IT flap is a chance for McDonnell

By: JEFF E. SCHAPIRO TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST | Times-Dispatch
Published: June 21, 2009

Virginia's $2.3 billion smooch with Northrop Grumman for computer services is behind schedule and another $6 million in the red. More than a year late and $8.5 million over budget, Motorola Corp. has yet to deliver a $340 million radio system to state police.

And what does Bob McDonnell do about all this? He issues a press release criticizing cap and trade.

Maybe the Republican nominee for governor should cap his chatter about nice-guy conservatism and trade it for a talking point that might resonate with voters: the competence of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, who concocted these deals and were empowered to carry them out.

Democrats say they're about ideas, not ideology. Here's a chance for McDonnell, disparaged by some Democrats as an empty-headed Pat Robertson clone, to hold the opposition accountable. As the outs, Republicans are free to assign blame while assuming none of it.

But this demands balance -- pointing a finger as well as putting a finger on the problem. In choosing a governor, Virginians pick a manager, ideally someone skilled in fashioning solutions that, even if nakedly self-serving, don't look it.

Democrats are trying to contain damage from the Northrop Grumman embarrassment, in part by gently discrediting the messenger: the IT chief who, as a veteran insider with plenty of pals in the legislature, complained about the company's billing -- and then was fired.

Republicans aren't immune from criticism. Since the George Allen years, they've successfully pushed --with more than a nudge from McDonnell, a lawmaker-turned-attorney general -- privatization of public services and approximations thereof as a cash cow.

But as fresh legislative scrutiny of the Northrop Grumman contract with the Virginia Information Technologies Agency demonstrates, these arrangements may prove udder-whelming -- and not only as a source of dollars or savings to the state.

There've been red flags.

Construction of state Route 288 in Richmond's western suburbs was a public-private venture that nearly sucked dry central Virginia's share of the road fund. And privately initiated renovations of two buildings on Capitol Square became the stuff of nasty legal disputes.

There's the nettlesome issue of accountability.

Even when transferred to private hands, services on which Virginians depend -- such as a hacker-attacked prescription-drug database at the Department of Health Professions, supposedly protected by Northrop Grumman -- are still viewed as public necessities.

Cock'em up, and the politicians get the blame.

That fear among legislators in both parties, and the financial crisis that has erased the billions of dollars with which Wall Street bankrolls these schemes, could do in Virginia what it's done in Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania: slow the drive to privatize.

Perhaps that's why a meeting this past Thursday of the Senate Finance Committee, to discuss, among other things, the panel's investigation of Northrop Grumman, drew lobbyists and flacks for CenterPoint Properties, pushing a disputed $3.5 billion gambit to run the Port of Hampton Roads for the state for 60 years.

Here's a chance for Bob McDonnell, self-styled "just-say-yes" Republican, to spotlight how government does business. Improving it -- and protecting taxpayers -- might require that, as governor, he just say no.

Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 6496814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com. Watch his video column Thursdays on TimesDispatch.com. Listen to his analysis Fridays at 8:33 a.m. on WCVE (88.9 FM).