The lady (temporarily) in charge
I guess she got the job after all.
One of the oddities about our political world is that not all terms in office begin at the same time. Here in Delaware, the governor is not sworn in until the third Tuesday in January, so there have been a few occasions in the state’s recent history where we have had a caretaker governor because the elected official jumped into a new job. For example, when our recently retired Senator Tom Carper first walked into that office, he had to resign as governor, handing Ruth Ann Minner the job a couple weeks early since she, serving as Carper’s LG, had won the 2000 election to succeed him. Eight years earlier, when Carper was first elected governor, he took over from the answer to a good trivia question: the last Republican governor wasn’t Mike Castle, who parlayed his being elected governor twice into a Congressional seat he would hold for 18 years, but his LG Dale Wolf, who wrapped up Castle’s second term with an uneventful 20-day tenure in 1992-93.
As of yesterday, we adopted another caretaker who, unlike Minner, lost her bid to succeed her “boss,” even though Delaware doesn’t elect the governor and his/her lieutenant as a ticket. Bethany Hall-Long finished second in the 2024 Democrat primary to incoming Governor Matt Meyer but got the consolation prize because outgoing term-limited Governor John Carney hadn’t lived off the taxpayers quite enough and at an age when most people retire (68) was elected this past fall as the mayor of Wilmington. (He succeeds 78-year-old Mayor Mike Purzycki, who opted not to seek another term.) Carney’s resignation yesterday means Hall-Long will get the job for two weeks as Delaware’s 75th governor before Meyer takes over.
Obviously that brings up the reference to another Delaware political fixture, Joe Biden. Back during the campaign there was some talk about Biden stepping aside early and giving Vice President Kamala Harris a little advantage of incumbency. Instead, Biden stuck it out, watched his second-in-command lose the election, and will presumably maintain his iron grip upon the office until noon on January 20. The only reason to quit now would be to spitefully mess up the Donald Trump trinket (45 and 47) sales by shoehorning Harris in as the 47th for a couple weeks. But Biden’s advisors have their own agenda and are working feverishly to thwart any reform Trump can have, and Harris may just get in the way of that. Instead, she got to be the humiliated one to preside over the formal adoption of the Electoral College count for the person she lost to in the election like Al Gore did in 2001.
But there is a big perk Bethany should probably get as a consolation prize. The salary for governor is more than double that of the LG, so there should be a nice little bump in pay for the soon to be unemployed Hall-Long. (Who am I kidding? She’ll find a consulting job somewhere that will likely be a pay raise from the $83,884 she made a year as LG.) For two weeks, prorated, that difference is about $3,000. I couldn’t find out if this was true, but I imagine that will also bump her pension up significantly since she served in the governor’s office, if only for a couple weeks.
A politician finding a way to grift a living is about the last thing we have to worry about in this corrupt nation, so shed no tears for Bethany.
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