Enough time has passed to evaluate Lou Leon Guerrero’s governorship, with enough information to quench our curiosity about the lame duck: How could she have been more effective? That’s not to say she wasn’t. But, as the saying goes, we all have room for improvement. In the governor’s case, that betterment could have served the rest of us better.
And where she could have done better had nothing to do with any genius or overwhelming change of heart and conviction.
Ronald Reagan was known as The Great Communicator. He was so effective at implementing his agenda because he knew how to ingratiate himself into the hearts and minds of the American people, Congress, and both allies and enemies of the state.
In the Calvo administration I had this co-worker named Bernie Artero who was, without a doubt, the most influential and powerful person in the government next to the governor. She was the chief fiscal advisor; the person who led the government of Guam from financial abandonment into sustainable fiscal reform. The current governor began her tenure on solid financial footing because of Ms. Artero’s work to stabilize finances, get the government on time with tax refund payments, and so much more.
In the beginning of our tenure in 2011, Bernie cut a deal with me: She would let me in to all of her fiscal policy stuff and explain all that smart math to me, as long as my office would be the one to translate all of it for the public. She was a financial wiz whom Governor Eddie Calvo often joked carried the government’s purse around with secret stashes of cash that she would reveal only to pay down bills and implement new services he wanted.
All she needed was a communicator; someone to increase public relations around the governor’s agenda so that she could continue doing her brilliant work quietly and at the same time have that marketed work increase Mr. Calvo’s popularity.
That popularity is what gave the governor the political capital to be as influential and beloved as he was. That’s how he was able to get so many things done.
Governor Lou Leon Guerrero could probably have accomplished so much more these past six years in office if she simply was a better communicator who earned herself greater political capital. Instead, her often brash and uncouth language, oftentimes condescending and dismissive even to the general public, has been a liability to what could have been a stupendous agenda for our benefit.
(By the way, her communications director Krystal Paco-San Agustin, has done as best a job as can be done. Her boss, the chief of staff, should have done a better job at empowering Ms. Paco-San Agustin so that she could have truly led gubernatorial marketing.)
In hindsight I have to wonder how long ago construction of a new Simon Sanchez High School or a new Guam Memorial Hospital would have started if the governor was – by popularity steered by effective communication – a step ahead of her detractors like Therese Terlaje, Chris Barnett, Joanne Brown, and Telo Taitague. Could we be on a path to universal health coverage, if she was just better at admitting her mistakes, explaining her process, and inspiring us with her vision?
Good communication skills or not, her series of accomplishments should not be diminished by this one drawback of hers. Her handling of the pandemic arguably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. Everything after that consideration is meaningless to me. She could have done a better job if she wasn’t so abrasive. I mean, prideful exclamations of forcefully taking over clinics and private property and telling nurses, “You have no say,” was just stupid. But did she get the job done? Yes. Yes she did, and history will remember her for that.
Never in the history of elected governors has any of them been able to boast five straight consecutive years of surplus budgets. She did what none of them could in terms of the fiscal management of the government. Here is a great example of how this monumental achievement could have been made better with fidelity to proper public relations. Somewhere either in her head, tossed around her senior staff, or perhaps in some written hidden plan is Ms. Leon Guerrero’s vision for a transformed government that meets the needs of modern society far into the future. With all that federal money that came and all the hundreds of millions in surplus the past five years, she could have programmatically funded her vision for the future.
Instead, her lack of political capital caused by her inability to communicate effectively with the public, has allowed senators to pilfer those funds for special interest and for the spending priorities of the legislative politicians. The pressure she was unable to withstand from the public, the media, and from within the less-than-scrupulous quarters of her own administration led to the squandering of so much federal pandemic funds. And look at how the Guam Department of Education has wasted so much money and opportunity with their federal funds. More popular governors like Eddie Calvo or Carl Gutierrez would have used the bully pulpit to pressure GDOE to spend money more appropriately. What did we get instead? Schools that couldn’t open on time because repairs waited so long, despite GDOE being flush with federal cash.
Perhaps her greatest test of her communications skills is happening now: Can the governor talk us into tourism? Can she market our island to millions of Korean and Japanese travelers who have been choosing other places because those other places are better marketed than Guam is?
I used to think the apparent corruption and cronyism in the administration were the handiwork of Governor Lou Leon Guerrero. But, as Kandit has spoken with dozens of witnesses in an ongoing federal corruption investigation into the administration, the one name that never comes up is Lou Leon Guerrero. Not a single direct or indirect connection has been made in the PUA fraud scandal to the governor, except by association to her administration.
Based on the wealth of information these sources have been able to provide, we have been able to connect further dots to the pandemic spending era, all the promotions in GovGuam that followed, and the reelection campaign of 2022. We have begun our deep dive into connecting this source information with campaign contributions, ERA payouts, LEAP grants, hiring throughout the government, contracts to cronies, and other obvious corruption and cronyism ventures.
In our analysis, Governor Lou Leon Guerrero’s fingerprints aren’t on any of these. All she has been doing, according to the information we’ve been able to gather, is governing. You might not like how she goes about her governorship, what she says, or what she refuses to say; but unless federal funds stashed away in the bank her family owns is proven by any investigation to have benefited her family, I really don’t see our governor as corrupt. Perhaps she has engaged in some light cronyism, but likely not to the degree of her predecessors.
Maybe the reason she seems so mad all the time is because she’s been doing her job and getting shit on for the corruption and cronyism fomented by someone else in her administration.
According to multiple witnesses and victims of the ongoing PUA fraud case, that’s connected to him, not to her.
Corruption and cronyism are apparent in the governor’s administration. (Let’s not be naive or partisan—corruption and cronyism happened in varying degrees under every Guam administration). It doesn’t look like she’s the problem. But the problem IS in Adelup. And he is a much better communicator.
The moral of the story: Just because someone cusses like a sailor or doesn’t say the nicest things doesn’t mean she’s less of a leader or a good person. Beware of the smooth talkers instead.
