Winners/Losers

May 16th, 12 / 0 Comments

Idaho Voters Stay Home in Droves

The closed Idaho primary election was the big loser yesterday. Most Idahoans – maybe close to 80% of the eligible voters – voted with their remote controls and stayed at home in front of the television rather than visit the polls and be forced for the first time to declare a party affiliation.

The Idaho Statesman’s Dan Popkey quotes Secretary of State Ben Ysursa today as saying, “Our biggest Election Day question used to be, ‘Where do I vote?’ Today, 90 percent of the calls we got were people upset about the closed primary and the party declaration being a public record.”

The extra partisan Republicans who pushed so hard for so long to close the primary may have forgotten that the enduring characteristic of the Idaho electorate in independence and privacy. Idahoans of either party, or no party, of the Libertarian Party, don’t like to be told what to do. They like choices, multiple choices, even if the vast majority of the time they end up punching the card for a Republican. The closed primary feels like an intrusion.

There were numerous sharply contested races – most in the Republican primary – yesterday and in most cases incumbents won. Where they didn’t, in Elmore and Kootenai Counties, for instance, there were mostly local reasons. So it is difficult to define any broad theme to the results yesterday beyond one of the oldest truths in politics, as Idaho Public Television’s Greg Hahn points out, “The power of incumbency is great.”

I’m left to ponder if Idaho Democrats – we know who they are now – will find a way to capitalize on the widespread lack of enthusiasm for the changes in the way we select candidates? A tiny sliver of sunshine for Democrats may exist in the spirited, but clean legislative primary races run in Ada County. Two young, committed first time candidates won contested primaries, for example, in District 19 in Boise’s reliably Democratic North End and they won the old fashion way – shoe leather, good messages, networking and endorsements.

If Idaho Democrats are ever to begin the long slog back to something like relevance, it will be because of committed, attractive younger candidates and a long-term strategy to woo Hispanics, college kids and the high tech community. Idaho Democrats need to re-invent themselves for the 21st Century. At least after yesterday, they have a place to start – a few thousands names of folks who actually stood up publicly and said: “I’m voting Democratic.”

 

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2012 Election, Idaho Politics

Election Day

May 15th, 12 / 0 Comments

A Watershed…or More of the Same?

Idaho voters will find something new today if they make the effort to get to their neighborhood polling place and it’s going to be very interesting to see whether they like declaring their party affiliation in order to vote. Here’s betting a number of us will feel just a little less comfortable in the privacy of the polling booth today than we did the last time we did our civic duty.

The most conservative elements in the Idaho Republican Party have been hankering for this change for a long time. The party may come to beware of what it wished for. Idaho’s impeccably fair Secretary of State, Ben Ysursa, is predicting a 23% voter turnout today; a dismal number if true that could permit a tiny sliver of the population to define the Idaho GOP for years to come. As has been the case for most of the last 20 years, Idaho Democrats are largely an afterthought. They feature a handful of contested elections for the state legislature, but most of the action will be on the GOP side of the ballot.

“This is the meanest dang campaign I ever saw,” Sen. Denton Darrington, a southern Idaho Republican told the Associated Press. Darrington is retiring after 30 years in the Senate rather than face a fellow Republican in a primary caused by a re-worked legislative district. “It’s the strangest, weirdest political season I’ve ever seen, and that’s a lot of years.”

I’ll be watching for trends in the Republican primaries in far northern Idaho, Canyon County and the Magic Valley where generally more middle-of-the-road incumbents are being challenged from the right. Several of these races have featured what feels like genuinely unprecedented levels of third-party, independent expenditures, a trend across the country that has finally come to Idaho in a big way. There have also been a number of last minute reports of confusing, or perhaps deceptive, mailings, endorsements, etc.

This has been a primary largely devoid of issues with most of the back-and-forth centering on who is the more reliable Republican conservative. Strangely missing – and this is true for Democrats as well as Republicans – has been much if any talk about the broad future direction of the state, job growth, expansion of the economy or education. This election has been fought, I suspect quite unsatisfactorily for all but the most partisan Idahoans, in the deep trenches of ideology.

One great irony of this new, closed primary environment is that the desire to limit participation in the GOP primary to the hardcore Republicans flies in the face of the historic success the party has long enjoyed. Generally speaking if you look closely at the election results in major races over the last 30 years, you’ll find that the larger the turnout the better Republicans do. One dirty little secret of the success Democrats enjoyed in controlling the Idaho governor’s office from 1970 to 1995 was that none of those winning elections for Democrats occurred in a presidential election year when turnout tends to be the highest. The only times Democrats have been successful on a statewide of congressional district basis over three decades or more is when they have faced damaged Republican incumbents, been successful in identifying and appealing to disaffected GOP voters and then hoping a lot of folks stay home on election day. A low turnout favors a Democrat in Idaho. Republicans, by closing their primary, have potentially begun to squander the broad numbers advantage they have enjoyed for years.

Dominate political organizations don’t always handle success very well for the long term. They overreach tending eventually to focus on the comfort of ideology rather than the hard work of ideas that relate to how the broad electorate lives and works.  Democrats, of course, or even a third-way movement that the state may be more and more ready to embrace, has to show some gumption if a reasonably alternative is to be offered. But this much is true: the ruling GOP club is going to be smaller tomorrow than it is today. We’ll see if that is good for the GOP brand in Idaho for the next generation or whether today’s election marks a point where the long arc of partisan politics finally starts to bend in a new direction.

 

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2012 Election

The Greatest

May 14th, 12 / 0 Comments

My All-time Team

I never saw Rogers Hornsby play baseball – he quit playing in 1937 – but I’m still pretty sure he was among the best right-handed hitters of all time. On my own personal greatest team Hornsby would play second base. His lifetime average was .358 – over 23 years! Three different times he hit over .400 for a season and a half dozen other times came close to that magic mark. The Rajah could hit. I think he was the best ever at second.

Selecting all-time greats in anything is highly subjective, but still great fun and since one of the enduring things about baseball is the history of the great game. comparing and contrasting players from different eras can fodder for endless discussion and speculation. So, bring on the debate. He’s the rest of Johnson’s Dream Team.

My catcher is Mickey Cochrane. I could make an argument for Bill Dickey, Johnny Bench or Yogi Berra, but I like Cochrane. Great defense player, twice American League MVP and a .320 lifetime batting average. Black Mike could play for me in any era.

The great Mike Schmidt is my third baseman. In 18 years in the Majors, Schmidt hit 30 or more home runs 13 times. He had 548 dingers in his career. He also won 10 Gold Gloves, nine in a row. There has never been a better all-around third baseman. I love Brooks Robinson, too, but Schmidt is my guy.

Shortstop is tough and I admit to being a late adopter of the fact that the Yankees’ Derek Jeter is a superb baseball player. He is a marvelous all-around player, a leader and he can lead off for my all-time team. Jeter will end his career with a lifetime .300 average, more than 500 doubles and way more than 250 homers. I hate the Yankees, but Jeter is a player for the ages.

Who could possible be the pick at first except the great Lou Gehrig? Seventeenth all-time in batting average with .340, fifth in RBI’s, twice American League MVP and just shy of 500 homers. The sorrow of Gehrig’s personal story notwithstanding, the Iron Horse was an all-time great. Few other first basemen even come close.

Now, talk about difficult, the outfield. Was Ruth better than Aaron? How does DiMaggio compare with Cobb? Was Bonds just a steroid-era freak? How about Clemente and Splendid Teddy Ballgame? And don’t forget Mays, Mantle and The Duke? I’ve always been partial to Al Simmons and Tony Gywnn. I could go on.

In a way there are no wrong choices. So, just to balance my line-up, I’ll put Williams in left, Mays in center – maybe the best all-around player ever – and the great Clemente in right. I want all those other guys, Ruth, Aaron, etc., on the bench. Might need to give someone a day off.

As for the mound. I’ll pick two guys I’d like in my rotation every year – Walter Johnson, a right hander, and the great Sandy Koufax, a southpaw. Those two guys just might be able to shutdown the rest of my dream team. Johnson won 417 games in his career. The Left Arm of God, as Koufax was called, won the Cy Young three times and remarkably twice lead the National League with 27 complete games.

What time is the first pitch?

 

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Baseball

Handling Adversity

May 11th, 12 / 0 Comments

A One Day Story That Wasn’t

Google “Mitt Romney” today and the first thing that appears is “Mitt Romney bullying,” which says a lot about a lot of things. It may just be that a lot of folks think a story about the GOP presidential candidate’s prep school years is an interesting story, or perhaps a silly story about the silly pranks of 17-year olds, or maybe a telling story about the candidate’s privileged upbringing, or just a mild distraction from debate about the economy and war and peace, or maybe it signifies something else entirely.

The story that broke yesterday in the Washington Post may yet prove to be a passing blip on the presidential political radar screen, but it may also be the first of a prolonged series of tests of Romney and his campaign concerning just how well they handle a little adversity. What interests me today is how the Romney camp has responded, as well as the candidate’s first instincts when presented with an inconvenient story.

Romney’s first response, in a radio interview, was to issue a blanket apology for youthful indiscretions and a specific response that he couldn’t remember the incident – an alleged Romney-led pack of high school guys who set up a frightened, long-haired, supposedly gay kid and then cut his hair – that was the basis of the Post story.

I don’t know about you, but I remember too much of my school years, particularly the embarrassing stuff. I remember back to the sixth grade when the tough kid in class pushed me down and sat on my chest as I was trying to walk home from school. I had my glasses in a case in my hip pocket and they were broken when I hit the deck. You tend to remember stuff like that, even 40 or more years later. So, the “I don’t recall” answer Romney initially offered and then repeated just doesn’t have the ring of reality about it.

So what, you might well say. Who cares about prep school antics? If we were all held to account for dumb things we did in high school we would all have some explaining to do, particularly to our parents. And in the end the bullying story may be just such an event, but it will not be the last bit of personal adversity Romney faces as he endures six months of vetting before the November voting. This is why Romney’s tin ear response, time and again, to adversity is a problem for his campaign.

Each one of these episodes – bullying, corporations are people, I like firing people, the wife’s two Cadillacs – paint an unflattering picture of a guy who is being defined before our eyes and he, so far at least, lacks the basic political skills to slip away from the characterizations.

It is striking in a way that Mitt Romney has been running for president for six years straight, served as a governor of a major state, and still offers such an incomplete picture of himself. Romney told an interviewer recently that one hard lesson he has learned from his years in politics is that you must define yourself before others do the job for you. If he learned that lesson, he seems to have forgotten it again.

The bullying story is interesting less for what it says about Romney’s youth, than for what it says about how he handles his present circumstances. Had Romney said, as Time’s Joe Klein wrote today, “I did a really stupid and terrible thing” 50 years ago and I’m sorry and wish I could take it back, he’d be back to talking about the economy today. Instead, lacking the instincts of a genuinely accomplished pro, he flubbed his lines and has invited a vast amount of follow up analysis and scrutiny.

Good campaigns – winning campaigns – handle adversity. Barack Obama did in 2008 with his outrageously outspoken preacher. John Kerry didn’t with his swiftboat critics in 2004. George W. Bush did with his Vietnam record and Al Gore didn’t with his fundraising at a Buddhist temple.

Romney got through a long primary campaign against a remarkably weak field by, as Newt Gingrich said, “carpet bombing” his opponents with expensive television advertising and by appearing to be the one guy who might have a chance to win the White House. It’s a new day. Obama may not be the strongest candidate, but he’s no Rick Santorum either. Romney’s adversity is just beginning. If he can’t handle quickly and deftly a story about his 17-year old life what will he do about something really important?

 

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2012 Election, Obama, Romney

Old Lessons

May 9th, 12 / 0 Comments

Where’s the Puppy?

Harry Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” I’ll offer the Johnson Corollary to Truman’s great one liner: “in politics, it is almost always your friends who cause you trouble.”

Most every politician I have known has a very good idea from which direction the partisan opposition will attack. It’s the onslaught from friends that is harder to anticipate and even more difficult to combat.

From Idaho to Indiana today, the Republican Party is in full revolt against itself and the soldiers in this war of the friends – faintly moderate Republicans battling really, really conservative Republicans – are in full battle gear.

The most recent purge of the “moderates” claimed its latest victim yesterday when 36-year Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar lost by 20 points in a GOP primary. Lugar, 80-years old, and portrayed as a squishy bipartisan moderate, was retired by the same type of voter who will next week take the Idaho GOP in an ever more rightward direction.

Lugar’s loss, like every losing campaign, turned on many factors. First, he may well have succumbed to the fatal illness that eventually catches many politicians; the voters just got sick of him. But, it’s also undeniable that The Club for Growth and other very conservative groups targeted the one-time chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for being one of the few in the Senate, on either side, willing to cross the aisle and work a deal. Lugar had the partisan misfortune of working with the president on arms issues and actually voting for two Obama Supreme Court appointees. Not good when your friends think such behavior is the political equivalent of sitting down for dinner with the Taliban.

In a remarkable statement released last night, Lugar neatly summed up what he – and more and more Republicans – are facing right now.

 ”Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country,” Lugar said. “And partisan groups, including outside groups that spent millions against me in this race, are determined to see that this continues. They have worked to make it as difficult as possible for a legislator of either party to hold independent views or engage in constructive compromise. If that attitude prevails in American politics, our government will remain mired in the dysfunction we have witnessed during the last several years.”

Closer to home, some Idaho Republicans are spending freely in an effort to shift their party further right. The combination of the new “closed” GOP primary, well-funded PAC’s targeting slightly more moderate incumbents and old intraparty feuds guarantee that Republicans, who have been almost completely successful over the last two decades in Idaho, will be deeply divided after the May 15th primary among the mere conservatives and the ultras. The headline in The Idaho Statesman today said it all: “Idaho House Leaders Attempt Fratricide”

Reporter Dan Popkey details the efforts by senior Republican leaders to target their own in primaries, prompting the state’s chief election officer, Secretary of State Ben Ysura, to observe: “This is groundbreaking, the open split in the leadership and money being spent against one of their own.”

Of course, Republicans have no lock on this type of “kill your friends” behavior. To disastrous effect, Franklin Roosevelt tried to “purge” conservatives from the Democratic Party in 1938. FDR, a generally brilliant political analyst, misread the country and created divisions within his party that lasted a generation. And, of course, Ted Kennedy helped contribute to Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980 with an ill-considered primary challenge against an incumbent president. Lyndon Johnson’s blood feud with Bobby Kennedy – the two most prominent Democrats in the country hated each other – is well-documented in Robert Caro’s new biography of LBJ.

Perhaps the truly remarkable feature of many of these intraparty feuds – fratricide is a good word for it – is that they happen at precisely the moment when a party has the most to gain by throwing up the biggest possible tent.

In 1938, Roosevelt had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. After his failed purge, he never passed another significant piece of domestic legislation. In 1980, national Democrats faced an energized effort, new at the time at least on such a scale, to target a number of their incumbents with independent expenditure campaigns. At the very moment the party needed unity rather than warfare, it opted for warfare and lost – big. Can you say President Reagan?

National Republicans in 2012 have an historic opportunity during a time of economic distress to turn out a weak incumbent, consolidate their hold on the House and capture the Senate. Lugar’s demise in Indiana, at the least, make that last objective more difficult, since a centrist Democrat in Hoosierlandwill now likely have an easier time witha Tea Party type than he would have had with Lugar.

In Idaho, you have to wonder if all this intraparty battling among Republicans is causing them to flirt dangerously with mucking up their own decades-long success. History may have a lesson on point. In 1966, conservatives in the Idaho GOP purged three-term incumbent Republican Gov. Robert E. Smylie on grounds that he was too moderate and had grown too big for the britches of his blue suits. Smylie’s replacement as governor was very conservative and a favorite of the Goldwater wing of the GOP.

Four years later, a 39-year old lumberjack from Orofino, Cecil D. Andrus, beat the very conservative and not terribly capable Gov. Don Samuelson. That 1970 election set off a 24-year run where Democrats never moved out of the Idaho Governor’s Office.

As that ol’ lumberjack is fond of saying, “don’t say anything bad about ol’ Don Samuelson. If there hadn’t been a Don Samuelson there would never have been a Cecil Andrus.”

Purges can have some of the most unintended consequences.

 

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2012 Election, Andrus, Idaho Politics

KSM’s Circus

May 7th, 12 / 0 Comments

Justice or a Show Trial?

Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s attorney has his hands full.

Idahoans who know Boise criminal defense attorney David Nevin, a quiet, well-spoken, extremely thoughtful fellow, will instantly identify with the challenges he confronts in a courtroom in Cuba as he attempts to mount a defense for the world’s most notorious terror suspect. Nevin, a University of Idaho law grad, would be the first to acknowledge that the sense of fairness that is supposed to be at the heart of our adversary-based judicial system, coupled with a commitment to the “rule of law,” is at the very core of what Americans mean when they think about the concept of justice.

Yet, the circus-like atmosphere that prevailed last Saturday during the long awaited arraignment of KSM and three other defendants seems to have little to do with the American system. “The system is a rigged game to prevent us from doing our jobs,” Nevin complained at the end of the 13 hour proceeding last weekend conducted before the military commission that will, probably years from now, put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial.

Specifically, attorneys for the terror suspects can’t have anything like a normal attorney-client relationship with the men they are supposed to be representing. Everything that KSM says, even to his lawyer, is apparently being considered by the government to be a state secret. And torture, specifically the allegation confirmed by the CIA that KSM was waterboarded 183 times, and that torture may have led to a confession is, so far, off-limits in the proceedings.

“The government wants to kill Mr. Mohammed to extinguish the last eyewitness to his torture,” Nevin said, as reported by McClatchy’s Carol Rosenberg.

Nevin is living out the highest calling of the American criminal justice system; the notion that everyone – even the man accused of plotting to bring down the twin towers – deserves a fair trial, a chance to hear all the evidence against him and to introduce evidence, including evidence of torture, if it may help his defense. The trouble for Nevin is simply that he’s been asked to supply an adequate defense for his client in an environment of secrecy and possible torture, while the awful wounds of 9-11 still haven’t begun to heal.

Here’s the real rub: the government of the United States wants to bring these guys to justice – we all do – but for largely political reasons has determined it cannot trust the normal, open American judicial process to work as it should. A decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct the legal proceedings in a New York federal courtroom ignited a firestorm of protest, the Congress got involved and the Obama Justice Department backed down. The military commission with its secrecy, determination to protect “state secrets” and Kafkaesque rules is now what David Nevin and the other lawyers at Gitmo must deal with.

One of the toughest critics of the Gitmo process is the now-retired Air Force Colonel and one-time terrorist case prosecutor, Morris Davis, who resigned his commission and retired rather than go along with a Pentagon ruling that waterboarding was permissible in dealing with terror suspects.

“After a decade of starts and stops and revisions and failures, the system is already presumptively discredited,” Davis said in an interview recently with the Los Angeles Times. “That the apologists for the commissions say they are essentially the same, or virtually the same, or nearly the same as federal court — the fact that they have to put a qualifier on it proves it is not the same.”

Davis predicts that KSM will eventually be executed, a martyr’s death he wants, after wringing the maximum propoganda value from the proceedings. “If we execute him, we will be giving him exactly what he wants,” Davis said.

Our government’s zeal to protect secrets almost always leads to bad outcomes. The desire to protect the secrets tends to pervert the very process that the secret allegedly protects. In the Gitmo cases, the most likey outcome is conviction of KSM and the others for the unspeakable crimes of September 11, 2001 and, while that might feel like justice it also might look to the rest of the world as an outcome derived by means of a distorted and unfair process.

The fundamental strength of the United States, including a justice system that has rules, procedures and methods to protect even the guilty, ends up looking to our enemies like an updated Stalin-era show trial. If the 9-11 mastermind is guilty – and I have no doubt he is – then show the world the evidence in open court. Try him as the suspected criminal he is, not some super human hoarding great secrets, and use the strength of the American justice system to show just what kind of man he is.

We must have a system of justice that is better than those individuals to whom we apply it. It’s doubtful these commissions will pass the test of history and let’s hope we don’t regret that failure to live up to our own best standards.

 

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September 11, Terrorism