Hey, it’s only money!
The New York Times today reveals that New York’s governor Kathy Hochul spent about 2 million dollars to outside consultants for help in preparing her 2022 and 2023 “State of the State” speeches. Apparently no previous governor had done that, or anything close: they relied on their staffs for speech ghostwriting.
The extravagant expenditure cannot be justified, though even as the Times exposes it, the paper tries to rationalize Hochul’s waste of taxpayer funds, emphasizing repeatedly that “the speech is among the most significant a governor delivers each year, laying the groundwork for months of negotiations and browbeating over the executive budget and other priorities.” Sure. It’s a speech. It’s not a contract, and what a governor says in it doesn’t commit her to anything, nor is anyone likely to remember what she said within a week of its delivery (especially the way Hochul talks). To be fair to the Times, Hochul is a Democrat, and the Times sees its job as protecting the party, even as the paper reports on inconvenient facts. When it chooses to….
Paying 2 million bucks for help on two speeches not only indicates unseemly insecurity in an elected official, it demonstrates no respect for budgets, priorities, or the public’s hard-earned tax payments. The consultants who got the job also were recipients of non-bid contracts. (Heck, I would have written one of those speeches for some Red Sox -Yankee tickets!)
The arrogance of our current class of elected leaders is a disfiguring blotch on the face of democracy, one that will only get uglier until voters hold them accountable for displays like Hochul’s.