Political constraints saved for later . Note that the governor not only stated principles, he did not start out with a huge set of political demands as to what would or would not be acceptable. Politics obviously has a major role to play, and legislation must be decided by elected representatives not by the bureaucracy or unelected officials. But there's a time and a place for different types of politics. If a set of principles leads to certain conclusions, those conclusions need to be stated first and their logic understood.
Valuable compromise involves trade-offs among competing principles.
If principles aren't well articulated at the start, any compromise is more likely to represent a random anarchic process where the tradeoffs are among special interests who need come forward with only the flimsiest rationales for their positions. After all, in the latter case the basis for decisionmaking is reduced to the power of each interest group. Accountable leadership . Their focus was almost entirely on presenting the state with a much better tax system than what it has now. A similar, although not identical, story can be told about the process that led to federal tax reform in 1986.