The screwup principal and 'change' in Puerto Rico

NY Times:

Republicans in Washington cheered when Luis G. Fortuño, one of their own, was elected governor of Puerto Rico on Nov. 4. But here on the island, where American affiliations are often worn and dropped like accessories, he now describes his victory as Obamaesque.

Mr. Fortuño emphasized in an interview that “cambio,” or “change,” had been his slogan since 2006. And like President-elect Barack Obama, Mr. Fortuño said the economy would be Job 1 for his administration, managed with a youthful nonpartisan approach.

“My message all along was that we had to pull together, that we had lost hope, our ability to dream,” said Mr. Fortuño, 48, a lawyer whose thick dark hair has only a few lines of gray. “It is the only way to go.”

And yet, as a test case for the Obama ethos, Puerto Rico is especially tough. In terms of both economic decline and distrust in government, the island’s problems are more entrenched, political analysts say, and will be harder to reverse.

The recession now emerging in places like Florida and Ohio has been a fact of life in Puerto Rico for three years. Unemployment has climbed to nearly 12 percent. Taxes have gone up, purchasing power has declined, and the island’s roughly four million residents are unlikely to be patient with their new leader.

“His honeymoon is going to be particularly short, not because of anything he has done or what he represents,” said Miguel Soto-Class, executive director of the Center for a New Economy, an independent research organization. “It’s just that people are very concerned about what is going on.”

The structural challenges are immense. Government here plays an outsize role, employing 20 percent to 30 percent of workers on the island, and it is on the verge of bankruptcy. The current administration said this week that it would end the year with a $2 billion budget deficit. One official suggested it was struggling to make payroll, and some institutions — like the Center for Puerto Rican Studies — already report that they have not received government money they are owed.

Governor-elect Fortuño, who spent the last four years as the island’s nonvoting representative in Congress, described the problem as “a local self-inflicted recession.” To turn things around, he said he planned to “streamline government processes and bring under control government expenses to be able to lower taxes.”

Specifically, he said he would institute a hiring freeze that would, with attrition, lead to a 3 percent to 5 percent cut in government staffing annually and save $1.5 billion in four years. He has also turned to the private sector for cabinet-level posts, and called on wealthy business owners to invest more on the island.

...

A Republican had a chance in Puerto Rico because of a real screw up by the Democrats in power. The down turn exposed their culture of corruption in a way that was hard to hide. The screw up principal holds that parties lose power when the screw up or in the case of the latest US election when their opponents create the perception of a screw up. That has what Democrats have een effective at doing over the last four years. The created the bogus impression that we were losing in Iraq and set out on a policy to insure a loss. While they were thwarted in this effort on the ground in Iraq their bogus perception became accepted as a political fact with the help of the media.

One the economy, the Democrats have been predicting recessions since George Bush was sworn in and the Democrat policy on lending to people who could not afford it finally produced a recession in the finance business at the same time their anti energy policies sdrove up the price of fuel further harming the economy. Dispite their obvious responsibility they were able to evade it in the last election and balme the Bush administration for their screw ups. It is proof that it helps to have the media on your side, and it hurts to not fight back. Too often the bush administration and Congressional Republicans acted like stoic punching bags during the bogus Democrat attacks and this helped to build the screw up perception.