Governor Carcieri Tuesday night during his State of the State address to a joint session of the General Assembly. He urged Rhode Island taxpayers to make their voices heard.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

“All of Rhode Island’s virtues, all of its assets, all of Rhode Island’s bright promises are overshadowed and, in fact, threatened by the budget crisis we face.”

I applaud Governor Carcieri for laying it on the line in his State of the State speech.

Speaking to the Democratic General Assembly in a broadcast address in the House chamber on Tuesday night, the Republican governor said the state faces financial disaster.

He did not try to duplicate what he did last year: Mask grim fiscal news amid a welter of happy talk, only to have release of the budget the next day unveil the truer dimensions of a harsher reality.

Even this time around, my guess is that people still don’t fully appreciate the depths of the incipient catastrophe or grasp the extreme solutions Carcieri will propose in the budget he is to submit Thursday for the coming fiscal year. He has to close a deficit of up to $450 million.

After listening to his speech — and having a remarkable, extended conversation with his wife, Sue, that I’ll share with you — I am more convinced than ever that the governor, however well intended, fails to appreciate fully the toll that his austere social philosophies and pro-wealth anti-tax views can take on the lives of less fortunate Rhode Islanders.

And while I wholeheartedly endorse his call on the Assembly, the unions and municipal officials to work with his administration to implement change, I saw little in the content or tone of his speech to make me believe he has the skills to make it happen or that the other parties will find it in them to effectively work with him. They may say they want to, but it seems likelier they will, as they often have in the past, resist or ignore him.

Certainly I sensed no chemistry in the chamber Tuesday night between the governor and sullen legislators who chose most of the time to sit on their hands.

Indeed, although he appeared before the lawmakers, he essentially used them as props and directed much of the speech to citizens who were watching on TV, listening on radio, or would read the newspaper.

He mentioned several changes he wants to introduce to make government more efficient and effective and declared, “If this plan is implemented, your taxes won’t go up.”

But he also warned, “This plan faces many obstacles. Everyone with something to lose will lobby this Assembly furiously against these spending reductions. If they succeed, this plan will falter and your taxes will go up.”

You may remember a speech President Richard Nixon made in 1969 amid growing unrest about the Vietnam War. He outlined a plan of American troop reductions, but with a continuation of fighting. And he said:

“So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support.”

Now, this year, here was Carcieri telling Rhode Islanders:

“So, tonight, I call on you — the hardworking Rhode Islander, the average citizen anxious about your own rising costs and the nation’s economic outlook — to make your voice heard.

“Your voice must be just as loud as the powerbrokers and special interests that regularly patrol these halls. If you want change, you must be a part of it!”

The governor told me later that, as he spoke those words, he actually had in mind an image of folks listening in: “What I see is people I know, because Sue and I are out a lot. People are very angry. They’re very frustrated, just for the reasons I said. Their costs are going up and up and up, and they don’t see their government doing the same thing they’re having to do. And so my message to them out there is: You know and I know what happens within the walls of this building. All the people that want something — their voices are heard loud and clear. They put enormous pressure on that General Assembly. The people out there need to understand their voices need to be as loud.”

I mentioned to him Nixon’s talk of a “silent majority.” Carcieri said he sees it among his neighbors; people lead their lives, go to work and so forth, and expected elected leaders to do the job they were sent to do.

I welcome some of Carcieri’s ideas. It certainly sounded like good news when he vowed in his speech to provide services to seniors in their own residences that will help keep them out of nursing homes.

Democratic Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, who long has favored such an approach, told me Tuesday night that legislation already has been drafted and that this was an example of how you can save money and assist people at the same time.

But she pounded Carcieri for cuts he is already proposing to help balance this year’s budget: He wants to remove thousands of adults and children from the state’s RIte Care health-insurance program for low-income people. “A cut in RIte Care is not a smart fiscal cut,” she said, warning that it would burden community hospitals by forcing people to visit emergency rooms.

Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed made similar points in a speech, inveighing against short-sighted economies, and declaring, “Budget decisions must be based on facts.”

In another speech, House Majority Leader Gordon Fox called for creative steps, including an initiative to get more people onto food stamps, which bring “valuable federal dollars into the state,” provide a nutritional boost and free up money for such other essentials as heat and shelter.

Good for Fox, and I’m sick of hearing about this. It is a travesty that advocates have had to plead for years — I repeat — years for the state to get up to speed in this area.

I fault Carcieri’s framing the budget debate as spending cuts versus tax hikes. It might be smarter, and fairer, to lessen the cuts and increase some taxes.

On Tuesday night, AFL-CIO leader George Nee stepped up labor’s grumbling over tax breaks the state has given the rich, tax breaks the Democratic legislature so far seems hardly more willing than Carcieri to reconsider. In an interview, Nee fumed, “We have almost created a class of people in this state that are untouchable.… We have no empirical evidence that any jobs have been created, and it’s all been on speculation. And to me, if we have a budget crisis that affects all Rhode Islanders, then everything should be on the table.”

On Thursday, at a Minority Legislative Caucus news conference, black and Hispanic lawmakers hammered away at Carcieri for a rich-get-richer/poor-get-poorer approach to government. After Sen. Harold Metts, D-Providence, voiced outrage about the tax breaks for the wealthy, I noted that they were enacted by the Democratic Assembly and that its leaders appear to have no intention of changing the situation.

“That’s why I pray for them every night,” said Metts, a Congdon Street Baptist Church deacon.

Carcieri had every right to call on rank-and-file taxpayers to make their voices heard in support of his proposals for rescuing the state. And I would make a similar point: If you dissent from his proposals, make your voices heard, particularly if you have constructive alternatives to offer.

By the way, in regard to speaking up, someone who is not shy is Sue Carcieri. She was once a teacher and is a champion of such causes as wellness programs and opposition to abortion. The Carcieris have a spectacularly handsome family: 4 children and 14 grandchildren. The first lady has a high profile on the political scene. Episodically, the younger generations do as well; indeed, I saw a good handful at the State House on Tuesday night.

I want to tell you about the conversation I had with Sue Carcieri. It took place, with my tape recorder visible and running, near the doorway to the ornate State Room, where a post-speech reception was going on. I greeted her, and she immediately took me to task for something I said in a column in Tuesday’s Journal.

In denouncing a proposal the governor made recently to drop 2,000 children of illegal immigrants from RIte Care, I said the the kids would now swamp emergency rooms or just go to school sick and pose a health hazard to other kids, including citizens. Among the words I used to describe the proposal was “cruel.”

The first lady seized on this, called it “hate speech,” and said it didn’t “reflect the truth.”

She said her husband was faced with tough decisions, and she suggested that I, as a parent (actually now also a grandparent), should understand. “You have children. Do you just give them everything whenever they say, ‘Daddy, I want this’? You just say, ‘Sure’? You don’t do any tough love stuff?”

A moment later, I said the children of illegal immigrants are young kids. “They didn’t do anything wrong.”

She said, “No, they didn’t do anything wrong, but they have parents who ought to be taking care of them…. The parents are responsible for them.”

I said, “Not all parents are capable of doing that, or they need help.”

She said, “You really have the bigotry of low expectations.”

Soon she turned the conversation to a protest last month against the governor’s layoff of three Southeast Asian interpreters. At a news conference, a 15-year-old Cambodian girl said, among other things, “The governor is sending a clear message to my community that we are not valued or welcome.” And a 16-year-old Vietnamese boy called his actions “racist.”

I wrote that if I were governor, I wouldn’t rest until I reached out to those two teens and others in the Southeast Asian community.

Now, on Tuesday night, Sue Carcieri suggested that if he were to meet with the teens it would be “rewarding bad behavior.”

She said, “First of all, I think they have mentors who are much older than them who are training them up. You know — how those terrorists have kids blow up, you know, Benazir Bhutto and so forth? You think the kids thought of it? I don’t think so.”

If true, that would be all the more reason, I would think, that the governor would want to talk with the teens, find out more about them and have them learn more about him.

But the first lady said she didn’t like the idea that people could “say something really obnoxious and nasty” and then “get somebody important” to meet with them.

She said her husband is invariably “polite.”

She added, “He has to do difficult things. It’s easy to write about things, but it’s hard to actually do things.”

She’s right, but that doesn’t mean I find it pleasant when I have to criticize him.

Now she spoke in more depth about the challenge of what the governor is trying to accomplish. “It’s very difficult, and that’s why nobody’s ever done it, because people just, you know, cave to whoever has the greatest and loudest demands. But it’s hard to stand strong, and, again, I do relate to having children, because we raise children. You cannot always say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ I mean there are those curfews and there are those restrictions on the allowance. Or, ‘You don’t get a new car because…’ ”

She said someone tough-minded must be in charge.

“We have a lot of soft hearts but not people with tough minds.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com