Kaine raises faux legacy

Squeezing time between his gig as Democratic National Committee chairman and the day job to which voters elected him, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine ambled into town Thursday under the comic auspices of kicking off a sales tax holiday, and this under the more authentic but not less comic notion of burnishing his legacy. Really, governor? There are terms Kaine and fans of the Washington Nationals should avoid. Start with record.

Locals owe the pleasure, loosely defined, of Kaine’s Staunton stop to the setting of the sun on his four years as the head man in Richmond. As Kaine tells it, he will head for the exit next year with Virginia known as the country’s best managed state, a constant refrain spilled from the governor’s lips, spoken frequently enough to be a chant.

Well, hoo-rah. Virginia has been making best-managed states lists dating back to Gov. Douglas Wilder. Governing Magazine and the Pew Center on the States acknowledge that history in their latest rankings: “Smart long-term planning is one reason Virginia has long been one of the best managed states in the country. ... Sound strategies provide the state with high-quality employees and information technology [IT] without great expense.”

Bravo, Gov. Kaine, for not unraveling a good thing.

Of course, Pew’s reference to information technology deserves an asterisk, given the unraveling of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency under Kaine’s watch. Northrop Grumman, inked pre-Kaine in 2005 to a $2.5-billion contract to manage the state’s computer network, has been beset by missed deadlines and charges of lousy service. When VITA’s boss tried to fix the mess, he received a prompt kick to the curb from the agency board while Kaine went about defending Northrop, a sudden large donor to the state Democratic Party.

There’s another thorny issue for Kaine and his legacy, that of his affinity for inflating revenue projections and ignoring admonishments from the opposition party. That practice in the last two years has culminated with the governor being forced to acknowledge that, uh, yes revenues, in fact, fell short of what he’d expected, by billions of dollars. As a result, he’s been forced four times to venture back into his two-year spending plan for cuts to meet the state’s balanced-budget requirement.

Some people say Kaine would have managed these affairs had his attention been affixed here rather than on bright national lights. He spent much of last year campaigning for Barack Obama anywhere and everywhere the future president asked. Once Obama took his place in the White House, Kaine took a position as DNC chairman and answered, again, the frequent call to venture beyond state lines for duties unrelated to that of governor and the day job that pays him $135,000 annually in taxpayer money.

None of this is to suggest that we are unwilling to join Kaine in the applause he accords himself as his term winds to a close. His departure is indeed a thing to be heartily cheered. Good riddance.