Author: christian

Al Gore, Grand Canyon, Italy, Theodore Roosevelt

To Be Thankful

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Grand CanyonA Grand Canyon

Looking for something to be thankful for this holiday season?

Lift a glass to the memory of the 26th President of the United States. He saved the Grand Canyon – saved it, I’m convinced, so that I could have the marvelous experience of standing at its rim on a cold, clear Christmas Day knowing that there are some things too perfect to let the heavy hand of man intrude.

Theodore Roosevelt called the Grand Canyon “the most wonderful scenery in the world” and compared it to “ruined temples and palaces of bygone ages.” It is a temple and thank God Roosevelt had the vision and grit to protect it from the zinc and copper miners who were – its hard to believe today – determined to exploit the Canyon in the early days of the 20th Century.

On May 6, 1903, as part of his celebrated “loop tour” that took Teddy to Yellowstone, Yosemite and eventually the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt stood at the south rim and spoke words that still ring with universal truth and his vision. TR’s trip, the longest and most ambitious ever taken to that point in presidential history, is recounted beautifully in Douglas Brinkley’s fine book The Wilderness Warrior.

Reflecting on the majesty of what the locals called “the big ditch,” Roosevelt said simply, “You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children and your children’s children and all who come after you as one of the great sights for Americans to see.”

When Congress failed to act on his request to protect the Canyon as a National Park, Roosevelt took his own action on January 11, 1908. Now, there’s something to be thankful for.

Christmas, Egypt

Merry Christmas

Posted on by christian

Christmas TreeGhosts of Christmas Past

I was blessed as a kid growing up with a big and diverse extended family. I loved all my aunts and uncles and many cousins were great friends and playmates.

I remember that one uncle, one of my mother’s brothers, always seemed to have the latest gadget or the newest must have thing. When digital cameras were still a distant dream, my uncle had the 1960’s version of instant photography gratification – the Polaroid Land Camera. Make a picture, wait 60 seconds and like magic you had a small, square color picture.

This uncle had an American Motors Rambler, a mostly forgettable automobile that nonetheless was a bit of a novelty when it was introduced. And, apropos to Christmas, uncle had the first aluminum Christmas tree I ever remember seeing.

The shimmery, silver tree came in a big box. You had to assemble it limb-by-limb and once fitted together you could switch on a rotating light with three colored gels that, when positioned just right, constantly changed the tree color from green to red to gold. My mother loved her brother, but was appalled by that tree.

Only one type of tree ever graced my mother’s living room – a real, “live” tree, dripping with tinsel, many, many uniformly sized colored ornaments and tiny little colored lights. Mom was fastidious about most everything. She ironed the dish towels, never, ever left a bed unmade and never went to sleep with a dirty dish in the kitchen sink. Christmas trees in her world were natural, green and, if not just perfect in size and shape, subject to certain engineering modifications. I can still see her cutting off an unneeded lower branch of a big tree and grafting it into a naked spot higher up that just didn’t quite conform to her notion of what a proper tree looked like. She would use black sewing thread to hold the grafted branch in place. Not a chance that this woman would embrace the artificial tree movement.

It’s funny the things you remember from long ago. I certainly remember that cutting edge aluminum tree, but also can see mom standing on tip toes hanging long strands of tinsel, insisting that each piece be absolutely straight. I once offered to help, but was politely and firmly told there was only one way to decorate a Christmas tree and I was welcome to help, if I did it her way. I watched.

While I did not inherit mom’s fascination with Christmas tinsel, I did get her natural tree dominate gene. And like a visit from Marley’s ghost, all these years later, I can see clearly the living room, mom’s tree, my Christmas stocking and my brother’s and the little Christmas figures she would haul out every year.

Memories – those ghosts from years past – are the real joys of Christmas now. No coal for me and no fake tree. Just a lifetime of memories and mother decorating her tree.

Merry Christmas and happy memories.

Internet., IRS

Net Neutrality

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plugsMessing With a Good Thing

I remember years ago interviewing then-Idaho Public Utilities Commissioner Perry Swisher, a smart, opinionated and cantankerous former state legislator and newspaper editor and reporter. Federal Judge Harold Greene had just issued his landmark decision – we are still living with the consequences – that “broke up” Ma Bell. I wanted to know the Commissioner’s view.

Swisher, an old school kind of guy, said of the 1984 break up of AT&T, and I think I can quote it correctly after all these years: “Judge Greene took the only perfect thing in the world and screwed it up.”

Swisher may or may not have been correct about the big break up of the phone company. After all, that decision arguably sparked decades of innovation in how we use telecommunications, but it also vastly complicated for the technically challenged among us the range of options, approaches, gadgets and applications.

Still in all, the change was probably inevitable. The famous Judge Greene, for example, often observed, as the The Washington Post noted upon his death in 2000, “that the telephone industry grew up in the copper wire days when it was a natural monopoly, and that when microwaves made it possible to bypass the wooden pole network, the monopoly could not last.”

I couldn’t help but think about former-PUC Commissioner Swisher and Judge Greene as I’ve read the avalanche of coverage around the Federal Communications Commission decisions on “net neutrality.” I don’t pretend to be an expert, or even a reasonably well-informed observer, of what role the FCC should play in managing access to the web. I do know, like Judge Greene in the early 1980’s, that FCC commissioners can make decisions that fosters innovation, access and nearly unimaginable new applications, or they can “screw up” something that seems to be working pretty well as is.

The FCC’s decision seems to have something for everyone to dislike.

National Journal and PC Magazine have good summaries of what the FCC rules mean. One thing it surely means is that the political, regulatory and economic debate about how to run the Internet is really about to get very heated and very interesting.

My requirements are pretty basic, if the FCC is listening. I want equal access from my desk top or my wireless device and I don’t mind paying reasonable fees for that access, but I don’t want my Internet provider deciding I can’t access some other providers content. Like the Judge Greene decision, as complicated as it once made the simple act of finding a long distance carrier, I want to unleash the marketplace, but I also want a tough cop, sort of like we need on Wall Street, making sure my access is secure.

In other words, I want the best of the capitalist approach with just the appropriate delicate balance of regulation and oversight that protects the user and not just the provider. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

American Presidents, Baseball, Guest Post, Obama, Politics, Polling

Obama’s Comeback

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Obama smilesNever So High, Nor So Low

It was as predictable as a Christmas sale. Make way for the Obama Comeback stories.

Immediately after the mid-term “shellacking” of Barack Obama and his party, New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker breathlessly and instantly analyzed the election under the headline – “In Republican Victories, Tide Turns, Starkly.” The President, Baker analyzed, “must find a way to recalibrate with nothing less than his presidency on the line.”

Wow. What a difference seven weeks makes.

A lead story at the Politico website carries the headline: “Obama Rebounding.” Reporter Jennifer Epstein expands a tiny uptick in Obama’s poll standings – his approval/disapproval now stands evenly split at 48-48 in the latest CNN survey – into the insight that more Americans support the President’s policies than any time since mid-2009.

Say what? What happened to the guy who couldn’t find his groove? What became of the fatally wounded re-election bid? In that November 3 Times piece, former House Republican leader Dick Armey, a voice of the Tea Party, flatly predicted that Obama has “already lost his re-election.”

What’s going on here is that politics sometimes resembles another game – baseball. Every day is a new game and, while every team looks unbeatable through a winning streak and impossible in a slump, seldom are the players ever as good or bad as they appear. The ups get exaggerated and so do the downs.

The other phenomenon in plain view is the absolute fascination of the national media with the “comeback narrative.” The so called “media elite” from the Times to Time, from Fox News to Politico can’t operate without a simple, concise narrative. Every storyline needs, well, a story and there is no better political story than “the comeback.” Need more proof? USA Today supplies it with a headline: “Obama Sets Up As Comeback Kid.”

Seven weeks is a lifetime in politics, particularly in a political environment as volatile as ours; an environment influenced heavily, it must be noted, by relentless and often misleading coverage of the latest poll numbers. Here’s a thought. Rather than sitting around the Beltway cracker barrel, how about some political reporters go out into the country and talk to voters? They just might learn something.

A few things are obvious, even if they don’t fit neatly into the political narrative of the moment. The President has had a good lame duck session, he did recalibrate his stand on extending the Bush tax cuts and, as yet, the country sees no serious challenger to him in 2012. Meanwhile, by some accounts, Obama is quietly remaking his White House staff for the run up to his re-election and positioning himself as a reasonable, mid-ground alternative to the current faces of the GOP – Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Also obvious, Obama is a good politician who displays the ability to grow in office. By the same token, he is not as good at the political game as his 2008 election made him look, but he is also not as bad as the recent mid-terms made him look.

For Obama, like all politicians, the highs are always lower than they seem and the lows are always higher.

In truth, as Michael Cooper astutely pointed out in the Times in the wake of the mid-terms, a good deal of political “analysis” is not just spin, it is mythology.

But, political time and myth will march on and the national media will soon need to invent new narratives. In a few weeks, Newt and Mitt, Sarah and Haley will be showing up in places like Manchester and Waterloo and we can read and contemplate the unfolding of the endless presidential campaign. It will, no doubt, be the most important election in our lifetimes. You heard it here first.

All this reminds me – and reminded Michael Cooper after the mid-terms – of the late Polish philosopher and political thinker, Leszek Kolakowski. Once a hard-headed Stalinist, Kolakowski came to see the Communism of his youth as a fraud and he eventually became a leading intellectual of the Solidarity movement in his native land. He won a MacArthur genius award and his work was celebrated by, among others, the Library of Congress.

Kolakowski promulgated what he called the “Law of Infinite Cornucopia,” which holds that for any doctrine one chooses to embrace there is never a shortage of arguments to support that view.

So, welcome to the remarkable Obama comeback or, if you prefer, wait for “proof” that it never happened.

Food, High Speed Rail, Ireland, Travel

Railing Against Rail

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trainThe Politics of Trains

I’m going to admit my obvious bias right up front: I love trains. I love travel by train. I collect visits to train stations. I am enamoured with the rails.

I’ve ridden the overnight Red Star from St. Petersburg (Leningrad in those days) to Moscow. I’ve taken the train from London’s Victorian-era Kings Cross Station to Edinburgh. I vividly remember a warm day in Italy and the leisurely train ride from Milan to Florence and on to Lucca. I once flew to Los Angels purely for the pleasure of riding what may be Amtrak’s best train, the Coast Starlight, from LA to Seattle. I shared a cigar break on the platform in Eugene with the sleeping car attendant. In New York, I go to Grand Central Station just to watch the people and have a drink at the famous Oyster Bar.

One of my earliest memories – I must have been about four years old – is of an overnight train trip with my brother and mom and dad. We had a double sleeper compartment and, while I would have liked the upper berth, my older brother got it. Still, when dad took my Buster Browns and sat them in the passage outside the compartment and informed me that the sleeping car porter would shine them and return before breakfast, I thought this is what the good life must look like.

As a junior high schooler growing up in the old railroad town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, I loved to go downtown – the Union Pacific mainline actually divides the heart of Rock Springs – and watch trains, particularly passenger trains, whistle through. In the late 1960’s American long distance train travel was in its last gasp, but the wonderful City of Portland still ran through Rock Springs and the romantic sounding Portland Rose made the daily run from Denver to the Rose City.

Now intercity passenger trains in the United States are about as scarce as the American manufacturing sector. The once great network of trains that existed to carry the mail and people has essentially shrunk to a few routes between major cities. Amtrak limps along with regular threats to its budget and often second-class service. The rest of the world is leaving us in the dust.

Spain has now become the world’s leader in high speed rail. King Juan Carlos opened the new Madrid – Valencia line over the weekend. The 219-mile trip will take 90 minutes.

China – big surprise – is investing billions in its intercity trains and has entered into agreements with GE to manufacture equipment. The Chinese have a plan in place to link, by high speed rail, China with Laos, Thailand and Singapore. In the USA, we can merely watch as the strategic Chinese leadership comes to dominate the world market for rail equipment and then uses that dominance to economically rule all of southeast Asia, in part, thanks to a modern, high speed rail system.

The universally hated Obama stimulus package contained $8 billion for high speed rail construction, but newly elected Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have refused the money that had been set aside for new routes in those states. Even as congressional Republicans, as well as some Democrats, are talking about reducing the commitment to rail, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has re-directed the Wisconsin and Ohio money to developing rail systems in Florida, California and a few other states. Conservative media voices are almost unanimous in opposition to this type of rail development and the safe betting is that even maintaining existing rail funding in the new Congress will set off a major fight.

The administration has sold high speed rail development a a jobs initiative than as a long-term transportation investment. And, while it is difficult to argue with the jobs that rail construction will create – Wisconsin is already facing job losses from the Spanish company that had set up shop in Milwaukee to build equipment – the real issue here is a long-term transportation strategy for the country.

Here’s a question for American policymakers: why is the rest of the world investing in this technology, even at a time of severe fiscal constraint, while we can’t arrive at any consensus about rail?

I think the answer rests in a different way of thinking in Europe and Asia about transportation. For economic and environmental reasons, countries like Spain, France, China and India are de-emphasizing the automobile and seeking other strategies. While the rest of the world is getting on with the work of finding new ways to get along entirely, or almost entirely, without a car, the U.S. can’t even come together on a strategy to streamline big city to big city transportation.

This may present a pivotal moment, ironically not unlike the moment in the 1950’s when Dwight Eisenhower committed the United States to a comprehensive interstate highway system. That decision, unfolding over years of planning and construction, transformed the country, uniting the nation with a modern surface transportation system. For good and bad – mostly good – we are living with that big highway legacy today. Secretary LaHood, a Republican and respected former Illinois Congressman, makes a compelling case that a new, national high speed rail network is this generation’s legacy transportation and infrastructure project. But, given our lack of ability to create a national vision about almost anything, can we possibly seize the moment?

Gov-elect Scott Walker in Wisconsin based some of his opposition to high speed rail on the on-going costs to the state of maintaining the system that was to connect Milwaukee with Madison and eventually Minneapolis. That is a legitimate long-term planning issue, but no different than the cost every state now incurs to maintain Ike’s interstates. The point is that 60 some years ago, the country made a strategic, long-term investment in transportation and, of course, the interstate highway system was incredibly costly. The federal share alone, not to mention on-going maintenance was close to $120 billion, but that cost pales in comparison to the jobs created, the people moved and the commerce facilitated. What will we do for transportation in 2050? China and Spain may be sending us a clue if we are smart enough to listen.

One of the great train stations in the world is the Gare de Lyon in Paris, the terminus of the French high speed trains that connect the heart of Paris with France’s second largest city, Lyon, and the great port city of Marseille. A high speed rail trip on the sleek and comfortable TGV from Lyon to Paris takes about 2 hours, intercity to intercity the 250 miles is covered in comfort and safety. Trust me, arriving at the Gare de Lyon, home to the fabulous Le Train Bleu restaurant, and grabbing a cab at the station beats the heck out of battling the crowds and traffic at Charles de Gaulle airport in the outskirts of Paris. When I made the trip a few years ago, the Paris bound passengers were a mixture of day trippers, business people and tourists. There were as many laptops and cell phones as backpacks and cameras. It was a first-class trip at a fraction of the time and cost to fly or drive.

I’m nostalgic about that first rail trip from Alliance, Nebraska to Omaha more than 50 years ago, but fond memories aside, I can’t escape the thought that Americans would come to value quality intercity train service if our policymakers could get their heads around the idea that we really can go back to the future.

Baucus, U.S. Senate

A Verdict of History

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mccarthyWisconsin’s Curious Senate History

At least three times in the last sixty-plus years Wisconsin voters have sent packing a respected national politician with a record of genuine accomplishment and replaced him with, well, to be generous, someone else.

La Follette – McCarthy

In 1946 Joe McCarthy, whose name is forever linked with a bleak period in American political history, beat Sen. Robert M. La Follette, Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary. Young Bob La Follette had replaced his father, Fighting Bob La Follette, in the Senate when the elder icon of the famous Wisconsin political family died in 1925. Robert La Follette, Sr. was selected in 1955 as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators.

By all accounts Young Bob was a serious, studious legislator determined to carry on his father’s progressive political legacy. La Follette was also supremely independent. He broke ranks with the old-line Republican Party in 1932 to support Franklin Roosevelt, supported much of FDR’s New Deal legislation and was a champion of civil liberties when such things were not very popular. A measure of La Follette’s respect in the Senate is contained in the intriguing fact that, although elected as a Republican, Democrats gave him the chairmanship of an important labor investigations committee in the 1930’s. He also helped pass landmark federal government reorganization legislation near the end of his Senate career.

McCarthy’s career, despite regular efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of the bully from Appleton, is well documented. He was shameless as a self promoter, trampled on the very idea of civil liberties and was ultimately censured by the Senate in 1954. His death at 49 in 1957 was directly related to his years of heavy drinking.

After service in the Truman Administration, young Bob La Follette’s life also came to a tragic end. He committed suicide in 1953.

Nelson – Kasten

In 1980, Wisconsin voters turned out another remarkable Senator, Gaylord Nelson. First elected to the Senate in 1963, Nelson, a former Wisconsin Governor, became one of the foremost champions in the Congress of conservation legislation. Nelson supported trails legislation, sponsored or co-sponsored the Wilderness Act and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. It was Gaylord Nelson’s idea to have the very first Earth Day in 1970. The event was important because, as Nelson later said, the country needed “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda.”

President Clinton presented Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, fifteen years after his defeat by Robert Kasten in the Reagan landslide of 1980.

Kasten went on to, charitably, a less-than-distinguished two terms in the Senate. Kasten now has his own consulting business. Defeated for re-election in 1992, Kasten was a part of the Class of 1980 that included Idaho’s Steve Symms, Indiana’s Dan Quayle, New York’s Al D’Amato and South Dakota’s James Abdnor. None of whom, history would say, made much of a lasting mark in the United States Senate.

Feingold – Johnson

It remains to be seen if the most recent Senate election in Wisconsin, where Sen. Russ Feingold lost re-election, continues the McCarthy – Kasten pattern of replacing an accomplished, national figure with a senator who doesn’t quite measure up.

Feingold, say what you will about his generally liberal politics, was widely seen as a serious legislator with one of the most independent records in the Senate. Republican John McCain got downright emotional in talking about Feingold’s Senate career. “I don’t think he is replaceable,” McCain said during a floor speech.

History will judge, but Feingold’s principled opposition to the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the Iraq War, not to mention his bipartisan work with McCain on campaign finance reform, mark him as someone who made a difference during three terms in the Senate.

Sen-elect Ron Johnson – he beat Feingold by 105,000 votes in November – came out of no where to do so. Johnson is a plastic manufacturer, a favorite of the Tea Party movement and has never held public office.

It has been said that we get the government we deserve. One wonders, with the perfect hindsight of history, if the great state of Wisconsin, proud of its cheese and Packers, might not like to replay at least a couple of its 20th Century U.S. Senate elections?

The judgment passing of history can be rather harsh on whether we voters always make the best choices. Put a different way, looking back on Wisconsin’s Senate history, another term for a Bob La Follette and a Gaylord Nelson might look pretty good right now.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Ron Santo

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santoA Great Cub and Good Guy

I told myself, what with the winter blahs and all, that I was done with misty eyed reminiscences about old ballplayers, at least until spring. But then Ron Santo died.

I’ve always thought of Ernie Banks as the eternal Cub and he is, but Santo – who should be in the Hall of Fame, by the way – is only a half step behind “Mr. Cub” in his lifetime of devotion to the boys on the North Side of Chicago.

In the eternal terminology of baseball, Santo was a gamer. Not elegant, not polished, just gritty and determined; a grown man loving playing a kids game and amassing fine stats over a 14-year career. A life-time .277 average, 342 home runs, numerous All Star appearances and a half dozen Gold Gloves puts Santo in rare company, indeed.

I loved the Ron Santo eulogy delivered by his long-time WGN radio broadcast partner Pat Hughes. Hughes took to calling Santo a “Cubs legend” and, as the Associated Press reported, the two broadcasters had a lot of fun together, including one hilarious moment when Santo’s hair piece caught on fire at Shea Stadium.

Hughes and Santo “were standing for the national anthem in the cramped booth when Hughes heard something ‘sizzling like bacon.’ He turned around, saw Santo’s head on fire and quickly poured a cup of water on it.

“‘He said how does it look?’ Hughes said. ‘I lied and said, ‘It doesn’t look that bad.’ It actually looked like a professional golfer had taken a pitching wedge and hit one off his head.'”

As good as he was as a ballplayer, Santo lived a long life battling diabetes. He originally didn’t tell the Cubs of his disease fearing it would prevent him playing baseball. It didn’t and considering the adversity he encountered, loosing both legs to the disease, Ron Santo turned out to be every bit as good and courageous a person as he was a ballplayer.

Everyone liked Ron Santo. Maybe that’s why he was destined to be a Chicago Cub.

 

Internet., Senators to Remember

Senators Worth Remembering

Posted on by christian

PopeJames P. Pope, Idaho

The Fourth in a Series…

Democrat James Pinckey Pope served only one term in the United State Senate from 1933 to 1939, but left his mark on both domestic and foreign policy. Pope was the first Boise Mayor to go directly to the United States Senate. Dirk Kempthorne repeated that political leap 60 years after Pope’s election.

Pope, a Louisiana native and University of Chicago law school grad, came to Boise in 1909, served in a variety of civic and political positions, including a term as mayor and work in the Idaho Attorney Generals office, before his election to the Senate in the Roosevelt landslide of 1932.

Pope was a reliable New Dealer whose election to the Senate clearly benefited from Roosevelt’s popularity as the Great Depression gripped the nation and Idaho. As Idaho historian Bob Sims has written, Pope’s 1932 campaign “anticipated the New Deal, as he stressed ‘the issue of the little man’ and ‘economic relief for the lower strata.'”

Idaho’s great Sen. William E. Borah was nearly as much of an issue in Pope’s 1932 campaign as was the nation’s distressed economy. Borah nominally supported his GOP colleague John Thomas, but did little to campaign for him, while Pope stressed that Borah’s vote in the Senate had often been cancelled by the more conservative Thomas. Pope easily defeated Thomas and soon enough emerged from the huge political shadow cast by Borah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

While Borah, like many of his Idaho constituents, was a committed non-interventionist in matters of foreign policy, Pope was an advocate for American involvement in the World Court and the League of Nations. Critics in Idaho, according to Sims, took to calling Pope the “ambassador to Europe from Idaho,” especially after the junior senator made two European trips in 1934 and 1935.

Ironically Pope’s participation in the Senate investigation of the munitions industry – the so called Nye Committee of 1934 and 1935 – served to undercut his internationalist foreign policy views. The Nye Committee, named for progressive Republican and isolationist North Dakota Sen. Gerald P. Nye – held more than 90 hearings investigating the role big money and the big armaments industry played in U.S. involvement in World War I. The committee reflected much popular sentiment in the country in the early 1930’s that the U.S. had blundered into the world war and that Wall Street – J.P. Morgan was hauled before the committee – had added and abetted American intervention by selling arms to all the belligerents.

The munitions industry earned the label “merchants of death,” which was also the title of a best selling book advancing the theory of Wall Street conniving to get the country into war. Nye earned lasting Democratic scorn for attacking Woodrow Wilson. Nye accused the former president of being less than honest about why the country had gone to war in 1917.

The Nye committee, with Alger Hiss serving as counsel for a time and with prominent members like Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, gave momentum to those, like Borah, who favored neutrality legislation and a general withdrawal from European affairs.

As a reliable vote for any manner of New Deal legislation, including FDR’s controversial court packing scheme in 1937, Pope’s political standing in Idaho, particularly compared to Borah, suffered near the end of his only term. The Idaho Democratic Party was also fractious, with Pope clearly at home in the liberal wing of the party. When a more conservative Democrat, popular eastern Idaho Congressman D. Worth Clark, challenged Pope for the Democratic nomination in 1938, Clark won. Clark’s foreign policy views were much more in line with Borah than Pope had ever been.

Still, even with defeat for re-election to the Senate, Pope’s political career was far from over. In 1939, Roosevelt appointed Pope to be a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a position he held until 1951. After his TVA tenure, Pope lived in Tennessee, practicing law, and eventually relocated to Alexandria, Virginia where he died in 1963.

James P. Pope of Idaho was another United States Senator worth remembering.

Others in this series: Reed Smoot of Utah, Bronson Cutting of New Mexico and Edward Costigan of Colorado.

American Presidents, Baseball, Federal Budget, Immigration, Obama, Politics

Tax Cut Politics

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bush-70b-tax-cutFiscal Constraint Can Wait

Considering the strum und drang of many Democrats reacting to President Obama’s “deal” with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, one would think that there was ever a serious chance that Congress would actually change tax policy while the economy remains in the ditch. Wasn’t gonna happen, but if there is a missed fiscal responsibility moment here it may turn out to be the failure by Obama and Democrats to leverage the moment to force a long-term deal to get the nation’s fiscal house in order. Time will tell whether it was a missed opportunity.

Announcing the tax deal, Obama acknowledged the obvious – the economy would not react well to a tax hike on the upper 2% or so of taxpayers even if most everyone else would see little if any change in tax rates. Add to that economic reality the fact that Republicans have largely won the broad political message battle over taxes and its impossible not to conclude – Keith Olbermann aside – that the President had little choice but to give way on his campaign pledge to let the tax cuts expire for the wealthiest taxpayers.

The stark fiscal reality remains however, even as the politics of the moment crowd totals up the winners and losers. The co-chairman of the President’s Commission on getting the budget deficit under control, Democrat Erskine Bowles, nailed the missed opportunity. Had Democrats been thinking along with Obama, they might have seized this moment to press for the grand plan to deal with the terrible mess both parties have created over the last decade. Democrats have yet to conclude that the country is ready for a call for shared sacrifice, pain and realistic action to cut spending, enhance revenue, scale back entitlements and reduce defense spending. Fiscal constraint will have to wait apparently, while all of us what for adults in both parties to begin to deal with nation’s real fiscal problems.

Still, given the push back from some Democrats, Obama displayed both political courage and political pragmatism in getting his deal. He also, importantly, got an extension of unemployment benefits that will have the benefit of keeping real money in the hands of real people who will spend it. Over the longer term, with this deal Obama may have also taken a step toward reassuring some of the independents who seem to have abandoned him in droves.

Here is the real political reality: if Obama and Democrats don’t make serious progress in getting the economy moving by Labor Day 2011, and moving in a way that most people feel in their bones as well as their pocketbooks, he and many othe Democrats won’t have to worry about being around in 2013 to deal with controlling the deficit.

Baseball, Politics

The Political Spouse

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edwardsElizabeth Edwards: 1949 – 2010

There is no more difficult – nor ill-defined – role in American public life than the role of political spouse. There are simply no rules and the highest and most unreasonable expectations.

Every woman – and let’s face it the vast majority of political spouses are women – has to make it up every day. Like a circus high wire act, there is no net and, politics being politics, there are always opponents, score settlers and even campaign handlers who are quietly cheering for a fall from the wire.

Some spouses like an Eleanor Roosevelt of history or a Hillary Clinton of the Senate and State Department find a unique way to play the role. Others like a Cindy McCain or a Joan Kennedy never seem comfortable in the awkward public space that surrounds them.

There is an old joke among political operatives that on the campaign trial you can always find a way to manage the (male) candidate’s personality, it will be the spouse that presents the real challenge. I can only imagine that the old line was whispered regularly on every John Edwards campaign.

Elizabeth Edwards, who died yesterday after a excruciatingly public battle with cancer, an unfaithful husband and the tragic loss of a young son, seems to have had vastly more than her share of the ill-defined role of public spouse. As the Washington Post said, she lived her private pain on a very public stage.

Edwards was by all accounts – and not all were praising her – whip smart, extremely tough, resilient, opinionated, demanding, ambitious, unable to suffer fools easily or well. All that would be viewed as a compliment where it a description of a male candidate rather than a political spouse.

Still the vast majority of the recollections of this remarkable woman’s life leave one thinking that our politics would be better had she been the senator, the vice presidential and presidential candidate. Instead, it was the now-disgraced John Edwards who flashed upon the American political scene and seemed just as quickly to flame out in the wake of personal scandal. Elizabeth Edwards went along for the ride, but not as a bit player, and in the process became a bigger and vastly more admirable player than her clueless husband.

The best-selling campaign book Game Change will feature in many Elizabeth Edwards obits because of its lacerating view of her as the opinionated witch on the campaign bus. When I read that account in the aftermath of the 2008 election, it struck me, as Jonathan Alter has now written, that the frequently vicious culture of American politics was kicking her when she was down. Some were being critical of Edwards for seeming to enable her husband’s behavior before turning it to benefit her own personality and celebrity.

What was missing in much of the portrait of Elizabeth Edwards was the element of human understanding and the unique dynamics of each and every personal relationship – especially a marriage relationship. Many political spouses don’t, initially at least, get much say in whether they go along for the political ride. Once on the campaign bus they find a way to play the role they are assigned and most end up taking pride and affirmation from the candidate-husband’s ambition and success. When controversy or adversity arises, the spouse, as in the case of Elizabeth Edwards, is left to cope as best they can. Being human, some do it better than others.

As Alter and others have written, Americans – particularly the class of political elites in both parties and the press – like nothing better than to build up our celebrities before we bring them low. We forget, too easily, that they are just people who suffer loss, endure pain and rage against illness. They just do it in real time in front of a camera and on the pages of anonymously sourced political books. And, of course, the truth in public life is never as clear cut or unambiguous as the air brushed image. The messy, tragic complexity of Elizabeth Edwards’ story should make the truth of that statement all too obvious.

In the whole scheme of playing the incredible hand she was dealt, you have to say that Elizabeth Edwards didn’t play it perfectly, just better than most of us would have and certainly better than the man she – and many of us – thought could be president.