Author: christian

2012 Election, Andrus, Baseball, FDR, Military History, Minnick, Politics

The GOP Field

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The Weakest Field Since 1940?

John Weaver, an experienced GOP political operative and former top advisor to John McCain, says his party’s presidential field is “the weakest Republican field since Wendell Willkie won the nomination on the sixth ballot in 1940.”

Weaver is an student of political history and he may be right about the strength of the GOP field, but he is also advising former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, so a skeptic might accuse him of diminishing the entire field to make his “outsider” – an outsider not unlike Willkie – look more electable.

Willkie, a progressive – today he’d be an unnominatable Republican moderate – was an Elwood, Indiana native, a lawyer and a Wall Street utility executive. (Well, one out of three ain’t bad when you are trying to deny Franklin Roosevelt an unprecedented third term.) Willkie was the ultimate dark horse in 1940; not much of a candidate – he had once been a registered Democrat – but he was an impressive man. He had the misfortune of running in a year when the only real issues were the war in Europe and FDR’s try for a third term.

One keen observer of the 1940 election, Democratic National Chairman Edward J. Flynn, told Willkie’s biographer, Steve Neal, that “one of the main reasons for Willkie’s defeat was the lack of support given him by regular Republican organizations. The organizations certainly did not want him to be nominated…unquestionably they left the convention with no kindly spirit toward their candidate.”

Flynn, an old political pro, said Willkie made a classic mistake in 1940 – he ignored or rejected his base. “He took every opportunity the could,” Flynn said, “to insult directly or indirectly the politicians of the Republican party. That course of action never wins an election, and it can certainly help to lose one.”

Willkie was caught between an old-line Republican party in 1940 that wanted desperately to repundiate Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also had to deal with public anxiety about the worsening world situation. France collapsed under the Nazi onslaught during the summer of this long ago election year. Britain turned to Winston Churchill to try and avoid the same fate. The country adopted, with Willkie’s full support, the first peace time draft in its history even as Americans were torn between FDR’s policy of creeping intervention in the European war and a burning desire to simply stay out of another world war.

With opinion polls showing Willkie closing on Roosevelt, FDR uttered a few words on the last weekend of the campaign in Boston that would haunt the rest of his career: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” It was a coldly calculated statement on Roosevelt’s part designed to reassure skittish voters worried about war and it worked.

FDR won 55% of the vote and an Electoral College landslide of 449 to Willkie’s 82. Willkie won his home state of Indiana and just nine other mostly Midwest and western states.

As losing presidential candidates go, Wendell Willkie has been treated pretty well by history. Although he made sharply partisan attacks on Roosevelt during the campaign he was not a red meat candidate. He even later admitted that some of his attacks were launched against the incumbent because politics demanded such things and he enthusiastically embraced FDR’s foreign policy after the election.

The current restiveness among many Republicans about the strength of the GOP field may – big qualifier – may provide an opportunity for a completely fresh face in 2012, the kind of fresh face that Willkie presented in 1940. That said, the timing and nature of modern campaigns makes it seem nearly impossible that a candidate who has gotten organized and out of the gate within the next couple of months could possibly win enough early primaries to capture the nomination. Willkie won the nomination at the 1940 convention when delegates just couldn’t warm to the more conventional GOP canddiates, including Robert A. Taft, Thomas E. Dewey and Arthur Vandenberg.

Amazingly Willkie only switched his formal party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in January of 1940 and he still got the nomination. Not likely such a thing could happen today and a brokered convention any more is virtually out of the question.

Hardly a dark horse, but certainly a fresh face compared to Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich and company, former Gov. Huntsman has now made his own conversion. He quit working for the Obama Administration more than a year before the nominating convention. In the weakest field in 70 years, is he the fresh face of 2012?

 

Andrus, Clinton, FDR, Middle East, Montana, Water

Fort Peck

Posted on by christian

Symbol of American Power

It’s raining in northeastern Montana today. A wet spring following a long winter. The water stands in the wheat and hay fields along U.S. Highway 2 and farmers hereby must wonder when spring will come – if it will come.

The BNSF railroad parallels the highway in this out-of-the-way corner of Montana and both crisscross the Milk River as it meanders to join the big Missouri. In this area just south of the Canadian border, the highway and the railway connect small and shrinking places with distinctly European names – Glasgow, Zurich, Malta and Havre.

This is the Montana Hi-Line, once the pioneering route of James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad. The railroad baron, “the empire builder,” Hill was an advocate of dry land farming and he built his Great Northern west from St. Paul to Seattle, in part, to compete with the rival Northern Pacific, but also to create a transportation route for European immigrants who hoped to fine a bit of agricultural heaven in dry land Montana – hence the names of those glamorous sounding towns along the Hi-Line.

There may be almost too much water this year, but it isn’t always so. Many of the early-day “honyockers, “the immigrant homesteaders who bought into Hill’s railroad marketing, didn’t make it. You can still see the evidence in widely scattered farms that once must have seemed like heaven, that is until the water ran out, the rain didn’t come and the grass gave up. 

When Franklin Roosevelt’s special train rolled along the Hi-Line in August of 1934, it was drought the folks in northeastern Montana were talking about.  Unlike this wet year, the problems in the 1930’s were too much debt and too little water. Roosevelt knew what to do. One farmer in North Dakota yelled at the president: “You gave us beer,” a reference to the end of prohibition, “now give us water.” He did.

With the stroke of a pen, thanks to the powers granted him by creation of the Public Works Administration, FDR authorized the construction of massive Fort Peck Dam. It was the biggest earthern dam in the world when it was completed in 1940. It’s still one of the largest in the world. If you could stretch out the lake shore in a straight line it would reach from northeastern Montana to Atlanta. It’s a very big pond.

FDR came to the Hi-Line in ’34 to see the huge dam under construction. Roosevelt sung the praises of water development in the 1930’s, but was largely motivated to create Fort Peck as a tool to fight unemployment and that worked, too. By the time construction on the dam was in high gear as many as 10,500 workers crawled over the ground south of Glasgow, pushing and hauling thousands of tons of dirt and rock to raise the dam high above the river. It’s estimated more than 50,ooo people worked on the project at one time or another.

The speed with which Fort Peck took shape – work was underway less than two weeks after Roosevelt issued his OK – was also helped by the absense of any requirement for an environmental impact statement (EIS). There was no Endangered Species Act in 1934 and no environmental group stood by to sue to stop the dam. It was a very different time.

Locals recall that folks in northeastern Montana felt it was a patriotic duty to support the construction project, even those who owned the land that is now at the bottom of Fort Peck Lake. This was the era of big dam construction. FDR stopped on his way to Montana to look at Grand Coulee Dam in Washington on the upper Columbia, which was also under construction, as was Bonneville Dam on the lower Columbia..

It seems almost inconceivable today that any of thse big dams, let alone three at once,  could be constructed. They likely wouldn’t pencil out in a cost-benefit analysis, the EIS would take years and cost millions, the Congressional hearings would drag on forever, the money would be difficult (or impossible) to appropriate and those most impacted could instantly put up a Facebook page to protest. It is a very different time.

The fine and talented folks at the Wheeler Center at Montana State University are hosting a conference on the cost of water in northeastern Montana today and tomorrow. They may well conclude that water is priceless, but also too cheap. We take it for granted in the United States, while much of the rest of the world struggles to get enough to get by on a daily basis.

It’s a good time to think about the cost of water. Drought isn’t gripping the throat of the Great Plains this year, instead folks are fleeing the rising river system as far south as Memphis.

Hard to believe looking at the map, but the water backing up behind Fort Peck in this rugged corner of Montana is all part of the hydrology of a river system that drains most of the United States and give life to crops, floats a barge, supports a water skier and, yes, once in a while floods a farmer’s field and drenches a town. Water, it seems, only becomes important when there’s too much or not enough.

Franklin Roosevelt came to Montana more than 70 years ago to make the water stretch and we’re still working on that idea. FDR was determined to “exploit” the resource. He talked about a project to benefit “the whole Nation” and Fort Peck on the upper Missouri is a testament to that vision. Fork Peck simply became the New Deal in Montana. The construction of the dam was envisioned as helpful to flood control and navigation far downstream – Memphis may disagree – and, of course, the president wanted to use this early day “stimulus funding” to whack at the nasty unemployment rate. Hardly anyone disagreed.

Today the Corps of Engineer’s managers at Fort Peck use several fingers to tick off their responsibilities – flood control, navigation, irrigation, recreation, power generation, water quality and fish and wildlife conservation. We still want to make the water stretch.

Long ago the age of building big dams was declared dead, never to rise again. Given the enormous cost and the often unattractive tradeoffs involved in backing up a mighty river its hard to argue that the big dam era is long past and should remain so. Still, standing in the bowels of the big Montana dam this morning and listening to the massive turbines hum – they turn at exactly 167 revolutions per minute – one cannot help but reflect on a simplier time when it was part of America’s claim to greatness that we could build such things.

The Missouri in northeastern Montana is running full tilt this May and they are shooting water down the Fort Peck spillway for the first time since 1997.  That mighty, precious water may just be the most valuable thing on this blue planet. Years ago harnessing it behind a massive earthen dam was a symbol of American power. Being smart enough to use that water wisely in the 21st Century is a test of whether we know how to use that kind of power today.

 

American Presidents, Baseball, Obama, Politics

Juxtaposition

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Koch, Daniels and Trump

Like all political parties who find themselves out of power, national Republicans officially began the search last night for their 2012 identity. The South Carolina GOP debate generally drew the second tier of candidates, no Mitt Romney for exampl,e and even John Boehner, the current face of the party, had dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse rather than watch on Fox.

That was very likely a very good call, Mr. Speaker. Steak and Cabernet vs. early debate red meat and whine.

While reviewing the coverage of the debate – Tim Pawlenty got most of the ink – I was struck by the juxtaposition of three other political stories involving three men who, in some way, could define the Republicans brand in 2012.

David Koch, that’s him above, is the billionaire financier of many conservative causes. Koch told New Yorker magazine that President Obama doesn’t really deserve credit for tracking down and getting Osama Bin Laden and furthermore, while he tries to hide it, the president is clearly “a hardcore socialist.” Koch is an true believer driven by a fierce dislike of the president. That’s one face of the GOP.

Donald Trump over the last few weeks has been another face. The second news item is out of Indianapolis, where Gov. Mitch Daniels presides, and where the greatest of auto races occurs later this month. Apparently race fans used a Facebook page to protest a plan that had The Donald scheduled to drive the pace car at the celebrated Indianapolis 500.

One fan told the Indianapolis Star, “Driving the pace car should not be used as a sound board for some terrible businessman to spew his political aspirations. Especially with this being the 100th anniversary.”

Trump, never one to shade the truth, claimed a scheduling conflict prevented him from slipping behind the wheel, but Star columnist Bob Kravitz cited the fan backlash as the real reason and joked that Trump probably doesn’t have a valid American drivers license anyway. The Trump brand – brash, clownish, a carnival barker – could be another face of the GOP.

But it’s the soft-spoken, self-deprecating Gov. Daniels who not only presents the best face of the party at the moment, but would be the greatest danger to Obama and Democrats next year,

New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, a card-carrying liberal, likes Daniels, which should be the kiss of death among many Republicans for the former Bush Administration official. Daniels is still weighing getting into the GOP primary tussle, but it is looking more likely that he will. If Daniels does get in, he will offer a stark contrast with the rest of the field.

As Hertzberg puts it: “Daniels is unobtrusively friendly. He doesn’t get defensive or suspicious. He is relaxed, and being around him is relaxing. He doesn’t throw off the crackles of craziness—or weirdness or megalomania or suppressed something (rage, fear, insecurity, resentment)—that, to a greater (Palin, Bachmann, Gingrich, Trump, Paul) or lesser (Huckabee, Romney) degree, you get from all the rest. (Huntsman is probably unweird, too, but I haven’t seen enough of him to judge.)”

Daniels in another potential face of the GOP.

Out of power in 1964, Republicans turned to a doctrinaire, flinty conservative named Barry Goldwater. He lost in a landslide. Out of power in 1980, Republicans turned to the sunny, great communicator Ronald Reagan, who defeated an incumbent. The national GOP has just as stark a decision this time around. The pace car has just pulled out.

By the way…

The Idaho Business Review today published my colleague Isaac Squyres’ analysis of the new poll I discussed in yesterday’s post. More on that survey next week.

 

Egan, Guest Post, Idaho Politics, Polling

The Great Divide

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Idaho’s Three Political Parties

According to a new statewide survey of Idaho voters, the state now effectively has three political factions – very economically and socially conservative folks, economically conservative but less socially doctrinaire voters and a shrinking group of Democrats.

The three factions – think of them as almost three different political parties – has served to fracture the Idaho political landscape in a way that may make it even more difficult in the foreseeable future for so called moderates, and especially Democrats, to win major political office.

Right now 38% of Idahoans self-identify as Republican, another 32.5% call themselves Independents, who are affiliated with no party, and just over 24% say they are Democrats.

The new research was undertaken by my firm, Gallatin Public Affairs, in cooperation with respected national pollster Greg Strimple and the Idaho Business Review. The Business Review will have a nice package on what the research says about public attitudes regarding the Idaho economy in its next edition and I’ll be devoting some space here over the next few days to a deeper dive into the numbers on a variety of issues.

We are fortunate to have been able to deploy the talents and insights of Greg Strimple on this project. As we say, Greg is kind of a big deal; an outstanding researcher and strategist and a relatively new resident of Idaho. Before relocating his family to Boise a year ago, Greg lived and worked on the east coast and provided first-rate public opinion research for major national clients and major Republican political campaigns. Greg did polling and strategy work for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and more recently helped elect a Republican governor in New Jersey and a U.S. Senator in Illinois. Greg’s polling firm – GS Strategy Group – is one of Idaho’s newest small businesses.

Greg and his family, like so many others, chose to live in Idaho because of our enviable lifestyle and fortunately the tools of the modern workplace allow him to live where he wants and still serve his national and regional clients.

Strimple’s research on the Idaho political divide finds, not surprisingly, that a strong plurality of Idahoans – 47.5% – consider themselves very or somewhat conservative. Another 29% describe themselves as moderates, while about 16% call themselves liberal.

Republicans meanwhile, who during the recent legislative session took action to limit their nominating primaries to real, card-carrying members of the party, are likely to continue to battle in a narrow range between the very conservative Republicans, deeply invested in social issues, and those Republicans who may be less consistently doctrinaire and line-up more consistently with what the Pew Center’s new survey calls “Main Street Republicans.” These voters tend to be low tax advocates and suspecious of government, but also concerned about education and the future of the economy.

(The new Pew research makes at least one point that I think tracks directly with our recent Idaho research. The far ends of the political spectrum – the far right and far left – are more extreme than ever, but the Independents are hardly a bunch of moderate, middle-of-the-roaders. Independents in Idaho and nationally amount to a swirling mass of diversity. The Independents are all over the political map – libertarian, social moderates and many disaffected – maybe even disillusioned – by both established parties.)

Idaho’s Republican fault lines, and we saw some of this in the recent legislative session, will likely focus on the clear divide between very socially conservative Republicans who are content, even happy, to limit the party to those who see the world as they do and what I’ll call “the bigger tent” GOP. To date, the first group is winning most of the important battles and clearly this is the fundamental base of the Idaho GOP.

Democrats meanwhile are, there is no nice way to say it, marginalized. They have little traction now outside of a handful of state legislative districts and their prospects in the immediate future, barring a Republican meltdown and a spectacularly attractive candidate, seem genuinely bleak.

Strimple’s Idaho analysis also shows a deep and potentially paralyzing divide that breaks down along demographic more than partisan lines. Generally speaking older, more rural, less well educated, less wealthy Idahoans have a very different view of the state’s economic future than do younger, more educated, better off voters.

The first group tends to look forward and see the Idaho that we have historically known with traditional jobs in construction, manufacturing and natural resources. This group thinks agriculture will be the dominate industry over the next decade. The second group looks ahead and sees an Idaho economy built on more technology, more innovation and more trade.

Our research project also included a survey of Idaho Business Review subscribers, a cross section of small and large business leaders. These business leaders tend to be somewhat divided, as well, concerning the future of the Idaho economy, but they are also more likely to think that industries dependent on technology, like energy and health care, will play an ever more important role in our future.

The political significance of this research, seems to me, turns on the question of who in the next generation of Idaho political leadership finds a way to connect with voters as a responsible fiscal conservative who also has a vision for the future of the Idaho economy.

Idaho voters are pretty pessimistic right now about any real improvement in the economy in the near term. A candidate who can give voters a sense of optimism about the state’s economic future, while not offending their generally small government, low tax notions, will probably have a bright future.

 

American Presidents, Intelligence, Obama, September 11

The Gutsy Call

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Getting Bin Laden

Of all the remarkable images over the last 24 hours or so, the tense scene in the White House Situation Room Sunday night tells most of what we need to know about the remarkable operation to capture or kill the evil mind behind Al Qaeda.

The President’s assistant for counter terrorism, John Brennan, called Barack Obama’s decision to send Navy Seals after Bin Laden “one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory.” I’ve been wondering if there has been another moment – the gutsiet moment – in any recent presidency. I think not.

The famous Doolittle Raid on Japan in April 1942 gave the country a sense of hope in the wake of the military disaster at Pearl Harbor. The raid was planned and carried out after Franklin Roosevelt told his military advisers shortly after the Hawaii disaster that he would like to see the Japanese home island bombed as a morale boost. The raid was of little military significance, but it did have great morale and propoganda value.

George H.W. Bush launched the 1989 invasion of Panama to oust the tin horn dictator Manuel Noriega who was captured, held as a war prisoner and eventually tried and convicted. Hardly a transformative event, the invasion was roundly criticized even as Noriega’s crimes were exposed.

There are bound to be some comparison between the Bin Laden operation and the failed effort in 1980 to rescue the Americans held hostage in Iran. The very public failure of that mission damaged American prestige and undoubtedly contributed to President Jimmy Carter’s re-election lost later that year. The raid served to reinforce an image of Carter’s presidency as something less than successful.

Think for a moment about what the reaction would have been had the incredible operation Obama ordered last Friday not worked as it did. We’d be seeing stories today about the failure of the White House and the president to carefully calibrate the odds of going into Pakistan and not coming back. What if a helicopter with a dozen Seals had been shot down and American lives lost? What if Obama had opted for a “surgical strike” with a Predator drone or a Cruise missile that missed or even hit the mark, but could not provide positive identification of the target that the operation has produced?

Obama must have known that the only way to get Bin Laden was to confront him face-to-face with a young American who could capture him, or if that became impossible, kill him. Without Navy Seals on the ground in Pakistan, we would not have the “evidence,” the “treasure trove” of documents and computers, that those young men took from that compound where Bin Laden has apparently been holed up for five or six years.

Obama did indeed make the gutsy call. It’s difficult to compare all this with any other single event that has the same kind of drama, the world-wide impact and the transformative possibility.

Still, while the events around Bin Laden’s death have already assumed historical proportions, such transformative moments can, and do, change over time. I remember thinking as George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and stood under that “Mission Accomplished” banner in 2003 that his re-election had just be secured.

Now, as history has moved on, the mission accomplished moment looks a whole lot different. I can’t help but wonder if the soon-to-be iconic photo of the President and his advisors huddled in the Situation Room watching the Bin Laden mission unfold will be seen ten years from now as we see it today.

It was a gutsy call and lots of history will follow it.

 

 

2016 Election, Baseball, Climate Change, Human Rights, Medicare, Politics, Supreme Court

A Tipping Point

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Law Firms, Gay Marriage and Civil Rights

I once heard Sherman Alexie, a gifted writer who also happens to be Native American, have some fun at the expense of those who maintain that there is something inherently evil about homosexuality. To drive home his point that homosexuality is as old as humankind, that gays live and work with us everywhere and that the creative class – writers, composers, actors, etc. – are disproportionately represented in the gay community, Alexie challenged his audience to go home and look at the titles in their bookcase.

Chances are you’ll  find on that book shelf, Alexie good naturedly said, writers who are “gay, gay, gay, Hemingway, gay, gay…”

I thought about Alexie’s humor recently as I read accounts about the big, white shoe law firm of King and Spalding dropping out as legal counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives, which intends to defend, now that the Obama Administration won’t, the so called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

King and Spalding’s then-partner Paul Clement, a former Solicitor General in the Bush Administration, had signed on to handle the DOMA case for the House of Representatives for a fee of $500,000. But apparently Clement either hadn’t vetted the representation carefully enough or the leaders of the big firm decided the high-profile gay rights case represented too much controversy. For whatever reason, the firm backed out. Gay rights groups immediately claimed creditfor getting the firm to abandon the controvesial case, editorials and politicians blasted the firm for caving in to such pressure and the firm has refused to say much beyond a terse statement from the managing partner to the effect that the representation hadn’t been adequately reviewed by the firm. Meanwhile, Clement resigned in protest and took the DOMA case with him to another firm.

At least two things are going on here. One potentially involves a fundamental principle of legal representation, the other may signal a tipping point in the long-running public debate over same sex marriage. First, the legal issue.

If King and Spalding, a 125-year old, international law firm with 800 lawyers, that represents, according to its website, clients as diverse as Coca Cola and Goldman Sachs, withdrew from the DOMA case under pressure then it deserves all the flack it’s taking. If, as seems more likely for a firm that has had partners like Sam Nunn and Griffin Bell, the firm had a breakdown in assessing a potential client (and assessing how, for example, the law firm’s commitment to diversity might be impacted by taking the case) then they get a black eye for process and public relations rather than for displaying questionable legal ethics. It’s worth noting, just to make this a bit more complicated, that two of King and Spalding’s partners are representing Guantanamo detaineeson a pro bono basis.

Everyone, it is said, from the suspected murderer to the white collar criminal, deserves legal representation. However – since I’m not a lawyer I can say this – not every lawyer has an obligation to every potential client. In fact, I’ve heard lawyer friends say it, and I’ve said it in the public affairs business, “everyone is entitled to good representation, but not everyone is entitled to my representation.”

In a New York Times op-ed piece last Friday, a Minnesota law professor made a compelling case that law firms have led society’s way in creating equal opportunities for gays and minorities. Dale Carpenter wrote, “Gay-rights supporters have transformed the law and the legal profession, opening the doors of law firms, law schools and courts to people who were once casually and cruelly shut out because of their sexual orientation.” This process has been slow, but steady not unlike the larger civil rights movement that since the 1960’s has transformed the attitudes in the professions – the law particularly – regarding opportunity and equality.

This controversy also may represent a larger societial tipping point. As Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak writes in the Times, we may be near a point where the nation’s thought-leading “elites” – including big-time law firms, the corporate community and the media – are “racing ahead of popular opinion and shutting down” what many still believe to be a worthwhile debate.” When firms like King and Spalding spend real time, money and effort on diversity in hiring and promoting, its hard not to conclude that broad public opinion is going to follow – and pretty quickly. And that is exactly what seems to be happening.

The Pew Center for the People and Press recently reported that its surveys indicate that public support for same sex marriage continues to grow with virtually the same percentage of Americans now supporting as opposing. This trend of growing support has been evident for some time, Pew notes, while the partisan divide over the issue remains deep.

“As has been the case since 1996, there is a wide partisan division on the question of same-sex marriage. Currently 57% of Democrats favor making it legal, while only 23% of Republicans agree. Independents (at 51% in favor) are more similar to Democrats than to Republicans, in part because 46% of Republican-leaning independents are supportive of same-sex marriage, along with 58% of independents who lean Democratic.”

Ten countries, including Canada and Argentina, now recognize same sex marriage and 15 other countries, including many nations that form our military coalitions in the Middle East, recognize civil unions. It’s hard not to conclude that the course on this issue is set and, whether intended or not, that King and Spalding’s decision not to represent the Congress in the Defense of Marriage Act case could further move the debate in the direction it is already clearly heading.

There seems to be a certain historical pattern to such issues. Opponents of same sex marriage, politicians and religious leaders, invoke spiritual teachings and cultural norms as the basis of their opposition. You often hear that same sex marriage will “weaken the institution of marriage.”

In a fascinating piece in the Times Magazine recently, the author of a new book on Ann Durham, President Obama’s Kansas-born white mother, notes that when Ann married Obama’s Kenyan father she did so at a time when “nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage.” It wasn’t all that long ago – 1967  in the case Loving v. Virginia – that the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed state prohibitions against interracial marriage. Incidentally, many of the same arguments advanced today against same sex marriage were used then to oppose interracial marriage.

Not surprisingly, Obama – like more and more Americans – admits that his views on same sex marriage “are evolving.” If you talk to younger Americans you’ll find little toleration for discrimination based on race or gender. They’re way beyond such things and generally can’t understand what all the controversy is about.

In his unanimous opinion in the 1967 Loving case, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California and 1948 running mate of Thomas Dewey, concluded with these words: “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Warren repeatedly referred in his short opinion to “basic civil rights,” guaranteed under the Constitution. The Court, Warren said, has “consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

It is undoubtedly some distance in the future, but it’s not difficult to imagine a Supreme Court justice writing the same sentence Earl Warren wrote in 1967  substituting the word “sex” for “race” and “gender” for “racial.” 

The simplest of all explanations – the logical principle of Occam’s Razor– is almost always correct. Perhaps the big, prestigious law firm of King and Spalding simply didn’t want to be on the wrong side of history.

But let’s give Sherman Alexie the last word on this subject. To those who say that gay marriage is a threat to the heterosexual, one-man, one-woman institution of marriage, Alexie says, not true. “Gay marriage does not threaten my marriage.  Beautiful, easy women with no boundaries threaten my marriage.  I don’t need anyone else’s help.”

 

American Presidents, Andrus, FDR, Obama

Rope a Dope

Posted on by christian

Ali, FDR and Barack

OK, I never thought I’d find a connection among the “greatest” heavyweight of all time, Franklin Roosevelt and the man now in the White House and officially certified as a resident of the United States, but bear with me.

Throughout his remarkable career Muhammad Ali struggled to be accepted for what he was – a consummate professional, a remarkably intelligent, one-of-a-kind man; an African-American with a gift for language who also challenged all kinds of conventional thinking.

Ali, a convert to the Muslim faith, was a man with a foreign name and remarkable championship skills; a man who made a principled stand against an awful war and paid dearly for it, a champion never accepted by many Americans as “legitimate.”  But, through it all, he could proudly claim to be “the greatest.”

It’s not bragging, they say, if you can do it and Ali could.

I watched the great champion in an old, black and white interview with Howard Cosell last night as he correctly analyzed himself as both loved and hated, misunderstood, undervalued, misrepresented and, well, just not one of us. He knows us better than we know him.

Elected to the presidency four times, father of Social Security, architect of victory in World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was never considered legitimate by some of his persistent critics. The narrative of illegitimacy dogged him in each of his four elections to the presidency.

FDR was – take your pick – a “traitor to his class,” as historian H.W. Brands described him in his fine biography or more nefariously the architect of a vast Jewish conspiracy. As another Roosevelt historian has described the myth makers, they were convinced FDR was out “to betray the United States into the clutches of international conspirators who were plotting a world state under Jewish domination.” In other words, Franklin Roosevelt, the Dutch-American born of aristocratic parents of the Hudson River Valley was secretly a “Jew,” presiding over an administration dominated by an  “invisible Jewish leadership.” In other words – he was illegitimate.

And…the current president, a man besieged until yesterday by many who considered his very birth in the United States illegitimate. Obama, the editor of the Harvard Law Review (that is generally considered a pretty big deal), who a “carnival barker” reality television host can wonder how he ever got into the such an establishment Ivy League bastion.

To some Americans, Barack Obama can never be “legitimate,” just as the great boxer or the greatest president of the 20th Century can’t possibly be legitimate. Accomplishment is simply not enough.

Ali was a “draft dodger,” a “loud mouth” and not even a good boxer. Roosevelt was a Jew, a “cripple” and “mentally ill.” Obama must be a Muslim, and couldn’t have gotten into Harvard on his own. He’s just not a real American. He can’t be “one of us.”

Stay tuned. The production of the president’s birth certificate won’t silence some of the doubters. Even as Obama played rope a dope with the birthers, daffy Donald Trump still said he would need to check the veracity of the document. It just may be illegitimate. The Idaho Falls Post-Register quotes a guy in an eastern Idaho diner wondering if Obama released his paperwork “for political reasons or did he manufacture one?” After all, he had two years to produce the document and “I’m just asking,” the guy says.

As silly as political discourse has become in America, and with too much of the media lacking a filter to shut off the loud mouth de jour, there is something more troubling at play here. The something is deeply engrained in the political DNA of Americans.

For the haters of Roosevelt it wasn’t enough to oppose his policies, he had to be, at a time when anti-Semitism was hardly in the closet, exposed as a secret Jew. He must have been something sinister. He had to be unlike us, illegitimate. Google “was FDR a Jew” and you’ll find them. Like the poor, such folks will always be with us.

For Ali and Barack, it is the differences that count – the names, the color, the background. Accomplishment in the ring or on the Harvard Law Review or in the United States Senate or with the Nobel Peace Prize couldn’t possibly be legit. There must be some other explanation. These guys are different, foreign, not like the rest of us…illegitimate.

Remember all that talk a while back about a post-racial America. Not so fast apparently. I hope I live long enough to see it, but I’m certainly not counting on it.

 

Mansfield, Uncategorized

All Politics

Posted on by christian

Stranger Than Fiction

Turns out Donald Trump’s checkered past is almost as interesting as his current foray into Republican presidential politics.

Trump has given a lot more money in political contributions to Democrats than Republicans, made a big contribution to Rahm Emmanuel’s Chicago mayoral campaign and volunteered to the Obama White House that he was just the guy to run the clean-up in the Gulf of Mexcio after the BP oil spill. Trump continues his daily media tour and, like moths to a flame, the cable shows and the mainstream media can’t get enough of it. Reminds me of the car wreck that you know you should avoid, but you can’t help yourself.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver, the number crunching polling guru at the New York Times, has an interesting analysis of polling on the “birther” question even as the White House produces the long-sought document.

Sounds as though the Queen of England, and perhaps the future King, subscribe to the old political maxim “don’t get mad, get even.” The last two British prime ministers – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – aren’t on the invite list for the event of the decade in Britain – the Royal Wedding. 

The Telegaph calls it a “snub of historic proportions.” Apparently, Her Majesty never developed a liking for the last two Labour PM’s and harbors a distaste for Blair’s wife. She never curtsied. And William has never forgiven Blair for his grandstanding at the time of his mother’s death. Get even time – royally.

My other favorite political story of the day is the continuing post mortum on Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s decision not to enter the GOP presidential field. Granting Barbour’s immense network of contacts, his fundraising ability, his political experience, etc., I could never see him winning either the nomination or the presidency.

Still, his fling with the idea has cast a light on what it takes to run. Barbour called it a “ten year commitment” to the exclusion of virtually all else. One needs a lot of passion, ego and ambition to embark on that journey.

Barbour now has time on his hands, Trump’s birther issue is gone in a flash – maybe they can fill in for Blair and Brown on Friday. Just a thought.

 

                                                           

Cities, Weekend Potpourri

Weekend Potpourri

Posted on by christian

Odds and Ends on Easter Weekend

Need a movie recommendation this weekend? Join Elwood P. Dowd and his buddy, Harvey, the invisible – except to Elwood – 6’3″ rabbit. The film was one of Jimmy Stewart’s favorites and, no, Harvey wasn’t an Easter bunny.

Good reads this weekend:

The Los Angeles Times has a piece about the uncharacteristically adult like behavior of the “gang of six” U.S. Senators who are trying to craft a true bipartisan approach to the budget. The “gang” includes Idaho’s Mike Crapo.

The extremely well-reviewed new bio of Malcolm X is on my bed side table. This review makes me anxious to get after it.

And this book I can unequivocally recommend – Unbrokenby Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the acclaimed book Seabiscuit. It is an absolutely riveting account of the combat and POW experiences of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic track star, who somehow was able to overcome his completely dehumanizing experience in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and go on to lead a fascinating life. You won’t be able to put it down.

Can’t say I’ve spent much time following the imminent nupitals of the British royals, but the announcement of the champagne they are serving got me to pay attention.  “Pol Roger,” the Decanter.com website says will be served and it, “has a long and honourable association with the British aristocracy. It was the favourite Champagne of Sir Winston Churchill, and in 1984 Pol Roger created the Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill in his honour.”

Good stuff…fit for a future King and Queen. No word if Sir Winston’s favorite Romeo y Julieta will also be available. I’m guessing not. A shame.

 

Baseball, Cuba, Medicaid, Politics

Cuba

Posted on by christian

Isn’t it Time?

Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn recently made their second trip to Cuba. Carter also went in 2002. Both trips, undertaken as a private citizen (but no former president is really a private citizen), were designed to try and move U.S – Cuba relations in a more positive direction.

Predictably, Carter was immediately denounced as a “shill for Castro” and an apologist for the Cuba government. Such criticism seems to roll of the former president’s back like water off a duck and Carter’s report on the visit, posted at the Carter Center website, paints a much different picture of what he did and said in Havana. Here’s the concluding paragraph of his trip summary:

“Both privately and publicly I continued to call for the end of our economic blockade against the Cuban people, the lifting of all travel, trade, and financial restraints, the release of Alan Gross [a jailed U.S. contractor] and the Cuban Five [Cuban dissidents], an end to U.S. policy that Cuba promotes terrorism, for freedom of speech, assembly, and travel in Cuba, and the establishment of full relations between our two countries. At the airport, Raul [Castro, the Cuba president] told the press, ‘I agree with everything that President Carter said.'”

For 50 years the United States has had an embargo against Cuba. During the Bush Administration and for most of that 50 years, it has been extremely difficult, even illegal, to travel to Cuba. Trade has been strictly banned. The Obama Administration has relaxed the travel rules some, but the chance that the two countries might actually get on a path to more normal relations remains wrapped around the axle of south Florida politics. The Cuba-American community there, largely Republican voters, remains a potent political force and last I checked Florida still played an outsized role in presidential politics. For years the political facts of life in one state have largely dictated the nation’s policy toward Cuba.

Nevertheless, by almost any measure our Cuban policy has run its course, and not just because I’d like to buy an extremely expensive Cuba cigar in the United States. At one time, post-Bay of Pigs and post-Cuban missile crisis it was easy to make the argument that Fidel Castro’s island regime was settling in to become a genuine threat to U.S. and Latin American security. Cuba did meddle in revolutions in far away places, like Angola, but today there is much reason to acknowledge that the Cuba-Soviet relationship was never as seamless as we feared nor was Castro, the socialist revolutionary, as effective as we might have thought. Cuba’s economy struggles today and the embargo, rather than bringing down Castro, has hurt the Cuban people and given the regime its anti-American reason d’etre.

Here’s the analogy that works for me. We’ve had 50 years of deadlock and non-engagement with Cuba, a country 90 miles from our shores, while halfway around the world, thanks originally to Nixon and Kissinger, we have engaged the Chinese and, I would argue, slowly, but steadily, helped bring a measure of the free market and openness in that communist country. We may have gone too far. The Chinese now threaten our economic leadership in the world. At the same time, we engage Vietnam, a country in which we fought a long and bloody war, with trade and diplomacy. We have an unsteady, but absolutely necessary relationship with Putin, the old KGB chief, in Russia. But nothing of any substance with Cuba.

Idaho and other Pacific Northwest conservatives, guys like Sen. Mike Crapo and Gov. Butch Otter, have long pushed for more trade opportunities with Cuba, the Castro brothers notwithstanding. In February 2008, Crapo signed a bipartisan letter to the Bush Administration, asking for a rethinking of U.S. policy in light of the resignation of Fidel Castro.

“Our current policy deprives the United States of influence in Cuba,” Crapo wrote, “including the opportunity to promote principles that advance democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.  By restricting the ability of Americans to travel freely to Cuba, we limit contact and communication on the part of families, civil society, and government.  Likewise, by restricting the ability of our farmers, ranchers, and businesses to trade with Cuba, the United States has made itself irrelevant in Cuba’s growing economy, allowing Cuba to build economic partnerships elsewhere.”

Cuba presents a “Nixon goes to China” moment. Relaxing trade restrictions and putting the countries on a path to more normal relations, requires conservative, trade-oriented Republicans, like Crapo, to keep pushing.

In a 2005 report, the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute, labeled our country’s Cuba policy “four decades of failure.” CATO’s trade policy director Daniel Griswold wrote: “The most powerful force for change in Cuba will not be more sanctions, but more daily interaction with free people bearing dollars and new ideas.” Indeed.

World-class cigars aside, Cuba can’t have much to sell to us. They import most of their food and manufactured goods. By contrast, we have everything the Cubans need from automobiles to high rise resort hotels, from Idaho potatoes to Washington apples. Continuing sanctions is simply a huge missed opportunity.

Jimmy Carter left office in 1981 with a 34% approval rating. His tenure remains controversial, but his standing in the history books aside, Carter has quietly and effectively been a model “ex-president.” His selfless work in Africa to end disease, his election monitoring around the world and his advocacy for women continue to be impressive. As one of the few Americans to engage at the highest levels with Cuba’s political elite, with dissidents, artists and religious leaders, he deserves a fair hearing on Cuba.

Pure south Florida politics aside, when Jimmy Carter and Mike Crapo are on the same page about Cuba, everyone should be listening.