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"Government worked tonight," she said after her surprising victory. "On one of the toughest, most financially complicated, politically charged issues we face, we did something right."
Hitting the Books
In normal times, pension reform is about as exciting as title insurance, but these days it's major news from California to Ohio to New Jersey. The reason is simple: the cost of retirement benefits for public employees is rising sharply at a time when budgets are as tight as skinny jeans. Rhode Island is merely an extreme version of a widespread problem: 10% of this year's state revenues went to cover shortfalls in the pension fund; without reform, that number was likely to double next year. America is talking about pension reform for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: that's where the money is.
Problems that were masked when the economy was stronger are inescapable now--as Rhode Islanders learned last summer when unpayable pensions forced the town of Central Falls into bankruptcy. Sunny San Diego is flirting with bankruptcy, craggy Colorado is $22 billion short, and Illinois may be in more perilous shape than Rhode Island.
Such chaos has set the stage for star turns by union-bashing Republican governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. But Raimondo, 40, is neither Republican nor conservative. She has come at pension reform from a progressive angle, which may make her an even greater threat to the Democratic Party's labor-led establishment. Suddenly, public-employee unions are fighting a two-front war.
Her argument for change is rooted in her biography, an American Dream story at a time when too many people fear that the dream is dying. Raimondo's grandparents arrived in the U.S. from Italy early in the 20th century. They settled in Providence, an ethnic stewpot with a rich Italian flavor. One grandfather became a chef; the other ran a butcher shop. Asked by a visitor to recommend the best place in Rhode Island for Italian food, Raimondo answers confidently, "My house."
Her father, a World War II veteran, earned a college degree and had a good job as a metallurgist for Bulova but lost his career when the watch company moved its factory in search of cheaper labor. Seeing her middle-aged father piece together part-time jobs was a searing experience for a sixth-grader; it fired her ambition. Every morning, Raimondo climbed aboard the city bus to La Salle Academy, seven miles from where she lived. From La Salle, she vaulted to Harvard, where as the top economics student in the class of 1993, she caught the eye of the Rhodes scholarship committee.
The mid-'90s was a heady time to be a young Democrat at Oxford. There was a Rhodes scholar in the White House, and Raimondo was part of a community of Americans in England that included such rising stars as Cory Booker, now mayor of Newark, and Eric Garcetti, president of the Los Angeles city council. Even in a crowd of bright young people brimming with plans to save the world, Raimondo stood out. Her "incredibly earnest exterior masked an even more earnest interior," as one classmate puts it. As for her toughness, perhaps all you need to know is that this wisp of a woman joined a rugby team.