Andrus

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Boise, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Gender Chasm

Posted on by christian

Mad Men Attitudes and 21st Century Politics

By every measure it seems clear that Ann Romney has the smarts, style and personal qualities to be a very popular and successful First Lady. But as good a surrogate as she can be for husband Mitt, it will be her husband’s name and not hers on the November ballot, which simply means she can help his campaign not carry it.

Ann Romney’s notable attempts to “humanize” her husband and at the same time close the Romney and Republican Party gender chasm may help at the margins, but most likely not enough to erase one of the two really serious demographic challenges confronting the almost certain GOP nominee. The candidate and his party must engage in that heavy lifting.

Let’s start with the obvious: if you need a conscious strategy to “humanize” a real person, you have a real problem. Last week the Romney campaign rolled out an online video of the genuinely appealing Ann reminiscing about raising her five sons, as well as Mitt who she said was often the “sixth son.” The video was a not very well disguised effort to address some of the important political news of the week, President Obama’s lead over Romney in new a poll conducted in key swing states. That nearly double digit lead is now in place largely thanks to Romney’s collapsing support among women.

To borrow a popular culture reference, this situation is a little like running the completely buttoned down 1960’s ad executive Don Draper from television’s popular period piece Mad Men for president in 2012. Handsome, out of touch Don just wouldn’t make it as a 2012 candidate and, while Romney may not have Draper’s various addiction problems, he acts like a guy from the 60’s who will never open up and will certainly never get in touch with his feminine side. Romney seems most of the time like a man transported through time to a place far, far away. He’s a 1960’s man in a 21st Century campaign. You can’t humanize that.

In last week’s USA Today/Gallup Poll of swing states, President Obama led Romney 51-42 among registered voters, and remember this research was conducted in places like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Iowa were our national elections are decided.

“The biggest change from previous polls,” USA Today reported, “came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.”

[Romney’s other potentially fatal demographic flaw is with Hispanic voters, but that’s a column for another day.]

From Rush Limbaugh to state legislatures, the Republican brand with women is tarnished, perhaps irrevocably in this election cycle. Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, dates the pivotal moment of the GOP collapse among women to what seemed at the time to be a completely off-the-wall question during a GOP debate early this year in New Hampshire. You may remember that George Stephanopoulos of ABC News asked Romney if he shared his opponent Rick Santorum’s view that “states have the right to ban contraception.”

Romney ridiculed the question, the audience booed George and most of us chalked it up to Stephanopoulos getting too little sleep because of his early morning TV duties.

But, as Rich notes, Santorum’s birth control views just made him “an advance man for a rancorous national brawl about to ambush an unsuspecting America that thought women’s access to birth control had been resolved by the ­Supreme Court almost a half century ago.”

Meanwhile in state legislatures from Virginia to Idaho, anti-abortion themed legislation requiring women to undergo an ultrasound procedure as part of the visit to a physician prior to being able to access abortion services immediately became a potent symbol for what Democrats have begun to call “a war on women.” Whether its a war of not, the backlash over the ultrasound proposals was immediate and stunning in its intensity. After passing mandatory ultrasound legislation in the Idaho State Senate, legislative Republicans in the even more conservative Idaho House of Representatives heard from their constituents – their female Republican constituents – and suddenly discovered that the best place for the ultrasound legislation was in the bottom of a committee chairman’s desk drawer.

From personal experience I can attest to the fact that last time Idaho had a high-profile debate about abortion that carried with it national overtones – that was 1990 when then-Gov. Cecil D. Andrus vetoed legislation that was not only harshly anti-female, but would have sent the state into years of litigation – the incumbent governor’s re-election was secured when he stood solidly against nationally-inspired legislation that was properly seen by women – and many men – as draconian. Conservative women flocked to Andrus, I’m convince not just because of his courageous veto, but because he displayed both toughness and compassion. In other words, the issue was a test of character. Andrus passed the test and voters – women included – could warmly relate to such attributes, which explains why Romney and the GOP are hurting with women.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, you may remember, lost her party’s nomination in 2010 to a Tea Party-backed opponent. She then mounted an nearly unprecedented write-in campaign in the general election that returned her to the Senate. Murkowski is what passes for a moderate in the national GOP these days and comments she made last week in her state place a stark frame around the problem Romney must fix if he hopes to win the White House in November.

“I think what you’re sensing is a fear, a concern that women feel threatened, that a long settled issue might not be settled,” Murkowski said on a radio talk show in Homer, Alaska last week. As the Homer News reported, “[Murkowski] cited things like conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh’s remarks about a female Georgetown University law student, which Murkowski called ‘offensive, horribly offensive.'”

“To have those kind of slurs against a woman … you had candidates who want to be our president not say, ‘That’s wrong. That’s offensive.’ They did not condemn the rhetoric,” Murkowski said.

The paper continued, “From her perspective as a Republican, Murkowski said she can’t understand why some in her party have raised reproductive rights as an issue.”

“It makes no sense to make this attack on women,” she said. “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

So, while national unemployment numbers released last week should be confirming the GOP’s laser-like focus on the economy as the on issue that really threatens the White House incumbent, the campaign narrative for a solid week has been “war on women” and his party’s and Romney’s gender gap.

Here, I think, is the larger context for November: I tend to buy President Obama’s assertion last week that women simply don’t vote as some monolithic block that is up for grabs for a skillful candidate who appeals to the magic mix of “women’s issues.”

When it comes to politics, women are discerning voters – period. What the toxic issues mix has done to Romney and the GOP is to provide for many women – and men – a lens through which it’s possible to get a definitive glimpse of “the unzipped” Mitt, as wife Ann might say. Had Romney even a little finesse in handling these gender bending issues – think of his stumbling answer to whether Augusta National ought to allow women members or his tepid reaction to Limbaugh’s sexist bashing of an outspoken female law student – he could send all voters, particularly women, a message that he gets real life beyond his private equity experience and Ann’s two Cadillacs.

Still, rather that providing the cause of the gender chasm, the “women’s issues” mix really provides a footnote for reference on Romney’s real problem with discerning voters – they just aren’t into him. As conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote recently, “It is entirely possible that women simply aren’t that into Mitt. He’s just not their kind of guy. Health care, taxes, budgets, debt ceilings, capacity utilization, Chinese currency: so important. But at the end of the day — does he have “it”?

Parker goes on to say, “His wife says he does, but then she knows the unzipped Mitt. The question for American women is, do they really want to go there?”

In politics, of course, issues do matter, but discerning voters can sift the issues for what really matters; indications of character and connection. They may not want the candidates unzipped, but most voters do want to support candidates with whom they are comfortable, with whom they can – here’s that magic political word – connect.

Women are sending a pretty simple message: If there is no connection, there will be no Romney election.  

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baucus, Boise, Civility, Egan, Idaho Politics, Justice Department, Obama, U.S. Senate

One of the Good Guys

Posted on by christian

Clancy Standridge, 1927-2012

More than 20 years ago I was on the way home from a trip to Washington, D.C. with Clancy Standridge, who was for many years the legislative liaison and a top political confidante of my old boss Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. It was late, the flight had been a long one, we were a little grumpy and tired from a series of those non-stop and not very productive meetings you often have in the nation’s capitol. As we stumbled up the long concourse in the Salt Lake City airport headed for the connecting flight to Idaho, handsome, debonair Clancy offered up an observation I have found myself repeating ever since. “This time of day,” he said, “your shoes feel like they are on the wrong feet.” Everyone laughed and the ordeal of getting home suddenly didn’t seem so onerous. That was Clancy Standridge.

Anyone who was around the Idaho Statehouse during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s will remember white haired, well-tailored Clancy Standridge who died recently in Portland, Oregon at age 84. It is a testament to Standridge’s skill with people and Andrus’s sense about what a Democratic governor had to do to interact successfully with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature that the state’s political watchers still say that Clancy was as good a gubernatorial emissary as has ever prowled the third and fourth floors of the Idaho Statehouse.

Clancy did his job the old fashioned way with unfailing courtesy, easy charm, a warm smile, a great sense of humor and by treating the most junior page with the same respect as the Speaker of the House. He also never forgot a commitment or failed to keep his word. Legislative attaches, the hardworking women who make the legislative machinery run, loved him. He handed out candy and compliments and people trusted him. It was remarkable the kind of gossip the old boy would pick up just by listening and being interested. When a junior backbencher just had to see the governor, Clancy made it happen. When a legislator who had consistently voted against everything the governor proposed, but still wanted a picture taken when his pet bill was finally signed into law, Clancy saw to it.

Born in Oklahoma on the cusp of the depression decade, Standridge was raised by grandparents, made his way west, served during the Korean War and hooked on with GTE, the old telephone company. He started out climbing poles and eventually worked up (or down) to serve as a senior government relations executive. Andrus plucked him from retirement to serve as his eyes and ears with the legislature. It’s hard to think he could have made a better pick. Clancy was smart, well read, schooled in politics, but more than anything he was a practitioner of the kind of personal style attributed to another Okie, Will Rogers, of whom it was said he never met a man he didn’t like. In politics, of course, you do meet people you don’t like, Clancy just never let on. I never heard him use the word, but Clancy Standridge practiced the art of civility, in fact he wrote the book on how to deal with people in the world of politics.

At a time when Barack Obama is criticized, even by those in his own party, for being distant and a loner, when it takes a Camp David-like effort to get two golf loving politicians, the president and House Speaker John Boehner, together to play a round, and when bipartisanship can’t even extend to the dinner table, it’s worth remembering what a little civility can accomplish. Despite the toxic nature of our politics and even in the face of poll tested attack lines the world – including the political world – still works on the basis of personal relationships.

Washington waxes nostalgic for the time when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could make a deal on taxes or when Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen could have a couple of belts followed by a handshake and move the country forward on civil rights. A few more D.C. golf games, a few more cocktails on the Truman balconey and a little more common decency in Washington and in every state capitol wouldn’t hurt any politician and it would be good for the country.

The little courtesies, the random acts of kindness work to build trust and respect and even powerful people can be moved. It becomes a little more difficult to call the political opponent an SOB when you’ve had dinner with the SOB and his wife and found out about his kids, his motivations and his needs. Personal relationships grease the wheels of politics or, if common decency and respect don’t exist, the gears seize up more frequently. Does anyone think the country would be worse off if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell shared a laugh together once in a while? Harry ought to send Mitch’s wife flowers on her birthday. Clancy Standridge would have tried something that simple and that effective.

Clancy Standridge knew all about personal relationships. He was one of a kind, but I hope not the last of his kind.

 

2014 Election, 2016 Election, Andrus, Borah, FDR, Prostate Cancer, Supreme Court, Wheeler

FDR’s Great Blunder

Posted on by christian

As Court Showdown Looms, an Anniversary of Note

Two years ago in his State of the Union address, Barack Obama called out the Supreme Court of the United States for its ruling in the Citizens United case involving campaign financing.

With most members of the Roberts Court looking on from their seats in the well of the House of Representatives, Obama told the country that the Court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”

With perhaps the exception of his reference to “foreign corporations” – it’s hard to tell the source of much of the new money flooding campaigns – Obama explained exactly what has happened in the subsequent two years. And predictably, the president was roundly criticized in the aftermath of the speech for an “unprecedented attack on the Court. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the five judges in the majority in Citizens, could be seen mouthing the words “not true.”

In retrospect, not only was the president right on the substance of his criticism of the Court – Obama did teach at one of the country’s great law schools – but he had the guts to deliver his critique right to the faces of those in the black robes who hold so much sway over the policy and priorities of American life. It was hardly an unprecedented attack, either, particularly in the context of an anniversary of, what I would argue, was a defining moment in the evolution of the modern U.S. Supreme Court.

Just over 75 years ago – February 5, 1937 to be precise – the president to whom Obama is so often compared and contrasted, Franklin D. Roosevelt, took a decidedly different tack with the high court he took issue with. FDR didn’t just criticize the justices, although he certainly did criticize, he attempted – and came reasonably close to succeeding – to fundamentally remaking the Court in his more liberal image. Roosevelt’s “court packing scheme,” as it quickly became known, turned out to be his greatest single blunder as president. It also presented the country with the greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

Now, with the Supreme Court poised to hear, in unusual detail, the arguments for and against Obama’s health insurance reform initiative – the Affordable Care Act – it’s worth reflecting on the history of the court over the last 75 years and considering what might have been and what has become.

The normally surefooted Franklin Roosevelt made misstep after misstep with his plan to enlarge the Court in 1937 and when his efforts at a judicial power grab finally ended he reaped the political whirlwind. Never before, after the court packing fiasco, would Roosevelt command a working majority in the Congress for his domestic agenda. With one ill-considered move, FDR squandered his massive 1936 re-election mandate – Democrats held 76 seats in the Senate after that election – he shattered the myth that he was politically invincible and, it seems, Roosevelt forever took off the policy table any effort by any president to “reform” the nation’s highest court.

Roosevelt’s tools in attempting to enlarge the Court were secrecy and subterfuge and each got him in trouble. With the encouragement of his Attorney General, Homer Cummings, FDR hatched a secret scheme to add one additional justice to the Supreme Court for each justice over 70 who refused to retire. He consulted with no one on the idea except his politically tone deaf attorney general and then sprung the idea on unsuspecting Congressional allies. They were first stunned and then outraged.

Roosevelt compounded his “born in secrecy” problem by dissembling about the real reasons behind his proposal. Clearly he wanted to liberalize a court that had come to be dominated by former corporate lawyers and Republican appointees, but he let Cummings peddle the fiction that he was trying to improve the Court’s efficiency. The “nine old men” on the Court had fallen behind in their work, it was alleged. That argument never gained traction and simply wasn’t true.

Had Congress adopted his audacious idea, Roosevelt could have immediately added six new justices to the Supreme Court, as well as a slew of other federal judges. The Supreme Court would have gone from nine members to 15 and, of course, the president would have the chance to appoint justices who held out the prospect of liberalizing the Court that had shot down so many of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives.

[On one particularly Black Monday in May 1935, the Court struck down three important New Deal initiatives, including much of the centerpiece of Roosvelt’s domestic agenda – the National Industrial Recovery Act.]

In a rare rebuff for Roosevelt, the Congress simply wouldn’t buy his court packing. Republicans, of course, rebelled, but so did many Democrats. Montana liberal Burton K. Wheeler, a fierce foe of concentrated power in government or the economy, was chosen to lead the Senate opponents of FDR. Ironically, Wheeler had been among the very first to encourage Roosevelt to seek the presidency having publicly done so in 1930. By 1937 Wheeler had enough of what he saw as Roosevelt’s accumulation of personal power and made common cause with Republicans like Idaho’s William E. Borah and Oregon’s Charles L. McNary to battle the president.

As the battle was fully joined in the summer of 1937, Wheeler collaborated with Justice Louis Brandeis, ironically the greatest liberal on the Court, to obtain a letter from the patrician Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes’ letter, quickly drafted over the weekend prior to Wheeler’s Senate committee testimony, completely demolished FDR”s argument that the Court was behind in its work.

Borah further complicated Roosevelt’s plans when he prevailed upon his neighbor, Justice Willis Van Devanter, one of the most conservative members of the Court, to strategically announce his retirement to coincide with the release of the Hughes letter. The combination was a classic political one-two punch, but Roosevelt still refused to compromise or fold.

The American Bar Association opposed Roosevelt, as did most of the nation’s editorial pages. Still, through the hot summer of 1937, Roosevelt soldiered on with his proposal, driving an ever deeper wedge into the Democratic Party. Roosevelt was offered a compromise. If he backed off, one or two additional members of the Court would quickly retire and he could have his more liberal appointees. He refused. Seeking another route to compromise, some senators suggested the president might get two or three new seats rather than six. He refused.

Even the 10-8 vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee against the president’s bill – the committee was dominated, of course, by Democrats – failed to move the president. Incidentally, Borah wrote much of the committee report; a report that has been characterized as one of the harshest denouncements of a presidential initiative in the history of the Senate.

Ultimately, it took a dramatic Senate tragedy to bring an end to Franklin Roosevelt’s biggest blunder. FDR’s loyal lieutenant, Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, while no fan of the court packing plan, still believed that loyalty to “the boss” demanded that he try to get something passed in the Senate. Robinson worked himself into a lather debating the court bill and managing the president’s expectations and in the stifling mid-July heat in Washington – the days before central air conditioning – the Majority Leader grew red in the face, announced he was done for the day and stormed off the Senate floor.

Senator Royal Copeland of New York, a physician, had warned Robinson that he was working too hard and that no bill was worth killing himself over. Robinson retreated to his apartment close to the Supreme Court building to rest. On the morning of July 14, 1937, his maid found the gruff, but much respected and well-liked Senate leader, dressed in his pajamas and slumped on his bathroom floor. Robinson was dead of heart attack. Nearby he had dropped his copy of the Congressional Record. Robinson had been reading the debate over the court bill.

Joe T’s death stunned the Capitol, in part because it was an open secret that FDR had promised the loyal Robinson the first vacancy on the Court, even though as a conservative southern Democrat Robinson was unlikely to become a liberalizing force on the Court. Senators took to calling Robinson, Mr. Justice, as they anticipated that any day FDR would name Joe to the high court.

Roosevelt hesitated. Had he made that appointment it might well have paved the way for a compromise on the court bill, or at least presented the president with a face saving exit strategy. But Roosevelt took no action and, with Robinson dead, hard feelings toward the president grew even worse in the Senate. Wheeler even went so far as to claim God himself seemed opposed to packing the court.

On the train that carried most of Robinson’s colleagues back from his funeral in Little Rock, Vice President John Nance Garner counted noses for the White House. When ol’ Cactus Jack arrived back in Washington he went directly to see Roosevelt and told him that he was beaten. The Senate when it voted, Garner said, would defeat Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Court. FDR was stunned. He continued until that moment to think that he could work his will on the Congress as he had so many times before. He reluctantly asked Garner to negotiate the best exit possible.

Garner went to Wheeler’s office in what is now the Russell Senate Office Building and told the Montanan that he “could write his own ticket” with regard to the court bill. As legend has it, the two old pols had a drink of bourbon and decided that the bill would be recommitted to the Judiciary Committee, in effect killing the proposal. Seventy senators eventually voted to recommit the court bill and Roosevelt had lost an epic battle over the Supreme Court. The whole contest had lasted for a mean 168 days.

Had FDR been willing to compromise, even a little, he might have modestly enlarged the Supreme Court in 1937 and we can only speculate as to what the long-term impact of that political act might have been. It seems safe to conclude that had a political compromise over the makeup of the Court occurred we would think somewhat differently about the Supreme Court today.

Roosevelt would later argue that he lost a battle over the Court, but eventually won a war and there is truth in that statement. Alabama Sen. Hugo Black was soon appointed to fill Van Devanter’s seat. Black, it was widely noted, had supported the court packing legislation and opposed the vote to recommit in the Senate. Black turned out to be one of the Court’s great liberals and a staunch defender of civil liberties. In time, Roosevelt also appointed Justices like William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter, who helped define American jurisprudence until the time of the Ford Administration.

Perhaps in an even more important way, Roosevelt’s efforts to expand the Supreme Court 75 years ago removed any possibility that any president could realistically hope to change the court simply because he disagreed with its rulings. It’s unthinkable today that a Roosevelt-like idea could be seriously considered. Instead, the fights over the direction and role of the Supreme Court are fought out each and ever time a president nominates a new justice. These confirmation fights, increasingly nasty and partisan, are still no where near as nasty as the 75 year ago fight over whether the Supreme Court would be fundamentally changed.

The great historian William Leuchtenberg has written: “FDR’s [court proposal] generated an intensity of response unmatched by any legislative controversy of this century, except possibly the fight over joining the League of Nations. Southern Democrats feared that an expanded liberal Court would give rights to blacks; progressives saw an assault on the branch responsible for protecting civil liberties; moderates who had always mistrusted Roosevelt now had proof of his treachery.”

It wasn’t as if Roosevelt hadn’t been warned. At one point Wheeler told the president that with many Americans the “Supreme Court is a religion,” and, Wheeler said, it is never smart to get in the middle of a religious fight.

This much seems certain, when the current Supreme Court issues its decision on the health insurance reform law later this summer there will, no matter how the decision goes, both glee and gloom. Still, when the smoke clears, the country, the Congress and the president will accept the verdict of the Court. Some folks, grumbling all the way, will not like the verdict, but just like the controversial decision that ended the 2000 election – Bush v. Gore – we’ll grumble and move on.

We don’t always like what we hear from the pulpit at church, but Burt Wheeler had it right in 1937. The Court may not always be right, but we accept the higher authority nevertheless.

In a way, we can thank Franklin Roosevelt and his furious fight exactly 75 years ago for that now enduring feature of American political life.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, FDR, Hoover, Minnick, Obama, Politics, Polling

Where’s George?

Posted on by christian

The Delicate Dance of a Former President

For 20 of the last 31 years a Republican president has occupied the Oval Office. Two of those presidents – the first and second George Bush – served for a combined 12 years, yet in the current political environment they seem as distant from the partisan hubbub as, well, Republicans of an earlier day wished Herbert Hoover would have been in 1936. More on that in a moment.

George H.W. Bush – Bush 41 – has offered an “unofficial” endorsement, whatever that means, to Mitt Romney, but Bush 43 is virtually invisible in Republican politics or public life. While Romney and Newt Gingrich fight to inherit the mantle of Ronald Reagan, no candidate makes the trek to the Texas ranch to seek George W.’s advice or endorsement. It’s almost as though his presidency, at least for GOP candidates, has been erased from the blackboard of the current campaign. It will be interesting to see if Bush the Younger has any role at this summer’s GOP convention.

Meanwhile, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has refused to endorse a candidate in today’s Florida primary and that decision has been the subject of much tea leaf reading. By most accounts a few words from the third Bush would have been very helpful to any candidate, but beyond jabbing the candidates for their anti-immigration rhetoric, the next Bush in line has stayed above the fray.

Writing for the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes suggests that Jeb Bush may be playing his cards so close because he can foresee a role for himself as a compromise and unifying GOP candidate in the unlikely event the Republican nominating process becomes deadlocked. Or, Barnes says, Bush could be a unifying choice as vice president on a Romney or Gingrich ticket. I say don’t count on it.

With no Kennedy now in significant public office, the Bush family is the closest thing we have to a dynasty in American politics. Still the elder Bush, now 87, is clearly in declining health and George W. is so politically radioactive after two controversial terms that no current candidate wants to be close to him. Many Republicans long for a Jeb Bush candidacy, but he demurs. He recently provided a glimpse into his thinking when he told an interviewer that 2012, given his age and the state of the country, was probably his year, but for whatever reason he has taken a pass, which takes us back to W.

If many Democrats see Bush 43 as the modern day equivalent of the Great Depression scarred Herbert Hoover, he is certainly behaving much differently than the discredited Hoover did four years after his defeat at the hands of Franklin Roosevelt.

Perhaps the difference can be explained by the fact that Hoover still hungered for another term in the White House. George W. had his eight years. In any event, the two men – tremendously unpopular when they left the White House – played their post-presidential years very differently.

In February 1936, just as FDR’s re-election campaign was beginning to take shape, Hoover gave a Lincoln Day speech in Portland, Oregon. By many accounts the former president, who had lost in a landslide to Roosevelt in 1932, saw himself as the best possible candidate for the Republicans in 1936. Hoover used the occasion of his Portland speech to rip into Roosevelt’s program and he sounded like a man eager for a rematch.

“The issue [facing the nation in 1936],” Hoover said, “is the attempt to fasten upon the American people some sort of a system of personal government for a government of laws; a system of centralization under a political bureaucracy; a system of debt; a system of inflation; a system which would stifle the freedom and liberty of men.  And it can be examined in the cold light of three years’ experience.”

Hoover was referring, of course, to the first three years of FDR’s term during which the Great Depression continued to create extremely high unemployment, a high rate of home and farm foreclosures and a general lack of confidence in the economy. At the same time, Roosevelt was assembling an unprecedented amount of personal power in the Executive Branch, or at least Republicans said he was.

In his Oregon speech 76 years ago, Hoover used some language that might have been ripped from today’s headlines. Critiquing FDR’s State of the Union speech, Hoover lambasted FDR’s references to “dishonest speculators” and “entrenched greed.” He said Roosevelt was issuing a call to “class war” and, of course, he criticized Roosevelt for deficit spending.

Despite his interest and availability, Hoover was never again considered a serious presidential contender after losing so badly in 1932. Tainted by the stock market crash of 1929 and what has widely be seen, then as now, as his less than effective response to the economic crisis of the early 1930’s, Hoover nevertheless continued to speak out on public issues. He was invited to the 1936 GOP convention and he gave the New Deal and FDR hell in a speech that featured language strikingly similar to what we hear from GOP candidates today.

Hoover lamented that the “New Deal is a definite attempt to replace the American system of freedom with some sort of European planned existence.” Sound familiar? Romney has repeated said that Barack Obama wants to create “a European style welfare state.”

“Billions have been spent to prime the economic pump,” Hoover said to the 1936 GOP convention.  “It did employ a horde of paid officials upon the pump handle.  We have seen the frantic attempts to find new taxes on the rich…Freedom to work for himself is changed into a slavery of work for the follies of government.”

Two things are worth noting about Hoover’s aggressive long ago critique of the man who beat him. The former president certainly didn’t help Republicans in 1936 and many Republicans simply wished the former president would have just pulled a George W. and disappeared.

Secondly there are really very few new attack lines in American politics. Republicans have long been accusing Democrats of “socialism” and Democrats have forever labeled the GOP the party of Wall Street.

In 1936, Roosevelt used tough language and a great deal of humor to carefully weave the Hoover legacy, if not the former president’s name, into his stump speeches. He was most effective with his mocking references to what the Republicans and their candidate Kansas Gov. Alfred Landon would do to his New Deal.

Obama has been regularly criticized for invoking Bush’s record and as of last fall he had stopped making references to “Bush’s failed economic policies” or “Bush style foreign policy.”

If history is any guide to what to expect in politics, and it often is with Hoover’s 1936 speeches being a good example, then expect the references to George W. to creep back into Democratic campaign rhetoric as we get closer to November. If Obama is as skillful as the Democratic president all Democrats love to invoke – Franklin Roosevelt – he’ll use a mixture of tough talk and dismissive humor to connect the eventual Republican nominee to the silent, but hardly forgotten George W. Bush.

 

2012 Election, Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Election of 1944, FDR, Lincoln, Minnick, Paul, Pete Seeger, Politics, Romney

Dumping the Veep

Posted on by christian

Pulling a Garner or a Hannibal Hamlin

John Nance Garner is mostly forgotten now days. If he’s remembered for anything it was for his alleged pity comment that the “vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” There is some debate around whether he actually said that or whether spit was what he was really talking about.

In any event, Garner – Cactus Jack – was Speaker of the House, a two-term vice president, a serious presidential candidate in 1932 and one of the few incumbent vice presidents in American history to be dumped from the ticket. Garner didn’t think much of his boss Franklin Roosevelt running for an unprecedented third term in 1940 and would have run himself had FDR not run. That challenge to FDR’s leadership coupled with Garner’s generally conservative political outlook, was enough to convince the supremely confident Roosevelt to send Jack back to Uvalde, Texas in 1941.

I’m reminded of this little history lesson by virtue of the political story that won’t go away – should Barack Obama dump Joe Biden from the 2012 Democratic ticket and replace the somewhat gaffe prone Veep with, say, Hillary Clinton?

Dumping a running mate is rare, but FDR – one of the greatest presidents by most measure – actually did it twice. Abraham Lincoln did it too in 1864 when he dumped a down east Republican from Maine with the wonderful name of Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket and replaced him with a Tennessee “war” Democratic by name of Andrew Johnson. The rest is history as they say.

Roosevelt second dumping took place in 1944 when the man he had handpicked to be vice president four years earlier, Henry Wallace of Iowa, was demoted and a not very well regarded Missouri Senator name of Harry Truman replaced him. On such decisions history turns.

In each case, the incumbent president made the decision to change vice presidents in order to strengthen the ticket. FDR wanted to run with a known liberal in 1940 and by 1944 Wallace had become a liability to the Democratic ticket so the safe Truman was ushered in. In 1864, facing a serious challenge from a “peace” Democrat Gen. George McClellan, and with the Civil War not going all that well, Lincoln aimed to create a national unity ticket by inviting a loyal Democrat from a southern state to balance the ticket. Once could argue that in each case the reshuffling strengthened the ticket and the president who made what must be a tough call was re-elected.

(Gerald Ford dumped Nelson Rockefeller in 1976 and replaced him with Bob Dole, but the circumstances were much different than the FDR or Lincoln scenarios. Neither Republican was elected for starters.)

So, will – or should – Obama shuffle the ticket this year? New York Times columnist Bill Keller says he should since the move would do “more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do.”

Columnist Jonathan Alter wrote last October that “if it’s clear that Democrats need to do something dramatic to avoid losing the White House, the Switcheroo will happen” simply because everyone involved will bury their pride to keep the GOP from taking over all three branches of the federal government in the next election.

Most of the speculation about “the Switheroo” has Biden getting a better consolation prize, the State Department, than Garner, Wallace or Hamlin did. Garner left public life in 1941, Wallace took the less than glamorous job of Secretary of Commerce and later ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, and Lincoln briefly considered, and didn’t follow through, on the notion of making Hamlin Secretary of the Treasury. Hamlin eventually returned to Washington for two terms in the U.S. Senate before retiring for good in 1880.

For her part Clinton – and her husband – seems to disavow any interest in making the big switch, even while folks like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich make the case for it.

So what will President Obama do? Hold tight with Biden? Make a big splash with a switch? Obama, apparently not much of a hands on manager who clearly doesn’t like drama, will want to practice the first rule of vice presidents – do no harm. If he thinks he can win with Biden he’ll stick with him.

If, on the other hand, come July Republican nominee Mitt Romney has the lead in the polls and momentum, Obama might go for the big gesture. He is a student of history and surely knows that dumping a vice president, if done with a certain calmness and style, actually helped the two presidents he most admires – FDR and Lincoln. Putting Hillary on the ticket would, of course, generate as much buzz as John McCain sparked when he plucked Sarah Palin out of Alaskan obscurity. But Obama won’t have to worry about Clinton answering Katie Couric’s question about what newspapers she reads.

Hillary just might be a game changer.

 

Air Travel, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Books, FDR, Obama, Politics

Confidence Men

Posted on by christian

No Passion for Anonymity Here

So many things we associate with the modern American presidency, including its imperial nature, where created by Franklin D. Roosevelt nearly 80 years ago. Roosevelt perfected the presidential news conference, used the mass media skillfully and repeatedly, polished the symbols of the office to a new sheen and he invented the modern White House staff and Cabinet machinery.

After reading Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men over the holidays, a sharply critical assessment of Barack Obama’s first two years in office often fueled by the mistakes of his dysfunctional economic team, I’m betting that the president has quietly cursed FDR for that last invention – the White House staff and Cabinet operation.

The overarching theme of Suskind’s book – a president who can’t or won’t control his own staff is going to have a tough time running the country – is, at its core, an indictment of the modern way of politics in our nation’s capitol. Big egos, retained minds, power for power’s sake and a supreme level of confidence in one’s own view of the world are, in Suskind’s telling, at the heart of the original Obama economic team and its response to the Great Recession.

The two principle (and bad) actors in Suskind’s tale are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Clinton Treasury official Lawrence Summers. Now-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was then White House chief of staff, plays a less central role, but still comes off like the opinionated, profane bully that everyone – admirer and not – seems to agree he is. For whatever reasons those unsvaory traits endeared him to the cool, no drama president.

Suskind’s book has had its detractors, including Geithner and the White House press office. Reviewing the 515 page tome in the New York Times, columnist Joe Nocera, a guy who almost always writes with insight and balance about the economy and politics, called the book “bloated” and “reeking of self-importance.” I agree. But Nocera also says the book “is an important addition to the growing library of books about this president. It tells you things — lots of things — that you didn’t know before. Very few of those things reflect well on Obama and his initial team.” I also agree.

Suskind’s book came out last fall at almost the exact time that Joe McGinniss’s much maligned hit piece on Sarah Palin arrived in book stores. Five months later no one is talking about The Rogue, but Confidence Men has lasted, perhaps because the subject is so much more important.

The history of the modern presidency dating back to FDR provides a guide to some of Obama’s missteps. He made two fundamental mistakes in staffing his White House; mistakes of inexperience committed by a rookie perhaps. First, he failed to appreciate that past behavior almost always forecasts future behavior. Summers, a man who had accumulated enemies during his tenure in the Clinton Administration, went from there to Harvard to serve as president and bombed. Summers’ comments about and inability to work with women cost him his job in the Ivy League and he brought, if you believe Suskind, all that baggage to the West Wing of the White House. A sub-theme in Suskind’s book is that the White House is a “boys” domain where Summers and others systematically kept senior women advisers, including current Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, out of the loop as they struggled to right the economy. 

As for Geithner, it’s difficult to think of a more inappropriate choice to help steer the economy out of a housing-inspired collapse fueled by Wall Street greed than the guy who presided over the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the meltdown. There is a chilling account in Suskind’s book of Geithner socially and comfortably rubbing shoulders with his Wall Street friends, while being almost completely uncomfortable with reporters, members of Congress and most of his administration colleagues. You can’t help but wonder what Obama was thinking with this appointment, particularly since he had the full support of people like the tough and independent former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who would have made a perfect Treasury Secretary in Obama’s early days.

Instead Obama went for big egos, big resumes and big Wall Street connections and Summers and Geithner brought big problems with them.

The second lesson of Obama’s initial years is the importance of discipline and loyalty and by that I don’t mean the blind loyalty of an H.R. Haldeman, but rather the kind of loyalty that requires you, as a White House staffer or Cabinet member, to carry out the boss’s orders or leave. By Suskind’s account, the Obama White House was endlessly “re-litigating” decisions that should have been made and implemented, apparently because guys like Summers and Geithner were convinced they knew more than the president. In short: no discipline, little loyalty.

One of the hotly disputed stories in Confidence Men is Suskind’s detailed reporting on Geithner’s failure to carry out Obama’s ordersto implement an orderly take down of Citibank. Geithner”slow walked” the Treasury process for weeks, according to Suskind, to avoid carrying out a decision that his boss had made. Suskind properly points out that such behavior is a firing offense everywhere but Washington, D.C.

Imagine how Obama’s fortunes might have changed had he called in his Treasury Secretary and told him of his disappointment in Geithner’s failure to carry out a direct order and that the price for that insubordination would be public humiliation and dismissal. A president with steel in his spine – Harry Truman say – would have called a news conference, laid out the story and said as of this moment we have a new acting Treasury Secretary. A public firing is a thing of the past in national politics. It shouldn’t be. In the hands of a young, inexperienced president it was a valuable tool that Obama apparently chose not to wield.

Roosevelt, of course, assembled a White House staff and Cabinet that was far from harmonious. Harold Ickes, the imperious Interior Secretary, warred openly with Henry Wallace the brainy and unconventional Agriculture Secretary. Both of them fought with FDR’s trusted insider Harry Hopkins, but none of these guys ever overshadowed the president. Roosevelt saw too that. Insubordination was not a subtext of Roosevelt’s presidency.

For his White House aides, Roosevelt sought, as it has been famously said, men with “a passion for anonymity.” They were there to serve the president – and the country. The young president seems to have selected men, at least on his economic team, with their own agendas and no passion for serving in his shadow. Obama has now re-shuffled his White House staff to get ready for the re-election battle and a hoped for second term. We’ll see if he’s learned any management lessons from his ragged first term.

Again a Roosevelt comparison is apt. Roosevelt clearly learned on the job in the 1930’s. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, FDR shuffled and re-shuffled his Cabinet and personal staff. Some, like Ickes became indispensable and stayed for the duration, but others like Gen. Hugh Johnson, who controversially headed the National Recovery Administration, and Joe Kennedy, the first SEC chief and Ambassador to Great Britain, were sent packing when their judgment or usefulness came to question. Twice, in 1940 and again in 1944, Roosevelt dumped incumbent vice presidents from the ticket he headed.

FDR managed and led his staff and Cabinet even as he remade the modern presidency. Every president since – including the inexperienced Obama – could learn from his approach that insisted on discipline, loyalty and a firm understanding of just who was in charge.

 

Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Election of 1944, FDR, Lincoln, Otter, Paul, Politics, World War II

Historic Politics

Posted on by christian

A Very Old, Very Modern Campaign

Thomas E. Dewey, the one-time mob busting New York City prosecutor and later governor of New York, made three different runs at the White House, twice winning the Republican nomination. He never won the biggest election and the question of why is pertinent to our political life now, long, long after Dewey is mostly forgotten.

On a handful of occasions in American history – 1864 during the decisive year of the Civil War being one of the earliest and 2004 during the tough early days of the Iraq war begin the latest – the country has chosen a president during wartime.

I’ve long argued that Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864 was the most important presidential election in our history. Had Lincoln lost that election to Gen. George McClellan it is altogether possible that the winner would have sought a negotiated end to the War of Rebellion, while maintaining the status quo regarding slavery. Lincoln won, thanks in part of Sherman’s timely victory at Atlanta, and refused to consider anything other than the complete capitulation of the rebellious states. America history was set on a course as a result.

In 1944, Tom Dewey won the Republican nomination for president and with it the chance to deny Franklin D. Roosevelt a fourth term. That election occurred at a decisive moment during World War II. As an insightful new book on that election – FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944 by David M. Jordan – makes clear, Dewey failed to make a compelling case against either Roosevelt’s handling of domestic or war issues and instead ran a campaign, one of the first, that attempted to exploit the threat of Communism influencing the federal government.

As Jordan notes, the “campaign of running against the Communists” was “a preview of what would become a standard of Republican campaigns in the years ahead, but in 1944 it did not play all that well.” In 1944, after all, Soviet Russia was a U.S. ally and the Red Army was bleeding the Nazi Wehrmacht white on the Eastern Front.

Jordan’s book, filled with insight into how both FDR and Dewey approached the election and particularly how FDR rather unceremoniously dumped Vice President Henry Wallace from the Democratic ticket in favor of Harry Truman, also puts the lie to the old notion that debates over foreign policy once stopped at the water’s edge. Dewey bitterly criticized FDR’s handling of the war, in particular suggesting that the administration was short changing the war effort in the Pacific to the detriment of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who willingly engaged in the sort of partisan politics that we would find completely inappropriate from a senior military commander today.

Republicans also eagerly circulated rumors, more accurate than not, regarding FDR’s health, but the GOP candidate and campaign were no match for the great campaigner – Franklin Roosevelt. By Jordan’s account, with which many historians agree, Roosevelt turned the entire 1944 campaign with one memorable speech delivered to the Teamsters Union on September 23. Today’s it’s remembered as “the Fala speech,” because of FDR’s humorous use of a story about his little Scotty dog – Fala.

Roosevelt opened that Teamster speech brilliantly: “WELL, here we are together again – after four years – and what years they have been! You know, I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to annoy some people. In fact, in the mathematical field there are millions of Americans who are more than eleven years older than when we started in to clear up the mess that was dumped in our laps in 1933.”

Dewey couldn’t keep up with such rhetoric in large part because FDR’s taunt rang so hard and true and because Dewey couldn’t begin to match Roosevelt’s personality as a candidate. Dewey suffered from a frequently deadly political malady. He was stiff and boring. Think John Kerry or today’s GOP contender Mitt Romney. Dewey also had a Romney-like tendency to quote FDR completely out of context, while modifying his own position on issues like the scope of a post-war United Nations.

At the end of the 1944 campaign, and remember that the Allied invasion of Normandy occurred just before Dewey was nominated in Chicago, American voters were unwilling to “swap horses in the middle of the stream.” FDR won his closest election polling 3.5 million more votes than Dewey. The contest was no contest in the Electoral College. Roosevelt won a 36 state landslide, including Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Utah. The war election of 1944 was also the last election where a Democrat won every state in the solid south.

There are many what ifs associated with 1944. What if the Democrats had not dumped Wallace from the ticket? The very liberal Iowan was very popular with the organized labor constituency of the Democratic Party and deeply resented his dumping. Some speculate Wallace would have been more accommodating of the Soviet Union than Truman turned out to be and that he would never have authorized the use of the atomic bomb on Japan.

And what if Dewey had won? Would the post-war world have been different? Would the humorless new president, a man unknown to Churchill and Stalin have gone to Yalta and done better – or worse – than Roosevelt who was clearly in seriously failing health?

Dewey lived to fight and lose the White House a second time. Today Dewey, who died in 1971, is best remembered as “the little man on the wedding cake,” a wonderfully snarky put down that is attributed to a half dozen wits of the 1940’s, and as the hapless candidate Truman beat in 1948.

Thomas E. Dewey, like so many who have run and lost the White House,was a fascinating, complicated man. He may have been just fine in the White House. Who knows. By the verdict of history Dewey was a two time loser, but also a victim of a great and almost always under appreciated factor of politics – timing. He ran an off key campaign against a brilliant campaigner in the war year of 1944 and, while Truman was stumping the country in a fighting mood four years later, Dewey tried to sit on a lead and run out the clock.

Where I advising any candidate today, I’d tell them to study both those elections. They each contain some enduring politic truths.

 

2014 Election, 2016 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Borah, Campaign Finance, FDR, Health Care, Obama, Supreme Court

2012 Wildcard

Posted on by christian

Elections and the Court

When the Obama Justice Department announced last week that it had asked the United States Supreme Court for an expedited review of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – Obamacare, health care reform, etc. – the government’s lawyers confidentially predicted that the current court would uphold the law. In making that claim the Justice Department cited several precedents in our history where the Supreme Court has reviewed and upheld once controversial laws that have now become established features of American life.

“Throughout history,” the Department said in a statement, “there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation, such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed. We believe the challenges to the Affordable Care Act — like the one in the 11th Circuit — will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.”

The Justice Department release represents more than a little wishful thinking and an even larger dose of selective historical memory. At least once before, in a case that has some striking parallels to what is unfolding with the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court considered and struck down major provisions of a Democratic administration’s domestic agenda. It happened in 1935 and the political fallout, the subsequent election campaign and the president’s policy response produced the greatest Constitutional confrontations since the Civil War.

Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law on June 16, 1933. The law created, among other things, the National Recovery Administration, symbolized by the “blue eagle” that appeared on signs in store windows, in propaganda-like newsreels and in vast demonstrations staged in major U.S. cities.

The NIRA granted to the president vast powers – unprecedented really – to promulgate industrial codes of fair competition. The effect was to form industrial cartels that were not suppose to engage in price fixing, but came very close to doing just that, as well as turning the capitalist concept of competition on its head.

The code provision had been controversial, particularly in the Senate, where some legislators who abhorred “monopoly” – senators like Borah of Idaho and Wheeler of Montana – were concerned the law essentially did violence to the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law on the book since 1890.

The NIRA also established rights to collective bargaining, regulated working conditions and some wages and, in a separate section, created the Public Works Administration (PWA), the major infrastructure investment vehicle of the New Deal.

There were many problems administering the complex NIRA and the inevitable legal challenges began almost immediately. Eventually on May 27, 1935, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled major parts of the NIRA unconstitutional. Roosevelt was stunned and outraged, even though FDR’s Justice Department, like Barack Obama’s Justice Department with the health care legislation, had tried to pick the case and the timing to take the issue to the nation’s highest court.

Writing for a united Court, that like today’s Court frequently found itself sharply divided between conservatives and liberals, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, zeroed in on Constitutional problems with two features of the law that FDR considered the centerpiece of the domestic agenda he hoped would lift the economy out of the Great Depression. Like the arguments around the Affordable Care Act, the issue in 1935 was the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

As Hughes wrote, “If the commerce clause were construed to reach all enterprises and transactions which could be said to have an indirect effect upon interstate commerce, the federal authority would embrace practically all the activities of the people, and the authority of the State over its domestic concerns would exist only by sufferance of the Federal Government.” Sounds a lot like the arguments over the health care bill’s individual mandate provision.

The ruling in the Schechter Poultry Corporation case that brought down the NIRA is today generally considered a very narrow 1930’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause and FDR certainly thought so. He famously complained to a room full of reporters gathered in his office that the Supreme Court had adopted a “horse and buggy” view of the nation’s economy and particularly of interstate commerce. The Commerce Clause is at the heart of the ACA debate because critics charge a central federal government has no business mandating that individuals must purchase health insurance. We’ll see. 

It would be unfair to stretch the parallels between 1935 and 2011 too far and it is possible the Supreme Court my opt for an artful dodge to avoid deciding the health care case before next year’s election. It is also true that we live in vastly different times, although the politics around the Great Depression feel a good deal like the politics around the Great Recession.

Since 1935, the Court has vastly expanded our understanding of what constitutes interstate commerce and the ruling Roosevelt disliked so much came more than a year before he sought re-election to a second term. Barack Obama, by contrast, may get his ruling on the Affordable Care Act smack dab in the middle of his re-election effort and, while the NIRA was controversial it had little of the polarizing political impact of health care.

After his initial “horse and buggy” zinger had been delivered, Roosevelt generally avoided mentioning the Court, while he privately seethed about the “nine old men” who had dismantled his handiwork in the midst of a national economic crisis. Once safety re-elected in 1936 Roosevelt came down on the Court with a ton of bricks, serving up his ill-fated plan to “pack the court” by adding up to six new justices who would presumably liberalize a reactionary court. The Congress refused to go along with such an overreach and Roosevelt suffered a massive defeat right on the heels of winning a second term in a landslide.

One way or the other, Obama looks to get his chance to be pleased or disappointed by the Supreme Court in the middle of a high stakes campaign season. Most Court analysts say they count four votes in favor of upholding the controversial law and four against. Obama may think about issuing a quick invitation for a golf game to Justice Anthony Kennedy. By all accounts he’ll decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act.

There is one more historical footnote related to the 1935 case that, if he’s thought about it, might well give former law professor Obama some political heartburn. In 1935 the most liberal member of the Supreme Court was the venerated Justice Louis Brandeis, who history records as one of the all-time great justices. Roosevelt was stunned when the man he called “Isaiah” ruled against him.

Robing up before the Court delivered its decision on the NIRA, Justice Brandeis told Roosevelt aide Tommy Corcoran, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.”

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Britain, Christie, Economy, FDR, Lincoln, Minnick, Obama, Politics, Reagan

Trying Times

Posted on by christian

Leadership? Not So Much

At pivotal moments in American history it has often been the case that the right leader somehow emerged from the chaos of the moment and the nation was able to pass through trying times and set course for a better future.

Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan lacked the vision and courage to head off the steady drift in the direction of sectional strife in the 1850’s and, while there is a good argument to be made that Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 was the tipping point toward civil war, there is hardly any disputing that Lincoln brought to the presidency the powers of leadership that ultimately saved the country.

Likewise Franklin D. Roosevelt proved to be the right leader at the worse time in the 20th Century. FDR restored confidence and, I’m convinced, reformed American capitalism enough to save it. He was a leader made for his times.

There are a handful of other examples in our history. Andrew Jackson, with all his flaws, may qualify for a leadership award. More recently Ronald Reagan, invoked by every current GOP candidate for president as the leadership gold standard, had some of the FDR in him. He was a confidence builder when the nation needed a big dose. Washington stands, of course, in a special class of right leader at a trying time.

It’s hard to escape the reality that the nation is at another such crossroads and our politics and politicians hardly seem up to the task. The litany of problems is almost too big to fathom: stagnant economy, double-dip recession looming, crippling unemployment, increasing poverty and income gap, a national and international debt crisis, declining quality of public education, the need for entitlement reform, the European fiscal crisis, the uncertainty and unpredictability of the Arab Spring, climate change, terrorism, even the Red Sox have melted down.

The thinking man’s conservative, David Brooks, identified the heart of the problem in his New York Times column yesterday: “the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic, emergent ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.”

The Democrats are all about tax increases on the most wealthy and increased spending to stimulate consumer demand. The Republicans can’t shake the gospel of tax cuts, controlling the deficit and whacking at regulation. What both sides miss is that we need to do all of that and more.

It may well be recorded at the supreme moment of missed opportunity in the Obama Administration was the president’s failure to grasp and champion the most important political and policy work to come out of Washington in a long, long time – the recommendations of Simpson-Bowles Commission. In the end, the discarding of the work of the former Wyoming Senator, Alan Simpson, and the Clinton-era White House Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles, will be recorded as a failure of leadership. The bi-partisan commission called for doing it all – tax and entitlement reform, spending cuts, deficit reduction. The Commission prescribed exactly what every thinking American knows in their partisan heart must be done. Obama punted and Congressional Republicans did as well.

And meanwhile the country is hungry – desperate even – for real leadership. Many Republicans salivate over the prospect that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will turn his consistent “no” into an announcement that he’ll enter the GOP battle and it’s easy to see why. Christie delivered an inspirational speech last night at Republican hallowed ground, the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. His indictment of Washington leadership will surely resonate with Democrats and Republicans who long for leadership from someone.

“In Washington,” Christie said, “we have watched as we drift from conflict to conflict, with little or no resolution.

“We watch a president who once talked about the courage of his convictions, but still has yet to find the courage to lead.

“We watch a Congress at war with itself because they are unwilling to leave campaign style politics at the Capitol’s door.  The result is a debt ceiling limitation debate that made our democracy appear as if we could no longer effectively govern ourselves.”

Christie specifically jabbed President Obama for failing to embrace the Simpson-Bowles work noting pointedly that it was “a report the president asked for himself.”

I’m not at all convinced Chris Christie is the Lincoln or FDR we need, but I am convinced that genuinely honest talk about the enormous problems facing the country, with an unstinting focus on big solutions to big problems rather than what David Brooks calls “proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand,” would be the beginning of the leadership the country needs and hungers for.

The electorate is deeply unsettled. The evidence floats about everywhere you look. A new CNN survey says only 15% of Americans have confidence in their government; an all-time low. The Coca-Cola chief says China is a better business bet than the USA. There is an unmistakable sense that American power and influence is in decline.

Is anyone up to the task? Can anyone see beyond the next election? I’m betting if someone could look that far ahead – see ahead to real leadership – it would be the best possible strategy to win.

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Christie, Economy, FDR, Obama, Politics

Confidence

Posted on by christian

When Its Lost Can it be Found Again?

I’ve had a good deal of fun over the last few weeks teaching a college-level political science course at Boise State University.

The course is built around the politics and policy of the New Deal period in the 1930’s and we focus a good deal on the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt (and others) as well as the lasting impact of those challenging and dramatic days on life here in the American West.

For a young adult in college today the 1930’s might as well be the 1730’s. It is ancient history, but considering the economic and political challenges we face today, I continue to be struck by the parallels between the political and policy discussion that took place in the 1930’s and the on-going debate we’re having in the country right now.

To prepare for a recent class, I went back and read and then listened to the very first Fireside Chat Franklin Roosevelt delivered in March of 1933. FDR, inaugurated eight days earlier, had closed the nation’s banks and gotten Congress to pass emergency banking legislation to facilitate the orderly re-opening of the nation’s financial institutions. He talked to the nation by radio on Sunday evening, March 12. The historic speech was a model of clarity, description and, most importantly, confidence building. If you have never read or heard the speech, it is worth your time. The brief talk stands the test of time as an example of the power and importance of effective political rhetoric.

Roosevelt patiently explained during his talk how banks work, why some banks had failed and why some Americans had made a run on banks to convert their deposits to currency or gold. He then explained what he had done and why and that Congress had supported his bold efforts to stabilize the banking system. He then explained how banks would begin to re-open.

Here is one of the more memorable sections of the speech:

“I hope you can see, my friends, from this essential recital of what your Government is doing that there is nothing complex, nothing radical in the process.

“We have had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds. They had used money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was, of course, not true of the vast majority of our banks, but it was true in enough of them to shock the people of the United States, for a time, into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. And so it became the Government’s job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible. And that job is being performed.”

I thought of Roosevelt’s simple, elegant words as I listened to Barack Obama speak to Congress this week. In a fundamentally important way, Obama has the same challenge FDR faced during that banking crisis in 1933. He needs to begin to restore confidence – in himself, the government and in the country’s ability to move ahead.

It’s not at all clear he made much headway.

Obama did use his speech to educate, the approach FDR mastered. At one point, for example, he said in speaking of the reality of cutting spending:

“So here’s the truth.  Around two-thirds of our budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security.  Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans’ benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20%.  What’s left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That’s 12 percent for all of our other national priorities like education and clean energy; medical research and transportation; food safety and keeping our air and water clean.”

A good approach, I think, but maybe too late to be effective. I kept feeling that the President should have given this speech two years ago, or at the beginning of the mostly senseless recent debate over the debt ceiling. The words Obama spoke seem more directed at the Congress than at the American public and that comes as most Republicans, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank points out, no longer take Obama seriously. As for the public, the polls say they are losing or have lost confidence.

Credibility, confidence and competence are the Big Three of politics. Once the notion settles with voters that a politician lacks one or more of the Big Three, it’s pretty close to impossible for that person to get back in command. Just ask Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush during his last two years.

The brilliance of Franklin Roosevelt was contained in his ability to connect and explain and the abiding sense that he had confidence so the country could have confidence, too. He never lost the confidence of a sizable majority of the American people, so never had to try to regain it. Maybe that is the true measure of greatness in politics.