Fear of a One-Party Planet

In both the Post's tepid endorsement of Bob Ehrlich today and Barry Rascovar's mash note to the Governor from last week, one of the most prominent reasons they give for voting for Ehrlich is not so much his accomplishments, which have been mediocre, nor Martin O'Malley's (perceived) shortcomings, but the belief that, as the Post put it, "an O'Malley victory would herald a return to the brand of one-party Democratic rule that has served the state poorly in the past." This strikes me as misguided, even though I recognize the value of divided government -- we could certainly use some of it in the federal government right now. But it seems to me there are two ways one can go about it. One way is for the opposing parties to forge some kind of compromise, either by genuinely bipartisan legislation or (more likely) by bargaining over specific policy proposals. Mike Raia alludes to Mark Warner's tenure in Virginia as an example of this. The other way is the path of constant oneupsmanship that Ehrlich, and to a lesser extent the General Assembly, chose. Given how often the Assembly has overriden Ehrlich's vetoes, one could even argue we have had two governments in Maryland for the last four years. If this is what divided government looks like, I can do without it.

A further thing to consider is that, even in the context of one-party rule, you're still going to have divisions in the government. Maryland may be a majority Democratic state, but that doesn't mean it's ideologically uniform, which you could see during the BGE crisis in the spring. Moreover, barring any last-minute rallies (or court orders), you're going to have O'Malley as Governor, Peter Franchot as Comptroller, and Doug Gansler as Attorney General. With three highly ambitious men like that in the executive branch, one could argue it lessens the probability of a go-along-to-get-along attitude running rampant in Annapolis, as Rascovar and the Post fear. Matthew Yglesias' comments on a character from The Wire are worth quoting in this respect:

Maybe it's just 'cuz I'm an asshole, but I find myself a lot more sympathetic to Tommy Carcetti than a lot of Wire-watchers seem to be. It's his very cloying, grating, somewhat unprincipled ambition that, I think, makes it plausible that he'd be a good mayor. Politics is not, at the end of the day, a game in which the pure of heart are going to succeed, so you can just cross that option off your list of possibilities. What Carcetti has going for him is that he's clearly not the kind of guy who's going to be satisfied if his last job in politics is Mayor of Baltimore. To take the next step and become governor or senator and nurse vague ambitions for the White House he's going to need, on some level, to do well as mayor and improve the city. By contrast, you see a more pernicious type of politician in Clay Davis and Clarence Royce -- men who lack higher ambitions and are therefore motivated primarily by veniality.