Two tweets posted on Twitter today within one minute of each other are telling, as well as related to part of my conversation with John DePetro for my weekly call-in yesterday.  First:

https://t.co/rPKfO5mXEa Went to the Prov Welfare office again this morning Lines are still long. #Stillbroken @JohnDePetroshow @GovRaimondo

— Patricia Morgan (@repmorgan) November 1, 2017

Second:

Governor @GovRaimondo reading to preschoolers at @childrenswkshop! #rireads pic.twitter.com/GkvtGOwx7F

— RI KIDS COUNT (@RIKidsCount) November 1, 2017

I don’t juxtapose these to promote Patricia Morgan, or even to advocate against Gina Raimondo.  An impression of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo has been building, and it could (and should) be a barrier to her reelection no matter how much money she’s able to dump into Rhode Island’s relatively small media market.

When it comes to actual crises and errors in the executive branch, Raimondo takes an incremental approach.  A new revelation puts UHIP in the news, so she comes up with something that appears to be a response and walks away again.  Meanwhile, her affection for photo ops and staged events is well established.

That isn’t leadership, and people know it isn’t leadership.  Whatever collage of pleasant feelings canned photo ops might generate can be washed away by manifest bad management.  To the extent that her ample professional staff (in and out of the campaign) believes that photo-ops are indispensable, every single one of them should be of a leader fixing problems.