. I’ve evolved I guess on the issue.”

Hogan said marriage rights for same-sex couples, extending in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants and other social issues “are really decided in Maryland.”

“They have no part in this campaign whatsoever,” he said. “We’ve been completely focused on the issues that all Marylanders are focused on right now, and that’s economic issues.”

A good decision politically–not to mention morally. The social issues like marriage equality are dead losers for Republicans in Maryland. When the focus is on them, they don’t even get a chance to get off the ground. And opinions on marriage have continued to move rapidly in the two years since Marylanders approved it at the ballot box.

(Note: The previous version of this story indicated that Hogan had changed his position after the primary based on recent stories in the press that indicated that Hogan’s position was new. RedMaryland kindly pointed out that I was wrong on this one. While Hogan certainly did not advertise his position, he took his position against fighting the law before the Republican primary. I hate not getting it right as much as the next guy, so have changed the story to be more accurate.)

 

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Anne Arundel

The GOP’s Peroutka Headache

Anne Arundel County Council Candidate Michael Peroutka was until recently the rare political bird who refused to talk to the media. When he finally did agree to talk to reporters, one cannot help but think that the original refusal was the better bet.

Peroutka has been active in the John Birch Society but it is his current board membership on the League of the South that has attracted scrutiny. Labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the League advocates secession from the U.S. Indeed, the video above shows Peroutka asking people to “stand for the national anthem” of Dixie–not the Star-Spangled Banner.

The Baltimore Sun, which  has done a fine job of covering Peroutka’s checkered past and current unacceptable views and thus been one of the many criticized by Peroutka, reports that he doesn’t think that was a mistake and refuses to leave the League.

As a result, Republicans have started running for the hills. Gubernatorial Candidate Larry Hogan wisely didn’t wait to disassociate himself from Peroutka and his campaign says that Hogan “absolutely disavows” him. Peroutka now whines that Hogan didn’t “dialogue” with him.

Yes, Peroutka and the League are just all about dialogue. I wonder how much dialogue Peroutka had with LGBT leaders before he said that the “gay rights movement will lead to ‘forced homosexuality.'” Or the League had immigrant advocacy groups before attacking “the flood tide of massive Third World immigration and leftist attempts to destroy [the South’s] very cultural and political foundations.”

Closer to home, Anne Arundel Republican County Executive Candidate Steve Schuh said he would not run with Peroutka after he refused to resign from the League: “I simply cannot support someone who is a member of an organization that appears to be racist or that advocates for the dismemberment of the United States.”

Unfortunately the State Republican Party has yet to back up their leading candidates and has made “no decision” on whether to back Peroutka. At this point, the GOP is late and needs to join Hogan and Schuh in this no-brainer decision if it doesn’t want to persuade more Marylanders that they are way out of the mainstream.

The Capital has reported the Peroutka now claims that he is anti-secession even as he won’t give up his seat on the League board:

He said people moving out of Anne Arundel County and the state of Maryland because of high taxes represent individual secession.

Peroutka said his campaign was “anti-secession” because he was “asking people to place trust in me so that I can work within that government to prevent the individual secession that’s occurring now.”

“Whether that individual secession will form into a political movement — I’m not a part of that,” Peroutka said. “I’m actually going in the other direction.”

Peroutka can continue to piss all over America to his heart’s content and his party’s heartburn but he could at least do us the courtesy of not calling it rain to borrow a phrase.

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