HARRISBURG – Arrests, prison sentences, knock-down-drag-out fights for the U.S. Senate, long, tedious slogs over the state budget — and that was just 2009 in Pennsylvania politics.

The denizens of Pennsylvania’s political scene can be accused of many things — and over the last 10 years more than a few have been accused, not to mention convicted — but you can never accuse them of being boring.

From the government pay raises of 2005 that led to a housecleaning of the Legislature, to the 2008 and 2009 arrests in the so-called Bonusgate public corruption scandal, to seven years of late state budgets, Pennsylvania leaders found themselves, more often than not, in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

”Public confidence in [state] government, as reflected in the polls, is at a 30-year low,” said G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster who has been tracking public opinion in Pennsylvania for years. ”You would have to go back to the late 1970s to find a comparable period.”

But even as state government took a battering over the last 10 years, Pennsylvania’s political star was in the ascendancy nationally.

Read the Morning Call’s wrap-up of the decade in politics here

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 6:52 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.