With Congress heading out of town, attention is turning to the states. If we care to pay attention, there is a wealth of valuable experience about the results we can expect should the president and the Democratic congressional leadership get their way on their liberal agenda.

Ross Douthat looks at the relative performance of Texas and California, the latter an example of the Blue States’ “zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.” He argues that the comparison should be sobering for those seeking to follow that model for the entire nation:

The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.

This helps explain why the Republican Party might be competitive in the Northeast for the first time in years. Chris Christie is easily leading Jon Corzine in the race for New Jersey’s governorship. Rob Simmons might unseat Chris Dodd in Connecticut. Rudy Giuliani, who has experience with blue-state crises, is pondering a run for the statehouse in New York.

And it also helps explain Obama’s current difficulties. The president is pushing a California-style climate-change bill at a time when businesses (and people) are fleeing the Golden State in droves. He’s pushing a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts. His ballooning deficits resemble the shortfalls paralyzing state capitals from Springfield to Sacramento.

Robert Samuelson makes a similar argument, focusing on the fiscal train wreck in California. He writes:

Its government made more promises than its economy can easily support. For years, state leaders papered over the contradiction with loans and modest changes. By overwhelming these expedients, the recession triggered an inevitable reckoning.

Here’s the national lesson. There’s a collision between high and rising demands for government services and the capacity of the economy to produce the income and tax revenue to pay for those demands. That’s true of California, where poor immigrants and their children have increased pressures for more government services. It’s also true of the nation, where an aging population raises Social Security and Medicare spending. California is leading the transformation of politics into a form of collective torture: pay more (higher taxes), get less (lower services).

[. . .]

The state’s liberal establishment is in mourning. “Reversing 40 years of progress” is how Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, a liberal research and advocacy group, put it in one blog. Some welfare benefits will be cut by half. California’s student-teacher ratio, now about a third above the national average, will probably go even higher. The University of California system lost 20 percent of its state payments. It’s raising tuition and student fees 9.3 percent, imposing salary reductions of 4 to 10 percent on more than 100,000 workers, and delaying faculty hires.

National parallels again seem apparent. Federal budget deficits — reflecting the urge to spend and not tax — predate the recession and, as baby boomers retire, will survive any recovery. Amazingly, the Obama administration would worsen the long-term outlook by expanding federal health insurance coverage. There’s much mushy thinking about how we’ll muddle through.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that Democratic governors are facing tough elections in 2009 and 2010. But the larger lesson is for the president and the Congress and about the inevitable results of liberal one-party rule. As Douthat says: “The president wants to govern America like a blue state. But for that to work, he’ll need the nation’s economy to start performing more like Texas.” It is far from clear, however, that Beltway Democrats — who have waited decades to achieve control of both ends of Pennsylvania — are going to give up their dream of enacting their ultraliberal agenda.