Author: christian

Books, Football

Turmoil in the BCS

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BCSBoise State’s Impact On The Big Time

The old comic Rodney Dangerfield’s signature line – “I can’t get no respect” – can no longer realistically be applied to the big time college football program at Boise State University.

When the New York Times is commenting, the world is watching.

In a lead article Wednesday headlined, “Boldly, Boise State Moves The Question,” the newspaper of record summed up the impact of the BSU victory over Texas Christian in the Fiesta Bowl with this sentence: “Perception in college football is driven by star power, and Boise State now has it.”

A USA Today blog picked up, as others did, the suggestion that when President Obama invites the eventual national championship team for the standard post-season White House visit, he should also include an invite to the Broncos.

Associated Press sports columnist Jim Litke’s take on how underdog Boise State gets real respect – it’s a political issue. So, cue the politicians and the issue ads aimed at reforming the Bowl Championship Series. Litke says: “Matt Sanderson, a Utah graduate and former campaign-finance attorney for GOP presidential contender John McCain, founded Playoff PAC with a half-dozen similarly politically savvy friends.

“We wanted to give a home to the tremendous grass-roots energy that’s formed around the BCS and channel it toward a proven method to get results — in this case, political pressure.”

Fixing college football’s dysfunctional national championship system may not rank in importance with health insurance reform or reducing the deficit, but it may actually be something Congress could do. It should.

Cars, Cities, Civil Liberties, Fashion, Poetry, Sandburg

The Poetry of Cities

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sandburgCarl Sandburg and Downtowns

It is the birthday of the poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg born January 6, 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois.

Twice winner of the Pulitzer – The War Years about Lincoln’s presidency won the award in 1940 and his Complete Poems won in 1951 – Sandburg is often dismissed today as too much the sentimentalist. Perhaps that is why I like him very much.

I thought of Sandburg’s poems about Chicago and Omaha and other cities this morning while absorbing the news that downtown economic mainstays – big Macy’s department stores – in Missoula and Boise are soon to close. As Idaho Statesman reporter Tim Woodward noted, the Boise store was a fixture in the heart of Idaho’s Capitol City for decades; a meeting place, a lunchtime destination. Such icons are hard – impossible perhaps – to replace.

Boise once had five downtown department stores. Now it will have none. Boise and Missoula are still among the most attractive downtowns in the west, but big, old time department stores are magnets for people and help support other small merchants and one hates to see them close and you wonder what can possibly fill the void.

But, back to Sandburg.

The editor of a recent collection of Sandburg’s poetry, Paul Berman, told NPR a while back that the writer was inspired by cities: “His genius, his inspiration in [the Chicago] poem and some others, was to look around the streets, at the billboards and the advertising slogans, and see in those things a language,” Berman says. “And he was able to figure out that this language itself contained poetry.”

There is poetry in great cities and, yes, a yearning for the variety and uniqueness of downtowns where people gather, things happen and the look and culture is much different – and vastly more interesting – than a strip mall or suburban shopping destination surrounded by acres of parking.

In one of my favorite Sandburg poems – Limited – the narrator is headed to a city, or at least a final destination.

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.

Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.

(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)

I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers: “Omaha.”

Read some Sandburg. This is a great site to sample some of his enduring work.

Cenarrusa, Famous Americans

More on Pete

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cenarrusaI Stand Corrected: Make That Two “R’s” and One “S”

I received a very gracious note yesterday from former Idaho Secretary of State Pete T. Cenarrusa thanking me for my post on his long career in Idaho politics and the publication of his new memoir. Pete also, ever so gently, pointed out that I have apparently been misspelling his last name for 35 years! And, of course, I did it again on Monday.

 

Pete said the misspelling is a common problem – even in the Basque Country – but I should have known better and extend my apology for the error. For a guy whose mother decided to spell his first name the way mine is spelled, I am particularly sensitive to such things.
By the way, Pete spelled my name correctly when he wrote his nice thank you!

 

My error does give me another chance to tout his fine new book – Bizkaia to Boise: The Memoirs of Pete T. [two “r’s” and one “s”] Cenarrusa.

 

Congratulations to Pete on his recent 92nd birthday and the publication of a great addition to the Idaho political bookshelf.
Basques. Books, Cenarrusa, Energy, Famous Americans

From Bizkaia to Boise

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cenarussaCenarrusa Writes It Down

His record of holding elected office continually for 52 years is not likely to be bested and the standard he established for running a non-partisan office as Secretary of State has, we can hope, been institutionalized in Idaho.

Pete T. Cenarrusa, the eight-term former Idaho Secretary of State, is 92 now and has been back in the public spotlight the last few weeks thanks to his welcome and worthwhile memoir.

The book – Bizkaia to Boise: The Memoirs of Pete T. Cenarrusa, written with long-time Associated Press reporter Quane Kenyon – is a fine addition to the relatively thin line of books about Idaho politicians and politics.

[Steve Crump had a nice Cenarrusa piece in the Twin Falls Times-News Sunday and the same paper correctly noted in a recent editorial that the Basque sheepherder from Carey is the most important politician the Magic Valley of southern Idaho has ever produced.]

Cenarrusa presided as Speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives during the landmark 1965 session when the state’s modern tax structure, including a sales tax, was put in place and the state’s Departments of Parks and Recreation and Water Resources were created. By common consensus that was the greatest legislative session in the state’s history. Governor Don Samuelson appointed Cenarrusa as Secretary of State in 1967 and no one laid an electoral glove on him afterward. He retired in 2003.

There is much worth saying about Pete Cenarrusa, but his real lasting legacy to Idaho may well be the fact that not once in my memory (which dates to the mid-1970’s) was the Secretary of State’s office seen as anything but a professional manager of the state’s elections and its lobbying and campaign finance disclosure process. With the help of a dedicated staff, including current Secretary of State Ben Ysursa [is another Basque in training for this job?] Cenarrusa dispensed good advice, conducted clean recounts and played by the book on Sunshine disclosures.

During a time when it seems that everything is partisan, everything is up for debate, Cenarrusa and his crew kept the playing field fair and tidy. Always the loyal Republican, Cenarrusa never played partisan games with the essential functions of his office. So should it always be.

Pete’s book, published by the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, is available there or in local bookstores. Proceeds help support the Cenarrusa Foundation for Basque Culture at Boise State University.

One quick personal Cenarrusa story: in 1992, while I served as Chief of Staff to Governor Cecil D. Andrus, I had the once in a lifetime opportunity to accompany the Governor on an official visit to the Basque region of northern Spain. The trip came about as a result of an invitation from the Lehendakari – the President of the Autonomous Basque government Jose Antonio Ardanza Garro – who had visited Idaho two years earlier.

It was a wonderful and wholly memorable trip climaxed with an Andrus speech to the Basque Parliament, the first time a non-Basque had officially addressed the Parliament. A day or so later, while touring with our Basque’s hosts, we stopped in a small, roadside tavern for some afternoon refreshment. The tavern was near the mountain town of Durango in Bizkaia, the Basque province from which Cenarrusa’s family emigrated to the United States. As we walked into the bar someone mentioned we were the group from Idaho. The bartender looked directly at Cece Andrus and said: “You must know Pete Cenarrusa…”

Now, that’s what you call name recognition – from Biskaia to Boise.

American Presidents, Campaign Finance, Dallek, Election of 1944, Health Care, Obama

Dallek on Obama

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dallekHealth Care Reform: A Lasting Legacy or Not

Robert Dallek, biographer of Kennedy and LBJ and skilled analyst of White House leadership, is, I believe, the best of the “presidential historians.” Dallek is evenhanded, accomplished and always engaging in making the historical connections between, say Barack Obama’s push this year for health care reform and Franklin Roosevelt’s advocacy of Social Security in the 1930’s.

Dallek’s op-ed piece this week in the Wall Street Journal is a fitting wrap-up of this year in presidential politics and a must read.

Here is a key section: “If the reform works as intended by expanding health insurance to an additional 30 million Americans and reducing the national debt, the Democrats will pillory the Republicans for the indefinite future. The GOP’s uniform opposition—only one congressman and no Republican senators supported the bill—will make it vulnerable to charges of wrong-minded thinking about the suffering of fellow citizens on a scale with Herbert Hoover’s failed response to the Great Depression. That cost his party five presidential elections.

“Should the bill fall short of promised gains, it will reinforce national prejudices against big government and facilitate another round of conservative Republican dominance of national politics.”

That pretty well sums it up.

Watch for Bob Dallek’s new book in the new year: The Lost Peace – Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope. HarperCollins is the publisher.

Airport Security, Civil Rights, Eisenhower, Film

Up In The Air

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TSAThree Sensible Alternatives…Call Them TSA

I don’t fly, thank the Lord, as much as George Clooney’s character in the funny and engaging new film Up In The Air. Clooney’s road warrior – his name is Ryan Bingham in the movie – is on the quest to reach 10,000,000 miles in the air and earn even more special perks – the platinum ID card and visit with the Chief Pilot, for instance – that go with such numbers. The traveling Bingham brags that he spent only 42 days at home last year.

 

I’m no Ryan Bingham, but I traveled on average once every other week during 2009. In my world, that is good enough to get special treatment – well, early boarding – on Horizon Airlines. You gotta start somewhere.

 

Any frequent traveler will identify with the scene in Up In The Air where Clooney is explaining the travel ropes to a young novice. Don’t over pack. Never check luggage. Wear slip on shoes. Never get in the TSA line behind a couple with children or where the swarthy looking young men will be targets for “additional screening.”

 

All this movie truth seems particularly relevant in light of the latest breakdown in air security that allowed a would be bomber to board a Northwest Airlines flight in Europe and come close to causing havoc on a fully loaded airplane approaching Detroit. Now the all to familiar, post-terror incident cycle unrolls once again. Bring on the political outrage. Cue Dick Cheney. Order up an investigation. This just in: air security doesn’t work very well.

 

My only qualification for comment on any of this is travel experience. I observe. I wish TSA would, too. So, at the risk of getting placed on the dreaded list that causes my wife, Pat – she does look like a terrorist – to get “additional screening” whenever she travels, I offer up Three Sensible Alternatives. My own little TSA.
Screen for the most obvious threat. I know, I know, no racial profiling. I’m a card carrying member of the ACLU, but lets be clear: the terrorist threat against the United States of America is overwhelmingly centered in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Young men from these places tend to be the operatives. When a traveler matching this profile attempts to fly into the USA, maybe they should automatically get additional screening, including a very detailed personal interview. This is the Israeli model. It is not racial profiling. It is managing against the most obvious, demonstrated, repeated threat. A sensible alternative would be to concentrate more and more resources on the most obvious threats and spend less and less time at SeaTac Airport frisking the 89 year old woman in a wheel chair.

 

Observe behavior and ask questions. I have done my own little survey on this point. You can try it yourself. You know the drill. Present your photo ID and boarding pass at the TSA checkpoint and start observing how often the agent actually compares your ID to your face. I’d say it has happened to me about one time in 50 in the last year. The agents appear to be trained to make sure the name on the ID matches the name on the boarding pass. That’s good, as far as it goes. A sensible alternative would be to train them to actually look at the passengers and assess what they see. Same goes with the little clear plastic bags of toilet items that now must come out of your carry on luggage. Does anyone ever really look at what is in those bags? Not in my experience. My point is this: our security system will never get better until we train the screeners to be more aware of what and who may pose a threat. To do better, humans must be able to observe critically and ask probing questions. Well-trained police officers do this all the time. They question and observe. As a nation, we have long lacked “human intelligence” capabilities. In other words, our system assumes that observing and questioning is beyond the boundary of acceptable airport security. I think it is the key to a better system.

 

Finally, use the best technology. We know full body scanners work. Use them. Spend what is needed to get the TSA database to interact with the State Department’s list of foreign nationals holding American visas. Why haven’t we done this? Beats me. Must be politics. Or perhaps we could just outsource our security to the Israelis…or the Canadians. With a valid US passport in hand, clearing security in Ottawa for a return to the USA earlier this year was a professional and thorough process. Lots of questions. Lots of observing. Lots of technology. Gotta love the Canadians.

 

I wonder what the response will be to the latest terror threat? The shoe bomber caused us to remove our shoes. The next threat produced those little zip lock bags for toilet items. Considering the most recent would-be bomber was reportedly carrying explosives in his underwear, I can see where this is going. No more boxer shorts on international flights.

 

Now, I’m moving over to the line for additional screening. And, go see Up In The Air. Clooney is great.
Air Travel, Books

Good Reads

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booksA Good Half Dozen

It is the time of year for lists of the “best of” of 2009, a year that may go down in memory as not leaving all that much to recommend it. Nonetheless, some new and not-so-new reads during the year are truly worthy of mention. None of these made the New York Times list or won the Booker Prize, but did make The Johnson Post half dozen.

 

Non-Fiction:

 

The best political biography I have read in a long time in John Milton Cooper’s life of the endlessly fascinating, endlessly flawed 28th president of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson – A Biography will likely remain the definitive treatment of Wilson for years to come. Cooper, a University of Wisconsin historian, is the Wilson scholar and he writes with a lively, engaging style that leaves none of Wilson’s many accomplishments – academic visionary, legislative maestro – or numerous shortcomings – stubborn, partisan – unconsidered. Still, Cooper likes his subject and we should, too. Reading this marvelous book made it clear once again that the modern world began in the Wilson Age. The world that emerged from “the war to end all wars” – not Wilson’s phrase, by the way – is the world of today: a violent Middle East, the fractured Balkans, a phony country called Iraq, etc.

 

For sheer delight in reading about a major figure of the 20th Century, few tomes can compare with Paul Johnson’s new, short biography of Winston Churchill. Johnson, a great writer and generally revisionist historian, captures Churchill in just 166 pages; no mean feat considering the great man’s life spanned the 20th Century from The Boer War to the Cold War. Johnson is particularly good at illustrating Churchill’s humanity. He was a damn tough taskmaster, but remarkably gentle with political foes once he had bested them. He taught himself to be a great speaker through – listen up would be politicos – endless practice and polish. He loved good Champagne and Johnson estimates that he may have consumed 20,000 bottles in his long lifetime. This is a great little book.

 

I approached Ted Kennedy’s memoir, published after his death, with some trepidation. Would Teddy offer up the typical book by a politician – interesting perhaps, but not really revealing? Kennedy’s book – True Compass – may, as his Senate career did, set a standard for such efforts. Kennedy candidly discusses his shortcomings and offers real insight into the “Kennedy Way”. His portrait of his father, Joe Kennedy, is particularly good and will cause a rethinking of the old man and his influence on American politics.

 

A final non-fiction pick for 2009 would be Antony Beevor’s D-Day, a superb re-telling of the Allied landings on the Normandy coast in June 1944 and the first major new book on the subject in 20 years. All the major players are here: Eisenhower, the brilliant organizer and politician, de Gaulle, Omar Bradley, Rommel, Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., but also the common soldier, sailor and airmen who accomplished the single greatest invasion ever undertaken. The invasion was brutal, brilliant, chaotic, callous and history changing. Beevor captures all of the story and suggests, as others have, that the invasion could well have ended in disaster. He also makes the case that atrocities – Allied bombing of French civilians and summary execution of prisoners on both sides, for example – have long been ignored in the myth making surrounding what Rommel called “the longest day.”

 

Fiction:

 

One of the best fiction reads this year was Jim Harrison’s The English Major. Harrison takes readers on a cross country romp from Michigan to Montana with funny and telling stops along the way. His hero is a 60ish English major turned backwoods farmer who finds himself without a wife and without much purpose in life. If you know Harrison, you’ll not be surprised that the book is full of quirky characters, massive amounts of food and drink and, of course, sex. The guy can write.

 

I have seen the movie with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet a dozen times and it is always enjoyable, but had never read The Maltese Falcon until recently. Dashiell Hammett’s classic was published nearly 80 years ago and it remains a great read. The John Huston movie is very faithful to the book, even using word-for-word dialogue, but there is no substitute for Hammett’s lean, clean prose coming off the page. This is the essential detective story.

 

Happy reading in 2010.
Christmas, Egypt

Merry Christmas

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Charles DickensA Dickens of a Christmas

There is a current school of thought that holds that Charles Dickens “invented” many of our current customs regarding how Christmas is celebrated. For sure his story about the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge has become a timeless classic and the Christmas feast a much anticipated routine.

Truth be told, the celebration of Christmas has long been a work in progress – sorry Bill O’Reilly – and always the subject of some controversy.

The Boston Globe had a wonderful piece this week about how the celebration of Christmas has evolved over the centuries in New England. It is worth a read. I learned, for instance, that Boston Puritans in the 1600’s effectively outlawed Christmas.

As author Stephen Nissenbaum writes: “On December 25, 1685, Boston Magistrate Samuel Sewall proudly wrote in his journal that ‘the Body of the People profane the Day’- that is, the town’s residents went about their work as usual – ‘and blessed be God no Authority yet compel them to keep it.’ Indeed, in a kind of reverse Blue Law, for a quarter century during the mid-1600s the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts actually outlawed its celebration.”

What were those Puritans thinking?

Garrison Keillor had some choice things to say recently about messing with Christmas tradition. He doesn’t like it, and he likes Silent Night just the way it is and, by the way, he isn’t crazy about those “lousy holiday songs” either, thank you.

“Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off,” Keillor wrote. “Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.”

Keillor’s column, big surprise, offended Unitarians (and Jewish songwriters) and may have, momentarily, pleased that policeman of Christmas correctness the bombastic Mr. O’Reilly. Who’da thought that possible?

As for me, I like the Dickens Christmas sentiment best of all. In the great scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge encounters the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, Scrooge tells the ghost that he had once been a great businessman. Marley’s disagreeing response is, in many ways, the essence of Christmas:

“Mankind was my business,” Marley says. “The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Now, there is a Christmas sentiment.

Best wishes to you and yours for a Very Happy Christmas. And, yes, I’m sticking with “Happy Christmas” – not the popular and generic “Happy Holidays.” My own tradition.

Thanks to Dickens for that great story. I like what it has done for Christmas.

Baucus, Clinton, Montana, U.S. Senate

Montana’s Mansfield

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manA Model of the Modern Majority Leader

Next to operating from the Oval Office, the front row desk on the majority side of the aisle in the United States Senate is arguably the most difficult perch in politics. That seat is where the Majority Leader sits – or stands – and attempts to move forward the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Mike Mansfield, by general agreement, did the job better than anyone ever has. Not bad for a one-time mucker from the copper mines of Butte, Montana.

During this holiday season, as the Senate rancorously flails its way to a conclusion on health insurance reform legislation, ol’ Mike is looking better than ever.

Current leader Harry Reid of Nevada will get – and deserve – any credit (or blame) due if Congress does complete the legislation, as is looking likely. But Reid has gotten to the finish line with a much different style than Mansfield would have used and, as a result, he presides over a much different Senate.

As Reid pushes for a bill, difficulties and tempers flare around the leader. His home state situation is troubling, too. Reid trails in the polls in Nevada and his unfortunate comments equating GOP opposition to the health insurance bill to support for slavery riled the Senate.

Mansfield was from a different era, for sure, but his was also a time – like ours – of great divide in the country. Somehow he made the Senate work a lot better than the current model. It is worth pausing for a moment to remember the truly incredible Mansfield and his style in the Senate.

Mike, as his Montana constituents knew him, held the Senate’s top job longer than anyone in history – from 1961 to 1977. His memory is revered in Montana and deserves to be long remembered in the history of American politics in the 20th Century.

Through civil rights legislation, through Vietnam, LBJ’s Great Society, Watergate and investigations of the CIA, Mansfield cultivated an approach to leading the Senate that involved less of him and more of everyone else. He insisted on fair play and dignity. Mansfield once stopped proceedings on the Senate floor in the middle of a roll call vote to demand that an amendment be considered that then-rookie Republican Ted Stevens felt had been given short shrift. Another Senator had given Stevens his word that the amendment would be considered, but then reneged on the pledge. Mansfield made it right. Stevens never forgot the moment and he told me years later that he considered Mansfield the Senate’s greatest leader and an even greater person. No faint praise coming from a highly partisan Republican.

Very late in his life, I had a fascinating few minutes with Mansfield in his Washington, D.C. office. He was long out of the Senate, had been U.S. Ambassador to Japan under both a Democratic and Republican president and was, just shy of 100 years old, still working almost every day as an advisor to Goldman Sachs. He came out of his tidy office in the old Washington Star building to greet me, ushered me to a comfortable chair and proceeded to make me a cup of coffee.

I realized at that moment some of the secret to his success. He was practicing the “servant as leader” approach to personal relationships. He had no need to see me, nothing to gain from offering 45 minutes of his time, and had no doubt answered the same questions that I would put to him a thousand times. Still he displayed for me the same qualities he used so successfully and for so long in the Senate – civility, respect, kindness, attention to detail and candor.

We spoke that day of Montana political history and I remember asking him his assessment of the great Montana political figures. He mentioned Senators Lee Metcalf, Thomas Walsh, Jim Murray and Burton K. Wheeler before allowing that he would rank below all of them in all-time accomplishment. I questioned his ranking and he firmly pointed out that I had asked him for his assessment. “And that is my assessment,” he said.

There is no institution of our government remotely like the United States Senate. It was designed by the founders to be slow. Tradition says that every Senator, no matter how junior or powerful, can bring the place to a grinding halt with two words – “I object.”

The last few weeks have often shown the Senate at its worst, locked in endless parliamentary combat with Democrats seemingly more focused on gathering up the magic 60 votes to stop a filibuster than in producing understandable reform. Republicans have played the obstruction card full tilt, which Senate rules allow if not encourage. The civility and respect that a Mike Mansfield brought to the leadership seems totally lacking on both sides of the aisle these days. It seems like Reid and his GOP counterpart Mitch McConnell are so locked in blind partisanship that they can’t see what the rest of the country sees – legislative chaos and incredibly unproductive gamesmanship.

Contrast that with Mike’s approach to incredibly contentious civil rights legislation in the 1960’s. As Don Oberdorfer writes in his masterful biography of Mansfield, the Majority Leader knew, as he prepared for what turned out to be the longest Senate debate in history, that he first had to deal with southern Democrats opposed to any civil rights legislation. The southerners, like today’s Republicans, were determined to slow and, if possible, kill any bill with the filibuster. In those days, it required even more votes – 67 – to cut off the talking and start the voting.

With great dignity and deference, Mansfield called the cagey leader of the southerners, Georgia’s Richard Russell, to his office and explained in detail the approach he would be taking to the legislation. Oberdorfer writes, “Russell was astounded by Mansfield’s candor and wondered if it were a prelude to some unpleasant surprise – perhaps a discovery of an obscure provision in the rules that had somehow eluded the master parliamentary experts from Dixie.”

Oberdorfer goes on to quote Mansfield: “I kept Russell informed of every move that we made on the civil rights bill. I don’t think he took me too seriously at first, but he did with the passage of time. [There were] no back strokes, no hidden areas.”

Next, Mansfield invited the Republican leader, Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, into the strategy development – Dirksen produced 40 amendments – and Mansfield insisted that his staff work to get the GOP leader the press attention he coveted and that ultimately lead to Dirksen receiving much of the credit for passing the landmark legislation. When Senators gathered after the historic vote to congratulate each other and claim credit, Mansfield avoided being in any of the photographs. He conspicuously gave away the credit to others.

Still, most Senators knew who had created the atmosphere for progress. Florida’s George Smathers summed up the feeling. “Much of the credit for the fact that [the bill] was disposed of without leaving large schisms was due to the good, calm, patient, magnanimous, long suffering and much admired Mike Mansfield.”

My favorite Mansfield story is told by former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, another wonderful and talented Butte Irishman. Pat had tried and failed, while Mansfield was serving as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, to lure the former leader to Capitol Hill so that he could be feted appropriately for his years of statesmanship. Finally, on a pretext, Mansfield had to come to a reception and be part of a receiving line where he quickly became the star attraction amid much praise of his work in the Senate and the Far East. When Williams reached out to shake hands with the former Senator, Mansfield pulled him in close and whispered, “Pat, what are we going to do about the Berkeley Pit?”

Never one to stand on any kind of ceremony, Mansfield was thinking, even at that moment and far away from Montana, about the massive Superfund site in his hometown.

The U.S. Senate may never see another leader like Mike Mansfield and that is a real shame for the Senate and the nation.

Allred, Economy, Education, Egan, Idaho Politics, Otter

A Race for Idaho Governor – Part II

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idaho state sealSix Things to Watch in Otter vs. Allred

As the New Year unfolds, Idaho voters may experience something they haven’t often witnessed lately – an interesting gubernatorial campaign.

After months of speculation that long-suffering Idaho Democrats might not field a serious candidate against incumbent Republican Butch Otter, a newcomer with interesting credentials jumped into the fray last week.

Yesterday’s post discussed the broad dynamics of the down and out Idaho Democrats and whether Keith Allred’s surprise candidacy can jump start their fortunes. Today: a half dozen things worth watching as this race unfolds.

1) How will the 2010 Idaho Legislature turn? The last two sessions have featured intra-party brawls between House and Senate Republicans and between Otter and GOP legislative leaders. The battles betray the fault lines between the more moderate elements in the party and the more conservative and have helped stall the governor’s legislative agenda, primarily transportation funding. It has been Otter’s fate to preside during a time of severe retrenchment and with the state’s economy still off in the ditch, the coming session promises more budget cutting and service reductions. Having been served this plate of political drama, Democrats haven’t been able to capitalize. So, watch how education funding fares – both K-12 and higher education – and whether continued deterioration in these areas really cause, or can be made to cause, consternation at the state’s kitchen tables.

2) By late summer or early fall will there be any discrenible improvement in the economy? Every incumbent would like a crystal ball on this question. At Christmas week, the state’s unemployment rate stands at a shade over 9%. If we could predict where that rate will stand on Labor Day and whether jobs and economic issues become a centerpiece of the coming campaign, we would have a better idea of whether an Otter-Allred match up will feature a real election or merely the run-up to a second term Otter coronation.

3) Can Allred gather the resources to run a credible race? The last two gubernatorial elections showed there is probably a million dollars available for any Idaho Democrat who works hard and seems credible. Still, carrying the fight to a well-financed incumbent is always an expensive proposition, particularly when one has to buy name recognition.

4) Will 2010 be a “throw the bums out election?” And, if it becomes an anti-incumbent year generally, will the notion of change gain steam across the political spectrum and in Idaho? Change was a powerful winning factor in national and state elections in 2008 and all the polling at the moment indicates folks are mad as hell and not anxious to take much more. Next year’s politics could be about change all over again, particularly if challengers, regardless of party, are able to make the case that the folks in office are part of the problem. That is, historically speaking, a tough sell for a Democrat in Idaho, but there is a populist wave building in the country and the smart candidates my try to ride it until November.

5) Does Allred’s personal story help him connect? The new candidate hails from Twin Falls, has a ranching background, a Harvard education, has served as an LDS Church leader and, until his announcement, could claim strong, non-partisan policy expertise. Does all that give him a chance to make his case in areas of Idaho – the Magic Valley in south central Idaho and the Upper Snake River Valley in the east, for instance – where Democrats are seldom heard and even less frequently considered worthy of a vote? While southern and eastern Idaho may seem a tempting target for a Democrat like Allred, historically the party’s successful candidates have had to play well north of the Salmon River and there the personal story will be dissected and debated for its relevance to many voters who still think in terms of timber and silver, salmon and wheat. I’ve always thought an acid test for an Idaho Democrat was being able to campaign at the gate of the Bear Lake County Fair in Montpelier and at the Border Days Rodeo in Grangeville, while not looking out of place in either locale. No Democrat since Cece Andrus have been able to pull that off.

6) And, can Keith Allred write a fundamentally new Democratic narrative in Idaho? And, will his adopted Democratic Party let him? He will need to fashion an updated, compelling 21st Century message, build a new electoral coalition, craft a new statewide organizing principle and, oh yes, there is that money. Democrats in Idaho also always need a major dose of luck – self-made generally.

A young John Kennedy warned tired and dispirited national Democrats in 1956 – with himself no doubt in mind – that the party needed “new ideas, new policies and new faces.”

Kennedy could have been talking about Idaho Democrats over the last 15 years. And while the political math for Democrats remains extremely difficult, a definition of “a new idea” would be nominating for governor a southern Idaho ranch kid turned Harvard professor, who is an LDS Bishop, sits a horse well and just happens to be a state government policy wonk.

Will a new face like that play in Grangeville? And will Allred’s consensus approach to policy catch on Bear Lake County? Stay tuned.