Consider how popular Chris Christie is in Blue Jersey, with a modest but discernible change in the business climate of the state, combined with a personality that is distinctly....Jersey. Imagine if Obama was able to bring our actual unemployment numbers down even a tick (everyone knows the 8.2% figure is a fraud), and wasn't such an insufferable prick? He'd have it in the bag come 2012...
Yeah, you know Texas is #1 in Chief Executive's annual rankings. But it's the bottom ten or so that I always find the most illuminating:
(Rank/State/Previous Rank/Change)
It's a coincidence that these states are all printed in blue, but it needn't be.
And remember - the president is from Illinois, and he wants to take "the California model" national. So how's it working out locally?
Oh, yeah, that:
California’s enduring place of perpetual decline continues in this year’s ranking. Once the most attractive business environment, the Golden State appears to slip deeper into the ninth circle of business hell. The economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. And its status as the most ruinously contentious place to operate remains undisturbed in eight years. Its unemployment rate, at 10.9 percent, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12 percent of America’s population, California has one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Each year, the evidence that businesses are leaving California or avoid locating there because of the high cost of doing business due to excessive state taxes and stringent regulations, grows. According to Spectrum Locations Consultants, 254 California companies moved some or all of their work and jobs out of state in 2011, an increase of 26 percent over the previous year and five times as many as in 2009...
