“Only an outsider can fix what’s broken here,” said Barrington businessman Ken Block during last night’s first Republican debate for governor.

His opponent, Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, may want to paint Block as a opportunistic flip-flopper, but to me he sounded a lot like the last affluent private sector executive from the suburbs to preach the “outsider” gospel.

And we all know how that turned out.

Don Carcieri was a private sector superstar before turning to politics. He was elected governor twice, in 2002 and 2006, but he’s now widely regarded as the worst chief executive of the state in recent memory. He wasted huge amounts of time opposing economic growth, like a deep water port at Quonset and a casino, both of which came to fruition, albeit late, after he was gone. His economic coupe de grace, of course, was his very publicly courtship of Curt Schilling and 38 Studios. He also ordered state troopers to raid a Narragansett Indian tobacco store when the tribe claimed a tax exemption. Whatever folly one associates with Carcieri, it’s fair to say he’s a third rail for Republicans, a whipping post for Democrats and an embarrassment for everyone else.

And before being elected to office, his political resume looked a lot like Ken Block’s.

Carcieri is from East Greenwich while Block is from Barrington. Carcieri ran a business called Cookson while Block runs one called Sympatico. Both built effective bully pulpits through favorable treatment from right-wing media like WPRO and the Providence Journal editorial page.

They have similar policy prescriptions, too. Both believe very strongly that welfare inefficiencies substantially hinder economic progress. And both suggest shrinking government is a growth strategy. Both believe private sector experience translates into public sector effectiveness, even though the Ocean State has seen scant evidence of such ever since Democrat Bruce Sundlun left office.

The problem for Block is that Carcieri, Rhode Island’s most recent GOP governor, has more-recently exemplified how terribly wrong the CEO-governor model can go. Carcieri’s Big Audit mentality may have succeeded in shrinking the size of government, but that has harmed the overall economy and exacerbated unemployment. What then will be the unintended consequences of Ken Block’s goal of eliminating $1 billion in government programs. A business person can eliminate expenses, but a governor can only redistribute them.

Governments, wrote House GOP leader Brian Newberry in the Valley Breeze last week, “are, in the end, not a business.” His submission was about 38 Studios, the most famous failure of the Carcieri Administration.

Norman Harris owns a dive bar/greasy spoon diner right in the heart of historic downtown East Greenwich and he is three-years delinquent on his sewer bills to the tune of $32,000. Some of that debt belongs to his business but the bulk of it comes from the five apartments connected to the restaurant that are occupied by family members.

The Town Council is threatening to revoke his liquor license if he can’t pay the debt in one lump sum.

Sharon Hazard, who runs the restaurant for her elderly father, told the Town Council that tough economic times plus a major money setback as a result of identity theft has left the family finances in shambles – and that they are even willing to remortgage their property to make the town whole. Still, she was berated by two of the elected officials.

Councilor Mark Gee lectured Hazard about how he too had faced hard times and never fell behind on his taxes. “To me it’s almost a little abusive to the town,” he said to her at a public meeting two weeks ago. Councilor Jeff Cianciolo forced Hazard to come back in two weeks with a title search, even though she told the Council she had already paid for one to be completed within the next two months. He wants the debt paid off in one lump sum. Council President Michael Isaacs was more understanding. He said, “We should exhibit some flexibility on this. I think they do need some time to work this out.”

Some see the Harris’ plight as just the cold, harsh realities of an unfriendly economy, and the delinquent sewer bill is the straw that broke the Harris’ business model. Others, like Councilor Gee, see it as a fairness issue; if you don’t have enough money to pay the town for your real property, you don’t get to keep your real property (unless you might turn it into a science center someday, more on this coming up).

And in the parts of town where Norman’s customers still live, a world away from the expensive track homes that constitute most of East Greenwich’s affluence, there are those who think it’s latent racism, class intolerance and a blatant attempt to socially engineer the Harris family off of Main Street.

The Harris’ are known locally as “the only black family in East Greenwich.” Of course this isn’t true, but it can certainly seem that way in lily white suburbia. As a point of fact, the Harris’ are bi-racial, and trace their roots back to the pre-Columbus Narragansett Tribe. (And other black people do live in town.) Perhaps more relevant than their skin color is their style. Many of the Harris’ just don’t look like modern day East Greenwich: think Swamp Yankee rather than soccer mom.

And their business attracts a rough crowd to an otherwise very gentrified center of commerce and community. I’d even go so far as to say the Harris’ can be a rough bunch themselves, and their tavern can be downright dangerous late at night. There’s a pool table, an ashtray out front and it serves cheap beer right across the street from a hotel that rents rooms by the week and/or month. People down on their luck get a room at the Greenwich Hotel, and find some friends across the street at Norman’s Tap. But that tale doesn’t always end well. The police are there frequently on Friday nights to break up fights.

It’s well worth noting that while Norman’s is a rough bar, it is not the roughest one in town. Some of the newer upscale bars and restaurants also draw a police presence on the weekends. The waterfront bars, which attract more affluent out-of-towners than the crowd that stay at the Greenwich Hotel, require multiple officers be stationed there throughout the evening (for parking and crowd control). And the only assault with a deadly weapon in recent years, a stabbing with a fork, happened in one of Main Street’s more posh eateries.

And as far as their debt is concerned, or it being some sort of affront to the community that they have let it fester for so long, I was personally more offended when Don Carcieri left vacant for 12 years (and counting) a piece of prime real estate the town gave him because he said he would turn it into a science center. No public lecture for the Republican former governor from the all GOP Town Council though.

So why do the Harris’ receive such harsh treatment from some on the town council and many more on the internet? Why would the Town Council consider destroying a local business that has been operating on Main Street for 50 years because of the three years of debt? What public good would be accomplished by taking away their liquor license?

There is absolutely a number of very influential local conservatives who think Main Street and the downtown economy would be well served if Norman’s Tap would just go away. Whether or not they are right is beside the point. A delinquent sewer bill should not be used as a tool to take away someone’s livelihood simply because some influential Republicans think more gentrification will make for a better community.

In a multi-part series that will be published throughout this week, I’ll get into the weeds on the specific reasons Rhode Island fell behind. A common theme will be how so many (but not quite all) of the problems originated with the man who is now, as Scott MacKay puts it, “retired in his Saunderstown manse by the sea, hiding from the media and the taxpayers he so avidly fleeced.”

Donald Carcieri

A cursory glance at the unemployment rate graph points to a likely culprit. What is perhaps most striking about Rhode Island’s decline is just how closely it corresponds with the tenure of Donald Carcieri. In his first few months, Rhode Island performed reasonably well. As America surged to the peak of the first Bush recession, unemployment jumped half a percentage point between January and June of 2003, but in Rhode Island, unemployment inched up by only 0.2 percentage points.

But giving Carcieri credit for his first few months makes about at much sense as blaming Obama for losing jobs during his first few months. The real test of a leader is how the economy performs once their policies have had a chance to take effect. In mid-2003, things began to turn around. Although America’s recovery was relatively anemic, with the unemployment rate falling by only 1.9 percentage points from the peak of 6.3% in June of 2003 to a low of 4.4% in March of 2007, things went much worse in Rhode Island. During that period, unemployment in our state dropped by only 0.7 percentage points, from 5.5% to 4.8%. In June of 2005, we crossed the national rate. Our jobs picture has been below average ever since.

Up through early 2007, Carcieri’s Rhode Island was in a slow, but not unprecedented, decline. State economies fluctuate, and our slide in the mid-2000s was nothing out of the ordinary. But things were about to get worse. A lot worse. In late 2007, the bottom fell out of the Rhode Island economy, and unemployment soared.  Surprisingly, much of the damage was done before the broader US economy began to collapse a little less than a year later.

By April of 2008, when the second Bush recession began in earnest, Rhode Island’s unemployment rate was already at 6.9%—far above the national rate of 5%. Over the next few years, that gap widened from 1.9 percentage points to a peak of 3.3 percentage points in April 2012, but most of the damage was done before the national recession even began. Clearly, something very, very bad happened in Rhode Island in 2006 or early 2007 to spark this collapse.

There is no magical fairy who pummels the economy whenever conservative Republicans find themselves in office.  What devastates the economy is the policies they enact.  Tomorrow we’ll begin to dig into the details of those policies and why they were so destructive.

Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, most agree that Rhode Island’s biggest concern should be the failing finances of our urban communities. GoLocal reports this morning in a piece on which local communities have the highest tax rates: “Some of the most dramatic increases are in urban communities facing financial distress. They also happen to be the places where taxpayers can at least afford the hikes.” This point, as well as those making it in the GoLocal piece, should be very familiar to our readers.

When Don Carcieri and the General Assembly cut income taxes for the affluent and state aid to cities and towns, it was like pouring gasoline on the smoldering fire that is Rhode Island’s regressive reliance on property taxes to fund public services. Gov Chafee and the 2013 legislature would do very well to address this.

That is, if Chafee doesn’t take a job in the Obama administration, as I’m hoping happens. Chafee would be a great Obama appointment and it would give him a classy exit from his unpopular reign as governor … it would also give Rhode Island a progressive governor in Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts. This good idea came courtesy of Dee DeQuattro’s blog, which always has interesting stuff like this in it.

Much has been made about the legislature’s shift to the left, but one way the House will move right is with the promotion of Rep. Stephen Ucci, who is expected to replace Rep. Paddy O’Neil on Gordon Fox’s leadership team. Ucci is a nice enough guy, but he’s an anti-choice Democrat. This effect will hopefully be mitigated if Rep. Christopher Blazejewski moves up to be Deputy Majority Whip.

Is Gina Raimondo less confident in pension cuts prevailing in court than she once was? Seems like it…

Today’s hero: Nick Gibbs catches a 58-pound stripped bass from a Narragansett Bay beach and donates the giant catch to the Amos House in Providence “where it was made into fish chowder to feed hundreds of people in need.” I’m sure we’d all love to know where he caught it but the article doesn’t say…

Former PC hoops star God Shammgod deserves the award too!

Wow … what a great passage in this ProJo editorial about the insurance lobby, climate change and how hurricanes affect the affluent coastal land owners the most: “Contrary to the clichés about ‘welfare queens’ and so on, federal programs skew heavily in favor of middle- and upper-income people.”

So long Tea Party, don’t let the door hit you on your way out!!

Thanks to Dan McGowan for recognizing the RI future crystal ball … but we supported plenty of people who didn’t win, most notably Abel Collins.

On this day in 1862, General Ambrose Burnside, a Rhode Islander for whom the downtown Providence park is named, took command of the Union Army.

I was surprised how candid he was about the negativity in Brendan Doherty’s campaign.

In this one he talks about the casino referendum, the clean water and open space bonds (which he didn’t really want to talk about!) and whether or not he supported any Democrats this election year.

Give Don Carcieri, the unequivocal architect of the 38 Studios deal, credit for at least two things.

One is that the former governor finally came forward and faced the public. He should have done so four months ago, but we panned him when he didn’t so we’ll recognize that he did. The other is that he did so with Tim White, the go-to guy when a politician needs to publicly apologize.

But that’s as much credit as he should get, if not more.

He hardly took ownership of the fiasco for which he is largely responsible. He parsed himself as being one of 12 members of the EDC board who decided to back Curt Schilling’s video game company with taxpayer dollars. In reality, it was his idea to court Curt here with a giant loan guarantee. He didn’t just vote for it, he dreamed up the idea.

But that wasn’t even Carcieri’s slimiest statement of the night. That moment would be when he suggested the state default on the loan rather than repay it. After all, he argued, it’s only a moral obligation bond.

“All I’m saying is this is not an absolute slam dunk obligation for the state,” Carcieri told WPRI.

Bonds or otherwise, moral obligations matter when doing the people’s business. And Carcieri’s ambivalence to this may well be one of the reasons he failed so mightily as a public official and made such a bad gamble with regards to 38 Studios.

Besides, the people just wanted an apology … I didn’t hear anyone ask Don Carcieri for any advice on how to get ourselves out of the mess he created for the state.

“Former Gov. Donald L. Carcieri’s long silence on the 38 Studios bankruptcy wound up putting fellow Rhode Island Republicans on the spot this week at Mitt Romney’s nominating convention,” wrote correspondent John Mulligan in today’s ProJo. “Carcieri, the delegation’s most prominent exponent of running a government according to sound business principles, declined to be interviewed Wednesday about his role in a state-backed loan guarantee for former Boston Red Sox star Curt Schilling’s company. The failed deal may leave Rhode Island voters on the hook for up to $102 million.”

That Carcieri broke his long silence on the 38 Studios debacle once it “wound up putting fellow Rhode Island Republicans on the spot” speaks to our post on Carcieri from Thursday in which we wrote: “Carcieri always represented conservatives first and then Rhode Islanders somewhere after that.”

Carcieri broke his silence on 38 Studios not when Rhode Island was most desperate for answers about it, but when Republicans were most desperate for cover.

Apparently that cover didn’t come quick enough.

Because Carcieri thought he could dodge the issue indefinitely, it ended up becoming a story when other Republicans had to answer for him. So not only was Carcieri’s tack on 38 Studios selfish, it was foolish too.

Here’s what some prominent Republicans told Mulligan about how Carcieri handled the situation:

“I would probably have spoken about my role” in such a loss of taxpayer dollars and Rhode Island jobs, said John Robitaille, Carcieri’s former communications chief.

“A lot of people are wondering” what went into Carcieri’s “business judgment” that the 38 Studios venture was a good investment of Rhode Island tax dollars, [Cranston Mayor Allan Fung] said.

Rhode Island’s incoming GOP national committeeman, Steven Frias, said Carcieri’s support of Schilling’s video venture will dog the state’s Republicans for a long time…

After all, Carcieri always represented conservatives first and then Rhode Islanders somewhere after that. We’re talking about a governor who gave more interviews to WPRO shock jocks than the rest of the local media combined!

But, like Scott MacKay of RIPR, we were surprised that Carcieri had the gall to be offering an economics lecture to President Obama. Here’s how MacKay put it:

Well, governor, what say you about a purported conservative Republican  Rhode Island governor who gambled with the taxpayers money, made the most reckless  crony capitalism economic development loan in the state’s history (38Studios, which is now bankrupt) and left the taxpayers hanging for $100 million in loan guarantees. Then this very same governor leaves office, goes into virtual hiding, refuses to answer to anybody to justify his actions and finally turns up in Tampa at the Republican National Convention to lecture the president on business.

The reality is many of Rhode Island’s economic sore spots are Carcieri’s fault. 38 Studios is only the most obvious example. Another is the state’s epidemic of failing cities. When Carcieri cut off state aid to the state’s poorest communities he virtually guaranteed at least some of them would have no other option than to go through an expensive reorganization.

As governor, he also focused his energies on cutting the state payroll instead of growing the state economy. And he fought really hard against obvious economic development winners like a casino and a port at Quonset.

One missed opportunity that few people recall is when Carcieri had the old Jamestown Bridge demolished instead of turning it into what would have been one of the most beautiful – and probably well-visited – bike paths in the world. Environmentalists and transportation advocates fought hard for the idea at the time, though the local media largely ignored the idea. Imagine how many additional people who visit and vacation in the Ocean State if they could ride their bikes from the South County beaches, through scenic Saunderstown over Narragansett Bay and right out to Beavertail and Fort Wetherill.

It’s well worth noting that Carcieri had a beach house in Saunderstown  – it’s his legal address these days, though we get the feeling he spends more time at his place in Florida than in Rhode Island – and many of the uber-affluent residents on both sides of the bridge deplored the idea of sharing their slice of Rhode Island with the masses.

The best thing Carcieri probably did for Rhode Island is give us proof positive that business acumen doesn’t translate to political acumen.

And now here is campaigning for a businessman for president.

That should be all the evidence Rhode Island and the nation needs to know that Mitt Romney is the wrong guy to be president. After all, Carcieri has proven no more effective at picking winners in politics than he has in the video game business.

We may be the most bluest state, according to a new study done by Gallup, but keep in mind that distinction doesn’t mean any more than the D after Jon Brien or Doc Corvese’s name on the ballot.

Especially in the northern parts of the state, Rhode Islanders will instinctively vote for Democrats, even if like Brien and Corvese, their politics are more-closely aligned with the GOP. That’s why we call it the Democrats in Name Only.

Speaking of not staying true … it seems that things have gotten so bad for former Gov. Don Carcieri that not even the conservative-leaning Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, which held its annual summer meeting this weekend, is willing to stand behind their former champion anymore.  For the past several years, it gave out an award called the Donald L. Carcieri Award for Good Government. Not this year, though. Wonder what happened?

On Friday I wondered aloud if anyone would be willing to stick up for gay-bashing congressman Allen West who was in town this weekend to raise money for local Republicans. It turns out Michael Riley, running against Jim Langevin, not only supports him but thinks he should run for president. Here’s what West once said about progressives: “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

Compulsive gamblers better hope Rhode Islanders pass a casino referendum this November … if we don’t, public money for their addictive habit will dry up. So, in other words, the state is only interested in funding gambling cessation programs if we can also make it much easier to gamble…

For the first time Narragansett Beer will be available outside of the East Coast as the 130-year-old lager will now be brewed in Wisconsin as well as the East Coast. Hi, neighbor indeed.

Anyone who cares about Narragansett Bay or the culture of quahogging in the Ocean State should read my friend Ray Huling’s book, which EG Patch did a great feature on. It’s a great read about how we allowed one of the state’s best resources to nearly fall off the map up until they get fried and sold out of a clam shack.

The produce grown at the Charlestown Community Garden goes to help feed the less fortunate in South County.

That said, the politics behind this whole thing has been atrocious. It was championed by both the former Gov. Carcieri and House Speaker Gordon Fox, which despite their different partisan labels, found some common ground in it. It displays that there is now a reckless disregard for the very real impact of the decisions that happen in the State House on the people of Rhode Island.

Everyone with an iota of power who is involved in the direction of this state needs to spend the summer discussing what’s happened over the last two years, what failed, what worked, and what needs to be done. I don’t care if you want to kill each other at the end, as long as it makes you more effective. The citizens of Rhode Island are more important than your feelings, and they deserve better.

To the officers of the General Assembly, please remember these cheery facts: in 20 years, people will have difficultly remembering your names. In 40 years, only historians doing research will. Your personal prestige needs to be subsumed into the idea that you need to make the best decision for the state.

No one should want you to fail. No matter your political affiliation, the issue is that you need to be the best you can be. And right now, you’re not. I don’t have the answers, and I can’t tell you how to do your jobs (though I think doing them full-time and for reasonable pay wouldn’t be a bad idea).

There was a lot riding on 38 Studios that shouldn’t have been. But this deal was opposed by the people of Rhode Island, and the more I compare the polls to the actions of our government, the more I wonder whether Smith Hill just lives in a different state.