Well, it's a little hard looking back to know for sure. We did
some things that were deliberately set up to keep control
programmatically in that we had what we called a policy council where
all the legislative proposals had to sift before they went to the
legislature. The budget, too. I think I talked about this before, but
I'll get on with it and say that I might take a different
view today, but probably not. I took the view that these people [Council
of State members] were constitutionally elected by the people, and they
were the ones that had constitutional responsibilities. The place where
that runs into joint interests is with the Department of Public
Instruction, because you can't be governor and not have an interest in public schools. And yet the
superintendent is constitutionally elected and the governor appoints the
state board. You've got this crazy government system
that's—well, dysfunctional is the wrong word, but
you work against that system instead of having that system help you. In
terms of the people in the cabinet, I think for the most part the people
worked as a team. You certainly had people with different ideas. Jim
Harrington, for example, thought the inventory tax ought to be repealed.
People in his department thought that, and frankly I thought that, too.
But I told him I didn't want him over there in the
legislature lobbying for that because we'd taken a firm
‘no tax repeals’ stand. We just sort of
stonewalled the whole thing for fear that the legislature would start
trying to decide about taking tax cuts. The first thing you knew the
whole budget's blown. Since the Advisory Budget Commission
had recommended some onetime tax rebate, it was a live issue at the
time. We had four different secretaries of transportation in four years,
which is not a good way to do things but is the way things worked out. I
suspect that people were hired that the governor's office
didn't know about. That probably still goes on today. Joe
Pell is probably the best of anybody of keeping his fingers on that.
You've got to have a certain amount of confidence in the
people that you put in cabinet positions. At the same time, none of ours
had ever had any government experience in the state government. It
probably meant that our administration was more cautious than most
administrations, and less aggressive in some ways. Frankly, when I look
back at accomplishments that you can check off, it's
remarkably good given the fact that we hadn't been there and
we were trying not to make any more mistakes than a naive new
administration had the potential to. We didn't turn the
secretaries loose with everything, so to speak.