After Jake Zimmerman regaled the West County Dems with his version of why, at the national level, Democrats and the country are not doomed, he led his remarks on the state scene by wailing in the same mock Old Testament prophet of doom voice as he had for the national scene.

“Jay Nixon is not a Democrat! He’s not working on health care for children! He’s screwing the city of St. Louis! Nothing good is happening! Republicans control the legislature. They are going to drive us off the cliff! Cynthia Davis is going to make it so that we can’t get divorced anymore and God knows what else! Everybody’s going to prison! (He paused in the tirade to confide: “That part’s true.”) “We’re DOO-O-O-OOMED!”)

Then, morphing back into a 21st century man, Zimmerman smiled and asked the crowd: “Jay Nixon’s been dealt a rough hand of cards, hasn’t he?” Zimmerman likened it to the hand that Bob Holden was dealt: both governors found themselves in tough economic situations where they were forced to make unpopular budget cuts. And both started off with a “silly scandal.” In Holden’s case, it was the “one million dollar inauguration”; in Nixon’s case, the e. coli outbreak at Lake of the Ozarks. Zimmerman’s take on the recent scandal was “I for one am stunned that the Lake of the Ozarks is anything less than crystal clear, pure drinking water.”

The real problem for both, of course, is the sick budget. The state of Missouri is in “perpetual structural imbalance.” Revenue is fixed, and the only way to get more funds is to go to the voters–who are none too fond of voting for more taxes, especially in the middle of a recession. In both cases, the legislature passed a pie in the sky budget and forced the governor to make the realistic cuts. Holden, for example, because the legislature had overspent, was forced to withhold funds. In the middle of Holden’s State of the State address, Rod Jetton stood up and, in Joe Wilson “You lie!” style, yelled: “Release the funds, governor! Release the funds!” The accusation stuck, and Holden owned that problem like an albatross.

But, Zimmerman asked, have you noticed that Nixon is not getting beat up in the press in the same way that Holden did for the painful economic cuts he’s been making? Zimmerman pointed out, for example, that despite the cuts that had to be made in higher education, Nixon was not labeled a villain:

“The administration quietly worked proactively with the universities and … announced a deal, with the presidents of all the major state universities standing up and saying, ‘We’ll take our budget cut; it won’t be as bad as it could have been. But we’re making a commitment to freeze tuition.’ You know what that is? That’s shrewd politics. Shrewd politics is helping people understand that you’re doing what you’ve got to do and reaching out to the constituencies in the right way and learning from what happened to the guy before you.

At that point, Zimmerman began building steam in his defense of Nixon, never approaching the mock prophecy of doom tone he used at the beginning, but evincing sincere admiration.

Governor Nixon has been dealt the worst hand of cards imaginable for a new governor, with the possible exception of what got dealt to Bob Holden, who also had a brand new angry Republican majority to deal with. And in spite of all that, in my judgment, he has handled the big stuff, the stuff that matters, leaving aside the silly political stuff, masterfully. And that will pay dividends by the time 2012 rolls around. It may or may not pay dividends next year.

But by the way, for anybody in the room who is of the opinion that Jay Nixon, because he doesn’t deeply and passionately share the progressive ideology, becauses he and I would differ on a whole host of substantive issues because he is a guy from Jefferson County through and through and he acts and thinks like a Jefferson County Democrat–lest you be tempted to think that he ain’t so much of a Democrat and that we might be just as well better off with the other team in charge, let me make this observation: Jay Nixon is devoted to one political task right now and it’s the only thing he’s been focused on all year, and it will be the only thing he’ll focus on next year–raising money, roughly a couple million dollars, to employ a team of staff that are fanning out around the state to get Democrats elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. That is not the act of a selfish bastard who cares only about himself. That is not the act of a guy who is not a real Democrat. That is not the act of a governor who is not interested in making meaningful change in Missouri. That is the act of a realist, of a guy who understands that there ain’t much he can get done with this team in charge.

So. If you’ve been kvetching about Nixon, does Zimmerman’s defense soften you up?

I’ll have more to say about Zimmerman’s take on state politics in coming postings. His description of the bizarro world of Republicans had us in stitches.