Attack of the Republican governors: 'the slick, the cruel, and the bought.'

• Author: Nichols, John

Meet Kirk Fordice--Republican governor. Shortly after taking office several years ago, Mississippi's chief executive was asked whether he planned to obey a court order requiring the state to provide historic black colleges with the same levels of aid as predominantly white colleges.

"We may have to call out the National Guard, because I'm just not going to do it," declared the first Republican to lead the Magnolia State in more than a century. Fordice mocks civil-rights-movement anniversaries, and he has failed to appoint any African Americans as agency heads in a state where they make up 36 percent of the population.

And he doesn't stop there. "The United States of America is a Christian nation," he says without apology.

Linking his words with public policy, Fordice has blocked attempts to increase support for Mississippi's woefully underfunded public schools, cajoled legislators to cap damages that can be collected by victims of corporate wrongdoing, and condemned his own attorney general for suing tobacco companies and other corporations.

To Beatrice Branch, who grew up in the Mississippi where Ku Klux Kian rallies and White Citizen Councils were still a part of the political landscape, Fordice is a terrifying throwback to an uglier time. Branch, a former head of Mississippi's Department of Human Services, who now serves as president of the state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is deeply troubled by the direction Fordice is taking the state. But she understands that Fordice is not merely a Mississippi phenomenon.

"I used to think Kirk Fordice some kind of Mississippi mistake," she said. "But then I started to recognize that he's not all that different from the other Republican governors around the country. They all have the same philosophies; Fordice is just less polished. But the agenda is pretty much the same--divide people and turn back the clock."

While the buzz about the nation's Republican governors remains remarkably positive, Branch represents a growing number of activists, academics, and political players who see these men as the storm troopers of the Republican revolution.

"These Republican governors are the Darth Vaders of the contemporary political scene--they are slick, they are cruel. and they are bought," says consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "They have dangerous agendas, and they are putting them into action so rapidly that a lot of Americans don't even know what's hitting them."

Playing on prejudice, offering warmed-over voodoo economics," embracing corporate lobbyists, and singing loudly from the Christian Coalition's hymnal, Republican governors are using their states as laboratories of reaction. Republicans in Washington hail them as models for the nation but the trouble is that they are undermining their own states. The question is not if, but when, the whole edifice will crumble.

"If you look at what they're doing, you have to ask yourself, `How can anyone in their right mind think this is going to work?'" says Tony Earl, former Democratic governor of Wisconsin. "They're revisiting all the mistakes of the Reagan era. They're employing simplistic thinking and untried concepts. They're creating public-policy messes that could take generations to clean up."

Says Earl, "These are not models for America."

But don't try to tell the Republican leadership in Washington--or most of America's leading political pundits--that the Republican governors are a bunch of political hacks who've gotten where they are by using racial "wedge" issues and discredited economic approaches.

To Washington's new GOP establishment, the governors are Exhibit A in the court of public opinion--the living embodiment of everything the Republican revolution is about. They are providing concrete examples for how Republicans can rule.

Ever since the votes were counted last November 8, Republican governors have been the hot commodity in the shopping mall of American politics. Sarah Ritchie, of the Center for the Study of the States at the State University of New York's Albany campus, says that if the Republican governors didn't exist, the new Republican Congressional leadership probably would have had to invent them.

After forty years of standing...