Missouri’s attorney general, Jay Nixon, will be a good governor for our state.
Nixon, a Democrat, is running against Republican Kenny Hulshof, a congressman from Columbia, Mo., representing central and northeast Missouri. Hulshof has presented some good ideas – and some questionable campaign claims – but Nixon has far more experience in state government. His stated priorities – jobs, education, health care – are in line with Missouri’s current pressing needs.
The state’s massive cuts in Medicaid three years ago have been at the heart of this campaign from day one. Nixon simply opposes the cuts. In the ’90s and into this decade, we stated in this space repeatedly that Medicaid costs were slipping out of control and that something had to be done, but Gov. Matt Blunt decided to use a meat cleaver where a scalpel was needed.
Today, Nixon claims, those cuts mean 150,000 children in our state have no health insurance – up 44 percent in two and a half years. How can Missouri tolerate that?
The cuts also made little sense budgetarily, since state reductions mean massive losses of federal matching money – in other words, we’ve lost a great deal of bang for the buck. Nixon vows to reverse those cuts.
Nixon has outlined other good ideas. He’d like to see our schools transform the senior year of high school. Every senior with good grades, he suggests, should be able to earn about a semester’s worth of college credit.
He’d like to expand the A-plus program, allowing students who keep their grades up to go to a couple of years of community college and finish up at one of the state’s four-year universities. “It’s a straight, clear way for middle-class families to get to college debt free,” he says.
We’d like to see Nixon show a little more urgency about transportation than he’s shown so far, but we have to concede that nettlesome issue will take a while to sort out. There is no consensus on how to proceed. Meanwhile, our roads and bridges age.
It’s also worth noting that Nixon has been in the area, making his pitch and listening to people. Hulshof just hasn’t been visible around here. As we say, he’s got some ideas, but is this part of the state on his radar screen?
