virginia leads the way in state management

check out the 2005 results from the Government Performance Project. look who stands out above all others... Virginia. it's hard to argue with these glowing words:

There is little that Virginia does not do well in government management. That’s been true for a while. But it keeps looking for improvements, and very often finds them. Outsiders might wonder how the only state that bars its governor from seeking reelection could provide its administrations with sufficient clout to make difficult decisions. But it consistently does. Virginia has an ethos of good management that has genuinely been institutionalized. Even if a governor betrays that culture—as did Jim Gilmore when he opened a $1 billion budget shortfall in the late 1990s with a cut in car taxes that was politically popular but fiscally unsound—the state seems able to find its way back to the path of good managerial sense.

harder still it is to believe that our executive is a democrat. well, a reasonably fiscally conservative democrat, saddled with a republican legislature. perhaps virigina leads the way in state management because it isn't actually a state, but a commonwealth. ;-)