2012 Election

2012 Election, 2016 Election, Campaign Finance, Minnick, Poetry, Supreme Court

Endless Money

Posted on by christian

Corporations Really Are People

While the nation holds its collective breath over the fate of Obamacare (hint, it’s going down) the conservative judicial activists on the U.S. Supreme Court have affirmed their original controversial decision that its just fine to have unlimited and often undisclosed corporate money flow into our political system.

At issue in the case summarily disposed of Monday was a Montana Supreme Court decision that attempted to uphold the Treasure State’s 100-year plus ban on corporate money in state elections.

The Court’s five man majority reversed the Montana court decision and reminded all of us of the essence of its earlier ruling in the now infamous Citizens United case.  “Political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation,” the majority said in an unsigned, one-page ruling.

Turns out that Mitt Romney was right, corporations are people, at least when it comes to spending political money that the Court equates with free speech protections under the First Amendment.

The Montana Attorney General, among others, had argued that the state’s special, if not unique, history of corporate influence – and in the early 1900’s corporate control – over Montana politics required a special remedy, namely banning corporate money from state races. The law dates back to when Copper King William A. Clark literally bought himself a seat in the United States Senate using the vast wealth he accumulated from his mining interests in Montana. Fast forward a hundred years and Karl Rove and others are using the opening created by Citizens United to use their free, if not inexpensive, speech rights to try and buy a president, a United States Senate and a few governors for good measure.

Remarkable how history has a way of repeating itself.

More interesting than the one-pager from the “conservatives” on the Court who show such respect for precedent that they overturned 100 years of settled law in the Citizens case is the dissent from Justice Stephen Breyer, who apparently has been reading the newspapers.

Breyer wrote: “Montana’s experience, like considerable ex­perience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do
so.”

Justice Breyer’s concern about the corrupting influence of money, even if it is only the appearance of corruption, is at the cold heart of this issue and the evidence is everywhere to be seen.

Mitt Romney invited a few hundred of his biggest donors over the weekend to a closed-to-the-press gathering in Park City, Utah. The donors were treated to the kind of face-time with the candidate that Joe and Jill Six-Pack could never hope to get. Also in attendance was the head of the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future. Our Swiss cheese-like campaign finance laws say Charlie Spies, the Super PAC leader and a D.C. lawyer, can’t legal “coordinate” with the campaign even as the television spots he is paying for mirror the campaign’s messages. But, apparently it is alright for Mr. Spies to camp out in the lobby of the hotel were the Romney event was taking place to see and be seen by those coming and going.

It brings to mind the great line from the movie Casablanca. The Vichy French police official Captain Renault, played by Claud Rains, announces that he is “shocked, shocked” that gambling is going on in Rick’s Cafe just as a croupier hands him his winnings for the night. The Super PAC’s will be the real story of the 2012 election and no one should be shocked that the charade of separation of candidates from PAC’s is as much a fiction as the Easter Bunny.

And, of course, Democrats do it, too. Republicans may just be better at attracting the kind of donors who will spend a few billion on a campaign. Both parties share the guilt for allowing this money in politics situation to spiral completely out of control.

Following the political money scandal that grew from the Watergate break-in just 40 years ago, the Congress, responding to popular outrage, made a stab at reforming campaign finance laws. (It’s worth remembering that Watergate, arguably the greatest political scandal in our history helped reveal the extent to which corporate money was being utilized by Richard Nixon to maintain his hold on the White House.)

The U.S. Supreme Court has sent a clear signal with its refusal to reconsider Citizens United that the sky is the limit when it comes to money in politics. Six billion is the estimate for this cycle and at the rate this trend is expanding it will be $12 billion in four more years.

Ironically, its not really the money that individuals give to candidates that is the major cause of worry in this case. But rather the unregulated, often unreported, no-limits funding of causes and candidates by those with the deepest pockets. That is what casts grave doubt, as Justice Breyer says, on the very essence of a democracy. Do the people chose the leaders or do the most well-to-do individuals and corporations chose?

Nothing succeeds like excess, they say, and by that standard the unregulated, uncontrolled campaign finance system in the United States is succeeding like never before.

As Captain Renault would say, “Round up the usual suspects.”

 

2012 Election, Al Gore, Campaign Finance, Minnick, Poetry, Theodore Roosevelt

It’s the Money, Stupid

Posted on by christian

A Hundred Years of History

On the presidential campaign trail in 2008, Arizona Sen. John McCain regularly invoked Theodore Roosevelt as his role model. “I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold,” McCain told the New York Times in 2008.

Channeling T.R. certainly has appeal for both Republicans and Democrats. Who other than perhaps a small-government Libertarian wouldn’t want to associate with the memory of one of the four presidents on Mt. Rushmore, a man arguably one of the greatest of the great presidents?

But by invoking Roosevelt as a model, McCain, in very many ways an exemplary individual and once upon a time a true maverick, is guilty of historical malpractice. The politics of our nation’s capitol today, and the distinguished senator from Arizona is part of it all, are as removed from the democracy Teddy Roosevelt embraced as Phoenix is removed from an ice flow. One need only look at this week’s news to understand the difference.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon waltzed into and out of a Senate Banking Committee hearing Wednesday suffering hardly a PR scratch despite the $2 billion plus his bank lost recently in risky financial bets. Washington’s favorite big banker did comment that some of his current and former underlings at the nation’s biggest (or maybe second biggest) financial institution might have to return some of their compensation and Dimon smoothly quoted Harry Truman on where the buck stops. (No commitment from the buck stops here guy as to whether any of his paycheck might be in jeopardy.)

In the big picture, as Congressional hearings go, Jamie Dimon before the Senate Banking Committee was a Beltway cake walk.  South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint helped set the tone when he said to the banker, “The intent here is really not to sit in judgment.” Got it.

It is substantially easier, I guess, for members of Congress to ask tough questions of former baseball players who might have used certain banned substances than to ask a really tough question of the biggest banker on Wall Street in the wake of the biggest financial crisis in 75 years. I wonder if Rafael Palmeiro, the steroid-abusing, once-a sure-thing Hall of Fame baseball player, who testified under oath before Congress about his transgressions was glued to C-Span for Dimon’s questioning? Palmerio a small-time drug abuser got the wire brush treatment. Jamie Dimon a big-time player who has opposed many regulations of the banking industry got an air kiss.

The other big money news this week was that Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has decided to further exercise his free speech rights and start spending millions on the Super PAC backing Mitt Romney. The numbers are stunning. So far, Adelson has written checks for $35 million and his minions tell Forbes he may be in the campaign for “unlimited” amounts.

There seems to be little doubt now that the 2012 election will involve billions – billions with a B – of dollars in unregulated, often unreported money from literally a handful of high rollers who, because of their personal financial balance sheets, are able to lavish dollars on the candidates and causes they support – or oppose.

In terms of the presidential election the United States has become, or is dangerously close to becoming, a Banana Republic where the biggest checkbook wins the day. Oligarchs spend money, control the media and determine the course of Russian politics. Can we seriously be that far away? Even the campaigns that benefit from all this lavish spending must be wondering if they can control the essential messages of their own campaigns when some kazillionaire has decided to fund a political action committee and own a few television stations.

All of this has happened thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the now infamous Citizens United case and that bring us full circle back to Teddy Roosevelt. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, opened the floodgates to all the unregulated, independent and corporate spending by overturning a century of established law, a law dating back to – that’s right – the Old Rough Rider.

Roosevelt, of course, famously spoke of the threat imposed upon a democratic society by what he called “malefactors of great wealth,” but he also said, “The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.”

As to the big banks, Roosevelt – he was the Trust Buster after all – would not have stopped at bemoaning their enormous influence over our economy and public policy. JPMorgan and the other top four biggest banks essentially control 56% of the entire U.S. economy. Roosevelt would have acted, he would have broken up the biggest banks in the interest of a capitalist system that resists giving so much control of the economy to so few people.

But that approach is not an option in these times, even given the continuing danger to the U.S. and world economy presented by JPMorgan-like risk taking. Mention breaking up the big banks or re-regulating them as T.R.’s distant relative did in the 1930s and you won’t be invited back to a Georgetown cocktail party.

In his justly famous New Nationalism speech in 1910 – President Obama tried and mostly failed to capture some of the same Rooseveltian quality in his own recent economic speech – the 26th president said:

“At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new.”

It is nothing new. Just over a hundred years ago, the United States had a political leader summoning the country to a higher standard of accountability and behavior. T.R. was a trust buster and an advocate for reducing the enormous reach of money in our politics. There is no one sounding his clarion call today, or if they are their voices are lost in background noise that only money can buy.

Ask yourself, “What would T.R. do?” The great president’s record from 100 years ago tells us and the answer has almost nothing to do with what is happening in our politics in 2012.

 

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, FDR, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Stumbles

Posted on by christian

Obama: Not Doing Fine

Skillful politicians, it is often said, make their own luck. They have – or develop – the instincts to act, speak or hold their tongue at the right moment. The best of the best use language and symbols to connect over and over again with their constituents, or at least with most of them.

Politics is many things: policy, determination, intelligence and timing, including being able to read the other side and know how and when to push back from the clinch and land an effective counter punch. Politics is handling adversity, taking a punch and bouncing back. Politics is also performance and performance is the ability to convey a story, a story that connects both intellectually and emotionally.

Last week was the week when, I suspect, Barack Obama went from a presumptive favorite to be re-elected in November to, at best, an even bet. To say that the Obama campaign has a bad week is to say the Queen had a nice little party recently. It remains to be seen whether it was the defining week of this campaign that seems to last forever.

Obama’s no good, horrible, very bad week began with jobless numbers that showed a modest increase in unemployment and ended with the president, looking more petulant that presidential, making one of the worst rhetorical stumbles he’s made since the 2008 campaign. In between those two black Fridays came news that Republicans substantially outperformed Democrats in fundraising in the most recent reporting period.

If a gaffe in politics is defined as a politician speaking the truth, then Mitt Romney’s “I like firing people” and Obama’s “the private sector is doing fine” probably are gaffes. I’m guessing both men meant exactly what they said. Romney’s private equity experience, by its very nature, involved a lot of layoffs and Obama, in real danger of losing re-election due to a struggling economy, must be chaffing when he sees that corporate profits are screaming along and the wealthiest among us truly are “doing fine.”

The Romney camp is no doubt rejoicing that Obama’s well-oiled political machine seems to be seizing up. The president’s mighty oratorical skills don’t seem to have quite the magic they once did and unforced errors, the bane of soccer players and politicians, seem to descend on the Obama campaign like a host of locusts.

Strip away all the obvious political problems the president is dealing with; the persistently sluggish economy, congressional Republicans who refuse to deal with dramatically serious issues like the coming fiscal cliff of auto pilot budget cuts and tax increases and a euro crisis that seems to worsen by the day. All of those problems, serious as they are, might be minimized, particularly in a race against a lackluster campaigner like Romney, if Obama could begin to tell a coherent story about his first term and what a second term might look like. So far he hasn’t and as a result a stumble like the private sector is doing “just fine” sucks the air out of his efforts.

The two presidential campaigns that most resemble 2012 were Franklin Roosevelt’s race in 1936 during the Great Depression – unemployment was more than 16% on Election Day – and Jimmy Carter’s contest with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Carter’s campaign stumbled under the weight of the Arab oil boycott, high inflation and the kidnapping of U.S. hostages by Iranian militants.

Roosevelt won despite his economic challenges. Carter didn’t. The reason, I think, was Roosevelt’s ability (and Carter’s inability) to weave a coherent story about what the country had been through and what could happen in the future. Roosevelt also understood the importance in politics of selecting your enemy. In 1936, FDR defined his real opponents as the conservative, big business leaders of the country who resisted his New Deal reforms. He called them “economic royalists.”

If you wonder whether history has a tendency to repeat itself, read the words Roosevelt used when he accepted his party’s nomination for a second term in 1936.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Talk about class warfare. Roosevelt defined his opponents as opponents of freedom and the Constitution and as “over-privileged.” Obama, on the other hand, has been unable to shake the accusation that he is attempting to fundamentally alter the American system. Roosevelt was fundamentally reshaping that system and he made the effort the centerpiece of his campaign for re-election.

Near the end of his acceptance speech in 1936, Roosevelt uttered some of the most riveting words you could hope to hear from the podium of a political convention.

“Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes,” he said, “but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales.

“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

Roosevelt went on to win 46 of the then-48 states, even as millions of Americans remained out of work. He won, in small part, because of a lackluster opponent – Kansas Gov. Alfred Landon – but more so because he summoned a hurting nation to join him in realizing a bright, new day. The current incumbent in the White House has dealt with many of the same issues Roosevelt confronted in the 1930’s. If he is to be re-elected he’ll need to tap into the mysterious cycle of human events and call forth for Americans a new meeting with destiny.

In short, Obama needs to tell a compelling, aspirational story about the future and why the country will be better off with him in charge. If he can’t – he’s looking more like Carter than FDR. Re-elections are always a referendum on the incumbent – what he’s done and what he says he will do. That was certainly the case in 1936 and 1980.

If the president continues to run his 2012 re-election campaign based on getting the better of Romney with an ever changing soundbite of the day, rather than explaining from where he has brought the country and where he plans to take it, he’ll lose in November.

 

2012 Election, Egan, Idaho Politics, Minnick

Winners/Losers

Posted on by christian

Idaho Voters Stay Home in Droves

The closed Idaho primary election was the big loser yesterday. Most Idahoans – maybe close to 80% of the eligible voters – voted with their remote controls and stayed at home in front of the television rather than visit the polls and be forced for the first time to declare a party affiliation.

The Idaho Statesman’s Dan Popkey quotes Secretary of State Ben Ysursa today as saying, “Our biggest Election Day question used to be, ‘Where do I vote?’ Today, 90 percent of the calls we got were people upset about the closed primary and the party declaration being a public record.”

The extra partisan Republicans who pushed so hard for so long to close the primary may have forgotten that the enduring characteristic of the Idaho electorate in independence and privacy. Idahoans of either party, or no party, of the Libertarian Party, don’t like to be told what to do. They like choices, multiple choices, even if the vast majority of the time they end up punching the card for a Republican. The closed primary feels like an intrusion.

There were numerous sharply contested races – most in the Republican primary – yesterday and in most cases incumbents won. Where they didn’t, in Elmore and Kootenai Counties, for instance, there were mostly local reasons. So it is difficult to define any broad theme to the results yesterday beyond one of the oldest truths in politics, as Idaho Public Television’s Greg Hahn points out, “The power of incumbency is great.”

I’m left to ponder if Idaho Democrats – we know who they are now – will find a way to capitalize on the widespread lack of enthusiasm for the changes in the way we select candidates? A tiny sliver of sunshine for Democrats may exist in the spirited, but clean legislative primary races run in Ada County. Two young, committed first time candidates won contested primaries, for example, in District 19 in Boise’s reliably Democratic North End and they won the old fashion way – shoe leather, good messages, networking and endorsements.

If Idaho Democrats are ever to begin the long slog back to something like relevance, it will be because of committed, attractive younger candidates and a long-term strategy to woo Hispanics, college kids and the high tech community. Idaho Democrats need to re-invent themselves for the 21st Century. At least after yesterday, they have a place to start – a few thousands names of folks who actually stood up publicly and said: “I’m voting Democratic.”

 

2012 Election, Minnick

Election Day

Posted on by christian

A Watershed…or More of the Same?

Idaho voters will find something new today if they make the effort to get to their neighborhood polling place and it’s going to be very interesting to see whether they like declaring their party affiliation in order to vote. Here’s betting a number of us will feel just a little less comfortable in the privacy of the polling booth today than we did the last time we did our civic duty.

The most conservative elements in the Idaho Republican Party have been hankering for this change for a long time. The party may come to beware of what it wished for. Idaho’s impeccably fair Secretary of State, Ben Ysursa, is predicting a 23% voter turnout today; a dismal number if true that could permit a tiny sliver of the population to define the Idaho GOP for years to come. As has been the case for most of the last 20 years, Idaho Democrats are largely an afterthought. They feature a handful of contested elections for the state legislature, but most of the action will be on the GOP side of the ballot.

“This is the meanest dang campaign I ever saw,” Sen. Denton Darrington, a southern Idaho Republican told the Associated Press. Darrington is retiring after 30 years in the Senate rather than face a fellow Republican in a primary caused by a re-worked legislative district. “It’s the strangest, weirdest political season I’ve ever seen, and that’s a lot of years.”

I’ll be watching for trends in the Republican primaries in far northern Idaho, Canyon County and the Magic Valley where generally more middle-of-the-road incumbents are being challenged from the right. Several of these races have featured what feels like genuinely unprecedented levels of third-party, independent expenditures, a trend across the country that has finally come to Idaho in a big way. There have also been a number of last minute reports of confusing, or perhaps deceptive, mailings, endorsements, etc.

This has been a primary largely devoid of issues with most of the back-and-forth centering on who is the more reliable Republican conservative. Strangely missing – and this is true for Democrats as well as Republicans – has been much if any talk about the broad future direction of the state, job growth, expansion of the economy or education. This election has been fought, I suspect quite unsatisfactorily for all but the most partisan Idahoans, in the deep trenches of ideology.

One great irony of this new, closed primary environment is that the desire to limit participation in the GOP primary to the hardcore Republicans flies in the face of the historic success the party has long enjoyed. Generally speaking if you look closely at the election results in major races over the last 30 years, you’ll find that the larger the turnout the better Republicans do. One dirty little secret of the success Democrats enjoyed in controlling the Idaho governor’s office from 1970 to 1995 was that none of those winning elections for Democrats occurred in a presidential election year when turnout tends to be the highest. The only times Democrats have been successful on a statewide of congressional district basis over three decades or more is when they have faced damaged Republican incumbents, been successful in identifying and appealing to disaffected GOP voters and then hoping a lot of folks stay home on election day. A low turnout favors a Democrat in Idaho. Republicans, by closing their primary, have potentially begun to squander the broad numbers advantage they have enjoyed for years.

Dominate political organizations don’t always handle success very well for the long term. They overreach tending eventually to focus on the comfort of ideology rather than the hard work of ideas that relate to how the broad electorate lives and works.  Democrats, of course, or even a third-way movement that the state may be more and more ready to embrace, has to show some gumption if a reasonably alternative is to be offered. But this much is true: the ruling GOP club is going to be smaller tomorrow than it is today. We’ll see if that is good for the GOP brand in Idaho for the next generation or whether today’s election marks a point where the long arc of partisan politics finally starts to bend in a new direction.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Handling Adversity

Posted on by christian

A One Day Story That Wasn’t

Google “Mitt Romney” today and the first thing that appears is “Mitt Romney bullying,” which says a lot about a lot of things. It may just be that a lot of folks think a story about the GOP presidential candidate’s prep school years is an interesting story, or perhaps a silly story about the silly pranks of 17-year olds, or maybe a telling story about the candidate’s privileged upbringing, or just a mild distraction from debate about the economy and war and peace, or maybe it signifies something else entirely.

The story that broke yesterday in the Washington Post may yet prove to be a passing blip on the presidential political radar screen, but it may also be the first of a prolonged series of tests of Romney and his campaign concerning just how well they handle a little adversity. What interests me today is how the Romney camp has responded, as well as the candidate’s first instincts when presented with an inconvenient story.

Romney’s first response, in a radio interview, was to issue a blanket apology for youthful indiscretions and a specific response that he couldn’t remember the incident – an alleged Romney-led pack of high school guys who set up a frightened, long-haired, supposedly gay kid and then cut his hair – that was the basis of the Post story.

I don’t know about you, but I remember too much of my school years, particularly the embarrassing stuff. I remember back to the sixth grade when the tough kid in class pushed me down and sat on my chest as I was trying to walk home from school. I had my glasses in a case in my hip pocket and they were broken when I hit the deck. You tend to remember stuff like that, even 40 or more years later. So, the “I don’t recall” answer Romney initially offered and then repeated just doesn’t have the ring of reality about it.

So what, you might well say. Who cares about prep school antics? If we were all held to account for dumb things we did in high school we would all have some explaining to do, particularly to our parents. And in the end the bullying story may be just such an event, but it will not be the last bit of personal adversity Romney faces as he endures six months of vetting before the November voting. This is why Romney’s tin ear response, time and again, to adversity is a problem for his campaign.

Each one of these episodes – bullying, corporations are people, I like firing people, the wife’s two Cadillacs – paint an unflattering picture of a guy who is being defined before our eyes and he, so far at least, lacks the basic political skills to slip away from the characterizations.

It is striking in a way that Mitt Romney has been running for president for six years straight, served as a governor of a major state, and still offers such an incomplete picture of himself. Romney told an interviewer recently that one hard lesson he has learned from his years in politics is that you must define yourself before others do the job for you. If he learned that lesson, he seems to have forgotten it again.

The bullying story is interesting less for what it says about Romney’s youth, than for what it says about how he handles his present circumstances. Had Romney said, as Time’s Joe Klein wrote today, “I did a really stupid and terrible thing” 50 years ago and I’m sorry and wish I could take it back, he’d be back to talking about the economy today. Instead, lacking the instincts of a genuinely accomplished pro, he flubbed his lines and has invited a vast amount of follow up analysis and scrutiny.

Good campaigns – winning campaigns – handle adversity. Barack Obama did in 2008 with his outrageously outspoken preacher. John Kerry didn’t with his swiftboat critics in 2004. George W. Bush did with his Vietnam record and Al Gore didn’t with his fundraising at a Buddhist temple.

Romney got through a long primary campaign against a remarkably weak field by, as Newt Gingrich said, “carpet bombing” his opponents with expensive television advertising and by appearing to be the one guy who might have a chance to win the White House. It’s a new day. Obama may not be the strongest candidate, but he’s no Rick Santorum either. Romney’s adversity is just beginning. If he can’t handle quickly and deftly a story about his 17-year old life what will he do about something really important?

 

2012 Election, Andrus, Boise, Egan, Idaho Politics, Minnick

Old Lessons

Posted on by christian

Where’s the Puppy?

Harry Truman famously said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” I’ll offer the Johnson Corollary to Truman’s great one liner: “in politics, it is almost always your friends who cause you trouble.”

Most every politician I have known has a very good idea from which direction the partisan opposition will attack. It’s the onslaught from friends that is harder to anticipate and even more difficult to combat.

From Idaho to Indiana today, the Republican Party is in full revolt against itself and the soldiers in this war of the friends – faintly moderate Republicans battling really, really conservative Republicans – are in full battle gear.

The most recent purge of the “moderates” claimed its latest victim yesterday when 36-year Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar lost by 20 points in a GOP primary. Lugar, 80-years old, and portrayed as a squishy bipartisan moderate, was retired by the same type of voter who will next week take the Idaho GOP in an ever more rightward direction.

Lugar’s loss, like every losing campaign, turned on many factors. First, he may well have succumbed to the fatal illness that eventually catches many politicians; the voters just got sick of him. But, it’s also undeniable that The Club for Growth and other very conservative groups targeted the one-time chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for being one of the few in the Senate, on either side, willing to cross the aisle and work a deal. Lugar had the partisan misfortune of working with the president on arms issues and actually voting for two Obama Supreme Court appointees. Not good when your friends think such behavior is the political equivalent of sitting down for dinner with the Taliban.

In a remarkable statement released last night, Lugar neatly summed up what he – and more and more Republicans – are facing right now.

 “Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country,” Lugar said. “And partisan groups, including outside groups that spent millions against me in this race, are determined to see that this continues. They have worked to make it as difficult as possible for a legislator of either party to hold independent views or engage in constructive compromise. If that attitude prevails in American politics, our government will remain mired in the dysfunction we have witnessed during the last several years.”

Closer to home, some Idaho Republicans are spending freely in an effort to shift their party further right. The combination of the new “closed” GOP primary, well-funded PAC’s targeting slightly more moderate incumbents and old intraparty feuds guarantee that Republicans, who have been almost completely successful over the last two decades in Idaho, will be deeply divided after the May 15th primary among the mere conservatives and the ultras. The headline in The Idaho Statesman today said it all: “Idaho House Leaders Attempt Fratricide”

Reporter Dan Popkey details the efforts by senior Republican leaders to target their own in primaries, prompting the state’s chief election officer, Secretary of State Ben Ysura, to observe: “This is groundbreaking, the open split in the leadership and money being spent against one of their own.”

Of course, Republicans have no lock on this type of “kill your friends” behavior. To disastrous effect, Franklin Roosevelt tried to “purge” conservatives from the Democratic Party in 1938. FDR, a generally brilliant political analyst, misread the country and created divisions within his party that lasted a generation. And, of course, Ted Kennedy helped contribute to Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980 with an ill-considered primary challenge against an incumbent president. Lyndon Johnson’s blood feud with Bobby Kennedy – the two most prominent Democrats in the country hated each other – is well-documented in Robert Caro’s new biography of LBJ.

Perhaps the truly remarkable feature of many of these intraparty feuds – fratricide is a good word for it – is that they happen at precisely the moment when a party has the most to gain by throwing up the biggest possible tent.

In 1938, Roosevelt had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. After his failed purge, he never passed another significant piece of domestic legislation. In 1980, national Democrats faced an energized effort, new at the time at least on such a scale, to target a number of their incumbents with independent expenditure campaigns. At the very moment the party needed unity rather than warfare, it opted for warfare and lost – big. Can you say President Reagan?

National Republicans in 2012 have an historic opportunity during a time of economic distress to turn out a weak incumbent, consolidate their hold on the House and capture the Senate. Lugar’s demise in Indiana, at the least, make that last objective more difficult, since a centrist Democrat in Hoosierlandwill now likely have an easier time witha Tea Party type than he would have had with Lugar.

In Idaho, you have to wonder if all this intraparty battling among Republicans is causing them to flirt dangerously with mucking up their own decades-long success. History may have a lesson on point. In 1966, conservatives in the Idaho GOP purged three-term incumbent Republican Gov. Robert E. Smylie on grounds that he was too moderate and had grown too big for the britches of his blue suits. Smylie’s replacement as governor was very conservative and a favorite of the Goldwater wing of the GOP.

Four years later, a 39-year old lumberjack from Orofino, Cecil D. Andrus, beat the very conservative and not terribly capable Gov. Don Samuelson. That 1970 election set off a 24-year run where Democrats never moved out of the Idaho Governor’s Office.

As that ol’ lumberjack is fond of saying, “don’t say anything bad about ol’ Don Samuelson. If there hadn’t been a Don Samuelson there would never have been a Cecil Andrus.”

Purges can have some of the most unintended consequences.

 

2012 Election, Minnick, Pete Seeger, Romney

Rolling the Vice

Posted on by christian

Who Will Mitt Pick?

There is an old truism in politics that holds that one can go from hero to zero just like that – meaning quick, very quick. The reverse is also true. Struggling front runner becomes nominee literally overnight  and our incredibly short political attention span moves on to the next decision.

Three weeks ago the pundits were wondering if Mitt Romney could beat Rick Santorum on Santorum’s  home turf in Pennsylvania. Today they’re suggesting he select, take your pick, Condi Rice, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio or half a dozen others, as the perfect running mate. For the GOP candidate the focus has shifted and now American voters, to the extent they are paying attention, can assess Romney’s real ability as a CEO. Can he pick the right person for his Number Two? History would tell us there are no perfect running mates, but Romney’s pick, whomever it turns out to be, will be sliced and diced to the last soundbite for hints of whether he has done what few would be presidents have ever done – pick the absolutely right person.

In 1964, in part to counter his ultra-conservative, southwestern cowboy, bomb throwing (or dropping) image, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater selected a little-know northeastern, GOP establishment Congressman named William E. Miller to run with him as vice president. We know how that turned out. Miller is now best remembered as the star of an American Express commercial that asked “do you know who I am?” Most people didn’t. Give yourself extra credit if you know the answer to the political Jeopardy question – Who was Bill Miller?

The conventional wisdom holds that the second spot on the ticket is all about  “balance” – regional, ethnic, religious or ideological – and while such reasoning has factored into vice picks historically, the more common consideration is more personal and practical and often turns a mirror on the candidate rather than focusing a spotlight on the running mate.

The balance arguement put Lyndon Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1960. John Kennedy absolutely had to carry Texas and Lyndon delivered. Franklin Roosevelt put Texas Congressman John Nance Garner on the ticket in 1932 less for regional balance than to remove Garner as a rival in the Democratic nominating process. Garner swung his convention delegates to FDR in exchange for a spot on the ticket. In 1948 Harry Truman picked Alben Barkley, another trivia question who actually was vice president, mostly because he felt comfortable with the older Barkley who was the Senate majority leader.

The desire not to be in any way overshadowed probably led George H.W. Bush to make one of the truly curious selections in modern times in 1988 when little-know Dan Quayle, a very junior, deer-in-the-headlights senator from Indiana, joined the GOP ticket. The same could be said of Richard Nixon’s pick of Spiro Agnew in 1968, although Nixon knew the former Maryland governor was capable of  carrying out the attack dog role that typically falls to the second fiddle.

Did Joe Biden help Barack Obama win in 2008? Or did Dick Cheney deliver for George W. Bush in 2000? Each may have helped the presidential candidate assume a veneer of foreign policy experience, but for the most part neither pick did any harm to the candidate’s electoral prospects, which in the end is the most reasonable criteria for the second pick.

John McCain may have had no choice but to roll the vice and pick Sarah Palin in 2008, a decision that looks in retrospect as reckless now as was unconventional at the time. Palin, I would argue, did do harm, because her choice by the supposedly mature, sensible McCain reflected badly on his judgment. I’m guessing Romney, the buttoned-down, data-driven former CEO won’t make that mistake. He’ll go safe and sober and hope to do no harm.

 Ohio Sen. Rob Portman would be safe and sober and Romney needs to win Ohio. If Romney is going to run his campaign based upon the twin pillars of his corporate experience and his allegation that the incumbent just isn’t up to the job, then he best use the vice presidential selection process as if he were picking a vice president at Bain Capital. Flash and dash isn’t what he needs, competence is. Romney needs a veep who helps build the CEO-brand, since that is the rationale he has adopted for his campaign.

In rare ocassions in American political history a vice president has helped win an election. More often the best they do is to accomplish the minimum, they do no harm. And – remember William E. Miller –  in the best case the vice presidential candidate doesn’t become the answer to a trivia question.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Boise, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Gender Chasm

Posted on by christian

Mad Men Attitudes and 21st Century Politics

By every measure it seems clear that Ann Romney has the smarts, style and personal qualities to be a very popular and successful First Lady. But as good a surrogate as she can be for husband Mitt, it will be her husband’s name and not hers on the November ballot, which simply means she can help his campaign not carry it.

Ann Romney’s notable attempts to “humanize” her husband and at the same time close the Romney and Republican Party gender chasm may help at the margins, but most likely not enough to erase one of the two really serious demographic challenges confronting the almost certain GOP nominee. The candidate and his party must engage in that heavy lifting.

Let’s start with the obvious: if you need a conscious strategy to “humanize” a real person, you have a real problem. Last week the Romney campaign rolled out an online video of the genuinely appealing Ann reminiscing about raising her five sons, as well as Mitt who she said was often the “sixth son.” The video was a not very well disguised effort to address some of the important political news of the week, President Obama’s lead over Romney in new a poll conducted in key swing states. That nearly double digit lead is now in place largely thanks to Romney’s collapsing support among women.

To borrow a popular culture reference, this situation is a little like running the completely buttoned down 1960’s ad executive Don Draper from television’s popular period piece Mad Men for president in 2012. Handsome, out of touch Don just wouldn’t make it as a 2012 candidate and, while Romney may not have Draper’s various addiction problems, he acts like a guy from the 60’s who will never open up and will certainly never get in touch with his feminine side. Romney seems most of the time like a man transported through time to a place far, far away. He’s a 1960’s man in a 21st Century campaign. You can’t humanize that.

In last week’s USA Today/Gallup Poll of swing states, President Obama led Romney 51-42 among registered voters, and remember this research was conducted in places like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Iowa were our national elections are decided.

“The biggest change from previous polls,” USA Today reported, “came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.”

[Romney’s other potentially fatal demographic flaw is with Hispanic voters, but that’s a column for another day.]

From Rush Limbaugh to state legislatures, the Republican brand with women is tarnished, perhaps irrevocably in this election cycle. Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, dates the pivotal moment of the GOP collapse among women to what seemed at the time to be a completely off-the-wall question during a GOP debate early this year in New Hampshire. You may remember that George Stephanopoulos of ABC News asked Romney if he shared his opponent Rick Santorum’s view that “states have the right to ban contraception.”

Romney ridiculed the question, the audience booed George and most of us chalked it up to Stephanopoulos getting too little sleep because of his early morning TV duties.

But, as Rich notes, Santorum’s birth control views just made him “an advance man for a rancorous national brawl about to ambush an unsuspecting America that thought women’s access to birth control had been resolved by the ­Supreme Court almost a half century ago.”

Meanwhile in state legislatures from Virginia to Idaho, anti-abortion themed legislation requiring women to undergo an ultrasound procedure as part of the visit to a physician prior to being able to access abortion services immediately became a potent symbol for what Democrats have begun to call “a war on women.” Whether its a war of not, the backlash over the ultrasound proposals was immediate and stunning in its intensity. After passing mandatory ultrasound legislation in the Idaho State Senate, legislative Republicans in the even more conservative Idaho House of Representatives heard from their constituents – their female Republican constituents – and suddenly discovered that the best place for the ultrasound legislation was in the bottom of a committee chairman’s desk drawer.

From personal experience I can attest to the fact that last time Idaho had a high-profile debate about abortion that carried with it national overtones – that was 1990 when then-Gov. Cecil D. Andrus vetoed legislation that was not only harshly anti-female, but would have sent the state into years of litigation – the incumbent governor’s re-election was secured when he stood solidly against nationally-inspired legislation that was properly seen by women – and many men – as draconian. Conservative women flocked to Andrus, I’m convince not just because of his courageous veto, but because he displayed both toughness and compassion. In other words, the issue was a test of character. Andrus passed the test and voters – women included – could warmly relate to such attributes, which explains why Romney and the GOP are hurting with women.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, you may remember, lost her party’s nomination in 2010 to a Tea Party-backed opponent. She then mounted an nearly unprecedented write-in campaign in the general election that returned her to the Senate. Murkowski is what passes for a moderate in the national GOP these days and comments she made last week in her state place a stark frame around the problem Romney must fix if he hopes to win the White House in November.

“I think what you’re sensing is a fear, a concern that women feel threatened, that a long settled issue might not be settled,” Murkowski said on a radio talk show in Homer, Alaska last week. As the Homer News reported, “[Murkowski] cited things like conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh’s remarks about a female Georgetown University law student, which Murkowski called ‘offensive, horribly offensive.'”

“To have those kind of slurs against a woman … you had candidates who want to be our president not say, ‘That’s wrong. That’s offensive.’ They did not condemn the rhetoric,” Murkowski said.

The paper continued, “From her perspective as a Republican, Murkowski said she can’t understand why some in her party have raised reproductive rights as an issue.”

“It makes no sense to make this attack on women,” she said. “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

So, while national unemployment numbers released last week should be confirming the GOP’s laser-like focus on the economy as the on issue that really threatens the White House incumbent, the campaign narrative for a solid week has been “war on women” and his party’s and Romney’s gender gap.

Here, I think, is the larger context for November: I tend to buy President Obama’s assertion last week that women simply don’t vote as some monolithic block that is up for grabs for a skillful candidate who appeals to the magic mix of “women’s issues.”

When it comes to politics, women are discerning voters – period. What the toxic issues mix has done to Romney and the GOP is to provide for many women – and men – a lens through which it’s possible to get a definitive glimpse of “the unzipped” Mitt, as wife Ann might say. Had Romney even a little finesse in handling these gender bending issues – think of his stumbling answer to whether Augusta National ought to allow women members or his tepid reaction to Limbaugh’s sexist bashing of an outspoken female law student – he could send all voters, particularly women, a message that he gets real life beyond his private equity experience and Ann’s two Cadillacs.

Still, rather that providing the cause of the gender chasm, the “women’s issues” mix really provides a footnote for reference on Romney’s real problem with discerning voters – they just aren’t into him. As conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote recently, “It is entirely possible that women simply aren’t that into Mitt. He’s just not their kind of guy. Health care, taxes, budgets, debt ceilings, capacity utilization, Chinese currency: so important. But at the end of the day — does he have “it”?

Parker goes on to say, “His wife says he does, but then she knows the unzipped Mitt. The question for American women is, do they really want to go there?”

In politics, of course, issues do matter, but discerning voters can sift the issues for what really matters; indications of character and connection. They may not want the candidates unzipped, but most voters do want to support candidates with whom they are comfortable, with whom they can – here’s that magic political word – connect.

Women are sending a pretty simple message: If there is no connection, there will be no Romney election.  

 

2012 Election, 2016 Election, American Presidents, Campaign Finance, Health Care, Minnick, Obama, Supreme Court

Supreme Power

Posted on by christian

Courts, Controversy and Conservatives

There is an old and respected approach to judicial review of controversial and essentially political issues that holds that judges should do almost everything possible to avoid wading into the dense thicket of politics.

If Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court were really conservative they would rule on the controversial Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) on the narrowest possible grounds. They might even seriously considered not ruling on the merits of the law under the old and accepted principle that the case is simply “not ripe” for adjudication since no one – at least not yet – has been “harmed” in the legal sense by the health insurance mandate and other aspects of the still new law.

Hardly anyone thinks either of those approaches is likely from the Roberts Court, particularly after last week’s marathon hearings. You will get even money today that Roberts will lead his thin 5-4 conservative majority in the direction of at least ruling the mandate unconstitutional. The odds are a bit longer that the Court will throw out the entire law. As they say, time will tell.

What interests me today is what President Obama, the former constitutional law professor, will do if the high court strikes down all or part of his signature accomplishment? A little history may be instructive; history I suspect Professor Obama knows well.

The most striking parallel to the current situation happened in 1935. The then conservative dominated Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the signature domestic piece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legislation to battle the Great Depression. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, every bit as much if not more a politician than Roberts, assembled a unanimous Court – including three real liberals – to deep six key features of FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act.

Roosevelt was brought low by a famously modest case –Schechter Poultry Company v. United States – a decision that prompted the great liberal Justice Louis Brandeis to remark to an FDR associate that the case marked the end of “this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.” Given that sentiment, Brandeis, were he on the Court today, might just be a vote against Obamacare.

Roosevelt’s reaction was, of course, to blast the Court as living in “a horse and buggy” era with regard to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and after his re-election FDR attempted, with disastrous consequences, to enlarge the Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s ideas about “judicial reform” were so outrageous that no president since has dare even suggest action to limit the scope or change the make-up of the Supreme Court. Instead we now fight epic battles over every new justice who is appointed and partisan political considerations, never far removed from judicial nominations, is now guaranteed to be front and center.

Obama will not, I predict, pull a Roosevelt. He knows, as the wise Jon Meacham wrote recently, “Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.”

Obama could, in theory, dust off some really old ideas and suggest a Constitutional amendment, as the great Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette did in the 1920’s, that would allow Congress to overturn Court decisions or, under certain circumstances, put Supreme Court decisions up to a popular vote. Of course, President Obama won’t do anything of the sort.

Obama is then really only left with the power of persuasion. He might suggest, as one wag did, that when the opportunity for insurance coverage for millions disappears they take their complaints to Antonin Scalia. Better yet, Obama could begin a real national conversation – including involing United States Senators who approve Supreme Court nominees – about the kind of Supreme Court the nation needs in the 21st Century.

You have to hand it to Republicans, they have been running against the Court for years. What prominent GOP lawmaker doesn’t have the talking points down regarding “activist, liberal judges” who legislate from the bench? That line of political positioning has been enormously successful in positioning a very conservative majority on the current Supreme Court to get away with precisely what conservatives have been critical of for years – legislating from the bench.

Set aside for a moment the merits of the Affordable Care Act and merely consider what some of the justices from the left and right said last week. As columnist E.J. Dionne noted, Justice Samuel Alito sounded like a House subcommittee chairman quoting Congressional Budget Office figures and wondered whether the government could mandate that we all have burial insurance, while Scalia went off with a weird analogy about the government mandating broccoli. The liberals didn’t comport themselves much better with some commentators noting that they tried to come to the rhetorical aide of the Obama Administration’s Solicitor General who had trouble at times articulating the best arguments in favor of the law.

But judges aren’t supposed to be super legislators, they shouldn’t care about policy or vote counting (beyond counting to five) and they have no business trying to bail out a lawyer who is fumbling his case. Such behavior paints the entire Court with an activist brush. What is needed with the current case, and I would suggest with the money in politics case Citizens United and the who will be president case Bush v. Gore is real, reasoned judicial restraint.

The Court has a legitimate role in the health care case in defining – or refining – the scope of the Commerce Clause, but the justice could also acknowledge the obvious. We’ll have an election in a few months where Obamacare will be one of the fundamental issues. All the Republican candidates say they want to repeal the law. Democrats will fight to keep it. That is the kind of messy and important debate we have elections to resolve. Real judicial restraint would find the Supreme Court – conservatives and liberals – searching for a super majority way to rule narrowly and leave the politics to those who are elected to vote on policy questions.

If the Court overturns the health care legislation, the president will undoubtedly take issue with the decision, but he ought also to use the moment to educate more broadly about how judges should approach their jobs, the Court’s sacred status notwithstanding.