Ronald Reagan won a presidential election in 1980 by asking voters whether they were better off than they had been four years before. He knew the answer. At a time of rampant inflation and unemployment at home and the kidnapping of Americans abroad, it took a Pollyanna to see the bright side.
Most of the time, the better-or-worse question is a lot more difficult to answer. And yet it's a provocative way of teasing out truths about recent history. The editors of Governing have been considering it this fall, focusing on the 15 years since we first began publishing a magazine about state and local government. We've been asking how those years have treated our large and disparate community of readers in positions of public responsibility all over America.
Of course, no two elements of that community have had exactly the same experiences. States have ridden a fiscal and economic roller- coaster--solvent, confident and entrepreneurial in the late 1980s; crippled by recession in the early '90s; flush and cocky again in the late '90s; and now broke again. Counties, meanwhile, have grown accustomed to living dangerously, trusted by the states and the feds with an ever-expanding roster of responsibilities, especially in social services, but denied both the money to meet them and the authority to raise that money.
Only cities can answer the 15-year question positively. They are better off than they were in 1987--not every city, not every aspect of city life, but many of them have reversed decades of population decline and restored vitality to districts that were painfully empty 15 years ago.
For virtually all state and local governments, however, the year-by- year ups and downs have been overshadowed by a single larger reality: They have been gaining importance in the federal system; the national government has been losing it.
One way to trace this is with employment numbers. In the past 15 years, the state and local workforces have both grown dramatically while the federal workforce has shrunk by nearly 15 percent.
Or one can look to the crucial issues that, contrary to past experience, have been handled at the state rather than the federal level. Congress failed to take action on health care policy or deregulation of utilities in the early 1990s; state legislatures did. Now, while Congress continues to debate climate change issues, eight states have passed air pollution laws this year alone. State attorneys general have assumed the lead role in pursuing the corporate scandals that began with Enron in 2001.
It was widely assumed, in the aftermath of the last year's terrorist attacks, that one outcome would be a recentralization of federal power to cope with the terrorist threat. In fact, however, most of the critical decisions and responses will be made at the local level.
Add these developments together--and throw in recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions enhancing the authority of the states--and it seems clear that, in the first decade of the new century, the federal government is no longer the instrument of first resort when it comes to dealing with the most complex social and economic problems. State and local governments are the problem-solvers--uncertain, underfunded and disunited as they frequently are.
If that is true, it demonstrates the wisdom of a radical prophecy made in the mid-1970s by the sociologist and futurist Daniel Bell: A generation hence, the national state would be a declining force, and the initiative for change would come from somewhere higher up or further down. His prophecy was central to the creation of this magazine in 1987, and has driven its coverage and editorial mission ever since. We started Governing on a hunch that the large forces of governmental change were moving our way; as the past 15 years have unfolded, it has become more than a hunch.
For those who work in state and local government, this does not mean that life has become more comfortable, or management simpler or resources more plentiful. But it has meant that there are more challenges and opportunities than any generation of public officials has encountered.
