Second, they argued, “the bailout mentality” is at odds with – and, indeed, threatens – Americans’ sense of personal responsibility. Better to let the “others [that is, the non-winners] go back to the drawing board better prepared to try again.” (My italics.) The governors lament government spending on “enterprises that in many cases need to reorganize their business model” and point to the Big Three CEOs’ private plane boondoggle as an example. There might be sound arguments for refusing money to the auto industry, but are the governors really invoking corporate extravagance to oppose federal money that will prevent states from cutting health care services for low-income households? Will someone who loses his or her job and finds himself or herself without health insurance really be “better prepared” to try it again? Try what again? Isn’t one of the arguments for “automatic stabilizers” like extended unemployment insurance (one of the proposals the National Association of Governors is seeking) that they ease the transition out of and then back into (unemployment benefits don’t last forever) the labor force?

Third, Perry and Sanford call on the federal government “to stop believing it has all the answers.” We have a system in which the federal government only steps in “for that which states cannot do themselves.” Whether you believe that assertion or not, unfortunately, the “expansionist federal government” the governors criticize is the same one that has avoided doing what states cannot do for themselves (and the same one, in some important cases, that has prevented states from doing what they can do). One glaring example is President Bush’s repeated veto of SCHIP. Indeed, in the same issue of the trusty Economist, the weekly writes an “e-mail” to Obama calling on him to “quickly increase the money given to states to pay for Medicaid and SCHIP (the scheme for children’s health that W. hates so much). You can deflect skeptics by arguing that increased spending on health…will do more to stimulate the economy than issuing tax refunds…”

At the governors’ meeting yesterday, Obama told the state executives: “one of the messages that Joe [Biden] and I want to continually send is that we are not going to be hampered by ideology in trying to get this country back on track.”

Perry and Sanford, on the other hand, have maintained their ideological purity.