Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
One of the perks of being the top official in one of the nation’s 55 states, commonwealths and territories is the invitation to be wined and dined at the White House every February during the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association (NGA). The black-tie dinner is usually a deliberate display of bipartisan collaboration, and a chance for governors to build relationships with each other and with the federal government.
In response to the disinvitations, the remaining Democratic governors said they wouldn’t attend the event. Then Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who chairs the National Governors Association alongside Moore, announced the organization would no longer “facilitate” the dinner. The next day, the NGA announced that “the president will welcome governors from all 55 states and territories to the White House.” Trump then attacked Stitt, calling him a RINO (Republican in name only), and suggesting that Moore and Polis still weren’t invited, and in fact were “not worthy” of being invited. The NGA did not respond to a request to clarify the guest list for the dinner or make its CEO, Brandon Tatum, available for an interview.
The NGA White House dinner is an event that “the American people admittedly don’t care about,” according to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat. But over the decades it has served many purposes, for presidents and governors both, and the dustup over this year’s event reflects a polarized and bitter politics that NGA has prided itself on being a bulwark against over the last century.
The NGA event is usually the first White House dinner that new presidents host when they take office. They have used the occasion to preview their budget proposals, typically delivered to Congress in the weeks following the dinner, and to set the tone for their presidencies. Jimmy Carter used the occasion in 1977 to introduce the Friendship Force, an effort focused on building global peace and cultural diplomacy. In 1981, Ronald Reagan told the assembled governors he was focused on shifting from “economic control by government to economic control on government.” Bill Clinton, who, like Carter and Reagan, had been a governor before he became president, opened the 1993 NGA dinner by saying, “You ever had the feeling you’ve been here before?” In 2009, first lady Michelle Obama invited reporters on a tour of the White House kitchen and garden before the NGA dinner to jump-start a “healthy food” initiative.
Governors have often used the occasion to build allegiances with one another. Former Utah Gov. Olene Walker, who was serving a partial term after her predecessor resigned to join the George W. Bush administration, reportedly decided to run for a full term after California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom she sat next to at the 2004 NGA dinner, promised to host a fundraiser for her in her state. (She didn’t end up getting Utah Republicans’ nomination that year.) And they’ve used the dinner to stir up speculation about their own prospects for higher office.
There have been previous dustups, partisan tensions and some notable absences. Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer, a Republican, made a point of skipping the NGA White House dinner in 1998 amid the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal. (Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had in fact had one of their “sexual encounters” in the White House on the same day as the NGA dinner two years prior, according to the Ken Starr report.) New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie skipped the dinner in 2014, during the Obama administration, as he was gearing up to run for president. Last year, Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, had a public spat over the administration’s stance on transgender student athletes. But the administration’s singling out of two opponents for exclusion from the dinner is a novel development.
“I don’t remember any governor ever being disinvited from either the meeting or the dinner,” says Raymond Scheppach, who led the NGA as executive director from 1983 until 2011.
In the early years of this century, the NGA was ranked among the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington. That was a direct result of its bipartisan nature, Scheppach says; when red-state and blue-state governors got together on something, it was typically a light lift for the president after that. For example, governors essentially wrote the welfare reform legislation that Clinton championed in the 1990s, Scheppach says. The NGA has waned in influence as its members have found less and less to agree on in recent years. The organization still promotes and tries to practice solidarity between governors of opposing parties. But the confusion over the guest list this month, and the question of whether the dinner will go forward if individual governors are disinvited, are a reflection of the changing times.
In the old days, Scheppach says, “If any White House had pulled what this White House has done, the party that was still being invited would boycott. They would just shut down everything. There wouldn’t be any questions about it.”
(Jeff Wheeler/The Minnesota Star Tribune/TNS)
One Hundred to One
Amy Klobuchar wants to leave the U.S. Senate and become governor of her home state. So do three of her fellow senators, Democrat Michael Bennet of Colorado and Republicans Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. For Blackburn, the governor’s job would come with a substantial increase over the $174,000 annual salary paid to U.S. senators. For the others, the governorship would come with a significant reduction in pay.
Why would someone leave the U.S. Senate, one of the cushiest, most prestigious jobs in politics, to become governor? One reason may be that the U.S. Congress is an increasingly divided, acrimonious and slow-moving institution. Senators have to hash out policies and budget bills as one of a hundred peers, with agenda-setting power that’s dwarfed by that of the president. Governors meanwhile are chief executives and they typically enjoy considerable deference when it comes to making state policy.
Sixty-five U.S. senators have run for governor since 1913, according to Ballotpedia, a site that tracks elections. Fewer than half of those elections, 27 to be exact, resulted in a senator becoming governor, with incumbent or former senators losing 21 primary elections and 21 general elections for the position. Richard Nixon had been a U.S. representative, a senator, a vice president and a failed presidential candidate by the time he lost his bid for the California governorship in 1962, culminating in a moody late-night concession speech in which he told the press, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Senators have had better luck in gubernatorial races since the mid-1980s, winning 13 elections and losing eight. Three sitting governors — Republicans Mike DeWine of Ohio, Mike Braun of Indiana and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire — previously served in the Senate.
Despite being outnumbered by senators 2 to 1 at any given time, former governors have run for and won Senate seats far more frequently than the reverse. Out of 347 elections in which a governor was seeking a Senate seat since 1913, they’ve won 127 times. Two recent governors, Democrats Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Janet Mills in Maine, are currently running for the Senate.
For other governors, the prospect of serving in the Senate holds no appeal. When Ronald Reagan was considering his political future at the end of his second term as governor of California, he reportedly ruled out the Senate, saying, “There’s nothing I can do in the Senate for what I believe in that I won’t be able to do anyway.” Recently, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz put it more bluntly. Asked whether he’d consider running for the Senate seat that Klobuchar is vacating, Walz said he’d “rather eat glass.”
