Taxing Issues

May 20th, 13 / 0 Comments

Trouble comes in threes and in the case of the stumbling start to Barack Obama’s second term trouble is spelled three ways – B-E-N-G-H-A-Z-I, I-R-S and A-P.

First, to state the obvious, this White House is pretty awful at political crisis management. Axelrod and Pfouffle are gone and the second term White House team seems both slow and indecisive, while opponents paint them as the venal second coming of Richard Nixon. The president’s strangely detached management style and his cool aloofness makes the country long for a Harry Truman who would cuss, get mad, write nasty letters and then calm down and do something presidential like fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur. When Obama gets mad he seems merely petulant or perturbed that one of those pesky White House reporters is asking another silly question.

Usually in politics the worst wounds are self-inflicted and the Obama team’s handling of the Benghazi tragedy is largely an exercise in failing to aggressively detail what happened and why. The White House seemed to think its good intentions would be enough to defang the deranged chorus that is determined to make the response to the Libyan tragedy more important than the tragedy itself. The slow reaction, shifting story line and “trust us we know what we are doing” attitude made an important story about the tender box that is the Middle East (and the limits of American power in that troubled region) into a scandal. It didn’t have to be, but this White House tends to dismiss its critics rather than aggressively explain itself. Never a good strategy in politics.

The second Obama second term “scandal” involves the secret collection of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, an action that is, of course, just pure political stupidity. Every administration settles into office thinking it can control everything about everything. Eventually every president should discover, but most don’t, that maintaining firm control of a vast bureaucracy with access to telephones and the phone numbers of reporters is a fool’s errand. Leaks happen for many reasons and some are honorable, many not. Vanity and a sense of power is often involved. Once in a while a leaker picks up the phone in order to expose real wrong doing. More often – brace yourself – a leak is designed to to inflict pain, secretly settle a grudge or influence a policy debate inside the government. The State Department leaks on the CIA, the White House leaks on someone it wants out of the way, the Army leaks on the Navy and, by most accounts, the CIA leaks on everyone. In the Bush Administration Dick Cheney’s guy Scooter Libby went to jail for his role in outing a CIA operative, a story about leaks to reporters, but given all the current hoopla that detail is just ancient history.

In the AP phone records case the story at issue involved details about a thwarted terrorist bombing, but when the CIA director says, as John Brennan did, that the AP story amounted to ”unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information,” every American should look for a grain of salt. We need to remember that in the post-9-11 world a society that tries to maintain something like openness is going to have to put up with the occasional newsworthy leak of information that the secret forces within the government would like to stay secret. A wise old editor once told me the way it must work. “The government tries to keep its secrets and the press tries to find them out.” Those are the rules of engagement that still must apply in a free society.

The Johnson corollary to that free press/free society notion is that no American government can’t manage the press by subpoena and you’ll never stop the leaks, never. In any event, as a general rule too much government information is classified and reporters, of all people, know that all too well. So the AP phone records snooping is recorded as self-inflicted wound number two of the still-infant Obama second term. Just a thought, but it might be a good time for the attorney general to return to private life.

Which brings us to the IRS scandal, the scandal the GOP correctly sees as the most damaging to the administration for the simple reason that everyone has a gripe with the IRS. Never mind that presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon displayed little hesitation about turning the tax man loose on political opponents, the idea that any modern administration – particularly in the wake of the real scandal that was Watergate – would employ the IRS to go after enemies is repugnant and needs to be investigated. Congressional Republicans with the help of many Democrats will see to that. The administration would be well-advised to get the details out – quickly. So far it hasn’t. 

Still, the truly interesting detail about the IRS mess is not that the White House ordered up any special scrutiny of Tea Party groups, since there is no evidence that took place, but rather that the IRS review of the flood of applications for tax-exempt status for politically oriented groups – most of which were conservative – has its roots in swamps of political money and particularly in keeping the sources of vast amounts of political money secret.

A “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame said, at least in the movie version of All the President’s Men, “follow the money.” More on that next time.

 

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Obama, Politics

Isn’t It Rich

May 6th, 13 / 0 Comments

Al Gore, the former vice president who but for the vote of one Supreme Court Justice would have captured the American presidency in 2000, is now “Romney rich,” so dubbed by Bloomberg News. Losing the White House does have its upside, I guess.

Bloomberg estimates that Gore may now be worth $200 million after selling his 20% share of the not very successful Current cable TV operation to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera for a cool $70 million. (Apparently a Gore strange bedfellow, Rupert Murdoch,  actually helped ensure that Al would get his big pay day by guaranteeing that Current would, despite awful ratings, stay on Murdoch’s DircTV,  a decision estimated to have been worth $200 million. Wouldn’t you like to have heard that conversation?)

Gore also made what appears to be a $30 million haul by exercising options on the Apple stock he accumulated while serving on the tech giant’s corporate board. “That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire [based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms] when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000,” writes Ken Wells and Ari Levy of Bloomberg.

Goodness knows I don’t begrudge a big pay day for a Democrat – or Republican or Libertarian, for that matter – although the stock options that Fortune 500 companies lavish on very part time and mostly very disengaged directors is one of the dirty little scandals of American capitalism. And come to think if it shouldn’t every liberal activist aspire to have Rupert Murdoch’s ear for heaven’s sake? Rather what has always bothered me about Al Gore, and this I suspect will be the flavor of the reporting on his vast new wealth, is that he has always struck me as being one of those people in public life who is not comfortable in his own skin. He is not exactly what he appears to be and what he appears to be is, well, confusing. Begging the question then – who the heck is this guy?

Is he the climate change crusader who shared a Nobel Prize for focusing attention on that issue? Or is he a big-time Silicon Valley communication and high tech wheeler-dealer who can romance the California corporate crowd and Rupert Murdoch? Or is he the guy who once and very questionably raised campaign money at a Buddist Temple, but now says “our democracy” has been hijacked by big and secret money? And what about the big houses and bigger carbon footprint? And did you, a guy passionate about global climate matters, really need to sell your TV network to a bunch of oil-rich princes in the Middle East?

In their wonderful little book The Prince of Tennessee - subtitled “The Rise of Al Gore” – writers David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima detail young Al Gore’s early days as the son of a Senator – Albert Gore, Sr. – who spent many of his formidable years growing up in Suite 809 atop the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.   Today the hotel’s website touts the place’s history. “Prominent tenants included a young Al Gore, Jr., Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, Admiral and Mrs. Chester William Nimitz, and Senator John L. McClellan. A young George H. Bush and his parents, Senator and Mrs. Prescott Bush, also made The Fairfax their home when in town.”

“If this experience made him different from you and me, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, it was not from being rich, but rather from being apart,” Maraniss and Nakashima wrote in their book published in 2000. “[Gore] grew up in a singularly odd world of old people and bellhops, separated from the child-filled neighborhoods of his classmates at St. Albans and further still from his summertime pals at the family farm in Tennessee.”

Gore’s only sibling, sister Nancy, was a decade older and Al grew up mainly with himself. It doesn’t take a Fitzgerald-like imagination to picture the young Al reserved and proper, typically hanging around not with his teenage friends, but with the old and stuffy Senate friends of his parents. On such occasions you’ll not be surprised to know that Gore was described as “a perfect gentleman.”

The description of Gore in The Prince of Tennessee, which I suspect will be the best insight we’ll ever have to the man who came so close to being president, is of a “serious and earnest” guy “always striving to do right, but at times [revealing] flashes of a more complicated struggle within, his stoic front masking a hidden artistry, sarcasm, and loneliness.”

In a lengthy profile in the current New York Magazine Gore is described as having been devastated by his lost in 200o to George W. Bush.  “For two and a half decades, he was on a trajectory that was supposed to end in the presidency,” according to Carter Eskew one of his closest advisers. Now Gore awkwardly attempts to hide what must be the lingering hurt and regret with a throw away line that, when delivered in his stiff and not quite believable way, sounds rehearsed as if it had been tested in a focus group. “I used to be the next president of the United States,” he says always followed by a laugh.

With that line everyone thinks Gore is referring to his less than 600 vote loss of Florida and the White House 13 years ago, a loss ratified by five votes out of nine on the Supreme Court, but one wonders if he wasn’t also thinking of his first campaign for president in 1988. Unprepared, unimpressive and uninteresting in the first go round, I’ve always thought it was interesting that the young Senator from Tennessee wasn’t an important or compelling enough character to be featured in what is now widely considered the best campaign book ever written – the late Richard Ben Cramer’s classic What It Takes. Perhaps Cramer concluded that compared to his nuanced and broadly sympathetic treatment of Bush Senior, Bob Dole, Mike Dukakis, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt and Gary Hart, that Al Gore just didn’t have what it takes. Speaking of strange bedfellows, remember that current Texas Gov. Rick Perry endorsed Gore in his 1988 race for the White House. You can look it up.

It is a rich irony that Gore got to the White House, as close as he would come anyway, thanks to the endlessly interesting and frequently bigger than life Bill Clinton, who picked him as his running mate and was always too comfortable in his skin. Gore, to the astonishment of most political pros, almost completely shunned Bubba when it fell his turn to seek the presidency, but that is political psychoanalysis for another day.

One gets the soft focus impression that Al Gore feels he no longer needs to explain himself even if he could. But in fairness to the man without a shadow, who do you know who is worth $200 million who worries about what others think of them or feels compelled to explain? He’s reached the point where money makes explaining unnecessary and unimportant. Gore, once so close to the ultimate brass ring, has come full circle. He really is different from you and me and always has been. Now he doesn’t have to be anything but different. When running for public office he tried out a variety of roles – New South populist, then New Democrat moderate and in his campaign against Bush a fire-eating, class warfare espousing champion of the little guy. None of the roles was entirely believable because the actor wasn’t convincing. John Wayne and Bogart were comfortable in their skin. Not everyone is.

In thinking about Al Gore, the new multimillionaire packing around a bundle of contradictions inside his checkbook, it’s tempting to recall the last line from Fitzgerald’s best book because there is a quality to Gore that indeed seems “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” a past that was never quite real and now is never over.

Yet, the better Fitzgerald line is this one from Gatsby and you can almost hear the man who once was “the next president of the United States” say it: “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

 

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Al Gore, Politics, Vice Presidents

The Culture of NO…

May 2nd, 13 / 0 Comments

There is a time tested theory in American politics which holds that the sunny optimist, the glass half full candidate almost always wins the race. Think Reagan and Roosevelt, Clinton and George W. Sunny and outgoing beats sober and reserved with Nixon being the modern exception that proves the old rule.

Americans like to tell themselves with persistent regularity that we are “a can do” country. If the job needs doing – sign us up. We’ll find a way, against all odds if necessary, to get to YES. In January the Gallup polling organization reported that fully 69% of American adults were optimistic about how they and their family will do this year. Democrats – a whopping 83% – and younger people by almost the same number were even more optimistic than the population as a whole.

The Gallup survey indicated that we are optimistic even as we believe 2013 will be a “difficult” year.

So with all this optimism and can-do spirit, with all this professed desire to get to YES, why does it so often seem that our politics have been hijacked by the naysayers? Let’s call them the NO Caucus and admit that they have elbowed out the optimists. Where are the Reagans and Humphreys? What has happened to the politician that starts with YES and finds a way to move forward?

I think our political culture of NO is really about avoiding risk.

The United States has certainly produced its share of YES men – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the modern economy and Henry Ford and Howard Hughes in an earlier time – but business risk takers, people willing to say YES to an innovative idea or a spiffy new product, aren’t the same breed of cat as public policy or political risk takers. It is becoming increasingly rare to see any person in public life – right, left or middle – willing to make the effort to back away from NO and embrace YES.

The kabuki dance in Washington, D.C. that substitutes for a confirmation process is one place were NO has become the norm. Both parties do it – stall, filibuster, play games with appointees from the federal courts to the Pentagon. For the first time in our history a Secretary of Defense nominee was subjected to a filibuster, but a host of other offices go unfilled as the culture of NO and the need to make every appointment “bullet proof” creeps into every decision.

Forbes reported a while back that “the Senate waited 487 days after Richard Taranto’s nomination before confirming him on March 11 as an appellate judge, though his 91-0 vote signaled no opposition. [President] Obama’s previous nominee for that post, lawyer Edward Dumont, withdrew his name from consideration after waiting more than 18 months.”

Forbes went on to note that “no nominee has been confirmed since 2006 for the D.C. Circuit, a feeder for the Supreme Court; four of the top court’s nine current justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, previously sat on the D.C. Circuit.” With appointments to the federal courts NO has become the default position.

Opposition has already formed to Obama’s recent pick to oversee the federal housing agencies. Idaho’s Mike Crapo says he’s “very concerned” about the nominees, which is D.C.-speak for “we may filibuster.” The filibuster is, of course, the ultimate way to say NO in the United States Senate. The filibuster says “I’m not just opposed, but I am so opposed we shouldn’t even talk about it.”

The senators from South Carolina, including a senator not elected but appointed to the office he holds, are holding up the appointment of the eminently well qualified MIT scientist the president has selected to lead the often unmanageable U.S. Department of Energy. Lindsay Graham, one of those South Carolina senators, seems these days to occupy a permanent seat – the NO seat – for the Sunday morning talk shows. Clearly Graham has concluded that his path to re-election in South Carolina (he may face a challenge from a place even further to the right of his very right-leaning politics) is to say NO over and over again.

Graham doesn’t like the FBI’s intelligence work before the Boston Marathon bombing, thinks the Benghazi consulate attack was the worse foreign policy blunder since Chamberlain came back from Munich and, well, don’t get him started on Syria. Graham is the current political personification of what the great Calvin Trillin calls “the Sabbath Gasbags,” the dependable and predictable talking heads who will always be against everything before you’ve had brunch on Sunday. Every talk show needs a NO sayer  and the NO caucus has them in ready and abundant supply.

Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican senator who proposed universal background check for gun purchases, committed the ultimate Washington, D.C. gaff recently when he spoke the truth about the NO votes in the Senate on that issue. “There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it,” Toomey said. In other words, NO was the default position for Senate Republicans on background checks and that position had little to do with the merits of the issue. It was just a reflex NO since NO is safer on gun issues – no NRA mailings in your state – than YES any day.

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma has made a career of saying NO to climate change. Against all the evidence, Inhofe has been the political system’s leading climate change denier. He recently went head-to-head with the four star admiral in change of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Samuel Locklear, on that subject – and lost the debate, but still put him down as a NO. The Senator tried to get the Admiral to say he’d been misquoted on climate change when he called it a major national security issue, but as Bloomberg News reported the decorated and highly educated Naval officer responded that “About 280,000 people died in natural disasters in his Pacific area of responsibility from 2008 to 2012.” 

“Now, they weren’t all climate change or weather-related, but a lot of them were,” the Admiral told Senator NO. And he added for good measure, backed up with facts and studies, that those circumstance will only get worse as the population soars and even more people move toward “the economic centers, which are near the ports and facilities that support globalization.” But in our culture of NO, complicated facts, even from respected sources like an four star Admiral with no political ax to grind, rarely get the better of the simplicity and finality of the country’s favorite two letter word.

From closing the detention facility in Guantanamo to passing sensible immigration reform legislation the default political position is NO. Sen. “NO Way” Graham says correctly, ”There is bipartisan opposition to closing Gitmo.” OK, so we let the 100 prisoners now on hunger strike in Cuba die with no prospect that their status will ever be judicially resolved and all the while the world looks on in wonder? How does that NO position help our war on terror? With all the attention lavished on the prospect of immigration reform being approved in the Senate the smart money bet is that the bi-partisan proposal that united John McCain with Dick Durbin and Marco Rubio with Chuck Schumer will get a great big NO when it hits the House. To be fair to Sen. Graham he is trying to get to YES on immigration reform, but his friends in the House are safely stuck at NO. It’s what they do in the House of NO.

In California Gov. Jerry Brown has battled the Culture of NO to a standstill on the issue of high speed rail. NO is the default position on improving rail service in the United States even in the face of all the evidence in Europe and Asia where governments and the private sector are investing billions in the surface transportation of the 21st Century. Closer to the city I know best – Boise, Idaho – the forces of NO have opposed even a study of a street car system or, heaven forbid, a valley-linking light rail system. Salt Lake has done it. Portland, too. Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Seattle all have light rail and enhanced transit on the drawing board and in the ground. But southwestern Idaho, one of the fastest growing areas in the west, has no plan and can’t get beyond the culture of NO.

 The happy blogger Dave Frazier in Boise has fun with these issue on an almost weekly basis and loves that local pols fearfully quake at his regular broadsides. But as entertaining as Dave can be he long ago put his rock on the NO button. In his heart of hearts Frazier is a NO growth guy in an allegedly pro-growth state, but he has out-sized influence in southwestern Idaho because he is for the most part against everything. He is the local blogger who echoes and channels the culture of NO, a comfortable place to be since so few in Idaho disagree with the sentiment that “it can’t be done” and “shouldn’t even be considered.”

Does Idaho need a chancellor system to better govern and coordinate higher education? Of course it does, but try getting to YES on that one. Rep. Mike Simpson, a sensible YES guy, has worked for a decade to get diverse parties together on wilderness protection for some pristine territory in central Idaho, but a few well-placed folks in the NO Caucus keep it from happening. I could go on, but you get the drift.

Late last year the Washington Post had a wonderful story about the culture of NO in, brace yourself, France. Seems that audacious, aggressive entrepreneurs in socialist France are regularly hamstrung by bankers and bureaucrats who can’t get to YES. According to the Post, Alexandre Marciel “a graduate of the prestigious Political Science Institute in Paris, said part of the problem lies in French education, which emphasizes digesting and reproducing previous knowledge rather than coming up with something new. ‘The notions of audacity, or innovation, these are not in the program of French schools,’” he said. Or, I might add, American politics.

So what we really have is the safe, risk averse culture of NO pushing back against the myth of America being the home of the brave and the land of the risk taker. Standing pat and settling for NO has become dominate in political culture since “audacity and innovation” are words seldom found in the same sentence with “it can’t be done and shouldn’t be tried.” American politics has become an exercise is managing risk to maximize time in office. The safe, risk averse path seems to be to do as little as possible in public office, issue a few “over my dead body” press releases liberally laced with NO, and file regularly for re-election.

The really successful politician I know best, four-term Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus, has often said, “It’s better to be for something than against something,” but these days its easier – and much safer politically – to just say NO. 

 

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Idaho Politics, Politics

Jim Crow’s Playmates

Apr 30th, 13 / 0 Comments

One of the best things about the new film about baseball great Jackie Robinson is actor Harrison Ford’s portrayal of baseball executive Branch Rickey, the man who found the guts in 1945 to sign Robinson to a minor league contract with the Montreal Royals and then in the 1947 season, against all odds, brought the first African-American player to the major leagues.

By all accounts Mr. Rickey, as everyone called him, wasn’t much of a ballplayer himself. He only played in the majors for four seasons, had a career batting average of .239 and hit only three home runs. Granted it was the “dead ball” era, but those numbers don’t get you to Cooperstown.

Rickey got to the Hall of Fame on the strength of his success as a baseball manager and executive. He had a hand in three great and enduring innovations – the establishment of the farm system to identify and nurture talent, breaking the color line with the signing of No. 42 and late in his life helping start the Continental League, a proposed third major league that failed to get off the grass, but nevertheless ushered in expansion of baseball to new markets.

The great sportswriter Jim Murray said Rickey “could recognize a great player from the window of a moving train” and the great man’s nickname, “The Mahatma,” was recognition of his pioneering ways and the deep Christian faith that he wore on his sleeve. One contemporary said when Rickey met you for the first time he wanted to know everything about you, then set out to change you.

In the wake of seeing the Robinson movie – it’s a must for any baseball or history buff – I read a splendid piece by another great sportswriter Red Smith. Writing in 1948, the year after Robinson broke the Jim Crow barriers around baseball, Smith was reporting – and not with any surprise – about how little support Rickey had received from the other leaders of the national past time.

“A curious sort of hullabaloo has been aroused by Branch Rickey’s disclosure that when he went into the ring against Jim Crow, he found fifteen major league club owners working in Jim’s corner,” Smith wrote. “It is strange that the news should stir excitement, for surely it couldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.” Those other owners – Red Smith called them “Jim Crow’s playmates” – were worried about alienating fans, suffering public abuse or hurting their investments. Most likely all three. Questions of morality often get snagged on the sharp edges of commerce. Morality wins, as it did in 1947, when a big man – make that two big men – act with a sense of righteousness and with history on their side.

It’s hard, I think, perhaps even impossible, for anyone born after the awful era of Jim Crow to grasp the degree to which economic, political and cultural forces were aligned to keep black Americans from jobs, health care, public services, the ballot box and the sense of decency that goes with simply being respected. It was a shameful, nasty and profoundly disturbing period of American history. One reason for young people to see the Robinson film, in addition to the well-told heroic story, is to get a taste of the appalling racism that Robinson and so many other Americans of color deal with every hour of every day.

A spectacular new book by Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson expands on the political implications of the Jim Crow era, and yes the implications still echo today, by exploring in detail the Faustian bargain Franklin Roosevelt entered into in order to push his New Deal agenda through a southern dominated Democratic Congress in the 1930′s. The Robinson story fits squarely in the history lesson Katznelson tells so well.

As Kevin Boyle wrote in reviewing Fear Itself in the New York Times, “[FDR's] calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order.”

Franklin Roosevelt, Katznelson argues, made a “rotten compromise” with the southern politicians of his own party who dominated Congress in exchange for being able to govern effectively in a time of depression, war and deep and persistent fear. While FDR didn’t challenge a segregated culture, ironically the New Deal served to both prolong Jim Crow and made its demise inevitable. FDR’s “rotten compromise” fails as a profile in courage, but the Hudson River valley aristocrat who fancied himself a Georgia farmer eventually made so many changes in the way we use and view government that his New Deal made Harry Truman and eventually Lyndon Johnson possible.

In the same way that Branch Rickey, The Mahatma of baseball, saw a wrong and tried to right it, first Truman and later Johnson, fully understanding the political consequences, abandoned the old Democratic Party of Jim Crow and ushered in the civil rights era; an era of unending struggles, that still dominates politics and culture today.

Every time I read or hear about another effort to make voting more difficult for minorities in America or hear a politician suggest that “American exceptionalism” makes it clear we don’t have to worry about race and class in this “post-racial” time in our history, I’ll remember Jackie Robinson’s one-time Brooklyn Dodger teammate from Alabama Dixie Walker. Walker, a fine ballplayer and a career .306 hitter who lead the league in hitting in 1944, also led the push back against Robinson playing with the Dodgers. Walker demanded to be traded and drew up an anti-Robinson petition that he and other Dodger players were determined to present to club president Branch Rickey.

Dixie Walker’s career dried up after 1947. Rickey traded him to the lowly Pirates and he retired in 1948, but would come back to coach in the majors often working  without issue with black ballplayers. In his 2002 book The Era, the great writer Roger Kahn quoted Walker as saying: “I organized that petition in 1947, not because I had anything against Robinson personally or against Negroes generally. I had a wholesale business in Birmingham and people told me I’d lose my business if I played ball with a black man.”

Fear is a great motivator. History has a tendency to reward people who push back against it. Rickey and Robinson are in the Hall of Fame. Truman’s stock at a great president continues to rise. Johnson’s place as the president who sacrificed his party’s once invincible regional base in the south in exchange for civil rights legislation is secure. Dixie Walker told Roger Kahn the anti-Robinson petition was the “stupidest thing he had ever done,” and he regretted it for the rest of his days.

Dixie Walker was by all accounts a devoted family man who, as Harvey Araton wrote in 2010, was “without much formal education, [but] he was curious and informed. Representing N.L. players, he helped devise the major leagues’ first pension plan, suggesting its revenue be generated from All-Star Game proceeds.” None of that has helped erase the stigma of what Dixie Walker did when driven by his own fear during the season of 1947.

Time may heal wounds, but reputations are much harder to repair. The playwright said it:  ”The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Fear itself stands in the way of so much.

 

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Baseball, Civil Rights, FDR, Film

Out of Sight, But Important

Apr 23rd, 13 / 0 Comments

For a state that hates government so much, Idaho sure has a lot of it.

Idahoans have single purpose districts for airports and hospitals, sewer systems and mosquito abatement. Idaho has government “closest to the people” to handle fires, irrigation, highways, cemeteries and auditoriums. Idahoans hate government so much that they often make it largely ineffective and remarkably inefficient – maybe that is the point come to think of it – by hiding away a five-person board over here and a special purpose taxing district over there.

While the state legislature has been busy creating all this government at the local level, remember these are the same folks who regularly memorialize Washington, D.C. on the inherent evils of a distant and menacing government, state lawmakers grant almost no real authority – as in taxing authority – to Idaho cities or counties. The state constitution places severe limits on government debt and local option taxation has been so unpopular in the legislature for the last 40 years it might as well be a Stalinist plot. There is no funding source for local transit service. Want to build a new library or police station? For the most part, Mr. Mayor and City Council, you have a choice – either save your money or beg the taxpayer for super majority approval to levy a bond. The legislative and constitutional constraints are so severe that the City of Boise had to lead the charge to change the state constitution a while back in order to expand parking at the Boise airport; an expansion that will be paid for entirely from revenue derived from folks who park cars to use the airport. Before the change, which had to be approved by voters statewide, even that type of “user fee” revenue couldn’t be used to upgrade airport facilities.

When you consider the various restrictions on local government’s ability to make investments in brick and mortar it is suddenly obvious why we build so little in the way of local infrastructure, and Idaho is, don’t forget, a state where local control is sacred, until it isn’t.

Lacking the tools that are common in places as politically conservative as Oklahoma City and Ozone, Tennessee – 37 states have local option taxes – Idaho cities are left trying to make the most of what few tricks they can pull from a tiny hat.

Here is a brief tour of around the hat. Boise has a city government with certain limited powers to collect property taxes to finance public services. Most of this revenue is devoted to police, fire, library and general government services. To advance downtown development the city years ago created a urban renewal agency, now known as the Capitol City Development Corporation (CCDC), a quasi-local government agency also with  very limited authority. For instance CCDC has developed and owns most of the parking structures in the downtown area and can use tax increment financing to further certain types of development within its established boundary. In 1959 the legislature authorized and Boise voters approved what became the Greater Boise Auditorium District (GBAD). This additional local government creature of state law is completely separate from the city and from CCDC. GBAD does have a dedicated source of revenue – a hotel/motel tax on folks who visit Boise and spend their money in the capital city. GBAD, within certain limits, can spend this money  - currently several million in cash – on “public auditoriums, exhibition halls, convention centers, sports arenas and facilities of a similar nature.”

That’s just about the sum total of scattered and very limited infrastructure “tools” available to any Idaho city.

If all this sounds a little like Afghan tribal politics you’re getting the idea. The city has a mayor and an elected council. CCDC has a board appointed by the Mayor with approval of the council. The city and its urban renewal agency have, to a degree, overlapping membership, but separate staff. GBAD has its own elected board, elected of course from a “district” that has different boundary lines than the city or the redevelopment agency. In a perfect world all these “units of government” would get together, agree on priorities, find a way to maximize the meager resources the control freaks in the legislature have granted them and build some things to create an even better city. But, they haven’t and as a result Boise hasn’t built much in the way of major public infrastructure in many years.

For years the city has had a wish list of public projects, including a new main library, a second neighborhood library at Bown Crossing, a street car system and a new multi-use sports facility that could be home to minor league baseball, soccer, high school sports and community events. The city has made nominal progress on these infrastructure priorities and not for lack of desire, but rather for lack of money.

GBAD has long advocated an expanded downtown convention center and has continued to bank money against that prospect even as doubt-after-doubt has been raised about the wisdom of such a move, particularly in the location the district has reserved for such a building. The expansion idea also lost steam while GBAD board members engaged in a nasty, protracted and distracting public spat about funding for the city’s convention and visitor bureau, a spat apparently now resolved. What remains is the question of what exactly GBAD wants to do with its money and authority, which brings us back to local quasi-governmental entities that are mostly out of sight, but still important.

To put it bluntly, the only local entity with a guaranteed source of revenue, albeit with a limited mandate on which to spend those resources, essentially has no plan for what to do with its money. Does it revisit the idea of a larger, if not optimally located convention center? Does it try to expand at its current site? Does it engage in planning a multi-purpose sports facility? (Full disclosure: I have advocated for the stadium approach.) Or does it, as some are now suggesting, find a way to financially support a downtown theatre space that might work in the old Macy’s department store building? Or…what? And more importantly what does the community really need and want?

On May 21 voters within the auditorium district, again the boundaries are different from the city, will vote to fill three of the five seats on the board. If history is a guide a couple of thousand voters will make the decision and, again with history as a guidepost, the district will quietly fade out of sight without the necessary debate about community priorities. It would be a shame. I’d like to know what each of the candidates thinks are the district’s priorities and just how they might approach getting in sync with those who should be their downtown playmates. Such a conversation in front of an election might give the community a sense of whether any consensus can be found on anything.

I would obviously be delighted to have a robust community debate about the wisdom and wherefore of a public-private approach to a new sports facility for baseball and soccer, but if not that idea – what?

Other cities are on the move. The city of El Paso, Texas – not my idea of a robust and economically powerful place – just began work on a new downtown stadium that will house a Triple-A team next year. Morgantown, West Virginia and Richmond are working on similar projects. San Diego is working on a convention center expansion and Phoenix has completed its expansion. Oklahoma City re-invented itself over the last decade with a ballpark, a convention center and other major public infrastructure.

GBAD built the Boise Centre more than 20 years ago and it has clearly become a major community asset, but ask yourself what else has the community really gotten behind since the Morrison Center was sited on the Boise State University campus back in 1984, nearly 30 years ago? Great cities build great public assets. It was easier in the days when the legendary urban developer Robert Moses waved his fist and a public facility was created in New York City. It’s admittedly much more difficult when the tools are scarce and the few tools you have are so widely dispersed.

Idaho’s convoluted and fragmented system of local government entities almost  ensures that nothing much will happen unless all the local players find a way to get on the same page. As a new nation we long ago ditched the unworkable Articles of Confederation in favor of a government able to make decisions and levy taxes to pay for those decisions. Such an elegant solution seems beyond the state legislature’s capacity. Instead one of the most conservative legislatures in the nation has given us the curious reality of more government than we want and less government than we need. And when all this government can’t agree on much of anything that is precisely what we get – not much of anything.

Pay attention to the GBAD election. It might be a chance to get something done in Idaho’s capital city.

 

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Boise, Idaho Politics, Uncategorized

Baseball on Film

Apr 17th, 13 / 0 Comments

I hope the new biopic about the great Jackie Robinson is as good as the hype, but even if it’s not I’m looking forward to seeing the film about No. 42 for a variety of reasons. It’s a great story and certainly Robinson deserves to be widely remembered and praised for his role in tearing down the awful barrier that existed prior to the 1947 season that prevented black players from reaching the major leagues. I’m also looking forward to the Harrison Ford portrayal of another hero in the story Branch Rickey. For at least a couple of hours this die-hard Giants fan can root for the Dodgers.

Another reason I hope 42 is worthy of becoming a classic is that there are relatively few really good movies about baseball. I think I’ve seen all of them. From the loopy Major League, best remembered for Bob Uecker stealing the show - “just a little outside” – and Renee Russo looking like, well Renee Russo, to the pretty awful Babe Ruth Story starring a classic actor, William Bendix, miscast as the great Yankee. As one description of that film put it Bendix “resembles Ruth slightly in looks and not at all in baseball ability.” That pretty much sums up the movie.

I remember watching The Stratton Story with my baseball loving dad. Jimmy Stewart played Monty Stratton, a successful real life Chicago White Sox pitcher who loses a leg in a hunting accident and makes a determined comeback in the minors. The movie wasn’t bad, but the trailer with narration from the adorable June Allyson, who plays Stratton’s wife, is a 1949 Hollywood classic. You can watch it here.

The laconic Gary Cooper looks a little better in pinstripes than William Bendix and does a passably good job of playing the great Yankee first baseman Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees. The moving story of Gehrig’s career and tragic death has to be on any must-see list of baseball films. The real Babe Ruth along with Yankee greats Bob Meusel, a lifetime .311 hitter who probably belongs in the Hall of Fame, and catcher Bill Dickey, who is in the Hall and deserves to be, make appearances in the film looking very much like the aging stars they were when the movie was released in 1942.

But none of those films make my top five. The best of the best baseball stories on film are not about real players, but often about the game, its rituals and the fact that baseball more than any other sport has a mystery and rhythm to it that has been, at least a few times, translated very well on the big screen. Here in descending order are my five best baseball movies:

5) Field of Dreams is a classic for the sentiment and its myriad connections to literature, history and baseball lore. I was lucky to play catch with my dad and debate Shoeless Joe Jackson’s guilt or innocence. What baseball fan hasn’t? And, of course, “If you build it, he will come,” is a line that has passed into movie lore and found its way into everyday usage. To me the line and the film are really references to a fanciful dream that comes true and wonderful dreams are good, even if they sometimes don’t pan out. Who wouldn’t like to see the 1919 Black Sox playing on your own diamond out by the corn field? Enough said.

4) Bull Durham is a classic baseball movie (and, yes, a little raunchy, too) that is also about life, love and second chances. OK, maybe I like it a little because Susan Sarandon stars as the groupie who haunts the Durham Bulls Class A team. Kevin Costner plays aging catcher Crash Davis who once made it to “the show,” but now observes baseball’s curious rules in the low minor leagues. His “I believe in…” speech delivered to Sarandon and the dense, wild but fast pitcher played by Tim Robbins is great. “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone,” he says, “I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing AstroTurf and the designated hitter rule…” Need to see it again.

3) A League of Their Own makes my top five list for Tom Hanks’ outrageously good performance as the manager of a woman’s professional baseball team in the 1940′s. Also for Genna Davis’ sweet acting job as the team’s talented catcher and for some seriously funny and memorable lines. “There’s no crying in baseball” has entered the ballpark vocabulary and will stay there forever. Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell are both believable as players and are wonderful as teammates. Hanks explaining to one of his players the importance of hitting the cutoff man is a priceless scene.

2) The Natural is, well, a natural. Robert Redford plays “the natural,” outfielder and big stick Roy Hobbs, who mysteriously shows up in the major leagues after, as he says, waiting “16 years to get here.” The screen adaptation is of the fine novel by Bernard Malamud and is very generally based on a real life incident involving Philadelphia Phillies player Eddie Waitkus. As with all these films a woman – or several in this film – play as big a role as the baseball does.

1) For my money the single best baseball-themed movie is the hauntingly beautiful screen adaptation of Mark Harris’ novel Bang the Drum Slowly. A young Robert DeNiro turns in a superb performance as a less-than-bright catcher, Bruce Pearson, who is dying of a terminal illness. Michael Moriarty is his pitcher friend, Henry Wiggins, and the film’s narrator. The fine character actor Vincent Gardenia is very good as the crusty manager. (Isn’t every baseball movie manager crusty?) The film is set around baseball, but it’s really about friendship, respect, teammates and ultimately living and dying. I love the film and particularly Wiggins’ last line – “from now on, I rag on no one” – which he delivers after telling us that none of Pearson’s teammates had bothered to show up for his funeral.

Three of these all-time greats were made in the 1980′s. Bang the Drum was released in 1973 and A League of Their Own in 1992. Here’s hoping the acclaimed Robinson film ushers in a new golden age of the baseball movies. I’m headed to the movies.

 

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Baseball, Film