I don't want to sound pretentious, but you could hire a bunch of monkeys to be on a TV show, and if it's successful, then everything's perfect and everybody's happy.
Further, a defensive policy involves the loss of the initiative, with all the consequent disadvantages to the defender.
My goal was to make New Jersey's state government a model for all other states to emulate, hopefully thereby to stem, or at least slow down, the flow of power to the federal government.