Month: August 2010

American Presidents, Obama

Recapturing the Narrative

Posted on by christian

obamaOK, Now What…

There is a great line in the 1972 film The Candidate starring the young Robert Redford. In the film, Redford’s character is an aspiring politico named Bill McKay who takes on the seemingly hopeless task of running for the U.S. Senate against an older, wiser and completely entrenched incumbent. Through many fits and turns and much learning on the campaign trail, the younger man pulls off the improbable upset.

As the reality of winning begins to sink in, McKay turns to an aide and, displaying genuine wonder, asks: “What do we do now?” He never gets an answer as the film ends.

That scene is art imitating life. No successful candidate – at least those completely honest with themselves – would not ask themselves “now what” as the flush of victory gives way to the reality of governing.

Campaigns have a beginning, middle and an end and are about organization, style, poetry and luck. Governing – real governing – requires a different skill set and, very often, different personalities. Governing is day-by-day, hour-by-hour and, more and more, thanks to the never ending news cycle, minute-by-minute.

I’ve always thought that every newly elected candidate ought to be handed, along with a certificate of election, a card printed with an old and almost always true political axiom – the people who help you get elected are often not the people to help you govern. The Obama campaign crew – as good as they were at getting him elected – may just have run out of steam when the political hill climb is becoming the toughest.

Admittedly everything in Washington is an echo chamber and, while the intensity of the political game is greater inside the Beltway, the political reality is that more than a year and half into his term Obama – and his team – have ceased to be able to drive the national narrative.

A Republican friend, genuinely amazed by Obama’s legislative accomplishments and astounded by the White House inability to shape the national dialogue, said it well. The White House hasn’t had a week on message in weeks.

From the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the ham handed firing of an African-American women in the Department of Agriculture to the Muslim cultural center in New York the White House seems always to be reacting to events and even then can’t get a coherent message out. Fellow Democrats aren’t helping. The ethics scandal surrounding Charley Rangel, and now Maxine Waters, seems sure to dominate the political narrative for weeks to come.

Add on the polls. According to Gallup, Obama, at 46% or so approval, is in the pre-mid-term range with Bill Clinton in 1994, Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and Reagan in 1982. Democrats lost 53 seats in ’94 and 47 seats in ’66. Republicans dropped 28 seats with the Gipper in the White House in ’82.

There are two indispensable qualities most politicians need and many lack – self deprecation and self awareness. The impression has settled in that Obama is cold and aloof. Where some see smart and thoughtful, many others see above the fray, out of touch, elitist or, worst perhaps, someone so sure of himself as to be too sure of himself.

It is a deadly combination this aloofness and sureness, if it sticks.

Todd Purdum, the former New York Times White House correspondent, has a great political junkie piece in the current Vanity Fair. Purdum, after interviewing most of the top Obama brain trust, comes away thinking that the President is going to keep on keeping on. He’s made a calculated decision to try and play the Washington game differently. As Purdum concludes:

“Obama’s gamble is that, if you look after the doing of the presidency, the selling of the presidency will look after itself. The short-term price may come in stalled poll numbers, electoral setbacks, and endless contradictory advice from the kibitzers. The payoff, if there is one, lies out on some future horizon. Obama may be right about this strategy, or he may be wrong. But it is the strategy he is following nonetheless.”

It is a gamble and I think the President could help himself and those of us who at least don’t wish him to fail if he let us inside the thinking that shapes his gamble. He could also learn from others who held the office and ended up successful in history and on policy.

John Kennedy had the remarkable ability to poke fun at himself at news conferences and to be genuinely self deprecating. He once quipped, as Jackie was received like a Princess on a trip to France, that he was merely the guy who accompanied his attractive wife to Paris.

Ronald Reagan had an actor’s timing and sense of humor and both qualities never failed to serve him well.

When Franklin Roosevelt, the truest patrician to ever occupy the White House, died in 1945 a distraught mourner was asked if he had personally known the president. No, the man answered, but he knew me. Good quality for a successful president.

Obama needs to remind Americans why so many of them found him an appealing candidate in the first place. His exuberance. His ability to get off a good line, often at his own expense. His candor about race and his sense of reality about how tough the problems really are. A case in point. Rather than ignore the ridiculous charge from some in the Tea Party crowd that he is a “socialist,” Obama would be better off to find a funny and engaging way to point out just how nonsensical the notion really is.

He also needs to resurrect the prime time news conference from the East Room. Take the questions. Bat aside the silly ones. Call on FOX News and join the dance. Above all educate the country about our hard choices. The guy got elected, after all, in no small part because he made a lot more sense most of the time than an angry, snarling John McCain.

The headline on Purdum’s Vanity Fair article is Washington, We Have a Problem. We do.

If Barack Obama really hopes to change Washington, and have a second term to do it, he has to adapt a good deal more than he has or than he appears inclined to do.

It may be time – or past time – to ask those smart guys who helped get him elected: Now what?

Afghanistan, Climate Change, Human Rights, Journalism

Whatever Happened To…

Posted on by christian

fischerBryan Fischer…

I confess that I hadn’t been following all that closely the controversy in New York City over the proposed construction of a Muslim cultural center not far from the site of the September 11 attack. Until, that is, I saw an item featuring the former Idaho fire brand, Bryan Fischer, suggesting that the country ought not allow the construction of another Mosque, ever, anywhere, at anytime.

Fischer, who used to run the Idaho Values Alliance (and is still listed on the group’s website) and served as the Idaho Senate chaplain, is cutting a wide swath these days. Fischer writes an on-line column, hosts a radio show and regularly offers up even more incendiary rhetoric that he did when he was defending a display of the Ten Commandments in a Boise park or objecting to books in the Nampa public library.

It was his latest column that grabbed my attention. Here’s the first graph:

“Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.”

Ok, then.

Other recent Fischer commentary has focused on his claim that new Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is “a dangerous judicial activist.” He also questioned the new Justice’s sexual orientation. Fischer jumped on the bandwagon with Texas Rep. Joe Barton, who he said was right to call President Obama’s ability to secure a pledge of $20 billion in Gulf Coast clean-up dollars from BP “a shakedown.” And – this one got a lot of air in the blogosphere – Fischer made the charge that Hitler was a homosexual and that some how that “fact” leads to a connection between Nazism and gays in the American military.

Read it for yourself. You can’t make this stuff up, unless you’re Bryan Fischer.

Fischer summarized his Hitler/homosexual/gays in the military column with this:

“Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews. Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history.” Some history.

Fischer bases this view on a 2001 Hitler biography by a German historian Lothar Machtan. A New York Times reviewer, a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said of the book and its scholarship:

“Machtan employs innuendo and insinuation. He asks rhetorical questions designed to lead the reader to answer them in a manner that supports his argument, even when alternative explanations are at least as plausible. He introduces possibilities that are then assumed to be probabilities and, indeed, certitudes. By the use of quotation marks, he highlights what are probably innocuous comments so that they seem loaded with homoerotic meaning. In short, he has written a tendentious book that is more a brief for the prosecution than a work of balanced history.”

Sounds a lot like a Bryan Fischer column.

Just for the record, and leave it to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show to drive this point, no serious historian of Hitler and Nazis makes an absolute claim that Hitler was homosexual. One suspects it would be news to Eva Braun. Fischer and his “sources” also conveniently ignore the incontrovertible historical record that the Nazis rounded up and sent to the camps homosexuals, along with Jews, the disabled, gypsies and other “undesirables.”

And, even if the record was less clear, conflating the tragedy of Nazi German with homosexuality is the worst kind of, let’s say it, intolerance and hate speech.

Fischer’s latest contention involving the proposed New York Muslim center hangs on just as thin a thread. Fischer wrote on August 11:

“The imam who is heading this project, Feisel Abdul Rauf, has ties to terrorist organizations himself, and said in a ’60 Minutes’ interview shortly after 9/11 that ‘United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.'”

Truth be told, Rauf has long had a close relationship with the U.S. State Department and Bush-era State Department official Karen Hughes enlisted his help and shared the stage with him when that administration was attempting to enhance its public diplomacy activities in the Muslim world. For what its worth, on Wednesday the Times had a bit more nuanced take on the New York controversy.

Or, put another way, not only is Fischer guilty of demonizing another religion he hasn’t got his facts straight. Even his throw away statement that the Muslim center is planned “for Ground Zero” is wrong. As this map shows the two sites are at least two long city blocks apart. It is sort of like saying that Boise High School is on the Statehouse grounds. It just isn’t true.

Here is my historical point: America has always had its share of Bryan Fischers. They live now, as in the past, on the hot oxygen of hate masquerading as political speech or true religion and they thrive because the media let’s them get away with it.

In the 1930’s Father Charles Coughlin built a mass following with his radio program and newspaper. Coughlin preached a populist economic message, flavored with anti-Semitism. He raged against the Federal Reserve, Franklin Roosevelt, Communism and in favor of a return to what he considered the true meaning of the Constitution.

Another preacher-turned-politician Gerald L.K. Smith started out as a Huey Long disciple, but after Long’s death he attempted to pick up the Kingfish’s mantle in Louisiana and beyond. He built a sizable following in the 1930’s and 1940’s. You can find YouTube videos of Smith that sound strikingly like contemporary cable television coverage of a Tea Party rally. In one 1936 speech, Smith frothed against “corrupt, thieving politicians” and predicted that “the baby havin’, stump grubbin’, sod bustin’, go to meetin’, God fearin'” Americans were finally going to take over the country.

Before long both Coughlin and Smith flamed out. Smith couldn’t get any candidate for president in 1948 to accept his endorsement and, in fact, he was widely repudiated. Coughlin’s own Bishop eventually silenced his radio demagoguery. Both men lived into the 1970’s, mostly forgotten and remembered only, as recounted in Alan Brinkley’s fine book, as Voices of Protest.

Bryan Fischer is of the same ilk and I suspect he will eventually secure the same fate. The pity is that such folks gain credibility at all and that it lasts for any length of time.

I reserve a spoonful of blame for the Idaho media who gave Fischer a launching pad for what is now a national megaphone and hardly ever held him accountable. While he was riling things up in Idaho there was precious little reporting on who financed him, where he really came from and whether his ideas and accusations could withstand serious review.

Guys like Coughlin and Smith rose the same way. They were media sensations in their day, always available to comment on anything and masters of gaining media attention with flamboyant rhetoric and flimsy facts.

This famous quote is attributed to, among others, Mark Twain: “A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.”

Google “Bryan Fischer” and see how slowly the truth is catching up with him. It’s time the former Idahoan to get some of the scrutiny he lavishes on others and should have gotten when he was dishing out his brand of demagoguery in Idaho.

To paraphrase Bryan Fischer, the monstrosities contained in this man’s hateful rhetoric are dedicated to overthrowing common sense and fundamental human decency. No one should take him seriously. Some obviously do and that, too, is a monstrosity.

 

Egan, Idaho Politics

Big Sky Tax Cheats

Posted on by christian

montanaMontana Figures It Out

For as long as I can remember Idaho has had a running debate about whether to really invest in a robust program of tax compliance in the interest of finding those individuals and businesses who, through villainy or ignorance, don’t do what the vast majority of us do – pay our taxes.

Historically the Idaho response has been to not make it a public or budgetary priority to go after the tax scofflaws. A modest investment was made in the Idaho compliance effort this year, but what was done also suggests there will be a modest payoff. Montana does it differently.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer made national headlines last week when he announced that tax audits and other compliance efforts in Montana have produced $80 million in new revenue this year – much of it from out-of-state individuals and businesses – that has helped keep the state budget balanced. Schweitzer added, for full political and practical effect, that this is money the state is owed and doesn’t cause Montanans who actually follow the law to pay any more.

In an editorial the Billings Gazette noted that 96% of working Montanans file a tax return annually, but out-of-staters are much less likely to comply with the law. In lauding Schweitzer’s initiative, the newspaper said, “Let’s keep making the tax cheats pay. Get that money for Montana, governor!”

Schweitzer, colorful and quotable as ever, compared the tax collection effort to the guy at the circus gate who makes sure everyone “pays their fair share.”

As noted, Idaho did invest a modest amount of money this year in its enforcement efforts but, according to the Tax Commission’s most recent annual report, audit efforts addressing all state tax categories collected about $44 million in Fiscal Year 2009. Included in that total is almost $11 million collected from those not in compliance with sales tax requirements. Compare that to the $80 million collected in Montana and don’t forget there is no sales tax in Montana. Idaho also has 600,000 more residents than Montana and, presumably, a substantially greater number of taxpayers.

All this suggests that Idaho is leaving a lot of money – money that could be spent on education and other priorities – under some mattress somewhere.

Two points to ponder, one practical and immediate the other practical and longer-term:

  • At a time when Idaho has slashed spending across the board and actually reduced, for the first time ever, year-over-year funding for public education, wouldn’t a tougher approach to tax compliance make sense both as a budgetary necessity and as a simple matter of fairness to the thousands of diligent Idaho taxpayers? For every dollar Montana spends on audits it collects $8 in taxes that legally should be paid. Anyway you slice it, that is a pretty sound – and conservative – return on investment.

    •  

  • Idaho’s revenue department, with due respect to the four full-time and politically appointed commissioners who run the agency, is an inefficient, 1944 approach to collecting the state’s revenue. (The Tax Commission was created by Constitutional amendment in 1944 with part-time commissioners, the full-time commissioners were put in place in 1967.) Idaho needs – and this has been long debated – an appointed director of revenue who, as in Montana and most states, is directly accountable for running the department and collecting taxes. Such a move would save money, could likely provide greater efficiency and, as witnessed by recent allegations of political favoritism, remove “politics” from tax collecting. It is a reform long overdue and, frankly, both major party candidates for governor should embrace such an initiative.

Add to these practical realities the fact that in politics – and tax policy is politics – perception is reality. And the perception is clear – from whistle blowers to an on-going ethics probe of a tax-protesting state legislator – that something is not altogether right with Idaho’s approach to collecting taxes.

Three long-time, former Tax Commission employees recently came forward alleging there is truth in the claim made in a pending lawsuit that certain well-connected Idahoans have benefited from “sweetheart” tax deals engineered at the Tax Commission. It has been suggested that a lawsuit may not be the best way to fix whatever is wrong. Probably true. A top-to-bottom independent review, followed by serious legislative work on reform, makes a lot more sense.

If the state wants to turn over rocks looking for legitimate tax revenue that is not being collected, Montana has the right structure, attitude and road map. Continuing the approach Idaho has taken is a recipe for more budget cuts, continued unfairness to those Idahoans who try hard to play by the rules, and a further deterioration of public confidence in the system.

You don’t have to be a $500 an hour tax lawyer to see that there is an election year issue – and potentially a big scandal – in there somewhere.

 

Baucus, U.S. Senate

The Senator From Alaska

Posted on by christian

StevensRemembering Ted Stevens

I wanted to feature this photo of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens for one reason. Stevens is smiling, something he seemed rarely to do – at least in public. A more common Stevens image captured him as a scowling, angry guy, given to instant fits that displayed his legendary temper. A D.C. magazine once voted him the “hottest” senator and not for his chiseled good looks.

Stevens, the longest serving Republican senator in the country’s history, died Monday night in a back country plane crash in Alaska, the state he represented in the Senate for 40 years. Stevens was 86 and scandal and controversy and temper aside he deserves to be remembered as one of the most influential senators of the second half of the 20th Century.

I can’t say I really knew the man, but did interview him on two occasions and both were memorable. In 1980, Republicans captured control of the Senate for the first time in memory in the election that saw a slew of western senators, Stevens included, elevated to committee chairmanships. Stevens went on to run the Appropriations and Commerce Committees with a loud voice and a fast gavel and, of course, with a slab of bacon for the Last Frontier always first in his mind.

I was producing public television programs in 1980 and some how was able to convince the boss to send me and a photographer (current Idaho Public Television General Manager Peter Morrill) to Washington to do an hour-long special on the newly powerful GOP. Stevens graciously sat for an interview and gave the yokels from Idaho plenty of his time.

Years later I was working on a piece for Montana Magazine on the late, great Montana Senator and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. I’d been told by a former Mansfield aide that I really needed to get to Stevens who, the aide assured me, would tell me a great story about his relationship with the famous Montanan.

Thanks for my old boss, Cecil Andrus, who had clashed many a time with Stevens over Alaska issues, but who nevertheless maintained a healthy respect for the senator, which Stevens reciprocated, I was able to connect with Stevens on the phone.

He told me a remarkable story of how, as a freshman senator, Mansfield has shown him an unprecedented degree of respect and courtesy and imbued Stevens with the notion that every single member of the Senate has a right to be taken seriously on every single issue. He ended by saying, in words I’ll never forget coming from a Republican about a Democrat, “Mike was the best leader the Senate has ever seen.”

Ted Stevens was tough on environmentalists and those who dared to cross him. He was a champion of the earmark back before speaking ill of federal appropriations became a litmus test for every politician. By one count, Stevens had a hand in nearly 1,500 earmarks over his Senate career worth more than $3.4 billion. Like his friend the late Robert Byrd, Stevens came to the Senate to take care of his state and that meant appropriating money for projects back home.

He was, as has been said of lesser men, not always right, but seldom in doubt. Stevens once proclaimed, while chairing the Appropriations Committee, “I’m a mean, miserable S.O.B.”

On another occasion, he said: “I didn’t lose my temper. I know right where it is.”

Ted Stevens was also part of a vanishing breed, a throw back to the Senate of Mansfield and Jackson, Church and Baker, Long and Dole. Theirs was a Senate were, once in a while, serious legislation got considered and past without the incredible partisanship displayed today by both parties.

Much will be made of the fact that Stevens’ death came in a plane crash, the same awful circumstance that claimed his first wife and nearly killed him in 1978. Considering his eventful life, including flying Army Air Force transports over “The Hump” in the Himalayas ferrying supplies from India to China in World War II, it seems like a eerily fateful ending to more than eight decades.

In his Senate farewell, Stevens summed up his career: “To hell with politics, just do what’s right for Alaska.” That’s pretty much how he’ll be remembered, I suspect.

With Byrd’s death earlier this year, we’ve now seen the passing of two old and tough Senate bulls, a type not around any more. They’ll both be remembered for a long time – and should be.

Air Travel, Books

The Richest Hill on Earth

Posted on by christian

butteDoig’s Historic Fiction…Butte in 1919

By 1919, Butte, Montana had fully made the transition from mining camp to industrial city. It is no exaggeration to say that the copper mining city, a mile high in the Rockies, was the most important mining center in the country. What a place it must have been – ethnically diverse, a cauldron of labor unrest; a place where culture, politics and big business collided.

Ivan Doig’s latest book – Work Song – deals with all this history in a compelling, engaging way that liberally mixes a novel’s plot with historical background. Doig understands what makes Butte such a fascinating and enduringly important place. In a recent interview with the Seattle Times the author of novels, non-fiction and a great memoir This House of Sky said that he encounters people from Butte at his book reading/signing sessions and “they’re still proud of Butte and still taken with it.”

Julia Keller, the cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, like me, really enjoyed the new Doig, saying it captures the American spirit.

Keller wrote, “Doig, grand storyteller that he is, understands this (spirit). His books — with “Work Song,” the tally hits 13 — explore the American West with humor and pathos. His men and women are drifters, gamblers, barkeeps, landladies, cowboys, thugs, poets and librarians, and that’s just the smallest peek at his census.”

The New York Times featured Work Song in the Sunday Book Review and also did an interview with Doig about his own work and reading habits. Big surprise for a guy writing about Butte, he loves Roddy Doyle’s book The Commitments about a band of young Irish musicians in Dublin.

Doig has long objected, in his gentle and gentlemanly way, to being characterized as a “western writer.” Tim Rutten, writing in the Los Angeles Times gives him his due. “Ivan Doig is an exemplary regional voice in American letters,” Rutten says, “which simply means he is a very fine writer who has chosen to site his work in the West, particularly in Montana, where he was born and grew up.”

Among the reviews of Work Song that I reviewed, only the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley took shots at the tight, little historical novel calling it “uninviting” and “a world-class dud” among other pejoratives. I can’t agree.

I wonder if the typically provocative Yardley has ever been to Butte. In 1919, the Anaconda Company, the powerful economic and political force in Montana, secretly owned virtually all the newspapers in the state and, of course, in his book Doig pokes many sticks at “the company.”

I’m not suggesting that the eminent critic of the Washington Post is some how secretly carrying water for the long-dead Anaconda Company, but his review is every bit as much of a polemic as you might have found on the front page of the company’s Butte newspaper in 1919. Which is to say, read Work Song for yourself and see if its not a pretty decent summer read with a realistic dose of the truth-stranger-than-fiction history of the “richest hill on earth.”

Clinton, Montana

This House of Sky

Posted on by christian

white sulphurOn the Road to No Where and Everywhere

In his classic memoir – This House of Sky – Ivan Doig writes of the country in the very middle of Montana, the country where he grew up, and he celebrates the beauty and the challenges of the landscape.

“The country’s arithmetic tells it,” Doig wrote. “The very floor of the Smith River Valley rests one full mile above sea level. Many of the homesteads were set into the foothills hundreds of feet above that. The cold, storm-making mountains climb thousands of feet more into the clouds bellying over the Continental Divide to the west. Whatever the prospects might seem in a dreamy look around, the settlers were trying a slab of lofty country which often would be too cold and dry for their crops, too open to a killing winter for their cattle and sheep.”

Even after a generation of trying to carve a life and a living out of this rough and beautiful country, Doig remembered, “a settling family might take account and find that the most plentiful things around them still were sagebrush and wind.”

Welcome to Meagher County, Montana.

The county seat of Meagher County – White Sulphur Springs – is close to little that “modern civilization” would value and in the middle of all that is important. The county, current population estimate is 1,868, is named after a complicated (notorious) Civil War general, was birthplace of Doig and once attracted the investment dollars of John Ringling, the circus entrepreneur and railroad builder. There isn’t much in Ringling, Montana (south of White Sulphur) these days, but John – one of the five circus brothers – once dreamed of a railroad linking Yellowstone and Glacier Parks with his luxury hotel at the half way mark. As Ivan Doig says, many came to this rough and lovely land with big dreams and not all made it work. Ringling’s railroad made it 22 miles and the hotel never got built.

Two remarkable people who did make it work in central Montana – Jamie and Jock Doggett – have made a major difference in Meagher County, Montana and beyond. The Doggetts live on the old place that Ivan Doig once called home and they are the kinds of people who make the West – and the world – work.

Jamie has been a country commissioner, organizes the annual – 6th annual this weekend – Meagher County Book Festival and seems to serve as the unofficial hostess of the county. Jock seems at one with this place – hard working, serious, very smart and, even better, wise. He is quick with a quip and quicker with his courteous, yet candid take on all things from the price of lambs to what’s happening at the Senior Center in town. He’s the kind of guy you trust with the keys to the new pick-up or your safe deposit box.

I met Jamie more than a decade ago when we served together on the board of the Federation of State Humanities Councils. She had chaired the Montana council. I’d done the same in Idaho. As two “non-academics,” given a chance to see what the power of “the public humanities” can do to change lives, we found some of the greatest change in our own lives. Both Jamie and I are nuts for history and love to examine the interplay and interdependence of cultures. Continuing her work in the humanities, Jamie is now a presidential appointee to the National Council for the Humanities.

Last Friday night, Jamie helped organize a talk in White Sulphur Springs by a Crow Indian woman and former National Park Service ranger, Mardell Plainfeather, that had a crowd enraptured. Her presentation focused on the tradition of Crow clothing as art, but her real message, as she said gently, is that we are all just people who can learn from one another.

The real power of the humanities is the liberation and power contained in critical thinking, leavened by a dose of history, literature and the other humanities disciplines. If you want to understand the world – and each other – a little better, check out the website for your state humanities council. It just might change your life.

I had never been this far into central Montana until last Thursday when we rolled into the Doggett’s Camas Creek Ranch and spent two unforgettable days beginning to understand how in touch with the land and their neighbors the Doggetts truly are. Living in a city – even a modest sized city like Boise – often precludes a chance to listen to the silence, watch a thunderstorm develop, or simply sit and swap old stories with an old friend. The pace in the Smith River Valley may not be slower, just better.

At the same time, life is demanding on the high plains of central Montana. Lots of folks – This House of Sky is my proof – just couldn’t make it here. It is not country for the uncertain. Maybe that’s why sensible talk about the latest book read, a Friday night conversation about what the Crow culture has to offer to a bunch of late arrivers, or how the high school football team will do this fall seems a little more important and a little more human.

It’s easy to romanticize the American West. It can be, and always has been, a place of conflict and controversy. Nothing comes easy. Not everyone is a saint. Hard work and a few scoundrels built the West. There is no Marlboro Man, never was, only complex people and sagebrush and wind. Still every place – in the West and beyond and Meagher County is lucky – needs a pair like the Doggetts; people who give and care and value history and not just their own.

Like a beautiful book that stays with you forever, good people and good intentions can change a lot for the better.

Ivan Doig’s beautiful book about growing up in Montana is really about the landscapes we all carry around in our minds, forever. I’ve now been to the floor of the Smith River Valley, up the road to Camas Creek, on the road to no where and everywhere. I’ll have those memories of landscape – and wonderful people – with me until the last day and, who knows, beyond.

Tomorrow…some more thoughts from Montana on Doig’s latest book – Work Song.

Andrus Center, Baseball

Idaho Baseball

Posted on by christian

IDhailey-baseballteam1rWho Were the Best Ever From Idaho?

As far as I know, none of the guys in the photo nearby – a ball club from Hailey, Idaho in about 1910 – ever made a baseball name for themselves outside of the Wood River Valley. Hailey, or Idaho for that matter, hasn’t ever been in the fast lane for pro baseball players, although the great state has produced a few genuinely talented players.

Harmon Killebrew, the “Payette Strongboy,” comes first to mind. Killebrew had a great major league career with the old Washington Senators and the later Minnesota Twins. he is 11th on the all-time home run list and did it by eating steak rather than injecting steroids. Any guy in the Hall of Fame – Harmon was elected in 1984 – should be on the “all-time, all-state” team.

Steve Crump, the columnist with the Times-News who has a fine eye for Idaho history, recently compiled his all-time list of players with at least some tie to Idaho. Crump identified three other Hall of Famers who at least had a cup of coffee in Idaho on the way to bigger things – the great Walter Johnson (played in Weiser in 1907), Reggie Jackson (played in Lewiston in 1966) and Ricky Henderson (played in Boise in 1976).

As good as Steve’s list is – and aren’t these kinds of lists fun to debate – I would argue for a mention of the late Larry Jackson, a native of Nampa, as among the all-time, all-Idaho team. Jackson, a right handed pitcher, had a 14-year career with the Cardinals, the Cubs and the Phillies and a career record of 194-183 and a highly respectable 3.40 ERA. Jackson broke in with the Cardinels at the tender age of 23 in 1955.

Another baseball great, Maury Wills, the base stealer, said of Jackson: “Larry Jackson has one hell of a slider. He also had a questionable balk move that was rough on a base runner. He got away with it, though, because he was a veteran.”

Sounds like the lament of a guy who had trouble getting a good jump. Jackson also had two career home runs back in the good old days when all pitchers had to walk to the plate.

Larry Jackson also holds the distinction of being the best Idaho baseball player to have a serious political career. Jackson served in the Idaho House of Representatives, rose to chair the Appropriations Committee, ran the state Republican Party operation and ran for governor in 1978. I remember him as a quiet, effective, open guy. I covered his political career, but wasn’t smart enough to really have a conversation about his earlier career in the big leagues.

Jackson angered a few fellow Republicans in 1986 when he endorsed Democrat Cecil D. Andrus for governor. Larry Jackson died too young in 1990.

Good ball player. Good guy.

Fly Fishing, Idaho

Hope over Experience

Posted on by christian

efork_bitterroot1-dayle-langley2It Will Be Different on the Next Cast

I’m convinced that fly fishing – much like politics – is a simple matter of hope overcoming experience. You can pursue the wily cutthroat for hours – days – and still believe that the next cast, the next perfect march of fly through riffle, will produce the fish that will keep you coming back and back.

Politicians, even successful ones, must practice the same “hope over experience” approach when wooing voters, building support and passing legislation. In both pursuits, you fail much more often than you succeed. Still, the pursuer of votes must believe that the next handshake, like the next successful presentation of an elk hair caddis, will produce affirmation, success and hope over experience.

In baseball, if you hit safely three times out of ten, you can get to the Hall of Fame. The success rate on a stretch of trout water or under a capitol dome is much, much lower.

Fly fishing (politics, too) is – excuse me – a brainy pursuit. It is all about practice, patience and persistence. You have to think about many things at once and if your mind wanders, even a bit, your fly is in the bushes or your waders are full of very cold water. Same thing in politics, although I know a lot more politicians than fishermen (or women) who can’t get their line untangled, if you get my drift.

The relative lack of success in trout fishing may explain why certain types of people – politicians – gravitate to the sport. Two of our brainiest presidents – Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter – were passionate fly fishermen. They also generally rank as among the most unsuccessful presidents. I would argue both have been victims of a bad rap in the history books. It’s time for some revisionism about both men – both engineers, both self made from humble beginnings who took up the fly rod for recreational and intellectual reasons.

Hoover once said, “Fishing is a… discipline in the equality of men – for all men are equal before fish.” That sounds like something Hoover would have said, but the old engineer was right. Forever the engineer, Carter has written well about fishing and become an expert fly tier.

Carrying all that baggage from the Great Depression – Carter had his own Iranian hostage baggage to lug around – helps me understand why a brainy politician, who didn’t succeed all that well at his chosen profession would seek solace on a stretch of water. Unlike politics, fishing is a solitary pursuit. Man against trout. And even when we know the river and its inhabitants will win the vast majority of the time, we keep casting. Hope over experience.

“Fishing is much more than fish,” Hoover also said. “It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.”

Amen. Any president who knew that simple fact can’t be all bad. I’ll think about the much maligned engineer/politicians from West Branch and Plains today when I am unsuccessful the vast majority of the time, but still loving every minute of it.

Clinton, Montana

The Western Industrial Age

Posted on by christian

smelterAnaconda…Then and Now

It has been said that Butte, Montana is where the frontier intersected with the Industrial Age. If that’s true, then just down the road in Anaconda is where the Industrial Age built its monumental smoke stack.

No black/grey smoke pours from the old Anaconda Washoe smelter these days and the smelter jobs left along with the smoke. The smelter has been closed since 1980, but the history – and environmental legacy – remains, as does the stack. Taller than the Washington Monument and the largest free standing masonry structure in the world, the Anaconda stack still looms over the old smelter town as a constant reminder of what once ruled here – copper and the “Company,” as the Anaconda Mining Company was known.

Today, Anaconda is continuing to reinvent itself as an outdoor recreation center and a tourism destination. The stack is a state park and on the National Historic Register. The Jack Nicklaus-designed Old Works golf course is one of the best public courses in the country. Still, the history of the Industrial Age bumping up against the frontier oozes from the streets here. The Hibernians still have a hall, you can still buy fresh pasties and the high school team is called the Copperheads. Among a few spectacular historic homes, the houses once occupied by the smelter workers stand so close together the eaves overlap.

This past weekend was reunion weekend for some grads of what were once the two high schools in Anaconda. We had breakfast with a couple of the graduates of the Class of 1969. I asked one of them, now a resident of Southern California and wearing a USC tee shirt, when he had left Anaconda. “When I was 18 years old,” came his quick reply. In other words, as soon as he could get out of town.

Another charming fellow – with Anaconda in his blood and memory – quickly added that he had worked his last summer job before college at the smelter. “If you were going off to college,” he said, “they made sure you had a job at the smelter. They were good about that…they just didn’t tell you it might kill you.”

The closing of the Washoe Smelter didn’t kill Anaconda, as some had predicted. The environmental clean up continues, as do the memories of one of the most spectacular and most consequential chapters in the industrial development of the American West. Anaconda is worth a visit to see a survival story and an important piece of American and Western history.