Year: 2011

2012 Election, Baseball, Minnick, Politics

Interminable

Posted on by christian

Let the Ordeal Begin

Britain has plenty of problems, as the recent and shocking riots in London, Manchester and elsewhere painfully illustrate. In the wake of the unsettling unrest, Prime Minister David Cameron calls on Britons to fight back against further decline in standards and conduct. We watch with some horror, but also fascination. It is, after all, the Mother Country.

Yet, with all the obvious problems of class and race and decline, the Brits have it all over us when it comes to selecting a national leader. Cameron has never had to face an Iowa Straw Poll.

What does it say about a 235 year old democracy that we begin the selection process for one party’s leaders at a state fair in Iowa, where the candidates pay for a choice spot to erect giant tents, some with air conditioned, in order to entice “voters” with BBQ and loud music and utterly simple-minded sloganeering? Welcome to the start of the 2012 American presidential election.

If you were to assemble the top 500 officials in the national Republican Party – senators, members of Congress, governors, top mayors and former office holders – Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who won the Iowa straw poll last weekend, wouldn’t be in the top 15 candidates for President of the United States. The seasoned pros in the party know that nominating Bachmann would be a political disaster, yet the Tea Party darling is now considered one of three top contenders for the prize and all thanks to the 4,823 votes she recorded at the Iowa State Fair. That total put her a whopping 152 votes ahead of Texas libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, another person who couldn’t possibly be selected for high public office by a political jury of his peers.

Our process doesn’t necessarily produce the best leaders, but it certainly produces the world’s longest campaigns.

About the best that can be said for our system of selecting presidential candidates is that the winners have survived the ordeal; survived the lengthiest, most demeaning and often nearly devoid of substance process ever devised by the political mind of man, or woman.

That Michelle Bachmann could actually be considered a potentially serious contender for the presidency based upon a record of no accomplishment in the House of Representatives, a stellar ability to craft a simplistic one-liner and a position on the debt ceiling that puts her at odds with every serious economist in the world, not to mention every serious person in her party, is all one needs to know about our candidate selection process. Come to think of it, that description – minus the debt ceiling nonsense – could well have explained the current occupant of the White House at this stage of the political game in 2007.

So, while David Cameron in Great Britain and most leaders in the rest of the world were vetted and selected for political party leadership by a process of careful evaluation by their peers, we run our leaders through a series of increasingly choreographed “debates,” straw polls, caucuses and primaries that reward the person with the greatest physical stamina and the greatest ability to avoid the self-inflicted gaffe.

With Rick Perry, the Texas governor now in the GOP hunt – with perhaps more to come – don’t be surprised if the process of selecting a Republican standard bearer grinds on well into next spring. Consider this scenario: Bachmann, minus a meltdown, wins the Iowa caucus early in 2012. Mitt Romney wins the first primary in New Hampshire and Perry, at home below the Mason-Dixon Line and with the Christian right in South Carolina. wins in that always nasty early contest.

Should that happen, and it’s not inconceivable, the GOP will have three front runners and a contest with all the substance and decorum of a World Wrestling Federation grudge match. Tell me this is a good way to select a potential president.

 

 

American Presidents, Baseball, Books, Football, Nebraska, Obama, Politics, Wall Street

Accountability

Posted on by christian

On Wall Street and the NCAA

The nation’s political chattering classes have had plenty to chatter about over the last couple of weeks – debt ceilings, riots in London, The Gang of 12, Rick Perry, European sovereign debt, S&P credit ratings and whether Barack Obama can become relevant again.

Lyndon Johnson once reportedly switched off the television in the Oval Office after watching the revered and legendary CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite tell the country that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. “Well,” LBJ said to no one in particular, “If I’ve lost Walter, I’ve lost the country.”

A voice of the inside the beltway progressives, the talented and occasionally snarky Maureen Dowd, isn’t Uncle Walter, but she writes like Obama may have lost her. What Dowd writes has a canary in the coal mine feel about it.

“Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss,” Dowd wrote this week in the New York Times. “Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt.

“Many of his Democratic supporters [in Iowa], who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One, are disillusioned.”

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen, a sometimes “message guru” for Democrats, offered an even more scathing critique of the President’s failures in a highly commented upon Times Op-Ed piece on August 7.

Rather than name names and hold accountable those responsible for the continuing economic mess, Westen said, Obama has utterly failed to address the fundamental need for a president – any president – to be the national narrative setter; to tell a story about what’s gone wrong, how it can be fixed and how the bad guys responsible will be held to account.

In contrast, for example, with Franklin Roosevelt’s full throated condemnation of Wall Street and greedy business leaders as the villains of the original Great Depression, Westen say Obama punted from the first day of his administration. Said Westen, “When faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze.”

Obama, Westen said, can’t bring himself to assemble the suspects in a political line-up and identify the bad guy(s).

He’s got a point. With this morning’s headlines comparing the economic roller coaster ride of the last few days to the awful days in the fall of 2008, I’m hard pressed to think of anyone in a position of authority and power who has been held accountable for the jobs lost, the mortgages foreclosed and the lives uprooted.

Standard & Poors, by all accounts, totally missed the risks of the subprime mortgage meltdown in the last decade when it should have been front and center judging and publicly reporting such risks to the economy. Now S&P’s nameless suits downgrade sovereign debt in high-minded tones, while appearing on the Sunday talk shows lecturing Washington’s leaders on political responsibility. The ratings agency, meanwhile, lobbies Congress not to require that it report “significant errors” in its own performance.

Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, who was at the New York Fed when the economy’s foundation began to crumble, apparently wants to leave his job as more folks call for his head, but Obama has begged him to stay. George W. in back on the ranch and the big Wall Street banks roll on, while the Congress systematically weakens the Dodd-Frank legislation and prevents the appointment of a tough consumer advocate.

Accountability is obviously on an extended summer vacation in the Hamptons.

Contrast the macro-world’s lack of accountability on the economy and little things like jobs and mortgages with the penalties for screwing up in college athletics. Boise State University’s long-time athletic director was fired yesterday by the school’s president in advance of the anticipated sanctions that will be leveled against the school for a variety of infractions involving college sports.

Some boosters immediately questioned the decision to fire a 30-year employee and there will be the predictable second guessing of Boise State President Bob Kustra. But as more of the story comes out, give the one-time politician turned college president this much: the new to the big-time Bronco athletic program is facing its first real big-time challenge with the anticipated NCAA sanctions and Kustra’s personnel action just set the standard for compliance at BSU for the foreseeable future. Good, bad or indifferent that is accountability.

The Ohio State University arguably took too long to fire its slippery football coach, but it happened. It’s now reported the school has paid just south of a million bucks to unravel what went wrong with the Ohio State football program.

In a perfect world there are no mistakes. No one needs to stand and take responsibility and be held accountable. But there is a real world out there that is messy and requires accountability. Particularly in a representative democracy, beset with deep economic, social and political problems, accountability has never been more required.

The British poet, essayist, humorist, and much more Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said “When a man knows he is to be hanged…it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” He might also have said it concentrates the mind of those who observe the hanging.

Accountability is not about grudges or getting even and it’s certainly not about shifting the blame. It is about understanding what when wrong and who was responsible, all in the interest of corrective action.

Dr. Johnson also wisely said “hell is paved with good intentions,” which is another way of saying good intentions don’t mend a broken economy or straighten out college athletics. Accountability isn’t the whole answer, but it is a pretty good start.

 

Baseball, Crisis Communication, Hatfield, Internet., Nobel Prizes, Oregon, Politics, Senators to Remember

Mark Hatfield

Posted on by christian

Not Likely to See His Kind Again

I’ve always thought of Mark Hatfield, the Oregon Republican who died on Sunday, as looking and acting exactly as a United States Senator should. If Hollywood were casting a role for a wise, reasoned fellow to be a U.S. Senator, Hatfield could have played the part. Heck, he did play the part for 30 years.

Most of the obits describe Mark Hatfield as “a liberal Republican,” and that is probably a fine description, as far as it goes. I think of him in the great tradition of Senate independents and independence is way more important in politics than being a Republican, a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative. Hatfield was an independent.

My old friend Joel Connelly correctly calls Hatfield one of the political “giants” of the Pacific Northwest and in his remembrance notes the range of things Hatfield touched, including appropriations, opposition to the Vietnam War, northwest salmon, nuclear disarmament and civil rights. Joel also remembers him, as I do, as one of the most dignified and best dressed guys in politics. Central casting again. Suits don’t make the man, but they don’t hurt, either.

The Oregonian’s Steve Duin remembers, as all who have been close to real politics know, that even the greatest of men walk on feet of clay. Hatfield was complex, could hold a grudge and he relished the perks of power displaying a blind eye to the propriety of accepting gifts from admirers and those whom had benefited from his power.

“Hatfield never lost an election, and rarely campaigned.” Duin writes, quoting the five-term senator as saying, “I am the Senator. I never yield that advantage by becoming a candidate.”

Hatfield was also highly religious and wise in how he applied the lessons he learned as a Baptist who – here is complex again – loved movies and learned early to enjoy dancing. An extensive interview he did in 1982 with Christianity Today introduced Hatfield this way:

“He is a Republican, but is known as a liberal in politics. He is against nuclear war, but he is not a pacifist. He supports all sorts of programs to aid the poor, but he is a diehard fiscal conservative. He is a friend of Billy Graham, and he cosponsors a resolution with Sen. Edward Kennedy. He has never been a “wheel” of the Senate’s power structure, but he has become chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee. He antagonizes his Oregon constituency by voting flatly against a measure 90 percent of them badly want, and they turn right around and reelect him to office. He is a devout evangelical and an active member of Georgetown Baptist Church, but no fundamentalist or evangelical organization has him in its pocket.”

When the role is called for United States Senators from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, I’m betting that the higher power that Mark Hatfield believed in and thought deeply about will want to know how those senators came down on a few issues that define their generation – Vietnam, civil rights, nuclear weapons and treatment of the most vulnerable among us. Flaws and all, Mark Hatfield, the independent, the complex man of faith, was on the right side of history and, who knows, perhaps his God.

Either way, the Northwest has lost one of the true political giants of the 20th Century.

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Christie, Economy, FDR, Obama, Politics

Missing the Signs

Posted on by christian

What Not to Do to a Fragile Economy

It is not really true, as is often said, that history repeats. No historical analogy is ever 100 percent correct. What history does offer, if we’re smart enough to seek it, is a certain context for how decisions made long ago played out and that we might learn from those musty old facts.

As historian David M. Kennedy recounts in his masterful, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Freedom from Fear, at the start of his second term in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt made a series of decisions about the fragile U.S. economy that with perfect hindsight – it was 74 years ago – look as though they could have been made in the frightfully dysfunctional Washington, D.C. of the summer of 2011. In the Roosevelt era, the result was “the Roosevelt Recession” or the “recession within the depression.”

As Kennedy points out, on the same day in the fall of 1937, Roosevelt told his advisors in the afternoon that, in light of a continuing slump in private investment and the lack of job creation, government stimulus spending must be maintained, and then later than night in a speech to a group of business leaders he said that the federal budget must be balanced.

The federal budget was a fraction in 1937 of what it is today, but FDR’s New Deal programs, aimed primarily at reducing unemployment, had overspent tax receipts by $4 billion, a sum nearly equal to the entire federal budget when Roosevelt became president. Sound familiar?

Still, even with all the accumulating red ink, then-Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marriner S. Eccles was astounded that the President had “assented to two contradictory policies” and he wondered if Roosevelt really “knew what the New Deal was.”

Roosevelt proceeded to dither for months while his administration tried to settle on a strategy of spending or cutting. In the end FDR did some of both, sending decidedly mixed signals to the markets, the public and, as the great Utahan who headed the Fed makes clear, his own advisers.

Only in 1938 did Roosevelt agree again to a relatively small stimulus effort that started to bring jobless rates back down, but even with those modest steps it wasn’t until 1941, with war production ramping up dramatically, that employment rates got back to where they had been in 1937.

Historian Kennedy offers the best explanation for FDR’s “weak and contradictory instruments of economic policy” when he says that Roosevelt may have “simply succumbed to the politician’s natural urge to do a little something for everybody.”

Fast forward to the summer of 2011. With the U.S. and global economy threatening to tank in 2008 fashion, with job creation, home construction and economic investment virtually flat, the Congress and the President have been locked in a protracted battle to cut spending as if the awful federal debt – and it is awful – was the pre-eminent economic concern. It’s not.

Like 1937, putting Americans to work is the real crisis confronting the country. Without a much higher percentage of Americans pulling down a paycheck, the country will limp along indefinitely in this wounded state of non-recovery. Yet, no one believes that there is any chance for more real spending to stimulate job creation. Major businesses meanwhile sit on huge piles of cash afraid to jump into a hiring mode for fear that the economy will get weaker before it gets better.

For his part, President Obama seems to send many of the conflicting messages FDR sent in the late 1930’s: control spending, increase jobs, make investments, raise taxes. No wonder the markets, not to mention voters, can’t make heads or tails of the direction.

Congressional Republicans, responding to the continual rightward drift of their party, have so far defined the economic problem as spending that has brought on the record deficits. Obama, meanwhile, has failed to offer his own compelling narrative for what happened to get the country – and the world – in this mess and, better yet, how to get us all out of the ditch.

Kennedy notes that FDR in 1938, thanks to high unemployment, his contradictory economy policies and a stumbling economy, was “a badly weakened leader, unable to summon the imagination or to secure the political strength to cure his own country’s apparently endless economic crisis.”

That, too, sounds familiar.

 

Books, Cenarrusa, Football, Idaho

Spud Bowl

Posted on by christian

Bring on the Sour Cream

Let’s get this out of the way right off the top: there is no better potato in the world than the Idaho potato. World class. Dependable quality. The tuber gold standard. And the “brand” is valuable.

Years ago some enterprising fellow in New Mexico got the bright idea of importing potato sacks with the “Grown in Idaho” mark and filling them with spuds grown, of all places, in New Mexico. A stop was put to that pronto. You can’t have an Idaho potato grown in New Mexico. It’s like Champagne. You may call it champagne, but if it ain’t made from grapes grown in the Champagne region of France and bottled there, it isn’t “real” Champagne, it is merely sparkling wine. Same with an Idaho spud.

So, given the historic Idaho association with the Famous Potato, it’s a natural, I guess, that the once named Humanitarian Bowl football game is now the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl. But Idahoans best brace themselves. The jokes are just beginning.

On Twitter, @TheRobMorse writes: “I’d like to see Chip Kelly coach against Hayden Fry in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.” And @ParkerShield22 says, “Gatorade shower replaced by players spreading butter and sour cream on winning coach and wrapping him in aluminum foil.” You get the idea and, believe me, there are lots more where those came from.

To be serious for a moment, the news of the renaming of the bowl should cause Idahoans – at least those with some responsibility for the state’s “brand” – to consider, well, our image. For a state frequently confused with Iowa – “I was in Des Moines once is that anywhere close to Boise?” – being almost completely defined by an admittedly superb agricultural product may have some real downside.

A lot of marketing folks would tell you, Idaho doesn’t have a brand. Maybe the same is true of most states. New Jersey’s brand? Hazardous waste sites and Tony Soprano. Kansas: The Tornado State. Or, North Dakota: You Can See Canada From Here.

Idaho is Famous Potatoes.

It’s a tough time for the state branding business. Washington State recently ended all state-sponsored tourism promotion. USA Today reported this week that at least 20 states have cut back on efforts to lure visitors, which really means they aren’t marketing whatever “brand” they have.

Not everyone is throwing in the towel, however. Michigan has been all over the air with its pretty good Pure Michigan campaign. Not bad for a state whose largest city can boast of a good baseball team, and not much else, playing amid years of decay. Montana, a state with a real brand, has big billboards in downtown Seattle and a new tourism promotion chief who has the good sense to market the state’s two iconic National Parks.

Idaho’s real marketing problem may just be that a state with such a vast collection of individuals will never be able to settle on one image, slogan or brand. Some Idahoans would be comfortable with calling our place “The Wilderness State,” but that certainly wouldn’t fly with the “no more wilderness crowd.” How about the “State of Big Hearted Rivers?” Nope. Rivers here are for more than floatin’ and fishin’, we use that water to grow, er, potatoes. The no-growth, “I wish it were 1950 again” types might opt for “Idaho – the tick fever state.” Not a winner with the economic development crowd.

Idaho: We Know Nuclear. Nope.

Idaho: Nevada Without the Gambling. Won’t catch on.

Idaho: Easier than Utah to Get a Drink? Even that isn’t really true any longer.

Idahoans should just embrace the iconic potato and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl as the best we got. It’s has put us on the map, or the Internet, after all. Google those words today and you’ll get 1,500,000 hits. It’s not Iowa, yet, but it’s a start and it’s not – thank your potatoes – in a class with the Poulan Weed-Eater Bowl.

 

Baseball, Christie, Economy, Federal Budget, Immigration, Politics

The Deal

Posted on by christian

The System Worked…Barely

I predicted a week ago that the “sensible center” would ultimately behave like adults and avoid a federal government default, but by last weekend I’d revised my personal odds to 50-50 and raised my blood pressure to “unhealthy.” I just didn’t think they’d get so close to messing it all up.

The more sensible member of my household flatly predicted a deal at 8:30 pm (EDT) on Sunday. She was right, missing the President’s announcement of a bipartisan cease fire by an insignificant 10 minutes. So, disaster averted, but now what?

With the deal passed, signed and delivered, the post mortems are rolling in and it’s not very pretty. Wall Street turned on a dime once the deal was done and decided the underlying economy is still a mess. Those nations with decent economies, the countries that once quaked at the thought of American economic power, now shake their heads in disbelief that our political system came so close to going over the cliff of disaster. The political left labels “the socialist” president a sellout. Needing Tea Party support many Republicans now head home to, most likely, face more venom from those who think we can fix a decade of fiscal foolishness in one hot summer in Washington.

Utah’s Orrin Hatch, having it both ways and facing a primary challenge back home, praised the deal and then voted against it. Just for good measure virtually all the GOP presidential candidates now oppose the deal proving, as always, that the safest territory in politics is to be opposed to something while standing on the sidelines without responsibility.

Already the pundits predict a second major political meltdown when the Gang of 12 fails in their task to recommend the next major steps just as the holiday season descends on battle weary Americans who don’t seem to trust anyone on anything, especially when it comes to the economy and fiscal policy.

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey finds broad support – as in 77 percent support – for the notion that Washington’s leaders “acted like spoiled children” in reaching the deal on debt and deficits.

Trying to explain American politics to a British audience, historian Robert Dallek writes in the Daily Telegraph that, “something is at work here that makes you wonder if rational discourse is beyond the capacity of many American voters to understand.”

Dallek accurately describes a Democratic Party increasingly unhappy with Barack Obama, a Republican Party in the death grip of what that old curmudgeon John McCain calls “the hobbits” of the Tea Party movement and a media environment that simplifies and sensationalizes to the point of anger.

“The public,” Dallek writes, “is deeply cynical about politics and politicians. The Congress holds only a 17 percent approval rating and the President now has the approval of less than 50 percent of the public. Moreover, the latest polls show little enthusiasm for any of the potential Republican challengers. Neither Mitt Romney nor Tim Pawlenty nor Newt Gingrich nor Michelle Bachman nor any of the lesser-known names in the mix generate much excitement.”

So, other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did we like this play? The best that can be said is that we dodged a big one, but in the dodging we displayed all the dysfunction, distrust and denial that got us into this mess in the first place.

Makes one wonder what will happen next time.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball, Boise, Montana

A New Stadium

Posted on by christian

A Vision of What Could Be

Bob Uecker – “Mr. Baseball” – best known now as a broadcaster, movie star and funny guy, wasn’t much of a major league ball player. Uecker was a lifetime .200 hitter, but he’s been living off the jokes he makes at his own expense for years. Still jokes aside, Uecker had a couple of pretty good seasons in a Boise Braves minor league uniform back in the 1950’s.

Uecker hit .332 in Boise in 1958 and smacked 21 home runs in only 92 games. One of the ex-Boise Braves funniest lines strikes me as a perfect entry point into the community conversation about whether Boise should embark on a plan to site and build a new, multi-use stadium that could be a much improved home for the city’s current professional team, the Boise Hawks.

Uecker once said, “I led the league in ‘Go get ’em next time.'” Boise is on the ragged edge of having to say, “We’ll get ’em next time,” because without a serious and doable plan to improve its baseball venue the city will be without professional baseball sooner rather than later.

Memorial Stadium, the team’s home since 1989, is aging, undersized, under concessioned and has first base seating that during a hot August night is close to unbearable. In short, the stadium isn’t the kind of venue successful minor league organizations call home any longer.

Look around the country at what’s happening in communities where a stadium has been the centerpiece of a community effort to revitalize, renew and recreate. Dayton, Ohio has a wildly successful Class A team in a great facility that recently established the all-time record for consecutive sellouts. Oklahoma City used a ballpark to jump start the rehabilitation of an old warehouse district. You can grab a drink and a steak at Mickey Mantle’s steakhouse next door to the stadium after a game. Louisville recently built a fine new arena to house University of Louisville basketball and the project has offered a major boost to the city center.

Closer to home, the Yakima Bears of the same Northwest League as the Hawks, are planning on pulling up stakes and moving to Vancouver, Washington next summer. Milwaukie, Oregon, a Portland suburb, is moving ahead with a ballpark plan in order to lure a Class A team.

Last week, Bill Connors of the Boise Chamber and I, along with a sizable group of civic and business leaders, launched the Better Boise Coalition to help push the new stadium concept through its next phase. The Coalition will underwrite a site evaluation study that should complement the feasibility study the City of Boise recently completed.

I’m sure we’ll hear from the “don’t do anything, ever” crowd of naysayers and that’s fine – everyone gets an opinion. Here’s mine: Boise needs professional baseball and needs to aspire to eventually attract a Triple A franchise. We’ll never get there without displaying a level of community engagement and commitment and without a first rate facility. A multi-purpose facility fills a multitude of needs, not just baseball. High school teams will have another venue for regular season and playoff games. The Hawks ownership, and to their credit they want to stay in Boise but just need a better home port, has said they’re interested in a minor league soccer team.

You can anticipate the usual voices saying government should have no role in any of this, but that just ignores reality. Think of any of the community assets that make Boise special and you’ll find government fingerprints on everyone – Bronco Stadium, Taco Bell Arena, the Morrison Center, the Boise Centre, the city’s new libraries. Sure private money is critical in many such investments, but government has to be a catalyst or such things just don’t happen.

I hope we don’t wake up in a couple of years realizing the opportunity has been lost and pull a Bob Uecker. It’s going to ring pretty hollow to say, “hey, we’ll get ’em next time.” Next time is now.

 

Baseball, Cold War, Economy, Egan, Idaho Politics, Nixon, Otter, Politics

What Goes Around

Posted on by christian

A Communist Under Every Bed

It is often said in politics that “what goes around comes around.” This is such a story.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s Arthur Dean was a pillar of the old East Coast Republican establishment, a leading corporate lawyer, chairman of the white shoe New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell and law partner and friend of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower.

Dulles pressed his friend into service in the early 1950’s to negotiate an end to the Korean War. Ambassador Dean, unfortunately for him, agreed to take on that assignment where he ran headlong into the McCarthy era, and particularly Joe McCarthy’s Senate acolyte, Republican Herman Welker of Idaho.

Welker was a small-town Payette, Idaho lawyer and Idaho State Senator when he won a U.S. Senate seat in 1950. Welker arrived in the Senate at the dawn of McCarthy’s national political power and he devoted his one, six-year term to carrying McCarthy’s water, including suggesting that Arthur Dean, the very respectable and very Republican Wall Street lawyer, was “a pro-Red China” apologist.

Dean’s transgression, in the view of Herman Welker, was to suggest that the United States just might consider a more enlightened policy toward Communist China at a time when right wing, virulent anti-Communists in Congress were making almost daily headlines by demanding to know why the United States  “had lost” China to Mao Zedong.

During an interview with a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper reporter, Dean said this: “I think there is a possibility the Chinese Communists are more interested in developing themselves in China than they are in international Communism. If we could use that as a decisive method of putting a wedge between the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union, I think we might try…”

In essence, Ambassador Dean, a Republican serving under a Republican president, was suggesting what Richard Nixon began to accomplish nearly 20 years later – a more nuanced, mature relationship with Communist China. But such talk in 1954, with Joe McCarthy identifying a Commie under ever bed and in every office at the State Department, was not only un-American, but dangerously close to displaying Communist sympathies. Welker pounced on Arthur Dean.

Dean was channeling, in Welker’s view, the views of pro-Communist elements in the U.S. State Department. As to the contention that the Chinese might be more focused on their own internal development than imposing Communism on the rest of the world, Welker dismissed the thought out of hand. “I can’t believe anything can be farther from the truth,” the Idaho Senator said.

Welker’s assault on Dean caused some weeks of discomfort for the Ambassador. He had to repeatedly deny any Communist leanings and justify what many at the time, and most today, would simply consider smart diplomacy. In short, Dean’s loyalty was questioned at a time when your blindly anti-Communist bonafides were the only litmus test for service to the American government.

The myths about “losing China” are deeply embedded in the DNA of American politics. The tangled belief that un-American activities at the highest levels of the United States government had conspired to abandon China to the Communists was the sort of political hot air that powered much of McCarthy’s demagoguery. Idaho’s Welker sang from the same song book.

But it has been Ambassador Dean’s view that has stood the test of time. With the Chinese now threatening U.S. economic leadership worldwide, China owning a huge chunk of our debt and manufacturing ship loads of the consumer goods exported to America, its very clear that the diplomat had a much better crystal ball than the Red Baiting Senator from Idaho.

It turns out the Chinese really were “more interested in developing themselves” in order to compete with us than in advancing world-wide Communism. The proof is all around. The numbers crunchers in Beijing must be sharpening their pencils in anticipation of the failure of our dysfunctional political system to find a solution to debt, spending and revenue so that they can take another great leap forward in cornering a bigger share of the world economy.

Herman Welker, McCarthy’s Senate friend and fellow Commie hunter, is mostly forgotten now; his one Senate term distinctive for nothing more than being on the wrong side of history. Welker’s attacks in the early 1950’s on Idaho Democrats like Frank Church and Glen Taylor for their alleged “radical” and “pink” politics read now like ancient, misguided history, yet some of the old myths and fears about the Communist Chinese continue even as the descendants of Mao eat our economic lunch.

Were Senators Church and Taylor still with us – both died in 1984 – they would no doubt appreciate the irony of the Idaho Republican Central Committee recently demanding an accounting of the state’s political and economic ties with China from Idaho’s Republican Gov. Butch Otter.

The Lewiston Tribune reports that the Idaho GOP resolution reads: “the stability of our form of government is being undermined by strategies used by the Chinese state-government-controlled entities through investments, corporate takeovers, intelligence operations and rare-Earth monopolization.”

Most members of the state central committee weren’t born when Herman Welker represented the state in the Senate, put they are channeling Joe McCarthy’s buddy all the same. What goes around.

The United States has rarely had a sane and sober policy when it comes to China. For years we maintained the fiction that Chiang Kai-shek and the government he established in Taiwan after losing a civil war constituted the real government of China. We squandered years on the fiction that State Department bureaucrats had “lost” China. We fought a senseless war in Southeast Asia, in part, to head off Chinese domination of Vietnam, countries that maintain an historic rivalry and have rarely made common cause.

So, perhaps the Red Chinese Scare of Joe McCarthy’s and Herman Welker’s day really is alive and well in Idaho. The only thing different now is that Republicans are questioning other Republicans about providing aid and comfort to the Communists.

By the way, Arthur Dean’s reputation has survived in substantially better shape than those of the men who blindly questioned his motives and loyalty in the 1950’s. Dean went on to served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, helped persuade Lyndon Johnson to end the bombing of North Vietnam in 1968, and donated a ton of money to Cornell University where he and his wife financed the acquisition of a remarkable collection of papers related to Lafayette and the American Revolution.

Senator Welker’s papers consist of a few large scrapbooks housed at the Idaho Historical Society and the University of Idaho. Most of the pages are covered with newspaper clippings of Welker’s 1950’s assault on Americans who had the audacity to think differently than he did about the world and its future. Some things never change.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

End of Innocence

Posted on by christian

When Did it End for You?

Growing up and loving baseball, I remember having near complete admiration for the daring exploits of the Big Red Machine and particularly “Charlie Hustle” – Pete Rose. I still remember reading a story where Rose made a comment that showed why the guy was such a competitor.

Pete said that maybe a dozen or twenty times during the long major league season, he would come to bat late in a game with no chance that his appearance at the plate could help decide the game one way or the other. In effect, the contest was over. One team or the other – the Reds or their opponent – were too far ahead to think that a comeback was possible. Rose said in such situation he went to the plate determined not to go through the motions on the way to a shower and a steak, but he went to bat determined to get a hit. His logic was superb. The other team was going through the motions. The pitcher was running out the clock, not exerting himself and certainly not bringing his best stuff to the contest. It was a perfect time, in the mind of the hyper-competitive Pete Rose, to add another base hit. Over the course of a long season, Rose knew, a handful of hits can mean the difference between a .280 average and hitting .300. Rose never gave in. Every at bat mattered even if the game wasn’t on the line. I loved that.

Then came the betting, the suspension, the ban, the fact that the best singles hitter of all time, with the all-time record for base hits, won’t make the Hall of Fame because he committed the original sin of baseball – he bet on games. End of innocence. At that moment, I lost the sense that the game was pure. I lost the innocence of a real fan.

The New York Times writer Alan Schwarz had a great piece recently on his own loss of sports innocence – it involved a long-ago Mets trade – and then on Sunday the paper offered fans a chance to comment on when the innocence ended for them. Most, like my Pete Rose case, involved the recognition that things aren’t what they appeared to be, that loyalty knows no home field in sports, that greed, pride and even cheating are more common than we ever want to admit. Our innocence blinds us to reality until one telling moment when it doesn’t.

Now, cue Roger Clemens, Lenny Dykstra, the owners of the L.A. Dodgers, Tiger Woods (who can’t even dismiss his caddy with any class), Lance Armstrong, and you add your favorite pick(s).

My favorite from the fans who responded to the Times article was the guy who wrote this:  “I grew up in the Chicago area. It was when the Cubs traded Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio. Who is Ernie Broglio you say? Exactly.”

Ernie Broglio, by the way, had a respectable 77-74 record as a pitcher in nine seasons, but, hey, he wasn’t Lou Brock. End of innocence.

OK, I know, most sports heroes aren’t. They are all  human. It’s not right to hold them to such high standards. There are few role models, few Henry Aarons or Harmon Killebrews. But, at its best, sport is about dreams and fantasy and hope that miracles can still happen. Maybe it’s naive innocence to believe it, but we do. I don’t want to dislike Pete Rose, but he had it all Charlie Hustle did, but it apparently wasn’t enough. I wanted to believe it was. We all do. We wanted to believe that innocence could triumph over greed and cheating. I wanted to believe that Pete was just what he seemed to be. Then couldn’t.

It’s human nature to have such beliefs. It’s human nature to hurt when they end. Baseball – and sports for that matter – in a messy, contentious, nasty, conflicted world, should be the proving ground for innocence, but it isn’t. There is always a Rose or an Ernie Broglio. Say it ain’t so, Joe. Get some class, Tiger, or at least some self awareness. Even baseball, the perfect game, can break your heart. Innocence can be thrown out stretching a double.

I didn’t suffer the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn or the Colts loading up the moving vans and vanishing in the night to Indianapolis, of all places, but Charlie Hustle snuffed out my innocence candle all the same. I still love baseball. I’m still in awe of the greatest players and the history of the game. I see a kid playing catch with a dad and think, this is the game. I just wish that kid, as he is bound to do, will never reach his moment when it changes. His innocence will end, it always does, and with it a little magic. Maybe that is as it must be with all things, even perfect games played in the sunshine on grass. I just wish Pete hadn’t made those silly bets and that I could get choked up watching him enter the Hall. It won’t ever – ever – happen and there is no innocence in that.

 

Baseball, Federal Budget, Immigration, Politics

Pat Moynihan

Posted on by christian

The Sensible Center

The late, great Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was asked back in 1993, when Congress was debating an earlier federal budget deal, if there “would be a fight until death” over taxes.

Moynihan, intellect and wit in full flower, came back at NBC’s Tim Russert: “Fight until death over taxes? Oh no. Women, country, God, things like that. Taxes? No.”

We may see a grand deal struck this weekend in the long running Washington drama over taxes, spending and debt and it is a safe bet no one will fight until death, even if the rhetoric makes all of what has been going on in the nation’s capitol sound like Armageddon. A deal must be struck. The only Armageddon here would be the shape of national and world economy should the United States of America default on its debt, even for a little while.

No death, just some taxes.

The “big deal” in Washington has never been easy. Our tight system of checks and balances is designed to make it hard, messy and slow. In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt proposed enlarging the U.S. Supreme Court. The morning he rolled out his plan, and FDR was at the very zenith of his popularity at the time, many fellow Democrats declared the plan DOA. It took months of hearings, speeches, efforts at compromise, fights and feuds before Roosevelt’s blunder was disposed of by the Congress. These things take time.

I’m going to guess that the final features of the deal now being hammered out will strike most of the participants as vaguely surreal when the deal is done. They may well ask themselves and each other: how was this possible?

The Oregonian’s Steve Duin talked over a year ago to former Sen. Bob Packwood who had a major role in engineering the historic 1986 tax reform deal. Ronald Reagan was in the White House then, Republicans ran the Senate and the House was Democratic. It’s worth reading the piece to see how a deal got done back then, admittedly when the Senate was a decidedly more civil place, but also to appreciate that the Washington deal always involves a lot of sausage making.

As Duin wrote: “While those [Finance] committee meetings were high theater, the true wheeling and dealing occurred behind closed doors. The standard deduction was increased, preferential treatment for capital gains eliminated. The deduction for state and local taxes ended, the corporate tax rate lowered.

“All of this,” Packwood reminds Duin, “we’re doing in the back room. We’re not doing this in the daylight at all.

“People are willing to give things up for the good of the country if they’re not going to be hauled over the rack right away.”

The Washington deal, as the late Pat Moynihan knew, as Bob Packwood knows, takes time and doesn’t involve threats of death. It does involve at least a few good people willing to give things up for the good of the country.

I think – I fervently hope – the Congress and the President get a deal done that really is good for the country. I have a sneaking hunch the great majority of Americans will embrace such a deal. They want our leaders to lead the country forward not into a fight until death.