Editorial: Did Tom Wolf understand politics?

Gov. Tom Wolf is about to close out his two-term tenure. It’s been quite a ride.

Over the years, we have not been shy about laying criticism at the governor’s door. We have castigated him for budget issues. We have harangued him for administrative hiccups and staff pay raises. We took him to task over poorly executed coronavirus pandemic policies.

Perhaps all of those examples contain the same thread. On some level, as a businessman who decided to take on the state’s top job, Wolf just doesn’t understand politics.

One could argue that’s good or bad. Most of Harrisburg’s problems are about an overabundance of politics, not a shortfall. On the other hand, an understanding of the reality of how things are going to work is important.

In a recent interview with Harrisburg ABC affiliate WHTM, Wolf spoke about what he had hoped to be one of his final actions. The governor pushed repeatedly in 2022 to have the state send $2,000 stimulus checks to qualifying residents, just like the federal government did in 2020 and 2021.

The plan would have used American Rescue Plan funds and was meant to address sky-high gas prices as well as rising inflation in areas such as housing and food.

“(The money) would have been a really nice help. I don’t know why I couldn’t get that done,” he said.

If he really doesn’t know, Wolf understands almost nothing about how Harrisburg works. Perhaps the repeated budget standoffs with the Legislature make more sense with that in mind.

For years, the governor’s office and the lawmakers fought bitterly over the idea of that annual spending plan. Democrat Wolf wanted to prioritize education and its hand-in-hand relationship with economic development. The Republican-led Legislature — particularly under Jake Corman’s term as senate majority leader — saw addressing the state’s pension crisis as the most critical task.

It isn’t that Republicans want kids to be uneducated. It isn’t that Wolf didn’t see the pension problems that grew over the last 20 years as important. They just both had their own priorities that weren’t tied to their political positions. They were welded there, joined by the heat of their arguments and cooled by the need to not give an inch.

That is politics — in Pennsylvania and in Washington.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro, another Democrat, will be taking the gubernatorial reins shortly. The Legislature itself is becoming a GOP-Democrat tug-of-war between the Republican Senate and the House of Representatives, which is having its own identity crisis pending special elections to replace three Allegheny County seats in February.

The partisan push and pull is unlikely to change, but perhaps everyone will have a better understanding of why a project that has so much baked-in politics is unlikely to pass.