Patriot News and Penn Live editorial and opinion page editor John Micek joins us to look back at a year that saw the election of a new governor in Pennsylvania.
When Democrat Tom Wolf takes over for Tom Corbett this month, he will face a host of challenges as he tackles an ambitious agenda.
Micek says that the election of Wolf was definitely the biggest political story of 2014 for the Commonwealth; the Democrat’s win broke with Pennsylvania’s longstanding “eight-year rule” by forestalling a second term for Tom Corbett. When Wolf takes office later this month, among his biggest challenges will be a statewide budget deficit of around 2 billion dollars.
Wolf also must fulfill his promise to fund the state’s public schools in a more robust way than Corbett and his administration had, as school funding was a key point of Wolf’s gubernatorial campaign and a major point of criticism for Corbett. According to Micek, Wolf also plans to move the state into the expansion of Medicaid that is provided through the Affordable Care Act -- another issue on which Wolf's and Corbett's campaigns differed sharply.
