America's Best Governor: For Republicans, a Rocky Mountain high - Bill Owens

'Do you want to hear my favorite CD?" asks Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, sitting in the passenger seat of his navy-blue Suburban. We're heading from the capitol building in Denver to an Empower America reception in Colorado Springs, and Owens flashes a puckish grin as he reaches for the volume knob. The old Soviet national anthem comes blaring through the speakers. The governor doesn't speak Russian, but he mouths the words to the song anyway. "Nobody else likes this music apparently," he says, after zipping through a series of Communist marching hymns. "What's fun is to think that we beat these bastards."

The Russians have been on Owens's mind ever since President Kennedy went on television to announce the blockade of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, which delayed the party for Owens's twelfth birthday. The boy responded by reading everything he could find about the Soviet Union, an experience that turned him, as a teenager, into a committed anti-Communist. In college, he organized students to wear red-white- and-blue armbands to show support for the Vietnam War. Today, the governor is the kind of guy who drinks Coors beer because, as he puts it, "Joe Coors financed a couple of prop planes for the Contras."

One of the books Owens came across as a young man was Witness, by Whittaker Chambers. "There was a time when reading Chambers had convinced me that we were on the losing side of history," he says. Yet he himself never grew accustomed to losing. Owens has won every election he's participated in, starting with a race for the state legislature in 1982. Four years ago, he ran for governor, prevailing by fewer than 8,300 votes in an election that saw more than 1.3 million ballots cast. The victory made him Colorado's first Republican governor in 24 years, and this year he's coasting toward an easy re-election.

He's also starting to attract attention outside Colorado. At the Empower America event, Bill Bennett delivered an impromptu tribute: "Governor Owens, you're the best. We really mean it. You've led the way on so many things." A growing number of talent-spotters on the right agree: Owens is America's best governor. His instinctive conservatism on everything from taxes and education to guns and abortion has served him well during his first term, and also has set him apart from an older wave of Republican governors whose reformist impulses have waned. When the Cato Institute's fiscal report card on governors comes out in September, Owens will rank at or near the top -- one of just two or three chief executives to earn an A grade.

The 51-year-old Owens is one of the few governors this summer not sweating out their budgets. State governments are projected to face cumulative deficits totaling as much as $40 billion by next year, thanks to what politicians like to call "revenue shortfalls" -- but which are more accurately labeled "spending binges." Kansas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania have already passed tax hikes, with other states sure to follow. With the recession lowering tax receipts everywhere, states are clamoring for congressional bailout packages.

Except in Colorado. "We didn't overspend in the good years," says Owens. That's partly because Colorado can't. The state constitution keeps the size of government from increasing faster than the combined rates of inflation and population growth, unless there's a vote of the people. When this amendment was put before its own vote of the people in 1992 as a ballot initiative, Owens was one of just nine legislators in the 100-member statehouse to support it. More than $2 billion has since been rebated to taxpayers, and state spending has been kept in check.

Owens, of course, deserves only partial credit for that accomplishment. His contribution was to turn it into a powerful argument for permanent tax relief: Owens slashed a series of taxes, including the income tax. When this year's tax receipts were down 13 percent, and the legislature nevertheless passed a budget that increased spending by 7 percent, the governor got out his paring knife: He cut $46 million from the general fund with the line-item veto. In the 16 years before his tenure, Owens's predecessors had used this authority only three times, for cuts totaling a mere $1.5 million. Owens additionally ordered across-the- board spending cuts of 4 percent from each of his departments.

As a Colorado legislator, the future governor made his reputation on education reform. When education bureaucrats accused homeschooled children of truancy, Owens helped pass a bill to protect homeschooling. He's responsible for giving school choice to parents interested in moving their kids across district boundaries. Perhaps most important, he wrote the nation's third charter-school law. A recent Heritage Foundation report singled out Colorado's testing practices as exemplary.

One of the most significant crises to occur on his watch took place a few months after he took office, when two students murdered twelve of their classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Owens has always been a supporter of gun rights, and the massacre occurred just as the legislature was debating gun laws, including a bill supported by Owens to make Colorado a concealed-carry state. The anti-gun lobby seized upon Columbine as a political opportunity, but the governor played defense and all the gun controllers got was a ballot initiative requiring background checks for gun-show purchases (which passed). "That's the standard we had in place for Sears and Wal- Mart," says Owens, who supported the measure. "It sounded reasonable." A few critics accused Owens of selling out, though it seems a small concession -- and it left the gun controllers deeply dissatisfied. The governor continues to push for a concealed-carry law, and he may get it depending on how a few local elections turn out this year.

Owens has gone on offense as well. Since Colorado's constitution prevents the state from financing abortions, Planned Parenthood has segregated its abortion division from the rest of its organization, which receives state funds. Or at least that's what it claims. When an outside auditor discovered that the group was secretly subsidizing abortions through a set of accounting gimmicks, Owens -- a pro-life Catholic -- cut it off last December. Planned Parenthood hissed and screamed and the decision caused a stir in the local press, but the governor has stood firm.

Owens also has provided paycheck protection to Colorado's 50,000 public employees, which means that their union dues are no longer automatically withheld by the state and channeled into union accounts. "If the members have to sign up each year, it's going to make labor leaders much more responsive to the rank and file," says Owens. "They won't focus on ancillary things like politics, but on retention and marketing." They'll have to work harder, too. They've already lost thousands of members and have suffered a severe blow to their finances because of Owens's policy.

The smart politician who is also a principled conservative is a rare breed, which is why the conservative movement should take advantage of those few who come along. Which leads naturally to the question: What's in the cards for Bill Owens? He'll win re-election this year handily, but then he's term-limited. There's a chance that Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a 69-year-old Republican, won't run again in 2004. Barring an Owens candidacy, the early favorite to succeed Campbell would be Rep. Mark Udall, a Democrat. Asked about the seat, Owens says, "I expect to fill out my term as governor." Convincing him to abandon his current office probably would take heavy lobbying from the White House.

Of course, there aren't many pols who have been both governor and senator who didn't prefer being governor -- and Owens knows it. So what else might he do? At the end of his second term, in January 2007, he'll be 56 years old and looking for a job.

One can't resist asking the Big Question, even though Owens is just a first-term governor and 2008 seems far away: Would he ever consider running for president? Owens immediately mentions his kids -- he has three of them, and the youngest will still be at home in 2008. The governor is serious enough about his family life that he and his wife quit the governor's mansion after a year and a half because their children were unhappy there.

But would he run for president? "I haven't been asked that before," he finally says. "I've always tried to do a good job, and I've learned the future takes care of itself. It also rewards you."

A good enough answer. For now.

COPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc.
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