Baseball

Andrus Center, Baseball, Basketball, Native Americans

James and Jeter

Posted on by christian

A Contrast in Class

I woke up this morning thinking of writing something about the GOP debate last night in New Hampshire. But that encounter, featuring seven Republican contenders, was so completely predictable that a little LeBron James analysis seems more urgent today. After all, the next NBA season will be upon us before the next New Hampshire primary. First things first.

I confess that the last time I was really interested in a National Basketball Association final, Larry Bird was still playing. I really only paid close attention, season-long attention, to pro basketball when the great Elgin Baylor was captain of the Lakers. Back then both the pants and the shots were shorter. While mom and dad assumed I was fast asleep, I can still remember turning the radio down very low and listening to Chick Hearn’s call of a late west coast Laker game from the “fab-u-lous Forum in Inglewood…”

So, for me this year’s playoffs where not a case of eagerly waiting for the great egos from South Beach to get their just desserts at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks. I really hadn’t been paying attention and came to membership in the “I really don’t care much for LeBron” crowd late in the game, er, late in the playoffs. And, apparently like millions of fans, I enjoyed the outcome immensely.

On the intense stage of a championship, regardless of the sport, it is one of life’s guilty little pleasures to watch the most hyped guy, the guy with all the press, all the cash and all the big talk, fall flat on his face. LeBron James certainly didn’t disappoint. And, as if to further cement his well-earned reputation for lacking in class, he handled defeat with, well, not a lot of it. Class that is.

Let the jokes begin: “LeBron will never make change for you as he never has the fourth quarter.” Or, “The reason why LeBron skipped college was to avoid the finals.”

The governor of Ohio, LeBron’s home state and the place he “abandoned” in order to bring a championship to Miami, actually issued a proclamation praising the “loyalty, integrity and teamwork” of the team from Dallas. Give LeBron this much: he united most of the country behind a team from Texas, no small accomplishment.

Now for something entirely different – Derek Jeter.

Loyal readers know that I have no love lost for the New York Yankees. Being a Yankee fan is too easy, too predictable. Sure it’s the greatest franchise in baseball history, but Microsoft is the greatest franchise in software. Where’s the romance in that?

Still, sometime soon the Yankee captain, a sure fire Hall of Famer, will enter elite company when he slaps his 3,000 career hit. He’s currently six hits shot of the magic mark. I’ll be rooting for him, despite the pinstripes. Derek Jeter is the antithesis of a guy like LeBron James. He’s played his entire career in New York, the media capitol of the world, and has found a way to not be a constant feature in the tabloids. He survived and thrived through the Steinbrenner years. He’s played along side the not so loved Alex Rodriguez and projected a certain calm professionalism that then A-Rod or a LeBron can only dream about. Of course, Jeter has his detractors, but mostly because he’s a Yankee and not becuse he’s a chump.

So, why is Jeter a widely beloved figure in New York and beyond and also widely recognized as both a consummate pro and a genuinely nice guy, while disliking King James is the national religion of sports fans?

Some would argue, Buzz Bissinger, for instance, that LeBron hatred as gone too far, but “the chosen one” just keeps bringing it on himself. James repeatedly violates the first rule of public relations: quit digging when you’re in a hole. Just a small flash of humility, a warm word for the great play of Dirk Nowitzki, maybe even staying out of the spotlight for a while, would start to alter the LeBron storyline, but of such basic common sense the very wealthy and very sure of himself young man seems entirely incapable. 

LeBron James will never be a fan favorite. Too late for that. He might still be a respected super star, but not if he spends his NBA career behaving like Barry Bonds in short pants. Sports fan don’t like LeBron James for a reason, just like they like Derek Jeter for a reason.

One of these great athletes gets it. The other hasn’t a clue. One guy is self aware, the other self centered. And that, as they say, is the difference in having folks root for you to reach a hollowed mark and being made fun of by the governor of Ohio.

 

 

Andrus Center, Baseball, Law and Justice, Music

Doing Well and Good

Posted on by christian

One Impressive Guy

Bill Neukom, now the managing general partner and CEO of my beloved San Francisco Giants, seems like one of those guys who has led ten great lives while the rest of us struggle to manage just one.

Perhaps best known as the most famous in-house lawyer in American business, Neukom started working at Microsoft when the software giant had a dozen employees. He stayed for 25 years and, as he modestly told a recent gathering of lawyers in Sun Valley, Idaho where he has a home, his bushel basket was positioned properly under the Microsoft tree as the stock options just kept falling. He made a bundle and is now reinvesting it in some handsome and useful ways.

Obviously, he bought into the Giants ownershipand has had an influential hand in strengthening the front office and building a scrappy team, including many cast offs, that won a World Series last year. But, that is hardly the sum of what Neukom has been spending his money on.

He donated $20 million for a new law school building at Stanford, his law school alma mater. (The Seattle Times couldn’t resist pointing out, Microsoft anti-trust decrees notwithstanding, that Attorney General Eric Holder participated in the dedication ceremony for the William H. Neukom Building in Palo Alto.)

Neukom has also used his family foundation to underwrite the critically important work of an organization you may not have heard of, but eventually will – the World Justice Project.

WJP is dedicated to leading “a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the rule of law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity.” A noble sounding mission that basically boils down to this: most of the rest of the world does not embrace nor have the tradition of a justice system that is based on well-defined rules, established and transparent practices and real accountability.

Neukom, who conceived of and founded the World Justice Project while he was president of the American Bar Association (another of his many lives), simply says without adherence to what lawyers call “the rule of law” people and institutions in the developing world will never have the opportunity and equality that all of us deserve.

The World Justice Project has developed a Rule of Law Index that evaluates countries around the world and the degree to which they respect the rule of law. For example, the Philippines ranked poorly, while Singapore ranked very high. Many of the lowest marks, perhaps not surprisingly, go to countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to establishing an objective database on the level of adherence to the rule of law, the Index has generated substantial international media interest like this line from the Jordan Times: “The index ranked Jordan 15th for clear, publicized and stable laws, essential for security and investment. However, in terms of promoting greater transparency, there is room for improvement.”

Neukom and his associates have importantly cast a very bright light on a fundamental human right that most Americans (too easily perhaps) simply take for granted. The U.S. justice system, don’t get me wrong, is far from perfect, but the western notion of how courts and judges, legislatures and the media should operate, is still a model for much of the rest of the world.

Thanks to Bill Neukom, serious work is underway to move the needle on this fundamentally important issue.

When I had the opportunity to hear Neukom speak recently, I was struck by his passion for the organization he has created, but also by one personal thing he said. The money he made at Microsoft, he said, “isn’t my money.” He meant, I think, that he felt a motivation greater than many of us do to give something back. He’s living proof that you can do well and do good.

Neukom is nearly as passionate about the ball club. He’s hands on, extraordinarily knowledgeable and, after last year’s surprising World Series win, willing to concede that magic must always be laced with hard work in order to win it all. He calls himself a “lucky guy.”

“How would I describe the guy that can fire me?” former Giant player and broadcast Duane Kuiper told the San Francisco Chronicle on opening day in April. “Let’s see, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, very handsome, one of the most intelligent guys I’ve ever known. You see where this is going.”

Yup. However, in the case of Bill Neukom, super lawyer, philanthropist, baseball guy, rule of law advocate, it’s also all true.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball, Baucus, Egan, Idaho Politics, U.S. Senate

Welker & Killebrew

Posted on by christian

Commie Bashing Baseball Talent Scout

The passing of the great Harmon Killebrew recently caused a few Idaho political, history and baseball junkies to reflect on another guy from Payette, Idaho – one-term wonder Sen. Herman Welker.

Welker is mostly forgotten to history these days, and probably deserves to be, except for two or maybe three footnotes in history. The Welker footnotes:

1) Welker’s nickname, Little Joe from Idaho, references his bosom buddy status with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Commie hunting, red-baiting politician from Wisconsin who had an entire era of politics – McCarthyism – named after him. Welker was just about McCarthy’s biggest defender, even as Joe was censured by the United States Senate.

2) Welker’s re-election was derailed in 1956 by a fresh faced young Idaho Democrat by the name of Frank Church, proving my old theory that Democrats only win statewide in Idaho when Republicans screw up. One campaign sign suggested Idaho need a “sane and sober” Senator. Welker didn’t fit the bill and Church beat “Little Joe” and launched a distinguished 24 year career. (The charge against Welker was both true and unfair. He died a short time later from a brain tumor.)

3) Welker “discovered” Killebrew, then a fresh-faced teenager in Payette. Al Eisele, an editor-at-large of the D.C. paper The Hill had a nice piece recently on the Welker-Killebrew connection. As was widely reported, along with the news of Killebrew’s death from cancer, was the detail that he was scouted by Welker. The lawmaker told Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith in 1954 that he should sign the big kid from Idaho who “was the greatest slugger since Mickey Mantle.” Griffith acted on the tip, sent a scout to Idaho and rest, as they say, is Hall of Fame history.

Eisele wrote: “Welker, who often attended Senators home games, once almost came to blows with Senators manager Charlie Dressen when he shouted during a game at Griffith Stadium, ‘You, Dressen, why aren’t you playing my boy?’ Dressen responded, “Why don’t you run your U.S. Senate and let me run the Washington ball club?'”

Here is another tidbit, not so benign, from Eisele’s piece on the obscure Idaho Senator.

“There is a bizarre footnote to Welker’s Senate career. In 1954, Democratic Sen. Lester Hunt of Wyoming, a bitter enemy of McCarthy, fatally shot himself in his Senate office, ostensibly because of despondency over poor health.

“But muckraking columnist Drew Pearson later reported that shortly before Hunt killed himself, Welker and Republican Sen. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire met with Hunt and warned him that if he ran for reelection that fall, Republicans would disclose that his 20-year-old son had been arrested for soliciting prostitution from a male undercover police officer in Lafayette Square.

“Pearson’s allegation was never proven, but the incident was believed to have been the inspiration for Allen Drury’s 1959 best-selling novel, Advise and Consent, in which a senator who opposes a nominee for Secretary of State who has lied to conceal his past Communist association, commits suicide after receiving anonymous threats that his past homosexual affair will be exposed unless he stops blocking the nomination.”

If the Pearson story is true, and we’ll probably never know for sure, then the contrast between the two men from Payette, Idaho, whose names were recently linked again, could not have been more different.

Harmon Killebrew celebrated in death as a greater human being than baseball player, and he was some kind of baseball player, and Herman Welker, the man who discovered the great Killebrew, not much of Senator or judge of character, but thankfully a fine judge of baseball talent.

 

Baseball, Politics

Implosion

Posted on by christian

“Go Talk to Tiffany’s”

Any candidate who says those words on national television is, by definition, in the deep do-do. Newt Gingrich used the “go talk to Tiffany’s” line in his Face the Nation interview last Sunday with the dean of D.C. television Bob Schieffer.

Schieffer, an old school reporter if there is such a thing, was like a dog with a bone wanting to know about what he called this “bizarre” story of the former speaker of the house and his wife owing between $250,000 and $500,000 to the tony jewelry retailer Tiffany’s. (The company has a great website, by the way.)

“What did you buy?” Schieffer asked the obviously flustered Gingrich. Gingrich never answered the question saying it was a matter “of his private life” and suggested multi-thousand dollar charge accounts at Tiffany’s are something every Joe Six Pack has.

The Schieffer-Gingrich interview was one of the most uncomfortable TV encounters I’ve seen in a while, and with the newly minted Republican presidential candidate refusing to respond to questions about his line of credit with Tiffany’s, its hard not to see this little glimpse into the candidate’s private life assuming a defining role in his effort to re-introduce himself to GOP primary voters. Coming on the heels of Newt’s comments about GOP plans to “reform” Medicare, Tiffany’s could be the bling that takes down the campaign.

His admirers, and there are many, say that the former speaker is a “brilliant” guy, a policy wonk, a big thinker. Maybe. If he were as smart as they say, he would have had a better answer for Bob Schieffer and he would never have dismissed the question with “go talk to Tiffany’s.”

A friend once told me that the part of politics he most enjoyed was “watching a candidate implode.” A bit cynical perhaps, but such implosion moments are very revealing. Remember the John Edwards $400 haircut? Or the fact that John McCain couldn’t recall how many houses he owned. Or George H.W. Bush in 1992 being amazed in a mock up of a grocery checkout line, obviously for the first time, to see the scanner technology that most of us take for granted several times a week.

In and of themselves such seemingly unimportant trivia, the candidates think, should pile up on the shoulder of the road to the White House. Trouble is they never do. Even accounting for the media pile on effect with a story like Gingrich’s expensive tastes at Tiffany’s, such stories are singularly important for the unscripted glimpse they provide behind the Oz-like curtain of the modern presidential campaign. Such stories also show the power of one incident to drive a story line – a negative story line – for days.

Since the Schieffer interview and the ever growing attention on Tiffany’s charge accounts as a campaign issue, a new poll shows Gingrich sinking with GOP voters. You might say he’s dropping like the Hope Diamond in a rain bucket. Another story links a former Gingrich aide to Tiffany’s lobbying operations at a time when Mrs. G. was a House staffer.

TIME magazine has a slide show of Calista Gingrich’s jewelry and one enterprising reporter went back and checked Gingrich’s published works for references to Tiffany’s. Hint: there are quite a number. And, for the truly uninformed about just how big jewelry store charge accounts work, the Washington Post rides to the rescue with a “fact check” piece that concludes Gingrich’s comment that this is all just routine don’t quite pass the smell test. Pile on, indeed.

There was a reason that Abraham Lincoln didn’t shy away from publicizing the fact that he was “born in a log cabin.” From Andrew Jackson to James A. Garfield, the log cabin was a potent symbol that candidates for the White House were in touch with the voters. Politicians always strive to be seen as “one of us,” but to be successful they must also be authentic or, at least, appear to be authentic.

Franklin Roosevelt came from great family wealth, as did John Kennedy. Neither one of them tried to hide that fact, but by the same token they didn’t try to be something they weren’t. The times were much different when those two sons of fortune occupied the White House, but I suspect even FDR and JFK would have had some explaining to do had it been revealed they had credit lines at Tiffany’s.

Curious thing about the American presidency, we expect these men – I chose that word advisedly – to be superhuman problem solvers, able to leap tall buildings, but we also expect them to be able to keep track of their houses, keep their haircuts affordable and window shop at Tiffany’s.

When we find out that they really aren’t at all like us, well, we do the natural thing – we conclude that guy isn’t authentic and that conclusion is deadly in politics.

Saying “go talk to Tiffany’s” is a bit like telling a reporter (or a voter) to “go pound sand” or go, well, you you know where.

I’ll bet you a peek in a Tiffany display case that before Newt Gingrich is done with this campaign – and that looks like it will happen sooner rather than later – we’ll know the answer to Bob Schieffer’s simple and completely predictable question, “What did you buy?” Stay tuned.

 

American Presidents, Baseball, Obama, Politics

Newt

Posted on by christian

Yesterday’s Candidate, Today’s Campaign

A good deal of the analysis of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s less-that-successful first days on the presidential campaign trail have focused on Newt’s “lack of message discipline” and whether the freewheeling former college professor can control his basic instinct to talk too much.

I think there may be something else at play that makes Gingrich’s race for the GOP nomination even more problematic. He is really yesterday’s kind of candidate trying to find his footing in today’s kind of campaign.

Political consultant Mark McKinnon said it well: “Elections are about the future, not the past. And Newt is anchored to another era.”

Jon Stewart wasn’t so kind. Newt is trying to hard to be cool, but his hash tags won’t get him there, Stewart said, in a savage take down of the old Gingrich.

Gingrich, his critics love to point out, has never been elected to anything – not including being elected by House Republicans as their leader – other than to represent a congressional district in Georgia. The last time he was on any ballot was 1998. Politics and campaigns have changed dramatically in the dozen years since Gingrich traded the daily inside game of Congress for the controlled environment of a Fox TV studio or the command and control of a hotel ballroom podium.

Even a guy who has been around as long as Gingrich needs to learn the rythem and the ropes of the modern campaign. It is a whole new ballgame out there.

When Gingrich last ran for anything Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, was 14 and still four years from Harvard. Twitter was nearly a decade away and YouTube wasn’t even an idea. Gingrich’s real problem isn’t just discipline, its age and agility.

Case in point. TIME reports that the Obama White House is doubling down on social media as it prepares for re-election.

In a story entitled, “Can they win one tweet at a time,” Michael Scherer writes: “When Barack Obama traveled to Texas this month to talk immigration, David Plouffe, his top message guru, decided to stay home and watch Twitter instead. While Obama spoke, Plouffe sat before two flat-screen televisions in the White House complex. One showed live footage of Obama in El Paso. The other flickered with a lightning-quick vertical ticker tape of people tweeting with the #immigration hashtag, reacting line by line to the President in real time. ‘I find it useful,’ Plouffe says, ‘to see what’s penetrating.'”

Gingrich must have thought he was out on the cutting edge by announcing his candidacy the other day via Twitter, but he may be confusing the tactics of social media with the mindset of a cutting edge campaign.

Gingrich made his now classic comment – “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering” – to NBC’s David Gregory last Sunday morning. By Monday morning the pundits were chewing him up and by Tuesday, too slow for a modern campaign, he had started to address the criticism fellow Republicans were flinging his way.

Democrats wasted no time in producing the standard YouTube video – Litmus Test – dissecting Newt’s comments. Meanwhile, the candidate was in Iowa getting pelted with a bag of glitter with one crusty Iowan, captured on video, telling him to get out of the race before he made a bigger fool of himself.

Gingrich is the 21st Century equivalent of those pre-20th Century candidates who campaigned by never moving from the front porch of their homes. His mindset is 1998, while the rest of the political world is operating in cyberspace in 2011.

A true test of leadership is the ability to react effectively in a crisis, avoid the human inclination to blame someone else for your mistakes and reset the discussion. Newt and his handlers should have known his incendiary comments on Meet the Press would require immediate damage control. His spokesman should have refrained from one of the longest, bitterest denunciations of the media I’ve seen in a while and he should have tried something to change the arc of his story.

He did none of that and on the Thursday after he laid his egg on national television the Gingrich story, and particularly the video from his interview with Gregory, was still all over the air and the Internet.

There is a mindset in military history referred to as the tendency of leaders to “fight the last war.” It happens in politics, too, but those kinds of campaigns tend to end in the cold and snow of a February night in New Hampshire. We’ll see if Gingrich last that long and whether he can learn quickly to adapt to the kind of daily politics he’s never really played.

TIMEnotes in its piece on David Plouffe, Obama’s social media guru, that he just sometimes “creates his own news. For the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Plouffe’s team created a fake movie trailer in the spirit of the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech, hoping it might go viral. The YouTube video of Obama’s remarks has already been watched more than 8 million times, a bigger audience than that of most nightly network newscasts. “People saw that and said, ‘I am going to share it with my family and friends,'” Plouffe says proudly. “You have to find ways to compound what you are doing.”

Or…to counteract what you’ve messed up.

Mark McKinnon gets almost the last word on yesterday’s candidate. Newt Gingrich has earned, McKinnon says, a spot in the “hall of fame for disastrous political launches.”

Meanwhile, Gingrich is booked on at least one weekend talk show already. Good strategy. Keep this great week going a little longer.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Harmon

Posted on by christian

One of the Greats Passes

Just when it seems that spring may final have come, it turns out to be a sad, sad day. The Great Killebrew is gone.

I’ve always been a Minnesota Twins fan. I grew up listening to Twins games on WCCO radio in the Midwest. Brought to you, of course, from“the land of sky blue waters” by Hamms…the beer refreshing.”

Harmon was a boyhood idol. My first real baseball cap was a dark blue Twins model. My first major league game was bat day at old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. When I moved to Idaho long years ago, I actually had my first opportunity to talk with Harmon and he turned out to be just what you got on the field and at the plate: a pro and a nice guy, and those words don’t always fit in the same sentence when the subject is a professional athlete.

Killebrew was the kind of guy who would gladly stand in an airport and patiently answer questions about his career, who he hated to face and how he was doing. He never seemed hurried, just a really nice Hall of Famer from Payette with a big smile and big biceps.

Legend has it that Idaho Sen. Herman Welker, also from Payette, tipped the Washington Senators to the fact that a strong kid in Idaho was worth a look. Welker wasn’t a great or even a very good senator, but he was right about Harmon.

Welker pestered Clark Griffith, the Senators’ owner, until Griffith sent his scouting director to Payette, a little farm town hard along the Oregon border in southwestern Idaho. Harmon told the guy he was going to play football and baseball for the Oregon Ducks, but when the Senators’ scouting director (that could refer to Welker or the team) saw the 17-year old hit one 435 feet out of the park and into a “beet field, not a potato” field, Killebrew turned pro.

In the many, many remembrances that are sure to come in the days following his untimely death at 74 from cancer, most will recall that he hit is 573 home runs when a player did it legitimately. By my count, at least four guys who have passed Harmon on the all-time home run list did it with the aid of something other than a diet of Idaho potatoes.

Killebrew was old school, a gentleman, a pro, a nice guy. Jorge Posada, who knows better, melted down the other night and took himself out of the Yankee line-up rather than bat in the nine hole. Can’t imagine Harmon ever, ever pulling such a stunt. Too much class.

One manager said Harmon could hit a ball out of any park “including Yellowstone.” And no less an authority than the great Al Kaline said of Killebrew, “he’s one of the great hitters of all time.” He was…and a really, really nice guy, too.

Not surprisingly, Killebrew handled the end of his life with the same grace and dignity with which he played the great game. He simply announced a few days ago that he was ending his cancer treatment to enter hospice care and, like one of his mammoth blasts at old Tiger Stadium or Fenway, he soared away a class act to the end.

This old Twins fan is going to remember him as long as I can read a box score. Harmon Killebrew was one of the all-time greats.

 

Baseball, Economy, Film, Otter, Politics, Schweitzer

The Veto

Posted on by christian

The Final Vote

The presidential or gubernatorial veto may be the single biggest political club our nation’s executives can swing. The House and the Senate at the federal and state level can consider, debate and pass legislation, but it still must come to the executive for the final vote. The way this considerable power has been wielded in Montana and Idaho lately is a real study in contrasting political styles.

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, he of the bolo tie, has been swinging the decisive veto club with abandon over the last few days. As of a couple of days ago Schweitzer, a Democrat, had vetoed more than 50 bills approved by the Republican controlled Montana Legislature. Schweitzer has generated many headlines for vetoing, among others, legislation dealing with concealed weapons, medical marijuana, abortion, federal health care, mining with cyanide and employment taxation. Schweitzer, a clever and confident politician if ever there was one, seems to revel in casting the final vote and he has used ever occasion to bash the legislature.

Across the Bitterroots in Idaho meanwhile, Republican Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, with an overwhelmingly GOP legislature, drew headlines for his one and only veto of the just completed session. Otter spread red ink on a bill dealing with state efforts to establish exchanges under the federal health insurance reform legislation, but he immediately issued an executive order restoring much of what had been in the vetoed bill. Few Republicans, publicly at least, said anything about the governor’s actions and the House Democratic leader actually praised the governor’s approach.

Otter administered his one veto of the 2011 session quietly and moved instantly to placate supporters with his executive order. while Schweitzer has been known to use a branding iron in front of the television cameras to mark up bills he doesn’t like. No kidding.

As CBS reported, Schweitzer recently “stood in front of the state capitol” in Helena, “and put the bills, one by one, on display. He then used a hot brand on each one, lighting the paper on fire and burning the word “VETO” into the wooden plank behind the bill.”

If the guv considered the bill frivolous, he used a “calf brand.”

George Washington, generally not the flamboyant type, issued the first presidential veto in 1792. George W. Bush made modern presidential history by not vetoing anything during his first five years in office. Bill Clinton, by contrast left office have used the veto 37 times. Barack Obama has issued two vetoes.

Franklin Roosevelt is the all-time champion vetoer at the federal level. He issued 635 during his three-plus terms. Grover Cleveland was no slouch, either. He killed a total of 584 bills in two terms. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, never vetoed a bill in eight years.

Governors and presidents, as a general rule, hate to have vetoes overridden. It’s seen as a mark of political weakness. But even the powerful FDR was overridden nine times, while the lowly Andrew Johnson holds the all-time record for having the Congress reject his veto. Congress did it 15 times to Andy.

The veto can be both a blunt instrument and a subtle tool used to punish, reward, make a political statement or chart a policy course. Often it is all of the above.

There could hardly be more contrast between the approach Schweitzer has taken and the line Otter had walked. Is one approach more politically or publicly effective than the other? The verdict on that may have to wait for another legislative session for as much as governors and presidents hate to be overridden, legislators hate to see their handiwork vetoed.

Most of the time, however, the final vote is the final vote whether its done quietly or with a smokin’ hot branding iron.

 

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

The GOP Field

Posted on by christian

The Weakest Field Since 1940?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

American Presidents, Baseball, Obama, Politics

Juxtaposition

Posted on by christian

Koch, Daniels and Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniels in another potential face of the GOP.

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

By the way…

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

 

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

A Tipping Point

Posted on by christian

Law Firms, Gay Marriage and Civil Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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