I’m Marc’s Prostate

Jun 17th, 13 / Comments Off

getty_rm_photo_of_man_in_doctors_office

As a kid growing up it always seemed that we had a daily newspaper in the house, as well as a magazine or two. We watched the network evening news, of course, everyone did, but for real information we turned to print. Very old school. My Dad was particularly fond of Reader’s Digest and would often consume the entire contents of the latest edition in one sitting. The articles were mostly short, crisply written and, in matters of politics, almost always had a right-of-center slant.

The Digest also had jokes that could be repeated safely in polite company. I particularly remember pages of jokes called “Humor in Uniform” (for the World War II generation like my parents ) and “Life in These United States,” humorous little stories about everyday life.  Sometime in the 1960′s the Digest also started publishing a series of short articles on various aspects of human health all written from the perspective of the vital organ featured. I distinctly remember Dad pointing out to me that I needed to read and absorb a little feature entitled “I’m Joe’s Heart.”

“I’m certainly no beauty,” Joe’s Heart says writing in the first person (or organ). “I weigh 12 ounces, am red-brown in color, and have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of —well, let’s call him Joe. Joe is 45, ruggedly good-looking, has a pretty wife, three children and an excellent job. Joe has made it. Me? I’m Joe’s heart.”

Joe’s heart goes on to report that Joe probably eats too much fat, has gained weight, smokes and doesn’t exercise enough. Sound familiar? It was a good, gentle and authoritatively delivered message that remains as appropriate today as it was to the Don Draper generation in the 1960′s. Reader’s Digest pieces on “Joe’s Liver” and “Joe’s Kidney” followed. I don’t recall that there was a Reader’s Digest piece on Joe’s Prostate this was, after all,  way before WebMD and “men’s health” (and women’s, for that matter) wasn’t much discussed in the polite company where Dad told his jokes.

Things have changed for the better in that regard with the Internet full to overflowing with good, authoritative information on “Joe’s Prostate,” or in the case that I have become most familiar with – my prostate.

Like more than 200,000 American men annually I was diagnosed recently with prostate cancer. Next to skin cancer, prostate cancer in the most commonly occurring cancer among American men. The disease claimed more than 28,000 lives in 2009, the last year for which we have the most complete figures. There is almost truth to the line I’ve heard and now use myself – “if you live long enough, I’ll get prostate cancer.” Prostate cancer is indeed widespread and it takes a particular gruesome toll among African-American men.

My case – special to me, for sure – nonetheless seems fairly typical in many ways. My own concerns about heart health lead me some years ago to regularly monitor blood pressure, cholesterol and other blood markers. Often these simple blood tests will also include the somewhat controversial screen for prostate cancer - the PSA test, or  prostatic specific antigen. Early this year my PSA level took a jump in the wrong direction. A re-test confirmed the increase and signaled cause for concern. A number of good and caring health care professionals advised a biopsy of, what until this spring had been, my somewhat mysterious prostate. The biopsy, conducted in a doctor’s office, confirmed cancer.

Like millions of other Americans I now know what it’s like to have a doctor straightforwardly tell you – “you have cancer.” Wow. Didn’t see that coming. It is a moment of coming face-to-face with your own mortality. One’s attention is immediately fixed.

Like any unwelcome news there was for me, at least, a period of denial. There must be some mistake, right? Cancer doesn’t run in the family. From a health standpoint I haven’t been behaving that badly. Maybe too much red meat and too few veggies, but I get my exercise. What gives? Soon enough denial gave way to questions about what can be done to treat the unwelcome visitor in the nether regions of the male anatomy? Answering that question became a research mission of the kind I have never before undertaken.

I offer only two pieces of advice in this little prostate post with the first being the importance of becoming your own best advocate when confronted with any health challenge. Doctors and other medical professionals are (generally) wonderful people, committed, smart, caring and often overwhelmed. They exist not just to treat your condition, but to be a walking, talking sources of first-rate professional information. In order to take full advantage of their knowledge, however, I’m convinced you must do your own homework and engage in the development of your own treatment strategy. Knowledge really is power and information about your health care options truly is empowering.

Since April I’ve spent hours reading, consulting friends who have dealt with the same issue, and quizzing health care professionals trying to learn about what I now consider my favorite gland. I gave that gland up to surgery a little over a week ago after it became clear to me that what the surgeon’s call a “radical prostatectomy” was my best option given factors like age, overall health and the state of my cancer. The surgery, again from my perspective, was a very big deal. Thousands of men undergo this treatment every year, but facing major surgery, time in hospital and recovery was a brand new experience for me.

Friends and family faced this new challenge with me and 10 days on I’m feeling better and better. There will be months ahead of coping with and overcoming the undesirable side effects of prostate removal, but thanks to early detection, superb medical care and those who have helped – they know who they are – I feel today like a 60 year old guy with a new lease on life.

Second piece of advice: don’t be confused about the controversy and debate over the utility of PSA testing after age 40. Every male needs to have enough information in order to formulate a personal point a view on this central issue of male health. In my case, because a savvy family practice doctor has rather routinely checked my PSA levels, which led to my early diagnosis, I am an advocate of the checks on a regular basis. The rap against the test is that it’s not precise, produces false positives and causes many men to undergo expensive testing that may not be needed.

In short, whatever you decide for yourself, don’t be a victim of a lack of knowledge. Take charge of your own health. Decide what works for you. It just might save your life. In my case I’m convinced regular testing and early diagnosis did save my life.

Finally to all the family and friends who have sent endless good wishes my way for the last couple of months I can only say – thanks a million. In the busy world of the 21st Century it is all too easy to take for granted, or not fully appreciate, the awesome power of people who take the time and trouble to care. Take it from me: it means the world.

Late last week a call from my surgeon confirmed that the pathology work up on my former prostate and the other tissue he removed during surgery was negative. My cancer had not spread beyond the prostate. In the textbooks they call that a good outcome.

My personal brush with the disease that is described as the “most rapidly rising” in most countries around the world was both frightening and enlightening. I am richly blessed to have had access to (and been able to afford) world-class health care and the tools to seek out information upon which to make life changing (and saving) decisions. I come away with a new appreciation for the American public health crisis of obesity, poor nutrition and lack of access to care and I’m convinced that knowledge and awareness of a whole range of health care issues is at the heart of a healthier country.

I’ve always taken good health for granted. I now consider it a gift, indeed a miracle.

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Health Care, Prostate Cancer

Appointing Senators

Jun 5th, 13 / 0 Comments

senateSam Ervin, the white haired Constitutional law expert from North Carolina who presided over the most famous and consequential Senate investigation ever, may never have made it to Senate had he not first been appointed to the job. That’s Ervin in the photo surrounded by Watergate committee staff and Sen. Howard Baker in 1972.

Ervin, appointed in 1954, served 20 years in the Senate and is now remembered to history for his drawling, gentlemanly and expert handling of the investigation that exposed the corruption at the very top of the Nixon White House. Ervin is one of about 200 people appointed to the Senate by governors since we started the direct election of Senators in 1913. All but seven of the Senators by stroke of the pen have been men.

As New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie considers his enormously high profile appointment to fill the seat vacated by the death of long-time Sen. Frank Lautenberg, it’s worth pondering the unique gubernatorial power under our system to literally create a senator. There is nothing else quite like it in our politics.

In keeping with his flamboyant style, Christie made news by saying he’ll appoint a temporary replacement and then immediately call a special primary election in August and then a Senate election in October, just weeks before Christie himself faces the voters, in order to give New Jersey voters a say in who their senator will be. New Jersey will then vote again for a Senator in November 2014. If all this plotting seems a little too calculating even for Gov. Christie then welcome to the strange world of appointed senators.

The analysis of Christie’s strategy has been rich and for a political junkie intoxicating. The governor knows he needs to make an appointment, but by calling a quick election to either validate or reject his appointee Christie (perhaps) can distance himself from his own pick. By scheduling the election three weeks before his own re-election goes to the voters Christie can get the complicated Senate business out of the way in hopes it won’t impact issues or turnout in his campaign. Or…well, offer your own theory.

One thing seems certain in New Jersey. Christie is too smart and too politically savvy to appoint himself. That has been tried and never works. Montana Gov. John Erickson orchestrated such a self-appointment in the early 1930′s and he subsequently lost when voters correctly concluded the appointment smacked too much of a backroom deal. Same thing happened with Idaho Governor-turned-Senator Charles Gossett in the 1940′s. Gossett resigned as governor having cut a deal with his Lt. Gov. Arnold Williams to immediate appointment him to the Senate. Voters punished both at the next opportunity. In 1946 the Senate actually had two self-appointed Senators – Gossett and Nevada’s Edward P. Carville who cut the same deal with his second-in-command. Carville also lost a subsequent bid to retain his self-appointed Senate seat. History tells us there is not a high bar to Senate appointments, but one thing that doesn’t pass the voter’s smell test is an appointment that smacks of an inside deal. Note that Christie made a point in his public comments to say he wouldn’t be part of such a deal, but his appointment when it comes will be scrubbed up one side and down the other for hints of just such a deal.

Idaho is actually in the running for the most appointed Senators – six by my count – with one of that number, Sen. John Thomas, actually appointed twice, once in 1928 and again in 1940. Alaska’s Ted Stevens first came to the Senate by appointment, so did Maine’s George Mitchell (a future majority leader) and Minnesota’s Walter Mondale (a future vice president). Oregon’s great Sen. Charles McNary came to the Senate by appointment and stayed to become a respected Republican leader and vice presidential candidate in 1940. Washington’s three-term Gov. Dan Evans was later appointed to the Senate. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a great leader on foreign policy during the early Cold War years, was an appointed Senator, so too Mississippi’s James O. Eastland, a power on the Judiciary Committee and a six-term Senator after his appointment.

Virginia’s Carter Glass had a remarkable political career – Congressman, Secretary of the Treasury, appointed Senator who went on to serve 26 years in the Senate and become an authority on banking and finance. The Glass-Steagall Act, a hallmark of the early New Deal regulation of banking, bares his name.

Only a handful of women have come to the Senate by the appointment path and most have replaced their husbands. Rose McConnell Long filled out the remainder of husband Huey’s term in 1935 and 1936, but opted not to run herself. Arkansas’ Hattie Caraway was appointed to fill the term of her deceased husband and then became the first women elected in her own right to the Senate in 1932. She won another election in 1938 and then lost a Democratic primary in 1944 to J. William Fulbright who went on to become one of the giants of the Senate.

Gov. Christie has a lot to ponder as he considers creating a United States Senator with the stroke of a pen. Will he create a Thomas Taggart of Indiana or an Irving Drew of New Hampshire? Both were appointed Senators and, don’t be embarrassed, there is absolutely no reason you should have ever heard of either one. Taggart, a Democrat, served a little over seven months in 1916 and lost an election bid. Drew, a Republican, served barely two months in 1918 and didn’t bother to run on his own. For every Sam Ervin or Charles McNary there is an appointed Senator who is something less than a household name.

Maybe Christie create a Senator like Idaho’s Len Jordan, a former governor appointed to the Senate in 1962 who went on to twice win election in his own right and establish a solid legislative record.

If history is a guide, Christie will reward a loyal and safe member of his own party – former Gov. Tom Kean for example – and someone unable or unwilling to overshadow the governor. The person appointed must also fulfill the fundamental qualification for the office – do no harm to the person making the appointment. Did I mention that appointing a Senator is just about the most political thing any governor can do? It’s going to be rich political theater to watch and analyze the actions of the governor of New Jersey who both wants to be re-elected this fall and run for president in 2016. Let the appointing begin.

 

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Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Politics, U.S. Senate

Congress Investigates

May 30th, 13 / 0 Comments

You could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the only thing Congress really seems to do these days is launch investigation after investigation of the Executive Branch. The chief House investigator, California Republican Darrell Issa, is a southern California multi-millionaire and a tough partisan who made his fortunate in the car alarm business. His voice – “Step away from the car” – was once more famous than his power to issue a subpoena. Not anymore.

Darrell Issa is the latest of a long, long line of Congressional investigators, politicians who have frequently overplayed their powerful hands. Occasionally and thankfully throughout our history a few investigators have brought real credit to the important role of the Congressional investigation, a Washington institution with a long and checkered past.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee gleefully suggested the other day that Issa will have a busy summer.  ”I’ve got a good feeling that Darrell Issa is going to be having quite a summer in reviewing what’s been going on here in the White House as far as this scandal is concerned,” said Reince Priebus and he was only referring to the Congressional review of the IRS scandal. Since Priebus spoke Issa has issued additional subpoenas for more White House records on Benghazi. All signs indicate he has hardly begun.

A Brief History of the Congressional Investigation

What is widely acknowledged to have been the first Congressional investigation took place during the presidency of George Washington in 1792 and centered on an inquiry into a disastrous military expedition led by Major General Arthur St. Clair against native tribes in the then-Northwest Territories. St. Clair lost more than half of his 1,400 man command – a defeat substantially greater than Custer’s at the Little Big Horn – and Congress, trying to understand what happened and why, eventually requested documents and records pertaining to the expedition from Secretary of War Henry Knox. After some days of consideration, Washington ordered Knox, as well as Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, to turn over the documents to Congress.

Feeling its way into the virgin territory of a Congressional investigation of the Executive branch, Congress, much as it still does, moved in fits and starts over the next year. Witnesses were called, reports examined, politics reared its unruly head and eventually in 1793 nothing much happened. General St. Clair was more-or-less vindicated, but he felt his good name had still been damaged badly. It is true that St. Clair, a significant Revolutionary War figure, has largely been forgotten, one of the earliest examples perhaps of the power of Congress to ruin a reputation. In an essay on this very first Congressional investigation, George C. Chalou notes that General St. Clair “emerged neither victor nor victim.” It was not a particularly auspicious beginning.

Every president, including the greatest ones like Jackson and Lincoln, have had to navigate the politics and public relations of the Congressional investigation. The great historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has written that Jackson complained in 1820, while subject of a Congressional investigation, that “he was deprived of the privilege of confronting his accusers, and of interrogating and cross-examining witnesses summoned for his conviction.”

Lincoln’s every executive decision and his strategy as Commander-in-Chief during the Civil War were poured over and second guessed by The Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the Present War, an all-powerful Congressional committee dominated by Radical Republicans often a odds with Lincoln. Historian Elizabeth Joan Doyle has written about the notorious committee and its imperious chairman Sen. Benjamin Wade of Ohio. “So flagrant were the abuses of the civil rights of the objects of the committee’s wrath (selective vendettas were carried on against a number of military officers) that one can only conclude that in the mid-nineteenth century most of the Republican majority in Congress agreed with Wade and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens that, in wartime, there could be neither a Constitution nor a Bill of Rights.” Ironically most of the members of the Civil War-era Committee on the Conduct of the War were lawyers.

The Congressional investigation, often marked by raw partisanship and fueled by ambitious political players, had fallen into such disrepute in the early 20th Century that the great columnist Walter Lippmann wrote of “that legalized atrocity, the Congressional investigation, in which congressmen, starved of their legitimate food for thought, go on a wild and feverish manhunt, and do not stop at cannibalism.”

Montana Sen. Thomas J. Walsh substantially rehabilitated the image of the Congressional investigation in 1922 with his calm, through and ultimately brilliant investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal. Teapot Dome, along with Watergate in the Nixon-era, is now generally considered to have established the gold standard for one branch of government investigating another. Walsh’s findings sent a Cabinet member, Interior Secretary Albert Fall, to jail and his handling of the investigation was so widely praised, after the fact, that the New York Sun said that the Montana senator was nothing less than a “Statue of Civic Virtue.”

In 1924, Walsh’s Montana colleague Burton K. Wheeler led a headline grabbing investigation that forced Warren Harding’s attorney general, Harry Daugherty, to resign and exposed widespread corruption in the Justice Department. (Daugherty has recently gotten a new lease on life, if you can call it that, as a shady character is the popular television series Boardwalk Empire.) Hard to believe now but both Senate investigations were widely condemned at the time, even by the New York Times, as nothing more than Congressional “poking into political garbage cans.”

One reason the Walsh and Wheeler probes were so powerful, and ultimately so effective, was the completely bi-partisan nature of the investigations. Republicans had the majority in the Senate in the 1920′s, but Democrats Walsh and Wheeler, both lawyers trained at assembling evidence and questioning witnesses, were given authority by GOP chairmen to run the high profile investigations. Imagine such a thing today. I can’t, it’s impossible. Wheeler’s investigation also ultimately played a key role in an important Supreme Court decision of lasting significance – McGrain v. Daugherty – that validated the power of the Congress to compel testimony as a critical component of its Constitutional responsibility to legislate.

Few today would defend the fairness or bi-partisanship of investigations in the 1940′s and 1950′s by the House Un-American Activities Committee or Joseph McCarthy’s reputation ruining, made-for-TV events that eventually claimed the Wisconsin senator as a victim of his own excess. By the same token Harry Truman’s exemplary investigation of the defense industry in the 1940′s shines as a beacon for the way Congress should, but doesn’t always, exercise its awesome responsibility to check and balance the executive.

Here’s what Truman said in 1944. “The power to investigate is one of the most important powers of Congress. The manner in which that power is exercised will largely determine the position and the prestige of the Congress in the future.” Truman was correct. The power to investigate is essential to our system and it can be used for many purposes, to illuminate and legislate or to damage and destroy.

Here’s hoping Darrell Issa has read his history. He might consider just what kind of investigator he wants to be – a Ben Wade or a Harry Truman, conducting a”wild and feverish manhunt” or a sober investigator remembered as a “statue of civic virtue?”

The power and prestige of the Congress are on the line as Mr. Issa heads into his busy summer.

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Congress, House of Representatives, Politics

Following the Money

May 28th, 13 / 0 Comments

One of the great faults of American journalism – and there seem to be so many in the age of never ending news cycles – is what journalist and tax analyst David Cay Johnston calls the “unfortunate tendency…to quote people accurately without explaining the underlying context.”

The story of the IRS targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny when those groups applied for IRS certification of tax-exempt status is a case in point – a breaking political story without a lot of context. Most reporting, as far as it has gone, has appropriately focused on who did what and why? Google Lindsey Graham/IRS and you’ll find 4,500,000 hits with the latest being the senator’s call for a special prosecutor to probe the “a scandal worse than Watergate.”

What has largely been missing is the origin of the whole brouhaha. Of course the who did what and why must be investigated and, trust me, it will be, but nothing ever happens in a vacuum where politics are concerned. The context of the IRS scandal is enormously important to understanding what has happened. Appropriate for the IRS – it always begins with money.

As former Wall Street insider and one-time Treasury Department counselor Steven Rattner tried to provide a little context recently in the New York Times:

“The decision in 2010 to target groups with certain words in their names did not come out of nowhere. That same year, the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case substantially liberalized rules around political contributions, stimulating the formation of many activist groups.

“In the year ended Sept. 30, 2010, the division received 1,741 applications from ‘social welfare organizations’ requesting tax-exempt status. Two years later, the figure was 2,774. Meanwhile, the staff of the division tasked with reviewing these applications was reduced as part of a series of budget reductions imposed on the I.R.S. by anti-tax forces.

“A far higher proportion of the new applicants wanted to pursue a conservative agenda than a liberal agenda. So without trying to defend the indefensible profiling, it wouldn’t be that shocking if low-level staff members were simply, but stupidly, trying to find an efficient way to sift through the avalanche of applications.”

In other words, thousands of applications for tax-exempt status for “social welfare organizations” inundated the IRS in the two years after five members of the Supreme Court effectively removed most restrictions on money, especially corporate money, in American politics. A bunch of smart political operatives – think Karl Rove and Bill Burton – seized this historic moment in our political history to create an opportunity to make a lot of money for themselves and spend a lot of money in highly partisan ways with all of it carefully hidden from any public disclosure. The one quasi-public step of the process to receive IRS sanction is to apply for an exemption, which as Steve Rattner notes, thousands of groups were doing in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Other groups just began operating without the formal approval apparently confident that they would eventually get the OK. The most well-financed groups like Rove’s Crossroads GPS and Burton’s Priorities USA could afford the kind of legal talent that is steeped in the nuance of IRS rules thereby virtually ensuring that their applications would thread the tax agency needle.

A little more context. Turns out the IRS rarely denies an application for one of these “social welfare” organizations. The Center for Public Integrity looked at all this and concluded that over the last four fiscal years the IRS has denied the applications of just 60 groups, while approving more than 6,800 applications.

Congress has, of course, delegated the rule making for how to assess these groups to the IRS meaning the bureaucrats are left to determine just what constitutes a “social welfare organization.”

Here’s what the agency’s own internal guidance says:

“Whether an organization is ‘primarily engaged’ in promoting social welfare is a ‘facts and circumstances’ determination.

“Relevant factors include the amount of funds received from and devoted to particular activities; other resources used in conducting such activities, such as buildings and equipment; the time devoted to activities (by volunteers as well as employees); the manner in which the organization’s activities are conducted; and the purposes furthered by various activities.”

Rove’s group, just to take one example, spent more than $300 million in the 2012 election cycle on its version of “social welfare” and is already financing campaign-style attack ads against Hillary Clinton; perhaps the earliest such attack in the history of presidential politics.

Writing in The Atlantic long-time Washington policy and politics observer Norm Ornstein nailed it when he said: “The idea that Crossroads GPS, or the American Action Network, or Priorities USA, or a host of other organizations engaged in partisan campaigning on both sides are ‘social welfare organizations’ is nonsense. Bloomberg’s Julie Bykowicz recently pointed to another example to show the farce here. Patriot Majority USA, run by a Democratic operative, told the IRS its mission was ‘to encourage a discussion of economic issues.’ It spent $7.5 million in ads attacking Republican candidates in 2012–and then virtually disappeared, with Bykowicz unable to reach the group by e-mail or phone. ‘Social welfare?’”

Ornstein’s fundamental point is this: “This is all about disclosure of donors, and about political actors trying to find ways to avoid disclosure.” Bingo.

In Idaho the ultra-conservative Idaho Freedom Foundation, which has never even hinted at the source of most of its money, operates under another section of federal tax law – section 501(c)(3) – and finances a “news service” that generally serves to reinforce the group’s libertarian political agenda, which most recently has been focused on lobbying to keep Idaho from establishing a health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – and publicizing the objections of the group’s executive director to the state’s traffic enforcement mechanism. In order to be exempt under section 501(c)(3) a group must be deemed to be a “public charity” or a “private foundation.”

In Idaho most hospitals are public charities so are many educational foundations and arts and humanities groups, but so too is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which has become one of the most powerful political forces in the state. It must be noted that IFF received its IRS designation before Citizens United started the avalanche of secret political money flowing to tax code empowered outfits like Rove’s, but still the Idaho group most recent tax return says it collected more than $350,000 in grants and contributions in 2011 to further its “public charity” work.

The real point here is that the IRS code is a confused, often contradictory hodge-podge of rules and dodges. Citizens United further confused the already messy landscape and spawned an entirely new industry where vast amounts of unregulated, unreported money is being used to influence public policy and elections. Money and politics going together is as old as eggs with bacon, but this new political world, illustrated anew by the IRS “scandal,” has perverted the one standard that has a chance of keeping our politics remotely clean and transparent. That standard is disclosure. Perhaps the months of investigation into who did what and why at the IRS will help Congress and the American voter see just who is hell bent on using secret money, with the help of the tax code, to increasingly dominate politics.

If it turns out the IRS willfully targeted certain groups, while not looking closely at others, then heads must roll. But if instead it turns out, as seems entirely possible, that the extra “scrutiny” was based on a fumbling bureaucratic response to a incredibly flawed system then Congress should set about to fix that problem.

As Salon’s David Dayen notes, “It’s pretty simple, then, to figure out what took place. The IRS, faced with the enormous task of dealing with a surge of 501(c)(4) groups taking advantage of an often contradictory law, performed triage by taking the path of least resistance – going after the most obvious targets, who didn’t have the resources to artfully stay within the tax laws, or to fight back against invasive reviews. They shied away from the heavily lawyered-up big-money groups, and instead focused on battles they thought they could win.”

There’s some additional context for you.

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Campaign Finance, Idaho Politics, IRS, Politics

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