Guest AuthorDoes Florida even need a governor? I know there’s been a lot of hoopla around Charlie Crist getting in the race for his old job, but seriously, is the position relevant anymore?
It seems to me that getting elected governor these days is like being knighted. It’s an honor for sure, but the job just doesn’t call for the same level of sacrifice and courage that it once did. Celebrity counts for more than chivalry, and it leaves me wondering if it’s worth all the fuss.
It certainly was in years past. To get government in the sunshine, Florida needed Reubin Askew. It took Bob Graham to make us focus on the environment. Bob Martinez wanted to put the brakes on spending. Lawton Chiles invested in children and Jeb Bush shook up our education system.
Whether or not their quests were successful or popular, they all had big ideas about what the state could and should be.
But Florida is a different place now. We, and thus our elected officials, seem to have given up on ambitious goals. We’re content now if things just don’t get worse, or much worse, anyway.
In this climate, the governor is more of a caretaker, like the captain of a museum ship that never leaves the harbor. That’s OK, I guess, but we certainly don’t need an expensive, divisive election to fill the job. And it shouldn’t come with nearly as much power and prestige.
So, what if we scrap the idea of an elected chief executive and just have the Florida Legislature hire a nonpartisan general manager?
The upside is pretty obvious. Instead of listening to tired political pablum about hope, leadership, change and the like, they could just take applications and hire the best candidate. Minus the prestige and political hype, it’s just another state job, after all.
Gov. Rick Scott isn’t really taking a paycheck, so we’d have to spend a little more money on salary. But we could make up for it with what we save on the Governor’s Mansion, security, press officers and scheduling operations.
If we look hard enough, I bet we could find some real talent out there – maybe pick up a superstar county administrator or agency head or business leader. We might even look outside Florida and snag a governor from a Division I-AA state like New Hampshire or Delaware.
The point is that I’m sure we can find someone out there qualified and willing to head up state government, someone who isn’t concerned about the title or the office or the perks. I’m also sure that person won’t be on the November ballot, so I say let’s try going without a governor. (We haven’t had a lieutenant governor for several months now. Have you missed anything?)
The only hard part would be amending Florida’s Constitution to eliminate the office. But let’s suppose we do get it on the 2018 ballot. Imagine if, in addition to the slate of candidates, there’s another alternative a little further down the page – one that provides a choice many of us have wanted for several years.
With such an amendment on the table, we could finally have a legitimate reason to actually vote for “none of the above.”
Based on what we’ve seen lately, I like the odds.
