A lot of questions hung in the air for Gov. Janet Napolitano as Election Day neared, and now that it’s over, most of them still lack answers.
At her weekly press briefing on Nov. 6, just two days after Sen. Barack Obama defeated Sen. John McCain, Napolitano fielded questions about whether she would join Obama’s Cabinet and what is to be done about the state’s overextended budget. The answers were much the same as they were before the election.
The most glaring question revolved around what role, if any, Napolitano might play in Obama’s administration. Guessing which Cabinet post Napolitano might fill in an Obama administration has been a popular conversation topic in Arizona since the Illinois senator locked up the Democratic nomination, with the most common predictions being attorney general and homeland security director. Napolitano was a prominent early supporter of Obama in his battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton for the nomination.
 At the press briefing, Napolitano declined to say whether she would accept a Cabinet position in Obama’s administration. She was named to Obama’s transition team after the election.
“I’m just not going to answer those questions at this point in time,” she said.
Napolitano said she believes she was chosen for Obama’s transition team, in part, because it is important to have a governor who is familiar with states’ issues.
“What it means is making sure there’s a seamless transition, that there’s communication with the existing members of the Bush administration, with the incoming administration so things don’t fall through the cracks, so that as you look at security issues, as you look at economic issues and the like, that information is already being exchanged so as one team leaves the other team can move in,” she said. “And I think what Senator Obama is signaling is that he understands how important the states are going to be in this partnership that we need to have.”
The governor said her spot on the transition team would not require her to spend much time away from the state and its budget problems, and said much of her work for the incoming Obama administration could be done by phone. She said her experience in dealing with issues such as illegal immigration, state involvement in homeland security, Medicaid and “the whole social-service interlock between the federal government and the states” were areas in which she could provide some expertise on the transition panel.
Also named to the transition team were former White House chief of staff John Podesta, businesswoman and Obama family friend Valeria Jerrett, and the Obama campaign’s chief of staff Pete Rouse.
Like many other states in the U.S., Arizona is facing declining revenue and a budget shortfall due to the slumping economy. Many Republican lawmakers have urged Napolitano to call a special session of the Legislature to deal with the current state budget, which will likely be short by more than $1 billion. The governor had resisted the calls to do so before the election, and said no decisions would be made until she had a post-election meeting with legislative leadership.
That meeting was held Nov. 6, and Napolitano said she and the legislative leadership had reached a general agreement on how big the budget shortfall is expected to be — about $1.2 billion, though she said that number could go up or down slightly. She said they would likely meet again late next week.
“I think we were in agreement that there will have to be a special session, but that the special session should occur when we, meaning leadership and myself, have reached agreement about what needs exactly to be done so that we don’t have legislators just milling around here. They come in, they vote, we’re ready to go,” Napolitano said. “So the timing is a little bit dependent upon when we reach an agreement. But we want to proceed as rapidly as possible.”
The governor said she did not think uncertainty over her possible departure for Washington would have an impact on the budget discussions.
“We had a good budget meeting this morning with leadership. The subject of that never came up. It was the same budget meeting we would have had before the election as after the election,” she said.
Napolitano said she and the leadership would further discuss spending suspensions for programs or projects that are slated for the current fiscal year but that could be put off until 2010. The state’s three universities, she said, would face another round of cuts after already cutting about $60 million over the summer. The governor also declined to guarantee that K-12 classroom spending would be off the table during budget negotiations, though she indicated that protecting it was a high priority.
“You can assume that I’m going to fight to protect K-through-12 classroom spending, absolutely,” she said.
Democrats held a large fundraising advantage over their GOP rivals for the Nov. 4 legislative races, and some had expressed hope that they could gain a majority in the state House of Representatives, where the Republicans held a 33-27 going into the election. Those dreams did not materialize, however, and the Republicans added seats in both chambers.
Napolitano said she was not sure what thwarted the Democrats’ attempts, though she mused that many of the legislative races were decided in the primaries, and said voter turnout for McCain and for Proposition 102, a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that was approved by the voters, may have been contributing factors.
“It’s hard to say, and obviously more analysis will be done. Certainly I think the Democrats did everything from an electoral organizing standpoint one can do. They recruited very good candidates. They had a good budget. They had good plans,” she said.