Election politics in Lincolnland

As the election season heats up here in Lincolnland, citizens are getting the old GnOPe Rauner-round, promises bereft of any plans or details, as if the how such things will be done were unimportant. Now where is it written that somebody who has made a lot of money in business (He’s rich. Get over it.)  knows anything at all about how to run a government?  These local Trumpettes (There is also Overwhite, the milk magnate.) do have better hair, but apparently no realization that a state government doesn’t work anything at all like their businesses, although the state government can and may go bankrupt, and that’s something they have probably experienced.  Please wait until TPP manages to extract his retirement funds from the state’s coffers before doing anything rash. (Yes, the fight with the retirement bureaucracy continues.)  One recent Rauner-round promise was to improve the administrative efficiency of state universities. Now this is something that TPP knows quite a bit about, and it’s a double whammy, a rich businessman who wants to be a politician who wants to tell educational professionals how to run a university.  Sure.  It’s bad enough when professional politicians try to run universities, let alone an amateur politician.  What happens when administration is made more efficient, i.e., smaller, is that the necessary functions performed by said administrators get pushed off onto faculty as if they had nothing else to do. Been there, done that. TPP has no love of university administrators, but he doesn’t want their job as part of his. Most of the Rauner-round is standard GnOPe sound bites, almost, but not quite as tired, but every bit as defunct as trickle-down economics. Voters let the GnOPe try all of this out in Kansas, their noble experiment, and the data is now in and everyone can see just how well it all worked. In case you didn’t know, it failed miserably.  (“Far from giving Kansas a bright new future, Brownback plunged it into chaos.”  Details at 11.) No question Lincolnland is a poorly run state, but at times you have to consider carefully the alternative, and with the realization that things actually can get worse, TPP will just have to hold his nose, and vote for the incumbent; if you don’t you just may get the change you asked for, just not the change you wanted.  Or you could move to Kansas and just try it out for awhile.