Kingston Daily Freeman

A full agenda - December 30, 2007

WITH A couple of days still left in the current year, the political agenda for 2008 already looks pretty full.

In November, Ulster County residents will be faced with the responsibility of electing their first county executive. It's a significant decision not only because the post will be the most important in the county, but because the first county executive will have a terrific influence in setting the tone and tenor of the new charter form of government. It's one thing to draft a new government on paper - it's quite another to make hundreds of decisions about how to conduct day-to-day operations.

In Dutchess County, can anyone doubt a coming collision between the headstrong County Executive William Steinhaus, a Republican, and the new Democratic majority in the county Legislature? Even with a Republican majority over the preceding 16 years, Steinhaus never got along particularly well with the Legislature. As an institution, however, the Legislature has never done particularly well in asserting its own prerogative, and that held true of the days prior to 1992 when a Republican majority faced a Democratic county executive. Despite, the weakened political position of Steinhaus, who barely squeaked out re-election in a county that is trending Democratic, here's guessing he will lord over the Democratic Legislature at least at the outset.

Greene County faces some fundamental decisions about infrastructure. Specifically, the county must decide how to renovate its courthouse and must make progress toward replacing its entirely inadequate and decaying county jail.

In the latter, it had better take a good hard look at the mistakes of its Ulster County neighbor.

AT THE state level, two separate dramas will play out.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer will enter his crucial second year, a year in which he will have to right his floundering administration. Having squandered a historical mandate from the electorate in a few short months, he's now just one of a cast of not-particularly-well-liked Albany political characters. He is going to have to scratch and claw his way back into a leadership position.

At the same time, the Republican majority in the state Senate will face a do-or-die November election. Republicans have controlled the Senate chamber for reasons that have nothing at all to do with textbook notions of democracy or representation in a state in which Democrats handily outnumber Republicans in the number of enrolled voters. Their margin of control has shrunk to a single member.

Nationally, the presidential election presents an opportunity for the country to have much-needed debates about our economic direction and how to battle Islamic extremism.

Economically, we are a bit adrift. Globalization has produced little, if any, widely distributed benefits for Americans. If anything, the middle class finds itself as squeezed as ever, seemingly bamboozled into thinking that tax cuts for the wealthy and a laissez-faire federal government would somehow redound to their benefit. Our government spends like a drunken sailor and our national debt ticks ever upwards while the value of the dollar falls. The costs of essentials from food to energy to higher education continue to outpace the growth of wages.

AS FOR our response to Islamic extremism, "a bit adrift" doesn't begin to characterize the formlessness of the foreign policy slapped together under President George W. Bush. The administration would have us believe the Iraq War was no mistake whatsoever, never mind the costly blunder it is by nearly any measure. As we roll toward the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden remains at large and we still lack a coherent policy toward ending the threat he and his terrorist ilk present. Our misadventure in Iraq has played a central role in dissipating our strategic focus on the task. The presidential campaign presents an opportunity to have a great national discussion about this matter.

And, at some point - perhaps this could be the year - Americans are going to have to take a look at the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the domestic centerpiece of the Bush administration.

If this initiative, intended to bring accountability and, hence, improved results, to public education, it has not been apparent to us.

Certainly, we should demand to see the results, if results there be, to this great national effort forced down the throats of the states and, then, local school districts.

We also deserve to ask ourselves in 2008 whether any system of complex objective measures and incentives based upon standardized testing ever could be successfully concocted in Washington.

Yes, you will have noted our skepticism.

©Daily Freeman 2007