Uncategorized

The Crown Jewels

SaguaroWhen presidential historians periodically take stock of “the greatest” American presidents Herbert Hoover never fares very well. His single term – 1929 to 1933 – was considered at the time and ever since as a prime example of a “failed presidency.”

The great stock market crash helped usher in the Great Depression and historically high unemployment on Hoover’s watch. His response to the resulting economic crisis has generally been considered inadequate, even callous, and Franklin Roosevelt crushed Hoover’s re-election hopes in an historic landslide in 1932. Hoover continues to rank among the most unlucky and unloved American presidents. History is a cruel mistress.

Yet, earlier this week I basked in the desert sunshine at a Herbert Hoover legacy – a truly monumental achievement – that the long-ago president created just days before he left the White House in disgrace. In the rocky, mountainous desert just west of downtown Tucson there exists what may be one of the failed president’s greatest, most visionary accomplishments. Thanks to the 31st president it’s our monument, too.

On March 1, 1933, Hoover, still smarting from his landslide loss to FDR, signed a presidential proclamation declaring thousands of acres of Arizona desert as Saguaro National Monument. The monument Hoover created with a stroke of his pen – he used his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act – eventually became a national park in 1994 and played host to nearly 680,000 visitors in 2013. It is estimated that the park, the largest tourist attraction in southern Arizona, contributes $75 million annually to the local economy. Hoover’s monument protects the towering saguaro cactus, a magnificent creation that is found only in the desert of southern Arizona and across the border in Mexico. When you hike this area you’re struck by both the harshness of the desert environment and its delicate nature. It is the kind of place where the heavy hand of man could easily destroy the majesty that Mother Nature has created. We have a failed president to thank for saving it so that my hiking companions and I could enjoy it 75 years after Hoover put his signature on a presidential proclamation.

Fast forward to this week when House Republicans again voted to gut the 1906 Antiquities Act that has been used by fifteen American presidents to, in effect, create the greatest system of national parks, monuments and wildlife reserves on the planet. What modern conservatives fail to acknowledge is that our great national park and monument legacy would simply not exist as it does without every president since the Act was created having used it to preserve and protect the nation’s special places.

Teddy Roosevelt, a president most modern Republicans embrace only gingerly, clutched the Act to his burly chest and saved the Grand Canyon from commercial exploitation. He preserved Jewel Cave in South Dakota and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, among a raft of other actions. Roosevelt knew he couldn’t get a reluctant Republican Congress to act, so he acted in the national interest and thank God he did.

William Howard Taft saved the Big Hole in Montana. Warren Harding used his authority under the Antiquities Act to preserve Bryce Canyon in Utah. Calvin Coolidge, not a man to fawn over executive power, used his to protect Craters of the Moon in Idaho and the marvelous Chiricahua’s in Arizona. FDR used the Act to protect Jackson Hole in Wyoming and Joshua Tree in California. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and both the Bush’s used the Antiquities Act. Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah and protected the Minidoka Japanese-American internment site in Idaho. LBJ used the act. Barack Obama has, too.

Read the list of national monuments and special places protected by presidential action and you’ll read a list of America’s heritage, a list of the places all of us would love to visit and do by the millions every year.

Utah Republican Rob Bishop sponsored the bill in Congress this week and complained, as Politico reported, “that Obama has designated a half-dozen monuments in the past year without input from Congress, including a significant expansion of a national monument along the Pacific Ocean in California this month. The March 11 action permanently protects about 1,665 acres of federal lands near Point Arena, 130 miles north of San Francisco.”

Obama acted, of course, because Congress no longer – and rarely has in our history – acted to create national parks and monuments. Many now hope, and I count myself in that number, that Obama will use his authority under the 1906 Act to permanently protect the Boulder-White Clouds area in central Idaho. If the president does act it will be because Congress, despite a vast amount of input from Idahoans and Americans in other states, has not acted for a generation to formally protect this area. The late Sen. Jim McClure and then-Gov. Cecil D. Andrus, a Republican and a Democrat, advocated action to protect the Boulder-White Clouds in the 1980’s and Republican Rep. Mike Simpson has pushed protection of the area for a decade and still Congress has not moved.

Teddy Roosevelt realized when he acted to protect the Grand Canyon that local pressure from politically influential economic interests would never permit Congressional action, so Roosevelt acted for the public interest. Once the canyon was protected, Congress got serious about it’s responsibility. Jimmy Carter famously used the Antiquities Act at the behest of his Interior Secretary – Idaho’s Andrus – to create his and the nation’s great Alaska lands legacy. The Alaska Congressional delegation only came to the table when presidential action finally forced serious action. Carter’s conservation legacy will one day be seen to rival Teddy Roosevelt’s and all thanks to the Antiquities Act.

The House vote this week is mostly for show, another poke in the eye of Obama, and is unlikely to spur action by the Senate. For more than 100 years the Antiquities Act has allowed American presidents of both parties to protect the national crown jewels. In an ideal world, Congress would regularly and seriously consider conservation measures like protection for Idaho’s Boulder-White Clouds, but in fact it rarely even holds hearings on such things.

As the Salt Lake Tribune in Rep. Bishop’s home state editorialized this week: “Turning a piece of federally owned land — land held in trust for all the people of the United States, present and future — into a national monument is an innately forward-thinking act. But it is one that could, should sentiments and circumstances change, be reversed.

“It’s at least possible that a majority of the American people, speaking through their elected representatives in Congress, could decide that the temporary benefit of burning another 100 million tons of coal or another 100 million barrels of oil outweighs the benefit of preserving beautiful, unique or environmentally fragile lands. If that happens, they can move to sell the parks, cancel presidential declarations of national monuments and rub their hands together over all the lovely money that their friends will make.”

The next time you visit a national park or monument remember Teddy Roosevelt’s words in 1908 when he protected the awesome canyon of the Colorado River. “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it; not a bit,” TR said. “What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.” Exactly.

There is nothing wrong with the Antiquities Act that a more conservation-minded, forward-looking Congress couldn’t fix.

Baseball, Christie, Economy, Politics, Uncategorized

Fighting to Innovate

2013-Tesla-Model-S-front-1Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, is attempting to revolutionize the American auto industry by building safe, attractive, energy efficient electric cars that are designed to meet a growing customer demand. But…there are some challenges.

Tesla, in challenging the long-established American way of selling new cars, is (big surprise) hitting decades-old speed bumps as it tries to invent a new approach for you – the consumer – to purchase a car. The Tesla story is a great case study in innovation, but also a story about how often American capitalism is arranged to thwart innovation and protect the status quo of well-entrenched interests who like the things just the way they are.

Henry Ford’s great contribution to American industry was, if not to invent at least to perfect, the assembly line. That process allowed one of his Model T automobiles (and after 1928 the Model A) to seamlessly travel a route along the factory floor as auto workers added piece after piece until finally a finish car eased off the line. It was an innovation that helped revolutionize the auto industry and made Detroit, for a couple of generations at least, the center of world manufacturing.

In ol’ Henry’s day Ford workers were paid $5 a day and it was said you could have any color Model T you wanted as it was black. The cars were affordable, relatively easy to repair and drive and Americans bought 15 million of them. When Ford decided to introduce the improved and more stylish Model A – you could buy the car in exotic colors including Arabian Sand – the big factories the company operated had to completely shut down for months while re-tooling took place. Ford’s dominance with the “T” had been challenged by General Motors and other manufactures who were innovating with more powerful engines and attractive features like electric starters and windshield wipers. Ford was into basic until he couldn’t sell basic. And while the Model A was a great car, Ford Motor Company never again truly dominated the industry Henry Ford had invented, in part, because the company took an innovation holiday that never really stopped until the advent of the trendsetting Mustang in 1964.

Ford and his rivals back in the early days of American motoring also faced tremendous challenges in getting their products to market. The system of automobile dealerships so common today began to develop in response to the need to distribute the product. Before long almost any town of size had a Ford dealer, a Chevy dealer and eventually perhaps a Packard, a DeSoto or a Chrysler dealer. The dealers became major players in the local and state economy. Some became household names because their faces were splashed on billboards or later television. And, in keeping with the American way, they became influential players in politics. In time the car dealers largely wrote the laws in most states that attractively (for them) limited competition by requiring, among other things, that you buy your new car directly from “Happy Town Ford,” an independent franchisee, rather than directly from a factory.

The trouble for Tesla is simply that the old dealership model, a feature of the American industry since the 1920’s, isn’t how Tesla sees its cars being sold in the 21st Century. I think of Tesla as the Apple of car dealers. Lots of customer service, a showroom more Mad Men than Joe’s Garage and a product that demands high touch and higher concept. Looking at a Tesla is like browsing an Apple store. Buying a new Toyota unfortunately feels more like a trip to K-Mart.

Three states – New Jersey, Texas and Arizona – have now made it clear to Tesla that the company can’t sell cars directly from its sleek, Apple-inspired stores.  Rather the company, under existing state laws, must conform to the old, old dealership model. Not surprisingly long-established automobile dealers, no doubt threatened by aggressive new competition and no doubt quietly encouraged by established manufacturers, have pushed state officials to make Tesla conform to a sales model and state laws that Henry Ford would have recognized.

“The dealer regulations are similar to those put in place to save the family farm and protect individual farmers,” Jack R. Nerad, the executive market analyst at Kelley Blue Book told the New York Times. “But the landscape is vastly different now. Big dealerships don’t need the type of protection the single-brand store needed back in the day.”

The latest state to tell Tesla to take a hike is New Jersey, ironically where Gov. Chris Christie has lately experienced his share of auto-inflicted political wounds. After apparently first encouraging Tesla to do business in New Jersey, Christie now says the automaker needs to deal with the state legislature in order implement its business plan in the Garden State. He sounds like he’s suddenly never heard of lobbying the legislature to encourage a new business venture.

“Tesla was operating outside the law,” Christie recently said during a town hall meeting. “I have no problem with Tesla selling directly to customers, except it’s against the law in New Jersey.” That, indeed, is the problem. Maybe, just maybe, the law needs to change, but if you’ve been around state legislatures much you know the local car dealers have a lot of clout.

Ironically, Tesla is facing serious push back from two states – Arizona and Texas – that Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has said he wants to consider as sites for a $6 billion factory that might employ 6,500 workers who would manufacture the lithium ion batteries to power the cars he wants to sell. I hardly need point out that the places where Tesla has been most aggressively backed off are all states with free market loving Republican governors. So far tough guy governors like Christie in New Jersey and Rick Perry in Texas haven’t done much of anything to change a restraint of trade business model enshrined in state law. The next time you hear a politician rail against too much regulation you might think Tesla.

All of this makes corporate recruitment a good deal more difficult, too. Tucson, Arizona would like to host the Tesla factory – who wouldn’t – but why would Tesla open a state-of-the-art facility and spend a few billion in a state that won’t allow the company to sell its product the way it believes in most effective?

I long ago came to believe that in politics, and in most of life, the simplest explanation is most often correct. American automobile manufacturers, and that group would include firms like Toyota, Nissan and others that have effectively become U.S. manufacturers, are looking over their shoulders at Tesla and seeing a smart, sophisticated and aggressive competitor. Detroit, a name we don’t often associate with new thinking, has been late to the innovation party at least since the Edsel hit the street. The status quo they know is comfortable and predictable. You can almost hear them saying – why change? We wrote the law and we like it just fine thank you.

Tesla is a 21st Century car company that is also trying to revolutionize the energy world. First, however, the company needs to change public policy and alter a status quo that works to the advantage of a powerful, entrenched group of business owners who love to sell and service cars just like they did when my dad bought his Model A Ford.

Inventing a new kind of car might prove to be a lot easier than changing a few decades of law that protects the aging and arguably outmoded business model of all those guys down at the Auto Mall.

Guns, Stevens

Packin’ in the Classroom

o-TEXAS-GUNS-CARS-CAMPUS-facebookIn more than 35 years of observing the Idaho Legislature I am hard pressed to remember another time when really controversial legislation – in this case the “guns on campus” bill – became law in the face of such wide-spread opposition from the people and institutions most directly impacted.

Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s signature on the contentious legislation was no surprise. He signaled his support early but, given the unanimous opposition from college and university presidents, the Otter-appointed State Board of Education (SBOE), an array of student leaders and many in law enforcement, it can be counted as a mild surprise that the bill ever got to the governor. Similar legislation has died in the past.

University presidents argued that allowing concealed weapons on a college campus would inevitably lead to more overall security concerns, greater costs for law enforcement and might well impact recruitment of faculty, students and athletes. Former Idaho House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, a conservative who is also a pragmatic guy, was known during his long tenure as Speaker for killing his share of crackpot ideas. Newcomb now manages government relations for Boise State University and he told the Boise Weekly, “I had one professor tell me, ‘All my kids are going to get A’s.’ I think it changes the whole climate.”

But back to the dynamic of a part-time, citizen legislature and a governor willing to ignore the wholesale opposition of the people closest to the kids and issues on the state’s higher education campuses. More than ever the state legislature considers itself a collection of the 105 smartest people in Idaho. They’re experts on everything and never in doubt on anything. The SBOE says on its website that it “is a policy-making body for all public education in Idaho and provides general oversight and governance for public K-20 education. SBOE serves as the Board of Trustees for state-sponsored public four year colleges and universities and the Board of Regents for the University of Idaho.”

That statement is clearly not true. Some trustee that can’t impact such a fundamental issue of campus policy and safety. Some oversight, particularly when the legislature is willing to substitute its “judgment” for that of the people legally and Constitutionally charged with that responsibility. The State Board was on record early opposing the guns on campus bill and the college presidents weighed in on this issue more forcefully than on almost any issue – including budgets – that I can remember. They might as well have been shouting down a dry well.

Answer this

In the wake of the horrific Virginia Tech shooting – the seven year anniversary is in April – where a lone, mentally-ill student shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others, attorney Brian J. Siebel, then a senior lawyer with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, suggested a variety of questions regard guns on campus in an article published in the George Mason University’s Civil Rights Law Journal. Siebel’s questions are as valid today as when the Virginia Tech shootings were dominating the news in 2007.

Do student want guns in classrooms, Siebel asked? Apparently not if you believe elected Idaho student leaders. Will students feel safer if the person next to them in chem lab is packing? Will parents be inclined to support a decision for their little Jennifer or Cameron to attend schools where guns are openly allowed, or given the attitude of the legislature, openly encouraged? What about the pressure, academic and otherwise, that many kids feel during those formative college years when grades clash with ready access to booze and worse? And will more guns on campus contribute to more suicide now the third leading cause of death among young Americans age 15 to 24? All those questions still apply to Idaho and the handful of other states that allow guns on campus. These are the kinds of questions higher education policy makers deal with every day as they worry about the welfare of young people in their charge, but these questions were largely ignored or certainly given scant attention in the recent Idaho debate. And why is that?

It’s impossible not to conclude amid the sober sounding claims that guns on campus is merely a straight forward Constitutional issue – it isn’t, that when the National Rifle Association shows up touting a gun bill the NRA’s legislative soldiers fall immediately in line. No phalanx of college presidents or concerned students can trump the political power of the gun lobby.

In year’s past the kind of opposition that came together to oppose the NRA-endorsed Idaho legislation may well have prompted a few sober-minded lawmakers to counsel a go-slow approach or, as some opponents suggested this year, a year of cooling off to really consider the ramifications of such lawmaking. But such is the lock (and load) hold of the NRA on legislators in many states that any departure – any departure at all – from the gun lobby line is considered gun rights treason.

Armed America

The Gun Report blog of the New York Times reports today that, “the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (Wayne LaPierre) spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., last week, and after equating freedom and individual rights with gun ownership, he painted a dire picture of a country with no defense but its armed citizenry.

“Freedom has never needed our defense more than now,” LaPierre thundered from the stage, as the Times put it. “Almost everywhere you look, something has gone wrong. The core values we believe in, the things we care about most, are changing. Eroding. It’s why more and more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition — not to cause trouble, but because we sense that America is already in trouble.”

This is the rhetoric of a dystopic Hollywood movie where a handful of heavily armed super heroes hold off the evil invaders. The only sane people in Wayne’s world are those armed to the teeth, because in the richest country on the globe with a long-enduring tradition of representative democracy, we can no longer trust the police, the courts, and our elected officials to keep our freedoms. Such is the mind set of an armed America and those policymakers who keep marching in lock step with the gun lobby, while completely ignoring the bloody reality of what the NRA’s agenda increasingly means.

The Times gun blog today recounts some recent headline gun news:

“A 2-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed himself with a handgun he found at a home in Broken Arrow, Okla., Tuesday night. It is unclear how the toddler got hold of the weapon. No arrests have been made.”

“Wesley Pruitt, 13, was killed in an accidental shooting at a friend’s home in Rains County, Tex., Wednesday afternoon. The victim and his 15-year-old friend were in a bedroom when the older boy pulled the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun, not realizing it was loaded. No word on charges.”

“A 57-year-old man was shot in the face during a home invasion robbery in Sandpoint, Idaho, late Monday. Three men were arrested after an 11-hour standoff with police.”

And so it goes day after day.

The Gun Violence Archive reports as of today 2008 Americans have died in gun-related incidents since January 1, 2014 and another 3,305 have been injured. We don’t know how many guns there really are in America, but various estimates say 270 million, at least. That number grows every day. Don’t you feel safer?

Rolling Stone magazine recently offered some statistics to back up a claim that just given the numbers regarding issues like health care, prison populations and gun violence, the United States more-and-more resembles a third-world, developing county.

“The U.S. leads the developed world in firearm-related murders,” the magazine reported, “and the difference isn’t a slight gap – more like a chasm. According to United Nations data, the U.S. has 20 times more murders than the developed world average. Our murder rate also dwarfs many developing nations, like Iraq, which has a murder rate less than half ours. More than half of the most deadly mass shootings documented in the past 50 years around the world occurred in the United States, and 73 percent of the killers in the U.S. obtained their weapons legally. Another study finds that the U.S. has one of the highest proportion of suicides committed with a gun. Gun violence varies across the U.S., but some cities like New Orleans and Detroit rival the most violent Latin American countries, where gun violence is highest in the world.”

In the America of 2014, with lawmakers in both parties in a perpetual defensive crouch to ward off any NRA-inspired assault should they dare question any element of the gun lobby’s agenda, such facts are not merely inconvenient, but more shockingly not even discussed. In the armed America of 2014, the only acceptable political answer is more guns in more places, including now in Idaho the college library and who knows were else next time.

Civil Rights, Film

Oscar Takeaways

82nd Annual Academy Awards - "Meet The Oscars" New YorkPerhaps the reason we like to watch – and dish snark – over the Oscar television awards show is that most of the 6,000 odd (I use that term advisedly) members of The Academy are so unlike the rest of us. The big Sunday night show means we can all live for a few moments in a world of glitz and make believe – if three-plus hours of awards given mostly to people we’ll never see again followed by awkward speeches generally devoid of self-awareness can be characterized as “moments.” We are all Walter Mitty during the Oscars.

As Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New York Times this morning, “If the Super Bowl is a secular Christmas that everyone can celebrate, the Oscars are Easter: the dress-up parade and those long acceptance speeches are all part of the ritual. But some traditions, notably the Academy’s insistence on handing out technical awards early, are tiresome. It can start to feel like a high school graduation where diplomas are handed out alphabetically, and your child’s last name begins with Z.”

So, I admit I watched and if not actually enjoyed the annual spectacle I do recognize it for what it is – a snapshot of American culture played out in real (and reel) time on national television and, of course, Twitter. And, while host Ellen DeGeneres got the buzz for her “selfie” with half the audience, I think the best Tweet goes to the numbers geek Nate Silver who commented via Twitter: “Great product placement by

Here are my completely arbitrary takeaways from, if not The Greatest Show on Earth, then the longest show last night.

“12 Years a Slave” won the Best Picture award and deserved it. Hollywood tends to award “serious” movies that probes serious issues, or in the case of “12 Years” an historically correct issue – slavery (and race) – that is still barely below the surface of American life. As a measure of the importance of this film, I’ll predict people will still be seeing it and talking about it 20 years from now. If you haven’t seen it, steel yourself to watch a brutal and moving telling of the darkest story in all of the American story.

Oscar host DeGeneres mostly left me longing for Bob Hope or Johnny Carson. The role of Oscar MC requires the skills, generally speaking, of a late-night talk show host – sharp, topical and (mostly) clean jokes, self deprecation, ad-libbing ability, and a relentless focus on poking fun at the absurdity of the whole show. Next year give me Jimmy Fallon or even Kevin Spacey. Classy guys (or gals) who get the joke and can make one.

Given a show that is all about recognizing people who create and deliver powerful messages, the Oscar acceptance speeches are (generally) appallingly bad. As the Times noted, Matthew McConaughey, who won the Best Actor award for a movie about a guy fighting AIDS, “praised God, his family and himself, but didn’t mention people with AIDS.” The speeches are a litany of thanks to family, colleagues, producers and the fat cats who finance movies. Thank God no one, at least no one I heard, thanked their lawyer or accountant, as has happened in years past. The good Oscar acceptance speech is as rare as the short Oscar acceptance speech.

One of the few good speeches came from the writer John Ridley who produced the screenplay for “12 Years.” Perhaps it should be no surprise that a talented writer can make a good, short, emotionally powerful speech. Best Supporting Actress Lupita Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave” also give a moving speech. “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.” That is a classy line, both true and self aware.

The visually stunning “Gravity” richly deserved all the praise it received and the awards, but while the film was highly entertaining it was not Best Picture worthy. The story was mostly unbelievable and the acting mostly overdone, but the effects were appropriately other-worldly. Perhaps instead of what seemed like endless clips of old movies – including the 9,000th tribute to “The Wizard of Oz” – the Academy could have commissioned a 90 second clip on how the special effects of a film like “Gravity” or “All is Lost” increasingly add magic and transform the movie experience.

I am gratified that foreign-born film makers – the Best Director is from Mexico and the director who made “12 Years” is a Brit – are finally getting some overdue recognition. Cinema is a world-wide thing and great movies are being made everywhere, not just in Hollywood.

Final takeaway: Cate Blanchett was far and away the Best Actress in any movie I saw in 2013. Her role as the emotionally broken down, once-rich glamor girl in “Blue Jasmine” was a performance for the ages. She now stands on nearly equal footing with the great Meryl Streep as the finest actress of our age. Here’s hoping she continues to get roles fine enough to match her very great talent. Her pitch to Hollywood to get beyond those “who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences. They are not,” was also spot on.

If, as has been said, politics is show business for ugly people then the Oscar awards show is prom night at a very exclusive, very expensive high school were all the girls dress with the certainty that they’ll be the queen and all the boys have the cockiness that goes with being sure they are destined to captain the football team. This Academy teaches conspicuous consumption, ego maintenance and the value of cosmetic surgery, both done well and not so much. In this school a pizza delivery – how very pedestrian – is the stuff of high humor and an $85,000 bag of swag is just the most obvious benefit of showing up for  class.

I get it. I really do. When the Academy asks me to produce the big show next year my first decision will be to have Penelope Cruz present all the awards.

See you at the movies.