About halfway through Wednesday night’s governor debate in Riverton, Eric Barlow got tired of being talked over.
“Just cuz you say it louder or faster,” the Republican nominee said, “doesn’t make it any more true.”
Rebecca Bextel, the Constitution Party nominee, didn’t miss a beat. “I am faster.”
She was. For an hour on Wyoming PBS, Bextel fired off claims about scams, swamp creatures and baseball bats while Barlow explained the Constitution and the budget process. If you were scoring on volume, Bextel won going away.
Afterward, she declared on social media, “I mopped the floor with Mr Barlow!!!!!”
Volume is not the measure.
Competence is.
In 1999, two Cornell psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, published research showing that people with the least skill at something tend to overrate themselves the most.
The skills you need to do a job well are the same skills you need to notice you’re doing it badly.
People who really know a subject hedge, because they know what they don’t know. People who don’t, don’t.
I watched the debate with that study in mind. It fit like a glove.
Start with the job.
The governor of Wyoming is the CEO of the executive branch, responsible for the agencies that plow the roads, license the drivers and manage the state’s land and money.
The governor is Wyoming’s brand ambassador, the person who sells the state to employers and speaks for us in Washington.
The governor proposes the state budget, appoints agency heads and picks judges from the lists of three the Judicial Nominating Commission sends up. Imagine those agencies run by Bextel’s ex-Freedom Caucus cronies.
What the governor doesn’t do is write the laws. That’s the Legislature’s job.
The governor can recommend, cajole, sign or veto, but the Legislature writes the laws and passes the final budget. Anyone who has served a session in Cheyenne learns that in a hurry.
Now hold Bextel up against that job description.
Asked for her qualifications, she led with, “I can spot bull crap from a mile away.” That’s a self-assessment, not a résumé. Barlow answered with a business, a family, a hitch in the Marines and 14 years in the Legislature.
On Proposition 1, the property tax cut, Bextel opened with, “I never trust official estimates. They’re always wrong.”
Then she offered a Rock Springs mayor’s golf membership as evidence.
Barlow noted the Legislature has taken up five property tax cuts in the last five years and said, “We don’t understand the full consequences of that.”
One candidate threw out the numbers. The other admitted the complications. A CEO who reads a balance sheet does the second thing.
The best exchange came on term limits. Barlow pointed out that age or term limits would take a constitutional amendment.
Bextel scolded him: “They weren’t asking for an explanation to the question.” In her view, knowing how the thing works is a weakness.
Judges are a core piece of the job.
Bextel called the people who send up nominees “deep state swamp creature lawyers” and told voters to vote no on retaining any judge appointed by Gov. Gordon or Gov. Mead, regardless of record.
Barlow’s answer was dry: the process is in the Constitution, and if you don’t like it, amend the Constitution.
Bextel also said she “might do nothing but veto legislation for the next 2 years.”
The Legislature can override a veto with a two-thirds vote, and somebody still has to pass a budget.
A governor who vetoes everything mostly gets overridden, while the agencies she’s supposed to run wait on their money.
Then came health insurance.
Bextel praised Medishare, the health care sharing program her family uses, as the kind of option she’d like to explore.
Barlow replied that he sponsored the legislation that made it available to Wyoming families. She was promoting her opponent’s work and didn’t know it.
On water, she promised to “renegotiate the Colorado water compact.”
That’s the Colorado River Compact, a 1922 agreement among seven states that Congress later approved. Wyoming can’t reopen it alone.
Reopening the 1922 agreement has the potential of costing Wyoming precious water.
I have to give Barlow credit for not taking the bait. He showed more patience than I could have mustered.
I would have borrowed a line from the principal in “Billy Madison”: “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points..”
Early voting is underway, and the whole debate is on Wyoming PBS’s YouTube channel. Watch it yourself and decide who has the skills, decorum and temperament to be the chief executive officer of the state.
Tom Lubnau served in the Wyoming Legislature from 2004 to 2015 and is a former Speaker of the House. He can be reached at: YourInputAppreciated@gmail.com
