Amid Specters of Governors Past, Warner Has Little to Cheer
L. Douglas Wilder is a fairly benign spirit, bringing glad tidings of great budget savings -- or at least some help in closing a $1 billion shortfall. Wilder, governor in the early 1990s and chairman of a special Warner commission on government efficiency, is a fellow Democrat and on-again, off-again chum of Warner's. Their friendship is on at the moment.</br></br>The other, more worrisome specter is that of James S. Gilmore III, whose tax-cutting legacy from the late 1990s is costing state government $1 billion a year and rising. Gilmore's Republican tax cut is the gift that keeps on giving -- or, in Warner's case, that keeps on taking a major bite out of the state treasury that's been limping along for a year.</br></br>Gilmore and Wilder couldn't be more different, but their budget experiences hold some powerful lessons for their younger successor, especially in this gloomy fiscal season.</br></br>Five days before Christmas, Warner will unveil a state budget that, because he has no other options, will cut once-inviolate programs so deeply that advocates for schoolchildren, the poor and the sick will run screaming from Richmond. To borrow the earthy imagery of Warner's senior finance adviser, sacred cows will be slaughtered on Dec. 20. Things will get ugly in the halls of the General Assembly.</br></br>In 1990-91, Wilder was in a similar jam, scratching his way through a recession and determined to survive without raising taxes. As the nation's first elected black governor, Wilder became a hero to Virginia's conservative white establishment by surpassing all expectations, shedding his big-spending Democratic ways and cutting the budget to the bone.