Former governor John Sununu insists he's not interested in running for his old job. But in an interview this week with Monitor editors, Sununu, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, laid out a blunt and often personal rebuke to Gov. John Lynch's tenure as the state's chief executive.

Sununu's argument - that Lynch and the Democratic majorities in the Legislature are robbing the state of its special character and dragging it to financial ruin - is the sharpest critique of the current Democratic leadership to date. And he offered it as a rallying cry for Republicans who hope to win back control of Concord next year.

"We have lost the qualities that made us a special state," Sununu said in the hour-long interview. "Fortunately, we started from being a great state, and this erosion has taken us down to the point where we're somewhere in the middle. But 'good enough' shouldn't be good enough for New Hampshire. The Democrats are ruining this state. Capital R, capital U, capital I, capital N, capital I-N-G."

That ruin, Sununu said, is visible in many places: in the decline in citizen participation in local affairs; in the $7 billion unfunded liability in the state retirement systems; in the decline in population growth. At the root of these problems, Sununu said, is the gradual shift in the way taxes are collected, with the statewide property tax swamping the town- and city-centered tax structure of past decades.

Sununu said this financial argument should be at the center of the Republican campaign platform in next year's elections, with a special focus on the most recent budget. Sununu accused Democrats of putting off tough decisions about cutting spending and hiding behind accounting gimmicks in an effort to shower special interest groups with money.

While he said the budget passed last month was more than 8 percent higher than the previous spending plan, other analysts have put the increase at between 5 percent and 6 percent. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have claimed this year's budget is slightly lower than the last one, although that claim requires them to ignore some spending that is no longer counted in the general fund.

Regardless of the percentages, Sununu said Democrats have chosen in recent years to value political victory over fiscal responsibility. Sununu cited several studies in support of his argument, including a report last year by the Pew Research Center that gave New Hampshire a failing grade for government performance. All of this, he said, is part of a Democratic plan to foist a broad-based tax upon the state.

"There has been a huge ramping up in the level of spending and what I perceive to be the mismanagement of state government," he said. "It has occurred a slice at a time so that nobody gets very excited about each slice. But like a good salami sandwich, if you put enough of these thin slices on it, pretty soon you get a pound. And we have had that accumulation of problems and policy changes."

He continued: "They (Democrats) are relishing the fact that they've mismanaged the state to the point that everybody will have to accept the fact that there might be an income tax."

In Sununu's version, the only fault from Republicans was allowing Democrats to outmaneuver them at the ballot box.

"We have not run good campaigns, we have not run good candidates, and most of all, we have not defined clearly the difference between Republicans and Democrats in New Hampshire," he said.

Sununu peppered his remarks with references to his own time in the corner office, for six years in the 1980s. He recalled it as a period of surplus budgets, slimmed bureaucracies and efficient services, a pattern Democrats have largely abandoned, he said.

"This is not hard to do, honest," he said. "It can be done."

And he described one of his favorite methods for gathering new ideas: walking through state offices unannounced.

"When I was there I was a nuisance to the departments," Sununu said. "I would just walk around and talk to people. You find and learn a lot."

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