Author: christian

Health Care, Mark Twain

The Great Twain

Posted on by christian

TwainClothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. – Mark Twain

Of all the incredibly funny things he said, that is my single favorite Mark Twain quote. I smile every time I see it.

April has been Mark Twain month. I’ve seen articles about his death 100 years ago this month. His love of baseball. He was an investor in the Hartford Dark Blues, a team that folded after one season. The local newspaper said his investment in the shaky enterprise had firmly established his reputation as a humorist. Ouch.

There are an embarrassment of new books about Twain. Stories about the fabulous house, now a museum, he built in Hartford. Controversy over naming a cove on Lake Tahoe after him. And always the quotes.

“I am only human,” he said, “although I regret it.”

No less a writer than Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…”

One of the best new books is Mark Twain: Man in White by Michael Shelden. Shelden tells the story of Twain’s last years as a celebrity and how he came to wear the snow white suits we now identify as part of his “brand.” I have been reading the book and completely enjoying the story of a man of immense talent, big ego, huge humor and breathtaking originality. Shelden makes the case that Twain managed his own image as carefully as his prose.

My friends at the Idaho Humanities Council are devoting their summer institute for Idaho teachers to Why Mark Twain Still Matters. Watch for more information on public events during the week-long event in July.

Before Mark Twain there never was anything like him and there hasn’t been since. He may have been the ultimate American original. Go read him again and read about him. You’ll be better for it and, as Mom would say, “it will be good for you,” but most of all it will be great fun.

Much of what Mark Twain said more than a hundred years ago still seems relevant, like this which wasn’t said, but might have been, about Washington, D.C. and Goldman Sachs.

“The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.”

Oh, yes, Twain coined the term “Gilded Age” when talking about the economic excesses of the late 1800’s. The guy has been dead for a century, but he’s as fresh as this morning’s headlines.

Hats, Immigration

Immigration Politics

Posted on by christian

immigrationA Short-term Bounce, Bad Long-term Politics

No matter your feelings regarding the merits of a single state – Arizona – taking action on immigration, there can be no doubt that what the state legislature and governor have done in the land of the Grand Canyon has set off another raging national debate. Boycotts are threatened. Lawsuits are planned.

Makes you wonder, as Linda Greenhouse wrote, what the ol’ libertarian Barry Goldwater would have thought about a bill that requires police to ask a person they only suspect of immigration violations for their papers.

The Arizona law has also, I suspect, firmly cemented the partisanship of immigration politics to the long-term detriment of the GOP.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the controversial legislation, had hardly gotten her pen back in her pocket before some of the more strategic thinkers in the Republican Party – Jeb Bush a Floridian and Karl Rove a Texan – declared Arizona’s sweeping immigration legislation a big political mistake. The GOP’s U.S. Senate hope in Florida almost immediately put distant between the Arizona action and his candidacy. With a name like Marco Rubio that may not really be a big surprise, but it does signal a Republican problem.

Here’s why these Republican luminaries are worried. The demographics of America continue to change – and rapidly. According to the Pew Center’s profile of the nation’s Hispanic population, Hispanics now comprise at least 10% of the population in Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Utah. In Nevada, Hispanics make up 26% of the population. In Arizona, the number is 30% and in California its 37%. No wonder Meg Whitman, the California GOP gubernatorial candidate, immediately said there are better ways to address the issue than the Arizona approach.

The median age of the Hispanic population in Idaho is 22 and other states are slightly above or below that number. The median age of native born Hispanics in Idaho is 15. Ninety percent of young Hispanics in Arizona are U.S. citizens. Do the political math. The Hispanic population is growing. These are young families and in a decade or so they will be voting in much larger numbers than today.

The immigration legislation in Arizona may crystallize what is potentially a very tight race between Brewer and state Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat. Depending upon the poll and the day, the lead in race is in constant flux. The debate in the great Southwest could also sharpen the partisan divide nationally as Democrats generally oppose the Arizona effort. By contrast, the GOP is all over the map.

For a long time the conventional political wisdom about this issue has held that the only real risk for a candidate was being too soft on immigration and that may hold for a while, but it is hard to argue with the numbers and the trends. If Democrats want a comeback strategy in a place like ruby red Idaho, they best start with understanding the demographics and aspirations of the growing Hispanic population. These Americans – and a generation of new voters – are up for grabs and Republicans, in Arizona at least, have sent a message – they’re not interested.

Democrats best get out the clip boards and start walking the neighborhood. Arizona just handed them an opportunity to organize, organize and organize. They don’t need to be in favor of anything except fairness and equal opportunity, old American values that will appeal to the fastest growing group of Americans.

The courts will eventually decide whether Arizona’s law is, as Rove suggested, fraught with Constitutional problems. The court of Hispanic public opinion may already be set to render a verdict that is fraught with real long-term political problems for Republicans.

Air Travel, Books, CIA, Military History

A Reputation in Tatters

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ambroseAmbrose Accused of Faking It

I’ve always had a soft spot for Stephen Ambrose the author of Undaunted Courage, the book that did more than anything, I think, to bring Lewis and Clark back from the dusty corners of American and Western history.

I have a vivid memory of visiting Ambrose at his summer place in Helena, Montana some years ago. It was a treat to be invited into his “office” – if I remember correctly a converted garage – where he wrote and where a photo of Dwight D. Eisenhower hung prominently on the wall.

Ambrose was a little on the gruff side, outspoken, but still gracious. He signed a couple of his books for me that day. At least, that’s how I remember it going. Then again, maybe I embellished the memory a little in the interest of making the experience a bit more, well, interesting.

I’ve been questioning my own memory about that meeting since I read, with more than a touch of sorrow, Richard Rayner’s piece in The New Yorker making a very solid case that Ambrose fabricated (embellished, made up, lied about) the level of interaction he had with Eisenhower during the time he was writing the general-president’s biography. Until now, the Ambrose works on Eisenhower have been considered the definitive story of Ike’s military and political career. No more.

Rayner documents, with the help of the meticulous records Ike’s assistants kept, of the very limited amount of time the historian spent with the former president in the 1960’s. Ambrose claimed hundreds of hours. The records show maybe five hours. The documentary evidence even calls into question Ambrose’s oft told story about how he came to write about Eisenhower.

As a result, as James Palmer notes, “everything Ambrose claimed Eisenhower said, including quotes that have often been used by other historians, must now be taken as false.”

Those who occasionally check in at this spot know that I am passionate about history. I have come to really disdain what some have called the American propensity for “historical amnesia.” It is a big part – and I don’t believe I overstate the case – of the reason our politics, our political discourse and our understanding of why things are as they are seems so limited so much of the time. A lack of historical perspective failed to inform the country about the dangers of going into Iraq, it recently led a governor of Virginia to proclaim Confederate History Month and forget to mention slavery, it permits a clown like Glenn Beck to get away with equating the Catholic (and other religions) tradition of social justice with “socialism.”

For the most part, Americans don’t know their history. So when popular historians like Stephen Ambrose find a wide following – he sold over 5 million books – a history buff can only rejoice that more people are paying attention. Except, what happens when the work of a popular historian is cast into serious doubt? And, not for the first time, regrettably.

In his OregonLive.com blog, Steve Duin recalls other of Ambrose’s misdeeds and the latest episode calls up his run-in with plagiarism related to his book about bomber crews in Europe during World War II. It is not a pretty record and his reputation as an historian, as they say, lays in tatters.

I have most of the books Ambrose wrote about Eisenhower. Until a couple of days ago, I thought of them as little temples to the times of a very important American. Now I’ll never think of those books the same way again. I’ll remember the kindness of their author, to be sure, but I’ll wonder what compelled him to mix fiction with history, particularly when the true story is so very interesting.

Winston Churchill famously quipped that history would be “kind” to him because he “intended to write it.” And, so he did producing one of the first and most voluminous histories of World War II.

Still, I can read Churchill knowing that what is on the page has been written by a participant in the great events; a participant colored by all his bias and desire to create a legacy and defend his actions. That doesn’t make Churchill’s version of history “bad” history, or less interesting, or without merit. You just know what you’re reading.

I used to read Stephen Ambrose’s words, naively it turns out, as the work of a keen, uninvolved, but still passionate, academically trained searcher for the “truth” in history. No more and that is a real shame.

2016 Election, Supreme Court

Put a Clinton on the Court

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Nope, Not Hillary…Bill

I know, I know, the 42nd President of the United States of America totes around just a little baggage – that whole impeachment thing – but appointing him to the Supreme Court may not be as crazy as it seems at first blush.

Consider four reasons why it would make sense for Barack Obama to put the former president where no former president has been since Warren Harding put William Howard Taft on the court in 1921.

  1. Obama needs a politician as much as a judge. Since he announced his retirement, much of the commentary about the long and distinquished career of Justice John Paul Stevens has focused on his remarkable ability to work the inside game on the Court, create a majority from time-to-time, provide intellectual leadership and craft the brilliant dissent that might eventually lead to a majority. Even his worst detractors would have to admit that Bill Clinton is a great politician; the smoozer in chief. You can just see him walking over the Justice Anthony Kennedy’s chambers and working his magic. Obama needs a person with Clinton’s political and personal skills to try and replace Stevens.

    2.  

  2. Clinton is a still young 64. If he lays off the cheeseburgers, he could spend a decade or more on the Court and be a huge player from the first day. We have no real tradition in America of getting value out of former presidents. We should. They leave office and are left to their own devices to find a way to put all the experience gained in the Oval Office to beneficial use. As a country, we invested a lot in the guy. Might as well get our money’s worth.

    3.  

  3. Obama will want to appoint a liberal to the court, but must be careful not to appoint too much of a liberal. Clinton would bring to the confirmation process a legitimate resume as a centrist, but with a liberal’s instinct for social justice and real sensitivity to race and class. The guy is a moderate southern liberal to the soles of his big feet. Obama would get his liberal without the obvious confirmation battle that would come by naming some liberal Appeals Court judge with a long paper trail. In spite of Monica, Clinton is emminently confirmable. Is the GOP senate really going to filibuster a guy who was the only Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt elected to two terms? His favorability late last year was 64%, a darn sight better than anyone else in public life these days. Added plus: the confirmation hearing will be must watch TV. I can’t wait for the questions from Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch.

    4.  

  4. Finally, being on the Court would be good for the guy and good for his wife. Clinton has established his foundation and done good work on AIDS prevention and other issues, but his portfolio as a former president is limited. Being the new guy, the new intellectual heft on the Court, might give him real purpose. Add to that the fact that more even than now, with Hillary at the State Department, he would need to mind his P’s and Q’s. Purpose for him, room for his wife. A twofer.

I’m betting Bill Clinton has never thought of Will Taft as a role model, but he should. Taft, the former president, became a hugely influential member of the Court. Of course, Taft had the advantage of being Chief Justice, but do you think for a minute that current Chief John Roberts wouldn’t be taken aback – intimidated even – by Justice Bill Clinton, every bit his intellectual equal, sitting in conference with him. It might be enough to open the Court to C-SPAN. With his political knowledge, international reach and good ol’ boy smarts, Clinton will quickly become the intellectual force in the Committee of Nine that is the Supremes.

I won’t be holding my breath for this appointment to happen, and its much more likely that a Clinton on the Court would be named Hillary, but if Obama really wants to make his mark on the Supreme Court for a long time to come, he won’t find a bigger or more effective justice than Elvis, the former president that is.

Clinton, Montana

The Creative Economy

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General-George-CusterWhat is it About Montana?

A few years ago North Dakota erected some clever signs at its border with Montana. One sign advised anyone headed west to remember what happened to a certain long haired cavalry commander who left North Dakota in 1876 and ended up in a sorry state on the banks of the Little Big Horn in Montana.

With all due respect to North Dakota, given a choice, does Montana sound like a lot more interesting place – to visit, to live, to work?

George Custer didn’t live to contemplate what I think of, and many others think of, as the allure of Montana. It has always fascinated me that the land of the Big Sky has a certain “brand” that states like Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado – not to mention North Dakota – never seem able to match. Maybe its because Montana has been building the brand since that fateful day in June of 1876 when the tourist from North Dakota misjudged his welcoming committee.

I got to thinking about what the Montana “brand” means to the economics and, perhaps more importantly, the image of the state while reflecting on two recent pieces of information.

The first was a program at Boise’s City Club a while back that focused on the “creative economy,” often identified as the critical mass in an area of artists, cultural non-profits and cutting edge businesses. Amoung the laments before the City Club was that 30-to 45-year olds are in danger of – or actually are – picking up and leaving Idaho, while an emphasis on developing home-grown entrepreneurs is waning.

When I first came to Idaho nearly 35 years ago, the Boise economy was largely defined by three amazing, home grown success stories. Harry Morrison had started his construction company – Morrison-Knudsen – in Idaho and shaped t into a world-wide powerhouse that pushed the dirt and poured the concrete to construct Hoover Dam and built a good deal of the American military infrastructure in South Vietnam, among many other big projects. In much the same time frame, Boise Cascade went from a small regional timber products concern to a major national player in the wood and paper industry. Joe Albertson pioneered the modern super market from the ground up with his first store in Boise’s North End and went on to build a national brand.

All three of those home-grown companies are still around, but in much different form than just a few years ago and none has the power or influence in the local economy that the old M-K, the old Boise Cascade and the old Albertsons had. The transformation of those three companies makes one wonder where the next great home-grown business will come from? I wonder particularly were the next great business will come from if we’re failing short, as many smart folks think we are, in encouraging a “creative economy.”

I know a handful of smart and aggressive young Idaho entrepreneur’s in the high tech world Idaho, but many of them will tell you they fear Idaho may not be the place where a new Micron, the last really big home-grown business, gets its start. The outlook is cloudy for a number of reasons.

Idaho has whacked its support for education at every level over the last two years. College is costing more and more and we don’t seem to be producing the workforce we need for a 21st Century economy. Idaho high school dropout rates and the number of young kids headed to post-secondary education is abysmal. As the Idaho Statesman reported yesterday the dropout numbers may be even more dismal – by double – than previously thought.

Bob Lokken, who built a successful high tech business in Boise and sold it to Microsoft, asked at that recent City Club event, “What if we took all the money we spend on K through 12 and create an information-age school system, not one that continues to make a labor pool for an industrial-age economy?” Good idea, but Idaho hasn’t even had a serious debate about what kind of education system we want – or need – for more than a decade. Building a 21st Century creative economy without a genuine strategy – a strategy that really engages the education establishment, business and those young entrepreneurs – is a bound to be about as successful as Custer’s trip into Montana. So, Idaho’s creative economy seems, at best, stuck in neutral.

Which brings me back to the Big Sky state and the second data point. The data came to me in the form of a special four page advertising section on – you got it – Montana that appeared recently in The New Yorker magazine. Before you dismiss an advertisement about Montana in the elitist New Yorker as self-serving fluff, consider the Montana message.

The Montana advertisement – really more an essay than an ad – was all about the creative economy. The piece quotes 20-year Montana resident Walter Kirn – he wrote the novel that became the hit movie Up in the Air – and Alex Smith, a film director, who will be making a film this summer based on a novel by Jim Welch – another Montanan – about life on an Indian reservation.

Montana officials say the piece was aimed primarily at encouraging tourism, but I think it works on a deeper level. It says, in effect: Montana values creativity, smart people like it here and we welcome such things.

The ad, or whatever it is, continues: “Montana captivates the imagination of remarkably imaginative people – writers, yes, but actors, directors, musicians, painters, sculptors – not because of what’s so obviously here or not here. Rather, creative people keep finding themselves amid unplanned moments of clarity that resound through their lives.”

That, my friends, is the language of brand building; not to mention the language of a creative economy of the 21st Century.

The Montana New Yorker piece ends with “few states have their own literature; Montana’s runs broad and deep, reaching far beyond familiar titles like the Big Sky, The Horse Whisperer and A River Runs Through It and into the lives of its people.”

Any ad guy, particularly one with a well-considered point of view, sort of like Don Draper in Mad Men, will tell you that a brand can’t last if its built on spin. It must be authentic and it must be true. Montana, I think, has an authentic brand.

Like Idaho and most other states, Montana also has big troubles with budgets, schools are hurting. What might be different, and it might explain why Montana is perceived differently – why the brand works – is that deep down in the land of the Big Sky they get the fact that captivating the imagination of deeply creative people is the economic road map into the 21st Century.

Andrus Center, Baseball

The Boys of Polyester

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jackie brownHideous Baseball Uniforms

When it comes to baseball, I’m a traditionalist. Some of the most appealing aspects of the great game are its traditions. It’s been said that if a veteran of the Civil War could return for a day, go to Wrigley Field or Fenway and watch a game, he would immediately know what was going on. The game doesn’t change much, but when it does it is usually change for the worse.

I have never liked the designated hitter rule. Pitchers ought to go to bat. I’d be happy bringing back a 154 game season. With all the playoffs games that are needed now, the current season is too long and besides a return to a shorter season would make all the older records more relevant. I don’t like the trend of players wearing their pants so long they drag in the dirt. Whatever happened to stirrup socks, anyway? And while we’re at it, put a gentle but unmistakable bend in the bill of that cap young man. What gives with these young players that don’t shape the bill of a baseball cap?

Tradition = baseball.

The regard for tradition and history really took a beating in the 1970’s and early ’80’s when most teams went in the bag for truly hideous uniforms in gaudy colors. It amounted to a nationwide outbreak of polyester. The picture above is of Indians’ pitcher Jackie Brown – remember him – in the 1977 Cleveland uniform. It almost hurts to look at that thing. Brown’s career record in seven seasons was 47-55, but, hey, he got to wear that great uniform in whatever color that is.

A friend sent me the link to pictures and commentary on “10 pleasingly hideous baseball cards from the 1970’s.” Check it out…but not if you have a queasy stomach!

If you can look at the Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers or Oscar Gamble cards without a snicker, you’re a stronger person that me. Now that I think of it, bring back flannel.

Have a good weekend.

Egan, Idaho Politics

Politics Still Ain’t Beanbag

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political booksAre Spouses Fair Game?

Finley Peter Dunne was an Irish-American writer and humorist and the creator of a once-popular character – Mr. Dooley – who Dunne famously had say in the 1890’s that, “politics ain’t beanbag.”

Mr. Dooley’s full quote, even more appropriate perhaps to the latest news out of a heavily contested congressional race in Idaho, was a bit more expansive. “Politics ain’t bean bag,” he said. “Tis a man’s game; an’ women, childher, an’ pro-hybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.”

Idaho Republican Congressional candidate Vaughn Ward, the perceived front runner to take on Democrat Walt Minnick in the sprawling 1st District of Idaho, has been dealing with the enduring truth of Mr. Dooley’s famous quip the last couple of days.

The Idaho Statesman’s Dan Popkey wrote a long takeout on Ward’s family situation this week that centered on the fact that the candidate’s wife is a decade-long employee of the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. The relevance of that fact to Ward’s candidacy is that he has made a centerpiece of his campaign his opposition to federal bailouts of the big financial institutions that helped cause the mortgage meltdown. By inference, one of those financial institutions is the employer of Ward’s wife whose salary has allowed him to campaign full-time for high public office.

Ward blasted back at the story, saying he “never thought” his wife would be attacked. A careful reading of Popkey’s piece, played with up most prominence on page one under a headline stating that Ward’s family is supported by the bailout he opposes, indicates more emphasis on what some might see as Ward’s effort to have it both ways – attack the bailouts that arguably preserved his wife’s job – than any real attack on his wife. The newspaper, meanwhile, pushed back saying that the story was entirely appropriate, in part, because Ward had himself created the issue.

Still, the story begs the question: just what is fair and what is off limits when it comes to a political spouse? The simple answer: there aren’t any rules.

Was Michelle Obama’s comment during the last presidential campaign that for the first time she was “proud to be an American” relevant? Were Hillary Clinton’s long ago trades in cattle futures relevant? Montana Senator Max Baucus’ ex-wife had a run in at a garden store some years back that made headlines. Was that relevant?

Politics is a fish bowl where the water gets changed every day and it sure ain’t beanbag and never has been.

In 1989, Dan Popkey wrote a series of very tough articles focused on the nomination of then-Idaho first lady Carol Andrus to the board of then-Boise based Morrison-Knudsen Corporation. The allegations, at their core, were about integrity and struck at the potential for a conflict of interest. I know first-hand how tough the pieces were because I was serving as then-Gov. Cecil Andrus’ press secretary and had the unwelcome responsibility of fielding Popkey’s questions. When a prominent GOP legislator jumped on the story, it went quickly from personal to very political and Mrs. Andrus, a highly intelligent, thoughtful and very private person, alone made the decision to withdraw from consideration for the corporate board.

Obviously, 20 years later, I remember many of the details of that story with a certain pit in the middle of my stomach. Was it uncomfortable to deal with? Absolutely. Were the stories inherently unfair? Given the day, I can argue it either way. I do know that it is not realistic to think of any governor’s wife as anything other than a public person. Same goes for a congressman’s wife, or the wife of a congressional hopeful.

I also know, and Andrus says as much in his memoir, that it was a darn painful experience for a close family that knew the rules of the political game and above all valued personal integrity. He adds the observation in his book – with Bill and Hillary Clinton in mind – that “attacking the family has become a kind of blood sport nowadays.”

It is the rare public person who can for any length of time keep the political separate from the familial. True fact: stories like the Ward story have become an expected part of suiting up and climbing in the political ring. Perhaps in a more genteel world it wouldn’t be so, but in that make believe world genuine bipartisanship would exist, as well. What often matters most with such stories is how the politician deals with the adversity, particularly when the adversity involves a family member. In that case, it is not just politics, but very, very personal and in my experience one of the touchiest of all political issues to manage.

So, politics sure ain’t beanbag, but tis surely a game for grownups and it helps as a candidate to have a very thick hide. Helps if the spouse does, too.

FDR, Public Television

More Assaults on Public TV

Posted on by christian

big birdVirginia Governor’s Plan Sounds Familiar

I wrote yesterday about Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s hasty retreat from a controversial Confederate History Month proclamation. Some how the Guv left out any reference to slavery in his proclamation, an oversight he quickly corrected.

McDonnell is not pulling back, however, from another of his controversial proposals – a plan to eliminate state support for the Virginia public television and radio system. Much as Idaho Gov. Butch Otter proposed a four-year phase out of state support for public television earlier this year, McDonnell is asking the Virginia legislature to cut $2.2 million in state support over a four-year period.

The Washington Post quotes the governor’s spokesperson today: “Due to a historic $4.2 billion budget shortfall, and because of the growing educational programming options on cable and through the internet, the Governor had to set priorities and make some tough decisions.” Sounds familiar.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch says the McDonnell is “gunning for Big Bird” and notes that eliminating the modest amount the state devotes to public broadcasting has long been a priority of legislators in the GOP-controlled House of Delegates. McDonnell’s proposal may not fare as well in the Democratic Virginia Senate.

As we know, in Idaho, the heavily GOP legislature refused to embrace Otter’s budget recommendations to eliminate support for public television (and several other small agencies) and the governor quietly signed an appropriation a few days ago that gave the Idaho system the same type of percentage reduction in funding that most other state programs received. Otter also signed, in a public ceremony, legislation to provide a temporary tax credit for donations to public television and several other programs.

Also as in Idaho, the editorial and public response in Virginia has been in favor of allowing public broadcasting to take its share of cuts in a tough economic environment, but not use the downturn as an excuse to eliminate a vital service.

As the Virginia Pilot noted in an editorial: “A tough budget year shouldn’t be used as an excuse to take a gratuitous swipe at local stations that are struggling to continue providing superior educational programming and insightful coverage of local and state issues during the recession.”

In Idaho a massive show of public support for public TV sidetracked the governor’s budget notions. We’ll soon see if Virginians appreciate Big Bird as much as folks in these parts obviously do.

Civil War, Hatfield

Yup, It Really Was About Slavery

Posted on by christian

Confederate MonumentConfederate History Month

On the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin stands a massive monument commemorating the side that lost the Civil War. The monument is all the proof one would ever need that Americans – south, north, black, white – have never completely come to closure about the gruesome episode that re-defined our nation.

Rather than the war that cemented forever the idea of one union, the American Civil War is still regularly referred to by some as the War Between the States or even the War of Northern Aggression. The war is regularly celebrated by some, usually in the south, as a four-year act of chivalry or as a principled act of state’s rights. As a matter of horrible fact, the Civil War was a 600,000 casualty blood bath launched and sustained by unconstitutional acts of treason. You can look it up. And, yes, the Civil War was certainly about slavery.

Based on the dust up recently in Virginia, where Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed Confederate History Month without making any reference to slavery, not all of us can admit – even in 2010 – that the war was at its very core caused by and prosecuted as a result of the single worst stain on the American story – slavery.

McDonnell retreated from his historically shaky proclamation faster than – pardon the reference – Stonewall Jackson’s “foot” cavalry moved at Chancellorsville in 1863, which is to say very fast. The “controversy” spawned a good deal of commentary, including Gail Collins’ observation it might be a good idea to always begin a Civil War history lesson with an acknowledgement that the “whole leaving-the-union thing was a bad idea.”

Not surprisingly, given the political nature of everything these days, a good deal of the chatter was about what rising star McDonnell had done to his future political prospects by failing to identify the central fact about the war. McDonnell’s defense was that the original proclamation he signed, the one without a slavery mention, was all about encouraging tourism.

Frank Rich sees an even more sinister motive behind the Virginia governor’s slavery oversight – an appeal to the very white, very state’s rights demanding Tea Party crowd. It is an interesting notion, but I’m not sure I buy it. After all, one can rarely go wrong by accepting the most obvious explanation for a political gaffe – incompetence backed by ignorance.

Too many Americans – even some governors – suffer from a potentially terminal case of historical amnesia. We don’t know our history, or perhaps in McConnell’s case he just conveniently forgot our history. If the GOP governor, even one officed in Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy, has ever read the Second Inaugural speech of another Republican he would have had the cause of that awful war explicitly identified. The cause, even Confederate leaders knew at the time, was slavery.

What Abraham Lincoln proclaimed was not a celebration of some romantic lost cause as apparently most Civil War revisionists desire, but emancipation. Even as the war continued to rage in March of 1865, he acknowledged the debt that both sides were paying for allowing the “peculiar and powerful interest” of slavery to come near to destroying the nation.

Lincoln prayed for a speedy end to the “mighty scourge of war,” but acknowledged that God might will the war to continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as it was three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'” Amen.

Lincoln knew what the war was about and it wasn’t about state’s rights or protecting southern homes and communities from those nasty Yankees, as Gov. McDonnell suggested. The war was about ending slavery and preserving the Constitution.

There is a good proclamation worthy of real history in those ideas; worthy even of a history challenged governor in the cradle of the Confederacy.

Grant, Idaho Media

News or Advocacy

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newspaperWho Pays and Why

I’ve long believed that one of the consequences of the vast proliferation of information sources – the Internet, cable, social media, etc. – and the contemporaneous decline of the so called “main stream media” would be the rise of an increasingly partisan media. By partisan, I mean “news” with a distinct point of view and an obvious ideological bent.

In a way, it’s a movement that goes back to the future. In the days of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, consumers of political news could read a “pro-Adams” or “anti-Hamilton” newspaper. Newspapers were the “voice” of political movements and made little effort to provide anything approaching real “fairness and balance.” Even fairly recently, the Chicago Tribune, under its autocratic owner and publisher Robert McCormick, was the leading voice of Midwest, conservative, isolationist sentiment. McCormick delivered the news heavily laced with his considered view of what America should be all about. As a Guardian blog points out, Britain has long had a tradition of news organizations representing a distinct political point of view or party and paid for in some clandestine manner.

The most effective manifestation of this back to the future in our politics is FOX News and MSNBC. Despite protestations from the heads of news operations at both cable networks that they play news coverage right down the middle, FOX puts a deliberately conservative slant on everything while MSNBC varnishes its coverage with liberal lacquer. I watch both, but always with the “are they reporting or advocating” meter turned up full. FOX and MSNBC are my idea of day-in, day-out “point of view” journalism.

Now comes the fascinating and not altogether encouraging development of “news bureaus” in several state capitals that are openly mixing “news” of state government with advocacy of particular public policy positions.

John Miller with the Associated Press in Idaho reported last week on a relatively new website – Idahoreporter.com – and what he described as, “similar news operations…now in place in Washington state, Michigan, South Carolina, Montana, Wyoming, Florida, West Virginia, Arizona, Missouri, Maryland, Nebraska, Illinois, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio and elsewhere.” In Idaho, the “news” site is connected to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a 501(c)3, non-profit that recently sent a fundraising appeal over the signature of former Republican Senator Steve Symms.

Miller notes that “there are fears that these organizations are trying to advance a certain agenda by the stories they decide to cover — even if the articles themselves are unbiased.”

He quotes Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: “They are still very new. But in any content, there are a couple of different kinds of bias to look for: the angles taken by a reporter, the tone of writing. But there is also a bias that can exist in terms of choices of stories to cover.”

These operations are flourishing for at least three reasons. The traditional media – newspapers and TV, primarily – are retreating in their coverage of government and politics. At a time when a majority of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction and many feel our politics are hopelessly dysfunctional, there is a dearth of local reporting on policy and politics. These new news bureaus are filling a void.

There is also a demand for “point of view” reporting. If there wasn’t, FOX News wouldn’t consistently lead the cable ratings. There is more and more evidence that liberals love to have their point of view validated. The recent New York Times/CBS News poll focused on Tea Party supporters found that crowd wildly in love with Glenn Beck and FOX. The complexity and ambiguity of that continuing search of “objectivity” is clearly something many of us desire to avoid.

Finally, there is the money. Someone out there has the deep pockets to finance the rather elaborate and sophisticated efforts of idahoreporter.com and similar efforts around the country. But who?

None of the people running these efforts, including former reporter Wayne Hoffman in Idaho, will talk about the deep pockets. Ironically, while Hoffman regularly blasts government for a lack of transparency and frequently posts the results of his requests for public records – salary information for the Wilder School District, for example – he justifies his own lack of candor about who backs his efforts by invoking the non-profit status of his organization.

This is a curious stance for a group that helped set a good part of the agenda for the most recent session of the state legislature. Hoffman’s group advocated elimination of state funding of Idaho Public Television, successfully sought to end the income tax check-off for political parties and strongly backed the state’s effort to legally challenge the federal health insurance reform legislation. Good for them. That is the way our system works. But, the system also works based on sunshine and it gets perverted when information about who is bankrolling efforts like Hoffman’s remains secret.

I’m an absolutist when it comes to the marketplace of ideas. Everyone can and should play. Admittedly, I prefer my news served up with at least a side dish of objectivity, but don’t begrudge a Rupert Murdoch or a Punch Sulzberger their points of view. They’re paying for it, after all. Or, better yet, the advertisers they induce to buy time with FOX or a full page ad in the New York Times are paying for it. In those cases the marketplace of ideas is supported by the market and the more of it the better.

By contrast, what these new “news bureaus” – and the “think tanks” that back them – lack is the very transparency they claim to value in the public arena. I’m confident the proponents of this confluence of “news” and “advocacy” will continue to expand their efforts to influence public affairs. Just don’t confuse what they do with real journalism or with advocacy that abides by the rules of real disclosure.

All of us are better served when we know who is writing the checks that make this kind of effort possible.