Egan

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.

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baucus, Boise, Civility, Egan, Idaho Politics, Justice Department, Obama, U.S. Senate

One of the Good Guys

Posted on by christian

Clancy Standridge, 1927-2012

More than 20 years ago I was on the way home from a trip to Washington, D.C. with Clancy Standridge, who was for many years the legislative liaison and a top political confidante of my old boss Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. It was late, the flight had been a long one, we were a little grumpy and tired from a series of those non-stop and not very productive meetings you often have in the nation’s capitol. As we stumbled up the long concourse in the Salt Lake City airport headed for the connecting flight to Idaho, handsome, debonair Clancy offered up an observation I have found myself repeating ever since. “This time of day,” he said, “your shoes feel like they are on the wrong feet.” Everyone laughed and the ordeal of getting home suddenly didn’t seem so onerous. That was Clancy Standridge.

Anyone who was around the Idaho Statehouse during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s will remember white haired, well-tailored Clancy Standridge who died recently in Portland, Oregon at age 84. It is a testament to Standridge’s skill with people and Andrus’s sense about what a Democratic governor had to do to interact successfully with an overwhelmingly Republican legislature that the state’s political watchers still say that Clancy was as good a gubernatorial emissary as has ever prowled the third and fourth floors of the Idaho Statehouse.

Clancy did his job the old fashioned way with unfailing courtesy, easy charm, a warm smile, a great sense of humor and by treating the most junior page with the same respect as the Speaker of the House. He also never forgot a commitment or failed to keep his word. Legislative attaches, the hardworking women who make the legislative machinery run, loved him. He handed out candy and compliments and people trusted him. It was remarkable the kind of gossip the old boy would pick up just by listening and being interested. When a junior backbencher just had to see the governor, Clancy made it happen. When a legislator who had consistently voted against everything the governor proposed, but still wanted a picture taken when his pet bill was finally signed into law, Clancy saw to it.

Born in Oklahoma on the cusp of the depression decade, Standridge was raised by grandparents, made his way west, served during the Korean War and hooked on with GTE, the old telephone company. He started out climbing poles and eventually worked up (or down) to serve as a senior government relations executive. Andrus plucked him from retirement to serve as his eyes and ears with the legislature. It’s hard to think he could have made a better pick. Clancy was smart, well read, schooled in politics, but more than anything he was a practitioner of the kind of personal style attributed to another Okie, Will Rogers, of whom it was said he never met a man he didn’t like. In politics, of course, you do meet people you don’t like, Clancy just never let on. I never heard him use the word, but Clancy Standridge practiced the art of civility, in fact he wrote the book on how to deal with people in the world of politics.

At a time when Barack Obama is criticized, even by those in his own party, for being distant and a loner, when it takes a Camp David-like effort to get two golf loving politicians, the president and House Speaker John Boehner, together to play a round, and when bipartisanship can’t even extend to the dinner table, it’s worth remembering what a little civility can accomplish. Despite the toxic nature of our politics and even in the face of poll tested attack lines the world – including the political world – still works on the basis of personal relationships.

Washington waxes nostalgic for the time when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could make a deal on taxes or when Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen could have a couple of belts followed by a handshake and move the country forward on civil rights. A few more D.C. golf games, a few more cocktails on the Truman balconey and a little more common decency in Washington and in every state capitol wouldn’t hurt any politician and it would be good for the country.

The little courtesies, the random acts of kindness work to build trust and respect and even powerful people can be moved. It becomes a little more difficult to call the political opponent an SOB when you’ve had dinner with the SOB and his wife and found out about his kids, his motivations and his needs. Personal relationships grease the wheels of politics or, if common decency and respect don’t exist, the gears seize up more frequently. Does anyone think the country would be worse off if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell shared a laugh together once in a while? Harry ought to send Mitch’s wife flowers on her birthday. Clancy Standridge would have tried something that simple and that effective.

Clancy Standridge knew all about personal relationships. He was one of a kind, but I hope not the last of his kind.

 

Climate Change, Egan, Human Rights, Idaho Politics

A Moment in Time

Posted on by christian

The Wrong Side of History

Politicians are defined by their actions, but also by what they fail to do. I’m guessing that at least some of the Idaho State Senators who voted quickly and decisively last Friday to reject – without comment or testimony – a proposal to add anti-discrimination language to state law concerning gay, lesbian and transgender Idahoans are going to come to regret their votes. They failed to act on a basic question of civil rights and those who spoke with reporters afterward had trouble explaining why.

Almost certainly it came down to politics and a concern that a vote to expand anti-discrimination protection for those “not like us” would be difficult to explain to some voters. There have always been such votes – from slavery to civil rights – and sometimes those votes put people on the wrong side of history.

The arc of history indeed may, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, bend toward justice, but it often takes time and those who resist the march toward greater justice often find themselves explaining why they resisted.

When Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door in 1963 in an attempt to prevent the enrollment of two black students at the University of Alabama he probably couldn’t envision that one day an African-American running back, Trent Richardson, would score the only touchdown in the Crimson Tide’s national title winning game. Gov. Wallace was on the wrong side of history more than 40 years ago and his enduring political legacy, the race baiting and the cultivation of the worst instincts of his constituents, still echoes down from those profoundly wrong moments in the schoolhouse door.

Barry Goldwater’s often exemplary political career still carries the stain of his rejection of civil rights legislation in the 1960’s.

Georgia Sen. Richard Russell was an icon of the Senate, so much so that one of the Senate office buildings in Washington carries his name. But it’s Russell’s dead end opposition to civil rights legislation from the 1930’s to the 1960’s and his bizarre explanation to Lyndon Johnson that couldn’t serve on the Warren Commission investigating John Kennedy’s assassination because he “didn’t like that man” Chief Justice Earl Warren that largely define his legacy today. Russell spent his long and, in many ways, distinguished career in the Senate, playing to the worst characteristics of his constituents on race and civil rights and he ended up on the wrong side of history.

The reverse can also be true – politicians are often rewarded for bucking prevailing sentiment, particularly when civil rights are involved.

Closer to home, few remember who opposed then-Idaho State Sen. Phil Batt’s efforts to create the Idaho Human Rights Commission, but the Commission and its anti-discrimination work remain a hallmark of Batt’s distinguished political career. The Commission, by the way, endorsed the legislation that died last week in the state senate.

Idaho was among the last states in 1990 to adopt a Martin Luther King holiday, but now the January commemoration of King’s birth and the cause of civil rights is an established ritual at the Idaho Statehouse. Young people, in particular, seem to relish the chance to celebrate King and his ideas. Few remember who voted, time and again, to defeat the King holiday idea, but those folks  know who they are and on what side of the history line they stand.

The arc of history does bend toward justice – slowly – but bend it does.

Toward the end of his life the old segregationist George Wallace, four times governor of Alabama and nearly assassinated as a presidential candidate, sought redemption, in a way, for his political sins. He spent hours on the phone calling his old political enemies, including Congressman John Lewis who was severely beaten by an Alabama state trooper during a civil rights march. Wallace found that he needed to confess that he’d been wrong with his use of race to appeal to his constituents and gain political power. He realized that being on the wrong side was wrong.

Filmmaker Paul Stekler made a great film about Wallace and came to regard him as an amazing character. “He begins gifted at politics, an idealist in some ways,” Stekler told freelance writer Maggie Riechers. “He works all his life to become governor and just when it is within his grasp, he’s prevented from winning. He then makes a conscious decision to give up his ideals and embraces racism, which gives him political success and power, more than he ever believed possible. Then at the height of his success, he is struck down. At the end of his life he goes back to his roots.”

The wrong side of history must be an uncomfortable place to be, particularly when you can’t really explain why you’re there. Dr. King said it well: “It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.'”

 

Cenarrusa, Egan, Famous Americans, Idaho Politics, Obama, Reapportionment

Drawing the Lines

Posted on by christian

Here’s an Idea…Let Ben Do It

When Idaho’s “citizen” reapportionment panel deadlocked recently everyone in the state looked to the Big Man on the second floor of the state capitol building for guidance. And for good reason. Ben Ysursa has forgotten more about Idaho’s election process than most of us could ever hope to know. So here’s a novel idea that will never happen, but should – let Ben draw the lines. I apologize in advance to my friend, Ysursa, but stay with me.

Rather than Ysursa’s steady and experienced hand on the redistricting tiller, we’ll now have a new reapportionment panel in place next week – three partisan Democrats and a trio of partisan Republicans – trying and do what the first gang of six failed to do in 90 days of expensive trying. In theory the equally divided “citizens” committee seems like a sensible solution to the games legislators historically play when it comes time, as it does every ten years, to decide the shape of the state’s legislative and Congressional boundaries. The sensible idea goes south, however, because both parties bring their partisan agendas to the process and common sense is handed a spoiled ballot. To those who will be quick to say, “but the citizen panel worked last time,” I say it worked only because one member – to perhaps his eternal regret – voted with the other side. The partisan political powers to be seemed determined to not have that happen again.

I know, I know, drawing legislative and Congressional boundaries may be the single most partisan thing done in our politics. Careers are made or ended based on these geographic and population decisions. All the more reason to let a pro call the shots. Suppose for a minute that the Commissioner of Baseball decided that we need to tweak the rules of the great game. Would he assign the job to a group of amateur fans, three Red Sox partisans and three Yankee fanatics? Of course not. Even Bud Selig would be smart enough to call in a Joe Torre or Frank Robinson; an expert who knows and loves the game, but is wise enough not to play games with the rules.

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call did a story last week detailing how difficult the reapportionment job is in a smaller states, like Idaho. The biggest states have finished the job, while Maine (and Idaho) seem hopeless caught in the political weeds. Idaho reapportioners wandered into the weeds when Republicans panel members pushed an agenda to create a legislature even more conservative than the current one and Democrats saw the process as offering a small sliver of opportunity to get the party back to relevance. Next stop: deadlock.

Of course, my solution – let Ben do it – will pass muster with no one, including most likely Ben. What sane person would want this job? But consider this: Ysursa has been in the Secretary of State’s office since just after statehood, or at least it seems so. Ben first toiled as long-time Secretary of State Pete Cenarrusa’s chief deputy and he has held the top job himself since 2002. Ben has twice been overwhelmingly re-elected with bi-partisan support. You would be hard pressed to find a loyal Republican, as Ysursa proudly is, who is seen by partisans of every stripe as both a professional and completely fair minded. I can think of no person in either party who would approach the partisan job of reapportionment with more dispassion and with a long view as to what is in the best interest of Idaho. He could have the lines drawn by tomorrow afternoon and I’d bet a ticket to a Red Sox – Yankee playoff game that Ben’s plan would pass Constitutional muster if, as always seems likely, the ultimate plan goes before a judge.

Somethings are too important to be left to politicians and, with all due respect to the six people who tried to write a plan, some things are too important to be left to amateurs. The lines defining Idaho’s legislative and Congressional districts should be drawn based, number one, on common sense as defined by population, communities of interest, geography and history. If six truly independent people brought that notion to the Idaho process they could write the plan in a week. Partisan considerations make that impossible.

Think that letting Ben do this job is crazy? Maybe, but let’s see where we are in six weeks or so.

 

Baseball, Cold War, Economy, Egan, Idaho Politics, Nixon, Otter, Politics

What Goes Around

Posted on by christian

A Communist Under Every Bed

It is often said in politics that “what goes around comes around.” This is such a story.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s Arthur Dean was a pillar of the old East Coast Republican establishment, a leading corporate lawyer, chairman of the white shoe New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell and law partner and friend of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower.

Dulles pressed his friend into service in the early 1950’s to negotiate an end to the Korean War. Ambassador Dean, unfortunately for him, agreed to take on that assignment where he ran headlong into the McCarthy era, and particularly Joe McCarthy’s Senate acolyte, Republican Herman Welker of Idaho.

Welker was a small-town Payette, Idaho lawyer and Idaho State Senator when he won a U.S. Senate seat in 1950. Welker arrived in the Senate at the dawn of McCarthy’s national political power and he devoted his one, six-year term to carrying McCarthy’s water, including suggesting that Arthur Dean, the very respectable and very Republican Wall Street lawyer, was “a pro-Red China” apologist.

Dean’s transgression, in the view of Herman Welker, was to suggest that the United States just might consider a more enlightened policy toward Communist China at a time when right wing, virulent anti-Communists in Congress were making almost daily headlines by demanding to know why the United States  “had lost” China to Mao Zedong.

During an interview with a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper reporter, Dean said this: “I think there is a possibility the Chinese Communists are more interested in developing themselves in China than they are in international Communism. If we could use that as a decisive method of putting a wedge between the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union, I think we might try…”

In essence, Ambassador Dean, a Republican serving under a Republican president, was suggesting what Richard Nixon began to accomplish nearly 20 years later – a more nuanced, mature relationship with Communist China. But such talk in 1954, with Joe McCarthy identifying a Commie under ever bed and in every office at the State Department, was not only un-American, but dangerously close to displaying Communist sympathies. Welker pounced on Arthur Dean.

Dean was channeling, in Welker’s view, the views of pro-Communist elements in the U.S. State Department. As to the contention that the Chinese might be more focused on their own internal development than imposing Communism on the rest of the world, Welker dismissed the thought out of hand. “I can’t believe anything can be farther from the truth,” the Idaho Senator said.

Welker’s assault on Dean caused some weeks of discomfort for the Ambassador. He had to repeatedly deny any Communist leanings and justify what many at the time, and most today, would simply consider smart diplomacy. In short, Dean’s loyalty was questioned at a time when your blindly anti-Communist bonafides were the only litmus test for service to the American government.

The myths about “losing China” are deeply embedded in the DNA of American politics. The tangled belief that un-American activities at the highest levels of the United States government had conspired to abandon China to the Communists was the sort of political hot air that powered much of McCarthy’s demagoguery. Idaho’s Welker sang from the same song book.

But it has been Ambassador Dean’s view that has stood the test of time. With the Chinese now threatening U.S. economic leadership worldwide, China owning a huge chunk of our debt and manufacturing ship loads of the consumer goods exported to America, its very clear that the diplomat had a much better crystal ball than the Red Baiting Senator from Idaho.

It turns out the Chinese really were “more interested in developing themselves” in order to compete with us than in advancing world-wide Communism. The proof is all around. The numbers crunchers in Beijing must be sharpening their pencils in anticipation of the failure of our dysfunctional political system to find a solution to debt, spending and revenue so that they can take another great leap forward in cornering a bigger share of the world economy.

Herman Welker, McCarthy’s Senate friend and fellow Commie hunter, is mostly forgotten now; his one Senate term distinctive for nothing more than being on the wrong side of history. Welker’s attacks in the early 1950’s on Idaho Democrats like Frank Church and Glen Taylor for their alleged “radical” and “pink” politics read now like ancient, misguided history, yet some of the old myths and fears about the Communist Chinese continue even as the descendants of Mao eat our economic lunch.

Were Senators Church and Taylor still with us – both died in 1984 – they would no doubt appreciate the irony of the Idaho Republican Central Committee recently demanding an accounting of the state’s political and economic ties with China from Idaho’s Republican Gov. Butch Otter.

The Lewiston Tribune reports that the Idaho GOP resolution reads: “the stability of our form of government is being undermined by strategies used by the Chinese state-government-controlled entities through investments, corporate takeovers, intelligence operations and rare-Earth monopolization.”

Most members of the state central committee weren’t born when Herman Welker represented the state in the Senate, put they are channeling Joe McCarthy’s buddy all the same. What goes around.

The United States has rarely had a sane and sober policy when it comes to China. For years we maintained the fiction that Chiang Kai-shek and the government he established in Taiwan after losing a civil war constituted the real government of China. We squandered years on the fiction that State Department bureaucrats had “lost” China. We fought a senseless war in Southeast Asia, in part, to head off Chinese domination of Vietnam, countries that maintain an historic rivalry and have rarely made common cause.

So, perhaps the Red Chinese Scare of Joe McCarthy’s and Herman Welker’s day really is alive and well in Idaho. The only thing different now is that Republicans are questioning other Republicans about providing aid and comfort to the Communists.

By the way, Arthur Dean’s reputation has survived in substantially better shape than those of the men who blindly questioned his motives and loyalty in the 1950’s. Dean went on to served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, helped persuade Lyndon Johnson to end the bombing of North Vietnam in 1968, and donated a ton of money to Cornell University where he and his wife financed the acquisition of a remarkable collection of papers related to Lafayette and the American Revolution.

Senator Welker’s papers consist of a few large scrapbooks housed at the Idaho Historical Society and the University of Idaho. Most of the pages are covered with newspaper clippings of Welker’s 1950’s assault on Americans who had the audacity to think differently than he did about the world and its future. Some things never change.

 

Bush, Church, Cold War, Egan, Giffords, Humanities, Idaho Politics, Nixon

A Little History

Posted on by christian

Idaho in the Age of McCarthy

Edward R. Murrow famously said of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy that he had not created the fear of Communism that swept the nation after World War II but that McCarthy “had merely exploited it, and rather successfully.” Joe McCarthy had lots of help in Idaho.

Next week the Idaho Humanities Council hosts its annual summer institute for teachers at the College of Idaho in Caldwell and Joe McCarthy is on the agenda. Nearly 40 Idaho teachers will spend the week in an intensive, multi-disciplinary look at the age that still carries the name of the junior senator from Wisconsin – McCarthyism. The Institute’s title: “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been…Fear, Suspicion and Incivility in Cold War America.”

On Tuesday evening, July 26th, I’ll have the pleasure of presenting a talk on Idaho’s politics in the early 1950’s that will focus on McCarthy’s best friend in the Senate, Idaho Sen. Herman Welker, and the Idaho politician who most suffered the guilt by association and out-and-out smears that defined much of the age, Idaho Sen. Glen Taylor.

My talk – drawing upon the nicknames of both Idaho Senators – is entitled “The Singing Senator and Little Joe from Idaho.” The event is scheduled for 7:00 pm at the College of Idaho’s Langroise Recital Hall. My talk is one of several during the week. You can check the full schedule at the IHC website.

I’m going to make the case that Welker and Taylor, a very conservative Republican and a very liberal Democrat, were the two most controversial political figures in the state’s history. They both came of age in the dawn of the Cold War and each flamed out as McCarthyism began to diminish as a political force. Between these two flamboyant men, one a rough, tough former University of Idaho athlete, the other a homespun, charismatic country music performer, the space was created that was necessary to allow the 32-year-old Frank Church to win a seat in the United States Senate and stay there for 24 years.

If you’re interested in Idaho political history and particularly how the McCarthy period in the early 1950’s influenced the political development of Idaho, you should plan to attend some of the events next week in Caldwell.

Other speakers include Nicholas Thompson, Senior editor of The New Yorker, who has written a fine book on his grandfather, Cold Warrior Paul Nitze a great foreign policy hawk, and George Kennan, one of the great figures in 20th Century American diplomacy. Thompson speaks Sunday night, July 24th.

Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History at Yeshiva University, speaks on Wednesday, July 27th. Professor Schrecker is one of the foremost historians of the Cold War period and has written extensively on McCarthy.

And Idaho native F. Ross Peterson speaks on Thursday, July 28th on McCarthy’s influence on politics across the Mountain West. Dr. Peterson is the author of a great book on Sen. Taylor.

One of the enduring lessons of the McCarthy period, a lesson we continue to struggle with as a nation, is the confusion, as Murrow so eloquently said in 1954, of dissent with disloyalty. Idaho was fertile ground for Red Baiting in the 1950’s. The charge of being “soft on Communism” or entertaining thoughts even slightly out of the mainstream could be enough to torpedo a political career. Making the charge against an opponent, on the other hand, was a proven strategy to advance a career.

The years when Joe McCarthy was a dominate figure in American politics are not among prettiest chapters of our history, but the period is one worth revisiting, understanding and evaluating in the never ending quest to create “a more perfect Union.”

 

 

Egan, Idaho Politics

Carl Burke

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The Second Man in This Picture

I went looking for a photo of Carl Burke, the great Idaho attorney and the only campaign manager Frank Church ever had, and, of course, couldn’t find one online. He could have been the second man in this photo of the Senator and Bethine.

Burke must be smiling – he usually was – as he maintains his “passion for anonymity” even as a generation of politicos and operatives remember him at his passing as the rarest of rare breeds in Idaho – a Democrat who could help elect Democrats.

Carl Burke, 89, slipped away quietly late last week and most everyone who came of political age since the pivotal Church – Steve Symms race in 1980 probably made scant notice of his death. He deserves more – much more.

Any real student of Idaho political history from the 1950’s until Church’s defeat in 1980 will credit the outgoing Carl Burke with the organizational and management skills that allowed the cerebral Church to win four straight elections to the United States Senate beginning in 1956. These guys – aided by the extreme political savvy of Bethine, the daughter of a former governor, and the now mostly forgotten Verda Barnes, Church’s long-time Administrative Assistant, out worked, out planned and out organized a couple of generations of Idaho Republicans. Only when they came up against a new brand of big-money, big-smear politics with the arrival of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) in 1980 did they lose, and even then by about 4,000 votes in a year when Ronald Reagan owned Idaho.

On the very day Carl Burke died, I had occasion to spend a couple of hours looking through the spectacularly well archived Frank Church papers at Boise State University and, big surprise, Burke’s finger prints are all over the Senator’s campaign records. Remarkable in a day when most politicians, or their aides, don’t write letters, Carl Burke carried on a voluminous correspondence with precinct leaders, labor leaders and national political operatives. He was one of the people in the Church operation who saw too it that the mail was answered and the small, personal notes were written to supporters and would-be supporters. It may be considered old school, but the fact that so little of that kind of thing is done today may just speak volumes about why Idaho hasn’t elected a statewide Democrat to major office in more than 20 years. Some principles of a good campaign simply never change.

I’ll remember Carl Burke for many things: his love of a good political story, his remarkable insights into how successful campaigns happen, his kindness and, yes, his ability to never hog the spotlight. There was a name on the ballot and then there were campaign workers. No show horse Carl Burke, a gentleman workhorse of the old school. He deserves a chapter in any political history of Idaho, but he’d be the first to say that’s not how things are supposed to work in politics. The Senator got the ink and the votes, Carl just helped organize it all.

All in all, not a bad legacy for a guy with a passion for politics who knew his place and played his role with remarkable skill for a long, long time.

 

Education, Egan, Idaho Politics, Kramer

What Next

Posted on by christian

Idaho’s Battle Over Education Reform

There was never a real chance that supporters of a recall of Idaho’s Superintendent of Public Instruction would be able to collect the nearly 160,000 valid signatures needed to force a recall of the controversial superintendent. Now that the recall effort is officially dead, the question becomes whether opponents of Tom Luna’s education reform ideas can keep the public concern – even anger – at a level sufficient to make a 2012 referendum, already qualified for the ballot, successful?

I’d argue the failure of the recall is a significant strategic setback for those who think Idaho’s education policy is headed in the wrong direction. The decision to mount the recall was, with perfect hindsight, a miscalculation that will now be portrayed as a sign of weakness.

Recall organizers, like Jim Allen in Pocatello, claim a moral victory with the recall effort despite not putting the superintendent’s job on the line.

“We’re not here whining and crying because it didn’t happen. We wanted to send a message and I think we succeeded in doing that,” Allen said.

We’ll see, but moral victories never win elections.

For his part, Luna said recall backers have made the issues surrounding education reform “personal,” while he’s focused on implementing the laws. After upsetting the status quo, the superintendent now is the status quo and so far he seems to be doing a credible job of playing both offense and defense. Luna is turning out to be, whatever you think of his policies, one of the more media savvy Idaho politicians in a long time.

If opponents of what Luna engineered in this year’s Idaho Legislature hope to overturn those laws next year they’ll need three things that may be hard to manufacture: money, a really compelling message and a level of public outrage that can be maintained for the next 17 months.

Recall opponents spent little money gathering signatures over the last few week – there are conflicting stories as to how short they fell – and they never came up with a consistent message about why what Luna and legislative Republicans have done is so harmful. They’ll need to do a lot better in the months ahead and history would indicate that they will need serious money to run a real campaign.

You can take it to the bank that the pro-reform forces will be organized, disciplined and well-financed.

In his statement in the wake of the recall failure, Republican Party chairman Norm Semanko seemed to indicate that he wants the continuing debate to stay focused on what became the GOP talking points during the 2011 legislature, namely curbing the union power of teachers.

Semanko said, in part, the efforts to place “Union interests ahead of the true recipients of public education, the students, have failed in Idaho.” That line of argument, coupled with a desire to control spending on education, essentially carried the day for the reform efforts during the legislative session.

The challenge for those who succeeded in putting the reform package on the ballot next year is to have the resources, the discipline and ability to make the referendum about something more fundamental – the future of education in Idaho. They may well have passion on their side, but they’ll need a strategy and money to overturn what is now the status quo in Idaho education.

A month can be a long time in politics. Seventeen months can be a life time.

 

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.

 

Education, Egan, Guest Post, Idaho Politics, Kramer, Polling

Education Reform?

Posted on by christian

Idahoans Aren’t Convinced

New statewide opinion research finds Idahoans distinctly unsure that the educational reform efforts that dominated the state legislative session this year will help Idaho students be better prepared for learning beyond high school and to enter the workforce.

My public affairs firm teamed up with respected pollster Greg Strimple and the Idaho Business Review to conduct a 400 sample survey in late April that was aimed at understanding more about where the Idaho economy may be headed and the priorities voters attach to various issues. The poll has a +/- of 4.9%.

(Strimple served as Sen. John McCain’s pollster in the last presidential election and works nationally for major clients like AT&T, the National Football League and GE. He lives in Boise.)

In a previous post, I noted the wide demographic splits that characterize attitudes about the economy in Idaho. In a nutshell, many older, less well-off, and less educated Idahoans are pretty content with the Idaho they have long known, including an economy dominated by agriculture and the state’s natural resources. A younger, better educated group thinks about the future economy quite differently. They believe innovation, education and technology hold the keys to the future.

We asked a series of questions in our survey about education, including a basic question about education reform: “In your opinion, will the recent education reforms passed by the state legislature make students better prepared to enter college and the workforce, less prepared, or make no difference?”

Idahoans in our survey were almost equally split: 24.5% said the Luna efforts would make students better prepared, 27.3% said less prepared, 28% said the reforms would have no difference. The rest didn’t know or declined to answer.

Looking more deeply into the internal numbers reveals that the level of division about the effectiveness of the reforms in terms of student preparedness cuts across virtually every demographic and ideological boundary. Even the most conservative folks we surveyed are split on whether the reforms will better prepare kids for more school and future work.

In fact in no demographic group – males, females, very conservative people, younger folks or older, etc. – does the reform package command a 50% majority who are convinced it will make students better prepared.

Perhaps this has something to do with the tone of the legislative debate around school reform. As the debate unfolded from January to April it was, by and large, a back-and-forth about teachers and money. That debate continues on an almost daily basis with Luna recently warning educators to be careful about mixing politics and school business and teachers accusing the superintendent of violating ethics rules. The entire conversation around education reform has been much less about student outcomes, including particularly what Idahoans might reasonably expect following such a long and difficult debate around a subject they obviously care a great deal about, and more about ending tenure and using more computers in classrooms.

And there is more: Idahoans who say they prefer a future economy focused on exporting goods and services, encourging innovation and fostering an entreperneurial culture are the most skeptical of Superintendent Luna’s reform package. This group thinks, by a 2 to 1 margin, that the reforms will result in students less well prepared for further education and future work.

We also asked our survey group to identify the initiatives “most important to helping Idaho’s economy grow and create new jobs?”

Providing better K-12 education and increasing the number of students that pursue higher education was the top choice of 43% of respondents. A favorable tax and regulatory policy was second with 21%.

We also asked what “government policies” are most important “to helping Idaho’s economy grow and create new jobs?”

Perhaps not surprisingly, nearly 32% of respondents said attracting new businesses and promoting job creation through incentives was the top policy priority. Developing a more highly trained workforce was second at 29%.

Our survey shows that Idahoans believe education policy is important to economic growth and job creation. Many may also think reforms will save money, curb the influence of the teachers union and emphasize technology in classroom, but they aren’t convinced – at least not yet – that students are going to benefit as they prepare for post-secondary education and a life-time of work.

Meanwhile, the long-shot effort to recall the state superintendent continues, as does the substantially easier job of obtaining the signatures that could force a referendum vote on the education package in the fall of 2012.