EANNE SHAHEEN'S four years as governor of New Hampshire have been marked by economic growth, greater access to public kindergarten, and expanded health-insurance coverage for childen. Her signal failure has been the weak leadership she has provided on improving the state's unfair system of financing public schools.
Still, with hopes that she will use her political skills to forge a program that raises enough money and relieves the overburdened property tax, the Globe endorses her for a third term.
Her two principal opponents are Republican Gordon Humphrey, a former two-term US senator and a fierce opponent of state spending, and Independent Mary Brown, an accountant and state senator who has a detailed plan for fixing the school-funding problem: a constitutionally capped income tax of 4 percent combined with a property-tax limit of 2 percent of a home's value.
Shaheen had not been in office a full year when the state's Supreme Court made the ruling that has set the state's political agenda ever since: It found the financing of schools through local property taxes to be unconstitutionally inequitable. With a governor who in both 1996 and 1998 ''took the pledge'' against any broad-based state taxes, the Legislature could only cobble together a statewide property tax that raises too little money and pits rich ''donor'' towns against poor ''receiver'' towns.
This year, Shaheen wisely refused to take the pledge and is awaiting the report of a blue-ribbon education and tax commission that - sometime after the election - will lay out various tax options. Her own favorite source of revenue has been video gambling - a tax on the poor if there ever was one.
Humphrey proposes a constitutional amendment to eliminate the shift of property taxes from rich towns to poor towns and optimistically counts on economic growth to generate enough revenues to cover the shortfall that amendment would create.
Humphrey has waged a feisty, well-funded campaign that has had to balance his old image as a self-described ''skinflint'' with a more moderate political climate. For instance, he now recommends stronger efforts to enroll uninsured children in the state's Healthy Kids program. At the same time, he has to justify past votes against school lunches, highway spending, and battered women's shelters, which he once characterized as antifamily ''indoctrination centers.''
With Jeanne Shaheen, voters are more sure of what they are getting: a down-to-earth, pragmatic problem-solver. She has led efforts to expand patients' rights, widen I-93, and curb electric utility rates. Shaheen has fumbled on school funding, but deserves another term in Concord.
