Wolf at the door

Facing a flagging incumbent, Tom Wolf's straightforward task this fall was to present himself as an acceptable alternative and then let the dyspeptic electorate do its job. As candidates from John Kerry to Mitt Romney have learned, that's harder than it sounds. Wolf triumphed Tuesday because he ensured that this campaign remained a referendum on Gov. Corbett.

Succeeding the Republican governor, however, will be harder than defeating him. The Democratic governor-elect will have to engage a legislature controlled by the opposite party and do better than Corbett did with his own. That will require more willingness to depart from partisan attachments than Wolf has shown.

The York businessman has a demonstrated weakness for some of his own party's more questionable beliefs - among them, that state liquor stores are a good idea and that a $47 billion unfunded pension liability is no big deal. In those matters and in his rush to return the Philadelphia schools to an elected board, Wolf has sided with organized labor and other special interests that too often call the shots among the state's Democrats.

And orthodoxy is no substitute for governance, as the man Wolf just defeated proved. Even in the teeth of a historic electoral defeat - the first for a Pennsylvania governor since the 19th century - Corbett insisted that the campaign came down to "one word: taxes." He was, in a word, wrong.

Corbett's lasting affinity for antitax rhetoric was a reminder that despite his success as a corruption-busting attorney general, he suffered from a shortage of goals as governor and an inability to accomplish the ones he had. His opposition to new taxes and spending had plenty of adherents, but it was so insufficient as a governing strategy that Corbett eventually abandoned it himself.

His no-new-taxes pledge during his first campaign put the governor in the awkward position of hesitating to take credit for one of his most important accomplishments, a transportation funding bill that raised gasoline taxes. More recently, Corbett even relented on his staunch refusal to tax natural gas. But he had already forgone years of revenue that could have helped balance his budgets, relying instead on unpopular and sometimes devastating cuts to education, welfare, and other services.

The governor's error was so obvious that the only question for Wolf and the other Democrats who vied to run against him was not whether to tax gas drilling, but how much. Wolf's proposal to use such a levy to boost state education funding is welcome. His broader goal should be to right the state's troubled finances and economy.

The transition ahead may give Wolf a chance to appreciate the governor's advocacy for a more sustainable approach to pensions. Corbett's proposed benefit reforms never made it past the legislature, which also sank his attempt to join the rest of the country in getting the government out of the liquor business. He was as correct about these matters as his successor is about education funding. The lesson for the governor-elect is that being right rarely counts for much in Harrisburg.