American Presidents, Catholic Church, Guns, Obama, Pope Francis, Visions

The Pope of Hope

CVC_TNY_12_23_13_no_date_580pxAn enduring image for me of the decidedly mixed year that is fast passing away is the whimsical cover illustration of a recent New Yorker magazine of the Jesuit Pope Francis spread eagled in the snow, six-year-old like, creating a snow angel. It seems a perfect image of hope in what has often seemed to be a year marked only by discord, strife and bitterness.

From the partisan breakdown in Washington politics, including the now distant memory of a pointless and costly shutdown of the federal government and the more recent abandonment of unemployment protections and reductions in food stamp benefits for millions of Americans, to the deadly and protracted civil wars in Syria and South Sudan and the near civil war in Iraq, from media fixation on the trivial ignorance of Duck Dynasty and Anthony Weiner to the incompetence of the Affordable Care Act roll out, only Pope Francis and Nelson Mandela seemed able this year to cut through the clutter and address something important.

In a superb profile in the same New Yorker with the Argentine snow angel on the cover, James Carroll offers a nuanced assessment of the still-new Bishop of Rome. Yet you come away from Carroll’s profile and the recent reporting of other Vatican watchers believing – even hoping – that this man is the radical that both his church and the world need. And the word radical is used not in its usual polarizing political context of right vs. left, but rather in the context of a moral and spiritual leader who recognizes the need for fundamental change both in tone and substance.

Carroll recounts that the Pope is “a large man with a ready smile” who preaches with fervor and with questions. “What kind of love do we bring to others? . . . Do we treat each other like brothers and sisters? Or do we judge one another?”

Elsewhere it is reported that President Obama sees the surprising Pope as an ally with like-minded notions about the need to shrink the gulf between the world’s rich and poor. However, what Francis has and Obama struggles to obtain may make the Pope a better mentor than a kindred soul. After two successive leaders of the Catholic Church who placed a premium on doctrinaire obedience by the church and its leaders to a our-way-or-the-highway view of social issues like gay rights, contraception and abortion, the new pope seems determined to reform the Catholic bureaucracy and turn the church’s message in a new and better direction with both his words and his deeds.

Symbols are important, as presidents from Lincoln to Reagan have taught us, and Pope Francis seems to instinctively grasp that truth. He has mostly abandoned the Popemobile for a small car, lives in a two room apartment rather than the Vatican penthouse, shuns the red loafers and ermine capes, and, yes, he kisses babies. He has attacked the bloated and corrupt Vatican bureaucracy like a born-again political reformer and dismissed some bishops and scolded others for forgetting – or ignoring – the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“The spirit of careerism,” Francis warned a recent gathering of new bishops, “is a form of cancer.” And he possessed of enough self-awareness – an indispensable political attribute  – not to shield himself from criticism. “Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others,” he wrote in recently, “I too must think about a conversion of the papacy.” That sounds a good deal like a radical with a plan laying the groundwork for a new direction.

One suspects that Francis also is a strategic enough political thinker to understand the value of surprise, the power of the unexpected gesture. As a 76-year old with only one lung Francis could easily have been a caretaker pope, but he’s been anything but so far. Rather he seems like a man in a hurry, at least in the context of a church that is defined by glacial change, who realizes he may not have much time to change things. So, with the surprise of his symbols and the courage of his convictions the pope, it seems to me, is executing on a grand strategy.

First he must change the focus of the church from a hectoring, secretive institution that has become comfortable with constantly saying “NO” to one that actually speaks of its real purpose, which is to serve the poor, seek justice, be inclusive even with non-believers, and advocate for peace. Once that moral authority is established and the bureaucracy is better under control he can move on to even more controversial issues.

One of the many remarkable things this new pope has done is to be gentle with the man he replaced. Under different circumstances and with a different leader having the previous Pope Benedict literally living above the store could have been awkward in the extreme. But Francis has done not only the kind and Christian thing, but the politically strategic thing by tending to his relationship with the uber doctrinaire ex-pope who once led the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, the Vatican office dedicated to keeping the church in line. On Dec. 23 Pope Francis visited his predecessor for prayers and lunch, just the kind of small but telling gesture that speaks volumes and resonates on television.

Pope Francis like Mandela, another great leader who was able to transcend his circumstances, are better politicians than most politicians. They understand that change – political and institutional change – come from a careful meld of arts both soft and firm. Leadership requires both moral authority and sense of purpose. It can mean quiet persuasion delivered with a smile as well as fierce determination to succeed coupled with the energy and drive to execute on a plan. Leadership also means outwitting your opponents and, a lesson Obama has yet to learn after five years in office, a willingness to cajole, flatter and co-opt. But it begins with moral authority.

Perhaps the president’s New Years Resolution should be to not merely quote the pope’s speeches, but adopt his political tactics.

Given what may become the long lame duck presidency of Barack Obama and given the dispiriting lack of genuine leaders elsewhere in the world – think of the thuggish Putin or any of the bureaucrats running western European nations – maybe, just maybe we have reason to hope at the end of this mostly hopeless year that God does work in mysterious ways.

When most we need a reminder of what one man can do on a journey from a jail cell to the Nobel Peace Prize we end 2013 reflecting on Mandela’s remarkable life. And when most we need to believe that someone can articulate with real moral authority the universal truths of compassion, respect, inclusion and peace we at last have a Pope of Hope.

 

Air Travel, Books

The Year in Books

stack460It is that time of year when it seems everyone produces a Top 10 List of something – the best new restaurants, the hottest celebrities, or the best books.

I did something this year that I have never done before. I kept track of everything I read. The list is eclectic, heavy on non-fiction, and while it is a long list I hope next year to make it even longer. If you love books, as I do, you may consider your own list for 2014. It’s a great way to recall that book and author you read in January and can’t quite recall in November. So here goes – my own Top Ten best reads of 2013.

The best new book I read this year was 1913 – The Search for the World Before the Great War by a British writer Charles Emmerson who takes us on a 23 city tour of the world on the brink of the war that shaped the 20th Century. As the Washington Post said in a review, “The centenary of the Great War will no doubt see the publication of many fine histories of the conflict, but few are likely to paint so alluring a portrait of the world that was consumed by it — and that helped bring it about.”

I read or re-read four novels this year that now have a place on my all-time great list. The Great Gatsby may not be the Great American Novel, but it has to be one of the two or three contenders for that title. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece came to the big screen again this year, but it’s much better as a book. Read it again.

This year marked the 150th anniversary of the great Civil War battle at Gettysburg and I marked the anniversary by re-reading Michael Scharra’s 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Killer Angels. This is the best kind of historical fiction. The story of Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet and Joshua Chamberlain and the battle they fought near Gettysburg in 1863 is a true gem.

I also enjoyed for the first time Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective novel Red Harvest, which is set in a town that sounds a lot like Butte, Montana in 1929. Capote’s novel is set in a town that sounds a lot like New York in 1958. Both are fine reads.

Two biographies rate special mention this year: David Nasaw’s fine and engrossing life of Joseph P. Kennedy appropriately entitled The Patriarch and A. Scott Berg’s equally fine Wilson, the gripping life story of the 28th President of the United States complete with all his brilliance and with all his contradictions.

Of the raft of books released in connection with the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination the best may be Robert Dallek’s Camelot’s Court. Dallek focuses on Kennedy’s foreign policy and the brilliant – and often brilliantly wrong – advisers who served the young president. I came away with more respect for Kennedy’s own judgment and his courage in standing up to the bombastic advice he received, for example, from his generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

I also give very high marks to Ira Katznelson’s original and compelling history of the New Deal entitled Fear Itself. Katznelson goes deep behind the usual and well-known narrative of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to explain the political realities of the 1930’s with particular attention to the power southern racists Democrats had in the United States Senate and how FDR tailored his policies to fit that reality. I predict it will become a modern classic of the period that still defines American politics.

And finally another history to end the year, a book end really to Emmerson’s 1913 called The War That Ended Peace by a great historian Margaret MacMillan. MacMillan charts the policies and personalities that ruled in Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Austria-Hungry in the years leading up to The Great War. One comes away marveling at the pathetic emperors, the petty statesmen and the egotistical generals who played so recklessly with the peace of Europe until the fateful summer of 1914 when they touched off the war that ended empires, re-drew the map of Europe and the Middle East and foisted on the world the deadly 20th Century.

So many books. So little time. There are ten good reads I enjoyed in 2013. Happy New Year.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

So Long to The Stick

Bat BoyThis photo could have been taken during the first game I saw at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. I think it was 1987 or maybe 1988. Will “The Thrill” Clark was thrilling that afternoon and had a career day – seven RBI’s my memory says – and about 1,500 people showed up for a game in the middle of the week. I loved it all on a beautiful summer day. Love the Giants still and, while I’m ready for Christmas I’m really ready for spring training and harboring a strangely nostalgic feeling about The Stick.

The 49ers football team will play the last game at The Stick tonight and one more old ballpark will go the way of the wrecking ball. Most will say “good riddance.” I’ll be left, like so much that is my life with baseball, with memories. I fell in love all over again with the great game at The Stick all those years ago.

With some friends on another trip to see the Giants we left Union Square in the heart of downtown San Francisco for the bus ride out to Candlestick for a night game. It was August and a glorious Bay Area afternoon – sunny, about 72 degrees with a pleasant light breeze. By the third inning the notorious Candlestick Point fog was rolling across the stadium and from our vantage point in seats up above the third base line you could barely make out Kevin Mitchell in left field. The wind was swirling, hot dog wrappers were circling the field faster than a player could circle the bases, and beer was out of the question. Too cold. Stocking caps and gloves came out – it was August remember – and ballpark vendors were hocking hot chocolate. It wasn’t very good hot chocolate, but it was selling fast. I held the cup to keep my hands warm.

NPR had a great piece this morning on The Stick. Reporter Tom Goldman remembered that Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham signed the deal to build at Candlestick in 1957 during a morning visit when the wind was calm. Stoneham subsequently visited later in the day. “It’s said he asked a worker,” Goldman recounts, “Does the wind often blow like this? Yeah, every day, the worker replied. But only in the afternoon and early evening.”

Willie Mays played a good deal of his career at The Stick and slapped his 3,000 hit there in 1970. The Beatles packed them in during a 1966 concert. In recent years, with the Giants off in the cozy confines of their new park South of Market, Candlestick has been the football home of the 49ers, but that will end next year when the team decamps for a new stadium further south in warmer Silicon Valley. It can’t possibly be as cool as The Stick and in more ways than one.

I’ve reached the age where I don’t like to see anything torn down. OK, maybe, the Berlin Wall, but not old buildings and not icons like Tiger Stadium in Detroit or the real old Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. [Every rule has its exceptions. Mine would be the Kingdome in Seattle. Good riddance to that concrete monster.]

Instead of humming Christmas carols today I have the old Sinatra song stuck in my head.

And there used to be a ballpark where the field was warm and green
And the people played their crazy game with a joy I’d never seen
And the air was such a wonder from the hot dogs and the beer
Yes, there used a ballpark right here

While the kids wait for Santa in a couple of days, I will note that there are about eight weeks until pitchers and catchers report. Once The Stick is gone they’re putting up a shopping center. Not a fair trade – memories of The Say Hey Kid for a Dillard’s. I hope its windy and cold when they open.

Bush, Church, Egan, Idaho Politics

Bethine Church

churchesIt seems only appropriate to mark the death of Bethine Church who, for nearly 30 years after the death of her husband in 1984, kept his legacy – and the Church legacy alive – by reflecting on an enduring photo of the two of them together. In many respects they were that rare commodity in modern politics – a husband and wife team.

Bethine Church died at age 90 on Saturday. Her health had failed markedly in the last few months and, as son Chase said, she simply died of “old age.” By any measure hers was a full life.

In the masterful third volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson – Master of the Senate – the historian Robert Caro did justice to the Church partnership when he wrote of her in the 1950’s: “Bethine Church did not fit that era’s mold of the docile Washington political wife, for while Frank was new to politics, she had been born into it, into Idaho’s Democratic dynasty, the ‘Clark Party.’ She had been raised in the Governor’s Mansion; during her girlhood her father was Idaho’s Governor, one of her uncles, D. Worth Clark, was Idaho’s United States Senator; another uncle had been the state’s governor some years before. She and the young man who had fallen in love with each other in high school were an exceptionally close couple; years later, one of Church’s staffers would call their marriage ‘the longest running high school romance in history.'”

On the morning after his razor thin loss to Republican Steve Symms in the contentious, nasty 1980 campaign, I was among a small horde of reporters stamping our feet to stay warm in the damp grass outside of the Church home on Idaho Street close to downtown Boise. The house had been Judge (and governor) Chase Clark’s home and later became the Boise outpost for the senator and his political partner.

Before long Church, with Bethine at his side, stepped behind a bank of microphones to do what I expect is one of the most difficult things in politics – offer a gracious statement in defeat. The first question, as I recall, after the short and gracious statement was “what do you intend to do now?”

With perfect timing the Senator Church said, “Oh, we’ll be staying together…” I remember nothing else that was said.

The next few days, appropriately so, will be given over to tributes to the Grande Dame of Idaho Democratic politics. She’ll be remembered for her passion for the Sawtooths, and wilderness and for protecting Frank’s legacy. Until the end of her long life she maintained vigorous relationships with big names like Joe Biden and Al Gore. She encouraged hundreds of would be candidates, some of whom might have been better off taking a pass on a political race. She toyed, perhaps seriously, with challenging Symms in 1986 and wisely took a pass.

Idaho has produced really only a handful of truly outstanding and nationally important political figures. Frank Church, sponsor of the Wilderness Act, wise and informed voice on foreign policy, early opponent of the Vietnam quagmire and the senator who warned against domestic spying a generation ago, is in that elite number. Still as Church’s biographers LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer have written in their book Fighting the Odds, “It is impossible to honor Frank Church without honoring her. He had believed, quite literally, that she had saved his life in his first battle with cancer. She had been his best friend and constant companion; by all accounts their love for each other ran deep. He had always needed her.”

Idaho and the nation has lost a great figure who lived a great story. We will not likely see her kind again.

 

Air Travel, High Speed Rail, Ireland, Vietnam

Air Worst

vintage airlinePerhaps you are as confused as I am about the recent mixed messages from the federal government about cell phone use on airplanes. (I know, you’re shocked that our government is sending mixed messages.)

Let’s just say this: I know what the policy should be – no cell phone calls on airplanes. None. Zilch.

With so very much glamor involved these days in hauling your body on to a Canadair regional jet – the planes with tiny overhead bins and a restroom right sized for the Munchkins from Oz – or spreading out in the sleek Airbus 310 with its expansive five inches of leg room (or less when the jerk in the row ahead of you insists on putting his seat all the way back) why risk diminishing the sophistication of modern air travel with something as crass as a public phone call originating from 11B?

If you have any doubt about how cell phones in the air might work just check out the boarding area for your next flight. The worst airport boarding area I know – west of Mogadishu – is the “E” concourse at Salt Lake City’s airport. My frequent air travel companion has dubbed the area “the Gulag,” as in the place were Stalin sent political prisoners to live out their days in mind-numbing discomfort, devoid of even a remnant of human dignity. If you hit the schedule just right in Salt Lake you might find a seat in this air travel prison camp, but if you do chances are that you’ll be next to the kind of chatty fellow I found myself involuntarily listening in on recently.

I now know that this total stranger, thanks to his very public cell phone call, was “headin’ for Billings.” I wasn’t really trying to listen in, but I couldn’t avoid hearing the weather report from every vantage point of his journey, I noted his reaction to the forecast for southern Montana – “damn cold, damn cold” – and listened with rapt interest as he speculated on college football bowl games and the fate of Obamacare. Then he called his wife. I’m delighted to report that the problem with their credit card has been cleared up. Someone in the family, also happy to report, with a serious medical condition has taken a turn for the better.

I’m not sure why the guy had to actually go to Billings, he seemed to have all the bases covered with a few cell phone calls from the E gate waiting area.

I’m old enough to remember when air travel actually did have the patina of glamor, when people wore their best clothes to make a flight and real food, as in the illustration, was available as part of the trip. My first flight was on Frontier Airlines – the old Frontier, not the current Frontier – in a Convair 580, a twin-engine 48-passenger prop plane that, as I recall, had big comfortable seats. It’s been downhill ever since. Actually, I date the real demise of decent air travel to an abysmal airline once owned by the weird billionaire Howard Hughes.

Hughes Airwest was really Hughes Air Worst. The airline went out of business in 1980 and somewhere they are still looking for checked bags. One running joke had it that Air Worst offered a tri-weekly flight to Lewiston, Idaho. The punchline: the plane goes up one week and tries to come back the next.

Others, including former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall, date the decline in air travel quality and comfort to the deregulation of the industry in the late-1970’s. In 2008, admittedly a particularly bad time for airlines, Crandall said: “The consequences (of deregulation) have been very adverse. Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality and international reputation. Fewer and fewer flights are on time. Airport congestion has become a staple of late-night comedy shows. An even higher percentage of bags are lost or misplaced. Last-minute seats are harder and harder to find. Passenger complaints have skyrocketed. Airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable.”

Of course since Crandall made those comments his old airline has merged with US Airways to create “the world’s largest airline.” I hope never to fly with them.

The U.S. airline business is a trillion dollar industry that is vital to the country’s and the world’s economy. Air travel is safe, can be – if you’re careful booking your ticket – a relative bargain, and for much business and leisure travel it is really the only game in town. It is also uncomfortable, often unpleasant and almost always a hassle. It’s hard to think of a consumer-oriented business anywhere where the creature comfort of the consumer is given so little attention. For that reason alone – keep the cell phones off, but also think for a moment about a different kind of travel experience.

In virtually every other developed nation in the world there are serious competitors to airlines. They are called trains. The United States is so far behind the rest of the world in the development and implementation of a national passenger train system that we might as well be Argentina, a country like the U.S. that once had a working national rail system, largely funded by British investment, that has now mostly been dismantled.

In his lively and engaging recent book One Summer – America, 1927 author Bill Bryson recounts the kind of rail system the nation once had and should strive to have again. “The most extraordinary feature of rail travel was how much choice there was…a customer in 1927 could buy a ticket on twenty thousand scheduled services from any of 1,085 operating companies.”

Actually sleeping on a train in 1927 wasn’t all that glamorous, Bryson acknowledges. It was often noisy with plenty of bumps, but then again try sleeping on an airplane these days. “To keep customers distracted, and to generate extra income in a crowded market, nearly all trains put a great deal of emphasis on their food,” Bryson says. “On Union Pacific trains, for breakfast alone the discerning guest could choose among nearly forty dishes – sirloin or porterhouse steak, veal cutlet, mutton chop, wheat cakes, boiled salt mackerel, half a spring chicken, creamed potatoes, cornbread, bacon, ham, link or patty sausage, and eggs any style – and the rest of the meals of the day were just as commodious.” You’re lucky to get a tiny packet of pretzels on a flight today. Most airlines now insist on cash only and if you are lucky enough to be on a flight where you can buy a snack good luck navigating enough room to eat it on the tiny tray table. Remember that guy in the row ahead. His seat will be all the way back.

There are a multitude of reasons that contributed to the demise of a national passenger rail network, including the fact that, like airlines these days, railroads in the 1930’s and 1940’s were in awful financial shape. But the nation’s fixation with cars and planes, and the massive subsidies we lavish on both, also helped drive the passenger train off the tracks. The next time you hear a politician say we can’t afford to subsidize rail transport ask him what we’re doing with cars and airplanes? Who builds the runways and freeways? We have subsidized the modes of transportation we value and generally left passenger rail off the list. Nearly everywhere else in the world from Beijing to Berlin it’s a different story.

If you could go from Seattle to Portland or San Francisco to L.A. or Chicago to St. Louis as fast and comfortably as a French businessman goes from the heart of Paris to downtown London you’d never think of flying. And most trains, I should note, have quiet cars where the cell phones are always turned off.

I admit to getting a bit nostalgic at Christmas time, so it may be fair to write off my longing for time when travel was more comfortable, more elegant and more interesting to a certain yearning for the days when men wore hats and suits on intercity trains. Today you’ll more commonly find stocking caps and flip flops. Rather than the Pan-Am Clipper they seem dressed for a trip to the landfill, and not to worry – given the ubiquitous cell phone – you, dear traveler, will almost certainly hear about their trip.

And, of course, I’ll keep flying – what choice do I have – but, please I have no need for a weather update from Billings either in the boarding area or on board. I have a personal device for that. Which I will use. Quietly. Off in the corner.

 

Andrus, Baseball, Boise, Egan, Idaho Politics, Judiciary, Politics, Vice Presidents

The Start of Something Big

cit7_SRX_EDWARD_LODGE_t620The United States Senate this week confirmed a new judge, Patricia Millett, to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That court is, after the Supreme Court, arguably the most important federal court in the nation. Millett’s confirmation had been stalled for weeks over a partisan dispute, not about her qualifications, but basically over whether a Democratic president would be allowed to make an important appointment to an important federal court.

That standoff helped precipitate the recent change in Senate rules that eliminates the filibuster as a tool of the minority to thwart a president’s federal court and executive branch nominees. When it finally happened the vote to confirm the new judge was mostly along partisan lines, two Republicans – Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins – did vote to confirm.

Regrettably, in my view, partisan politics – and both parties bear some guilt – has taken on a completely outsized role in the selection and confirmation of federal judges. And, remember in the case of new Judge Millett, hardly anyone questioned her strong qualifications for the job. She has been a partner at the white shoe D.C. law firm Akin Gump, she worked at the Justice Department in both Republican and Democratic administrations and argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court. She’s qualified, but partisanship was the stage manager in this case, and unfortunately, has been in many others in the recent past.

Until the 1920’s appointees to the Supreme Court didn’t even go before a Congressional committee for a confirmation hearing. When former Utah Sen. George Sutherland was nomination for a position on the Supreme Court in 1922 his nomination went to the Senate one morning and he was confirmed that afternoon. Admittedly that pace may have been too light on the “advise and consent” role of the Senate, but now days it’s not uncommon for a judicial nominee to hang in confirmation no-man’s (or no-woman’s) land for months. It has become an awful system that will over time further erode public confidence in an independent judiciary and it doesn’t have to be this way.

A small, long ago example from Idaho involving Federal District Judge Edward Lodge (that’s Judge Lodge in the photo) makes the case that judges – and sometimes great judges – are indeed “made” by politicians acting as politicians, but that politics – if practiced wisely – can also help ensure the right man – or woman – ends up in the right job.

Ed Lodge has been on the Federal District Court in Idaho since 1989. He was nominated by Republican George H.W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. The Judge, widely respected, even revered by those who know him and practice before him, just passed 24 years on the federal bench and all told Lodge has been a judge in Idaho for half a century. But, it’s Ed Lodge’s time before he came to the attention of the first President Bush – we can thank Sen. Jim McClure for that – that really counts in this little story.

In 1965, Lodge was laboring in relative obscurity as a probate judge in Canyon County, Idaho – Idaho did away with probate judges during judicial reorganization years ago – when a vacancy came open in the state District Court bench in Canyon County. It dawned on a couple of young, northern Idaho legislators – Ed Williams from Lewiston and Cecil Andrus from Orofino, both Democrats, that they might be able to use the Canyon County vacancy to engage in a bit of political mischief at the expense of Republican Gov. Robert E. Smylie and also help create a new judge at the same time.

Smylie, a mover and shaker in national GOP politics, was out of the state for a few days as was his habit; a habit that helped get him in trouble with voters a year later, which meant the governor had left the tending of the state store to his Democratic Lt. Gov. William Drevlow, a old-style party warhorse who hailed from Craigmont. In Idaho, by virtue of the state constitution, when the governor is physically absent from the state the lieutenant governor assumes the governor’s full powers, including the power, if he chooses to use it, to make appointments. If you understand politics perhaps you see where this is going.

According to Andrus, his good friend Williams came up with the idea of trying to convince Lt. Governor Drevlow to act in Smylie’s absence and fill the Canyon County judicial vacancy. But who to appoint? The two north Idaho lawmakers consulted with Rep. Bill Brauner of Caldwell, also a Democrat, and a well-regarded local attorney. (Yes, Canyon County did once upon a time have Democrats in the Idaho Legislature.)

Andrus recalls that another prominent Canyon County attorney and Democrat, Dean Miller, was brought into the discussions and it was Miller who suggested strongly that able young Ed Lodge, who Miller knew personally and professionally, would be a superb candidate to fill the vacancy. All the players in this little tale, save for Andrus and Lodge, are no longer with us to confirm or deny, but Andrus claims none of them were really sure at the time of Lodge’s politics. Lodge was being touted by Democrats who knew him well, after all, and only later did the legislators learn that Republican blood ran in Lodge’s lawyerly veins. Even better they thought. When the stuff inevitably hits the fan the conspirators could fall back on the fact that a Republican-leaning judge had been appointed by a Democrat. What could be more bipartisan?

But the really key thing here is that the mischief makers were not looking simply to make mischief, although that was clearly a motivation, they also wanted to see a capable judge appointed. Politics was played, but the goal of putting a capable candidate on the bench was also achieved.

“We convinced Bill Drevlow, maybe with a little help from John Barleycorn,” Andrus said, “to make the appointment. He knew it would damage his relationship with Bob Smylie, but he really didn’t care. We knew Smylie would be livid, since he must have had his own candidate.” And, one suspects, that didn’t bother the legislators either.

Judge Lodge was appointed to the state court vacancy by Drevlow – the youngest district judge in Idaho at the time – where, by all accounts, he immediately began to acquit himself with real distinction winning awards as the state’s top trial judge and serving for years as the administrative judge of the district. After a short stint as the state’s federal bankruptcy judge President Bush came calling and Lodge went to the federal bench some twenty years after his Democratic benefactors plotted to get him appointed to the Idaho court.

Andrus remembers Smylie being peeved about the whole thing, but as the man who would go on to be elected governor of Idaho four times told me recently, “Smylie could never argue with the fact that the cream rises to the top. And time has proven that Ed Lodge is one of the two or three best federal judges Idaho has ever had.”

Any way you analyze it Ed Lodge has had a distinguished and impactful career. He presided over the Ruby Ridge case, Claude Dallas was in his courtroom, financial responsibilities under the Superfund law in the Silver Valley were hashed out under his watch, and the U.S. Department of Energy was held to account for cleaning up the Idaho nuclear waste legacy of the Cold War. Judge Lodge was honored last summer for his his service and for the longest judicial tenure in Idaho history. His is quite a legacy.

Is there a moral to this little story of political intrigue? It’s entirely possible that Ed Lodge, even without the bipartisan push he got from a bunch of mischief making young Democrats in 1965, would have amassed a distinguished legal career. He might well have made it to the state district court by another route and been ultimately appointed to the federal bench to preside over all those important cases. Who is to say?

Perhaps the only moral, as the old saying goes, is that politics does – or can – make strange bedfellows. And once in a while – not as often as it once did unfortunately – strange bedfellows conspire to help along the career of an able young man, who given the chance became a truly distinguished judge and helped write the history of Idaho for the last half century.

Next time you read a news report about some judicial decision that identifies the judge involved as an “appointee of George Bush” or as a “nominee of Bill Clinton,” think about Judge Lodge. There is more to most judges – and there should be – than the partisan label attached to the person who appointed them. And think about the new and highly qualified D.C. Circuit Court Judge Patricia Millett who came so close to being denied a chance to serve at all because of, well, just politics.

There will always be “politics” involved in the appointment of judges. It’s been that way since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fought over the shape of the federal judiciary, but too much emphasis on politics must inevitably lead to a too politicized judiciary, which only damages public confidence in the judges and our judicial system. Ed Lodge got his start on the merits. An able young man with supporters on both sides of the aisle then proved over the course of a distinguished career just what he was able to do.

I like to think that is what we call the American Way.

 

Britain, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Mandela, Reagan, Veterans

Mandela and Us

NM_mandela_old_photo_110127_16x9_992Most of the world is rightly celebrating the life and lessons of Nelson Mandela. Warts and all Mandela will go down as a pivotal figure in the last decades of the 20th Century and will no doubt remain the gold standard for the difficult, seemingly impossible politics of racial reconciliation.

Still it’s fascinating to see the broad and deep bipartisan out pouring of respect for a man that the Reagan Administration contended in the 1980’s was head of a terrorist organization, a designation that was not formally changed until 2008. There is some reason to believe the CIA tipped off South Africa’s whites-only government to Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, a tip that ultimately led to his trial and lengthy incarceration.

I’m reminded of the intense and passionate debates in the early 1980’s over whether Ronald Reagan could be pressured to impose economic sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. Then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted in 1985 against a resolution that called for Mandela’s release from jail and commentators from George Will to William F. Buckley defended the white South African government and condemned Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) as just a pawn of the Soviet Union.

After much debate the Congress in 1986 voted to do what the Reagan Administration wouldn’t and imposed economic sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. The president vetoed the legislation. Reagan, knowing he held a weak hand in the face of growing public outcry over the continued oppression of blacks in South Africa, pulled out all the stops in order to sustain his veto.

As the New York Times reported at the time, “Mr. Reagan made a major effort…to salvage his veto, and he called a number of Senators personally, arguing that he would appear weak and ineffective” in an upcoming summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev “if he were rebuffed by the Republican-controlled Senate on a major foreign policy question.”

The Senate eventually voted 78-21 to override Reagan’s veto of the sanctions legislation, but not before Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, warned that “the thrust of this legislation is to bring about violent, revolutionary change, and after that, tyranny.” Helms and Mandela are now both dead and we know who was right.

For the record, the Northwest delegation in 1986 was entirely Republican. Oregon’s senators – Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood – and Washington’s senators – Dan Evans and Slade Gorton voted for the sanctions against South Africa and to override Reagan’s veto. Idaho’s senators Steve Symms and Jim McClure voted with Jesse Helms.

The U.S. was actually quite late in adopting a policy of isolating South Africa in part because the country’s leaders spent so much of the post-war world viewing every event in every corner of the world through the narrow prism of the Cold War. The logic was simple and wrong: Soviets supplied backing to the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela was in jail for being a leader of the ANC, therefore it must logically follow that we had to oppose the ANC. But the larger lesson here is simply that time and again in the post-war world the United States misread, from Vietnam to South Africa and even on to Iraq, the nature of national struggles over self-determination.

Successive State Departments and CIA wise guys framed nearly every issue as a struggle pitting the democratic West versus the Evil Empire, when often, as Nelson Mandela showed us, the great twilight struggles of the last half of the 20th Century were typically about more basic and more enduring things – the right to vote, the right to self determination, the right to throw off colonial shackles, the right to make your own way, the right to be treated with dignity. We too often lacked the imagination that might have allowed us envision that a man imprisoned for 27 years might walk out of his prison cell, Gandhi or King-like, and embrace a type of political and racial reconciliation that would usher in a peaceful revolution the likes of which a Jesse Helms simply could not fathom.

For most of his too short life, we must recall, his own government spied on the revolutionary Dr. King, convinced he must be a Communist agent.

As the world – and almost every American politician – rushes to get right with Mandela, we would do well to remember at least two things. Mandela was not a saint, but rather a remarkably pragmatic politician and a damn good one too, and in many ways a much better politician than some of the Americans who for so long failed to understand his motivations and talents.

The second is that Mandela was a revolutionary; a revolutionary who, fortunately for his country and the world, made the transition from advocate of armed struggle to champion of constitutional democracy. For too long his movement and the man were seen in the United States through the foggy lens of what some call  American exceptionalism, the idea that our system and our approach is automatically superior to every other system or approach. This notion, that political legitimacy can only come about as the result of a fully baked western-style Jeffersonian democracy, has driven American foreign policy since at least Woodrow Wilson and has often left us blind to the real motivations of nationalist or anti-colonial movements from Vietnam to Soweto.

Part of the legacy of Mandela and us is that the United States has often been exceptionally wrong for too long about movements like the fight to end apartheid in South Africa and wrong about the people who lead those fights. So, by all means, celebrate the life of a man who now belongs to the ages and whose name fits in the same sentence with Gandhi and Dr. King, and while doing so remember that our own history as a nation traces its origins to a messy and bloody revolution and the vision and leadership of determined, political men whose real motive was freedom.

 

Economy, Egan, Idaho Politics, Otter, Public Lands

Old Debate, Same Outcome

sagebrush

The Idaho Legislature has devoted considerable time and money over the last few months to an analysis of how the state might take over the public lands in Idaho that have been owned since statehood (and before) by all of us – meaning all American citizens – and managed by the federal government.

Never mind that the effort would likely be declared unconstitutional or that the U.S. Congress would never permit such a wholesale transfer, the movement has once again gained some modest traction in the American West. This latest effort will doubtless fade, as earlier ones have time and again, when the reality of managing the land collides with the fear of having to sell much of it in order for a state to afford ownership.

As the Washington Post has reported Utah has been the most aggressive in pushing a state takeover. Utah’s governor signed legislation in 2012 demanding the federal government transfer title even though the state’s legislative counsel opined that the move had a very “high probability of being declared unconstitutional.”

Just because a federal land transfer is a fool’s errand doesn’t mean this is a new issue. Far from it. Some of us will remember the Nevada roots of the a similar effort in the 1980’s, dubbed “the Sagebrush Rebellion” when local officials in the Silver State worked themselves into high dudgeon over federal management of public lands. The movement rose like a rocket and eventually sank like a stone, but not before it had a full political run at the county and state levels all across the West.

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 he promised to reflect the “values and goals” of the Sagebrush Rebellion, but the former California governor must have know, even if his inept Interior Secretary James Watt didn’t, there was no public appetite for selling off the public’s land or for allowing it to be exploited by a rape, ruin and run crowd of exploiters. Quite to the contrary, the public wanted in the 1980’s – and still wants today – a conservation and economic development balance that demonstrates respect for policies that both conserve and carefully utilize the public lands.

An internal 1980 Interior Department analysis of the Sagebrush Rebellion – “A Old Issue With A New Name” – pointed out that agitation over control, ownership and management of Western public land is as old as the nation itself. In other words, the political winds have blown back and forth on these issues, but always the policy course has tacked in the direction of maintaining the public’s land for the public’s benefit.

I want to quote from that 33 year old Interior analysis, because it still seems so relevant to the debate today in Idaho, Utah and elsewhere:

• In 1832 the Public Land Committee of the U.S. Senate claimed that state sovereignty was threatened by federal land ownership. The rest of Congress, however, maintained its discretionary authority to manage such land without limitation and rejected the complaint.

• In 1930 the Hoover Administration proposed to cede much of the public domain to the states. The recommendation was opposed by both an eastern Congressional majority and by Western states, who having already acquired the most productive land, wanted no responsibility for, as was said, the “waste lands” remaining.

• In the 1940’s Nevada Senator Pat McCarran conducted a series of “investigations” into the Grazing Service (one of Bureau of Land Management’s predecessors) and the Forest Service, both of whom were trying to bring livestock grazing under greater control on public land. In 1946 Senator Edward Robertson of Wyoming sponsored a bill to convey all unreserved and unappropriated lands to their respective states. The BLM was formed the same year.

• In 1956 Senator Russell Long of Louisiana proposed similar legislation.

None of the legislation went anywhere, but the political heat generated was substantial in every case.

The 1980 Interior document goes on to pin the genesis of the 80’s Sagebrush Rebellion on what it termed “the pinch of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the final comprehensive articulation of national policy on how the remaining unreserved lands would be managed. FLPMA, years in the making, reflected the public realization of the enormous national values held in trust in the public lands and called for those resources and values to be managed for all Americans under the principles of multiple use and sustained yield and on the basis of sound land planning.

“Stated simply, it became clear that consideration of all possible users made the sphere of influence of certain users, heretofore unchallenged, suddenly shrink.”

It has been argued by various advocates of state control over the West’s vast public lands that the states could manage the land more efficiently. The 1980 Interior analysis asked and answered a more important question.

“Fundamentally, the question isn’t whether the States can afford to manage the public lands. They could. They could increase taxes and sell some of the land, and in the case of the energy States bet against future revenues. That’s not the right question. The question is whether the Nation’s interests are best served by such management, and the answer is no.”

Some useful information has been generated by Idaho’s current effort, including a new Congressional Research Service report that estimates, on the conservative side, that the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service spend upwards of $320 million annually managing your public lands in the state. The Idaho Department of Lands entire budget, including federal funds that the department administers, is something less than $20 million. The math, to say the least, doesn’t compute.

The Tea Party-type groups that have to a significant degree been driving the current debate must believe the transfer of lands issue is a political winner, but they may want to check that assumption. Before he was governor of Idaho, Butch Otter was the congressman who briefly advocated selling some public land in the West to offset Hurricane Katrina expenses. The future governor wisely backed off the idea when the political downside, including a potential loss of prized Idaho hunting ground, became a real liability.

From time-to-time and for far into the future we will hear of “a new Sagebrush Rebellion” sparked by some alleged misdeed by a federal agency or federal policy, yet the overall course of federal-state relations in the West is set and has been for a long, long time. Serving the broad public interest will no doubt remain the essential objective of public lands policy in the American West.

The land legislators talk about as “federal” is really “public” land, and one of the beauties of America unlike most of Europe, for example, is that the land really is owned by all of us. Even better for we westerners, American taxpayers in states with little or no public land – think Nebraska, Kansas or Iowa – subsidize the management of our public land, but we need to remember that those folks also share ownership.

We’ll continue to fight over public land management, that is the western way, but rather than continuing to argue over a land transfer that will never happen we might be better served to more constructively debate the details of land management policy, including fire, grazing, timber and mining policy, so that our kids and grand kids can be certain to benefit from the great legacy – the trust – that is embodied in the singularly American idea that all that precious land belongs to all of us.

 

Education, Higher Education, Iran, Kramer

America’s Great Problems

1028_retire-early-education-caps_397x278The verdict is in. I haven’t done any scientific analysis, but I’m confident of what I am about to assert – the American attention span is shorter than the time it takes for Auburn to score a touchdown after a missed Alabama field goal.

In other words – short. Very short.

For a few moments earlier this fall we were consumed by the news of a humanitarian crisis and chemical weapons use in Syria. Then the Obamacare website didn’t work. Then Iran seemed to be coming to the international table to negotiate over its nuclear weapons program and then China started issuing orders about disputed airspace in the Far East. Oh, yes, throw in a train wreck, a few tornadoes and an NFL lineman who is a bully. So much news and so much noise that much of the media and most policy makers seem to consistently miss the truly great issues confronting the nation.

Most of us continue to look – silly us – to our political leaders to help us understand what is really important, but people in elected office, even the smartest, most dedicated seem more victims than masters of the nation’s collective attention deficit disorder. We certainly don’t lack for controversy and crisis. We do lack a leadership that helps define a sense of national priorities. What might we agree on as a nation that would really make a difference?

Syria, Iran, China and inadequate health insurance websites are all legitimate problems to be sure, but they are truly dwarfed by two more fundamental issues that, at the risk of hyperbole, really threaten the nation’s long-term viability. For the most part political leadership is missing in action. The issues are growing income inequality and the profound challenges confronting the nation’s education system at every level. As if to render the issues even more complicated, we need to recognize that income inequality and educational attainment are actually two sides of the same coin.

A few statistics to put the great problems in sharper focus:

State-level funding for education at all levels, and particularly higher education, has been tumbling since the 1980’s and at the same time – if you’re putting kids through college you know this – tuition rates have spiked. In Idaho, in-state tuition is up by about 45 percent in less than a decade. There have been comparable increases in Oregon and Washington. Arizona led the nation with a 70 percent increase in the last five years, while the national average increase has been 27 percent. Little wonder there is a mounting crisis – $1.2 trillion worth – of college loan debt.

The American Council on Education, a respected advocacy group of college and university presidents, said in a recent report appropriately entitled A Race to the Bottom, “The 2011 funding effort [for higher education] was down by 40.2 percent compared with fiscal 1980. Extrapolating that trend, the national average state investment in higher education will reach zero in fiscal 2059. In other words, states are already 40 percent of the way to zero. At this rate of decline, it will take another 48 years to finish off the remaining state support for higher education.”

Another data point: The country’s standing in terms of the number of young people completing post-secondary education is in decline compared to much of the rest of the developing world. As the Washington Post reported in September, “Instead of gaining ground, the United States has fallen from 12th to 16th in the share of adults age 25 to 34 holding degrees, according to the report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It trails global leaders South Korea, Canada and Japan and is mired in the middle of the pack among developed nations.”

The attainment rate for college graduates in the United States has actually crept up to 41 percent, but as the Post noted, “in South Korea, which has become the world leader, the rate has reached 63 percent. Canada and Japan rank second and third, respectively, with attainments of about 56 percent.”

In terms of college attainment the United States now trails Russia, Ireland, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Israel and Belgium — as well as Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, France and Sweden, all of whom passed the U.S. in the latest rankings.

No doubt you’ve heard that a college degree, more costly than ever, just isn’t worth all that much in terms of economic value. It’s just not true.

Eduardo Porter, a very well educated fellow, writes the Economic Scene column for the New York Times and recently wrote this: “On a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the doubters are wrong. Despite a weak job market for recent graduates, workers with a bachelor’s degree still earn almost twice as much as high school graduates. College might be more expensive than ever, but a degree is worth about $365,000 over a lifetime, after defraying all the direct and indirect costs of going to school. This is a higher payoff than in any other advanced nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.”

Now let’s try to connect the dots of educational attainment and income inequality.

In September – you remember September, we were focused on shutting down the government, I think – the Census Bureau reported that 15 percent of Americans now live in poverty and a typical American family is making less on an annual basis in 2013 than it was in 1989. From about 1993 until about 2000, median household income was increasing steadily, but that upward trend ended and has, with the exception of brief uptick in 2007, been headed down…and down.

It is not terribly surprising that educational attainment is generally the worst in communities with the worst economic conditions. One example from Las Vegas where, as the Review-Journal reported recently, “With rare exception, school ratings are higher district wide when the surrounding neighborhood has a higher median household income and more college-educated residents, regardless of whether parents have degrees.

“Schools do progressively worse when their neighborhoods have higher rates of high school-only educated residents, families falling below the poverty line, and minorities.” In other words, education equals better economic conditions.

To summarize: state-level support for education at all levels (but higher education particularly) has been plummeting, more Americans than ever are acquiring education beyond high school (in part because the recession sent many folks who were out of work back to school), but most of the rest of the developed world – our economic competitors – are getting more advanced education then we are, and more education is still the surest path to a better economic life, particularly when real family income in the United States is as flat as a pancake.

The progressive “think tank” Think Progress says this about the growing economic divide in America. “Income inequality has been growing since the 1970s, as the richest 20 percent of Americans saw their income grow much faster than the bottom 20 percent. But things have accelerated in the economic downturn. For the past three years, those at the top of the income ladder saw their incomes grow by 5 percent while everyone else’s income dropped. The top 10 percent of the country’s earners took home half of the income in 2012, the largest amount on record.

“And things at the bottom have been declining. The bottom 60 percent of earners have experienced a ‘lost decade’ of wage growth, seeing their compensation fall or stagnate. Many forces have contributed to this trend, but the growth of low-wage jobs that replace middle class work during the recovery has helped it along.”

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that more education for more Americans – college degrees, technical skills training, even an English degree – is the one sure path to a better standard of living and, I would argue, a stronger, more diverse economy. It is past time that our budget and policy priorities got in sync with this reality.