Politics

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

Great Political Reads

Posted on by christian

political booksA Top Ten List

Legislatures are in session, the president is poised to deliver the State of the Union and we just marked the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inaugural. All politics all the time.

So…writing recently about Richard Ben Cramer’s political classic What It Takes got me thinking about some of my favorite political reads. Here, in no particular order, is a Top Ten List of Political Reads – or a Top Eleven counting Cramer’s tome, which has to be on any list of mine. Here goes.

1. Truman by David McCullough. Certainly among the greatest political biographies, McCullough won the Pulitzer for his great writing and research and this booked helped rehabilitate the reputation of the Man from Missouri.

2. They Also Ran by Irving Stone. This is the fascinating story of the men who ran for president and lost. In chapter length profiles, Stone groups these “losers” into categories like “Generals Die in the Army” and “Wall Street Lawyers.” This classic was published in 1943, so it ends with the story of that “loser” Wendell Willkie who, with the full benefit of hindsight, seems to have been a remarkable man. In fact, Stone makes a compelling case that many of those who ran for the White House and lost were every bit as able – and often better – than those who won.

3. Shooting Star by Tom Wicker. There are many, many good books about controversial Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but if you read just one you will find none better than Wicker’s little volume. The great one-time New York Times writer establishes McCarthy in his times with all his well-documented excesses, but also offers a nuanced view – too nuanced for some critics – of McCarthy’s troubled personality. This is a critical book, but also fair and full of color sustained by the perspective of a political reporter who knows politics and politicians.

4. Huey Long by T. Harry Williams. Another biography, this one exhaustive, of another demagogue. Long was a brilliant Louisiana communicator/politician who rose from humble beginnings to command a virtual state dictatorship. Williams’ book is highly readable and, some would argue, more sympathetic to the Kingfish than it should be, but it is also a classic work of political history. By 1935, Long had become a national figure – his radio speeches were powerful, funny and frightening. He also became a threat from the left to Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election. Long’s life ended in September 1935 in a hail of gunfire in the hallway of the capitol building he had built in Baton Rouge, but the Long dynasty survived. The Long family produced another governor, a congressman and Huey’s senator son Russell who, like his papa, was one of the great political figures in the history of the United States Senate.

5. Advice and Consent by Allen Drury. Drury was a Congressional correspondent when he wrote his classic 1959 novel about a bitter Senate confirmation battle. The book has lasting appeal as a look inside the exclusive club, complete with deals, double crosses, sex, scandal and statesmanship.

6. Senator Mansfield by Don Oberdorfer. Montana’s Mike Mansfield was a great Senator and perhaps, with apologies to Lyndon Johnson, the most constructive Senate Majority Leader in history. In former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer’s masterful biography, Mansfield emerges as a great thinker and a profoundly decent man; the model of a modern senator.

7. The 103rd Ballot by Robert K. Murray. It is hard to believe these days, with our national political conventions little more than carefully choreographed TV commercials, that years ago the conventions were great political theatre where presidential candidacies were both born and buried. In 1924, Democrats took an unbelievable 103 ballots to nominate a compromise candidate John W. Davis who, not surprisingly, took the horribly divided party to disastrous defeat. That convention – one observer noted that Democrats had taken a week to commit political suicide – is detailed in Murray’s colorful history, complete with the KKK, prohibition, religion and, did I mention, large doses of bare knuckle politics.

8. Five Days in Philadelphia by Charles Peters. There have been, I think, two absolutely pivotal presidential elections in American history: 1864 when Lincoln was re-elected and thereby able to prosecute the Civil War to its ultimate end and 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term and a chance to lead the country away from isolationism. Peters’ great little book centers on the GOP nominating process in 1940 and the convention in Philadelphia that nominated Wendell Willkie. Willkie was the last true “dark horse” to win a presidential nomination.

9. Mick – The Real Michael Collins by Peter Hart. I’m both fascinated and repelled by the complex and frequently awful history of modern Irish politics. Any effort to understand the complex tale of modern Ireland must include the story of the great Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. Collins was both general and politician, but mostly brilliant political strategist and manager. He was also clever, ambitious, brave and brutal. He lost his life during the Irish Civil War in 1922. Collins had a pivotal role in the negotiations with the British – the British delegation included Winston Churchill – that resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty helped secure Irish independence, but was so unpopular with some that it also precipitated the civl war. As a practical, pragmatic peacemaker, Collins defended the treaty and knew that in doing so he might well have written his death warrant. Nearly 90 years after his death, Collins’ grave in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery is still every day festooned with fresh flowers.

10. Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro. Caro’s monumental, multi-volume biography of LBJ is notable for the vast reach of his research, but also for his unrelenting (and at times unfair) critique of Johnson’s remarkable career. Still, the third volume on Johnson’s years as Senate Majority Leader, is as good a portrait of the Senate as any every crafted. The publication of the final volume of Caro’s nearly life-long work on Johnson will be a major milestone, but who knows when he’ll be finished with it. Caro took 12 years to write Master of the Senate. It is a huge book and hugely important.

There you have it – a Top Ten list for a political junkie.

Baseball, Giffords, John V. Evans, Politics

Tragedy in Tucson

Posted on by christian

giffordsPolitics, Guns and America

President Obama spoke for most Americans yesterday, as presidents do when tragedy strikes and something truly senseless happens, when he said we “would get to the bottom” of the horrific events on a sunny Saturday morning outside a Safeway store in Tucson.

Get to the bottom indeed.

We all tend to measure the impact of big events by the closeness of personal connection. For me, this one is close and truly does, as Tucson resident and former Bush Administration Surgeon General Richard Carmona said, make your heart bleed.

I spend a good deal of time in Tucson. Our place is less than two miles from where the mayhem that took six lives, including a respected federal judge and a nine year old girl, took place. I’ve been in that Safeway store a hundred times, often on a sunny Saturday morning, to get my daily newspaper fix.

I’ve also followed from a distance the promising political rise of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who now fights for her life not to mention a chance for a further political career. Before going to Congress, Giffords represented parts of Tucson in the state legislature and struck me – regardless of your partisan tint – as the kind of bright, well-spoken, committed young person we want and desperately need in our politics.

While it is much too early to come to judgments about the motive – if any – of the apparently badly troubled young man who is in custody and accused, perhaps with unidentified others, as the murderer. It is nonetheless inevitable that getting to the bottom of this American tragedy will turn to politics and guns.

It is already being asked if our American political culture has become so coarse, so bitter and tinged with the language of violence that such events directed at political people are made more possible. An eyewitness to the Tucson events said there was no doubt the gunman’s real target was the Congresswoman.

The wise and experienced old sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik – he’s been sheriff for 30 years and is respected for his blunt candor – said it explicitly.

“Let me say one thing,” the 73-year old Dupnik told reporters yesterday, “because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by the people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”

Dupnik, in sadness and in anger, said Arizona has become “a Mecca” for intolerance and bigotry.

This much we know. Giffords’ Tucson office was vandalized during the intense blizzard of national vitriol surrounding the health care legislation, she was shouted down at town hall meetings and, by all accounts, the campaign in Arizona’s 8th District last year was bitter and nasty. And, of course, Sarah Palin and others used tough language and imagery, including putting crosshairs over Giffords’ district, to target her for defeat last November.

Giffords made note of the Palin’s actions last fall when she said, “She [Palin] depicted the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize there are consequences.” Palin, it must be noted, was one of the first to condemn the outrage.

Ironically, Giffords was a true moderate in the House. She was a “Blue Dog” Democrat who cast a protest vote last week again Nancy Pelosi. She voted instead for civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who was himself once beaten senseless in the name of politics. Giffords proudly read the First Amendment on the House floor last week during the reading of the Constitution and she was widely regarded as a calming voice in a divided district.

Consequences. Words are powerful weapons and, at times, the alarming coarseness of American political rhetoric does seem seriously deranged and dangerous. Calls for civility have never seemed more timely or more necessary. The Los Angeles Times editorialized this morning calling out the truly moronic postings – from all points of view – regarding the Giffords shooting. Read it and weep again.

Getting to the bottom also requires a mature society to engage in real and sober self-reflection about our culture of guns. I know, I know, this is the third rail of American politics, but finding the discussion uncomfortable or politically difficult doesn’t make the self-reflection any less important. How can a culture that claims to value the sanctity of life tolerate the level of gun violence we seem to now find tolerable?

Once again American politics intersects with guns and violence. Ours is a great country, but the tragedy in Tucson suggests once more many uncomfortable things about our less-than-perfect Union. We have some work to do to get to the bottom and try to learn from – and rise above – yet another horrific tragedy.

Baseball, CIA, Military History, Politics

That’s Accountability

Posted on by christian

LewdNavyStIf All Government Operated This Way

Accountability, at least most of the time, is sure and swift in the United States military. Just ask Captain Owen Honors, who has been sacked as the C.O. of one of the U.S. Navy’s most prestigious sea commands.

By now most everyone has heard the story of how Honors, as the then-Executive Officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise, hosted racy videos with homophobic, sexual and other offensive content that were broadcast during “movie nights” on the big aircraft carrier. He subsequently became the Commanding Officer of the Enterprise, the videos came to light and his career is as ruined as it would have been if he had run his ship aground in San Francisco bay.

The certainty of consequences for bad behavior or unethical conduct is one of the reasons that order, morale and effectiveness remain as high as they do in our all-volunteer military, while at the same time two wars and countless deployments have made military life incredibly difficult for thousands of young American men and women.

As I read about the Captain’s truly silly behavior – and, yes, I admit to finding the videos on YouTube and did take a look – I thought about the relative lack of accountability for bad behavior or performance on the civilian side of our government. It is a truly bipartisan problem.

Take your pick: the Treasury Secretary’s failure to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, various senators in both parties with ethical problems ranging from sweetheart home loans to sexual peccadilloes, heck even a former New York governor now has a prime time show on cable while the documentary about his frequent visits with prostitutes runs in theaters. Closer to home, a sitting Idaho state representative remains dogged by his tax problems and an Idaho tax commissioner operates under an ethical cloud.

Some might argue that the standards applied to the Captain of the Enterprise are a little harsh give the frat boy nature of his offense. Still, the Navy’s top brass demanded accountability – and swiftly – and not for the first time.

When the Captain’s boss “lost confidence” in him, he walked the plank – immediately.

Admiral John Harvey, in announcing that the can was tied to the Enterprise’s video host, talked about the Navy’s determination to maintain its values of “honor, courage and commitment.” Officers, Admiral Harvey said, simply must be held to the highest standards. The military code of conduct system demands it. End of story.

In the wake of his own bad behavior, Eliot Spitzer got his own television show. Increasingly, it seems, the American political system allows that sort of “accountability.” Little wonder then why the American public gives the military high approval ratings, while the public approval of Congress and other governmental institutions sinks to all-time lows.

No accountability, no confidence.

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

Richard Ben Cramer

Posted on by christian

cramerThe Best Political Book No One Bought

Before Richard Ben Cramer, the campaign political book genre was dominated by the great Theodore White and his remarkable Making of the President series. That changed after the appearance of Cramer’s monumental door stop of a book on the 1988 presidential campaign.

Now every book about American politics is measured against Cramer’s masterpiece – What it Takes: The Way to the White House. Cramer’s book, a classic piece of “new journalism,” not only provided the inside account of the campaigns of politicians like Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, Bob Dole and the eventual nominees, George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, but also offered fascinating, in depth profiles of the candidates. It was a book about character as much as politics and it has become a classic for political junkies and Cramer and his approach have become a role models for a new generation of writers who see politics as less an insiders game and more a study in character and motivation.

[One might argue that the 1988 campaign did a great deal to shape the current presidential campaign environment. Just remember some of the moments: Biden’s plagiarism, the Willie Horton ad, Dukakis is a silly helmet in a tank, Bush 41’s “read my lips” and Lloyd Bentsen’s put down – “you’re no Jack Kennedy” – delivered at Dan Quayle expense.]

Politico has produced a must read profile of Cramer with insights into his book – the book was panned by reviewers when it came out years after the ’88 election and never sold well – that is also a great look into what now passes for political reporting. Most big-time Washington reporters continue to focus their political coverage on the inner workings of the campaign. It’s reporting analogous to covering a baseball game – report on the balls and strikes, throw in a little strategy, compose a clever opening graph and you’re good to go.

Cramer’s book – he claims to have done more than 1,000 interviews – concentrated instead on why these remarkable men came to be where they found themselves in 1988. He was interested in who they were as people and what made them tick. This approach – the motivations of people, their background and the details of their lives – is vastly more enlightening to voters than most of what we get in more standard political reporting.

I suspect that one of the reasons we don’t get more of the kind of reporting Cramer does, in addition to the fact that it is darn hard work, is that candidates generally hate this kind of reporting. As Cramer told Booknotes interviewer Brian Lamb in 1992, most politicians aren’t introspective. They never spend 15 minutes thinking about who they really are and what they really hope to accomplish. Cramer’s book gets to these questions.

The big book of the 2008 campaign was Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, a book full of gossipy detail and the interesting, but not always insightful, “inside baseball” of politics. Cramer, never one to mince words, is dismissive of Game Change because, as he told Politico, it “almost religiously eschews any understanding of who [the candidates] are.”

Cramer became disillusioned with reporting on politics after the initial tepid response to What it Takes – he still owes his publisher $200,000 from the advance he received – and hasn’t written about politics or candidates since. Instead, Cramer has produced books on baseball, including a book on Ted Williams and a devastating biography of Joe DiMaggio, and is now at work on a book on Alex Rodriquez.

It’s never too early to get ready for the next presidential election – candidates are already planning trips to New Hampshire and Iowa – so, if you haven’t read What it Takes, haunt a used book store and lose yourself in one of the best political books ever written. What it Takes is a classic.

And thanks for checking in here during 2010…a Happy New Year to you and yours.

American Presidents, Baseball, Guest Post, Obama, Politics, Polling

Obama’s Comeback

Posted on by christian

Obama smilesNever So High, Nor So Low

It was as predictable as a Christmas sale. Make way for the Obama Comeback stories.

Immediately after the mid-term “shellacking” of Barack Obama and his party, New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker breathlessly and instantly analyzed the election under the headline – “In Republican Victories, Tide Turns, Starkly.” The President, Baker analyzed, “must find a way to recalibrate with nothing less than his presidency on the line.”

Wow. What a difference seven weeks makes.

A lead story at the Politico website carries the headline: “Obama Rebounding.” Reporter Jennifer Epstein expands a tiny uptick in Obama’s poll standings – his approval/disapproval now stands evenly split at 48-48 in the latest CNN survey – into the insight that more Americans support the President’s policies than any time since mid-2009.

Say what? What happened to the guy who couldn’t find his groove? What became of the fatally wounded re-election bid? In that November 3 Times piece, former House Republican leader Dick Armey, a voice of the Tea Party, flatly predicted that Obama has “already lost his re-election.”

What’s going on here is that politics sometimes resembles another game – baseball. Every day is a new game and, while every team looks unbeatable through a winning streak and impossible in a slump, seldom are the players ever as good or bad as they appear. The ups get exaggerated and so do the downs.

The other phenomenon in plain view is the absolute fascination of the national media with the “comeback narrative.” The so called “media elite” from the Times to Time, from Fox News to Politico can’t operate without a simple, concise narrative. Every storyline needs, well, a story and there is no better political story than “the comeback.” Need more proof? USA Today supplies it with a headline: “Obama Sets Up As Comeback Kid.”

Seven weeks is a lifetime in politics, particularly in a political environment as volatile as ours; an environment influenced heavily, it must be noted, by relentless and often misleading coverage of the latest poll numbers. Here’s a thought. Rather than sitting around the Beltway cracker barrel, how about some political reporters go out into the country and talk to voters? They just might learn something.

A few things are obvious, even if they don’t fit neatly into the political narrative of the moment. The President has had a good lame duck session, he did recalibrate his stand on extending the Bush tax cuts and, as yet, the country sees no serious challenger to him in 2012. Meanwhile, by some accounts, Obama is quietly remaking his White House staff for the run up to his re-election and positioning himself as a reasonable, mid-ground alternative to the current faces of the GOP – Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Also obvious, Obama is a good politician who displays the ability to grow in office. By the same token, he is not as good at the political game as his 2008 election made him look, but he is also not as bad as the recent mid-terms made him look.

For Obama, like all politicians, the highs are always lower than they seem and the lows are always higher.

In truth, as Michael Cooper astutely pointed out in the Times in the wake of the mid-terms, a good deal of political “analysis” is not just spin, it is mythology.

But, political time and myth will march on and the national media will soon need to invent new narratives. In a few weeks, Newt and Mitt, Sarah and Haley will be showing up in places like Manchester and Waterloo and we can read and contemplate the unfolding of the endless presidential campaign. It will, no doubt, be the most important election in our lifetimes. You heard it here first.

All this reminds me – and reminded Michael Cooper after the mid-terms – of the late Polish philosopher and political thinker, Leszek Kolakowski. Once a hard-headed Stalinist, Kolakowski came to see the Communism of his youth as a fraud and he eventually became a leading intellectual of the Solidarity movement in his native land. He won a MacArthur genius award and his work was celebrated by, among others, the Library of Congress.

Kolakowski promulgated what he called the “Law of Infinite Cornucopia,” which holds that for any doctrine one chooses to embrace there is never a shortage of arguments to support that view.

So, welcome to the remarkable Obama comeback or, if you prefer, wait for “proof” that it never happened.

American Presidents, Baseball, Federal Budget, Immigration, Obama, Politics

Tax Cut Politics

Posted on by christian

bush-70b-tax-cutFiscal Constraint Can Wait

Considering the strum und drang of many Democrats reacting to President Obama’s “deal” with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, one would think that there was ever a serious chance that Congress would actually change tax policy while the economy remains in the ditch. Wasn’t gonna happen, but if there is a missed fiscal responsibility moment here it may turn out to be the failure by Obama and Democrats to leverage the moment to force a long-term deal to get the nation’s fiscal house in order. Time will tell whether it was a missed opportunity.

Announcing the tax deal, Obama acknowledged the obvious – the economy would not react well to a tax hike on the upper 2% or so of taxpayers even if most everyone else would see little if any change in tax rates. Add to that economic reality the fact that Republicans have largely won the broad political message battle over taxes and its impossible not to conclude – Keith Olbermann aside – that the President had little choice but to give way on his campaign pledge to let the tax cuts expire for the wealthiest taxpayers.

The stark fiscal reality remains however, even as the politics of the moment crowd totals up the winners and losers. The co-chairman of the President’s Commission on getting the budget deficit under control, Democrat Erskine Bowles, nailed the missed opportunity. Had Democrats been thinking along with Obama, they might have seized this moment to press for the grand plan to deal with the terrible mess both parties have created over the last decade. Democrats have yet to conclude that the country is ready for a call for shared sacrifice, pain and realistic action to cut spending, enhance revenue, scale back entitlements and reduce defense spending. Fiscal constraint will have to wait apparently, while all of us what for adults in both parties to begin to deal with nation’s real fiscal problems.

Still, given the push back from some Democrats, Obama displayed both political courage and political pragmatism in getting his deal. He also, importantly, got an extension of unemployment benefits that will have the benefit of keeping real money in the hands of real people who will spend it. Over the longer term, with this deal Obama may have also taken a step toward reassuring some of the independents who seem to have abandoned him in droves.

Here is the real political reality: if Obama and Democrats don’t make serious progress in getting the economy moving by Labor Day 2011, and moving in a way that most people feel in their bones as well as their pocketbooks, he and many othe Democrats won’t have to worry about being around in 2013 to deal with controlling the deficit.

Baseball, Politics

The Political Spouse

Posted on by christian

edwardsElizabeth Edwards: 1949 – 2010

There is no more difficult – nor ill-defined – role in American public life than the role of political spouse. There are simply no rules and the highest and most unreasonable expectations.

Every woman – and let’s face it the vast majority of political spouses are women – has to make it up every day. Like a circus high wire act, there is no net and, politics being politics, there are always opponents, score settlers and even campaign handlers who are quietly cheering for a fall from the wire.

Some spouses like an Eleanor Roosevelt of history or a Hillary Clinton of the Senate and State Department find a unique way to play the role. Others like a Cindy McCain or a Joan Kennedy never seem comfortable in the awkward public space that surrounds them.

There is an old joke among political operatives that on the campaign trial you can always find a way to manage the (male) candidate’s personality, it will be the spouse that presents the real challenge. I can only imagine that the old line was whispered regularly on every John Edwards campaign.

Elizabeth Edwards, who died yesterday after a excruciatingly public battle with cancer, an unfaithful husband and the tragic loss of a young son, seems to have had vastly more than her share of the ill-defined role of public spouse. As the Washington Post said, she lived her private pain on a very public stage.

Edwards was by all accounts – and not all were praising her – whip smart, extremely tough, resilient, opinionated, demanding, ambitious, unable to suffer fools easily or well. All that would be viewed as a compliment where it a description of a male candidate rather than a political spouse.

Still the vast majority of the recollections of this remarkable woman’s life leave one thinking that our politics would be better had she been the senator, the vice presidential and presidential candidate. Instead, it was the now-disgraced John Edwards who flashed upon the American political scene and seemed just as quickly to flame out in the wake of personal scandal. Elizabeth Edwards went along for the ride, but not as a bit player, and in the process became a bigger and vastly more admirable player than her clueless husband.

The best-selling campaign book Game Change will feature in many Elizabeth Edwards obits because of its lacerating view of her as the opinionated witch on the campaign bus. When I read that account in the aftermath of the 2008 election, it struck me, as Jonathan Alter has now written, that the frequently vicious culture of American politics was kicking her when she was down. Some were being critical of Edwards for seeming to enable her husband’s behavior before turning it to benefit her own personality and celebrity.

What was missing in much of the portrait of Elizabeth Edwards was the element of human understanding and the unique dynamics of each and every personal relationship – especially a marriage relationship. Many political spouses don’t, initially at least, get much say in whether they go along for the political ride. Once on the campaign bus they find a way to play the role they are assigned and most end up taking pride and affirmation from the candidate-husband’s ambition and success. When controversy or adversity arises, the spouse, as in the case of Elizabeth Edwards, is left to cope as best they can. Being human, some do it better than others.

As Alter and others have written, Americans – particularly the class of political elites in both parties and the press – like nothing better than to build up our celebrities before we bring them low. We forget, too easily, that they are just people who suffer loss, endure pain and rage against illness. They just do it in real time in front of a camera and on the pages of anonymously sourced political books. And, of course, the truth in public life is never as clear cut or unambiguous as the air brushed image. The messy, tragic complexity of Elizabeth Edwards’ story should make the truth of that statement all too obvious.

In the whole scheme of playing the incredible hand she was dealt, you have to say that Elizabeth Edwards didn’t play it perfectly, just better than most of us would have and certainly better than the man she – and many of us – thought could be president.

Baseball, Politics

Government’s Best Job

Posted on by christian

PHO-10Jul28-240950Press Secretary to a Good Boss

I once held the best job I can think of in government. For five years, I was the press secretary to a candidate for governor who then became governor. As I think back on that stint from 1986 to 1991, I consider it my “post graduate education” in communications, public affairs strategy, crisis management, handling of big egos and multi-tasking. It was about the best job – and the most stressful – I’ve ever had.

That’s Steve Early looking over Franklin Roosevelt’s shoulder in the photo. Early, a former reporter, was perhaps the earliest person in American politics to really be considered a “press secretary.” He worked on FDR’s 1932 campaign and took his considerable skills into the White House where he served every day of Roosevelt’s presidency. Based upon what I’ve read of Steve Early’s career, he was more than a gatekeeper. He advised on policy and often when FDR was away from Washington, Early was literally in charge. Almost a deputy president. Heady stuff.

Early went on to work for the Pullman Company and served in the Truman Administration as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Arguably, being FDR’s spokesman and policy advisor equipped him for just about any job.

[There is a good book on Steve Early and his role in helping FDR succeed that is a very worthwhile dip into Roosevelt’s political genius and his mastery, with his press secretary’s considerable help, of the media.]

The best and most successful politicians, I think, bring their press secretary or communications directors into the policy process. I was fortunate in my time as a press secretary to have a “seat at the table” in any meeting, easy and open access to the boss and real input into policy. I’m convinced it allowed me to do my press liaison job better. I wasn’t hearing things second or third hand. I was there when the decisions were made. I’ve always been glad I didn’t have to joust with reporters without a full, nuanced understanding of what the boss was trying to accomplish and why.

Many recent American presidents have had very good press secretaries, in part I think, because guys like Jody Powell (Carter), Marlin Fitzwater (Reagan), Pierre Salinger(Kennedy)and today’s Robert Gibbs have an advisor role as well as a spokesman role. Richard Nixon, by contrast, kept Ron Ziegler in the dark about most everything leading to the spokesman’s infamous phrase that “this is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” In other words, I mislead you before, but you can count on what I just said. Bad territory for a press secretary.

There is nothing in the world quite like handling communication for a person in political life, which is just one of the reasons I’m so happy to welcome another person to our firm with that background. Anna Richter Taylor, the chief spokesperson and policy advisor to Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski is joining our firm’s Portland office early next year. Anna will be a stellar addition to our firm.

Anna will find, as I did some years ago, that being at the elbow of a governor who values the advice and perspective of a communications pro is about the best experience anyone can accumulate in politics and public affairs. It really is the best job in government. And that is an operative statement.

Baseball, Politics

Chalmers Johnson

Posted on by christian

chalmers johnsonAn American Critic

Chalmers Johnson, who died recently at age 79 in California, may be among the most influential foreign policy thinkers since George Kennan and too few people outside of the academy knew his name.

Johnson, an Asian scholar, was one of the first to understand and reinterpret the economic strength of Japan and China and, after spending his early life as a CIA consultant and a hawk on foreign policy, he transformed his thinking into insightful analysis of what he saw as the imperialist tendencies of the United States.

Johnson repeatedly asked a simple question that American policy makers rarely confront. Why is it that since the end of the Cold War, American defense spending has continued to escalate at a remarkable rate and why do we need more than 700 military installations in every corner of the world? Good question.

Johnson argued in a 2007 NPR interview and in his book Nemesis that America’s vast military complex, the cost to maintain it and the power it invested in the presidency was a fundamental danger to American democracy.

Johnson was in the tradition of great scholar/writers and politicians who were also foreign policy thinkers. He attempted in a careful, thoughtful way to place the American experience in the world in the context of history. He was not blinded, as so many political leaders are today, by the notion that America’s role in the world is somehow pre-ordained. The Romans and the British were forced, eventually, to come to grips with their lack of “exceptionalism” and that empire was a costly, ultimately futile (and fatal) exercise. The same fate may await the United States.

Chalmers Johnson argued that American democracy is the only aspect of our story that is truly exceptional and with so much attention devoted to American empire we are in danger of squandering the very thing that makes us great.

Baseball, Federal Budget, Immigration, Politics

“We Need to Listen…”

Posted on by christian

deficitTime for an Adult Conversation?

I listened to CNN’s Candy Crowley the other night as she interviewed the new Congresswoman-elect from South Dakota, Kristi Noem.

Noem, who defeated the incumbent Democrat last week, was pressed repeatedly on how she intended to keep her promises to reduce spending and balance the out of control federal deficit. Her answer: We need an adult conversation, but no specifics.

Crowley pressed her, but what about specifics? Noem was smiling when she said “we need an adult conversation” about these things.

“I ran on the campaign that we needed smaller, more limited government,” Noem said in another interview, “we needed to cut our spending, we needed to make some tough decisions to make sure small businesses could still survive and exist. And that resonated across South Dakota.”

It certainly did and it resonates all across America. It will now be a fascinating exercise in political jujitsu to see how the newly elected – and re-elected – deal with the you-know-what that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the leaders of the bi-partisan deficit commission, just put in their pockets.

Bowles and Simpson offered an early sneak preview this week of some of the ideas that simply must be on the table if Congresswoman-to-be Noem and others are serious about their campaign promises. Predictably, the “dead on arrival” proclamations are already being issued, one by Nancy Pelosi who almost instantly declared her opposition. That’s crazy.

President Obama said the adult thing, “before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts.”

Adult conversations really need to begin with the facts. Here are a couple: we’re not going to control the deficit by “symbolic” cuts in small discretionary spending, but nonetheless look for assaults on things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments as the sole answer.

When you hear the would-be adults debate these issues, if the first thing you hear is that we need to go after the Peace Corps budget, you know you’re listening to the kids squabble and not the adults converse.

We are also not going to control the deficit without addressing three sacred cows: entitlements (like Social Security and Medicare), the defense budget and the tax structure. Simply can’t happen. Adults, in conversation, know that and honest politicians in both parties need to start leveling with the American people.

Just one more adult thought: the U.S. defense budget, thanks in large part to endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now nearly as large as the defense budgets of the rest of the world combined. Do you think there is some savings to be had there?

“If people are, in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country,” Obama said yesterday, “then they’re going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved, and we can’t just engage in political rhetoric.”

You can get elected in America on a theory of how government and the economy works, but the reality of governing is based on facts, pain, shared sacrifice, honesty and candor.

Let the adult conversation begin.