My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.
2005-01-14
Reactions In The Chamber
Part of the fun of seeing the speech live was the opportunity to watch the reaction of the opposition party to certain points in the speech. I tried ahead of time to guess which lines in the speech would earn applause, and then watched the Democrats to see if they joined in. I counted ten occassions on which the Dems did not join in to the general applause.
Four of them were, predictably, from "The Gauntlet" section of the speech. Here are the others:
And the forecasters at "Economy Dot Com" project Colorado job growth in 2005 at 2.8 percent--one percentage point higher than the national average. In fact, the FDIC velieves 2005 will be the best year in Colorado for new jobs since 2000. I'm not at all sure what in that section the Dems find distasteful or unworthy of applause. It cannot be a good thing to be in the position that your personal/political gain comes at the expense of your constituents.
. . . I stand before you this morning and report that the state of our great state is sound. Again, not sure why this is unworthy. Perhaps they simply disagree--in which case they become the party of pessimists.
Local governments have used this provision in TABOR. And voters have responded. The key is to let taxpayers know specifically what the funds will be used for. This was not a full split--a few Dems (I guess the ones that were still paying attention) did applaud this line.
When we passed these reforms, we asked educators and parents to give this bold change a chance. To let us put it in place, and let it work. They did. And it did. Yeah, can't applaud the CSAP--the CEA might withhold its money.
65 fewer schools are rated Low, representing 55,000 students. — There are 32 fewer schools rated Unsatisfactory, meaning that more than 7,000 students are no long attending unsatisfactory schools. Still with the whole hoping for bad news caucus.
I will oppose any effort to weaken our reforms or take tools out of the hands of our parents and teachers. We will not turn back. Okay, that one's obvious.
We all know what happens to the budget when voter initiatives require spending that our revenues can't sustain. Let's learn from our past experiences. A not-too-subtle shot at Amendment 23 here--pretty obvious why the Dems did not applaud this one.
I'm not sure if you can infer from the Democratic response that there are certain issues they hope to carry, or certain legislation they have already planned that goes counter to what the Governor is talking about. But they certainly are in the position of either relying on bad news to ensure their grasp of power, or are simply unwilling to deal with good news.
Either way is not good for them, and could spell short-term majorities. | |
|
