GOP governance fails.

If you want some good Sunday reading, check out this article from Salon.com's Paul Rosenberg. The whole article is deep and filled with stats, and shows the Democrats' superior economic record when they are in control. If you live in a world where results matter, you can't help but notice that most big-name GOP governors fail miserably, including our Guv here in Wisconsin.

What do Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal all have in common? They’re all sitting governors who’d like to be president, sure. But what else?

How about being embarrassingly bad at job creation? That’s right. From January 2011 through January 2015, Louisiana under Jindal ranked 32nd in job creation with 5.4 percent growth over four years. Wisconsin under Walker ranked 35th, with 4.85 percent growth. New Jersey under Christie ranked 40th, with 4.15 percent growth. This compares with a national average of 8.21 percent.

Rosenberg goes on to note that as these GOP guvs try to promote their record on the national stage, the reality back home is that their right-wing policies are bankrupting their states, to the disapproval of the people that know them best.

It’s not just the embarrassing job-creation numbers, though that alone should be enough to disqualify the whole lot of them. New Jersey has just experienced its ninth bond downgrade under Christie, who may end up looking for a bridge to hide under. In Wisconsin, Walker, facing a two-year deficit that could go as high as $2 billion, has responded with $300 million in cuts for higher education, on top of billions in previous education cuts. Still, job creation was supposed to be Walker’s big thing—he promised to create 250,000 jobs in four years when he first ran in 2010, but came up short by more than 100,000 jobs. Making matters worse are the neighborhood comparisons. Wisconsin ranked between 29th and 41st in job growth over the last four years, the worst in the Midwest three of those years, and second worst the other. In fact, the state performed poorly on a whole host of indicators used by Bloomberg News, and suffers markedly in contrast with neighboring Minnesota, where progressive policies have that state’s economy recovering nicely.

Perhaps the pundits are still dazzled by these guys, but folks at home, not so much. Neither Christie nor Walker has any traction in beating Hillary Clinton in head-to-head home state matchups, probably the only kind of polls this early with any potential long-term 2016 value, since they involve figures well-known to the public being polled. Then again, Walker’s job approval fell to 41 percent in the latest Marquette Law poll (56 percent disapprove), which has plenty of other bad news for him as well.

Throw in Jindal's disastrous reign in Louisiana, which had unemployment rise from 5.6% to 7.2% during 2014, in a year that saw the U.S. add the most jobs in 15 years. Add in a chronic budget deficit, the GOP's refusal to raise taxes or even roll back tax cuts, and constant cuts to education that led LSU to consider filing for bankruptcy last week, and Jindal has been horrendous, even by the GOP's low standards.

And yet there are still some who think the GOP is the "responsible, adult" party that can run government better. I have no idea what planet these people are living on, except for the fact that in GOP-world, results don't matter, "bold moves" and other types of poses do. I'd hope we ask for more from our candidates outside of the bubble.