Egan, Idaho Politics, John V. Evans

John V. Evans: 1925 – 2014

JohnEvans-IdahoHistSoc-photo_t210As Idaho’s political history is written it should be kind, and I expect it will be, to John Victor Evans. Evans, who died on Tuesday at 89, ranks third in the state’s history for length of service in the governor’s office and his accomplishments, not always fully appreciated during his tenure or now, were substantial.

Evans, from a pioneering Idaho family, was both blessed by political luck and beguiled by his political circumstances. It was his good fortune, after a career in the state legislature and as mayor of Malad, Idaho, to win the race for Idaho lieutenant governor in 1974. Then incumbent Gov. Cecil D. Andrus drew a particularly inept Republican opponent in that race and realizing that Evans was within striking distance of winning his own race wisely diverted resources from his final campaign television buy to bolster Evans’ campaign.

The strategy worked and that decision, as my old friend and long-time business partner Chris Carlson properly pointed out in his book Medimont Reflections, made it possible for Andrus to accept the offer made by President Jimmy Carter in 1976 to become Secretary of the Interior. Had Andrus been confronted with turning the governor’s office over to a Republican he never would have made the move to Washington, D.C. On the strength of such details political history is written.

Evans thereafter, and often unfairly, suffered in the Andrus political shadow. He took the reigns of state government and provided a steady and often very successful brand of leadership. During the national economic downturn in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Evans battled a Republican controlled legislature to prevent deep cuts in education and other critical funding. Three times he worked magic as a Democrat in a state dominated by the GOP to raise taxes enough to prevent the kind of broad scale damage to education that we have seen in more recent difficult economic times. The tax work took both guts and political skill.

In the complicated and acrimonious showdown over water rights on Idaho’s mighty Snake River, Evans helped establish the massive adjudication of thousands of water rights in the Snake River Basin, a vast undertaking that took 30 years and its completion will be celebrated later this summer.

Evans became an early advocate of state-level compacts to help manage nuclear waste and created enough public attention around the U.S. Department of Energy’s dubious practice of injecting Idaho National Laboratory process water into the huge Snake River Aquifer that DOE finally abandoned the practice. I remember the day that DOE finally decided to celebrate the end of the aquifer discharges rather than continue to resist John Evans. A media event was held at INL – I still have the hefty paperweight commemorating the occasion – and a smiling Evans helped seal the injection well.

Evans even had to deal with the aftermath in northern Idaho of the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helen’s in Washington state.

In 1986, John Evans made his last race for public office, a losing effort for the United States Senate in a bitter race against incumbent Steve Symms. Symms finished out his truly lackluster two terms in the Senate and Evans took on his own second act – growing the family business. Today D.L. Evans Bank has become a community banking powerhouse across southern Idaho in no small part because of the same kind of diligence and hard work that John V. brought to his public life.

On a purely personal note, I’ll forever remember John Evans as a truly kind and decent man, which is saying something in our day of too often cynical meanness in our politics. I think it was 1981 when the region’s governors gathered in Boise to help launch the regional energy planning and conservation effort embodied in the Northwest Power Act. As a producer and television host at Idaho Public Television, I hatched the bright idea of trying to pull off a full-blown half hour sit down interview with the governors of Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Montana. Not only did Evans allow us to turn his office into a make-shift television set for a day, but he personally buttonholed the other governors – Dixie Lee Ray, Bob Straub and Tom Judge – and asked them to participate. It may have been the first and last time such an interview was done and had Evans been any less open or accommodating it simply wouldn’t have happened.

While it is a political fact that Evans reached the governor’s office as an “accidental governor,” it shouldn’t be forgotten that he also won two races of his own to keep the job. He faced a tough re-election in 1982 given the sour economy, a fierce battle over right-to-work legislation, and Idaho’s still unfortunate flirtation with a California-style property tax limitation. Republicans nominated popular Lt. Gov. Phil Batt that year.

The Evans – Batt race may well have turned in the final days of the campaign when an independent expenditure committee produced a comic book-style pamphlet criticizing “Big John” Evans. Evans was portrayed as an inept flunky for organized labor, but the caricature didn’t match the kindly, decent, honest guy who Idahoans had come to trust with the governor’s office. Batt was slow to distance himself from the smear and Evans won with 52% of the vote.

When Evans, somewhat controversially, appointed the outspoken, often caustic former legislator and newspaper editor Perry Swisher to the Idaho Public Utilities Commission in 1979, I sat down with Swisher for an extended interview on the afternoon of the day the governor announced his appointment. Near the end of the interview I asked Swisher for a short sentence to sum up John Evans. With no hesitation, Swisher said of the man who had just appointed him to a very important job, “John Evans is the mayor of Malad who by a quirk of political fate became governor of Idaho.”

A true enough statement, but incomplete. Evans took the small town qualities that make a mayor successful – attention to detail, remembering people’s names and needs, and a focus on practical and common sense solutions – and created ten productive years in the Idaho Statehouse. He should be remembered as one of Idaho’s best governors and, moreover, as a very nice and very decent fellow.

Baucus, Mansfield, U.S. Senate

Texas Two-Step

ted_cruz2The junior senator from Texas would not appreciate the comparison, but freshman fire-brand Ted Cruz has risen higher and faster in the United States Senate than even the legendary Texan Lyndon Johnson. It took LBJ only two years in the Senate to win election as minority leader and then two years later he was the top Democrat in the country, standing astride the Senate as majority leader, cutting deals with Ike. Cruz is on a faster trajectory.

In the considered opinion of Tony Perkins, one of the leaders of the social conservative wing of the GOP, Sen. Cruz  “has become a de facto leader of the Republican Party. He is what people are looking for. Somebody who will stand up and say, ‘This is what I stand for, this is what I believe.'”

Texas native Bob Schieffer appeared astounded last Sunday about the rapid rise of Cruz and he asked Sen. John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas who Cruz has declined to endorse for re-election, about just how it is that the young man in a hurry has become the party’s chief strategist and spokesman.

“Let me just ask you this,” Schieffer said on Face the Nation. “You’ve been around for a while.  How is it that you wind up with a freshman senator, who’s been in office less than a year, becomes the architect of this thing that has the two sides so gridlocked that nobody seems to know a way out of it?  How did that happen?”

Choosing his words carefully and looking a little taken aback, the number two Republican in the Senate covered for his non-collegial colleague from Texas, “I think what Ted and so many others are addressing is the fear in this country that we are careening down a path that unless we stop and correct it, in terms of spending, in terms of government over reach, that our country will become something we don’t even recognize,” Cornyn said.

The operative word in Cornyn’s sentence is “fear” and in the long history of the United States Senate only two men in modern times rose as far and as fast as Ted Cruz has in 2013. Huey Long did it in the early 1930’s and Joe McCarthy did it in the early 1950’s. And make no mistake, Ted Cruz is of a piece with those great Senate demagogues of the past. His tactics and use of fear come right out of the same old playbook.

Writing in the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen made explicit the Cruz-McCarthy axis. Part of McCarthy’s eventual downfall was that he never made the early-50’s transition from print to television, but Cruz is a master of the soundbite media. It is telling that the images on Cruz’s official Senate website are nearly all from one of his countless appearances on cable talk shows or C-Span.

“Cruz has both a comely appearance and a mastery of his message,” Cohen wrote, “A viewing of [Cruz on Meet the Press recently], as well as a close reading of the transcript, reveals a man who speaks in whole sentences, actual paragraphs and who feels no obligation, moral or otherwise, to actually answer a question. The English language exited his mouth ready for publication. Cruz does not clear his throat. He does not repeat the question while he riffles through memorized talking points. At every turn, he made Harry Reid the heavy — if only the Democratic Senate leader could be reasonable! — while he, Cruz, and his allies were the very soul of moderation.”

Joe McCarthy’s bogie-man was, of course, nameless, faceless communists in the United States government. Ted Cruz’s villain also has an ominous name – Obamacare. “Just like the Communist menace of the past, the Affordable Care Act cannot be seen nor, given the Obama administration’s inept selling effort, even understood,” Cohen wrote. “Until just now, it didn’t even exist, although in Cruz’s telling it has already forced good people from their jobs and soon, no doubt, from their very homes as well.”

And just like Tail Gunner Joe waving about his made up lists of communists in the State Department, Ted Cruz confidently alleges, without the slightest evidence of course, that “Obamacare is the biggest job-killer in the country.”

Just like Huey Long, the silver-tongued demagogue from Winn Parish, Louisiana, the glib honors grad from Princeton has become by many accounts the most hated man in the Senate, a charge Cruz flicks away with a smile. “Look, what the Democrats are trying to do is make this a battle of personalities,” Cruz told Megan Kelly on Fox, “they have engaged in relentless, nasty personal attacks…I don’t intend to defend myself. I don’t intend to reciprocate.

A nasty personal attack is obviously only a nasty personal attack when it is aimed at the junior senator. When Cruz suggested very McCarthy-like, and with absolutely no evidence, that fellow Republican Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, former Senator and now Secretary of Defense, was hiding foreign sources of income during his confirmation hearings, the Texas senator was, in his view, merely engaging in honest, high-minded inquiry.

“We do not know, for example, if [Hagel] received compensation for giving paid speeches at extreme or radical groups,” Cruz said just before the Armed Service Committee voted on confirmation. “It is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.” This time-tested political tactic – make your opponent deny an outrageous charge – is, in the hands of a glib communicator, the slick and oily stuff that made Long and McCarthy household names.

Like Cruz, Huey assailed the leadership of his own party, demanding in 1932 that Democrats needed more “radical” leadership. “Waltzing up and down the aisle, mopping his brow with a pink handkerchief, Long dramatically resigned from all Senate committees,” historian Cecil Weller has written, so as not to be obligated to his party’s Senate leadership. “We cannot sit here and tell the people that they can swap the devil for a witch,” Long said in condemning what he considered the timid leadership of his own party.

Some Republicans have started to push back against Cruz, but with the exception of Sen. John McCain few are doing so in public and the reason is that one word – fear. McCain has called Cruz a “wacko bird” and has condemned the defund Obamacare strategy as “not rational” and a “fool’s errand.” But Cruz’s defenders, like Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, ride immediately to his defense just as McCarthy’s acolytes once did.

Bozell blasted McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee for president, for being among the “whiners” and “faux conservatives” who have criticized Cruz for leading the fight that triggered the government shutdown. Meanwhile, the junior senator stands nearby soaking up the cheers and offering his telegenic smile.

Most Republicans were tragically slow to condemn McCarthy and his tactics in the 50’s and most Democrats flinched at confronting Long in the 30’s. Like Cruz, each of the earlier demagogues commanded a national following and were willing to threaten and browbeat any opponent. The fear factor worked, at least for a while. Maryland Sen. Millard Tydings, a conservative Democrat, was among the first to label McCarthy “a fraud and a hoax.” McCarthy quickly got even using a completely fabricated photo of Tydings allegedly talking with an American communist leader to help defeat the long-time senator. By the same token, Long’s grip on the south was so solid after 1932 that few people in positions of real power were willing to risk his wrath by calling him out.

Ted Cruz’s rise to the top of the Republican Party has been just as fast – he has after all used many of the same successful tactics – as Long and McCarthy, but the boy wonder from Texas may find that his trip down from the mountain top occurs just as fast. Once the Senate, and particularly those in their own parties, got a belly full of the antics of Huey and Joe their days of fear and effectiveness were numbered. The Tea Party faction of the GOP considers Cruz a hero today, but his fortunes also sink right along with his doomed strategy to shutdown the government, engage in glib accusations and hardly disguised character assault.

Ultimately it will be up to Republicans to embrace or reject the junior senator from Texas, because he is more about them than the country. As Republicans mull that stark choice; a choice that could do so much to shape the party’s future electoral success, it would be well to ponder the crystal clear words of a long ago senator from Maine – Margaret Chase Smith. On June 1, 1950, the prim and proper Sen. Smith took to the Senate floor to chastise her colleagues and call the GOP to its better angels.

“As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican Party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge that it faced back in Lincoln’s day,” Smith said in one of the great speeches in Senate history. “The Republican Party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation—in addition to being a party that unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.

“Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of ‘know nothing, suspect everything’ attitudes. Today we have a Democratic administration that has developed a mania for loose spending and loose programs. History is repeating itself—and the Republican Party again has the opportunity to emerge as the champion of unity and prudence.

“The record of the present Democratic administration has provided us with sufficient campaign issues without the necessity of resorting to political smears. America is rapidly losing its position as leader of the world simply because the Democratic administration has pitifully failed to provide effective leadership.”

Margaret Chase Smith entitled her famous speech “National Suicide” and it was aimed primarily, of course, at McCarthy and his ilk, but also contained a very practical political warning that seems eerily appropriate today.

To merely displace a Democratic administration, Smith said, “with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this Nation. The Nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.

“I doubt if the Republican Party could—simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party win that way. While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican Party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican Party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.

“As members of the minority party, we do not have the primary authority to formulate the policy of our Government. But we do have the responsibility of rendering constructive criticism, of clarifying issues, of allaying fears by acting as responsible citizens.”

Quite a speech. I wonder if anyone is capable of giving such a speech in the United States Senate today?