Left, right, and wrong

Asked frequently during his gubernatorial campaign how he would prevail upon a conservative legislature to approve his liberal proposals, Tom Wolf cited his Peace Corps experience persuading Indian farmers to adopt novel rice strains. And sure enough, when Wolf's tax-hiking budget went before lawmakers amid a lengthening stalemate last week, not a single Indian farmer voted against it.

Unfortunately for Wolf, most members of the Pennsylvania House did vote against it. Adding insult to impasse, nine of his fellow Democrats defected to a unified Republican majority to resoundingly reject the governor's budget.

Unfortunately for Pennsylvanians, Wolf is right about much, especially the need for additional revenues to truly balance the budget and adequately fund education. But as the governor should have learned by now, being right doesn't count for much in Harrisburg, and in that light, his strategy looks all wrong.

Not that his predecessors had it figured out. Tom Corbett, who shared a party with the legislative majority for the entirety of his term, and Ed Rendell, a renowned wheeler-dealer, both struggled with legislative recalcitrance. Corbett, in fact, considered his on-time budgets a major achievement largely in reaction to the habitually tardy budgets of the Rendell regime. Now Wolf's first budget, having just passed Rendell's second-worst mark of 101 days late in 2009, is careening toward his record of 176 days in 2003, when a Christmastime deal blew the June 30 deadline by half the fiscal year.

This budget is also in rare - and bad - company among the states, all of which have passed a fiscal plan save Pennsylvania and Illinois. Not coincidentally, Illinois is also one of only two states whose debt is considered riskier than Pennsylvania's.

Wolf was ushered into office last year on a landslide that repudiated the credit-sinking, school-squeezing budgets of the Corbett years. So the rookie governor may be surprised that lawmakers continue to openly espouse those and other irresponsible approaches, such as attempting to lean even more heavily on gambling.

But the governor hasn't helped his cause by being slow and reluctant to offer concessions on reasonable Republican priorities such as reforming state employee pensions, another serious threat to the state's fiscal health, and euthanizing the government's backward booze monopoly.

Meanwhile, the standoff has begun to hurt governments, schools, and nonprofits that rely on the state. Last week, for example, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging's debt, attributing its "rapidly deteriorating liquidity" partly to "a prolonged delay in payments from the commonwealth."

And yet it's not hard to imagine a budget that delights neither governor nor legislators even as it improves the state's fiscal condition, allows its schools to function, and, for goodness' sake, pays the state's bills. At least, it's not hard outside Harrisburg.

In the aftermath of last week's embarrassing reiteration of the impasse, Democrats, Republicans, administration officials, and legislators all accused each other of being detached from reality. Sadly, they were all right.