A pitched battle with Washington will soon decide which states will be able to continue performing their basic functions and which will in effect become wards of Congress. So it's hard to imagine a time when races for governors seats across the country mattered so much.
By any standard of justice, Tennessee does not deserve the fate of a number of other states. Lawmakers here made agonizing spending decisions both before and during the recession. What the state could not afford - some TennCare benefits, for instance - it did without. Tennessee behaved like an adult.
Meanwhile:
* California imposed crippling environmental rules that drove its energy costs up and frightened away manufacturers, ballooning deficits into the tens of billions of dollars.
* New York state levied back-breaking taxes then had to borrow $90 million a week from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits - to workers who were laid off in part because high taxes destroyed their jobs.
* Illinois racked up a $5 billion debt then stopped paying so many of its bills that some banks won't lend to companies that are owed money by the state. They just don't believe Illinois is going to pay up.
* Congressional Democrats plunged the country into a fiscal vortex with a redistributionist medical takeover and a government-bloating stimulus - and $13.2 trillion in debt.
Tennessee sensibly avoided enrolling in this Dr. Kevorkian school of economics. The state sowed low taxes and sensible levels of regulation, and it is reaping rewards such as the Volkswagen plant. Washington and its state-level imitators sowed high taxes and regulatory extremism, and they are reaping a predictable whirlwind.
But if Tennessee doesn't pick a governor who will stand up to the president and the Democrat juggernaut in Congress, the fiscal sanity the state has achieved may be swallowed up in a bailout rampage that will make current levels of federal taxation look like petty theft.
Don't think for a second that a Democrat president, House and Senate are going to let a blue state go under if they can prop it up with confiscatory taxes collected in part from thriftier states. Democrats in Congress have every political incentive to shower bounty on states that provide them the most votes and to punish those that don't.
That makes federalism - the constitutional interface between the limited powers delegated to Congress and the broad powers retained by the states and the people - the most important battle that governors will wage over the next few years.
Tennessee's new governor has to hit the ground telling Washington to back off, and the candidate most consistently pointing out the need for Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the president to take a hike is U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp.
"We need two dozen governors that will stand together and say the 10th Amendment has been run over too long," Mr. Wamp said in September. "We're going to protect freedom in our states."
This past June, he put the battle against ObamaCare's cancerous mandates on the states in necessarily uncompromising terms: "We will not pass a state income tax to pay for this. We will not go into debt to pay for this. We don't have anywhere to turn on our sales tax revenue. Our state cannot pay for this. And when asked in one of our candidate forums, how do I plan on paying for it, I said I don't plan on paying for it. ... (T)he states don't have the money to pay for it, period."
What Rep. Wamp understands with vital clarity is that the federal government is running out of piggy banks to loot to fund the radical expansion of its control over our lives, so it's trying to stick states with the tab.
And it's doing so faster than Barack Obama can read the words "Let me be clear" off a teleprompter. Talk of mortgaging somebody's grandchildren's future is now hopelessly quaint. The wolf isn't just at the door, he's chewing it off the hinges.
It matters a great deal whom Tennesseans put on this side of that door.
Follow-up: In columns I wrote in February and last Sunday, I pointed out an ad that Bill Haslam's gubernatorial campaign ran on the left-wing Huffington Post. Mr. Haslam's press secretary, David Smith, called Monday and said the HuffPo ad had been run in error and that the campaign removed it after it came to light.
To reach Steve Barrett, call 423-757-6329 or e-mail sbarrett@timesfreepress.com.