From left: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford; Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour; Texas Governor Rick Perry
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But critics like Leatherman say Sanford is ideologically blind to the pump-priming effects that public spending can have on business expansion and job creation, especially during crises. By the end of Sanford's first gubernatorial term, in 2006, many GOP leaders groused that his thrift crusade had brought the state economy to a standstill. Despite the national economic boom, South Carolina's coveted AAA bond rating had slipped because of lackluster growth, high joblessness and abysmal per capita income. When the state lost its bid for a $500 million Airbus plant that would have employed 1,150 workers, Sanford was widely questioned for what seemed a miserly effort to lure the aerospace giant. As he vetoed budget items to build trade centers or fund tourism marketing, and as the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce voiced a high level of frustration, some disgruntled Republicans mounted a primary challenge, which Sanford eventually beat back.
That 2006 victory emboldened Sanford in his commitment to conservative dogma. It also made him, in the wake of November's national-election disaster, a standard bearer for the GOP's hard line, along with Perry, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, all of whom have refused or threatened to reject parts of the Obama stimulus. Their chief complaint is the requirement that states pay unemployment benefits to part-time workers, which their states, unlike many others, don't do. That money is usually a small portion of the total stimulus disbursement — just 3% of the $17 billion Texas is getting — but the governors have seized on it as budget-busting Big Brotherism. (See who's who in Obama's White House.)
Sanford, however, is taking the stimulus defiance a step further: he said this week he'll turn down $700 million of it unless the Obama Administration grants him a waiver to use it to pay off South Carolina's debt instead of spending it on infrastructure and aid. Warning that the stimulus could "destabilize" his state's economy, he insisted it's "not a good idea to spend money that you don't have. We need to look longer-term and much more holistically at the notion of economic stimulus." But given South Carolina's economic straits, Leatherman compares using stimulus money to pay down debt to "seeing your house on fire and then rushing down to the bank to pay your mortgage instead of calling the fire department."
One theory holds that the hard-line GOP governors have little to lose by railing against the stimulus: pols like Sanford, who also said this week he's neither "ruling in nor ruling out" a presidential run, get to play to their conservative base while getting Obama's billions anyway. But others, like Leatherman, wonder if the showboating is all that risk-free. Should the stimulus work, it undercuts the governors' cowboy creed; and even if it doesn't succeed, they may be left looking like Rush Limbaugh, rooting for failure, with few alternatives but further belt-tightening to offer families whose belts have run out of holes. That might really remind folks a little bit of Zimbabwe.