Month: March 2020

Uncategorized

How We Live Now…

Posted on by mjohnson

NOTE: A reached out this week (thanks social media) to a great reporter I’ve known and respected for a long time who now lives in northern Italy.

I was hoping Andrea Vogt, an Idaho native, would give me some fodder for my regular column in the Lewiston, Idaho Tribune where she used to work. Andrea writes regularly for European newspapers and has produced documentaries for the BBC.

Andrea’s sobering, enlightened essay was more than I expected. I want to share it in full.

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Idaho has always been a bit of a paradise oasis, even when all hell breaks loose in the rest of the world: a safe place to live, a reassuring place to come home to, a remote place where it is easy to say with a blithe shrug “well, it won’t happen here.”

As the coronavirus pandemic swept through northern Italy, where I now live, I watched it encroach – despite a strict lockdown — toward my region, then toward the nearest city and then eventually into my small town.  

A billboard in northern Italy. The entire county has been under a lock down order since March 9, 2020

I live in one of the most affluent regions of Italy, with quality socialized health care, free and accessible for all – and yes, we pay for it with high taxes, but I have rarely had to wait long for an appointment and never had to worry about how to pay a medical bill. And yet, the severity of pneumonia associated with the coronavirus epidemic severely strained and at times overwhelmed the system here, mostly because so many patients needed serious help all at once and because Italy has such a large population of high-risk elderly and because, in the beginning, they underestimated the swift and deadly contagion. 

It is easy to make the mistake of debating the risks of coronavirus, when the more pressing concern is that the pandemic creates a shortage of ICU beds available for other emergencies –  things like ATV wrecks, logging mishaps, highway collisions, accidents at home or in the shop, or patients needing surgeries for other reasons, like cancer or hip replacements. Are the region’s hospitals and clinics equipped to meet all the needs of its residents as the pandemic bears down?

Idaho has the advantage of being naturally socially distanced by its wide-open spaces and sparse population. But this can also provide a false sense of security –  I hope I’m wrong, but I imagine that even though an invisible menace is threatening “everyone else,” in Idaho, life is probably chugging along fairly normally: farmers meet for coffee at the diner, loggers line the barstools at the tavern, prayer meetings and family gatherings still seem safe enough and the daily shifts at the factories – Simplot, Micron, Clearwater Paper — hum on, oblivious to the danger facing production lines.

That was the case where I live, too, an initial hesitance to close everything down, for fear of hurting the economy. It was gradual, starting in late February, but now everything (except commercial activities strictly linked to the basic supply chain and essential services) has lurched to a dramatic halt, as the economy (and personal freedoms) began playing second fiddle to desperately saving lives.

In a little town not far from me called Medicina, population 16,000, the virus raced silently through the local senior center, killing its cook, its handyman, the vice president and a whole table of retired card players – this virus tends to kill more men than women.  They felt safe. They were healthy and lived in a small town. They didn’t see it coming. Now Medicina is mourning their grandpas.

The day that happened I wrote an urgent email home to my mother, sister, aunts and uncles in northern Idaho. Ten days before there was any discussion of social distancing in the U.S., I urged them all to begin canceling appointments and preparing. I wonder about others who may not have such a personal connection to the pandemic, who did not receive a dire warning from someone they know and trust. I worry about the lack of unified, coherent federal response in the United States, which will leave poorer, less resourceful states more vulnerable. 

The center of the virus outbreak in northern Italy

Washington State, California and New York perhaps can manage on their own. But can Idaho? Will Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’Alene have enough respirators (and what about overflow from Spokane?) How about St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Lewiston-Clarkston, with its large number of retirees? What about Gritman in Moscow and St. Luke’s in Boise?  

These are the questions to put to Idaho’s elected officials, who were apparently busy passing bills to regulate transgenders as the pandemic approached. They were elected to protect and represent you. Hold their feet to the fire and ask each one of them how prepared the hospital nearest you is, and what is plan B? How many ICU beds, how many respirators, how many masks in the storage closets for the frontline doctors, nurses and staff? 

This is going to matter to you much more in 10 days time than whether or not John or Betty changes their gender on their birth certificate. I pray Idahoans don’t end up facing the dilemmas unfolding in the rest of the world – but as a remote, self-sufficient, independent place that has always prided itself on preparedness, I hope Idaho’s elected officials, at state and local levels, are all pragmatically preparing a vigorous, level-headed plan to address to the real problems they could encounter. When there is a record snowstorm in the forecast, they get the plows ready. Now, they need to make sure Idaho’s hospitals are equipped to respond to this very different kind of storm, which they cannot say they didn’t see approaching.

In the meantime, fellow Idahoans, my advice is to stay home and stock up, not just on flour and butter for your pantry, but on the goods you might not expect to have needed to cope in the coming weeks: compassion, creativity, patience and strength. 

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Additional reading:

  • Absolutely unbelievable story: Reuters reports that beginning in 2017 the Trump Administration slashed by two-third the staff of a CDC facility in China designed to work on epidemics. “The CDC office in Beijing is a shell of its former self,” said one of the people, a U.S. official who worked in China at the time of the drawdown.
  • John Barry wrote the definitive account of the 1918 pandemic called The Great Influenza. His interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick is worth your time. And it’s not like this hasn’t happened before.
  • An outstanding young scholar and teacher at the University of Montana, Rob Saldin, has a book coming soon on the NeverTrump Republicans. Rob, who I am happy to call a friend, had a great piece recently in the New York Times. It, too, is on point for this moment in history.

2020 Election, GOP, Pandemic, Trump

War on Government…

Posted on by mjohnson

As a world-wide pandemic silently sulks its way across the globe pulling the international economy into recession or worse, it has become increasingly clear that Americans are facing a political, societal and economic crisis unlike anything most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. 

It looks kind of interesting. It’s not

And for better or worse, it’s going to be up to individuals, a few insightful business leaders and a relative handful of courageous political leaders to chart the course forward. Our politics is broken, perhaps fatally. Half of the political leadership class is captive to willful misinformation, conspiracy theories, disdain for science and expertise of every kind and devoted to the kind of government that shutdown the White House office responsible for coordinating the response to what we now call COVID-19.

The Republican Party has been fighting a “war on government” since Ronald Reagan infamously labeled government the cause of our problems, not the answer. Whether he intended to or not, and Reagan was less ideological than almost anyone in the GOP today, at his 1981 inaugural the heir of Barry Goldwater heralded the establishment of a new Republican philosophy that continues. There are essentially two Republican policies: tax cuts for the wealthy and unlimited spending on the military. Everything else, perfectly highlighted by Donald Trump’s incomprehensible inability to anticipate and counter a killer pandemic, is expendable, or unnecessary. 

When in 2018 our blustering incompetent president shuttered the National Security Council office devoted to preparing for the next pandemic there was nary a ripple of concern. Trump has been lying this week, as every week, saying he had nothing to do with the decision, but videotape has now surfaced where he brags about this epic leadership failure. 

“Some of the people we’ve cut they haven’t been used for many, many years and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money,” Trump said at the time. How has that been working out? 

Some times a picture really is worth a thousand words

Some astute observers of American politics can remember all the way back to the early days of the Trump regime when Steve Bannon, Trump’s government hating senior strategist, boasted that his job was the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” meaning, as Fortune magazine pointed out, “weakening regulatory agencies and other bureaucratic entities.” Bannon’s bombast and stupidity doesn’t look so good these days. 

Indeed, as Beth Cameron, a leader in the White House pandemic office that is no more, wrote recently “it is clear that eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response. What’s especially concerning about the absence of this office today is that it was originally set up because a previous epidemic made the need for it quite clear.”

Put another way, Barack Obama created the office in 2014 to combat Ebola and did so effectively, so Trump did away with it four years later because he could. 

This utter disdain for expertise and common sense has become the defining feature of the Republican Party and you can see it from Washington, DC to Boise. Congressman Russ Fulcher defaulted to the GOP playbook that tax cuts will cure a pandemic when he was one of 40 House Republicans who voted against emergency legislation to address sick leave for the millions of Americans who are without it, a move considered by health experts as a key strategy to contain the spread of the virus. 

“First of all, government shouldn’t be mandating to businesses how they pay their employees, in my view,” Fulcher said in explaining his inexplicable vote. “And secondly, that’s going to put some small businesses out of business.” 

Fulcher advocated tax incentives, not “hard mandates” from the government. The rookie congressman will soon enough discover that “hard mandates” are precisely what is required along with massive government spending that preserves jobs and enhances the ability of health care providers to meet the crisis. 

Fulcher is the perfect embodiment of a head in the sand political Neanderthal, a dim partisan functionary tethered to right wing ideology rather than real world realities. The same can be said of the Republican dominated Idaho Legislature that is stumbling to adjournment worried not about strategies to protect the sick and those who will be, but devoting its closing hours to passing legislation to prevent transgender females from participating in athletics, making sure Idaho can outlaw abortion when the Supreme Court makes that possible and twice defeating an already inadequate higher education budget.

Legislators debated how many ideologues fit on the head of a pin. Local school boards and mayors got to work.  

As the Washington Post noted earlier this week: “For weeks, many on the right, including Trump, minimized the virus, if they considered it at all. Even in recent days, as much of the world shuts down to try to stop its spread, some Republicans mocked what they saw as a media-generated frenzy.

“Their reaction reflected how the American right has evolved under Trump, moving from a bloc of small-government advocates to a grievance coalition highly skeptical of government, science, the news and federal warnings.”

It is so transparently telling that Trump’s Oval Office speech last week where he made his first faltering effort to get in front of the danger the pandemic represents to all Americans was written by two incompetent ideologues – Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller – guys with no experience whatsoever in the subject at hand. Trump and his speechwriters were practicing public relations, and badly to boot, not engaging in crisis management or presidential leadership. 

Kushner, Miller and Bannon: the Three Stooges of the modern Republican Party – LA Times photo

There are so many mileposts over the last three years that might have flattened his unique curve of presidential malfeasance – the GOP dismissal of Russian election interference and the investigation that exposed it, Trump’s gross mismanagement of foreign policy and ignorant, heartless approach to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico, the kids in cages on the southern border, the hate filled tweets and ugly insults, the Senate Republican willingness to ignore the president’s clear efforts at Ukrainian blackmail – but all now fade into our collective rearview mirror. 

We are left staring straight ahead at what will likely prove to be the worst American crisis since World War II, coupled with the worst economy since the Great Depression all presided over by a man no serious Republican would hire to manage a car wash. 

Trump and Republicans didn’t create the pandemic and the economic meltdown. They merely furthered a notion of government and political irresponsibility that made such a nightmare possible and they labeled it all “American exceptionalism.” But, of course, the only thing exceptional is the ignorance and selfishness. As the writer Howard Bryant says, “We replace destruction with exceptionalism: it could never happen here.” Yet, it has. 

There are tough days ahead. We’re in unchartered seas. Personal and mostly non-governmental institutional initiative coupled with charity, decency and honesty will be essential. When we emerge on the other side America will be a different place. 

We’ll be either a stronger, better, more decent people without Trump and a lot of his enabling Republicans, or we won’t. America will begin to get well, or our sickness will deepen. No one will save us but us. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

  • I found this piece by Adam Garfinkle in The American Interest fascinating and I hasten to add I don’t agree with everything he says, yet he carefully and persuasively makes the case that the handling of the Trump impeachment was an American disaster. Read the whole thing.
  • American and world airlines are in a deep dive. (And I complained to Alaska Airlines this week about the carriers flight change policy in this time of turmoil, so I am hardly an uninvolved bystander.) And we should all brace ourselves for the big – BIG – cost of propping the air carriers up. Here’s why it matters and why the government should extract some concessions.
  • There are a number of viral – pardon me – videos making the rounds recounting the president’s earlier discounting of the cornoavirus. This one about Fox News is, well, stunning.
  • And…a serious and seriously funny guy, Dave Pell, has re-written a few lines of famous poetry for the Age of the Virus.
  • Thanks for reading…and sharing. Wash your hands.
2020 Election, Pandemic, Trump

Trump Face Palm…

Posted on by mjohnson

The greatest vulnerability for most politicians is not the unwise vote they cast a dozen years ago, or the youthful but still stupid favorable comment made about a bearded Latin American dictator. No, the real vulnerability comes when an elected official’s political position intersects with a requirement for competence.

Gaffes can be managed; being awful at your job in public can be fatal. Think about some of the great political leaders of the not too distant past, and then if you dare, think about leadership today. 

Franklin Roosevelt was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and earned an Ivy League law degree, but still had few demonstrable skills beyond a sunny personality when he won the presidency. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said FDR possessed “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.” And the great political analyst of his day, Walter Lippmann, dismissed Roosevelt as a “pleasant man who without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” 

FDR, a born leader at his best in crisis

But Roosevelt was a born leader – decisive, informed, careful, yet willing to take a calculated risk. He surrounded himself with serious, smart, intelligent people who he empowered and for the most part listened to. Roosevelt’s leadership during World War II is reason enough to rank him among our greatest presidents. 

For sure FDR made mistakes with personnel, but he was smart enough to put General George Marshall in charge of the war effort and dispatch his most trusted aide, Harry Hopkins, to deal directly with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. Roosevelt was not a manager or meddler, but a grand strategist and his principle skill was as a communicator. 

Churchill, most historians agree, was a meddler, but also a brilliant synthesizer, a leader constantly prodding and pushing his subordinates to do more and do it better. And Churchill accepted advice. As his most recent great biographer Andrew Roberts recounts, not once during the entirety of World War II did Churchill go against the unanimous advice of his top military advisers, a remarkable fact given that Churchill trained as a soldier and fought battles on three continents by the time he became prime minister. 

Churchill, a great leader in a crisis, with General Dwight Eisenhower

No one in their right mind would suggest that the two great wartime leaders were anything but competent at their jobs. Tragically, and one hopes not fatally, we can’t say the same. 

Three events – at least three that we know of – converged in short order to highlight the abject incompetence of the current American commander-in-chief. Dealing with a raging pandemic, a fragile economy shaken by the COVID-19 virus and the 20-year military quagmire in Afghanistan has laid bare Donald Trump’s true skill, which is to say he has no true skill useful to the current perilous moment. 

The Republican politicians – think the Idaho delegation – who have belted their own reputations to the incompetence of a guy none of them would trust to manage a Dairy Queen (and I mean no respect to soft serve ice cream) deserve everything they will endure in the weeks and months to come. They have wrapped themselves in ineptitude hoping that partisanship would mask their own and the president’s failures.

Since most politicians default to thinking that their position will always prevail, they’ve been hoping – praying more likely – that what has happened over the last few days would somehow not be visited on Trump and his cabinet of bozos. Now it has and they own it. 

Oklahoma Republican Congressman Tom Cole, hardly a Trump basher, nevertheless put a fine point on Trump’s ineptitude this week when he chastised the administration for its persistent and cavalier dismissal of the threat of a serious health emergency. 

Cole was warning back in 2017 that Trump Administration inattention to budgets and personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health would likely bite Trump where he sits. That prediction has now clearly come to pass. During a hearing this week Cole said the coronavirus outbreak and the abject failure of the administration to aggressively meet the crisis was a “sort of vindication of the bipartisan judgment over the last several years that this was really an area we needed to make investments.”

The Trump Administration has proposed steep cuts to these agencies in each of its four budgets, leaving Congress to devise, largely without the help of the agency experts its own funding and staffing priorities. 

Trump actually said when it still must have seemed to him that he could employ ignorance to bluff his way through a pandemic that “some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years. And if we have a need, we can get them very quickly.” Right. 

Stock futures began to fall Wednesday even as Trump delivered what was billed as a calming speech. One Wall Street analyst called it “the most expensive speech in history.”

The bumbler-in-chief when on: “And rather than spending the money — and I’m a business person — I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

Tell that to the hospital workers who will likely be overwhelmed soon with patients who need services which in many areas just may not be available. 

As world markets tumbled from unrealistic and unsustainable heights, Trump went before the camera to peddle his unique brand of nonsense. No Churchillian honesty and candor for the guy who bankrupted a casino, rather we get bombast and misinformation. The number of coronavirus cases in the country stood at 15 at the time with every credible expert predicting a serious increase almost immediately. “Within a couple of days,” Trump said, it “is going to be down to close to zero.” We are now well over 1,000 cases. 

Asked a few days later if he’d been briefed that as many as 100 million Americans could be exposed to the virus Trump didn’t exactly channel FDR in a fireside chat. “I’ve been briefed on every contingency you could possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of positive. Different numbers, all different numbers, very large numbers, and some small numbers too … Be calm. It’s really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen.”

Amid all the other chaos this week we haven’t heard much about Afghanistan. We will. It, too, will be a disaster. 

We are all advised not to touch our faces these days, but in moments like we’ve been experiencing a face palm every few hours seems entirely reasonable. 

—–0—–

Further reading:

  • A serious recession is looming. “The US economy could shrink by 2% in the first quarter and 3% in the second, JPMorgan projected, while the eurozone economy could contract by 1.8% and 3.3% in the same periods.”
  • The Atlantic’s James Fallows on why Trump’s Oval Office speech was such a flop. “Until Trump,” Fallows writes, “other presidents have applied the ‘show, don’t tell’ policy when it comes to their own competence. They want to show they are acting the way the country would hope, so they don’t have to say it.” Trump can’t do it.
  • Since most of us are spending a lot of time at home these days…what to watch on Netflix. I recommend The Irishman.
  • Thanks for reading…and please pass along to anyone who might be interested.

Idaho Politics

Don’t Do It…

Posted on by mjohnson

More than 80 years ago, spurred on by sportsmen worried about creeping politicizing of management of the state’s wildlife resources, Idahoans created an enduring and effective public policy. By initiative in 1938, the state’s voters mandated a nonpartisan — or perhaps more correctly a bipartisan — Fish and Game Commission.

Some in the Idaho Legislature are now determined to undo a tradition of partisan balance on the commission by eliminating the requirement that no more than four of the seven commissioners represent the same political party. The issue of partisan representation came into sharp focus recently when Senate Democratic leader Michelle Stennett pointed out that Lewiston Commissioner Brad Melton, before his appointment last year, had changed his political affiliation from Republican to non-affiliated in order to avoid violating the law. To his credit, Melton subsequently resigned and Gov. Brad Little has indicated he plans to appoint a Democrat to replace him on the commission.

Good for Little, but he should also be inking up his veto stamp because his fellow Republicans are up to mischief.

Endorsing the Fish and Game initiative back in July 1938, the Idaho Falls Post Register offered a justification for limiting partisanship in matters of wildlife management. The rationale remains as clear today as it was when Democrat Barzilla Clark was sitting in the governor’s office. “The fish and game commissioner,” the newspaper noted, “who is subject to the whims of a political boss whose primary interest lies in votes finds he cannot act according to his best judgment.”

The wildlife manager hampered by partisanship, the newspaper contended, was in danger of being “crippled by orders from political headquarters, by ‘suggestions’ from staunch party supporters and by a dozen other hindrances he would not face were he independent of politics.” Exactly.

Riggins Republican Rep. Paul Shepherd is sponsoring the measure to eliminate partisan balance on the Fish and Game Commission. “Membership (on the commission) shouldn’t be about politics, but what is best for fish and game,” Shepherd said when the bill was introduced. His justification is as phony as a fiberglass whitetail.

First, Shepherd’s bill clearly isn’t his handiwork. The legislation originated in the House Ways and Means Committee, a launching pad (or death chamber) for measures that House Republican leaders, who populate the committee, have particular interest in. So, rather than not being about politics, the Fish and Game legislation is all about politics. As legislative Republicans have proven with efforts to make the legislative redistricting process, now done by a bipartisan commission, tilt to the GOP, the state’s already hugely dominant political party will miss no opportunity to further consolidate its political power.

Republicans almost completely dominate Idaho politics, now some want to make certain they also dominate wildlife management

Having super majorities in the Legislature and holding every statewide and federal office apparently isn’t enough, but blatant politicizing of the Fish and Game Commission should be a political bridge too far.

Shepherd may simply be disingenuous about his motives, but he can’t be in the dark about the results of his blatantly partisan bill. Rather than removing politics, Shepherd would make sure every future governor could pack the Fish and Game Commission with seven card-carrying Republicans. And should his bill become law, does anyone really believe that wouldn’t happen?

Little certainly knows what’s at stake here. And it’s more than his reputation for fairness and honest dealing. The governor — or a future governor — may well want an independent commission, buffered from political conflict. What help would a purely politicized and Republican Fish and Game Commission provide when Idaho confronts the inevitable regional pressures to remove the fish-killing lower Snake River dams?

Or what happens when Idaho politicians finally have to admit that climate change is forcing changes in habitat and threatening species survival? Will a partisan commission have any credibility to explain these hard facts to Idahoans who fish and hunt?

Under the approach put in place in the 1930s, Little — or any future governor — has some insulation from day-to-day wildlife management decisions, and they should enjoy that buffer. When sportsmen vent, as they recently did in Twin Falls about a Fish and Game decision to kill more than 200 elk in an effort to reduce depredation, the commission took the heat. And commissioners should take that responsibility; it is what voters demanded years ago.

Does any governor really want the political heartburn of owning every single wildlife management decision and having every one of those decisions be seen as purely partisan?

The 1938 initiative enjoyed broad bipartisan support because making fish and game management nonpartisan, as Frank Griffin, one of the backers of the 1938 initiative and an assistant U.S. attorney at the time, contended “would give the assurance that plans, programs and policies when once adopted and found to be beneficial would be continued without interruption.”

Such a system, Griffin said, “would remove all inducement to grant favors to one section of the state not accorded to all other sections.”

That was true 80 years ago. It remains true today.

Shepherd’s bill — the Republican bill — is not about better fish and game management. It’s about Republican politics, which is why legislative Democrats have opposed it.

Democrats know what little representation they currently have on the state’s highest profile commission would disappear. Do hundreds of thousands of fish and game license holders really want partisanship to be the No. 1 consideration in every wildlife decision?

Little ought to make it clear he stands with sportsmen and sportswomen in keeping the Fish and Game Commission out of partisan politics. And the funny thing is, as Little will surely discover if he finds himself vetoing this bad idea, there is real political payoff in putting Idaho’s sportsmen and women ahead of partisan politicians.

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Further reading:

  • Jonathan V. Last has a piece in The Bulwark that wonders if our current political moment is as good as it gets. Lord, I hope that is not the case.
  • I’ve been following Dan Kaufman since reading his excellent book The Fall of Wisconsin. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Kaufman has a great take in the current The New Yorker on the effort to recall the governor of Alaska.
  • And on the new movie watch is Greyhound with Tom Hanks starting as a naval officer in command of a convoy escort during the longest battle of World War II – the Battle of the Atlantic. Hanks also wrote the screen play.