Politics

American Presidents, Baseball, Obama, Politics

A Declining Presidency

Posted on by christian

DallekLess Imperial, More Reactive

Robert Dallek is one of the best of the current crop of presidential historians. He’s fair-minded and a scholar, but also possesses a keen ability to link the present to the historic. It was no accident that when President Obama, not once but twice, had a small group of historians to the White House for dinner, Bob Dallek was on the guest list along with Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin and a half dozen others.

He’s also discreet. When I visited with him a few weeks ago, Dallek was carefully respecting his own ground rules for the White House salon. He said he’d gladly talk about what he had told the President, but wouldn’t attempt to interpret Obama’s response or reaction. Others in attendance, at least at the first dinner, haven’t been so careful. The brilliant and provocative Garry Wills wrote a while back about his advice to Obama and his disappointment with the president. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wills didn’t get invited back. Wills has argued that Obama is making a Kennedy/Johnson-like mistake by pursuing the path he is on in Afghanistan.

In a nutshell, Dallek said he also warned Obama about the historical quagmire that Afghanistan has been and looks like has become again.

Bob Dallek’s books about JFK and LBJ are important and enduring works and give him a perspective on Obama’s challenges that is worth attention. Dallek is on to something with his observation to the New York Times’ Matt Bai this past weekend that we are seeing “the diminished power, the diminished authority, the diminished capacity to shape events” of the Obama presidency.

Since at least 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt put his hands on the levers of presidential power, each succeeding president has attempted – many have succeeded – in expanding the authority of what the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once famously called “the imperial presidency.” We may be seeing the decline of that all powerful, too powerful perhaps, presidency.

It is, Bob Dallek says, “the presidency in eclipse.”

I tend to the historical view that the presidency has, since FDR’s day, become too powerful and that Congress has lost its way in checking that power, particularly when Congress acquiesces to foreign policy adventures cooked up by presidents of both parties. So, a pulling in of presidential power is not an altogether unwelcome turn of event, whatever the cause.

Still, there is a problem. Is it conceivable the current Congress – on both sides of the aisle – is capable of exercising more responsible authority? Can the Congress rise, while the presidency is in eclipse? Don’t hold your breath.

The days when a J. William Fulbright, a Frank Church, a Howard Baker or an Everett Dirksen could speak with moral and political authority – and often in opposition to a president – on a national or international issue seem like a distant memory. The Founders envisioned a separation of powers in the national government with each one of the three branches purposely structured to check the influence and power of the others.

If it is correct, for a variety of reasons, that Barack Obama is presiding over a shrinking presidency, then the leadership of Congress must step up their game. The balance envisioned by the Founders has to work and the responsibly for ensuring that it does is both diffused and shared.

(Note: Bob Dallek’s latest book – The Lost Peace – a history of the immediate post-war period, will be out in October.)

Baseball, Politics

Goodbye to the Center

Posted on by christian

SenateThe Last Moderate Can Turn Out the Lights

The media’s favorite academic pundit, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, has slightly jumped the gun on the traditional Labor Day start of the fall campaign by flatly predicting that the GOP will capture control of the House of Representatives in November. Sabato says Republicans have an increasingly good chance of taking control of the Senate, too.

If Sabato is right, and his predictions are supported by lots of recent state-by-state polling, as well as the instincts of lots of political operatives, then – brace yourselves – the next Congress could be even more sharply split than the current one. The reason is simple: both parties, in a frantic race to secure the support of their most ideological supporters, have abandoned any notion that the center of the political universe is worth trying to capture.

Republicans, supported by the Tea Party movement, have dumped incumbent U.S. Senators in Utah and Alaska for extremely conservative alternatives. Bob Bennett in Utah and Lisa Murkowski in Alaska were deemed “too liberal” for the party base. By the same token, three incumbent Senate Democrats faced primary challenges from the left. Blanche Lincoln and Michael Bennet, alleged to be “too moderate” survived in Arkansas and Colorado. Arlen Specter, the party-switcher, didn’t make it in Pennsylvania.

The bottom line: in the reddest of the red states and the bluest of the blue states, the greatest threat to incumbency has now become the threat that an office holder will get “primaried.” Republican “moderates” are attacked from the right. Democrats get it from the left. Being called a moderate is about as helpful to one’s political future as being called a Taliban sympathizer.

This politics of the extreme left and extreme right has seen, for example, the career efforts of Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson – no serious person’s idea of anything other than a responsible conservative – being condemned by his own party’s convention. Simpson’s sin – laboring for ten years to collaboratively resolve the wilderness dispute in central Idaho. Resolving disputes is what legislators are supposed to do and it involves, in the best sense, compromise and, yes, moderation.

On the left, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs lashed out recently at liberal critics of the president suggesting that they “ought to be drug tested.” Gibbs said the “professional left” is just as out of touch with reality as some of the far out voices on the “professional right.” More evidence of the near complete polarization of our politics.

If Republicans do succeed in capturing the House, and maybe the Senate, in November they will find that the purge of the moderates will, in all likelihood, make getting anything of substance done in the next Congress virtually impossible. There are already predictions that the fault lines within the GOP will split the Tea Party crowd from the more traditional wing. Right now the party is united in opposition to Barack Obama and not united on how it might actually try to govern if given the chance.

If you think Congress is dysfunctional now, and under Democratic control it has been, then stay tuned. We my not have seen anything, yet.

 

Baseball, CIA, Military History, Politics

Communicating the Story

Posted on by christian

mccrystalI’d Like to Audit This Course

Gen. Stanley McCrystal, the fellow Barack Obama fired earlier this year as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is lecturing at Yale this fall. McCrystal’s syllabus was published by the Yale Daily News and I’ve got to say it looks pretty interesting.

The General, who will draw on his lengthy military career for the seminar entitled “Leadership in Operation,” will lead off on September 7th with a lecture on “The Importance of Leading Differently.”

The notes on the seminar say the session will involve, “A description of how changes in our operating environment over the 34 years of my service have demanded changes in how organizations operate – and how leaders lead them. For the military, focus often falls too narrowly – on technological advances in weaponry and armor. But like most organizations, truly significant changes in technology, politics, media, and society overall have driven change to almost every aspect of leading. Increasingly, the product of a failure to change – is failure.”

McCrystal will focus on four “case studies” in his first lecture – his own career, the decision to invade Iraq in 2002 and 2003, the American Civil War and German military strategy during World War II.

Toward the end of the semester, McCrystal will lecture on “Communicating the Story – the Media Environment.” That should be good. The General’s downfall came, of course, after Rolling Stone published an incendiary article that featured on the record quotes from McCrystal and several members of his staff sharply questioned the ability and smarts of the President and his national security team.

I have often believed that our society really has only one true meritocracy; an institution were individuals, in the vast majority of cases, advance on the basis of merit, wisdom and drive. The American meritocracy is the U.S. military. You don’t get to wear four stars without knowing a few things about leadership, history, politics and human nature. The proof of the modern military’s approach to merit and responsibility is Gen. McCrystal. He screwed up and lost his job. End of story. Not so in any other field of endeavor in American society.

There are exceptions, of course, to the military merit story line and the U.S. military, obviously, hasn’t always been a place where merit wins out. William Westmoreland and George Custer come to mind. Still, day-in and day-out, I’d put the military’s merit selection up against our political selection process, as well as against corporate America and even the academy.

It is very interesting that McCrystal, at least for the time being, has taken a pass on the post-military life of many retired officers. He appears not to be interested in the opportunities he surely could have to consult for a defense contractor or become a talking head pundit on cable television. Instead he’ll lecture at Yale.

It would be fascinating to listen in on those seminars.

Baseball, Basques, Media, Politics

Just Plain Getting it Wrong

Posted on by christian

Park51300Don’t Confuse Us With Facts, Please…

The photo is of Park51, the proposed site of an Islamic cultural center, two Manhattan blocks north of where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

By now, I suspect, everyone in the country – except perhaps that escaped prisoner caught late last week in Arizona with his accomplice girl friend – has an opinion on whether the so called “Ground Zero mosque” is appropriate for this site.

(I’m making the assumption that the jail breaker might just have been too busy while out on the lamb to check in on cable TV or pick up a paper to follow this controversy, but who knows? Seems like everyone else is weighing in.)

There are many things of interest about the hottest story out of New York since Chelsea’s wedding. The “mosque issue” is fast becoming a political litmus for this year’s candidates and political analysts are debating how much voicing support and then walking it back a bit it is hurting the President. Republicans, for the most part, have jumped all over the issue and made the case that this is the worst idea, well, since Mohammad demanded the mountain come to him.

President Obama, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and some of former President George W. Bush’s guys have made the case that the issue must be about religious freedom and not condemning an entire religion by saying all Muslims harbor radical, violent intentions. Others ranging from Newt Gingrich to Harry Reid, in various shades of heated rhetoric, have condemned the location of the proposed Islamic center and, in many cases by extension, also condemned the religion to which 1.5 billion of the world’s people adhere.

One more thing of interest in this story, a story that has dominated the news now for close to three weeks, says a great deal about how information gets disseminated and used in the digital age. It is fascinating to me just how many of the essential elements of the story lack factual basis or have been so distorted in the repeated re-telling that they have little resemblance to the truth.

Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the August 16 edition of The New Yorker tried to catalogue some of the details that have just gotten lost, or been distorted, or are just plain wrong as the story has picked up steam and controversy.

“Well, for a start,” Hertzberg wrote, “it won’t be at Ground Zero. It’ll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops (electronic, porn, you name it) churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash. Park51, as it is to be called, will have a large Islamic “prayer room,” which presumably qualifies as a mosque. But the rest of the building will be devoted to classrooms, an auditorium, galleries, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001 (emphasis added), and a swimming pool and gym. Its sponsors envision something like the 92nd Street Y – a Y.M.I.A, you might say, open to all, including persons of the C. (Christian) and H. (Hebrew) persuasions.”

Hertzberg went on to note, as others have, that the principal backers of the center are immigrants from Kuwait (a country we went to war to liberate) and Kashmir and the man who is now routinely referred to in press accounts as “a controversial imam,” Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a Columbia University grad who has been in charge of a mosque in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York for nearly 30 years.

Rauf is so dangerous that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enlisted his help to “conduct ‘sensitivity training’ for agents and cops” after 9-11. Rauf is also the vice-chair of the New York Interfaith Council, which means he regularly associates with Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists who, one assumes, thought enough of him to elected him vice-chair of their organization. (The founder and chairman emeritus of the Interfaith Council, by the way, is the retired Dean of the Cathedral of St. Patrick the Divine. Those Anglicans can be pretty radical.) Rauf has also often and at length, it is important to note, denounced terrorism in general and the 9-11 attacks in particular. Before it became popular for Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh to denounce him, Rauf palled around with Condi Rice and Karen Hughes of the Bush Administration.

Not quite the story that appears in the thousands of words written daily about this issue, but it does help explain, if not excuse, why so many people have made up their minds that the “Ground Zero mosque,” promoted by “radical Muslims” will be a threat to all Americans and an insult to the 9-11 victims and their families. Lots of folks believe that, it’s just not true.

When I went to journalism school back in the dark ages, a old prof told us over and over that reporting a story – particularly a story steeped in controversy – required more than merely recounting what “he said and what she said.” That kind of journalism, the old, green eye shade guy would say, almost always ensures that “the truth goes and hangs itself.” Seems like that is what has happened on the south side of Manhattan.

There us much more evidence, everywhere you look, of the truth looking for a place to die. Consider, for a moment, the President’s religion and place of birth.

Barack Obama wrote two best selling books about his life and background, books that have been poured over by reporters and his political enemies for years now. Books that discuss at some length his views on religion and what it means to him to be a Christian. Obama has given interviews and made speeches talking about his faith and, in particular, how those of us not of the tradition can begin to understand the black Christian church in America.

Yet according to a new Pew Research poll 20% of Americans now firmly believe the President is a Muslim. In the same survey, fully 34% of conservative Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim.

In his book The Audacity of Hope – you can look it up on page 208 – Obama writes about his decision to fully embrace Christianity:

“It was because of these newfound understandings – that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic or social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved – that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany…I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to His truth.”

Reading those words, one who continues to believe Obama is a secret Muslim simply has to believe he is a serial teller of untruths, which may actually help explain the 34%. The opinion page editor of the Dallas Morning News wrote about this the other day and made a telling point when declaring that the paper would quit printing letters making religious claims about the President for which there is absolutely no evidence and that are clearly not true.

“Aren’t the people who claim Obama is a Muslim,” the editor asked, “some of the same people who said they could not trust a man whose Christian preacher said racist and unpatriotic things from the pulpit? Which is it? Is he a follower of a controversial Christian preacher or a Muslim?”

Truth and logic there, but is anyone paying attention?

Another 41% of Republicans in a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country. Even when a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, certified as authentic by officials in Hawaii, was posted on the Internet, the so called “birthers” continue to believe what just ain’t so.

Of course, there is more. The story continues to circulate that current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner used to work at Goldman Sachs, one of the big, bailed out Wall Street banks. Nope, the Goldman guy was the last Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Or, what about the now accepted notion that the terribly unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) – hated left and right in a rare show of bipartisanship about anything – was all Obama’s doing. Wrong again. TARP occurred on the Bush watch late in 2008 with W’s full backing, as well as that of John McCain.

What’s going on here? There are lots of theories, including one called the “backfire effect.” This notion holds that when a person harbors a particularly strong view, that is shown by facts and logic to be wrong, they often actually reject the facts and logic and strengthen their belief in what is false. It is a sort of “don’t confuse me with the facts” response, on steroids, to something that may be personally comforting or important to believe even if it is just not true.

One theory is that some folks so dislike Barack Obama – much as some folks so disliked George W. Bush – that they need/want to believe things that reinforce their views even if those things aren’t true. The human mind is a curious thing.

A political scientist, Brendan Nyhan, who is a Robert Wood Johnson scholar in health policy at the University of Michigan, has studied the “backfire effect” and recently told NPR’s Talk of the Nation that misinformed people – conservatives and liberals – rarely change their minds once they are made up. Now, there’s a cheery thought.

As traditional journalism declines apace, one of the promising new developments has been a greater commitment by some news organizations to good, old fashioned “fact checking.” There are websites devoted to this. One of the best is FactCheck.org that tries to keep politicians and others making public claims honest. It is, after all, possible to research and find real answers to many things.

Yogi Berra was right, once again, when he famously said “you can look it up.” Yes, you can, if you will.

Nevertheless, Nyhan and others say fact checking, no matter how well it is done, may not have much impact on those who simply won’t be confused by, well, facts.

If, when talking or speculating about things that we believe that just aren’t true, we were focused on whether Elvis is really dead or whether Neil Armstrong really walked on the moon or why the U.S. Air Force just won’t come clean with all it knows about UFO’s, it would be a mild curiosity. We could write it off as just a fact of life that some people will believe what they want to believe. But, when the myths continually trump the facts for a significant number of people in the every day political and policy life of the nation, it is a cause to wonder – can this be good for the country?

The Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page calls what is going on “American dumb-ocracy” and cites as proof of the dumbing down not only the recent Pew survey about Obama’s religion, but also Jay Leno’s on-street interviews and evidence that way too many Americans, for example, have no idea what the First Amendment protects. Civic engagement, Page says, has to mean more than closely following Lindsay Lohan’s drinking problems. Page is discouraged about dumb-ocracy and me, too. He simply says, “heaven help us.”

Lincoln, I think, talked about not being able to fool all the people all the time. That is some cold comfort, but I’m also reminded of the old line, often attributed to Mark Twain, that “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Baseball, Basques, Media, Politics

News, Money and Politics

Posted on by christian

murdochBlurring the Lines a Little More

I’ve long been a believer that the best defense against what is often referred to as “the nefarious influence of money in politics” is the disinfectant that comes with vast amounts of sunshine. In short, let the sunshine in and disclose, disclose, disclose.

As long as the Supreme Court equates First Amendment rights with essentially unlimited political contributions, even from corporations and unions, full disclosure is about all the assurance anyone has that we have the means to judge who – or what – is bankrolling a campaign.

My personal preference would be for even more disclosure, including more frequent requirements for reporting and more disclosure of the ultimate sources of political action committee, union or corporate contributions. If money in politics is poison – even Teddy Roosevelt said it was – then tighter limits on the amounts of individual, corporate and union contributions seems like a sensible approach. But, thanks to a tangled web of laws, regulations and court rulings, we have an increasingly wide-open system where every election cycle the money flows farther and faster and the candidates spend vast amounts of their time, as the campaign language goes, “dialing for dollars.”

Leave it to Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, as his recent biographer described him, to add a new wrinkle to the long-running saga around campaign finance. Murdoch, owner of the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and, most importantly, Fox News, just had his News Corporation write a $1 million check to the Republican Governors Association. Perfectly legal, properly disclosed by all accounts, but a further and unmistakable blurring of the lines between news and politics.

The News Corporation contribution to the Republican governors is certainly not unprecedented. GE, Disney and other “media companies” have been players in this space for a long time. What is unusual is the size of the check and the partisan implications.

News Corporation maintains the corporate side of the house made the contribution with no involvement from the guys who run the cable network where Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck hold court nightly, almost always in high dudgeon about the latest Democratic action, and where a sort of GOP shadow government – Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich – gets paid to comment.

Predictably, Democrats were outraged and demanded disclaimers on future RGA sponsored ads taking on Democratic gubernatorial candidates. It was also widely noted that the News Corporation donation some how didn’t generate much coverage on Fox News. I wonder how Fox might cover a million dollar contribution from the New York Times to a Democratic committee?

The trouble with the News Corporation explanation that this was simply a corporate decision with no connection to the hot house cable network – and let’s assume for the sake of argument that News Corporation is giving us the fair and balanced truth here – is that it just doesn’t pass the old smell test.

As a friend regularly reminds me, the Murdoch explanation lacks the quality of verisimilitude. That ten dollar word is defined as “the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability” As in “the play lacked verisimilitude.” This play lacks.

It reminds me of the newspaper that editorially endorses one candidate over another and then says, as I almost always believe, that the editorial opinions of newspapers are totally walled off from the newsroom and news coverage. Few readers believe such explanations. They have become as cynical as many reporters. In the age of a more and more sharp edged, opinionated, point-of-view media, Fox News, or anyone else playing at the million dollar level in partisan politics, shouldn’t be surprised that the explanation of separation between the corporate side of Murdoch’s empire and the news side just doesn’t pass the basic test of seeming to reflect, well, the truth.

Here’s the real issue, I think, with Murdoch and his approach. The guy is a businessman, and a very successful one by most accounts, and he is also a committed conservative. In keeping with his personal politics and political philosophy, why not just drop the pretense of “fair and balanced” and engage in the market place of ideas in a fully transparent, genuine manner. If Murdoch would just acknowledge what everyone believes – detractors and fans, alike – that Fox is the conservative opinion network, it would be liberating. Well, on second thought, that may be a poor choice of words. It would be honest.

As I’ve noted in the past in this space, the news business – and it is a business – that we once knew is as dead as a dodo bird. We are going back to the future with “news” organizations becoming more and more identified with a point of view and a partisan agenda. In my perfect world – I remember Walter Cronkite – I think this is a bad trend, but it is also not likely to be reversed. It was, after all, good enough for the days of Hamilton, Adams and Jefferson and it is going to have to be good enough for the days of Obama and Palin, Fox and MSNBC.

Rupert Murdoch’s big check to the RGA is all right by me as long as he plays by the rules of disclosure. I just wish he’d take the next step, conduct himself like a Hearst, a Pulitzer or a McCormick (partisan news moguls of the past) and drop the pretense that his politics and his cable news operation is anything but a major political player, in both opinions and money, in American conservative politics. Fox News regularly wins the ratings battle against left-leaning MSNBC and CNN, which finds itself in the ill-defined middle, so why not just admit that Fox is the home of conservative opinion and will support conservative causes with its really big checkbook and its really big megaphone.

I happen to think Murdoch is brilliant from a business standpoint in occupying a space where he can shape opinions and influence policy completely in sync with his own views. That is the American way, even if you are Australian. Just go the final step and admit that is what you’re doing.

Jon Stewart – he of the obvious truth – said what lots of folks must be thinking: “This (the News Corporation contribution) is a travesty. I really think if anything Republicans should be paying Fox News millions and millions of dollars. Not the other way around.”

Now, there is some verisimilitude for you.

2016 Election, Baseball, Baucus, Politics, Supreme Court, U.S. Senate

Byrd, Kagan and the Senate

Posted on by christian

byrdA Monday Morning in Senate History

The news that the longest serving member of Congress in the nation’s history, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, had died got me to thinking about all that the silver maned “dean of the Senate” has seen since coming to Washington, D.C. in 1952. Think about it: Korea, McCarthy, the Cold War, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Vietnam, civil rights, Nixon, Watergate, the rise of China, the end of the Soviet Union, radical Islam, Iraq and Afghanistan. What a time and what a career. Byrd was 92 and he loved the Senate.

Byrd, with his courtly demeanor and three piece suits, was a throwback in many ways. Before his declining health, he was one of the Senate’s great theatrical orators. Byrd was also a respecter of tradition and rules, one of the Senate’s champion appropriators – it seems like half of the bridges and buildings in West Virginia carry his name – and a fierce defender of the Senate’s role and responsibility as an institution in our system; particularly the Senate’s role in limiting executive power. His has not been a career free of controversy, either.

In the early 1940’s, Byrd organized a Ku Klux Klan chapter in his hometown, Crab Orchard, and was chosen the chapter’s “Exalted Cyclops.” The Klan connection followed him all the rest of his life. In his memoir, Child of the Appalachian Coal Fields, published in 2005, he called joining the Klan a serious case of “bad judgment” driven by the naivete and ambition of a young man.

“(Klan membership) has emerged throughout my life,” he wrote, “to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one’s life, career, and reputation.” Byrd goes on to note, not without irony, that organizing the Klan chapter in the 1940’s served as his stepping stone to politics.

He was mentioned as a presidential or vice presidential candidate more than once, rose to become Senate Majority Leader and has been a genuine scholar of Senate history. His book – The Senate: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate, 1789-1989 – is wonderful reading for a political history buff.

In his day, Byrd could play a pretty fair fiddle. I remember seeing him in action in a stiflingly hot Boise High School auditorium during a campaign event for Sen. Frank Church in the fall of 1980.

Byrd has also been a passionate advocate for better teaching of American history and when the Federation of State Humanities Councils presented him some years back with an award for his advocacy and support, he pulled out tattered copy of a history text he had read as a child in those Appalachian coal fields. The book, now mostly long forgotten, was An American History written by a Columbia University historian, David Saville Muzzey, and first issued in 1911. Muzzey’s work was a standard American history text in the early 20th Century and Byrd praised it to nines; repeatedly referring to “his Muzzey.”

In 2004, Byrd authored another book; a slim and well-reasoned volume entitled Losing America. With the book he lamented the steady rise, during what was then his nearly 60 years in Washington, of the power of an American president to commit our military to action with little if any questioning by the Congress. The book was written in the wake of 9-11 and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq; a action Byrd had courageously and very openly opposed.

He wrote: “The awesome power to commit this nation to war must be taken back from the hands of a single individual – the president of the United States – and returned to the people’s representatives in Congress as the framers intended. No president must ever again be granted such license with our troops or our treasure.”

At a time when there is so much talk about threats to the Constitution from – take your pick – President Obama, the Democratic Congress, a conservative Supreme Court or talk radio it is interesting that those doing the denouncing on both the left and the right hardly ever – OK, Ron Paul is an exception – mention Byrd’s point about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 – “The Congress shall have power…To declare war.”

Bob Byrd knew “his Muzzey” and his Constitution. He has always carried a copy of the founding document in his coat pocket. His Senate career is one for the record books and the history books and the Senate could use his historical perspective as it takes on another Supreme Court confirmation this week.

And Now, Judging Kagan

Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings open today and the Senate’s increasing inability to comprehensively, carefully and civilly carry out the “advise and consent” function may be as much on trial as the nominee.

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were threatening over the weekend to boycott the hearings unless they got access to more Kagan documents. Ranking GOP member Jeff Sessions even suggested a filibuster might be in order.

Almost all of this, along with unbelievable talk about Kagan’s wardrobe and looks, is little more than political theatre. The real questions that need to be asked, and probably won’t be, are much less theatrical and much more important.

Is she competent? Supreme Court clerk, White House Counsel’s Office, Harvard Law dean would argue for a yes. My question: what did she learn from those experiences and how might it apply to the Supreme Court?

Has she done anything in her professional or private life that might disqualify her – or anyone with similar history – from service on the high court? Nothing we know of.

So, ultimately, does she understand the role of a judge? While we’ll hear a good deal about her “judicial temperament” and whether she is an “activist” or a “liberal.” I’d like some member of the Senate committee to ask her who she thinks has most affected American judicial thought since 1789, or in the 20th Century? Does she know anything about Holmes and Brandeis, Marshall and Taney? What opinion of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s does she most admire? What has she read lately? How does she see the job of lawyer to the president? How will she work with Roberts and Scalia? Does she think she has any responsibility to explain herself – and her opinions – if she gots to wear the robe?

You can bet the White House has equipped Kagan with 110 ways to say “I couldn’t possibly comment on that since it is an issue that may well come before the Court.” So, maybe we could have the Senate engage her in a conversation about how she thinks, what she knows about history and the Constitution and how she will apply her experience.

I’m not holding my breath. The nineteen members of the Judiciary Committee – assuming the Republicans show up – will each need plenty of C-SPAN time. Why waste any of those precious moments on a real question that might really tell us something about the nominee when a partisan speech is possible – and expected?

Bob Byrd and Elena Kagan are joined in history this Monday morning; the history of the United States Senate. Let’s hope the current Senate is up to playing something approaching a useful role in writing one more chapter in that history, because with two problematic wars raging, a stagnant economy and millions out of work, the country hardly needs the sideshow of an unproductive fight over who should join the Supreme Court. The White House and the Senate have a stake in making things work, and work better. Why not start today?

In his massive history of the Senate, Byrd wrote lovingly about the great Majority Leader from Montana Mike Mansfield and quotes the Montanan – the longest serving leader in history – as saying: “In moments of crisis, at least, the President and the Congress cannot be adversaries; they must be allies who, together, must delineate the path to guide the nation’s massive machinery of government in a fashion which serves the interests of the people and is acceptable to the people.”

That is the Washington we need right now and can’t seem to get.

Baseball, Politics

Foot In Mouth Disease

Posted on by christian

BartonGaffes, Misconstrues, Misspeaks and Goofs

My old boss, Cece Andrus, was about as good at speaking off the cuff as any politician I’ve ever seen. He had a plain spoken, even blunt style, softened with a great sense of humor. He rarely misspoke – read on – and lived with the knowledge that, as he has often said, “you can go from hero to zero (snap your fingers) just like that in politics.”

I thought of that old truism – and winced – watching Texas Congressman Joe Barton yesterday slip the biggest size 10 foot in his mouth as I’ve seen in a while. Unless you’ve been exclusively watching World Cup replays, you can’t have missed Barton’s “apology” to BP for undergoing “a shakedown” at the Obama White House. While the rest of the world – well maybe not British Prime Minister David Cameron – was gorging on the ritual of a Congressional hearing – main course, oil company executive under TV lights – Barton managed to steal the show with his defense of the guys scrambling to contain the biggest environmental mess in American history. Talk about off message. Even the BP executive receiving the apology looked uncomfortable.

Barton later, not once but twice, apologized for his “misconstrued misconstruction.” Huh?

I’ve been struck by the incredible spate of similar gaffes recently. It is almost impossible to keep track of all of them. This is clearly a bipartisan phenomenon and, maybe we should be happy about this, not confined exclusively to elected officials or candidates.

Helen Thomas, the venerable, grouchy White House gadfly, resigned for popping off about getting all the Jews out of Palestine. Helen got little sympathy from the boys and girls on the presidential beat, some of whom were jockeying for her front row seat in the White House briefing room. You knew it was truly bad for her when, hold on, Ralph Nader rose to defend her. With friends like that…

BP’s chairman stood this week before cameras outside the White House and talked about his regard for the “small people” of the Gulf. In fairness to the Swedish head of BP’s Board, what he really meant may have been lost in translation. Still, a gaffe in the Swedish vernacular is still a misconstrue in my book.

Rand Paul the Kentucky Senate candidate offered up a series of gaffes immediately after his recent primary win and now says he feels Barton’s pain. It takes a gaffer to know one. Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senate candidate in Connecticut, is still in trouble for misstating his military record. To gaffe again once exposed seems doubly daffy.

The unbelievable story out of South Carolina gets better by the day. The surprise winner in the Democratic Senate primary there, Alvin Greene, is so unaware of what the job – and a campaign – entails that he asked Time magazine “if the candidate gets paid” for the interview he finally granted? Huh?

One of the great political websites – Political Wire – features the gaffe Top 10 list so far this cycle and, yes, Idaho’s Vaughn Ward gets spot number 4 for his “Puerto Rico is a country” slip up during the recent primary.

All this, and I could go on and on, may seem like the political equivalent of the BP gusher; a vast increase in gaffiness that just can’t be brought under control. My guess is that its not a real increase at all. Politicians and others in the public eye have been saying stupid things since the days of Caesar.

What is different – expanding the range and speed of gaffes and misconstrues, to paraphrase Joe Barton – is the Internet and YouTube. The off the wall comment now takes on an instantaneous life of its own and thanks to 24-hour news it gets repeated and repeated. Think of it as gaffing at the speed of light. And, thanks to Google, the gaffes never, ever go away.

Consider a rare Andrus, er, gaffe.

Shortly after his close 1986 comeback election victory, Andrus was asked on a TV talk show about the grief he’d taken from the National Rifle Association during the campaign. The NRA’s endorsement of his opponent – and frankly smear of him – particularly rankled the hunting and fishing governor because his lawyerly opponent was not a “hook and bullet” guy in the Idaho tradition. So, Andrus said of the NRA when asked, “oh, you mean the gun nuts of the world…”

We’re talking instant front page. Andrus also promised “retribution” for the “political distortions” he had been victim of. “Nuts” with that “retribution,” I remember it well. Proof perhaps that even the best trip up from time-to-time.

Just remember when you hear or read the next gaffe, it is said in Washington, DC that the real definition of a gaffe is “when a politician speaks the truth.”

Which is another way of saying that rarely does the “misconstrue,” apology notwithstanding, veer far from what is really on the gaffer’s mind. You can look it up.

Baseball, Politics

Politics 101

Posted on by christian

political booksThinking About Our Fractured Politics

Jim Leach, the current chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a former 15-term Republican Congressman from Iowa, has the perfect formulation for why the middle has disappeared in American politics, while the most out there elements in both parties continue on the rise.

Leach was in Boise last week as part of his national crusade to stress civility in our public dialogue and in our partisan politics.

In between his stint as a Congressman – Leach joked that his constituents invited him to leave – and his tenure at the NEH, he taught at Princeton. While there he developed what he calls two minute courses on American history and politics. One mini-course he entitled Politics 101.

Politics 101 begins with the recognition that the American electorate is roughly divided into thirds – one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, one-third independent. Then, realize that in primary elections, like the one recently in Idaho, only about 25% of registered voters participate in selecting a party’s nominees. This 25% is generally made up of the most ardent party faithful; the true believers who also tend to be the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats. Furthermore, in some states with party registration, independents play no role in selecting the partisan contenders, effectively giving these self-defined “middle of the roaders” no role in defining who carries the partisan banners.

So, by Jim Leach’s formulation, as we slice the electorate ever more finely in party primaries, we get down to about one-sixth of the total population making the big and basic decision about who goes on to a general election. In Idaho, winning a GOP primary is, in most places, the election and its often decided by a tiny fraction – the most partisan fraction – of the electorate. The recent Democratic primary in Idaho featured the smallest percentage of participation in many years.

Under this basic political arithmetic, no wonder most Republicans are tacking to the right and Democrats to the left. If they look and act like moderates – moderates like Jim Leach during his years in Congress – they get, in the vernacular of modern politics, “primaried.” And, just like that, the middle of American politics has ceased to exist.

A Republican like Bob Bennett in Utah or a Democrat like Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas plays Russian roulette if they dare to work across the aisle. One of the great charges against Bennett, a three-term senator, was that he worked with Ted Kennedy and dared to supported the bi-partisan Wall Street bailout that, by the way, occurred on the watch of a GOP president.

Leach quoted – perhaps not altogether in context, but the words do ring – the great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” where the “best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Our fractured politics stand to get worse, I fear, because self preservation in the human and political animal is such a powerful force. It takes a remarkable man or woman to try to appeal beyond the fringes of either party. The center is a dangerous place now in politics, but it has always been where real things get done.

Politics 101 today equals friction and faction. The middle not only hasn’t held, it has disappeared.

 

Baseball, Politics

No Coincidence

Posted on by christian

blumenthalOpposition Research, Politics and the Press

Richard Blumenthal’s problems prove one of my cardinal rules of politics – there is no such thing as a coincidence. You look deeply enough and you’ll find a reasonable explanation, not a coincidence, for everything.

Blumenthal is the attorney general of Connecticut and, before the New York Times exposed his – to say the least – inconsistent statements about his Marine Corps service during the Vietnam era, he was also the front runner to replace retiring Sen. Chris Dodd in the U.S. Senate.

But Blumenthal’s still unfolding story is about more than just another politician not being square about his military service. His story is also a rare and fascinating glimpse behind the veil of secrecy that, more times than you might think, finds reporters and news organizations serving as the willing conduits for information/dirt/scandal that one political camp wants to dish on another.

It was no coincidence that the story about Blumenthal’s apparent embellishment of his military record hit just before the state’s political nominating conventions and at a moment when he appeared to be on a smooth glide path to election in the fall. The story of a politician imploding that appears on the front page of the Times is about as big a body blow as you can imagine for a candidate, particularly if that candidate is a Democrat.

The Bluemental story went national instantly and with all the mainstream credibility that goes with a story where the venerable Times takes down a liberal. Its hard to think the story would have had as much impact had it originated in, say, the Hartford Courant. An immediate Rasmussen survey showed that the Times story had dramatically tightened the Connecticut race.

It was also no coincidence that Blumenthal’s GOP opponent in the November election, multi-millionaire Linda McMahon, helped the Times explore the essence of Blumenthal’s exaggerations based upon McMahon’s own opposition research. While it is still unclear how exclusively the Times relied upon the work of Blumenthal’s opponents to try and bring him down, it is not in doubt that McMahon’s campaign had a role. They actually bragged about it.

Times’ editors, meanwhile, defend the handling of the story and insist it didn’t originate with McMahon’s campaign, but don’t explain precisely how they came to investigate the story. Blumenthal defenders quickly hit back, with Howard Dean calling the Times story a “hatchet job” because the paper relied upon information from an opposing campaign.

The hubris of Blumenthal’s opponent actually admitting to playing a role in advancing the story is fascinating since it violated the unwritten rule about such things. Political operatives and reporters engage in the dance for information all the time but rarely, if ever, let the rest of us in on the details. Ironically, the bragging by McMahon’s campaign also tended to dampen the impact of what Blumenthal has done.

Consider all this the journalistic version of the Mafia’s code of silence. Reporters take tips and research from political operatives all the time, but it is considered truly bad form to admit that it happens. This delicate dance is part of the little understood symbiotic relationship among reporters, politicians and their operatives who constantly engage in the trading of information. Information, like the fact that a candidate hasn’t been square about his military service or had a business deal go bad, is particularly valuable to reporters when an election roles around and a opposing campaign has the financial ability to fund deep and broad opposition research. It’s like adding a research bureau to the newsroom.

Closer to home, I have no idea – only my belief in no coincidence – about why and how the relentless barrage of stories have surfaced over the last month about the various missteps of Idaho congressional candidate Vaughn Ward. It violates my rule to believe the stories are mere coincidence.

Clearly some of the stories – Puerto Rico is a country, for example, not a U.S. Commonwealth – were driven by Ward’s own words. But with all due respect to the Idaho reporters who broke other stories about Ward’s failure to pay taxes, failure to vote in 2008, failure to acknowledge – or at least see the irony – in his wife taking home a paycheck from Fannie Mae while he was bashing bank bailouts, that he cribbed from other candidates websites to flesh out his own positions, that he misfiled his financial disclosure form, that he violated Marine Corps rules about using his military standing in his ads and that he borrowed a pick-up truck for his first TV ad – did I miss something – its impossible to believe all that information was merely the result of old fashioned, hard-work reporting…or coincidence.

We all know newsrooms are in steep decline. Reporters and news organizations have fewer resources and less time than ever to pursue stories, particularly stories that take time and may – and often do – result in nothing more than arriving at a dead end. This environment makes opposition research even more valuable for news organizations and makes it all the more important that news consumers understand how the game is played.

A few weeks ago, John Miller of the Associated Press filed a fascinating story – no coincidence – that Idaho campaigns are becoming better and better at opposition research. Miller noted that reporters often get a call that starts with something like: “hey, did you hear about…”

So, with these caveats – Blumenthal has some serious explaining to do, each of the Ward stories is legit and helps explain the character of a major candidate and there is nothing wrong with reporters getting tips from anyone – I offer three rules to guide future reading of such stories.

  • Money pays for research. McMahon’s campaign in Connecticut is self-funded – she says she’ll spend $34 million on the race – with the millions she made from professional wrestling. And, again no coincidence, national Democrats have more money than Republicans so far in this election cycle. By definition, that means more money for opposition research on candidates like, say, Vaughn Ward. Well-funded campaigns tend to do the most complete job of researching their opponents – no coincidence.

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  • Reporters make use of this kind of information – oppo research – all the time and almost never with any hint of where it came from. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but it does raise questions of motive and benefit. Next time you see a story along these lines, ask yourself who stands to benefit the most from having the story reported? Who has a motive for getting the story out? And, remember no coincidences.

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  • Finally, as Harry Truman famously said, if you can’t stand the heat leave the kitchen. Politics is a contact sport. Life – political life, especially – ain’t fair. If you have skeletons in that closet, they’ll be rattled. Reporting the shortcomings in political resumes is what reporters do. With respect to Sarah Palin’s stumping for Ward in Boise this week, as she calls it, the “lamestream media” reports what it can stumble upon and also what it is served on a silver platter and that, too, is no coincidence.
Baseball, Politics

The Best Ad Ever for Ag Commissioner

Posted on by christian

DaleNever Heard of Dale Peterson…Now You Have

Big ol’ Dale has become, thanks to the Internet, the most famous man ever to run for State Agriculture Commissioner.

If you’re a political junkie, or just a student of popular culture, you must check out Peterson’s web-based commercial. The spot hasn’t ever run on TV, but it’s gone viral on YouTube (an increasingly vital portal for political ads), received thousands of hits, generated national press coverage and spawned a parody. Since this is a family website, you’ll have to go find the parody yourself. It won’t be hard.

In the spot, Peterson, a Republican, rides a horse, wears a white Stetson, hoists a rifle and looks directly into the camera and bellows – “listen up!” It’s raw, populist red meat for red necks and its, perhaps unintentionally, very funny. Yet, the guy really looks like he should be the Ag Commissioner in Alabama.

A number of observers, including this one, say the ad is the best so far in this political cycle.

Peterson’s ad is, like most memorable political spots, different, funny and sharply pointed. It reminds me of some of the ads Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and New Mexico Gov, Bill Richardson have run in their campaigns.

Dan Testa, writing for the Flathead Beacon, makes the Schweitzer connection and offers his check list for a Peterson-type ad: “…this one covers all the bases: Horses? Check. Western wear? Check. Ranch or farm setting? Check. White-hot faux populist anger? Check. Firearms? You should know better than to ask.”

The best political ads, I think, give the viewer 30 seconds (or 60 in Peterson’s case) of real insight into the candidate. In 1990, former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus’ best – and most remembered spot – featured him spontaneously reaching in his pocket to pull out his wallet in order to show a potential voter the fish he had caught with his granddaughter. When the prospective voter asked the angling governor, “where did you catch those?” Andrus responded: “No tellem creek…” and everyone had a good laugh.

The spot was truly captured as it happened, unscripted and unrehearsed. In a few seconds it showed Andrus to be a proud grandfather, a successful fisherman and a fast man with a quip. In other words, it provided that 30 second look into what the guy is all about.

I don’t know if Dale Peterson will win the GOP nomination for Ag Commissioner in Alabama, but I do know most people who see his commercial will remember it – and him. That’s the point.