Breaking: Three top aides to Idaho gubernatorial candidate Paulette Jordan resigned late Friday, according to published reports. The campaign had no immediate comment and two aides said non-disclosure agreements with the Democratic nominee’s campaign prevented them from commenting.
Earlier Friday my regular column in the Lewiston Tribune dealt with Jordan’s campaign. That column is below.
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There are few universal rules in politics, but one rule certainly holds that no challenger wins a contest without making the incumbent the issue. Challengers who don’t take the fight to incumbents lose. Paulette Jordan, the Democratic nominee for Idaho governor, isn’t precisely running against an incumbent in Republican Brad Little, three-term governor C.L. “Butch” Otter’s lieutenant governor, but Little has all the trappings and the potential downside of incumbency.
Little is an “establishment” Republican who vanquished two conservative foes in a divisive GOP primary. He’s been around Idaho politics for years – his father was a long-serving state senator – and he is, in effect, running for Otter’s fourth term, accountable for all the bad and ensured of only modest credit for the good. Yet, seven weeks in front of the November election Jordan, the insurgent challenger, has yet to lay a glove on the incumbent. She certainly isn’t making it clear, as she must if she hopes to win (or even come close), that the election is a referendum on 12 years of the Otter-Little administration. A skillful candidate would by now have exploited some of the many missteps of the last dozen years, but beyond supporting Medicaid expansion and offering pabulum about a more humane government, Jordan hasn’t offered specifics about much of anything.
Jordan, a novice statewide candidate, is also violating Tip O’Neill’s old truism that “all politics is local,” by largely ignoring the traditional means of politicking in Idaho. Jordan has received heaps of attention from CNN and national publications have devoted ink to her resume as potentially the first woman and first Native American governor in Idaho. Yet she regularly avoids engaging with Idaho reporters and was largely missing on the summer fair and rodeo circuit. One long-time weekly newspaper editor told me recently he hasn’t seen the Democratic candidate and doesn’t expect to. He’s given up on ever getting a phone call returned. It’s a common refrain.
Jordan should have taken a page from the surging campaign of Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke who is challenging Texas Senator Ted Cruz and seems to have made that race a virtual toss up. O’Rourke, running as the underdog in a Trumpishly red state, has crisscrossed Texas repeatedly holding town hall meetings with anyone who will show up. During a recent gathering in San Marcos, according to the Texas Tribune, “O’Rourke answered questions about what he thinks about impeaching Trump, how to address the wealth gap between African-Americans and whites and whether he supports Betsy DeVos’ efforts to bring guns to campuses (‘No,’ he said).”
Democratic candidate Paulette Jordan
In contrast, Jordan recently swapped time in Idaho for an appearance on a Saturday night CNN show where she avoided discussing any specific issue. Idaho voters, she said, were “ready for true compassion and governance again.” Jordan told CNN host Van Jones that her upbringing stressed love of country, love of the land, love of all humanity, but that such attitudes hadn’t been “reflected in Idaho for the last three decades.” That is a vacuous and dubious claim at best. Going back thirty years, for example, would take us to the third term of the last Democrat to win the governorship, Cecil D. Andrus, a man who championed good schools, fought the feds over nuclear waste storage, presided over a strong economy, advocated for human and civil rights and certainly loved the land. Andrus knew that any successful Democrat has to run with a real and specific agenda.
Jordan does seem to be attempting to expand the electorate, trying to appeal to disaffected Idahoans and younger voters. O’Rourke has much the same strategy in Texas, but he adds the critical ingredients of substance and presence. In other words he shows up and is willing to confront issues, even difficult ones, head on.
I have long argued that Idaho Democrats must find a new approach to running statewide campaigns, including strategies to expand the electorate. They need to focus on younger voters who much research shows aren’t particularly wedded to either political party. They need to play to their one true strength, years of commitment to improving educational opportunities. And they must relentlessly and enthusiastically engage voters. A brief hit on CNN is no substitute for a town hall meeting in Payette, a picnic in Orofino or knocking on doors in Soda Springs.
Jordan has apparently mastered one part of a new Democratic strategy. The University of Virginia Center for Politics and Ipsos, the polling outfit, has created an online 2018 Political Atlas for every major race in the country. The Atlasmeasures, among other things, a candidate’s social media presence and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Jordan looks like a winner. One analysis gives her seven times as many Twitter followers as Little and six times as many followers on Facebook. Nevertheless respected political scientist Larry Sabato who helped invent these new measures calls the governor’s race “safe Republican.” That call is based on his detailed analysis of polling, Idaho’s electoral history, the quality of the candidates and other first hand intelligence.
A good social media presence is clearly an element of a challenges strategy, but it’s hardly enough by itself. The vast majority of Jordan’s social media followers appear to be fans from outside Idaho and therefore unable to vote for her in November. Perhaps that’s what you get when you base an Idaho campaign on profiles in The Atlantic or interviews on CNN.
Former Idaho Governor and Secretary of the Interior Cecil D. Andrus died on August 24, 2017 in Boise. He was a day short of his 86th birthday. I was lucky enough to meet him in the mid-1970s and even more fortunate to work with him from 1986 on.
He was simply the best and greatest man I have ever known. I was honored and humbled to offer a remembrance for a packed house of family and friends at a memorial service in Boise last week. Below is what I said about a personal and political giant.
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Cecil Andrus had, in almost every respect, a quintessentially American kind of life rising from the most modest beginnings to the far heights of political and personal accomplishment, and frequently his many and varied victories came in the face of the longest of odds.
Cece Andrus, 1931-2017
Reflect for a moment on those humble begins in rural Oregon: The governor told of learning, as a youngster along with brother Steve, how to hunt and fish, and not merely for enjoyment, but because a successful hunting or fishing expedition put food on the family table. You can understand the seeds there of a life long love of hunting, fishing and the outdoors. He would joke in his retirement that with an elk in the freezer he and Carol could make it through the winter.
These early Oregon days were before there was a Bonneville Power Administration or the REA, electricity was scarce in the rural west. He vividly recalled his dad using the car battery to power the family radio set so that everyone could listen to Franklin Roosevelt’s Fire Side Chats. And he embraced throughout his political life the lessons of FDR’s New Deal, as well as the buck-stops-here pragmatism of Harry Truman. Politics, he thought, should be an honorable calling since it should always be about improving the lives of people. And government was the tool to make the improvements.
He never forgot where he came from.
Years after working long days in the woods, after serving in the Cabinet, after meeting the Pope, and presidents, and titans of industry, and after conserving vast swaths of America’s last frontier, he could still walk the walk and talk the talk of a gyppo logger from north Idaho. Some wise guy once conceived of a campaign commercial where the governor donned a hardhat and cork boots and wielded a chain saw to cut down the biggest dang Ponderosa pine you can imagine.
This was 1986, and probably 20 years after his last logging job, and he dropped that tree right where it was supposed to be.
He never forgot where he came from.
To those who had the honor to work for him – with him – he was role model, mentor, inspiration and surrogate father. He was simply a wonderful guy to work with. It was fun, demanding and important work, and, in my case, his taking a flier on me and bringing me into his orbit absolutely changed my life – and all for the good. I even adopted his hairstyle.
A Political Accident…
All of you know the broad outline of his story, but permit me for a moment to draw the big picture that, I think, helps us understand what will be his enduring legacy. He was elected at age 29 to the state senate from Clearwater County by defeating an incumbent Republican. He had never before held political office. Elected governor at age 39 in 1970, he became the first Democratic governor in Idaho in sixteen years. He defeated an incumbent Republican that year by gaining 52 percent of the vote. Four years later, he won re-election in a crushing landslide – 71 percent of the vote.
Interior Secretary Andrus with President Jimmy Carter
His political and personal skills and his first-rate intellect next took him to the president’s Cabinet – the first Idahoan to ever serve there.
Following service in the Carter Administration he returned to Idaho, in and of itself a remarkable fact since “Potomac Fever” is a powerful affliction, but it never settled on Cece Andrus.
In 1986, he was trying again to win what he often called “the best political job in the world,” and he won a very close election for governor with just under 50 percent of the vote. Four years later, he won an unprecedented fourth term in another landslide – more than 68 percent of the vote.
I like to say he was elected four times in three different decades, a Democrat in one of the most Republican states in the nation, a conservationist in a state where timber, mining and agriculture were paramount. He built a record of remarkable legislative accomplishment that occurred while his party never once controlled either house of the state legislature.
I remember going to Marsing during that 1986 campaign and seeing a pick-up truck with an Andrus sticker on the left rear bumper and a Steve Symms sticker on the right rear bumper. That is the definition of bipartisan appeal. He never would have won all those elections without having remarkable appeal all across the political spectrum.
And there was a discernible pattern in his political life, and his victories were no flukes. He would win an election narrowly, as in 1970 and again 1986, and then, after showing voters how well he led and how much he cared – in other words the more the voters saw him in action the better they liked him – he won the two greatest victories in modern Idaho gubernatorial history. You need to go all the way back to 1896 and Frank Steunenberg to find another gubernatorial election won by a larger margin that Cece Andrus’ margins in 1974 and 1990.
Lewiston Tribune photographer Barry Kough found this photo from 1986 and added his own caption. “Tribune muckraker Sandy M. L. Q. Lee interrogated Gov. Cecil Andrus and his chief flunky Marc Jonson while Andrus tried to find friendly faces while campaigning in Stangeville.”
And after he won he led, and he governed. Permit the editorial opinion that we could use a little bit more of that formula in our politics today.
Historians will sort this out, but I think it is fair to argue that no politician in the history of Idaho had a bigger impact for good for more people for a longer period of time than Cece Andrus.
He was, to appropriate the title from Bernard Malamud’s great novel, he was indeed The Natural. He believed, as Churchill said, that you had to be an optimist – it simply wasn’t much use to be anything else.
I have rarely met another person, let alone a politician, so completely comfortable in his own skin as was Cece Andrus. He was the very definition of the old saying: What you see is what you get. No pretense. No artifice. No overstuffed self-importance. Cece Andrus never met a stranger and never had to master the politician’s trick of faking sincerity.
He liked being Cece Andrus – and who wouldn’t?
What you saw is what he was: confident, decisive, almost always the smartest guy in the room, but never one to believe it of himself. He rarely – as in never – seemed to have a bad day. He had an amazing capacity for work and analysis, but also a remarkable ability to make a tough decision and never second-guess that decision. He also displayed, more than any other quality, a genuine regard for people, which I would submit was the secret sauce of his astounding political success and why he remains, nearly a quarter century after leaving public office, the most popular Idaho politician of the modern era. He really liked people. And they liked him precisely because he was – to use a phrase political consults employ today – he was authentic.
To Carol, Tana, Tracy, Kelly, Monica, Morgan, Andrew and great granddaughter Casey and all the extended Andrus family: At this difficult time and while still coming to grips with such a great loss please know we hold all of you in our hearts and in our prayers. While we gather today to celebrate the governor’s remarkable life and legacy we are all too aware that no words can really ease the hurt you feel.
Still, it would be our collective hope that the sentiments, the images, the music and the outpouring of love and affection from all gathered here, as well as the collective memory of what he has meant to all of us, will begin to bring some degree of peace.
Cece and Carol Andrus
We confront today, each of us, the realization that no matter how large the hurt, no matter how awful the loss, we can – and we should – take profound inspiration from Cece Andrus’ life. He would tell us, I think, that when faced with adversity we have only one choice – to move ahead, to step confidently, as he would, toward the bright sunshine on the next high hill, to envision and work for a better future, and to never indulge in the darkness of despair.
He once said, in reflecting on his long career, that when things change we need to change to meet the new circumstances. He was nothing if not an agent of change, and he was always – always – focused on the future.
And we remember that great sense of humor, those flashing eyes, and the perfectly delivered self-deprecating joke. We all have a Cece story.
Here is a favorite of mine: it was August 1986, and he was locked in a tough campaign for a third term as governor. As well known as Cece Andrus was at that time, he had been off the ballot for a dozen years, away from the state for four years and he was a blank slate for a significant number of Idahoans. Practicing the best kind of politics – the retail, handshaking and visiting kind of politics – we were trying to get him in personal contact with as many voters are possible. But on this particular hot August day we didn’t have a blessed thing scheduled – no Rotary Club speech, no parade, nothing. Not one to waste a campaign day, he had his tiny paid campaign staff – Larry Meierotto, the campaign manager, Clareene Wharry (of course) and me gather at his office on Bannock Street downtown. He wanted to know what we could do that day to meet some voters.
Larry shuffled through some papers in his lap and said: Well, the Owyhee County Fair starts today. We could drive out to Homedale – as you all know a Democratic stronghold – and work the fairground. Strategy decided we took off mid-afternoon for Homedale. As we arrived at the fairgrounds something just didn’t seem quite right. For one thing no one was around. The fairgrounds were deserted. Armed with a handful of Andrus brochures, the governor set off to find some voters, any voters, and we finally spotted four guys sitting in the shade drinking Coors out of can and smoking cigarettes. He introduced himself and asked these guys where they were from. Nevada, they answered. They were the “carnies” setting up the carnival rides for the Owyhee County Fair that would start – the next day. We went to the fair on the wrong day.
For the rest of my life in the wonderful orbit of Cecil Andrus the Owyhee County Fair became shorthand for anything that didn’t turn out quite right. All he had to do to make a point about a lack of planning or execution was to say those words – “Owyhee County Fair.” And he would frequently add, twinkle in his eye: “That was a real high point of the campaign, talking to four guys in Homedale, all from Nevada who couldn’t vote for me.”
When his hunting mule Ruthie delivered a serious blow to his head during an elk hunting expedition and he was helicoptered off a mountain up above Lowman, I went sprinting down to the emergency department at St. Luke’s not knowing how seriously he had been hurt. About the first person I saw was the National Guard helicopter pilot who had delivered him to the hospital. “How is he doing,” I asked. “I think he’s going to be fine,” the pilot said, “the first thing he asked me when we got him strapped in was whether there was any chance we had a cold beer on board the helicopter.”
He was not the kind of leader who expected perfection, but rather competence. He wasn’t in any way a harsh taskmaster, but he did demand honesty, hard work and really insisted that you harbor a sense of the awe that he felt in having the privilege and responsibility of working for the people of Idaho.
Andrus with Idaho Senator Frank Church
He wasn’t a memo writer and he rarely issued orders, but he did expect everyone who worked for him to be on his or her A-game all the time. And he had standards: Tell the truth; no surprises – if you had a problem you’d better let him know, he didn’t want to read about it in the newspaper – no funny business with expense reimbursements – if you cheated on the small stuff, you’d cheat on the big things, he said – and no drinking at lunch. Think of the problems those simple rules avoided.
When things went wrong, he took responsibility. When things went well, he shared the praise. Ask anyone who ever worked for him and you’ll find that he inspired incredible loyalty. You wanted to work for the guy and no one ever wanted to disappoint the boss.
He led the best way – by example. A good way to measure the character of a politician is to see how people who worked for an elected official regard their experience. I believe I can speak for the so-called “Andrus Mafia” in saying that working for Cece Andrus was the absolute pinnacle of our professional lives.
The Andrus Legacy…
He loved to hunt and fish. And the outdoors, in addition to Carol, his daughters, grandchildren, and great granddaughter, were his great personal passions. He also had, I think, three great political passions. Perhaps above all he valued education. He admired and cared for students and teachers. I’ve always thought one reason he placed such great stock in education was due to the fact that he did not have the chance to complete his own college education. Lord knows that never hampered him, but he always knew that education was the way ahead in the world. He believed every single youngster deserved a first-rate education and he was determined as a legislator and as a governor to do everything he could to emphasize and improve education. It is one of the Three E’s of the Andrus Legacy.
His second E was the economy. First you must make a living, he said, and then he acted on that idea. He promoted Idaho products – like the spuds in those great commercials – and he courted those, like Hewlett-Packard and Micron, who would bring about a diversification of the Idaho economy. But he was also a shrewd and pragmatic dealmaker. He told David Packard that Idaho would be glad to have a big technology company like H-P locate here, but to not expect a bunch of tax giveaways since that wouldn’t be fair to companies already here. H-P came.
Micron needed engineering education in Boise. He found a way to get it done.
He had an astute sense of leadership that helped him navigate domains as different as the Albertson’s boardroom, the White House Cabinet Room, a Land Board meeting or an elk camp. Only after I observed him in action for a while did I conclude, without a doubt, that this guy could have literally done anything in business or in politics. He inspired people to be better than they were and they followed him – the very essence of a great leader.
We have heard a good deal lately about certain people who know the art of the deal. Most of them don’t. Cece Andrus did. Since we are here today on the Boise State University campus I want to relate one of my favorite stories about Andrus the dealmaker. Back in 1974 – long before Bob Kustra – Boise State College was the poor stepsister of Idaho higher education, but even then the Broncos had big aspirations, aspirations shared by the largely Republican delegation from Ada County…and by Cece Andrus.
Here is the art of the Andrus Deal.
The legislation to create Boise State University – rename it from a college – was sitting on Governor Andrus’ desk in 1974 at the precise moment the state senate was considering whether to confirm the nomination to the Public Utilities Commission of a crusty former labor leader from Pocatello by the name of Bob Lenaghan. To say the least, Bob Lenaghan was not a GOP favorite, and Andrus knew he would need a handful of Republican votes to get him confirmed. A potential yes vote rested with a Republican state senator from Ada County by the name of Lyle Cobbs, who just happened to be the sponsor of the legislation to create Boise State University. You may see where this is going.
Literally while the roll call to confirm – or not confirm Bob Lenaghan’s PUC appointment – was proceeding on the senate floor the governor of Idaho dialed the phone and it rang on Senator Cobbs’ desk.
“Lyle, this is the governor…anxious to know how you intend to vote on the PUC appointment.” Long, silent pause on the other end of the line. “Lyle, just so you know, I have your BSU legislation sitting right here on my desk awaiting action…”
Governor Andrus signs the legislation creating Boise State University in 1974. Senator Lyle Cobbs (standing in plaid jacket) looks on.
The vote to confirm Bob Lenaghan was 18 in favor, 17 opposed. Senator Cobbs cast the deciding vote in favor. At the signing ceremony for the BSU legislation – by the way there is a great photo on the BSU website of the occasion with a rather anxious Lyle Cobbs looking on – the senator quietly asked the governor: “You wouldn’t really have vetoed that bill would you?” Andrus, smiling, said: “Lyle, you’ll never know will you?” The governor got his PUC commissioner, and he helped launch a fine university in one fell swoop.
The third E in the Andrus Legacy is, of course, the environment. He championed the environmental long before it was popular and long after some attempted to make conservation a purely partisan issue. Alaska is the greatest piece of his conservation legacy, but we should remember as well smaller, but no less important victories.
He shamed a timber company in northern Idaho into changing its forest practices when he personally took photographs of a logging job that had messed up a stream.
He told Jack Simplot to clean up the effluent from his potato processing plant on the Snake River or the state would shut it down. Simplot complied.
And all the while he was also a pragmatist. You could have it both ways, he believed, you could build and sustain a strong and vibrant economy, but you could also protect public lands for his generation, for mine and for our kids and grandkids. “First you must make a living,” he said, “but you must have a living that is worthwhile.”
I suspect at one time or another all of us have pondered a fundamental question of human existence: can one individual really make a difference? Can one person in a big and very complicated world make a lasting mark? Cece Andrus’ life is all the proof any of us need that one person can make a difference. If you take nothing else away from this occasion today, please take that lesson from his long and impactful life – one person can have a profound influence for good.
And he showed us how to do it by: Pushing for kindergartens, putting the first women on the Idaho Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, unflinching support for Marilyn Shuler and human rights, the courage to confront the DOE, one of the earliest to question the excesses of the National Rifle Association, one of history’s great crusaders for conservation.
Conservationist Ernie Day’s iconic photograph of Castle Peak in the White Clouds range in central Idaho.
It was so enjoyable to talk with him and watch him revel in Mike Simpson’s dogged pursuit of wilderness protection for the Boulder-White Clouds. And it was so typically Andrus that he enjoyed Mike’s great victory every bit as much as any victory of his own.
The words repeated over the last few days – Giant, Icon, Legendary – are all true. And Cece Andrus will be remembered for many things not least for his courage and his humanity, not least for the fact that indeed his life did make a huge and lasting difference.
The Best of Us…
Cece Andrus was our North Star – our beacon – inspiring us to be a little better, to think a little bigger, to act a bit more boldly. He was the ultimate people person – big-hearted, generous, fair, and the most loyal of loyal friends. He made us want to walk toward that sunshine on the next high hill.
John Kennedy had inspired him in 1960 at the beginning of his political life, and Barack Obama did much the same nearer the end. Reflecting on the improbably of a black man in the White House, Cece Andrus said, “I can still be inspired. I can still hope.” In turn, he always gave us hope, which is after all along with the love of our family and friends, about all we can surely count on in this world.
His optimism and his sense of hope, his personal decency and his rock solid integrity, and of course his caring is why we loved him, and followed him, and believed in him, and it is why we mourn him. Long after all of us go on to our own just rewards they will still be talking about Cece Andrus.
And, of course, we will continue to admire him and miss him in the days and years to come and we should all try to give him the best possible tribute and live out his example.
We will never, ever forget what he did for his country, his state and for each of us.
The Lewiston Tribunethis week published my remembrance of Mike Mitchell a long-time Idaho legislator and one-time chief of staff to Idaho Governor Cecil D. Andrus. Here’s the piece, written with a smile and a heavy heart.
Generally speaking there are two kinds of people in politics: the show horses and the workhorses. The show horses are often in the game for the title, the attention and because its makes something of them. The workhorses are different. They don’t crowd to the front to take the bows. They go to the meetings, read the bills, master the budget and are in politics because they think they can do something, not just be something.
Mike Mitchell – Political Workhorse. Lewiston Tribune photo
Long-time Lewiston state legislator Mike Mitchell, who died last week at 91, was a workhorse, or more correctly a draft horse. He pulled the heavy loads in state government and he did so for decades motivated by a fierce commitment to Nez Perce County, his state and to those people at the edges of our system who never seem to have a platform, but deserve an effective voice.
I first met Mike Mitchell in the late 1970s. I was a very junior statehouse reporter. Mitchell, already a legislative veteran, was a minority Democrat on the powerful Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, the legislature’s budget committee. It didn’t take long for even a novice political reporter to appreciate his encyclopedic grasp of the state budget. He was approachable, authoritative and incapable of the kind of partisan animus many politicians can’t seem to avoid. He was funny, often at his own expense. My regard only grew as I came to know him better and better.
During his long years of public service Mitchell mastered the hard, essential, but not very unglamorous work of government. He forgot more about the state budget than most legislators ever learn. He was an expert on corrections and education and, of course, Lewis Clark State College. He knew more about roads and bridges than most Idaho Transportation Department district engineers. Mike was a student of government and his fingerprints are all over Idaho from social work licensing to services for troubled kids.
It is often said, incorrectly, that government must operate more like a business. Mitchell knew something about business – he was a successful businessman, too – but he also knew that government is different than the private sector. Operating successfully in the public arena, particularly as a Democrat in Republican Idaho, requires an appreciation for facts, a commitment to accommodation and a belief in the art of the possible. Success depends on build relationships and trust and credibility, all of which Mike did and that is why so many people who knew him and worked with him praise his ability to bridge the partisan divide. To know him was simply to like him and respect him.
Then-Interior Secretary Cecil D. Andrus with then-State Senator Mike Mitchell. Tribune photo by Barry Keough
Mike Mitchell wasn’t a big guy, but his heart was. It was made of gold and his backbone made of steel. Mike wasn’t one to shy away from a fight, but he was more comfortable making things work and he did make things work time and again.
I had the singular honor of my life to work with Mike Mitchell and for Cecil D. Andrus, the man Mike replaced in the state senate when Andrus was elected governor for the first time in 1970. Mike became a mentor, a friend, a golfing partner and one of the best joke tellers I’ve ever laughed with.
When he “retired” after Andrus’ 1990 re-election – that retirement didn’t stick and he had a whole second act in politics and public service – I followed him as chief of staff to the governor. I didn’t replace him, however. No one could. He was Mike Mitchell.
There was only one of his kind. He is missed already.
Conventional political wisdom holds – we all know how “conventional” the current campaign has become – that Bernie Sanders has no (nadda, zip, zero) chance of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, let alone reaching the Oval Office.
Unthinkable, the Beltway Gasbags say, that the former mayor of the People’s Republic of Burlington wins, even though Vermonters have been sending him to Washington since 1991.
Senator Bernie Sanders
Sanders must then be doomed by his age? He is 74-years old.
Or maybe it’s his unruly shock of white hair that looks like it was styled in a wind tunnel. Maybe he’s too Jewish. Maybe its because he comes from Vermont, a small, weirdly shaped state that unless you are from New Hampshire (or Canada), most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
Or perhaps it’s the native New Yawker in Sanders, who sounds like a Big Apple cab driver, well at least he sounds like the kind of cab driver New York had before all New York cab drivers started sounding like they grew up in Somalia or Pakistan.
Maybe Sanders’ positions on the issues will disqualify him, even though a good number of polls indicate that many, many Americans agree with Sanders’ call to deal with income inequality and educate young people without saddling them with a lifetime of tuition debt.
It’s All About the “S” Word…
None of his apparent political shortcomings – age, hair style, positions – fully explains why Sanders has a “he can’t be elected” problem. His real problem is the “S” word – he’s a s-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-t.
Actually, Bernie describes himself as a “democratic socialist,” which in real life – and in Europe and Canada – means he believes in the democratic political process – things like elections, representative government, trying to convince others to agree with you. But, he also believes the system is too often rigged to leave out the little guy. What a radical idea. He’s actually been very consistently saying this for, like, 40 years.
Still, in our politics describing yourself as a “democratic socialist” is a little like being convicted of child abuse while reading Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. It is the kiss of political death this socialism.
But why? Why has only the United States among the rest of the world’s industrial and, yes democratic societies, never had a particularly serious socialist political movement? Canada, France, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, on and on have a 20th Century tradition of what Sanders calls democratic socialism, but not the United States.
But before we lock up the women and children and worry about nationalizing the railroads, let’s consider what Sanders (and others of similar ilk) have actually said and done over the course of American history and why the term and the idea have become such political kryptonite.
In their book It Didn’t Happen Here – Why Socialism Failed in the United States authors Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks observe that an American “working class party,” with a foundation of trade union members, never caught on in the U.S. precisely because what social democrats offer is what many Americans already believe they have – “a democratic, socially classless, anti-elitist society.” The authors call it Americanism.
In essence, although most Americans would never say it this way, we have long embraced a political philosophy – Americanism, if you will – that is wrapped up in our aspirations, our myths, and our ideas of exceptionalism. Americanism is also deeply rooted in our notion that our political system is in no way separate from free market capitalism and that by extension, capitalism translates to “a democratic, socially classless, anti-elitist” society.
As a result, when a political candidate suggests that capitalism might not be the complete answer to American issues like wide spread poverty, racial or class inequality or, just to mention one of Sanders’ key issues, making certain every young person who wants a higher education gets one.
Capitalism = Democracy…
For most of the 20th Century the Americanism equals capitalism construct has defined American politics. To suggest that capitalism might not be the answer to every one of society’s issues has been a good way to get branded with, well, the socialist label. Suggest that the really wealthy need to pay a greater share of taxes because, well, they can afford to do so and you are guilty of “class warfare,” the ugly twin of socialism.
But it wasn’t always so. Once the Sanders’ notion of “democratic socialism” was seen as a legitimate alternative to the policy prescriptions of conservative Republicans and more left of center Democrats.
Wilson, TR and Taft in 1912
In the election of 1912, one of the most interesting, complicated, and important presidential elections in our history, four major candidates sought the White House. Two of the contenders – Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Bull Moose ticket, and the election winner, Democrat Woodrow Wilson – were certainly not socialists, but did advocate a robust form of progressive politics that included sweeping attacks on the excesses of big business, support for organized labor, and improvements in the lives and economic conditions of working Americans.
A third candidate, incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft, was a kind of “establishment Republican” of his day and ours. Taft would not be out of place or uncomfortable in the modern Republican Party of John Boehner or Jeb Bush. Taft was a candidate embraced by big business, a big man with little interest in the kind of “activist” presidency that Roosevelt or Wilson personified.
Eugene V. Debs
The fourth major candidate in 1912 was a socialist – Eugene Victor Debs, an Indiana-born, railroad union leader who ran for president five different times. Debs captured nearly a million of the 15 million votes cast in 1912 – his issues then were essentially Sanders’ issues now – and that election proved to be the high water mark of American socialism.
Eight years later Debs was running for president again, but this time from behind the bars of the federal penitentiary in Atlanta where he was doing time for speaking against U.S. involvement in the Great War, a victim of the era’s hysteria about “radicals” who dared to veer from conventional ideas about American patriotism.
The “Radical” Ideas of Eugene V. Debs…
At the end of Debs’ trial – he was convicted under the Sedition Law of 1917 – he spoke to the court and said, in part:
“In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…”
Little surprise that as a young fellow Bernie Sanders produced a documentary on Eugene Debs.
In his fascinating history of the Socialist Party in America, historian Jack Ross details the number of elected officials in the country who were elected on a Socialist ticket, most of them at time Eugene Debs was the American face of socialism. Ross’s list makes for interesting reading.
When Milwaukee and Many Other Cities Elected Socialists…
In the first two decades of the 20th Century, hundreds of Socialists were elected to city councils, as mayors, and state legislators in nearly every state. Wisconsin – take that Scott Walker – elected literally hundreds of Socialists and Milwaukee had a Socialist mayor nearly continuously from 1910 to 1960. One of those mayors, Daniel Hoan, served from 1916-1940 and another, Frank Zeidler, from 1948-1960.
Frank Zeidler was Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor from 1948-1960
These so called “sewer socialists” sounded a good deal like Bernie Sanders in their demands for greater focus on the needs of the working class and they governed well, providing efficient and effective city governments. They would not have been re-elected time and again had they not been good at the nuts and bolts of governing and a good place to look for evidence of Sanders’ version of democratic socialism is his time as a small town mayor.
Butte and Anaconda, Montana had Socialist mayors before the Great War. Socialists were elected as county clerk and sheriff in Minidoka County, Idaho in the same period, a place where no Democrat has been elected in decades. The city of Sisseton, South Dakota had a Socialist mayor and Nebraska elected a Socialist to the state board of regents. But no more.
With the exception of the owners of a few Che Guevara posters leftover from the 1960’s, American socialists are about as prevalent today – and relevant – as, well, Che Guevara.
“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.” – Ronald Reagan
My own theory as to why the socialist philosophy failed to gain greater political traction in the United States relates to the aggressive and very effective demonization of American socialists that began in the post-Civil War era, accelerated during the Red Scare of the 1920’s, climaxed with Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s, and has remained a key fixture of conservative political rhetoric ever since. The steady branding of “socialism” as far outside the American mainstream, combined with the conflating of “democratic socialism” with Soviet communism sealed the political fate of the heirs of Eugene V. Debs.
In post-World War I America, the Palmer Raids, initiated by the attorney general in a Democratic administration, rounded up thousands of “radicals,” many of them immigrants, and hundreds were deported because of their alleged leftist or un-American attitudes. America suffered a “red scare” that tended to feature more violations of civil liberties than any real threat to national security.
Congressional committees and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI later lavished attention on leftists in Hollywood, the media, and in government. Increasingly little if any distinction was made between “democratic socialists” and communists, even though you can plausibly argue that anti-communism (and anti-socialism), with all its excesses, has been a far more powerful force in American politics than any theory advanced by Karl Marx.
Joe McCarthy’s “red baiting” in the early 1950’s briefly made him the most feared and loathed man in the country and his reckless methods destroyed careers and reputations. Every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt has been called a socialist or a communist by someone on the political right. Roosevelt, a New York multi-millionaire, was no socialist and, ironically, may have actually saved the country – and American capitalism – from moving to a radical leftist place during the Great Depression. Still the far right, even now, laments the “socialist” agenda of the New Deal.
Even FDR was a “Socialist…”
Roosevelt did accomplish some radical change – massive spending on public works, breaking up the huge and often corrupt utility holding companies, creating an old-age pension program that has proven to be kind of popular ever sense – and FDR did try to implement large scale planning of the economy with the National Industrial Recovery Act. The Supreme Court told him no.
I love the story of Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins testifying before Congress on the legislation we now call Social Security. A skeptical senator, probing for the Achilles heel of the idea that the government might create actually create a program we all pay into in order to provide a degree of security for all of us in old age, pressed Ms. Perkins: “Isn’t this just a tiny bit of socialism,” the senator asked. No, she replied, it isn’t.
Loyalty Oaths, Alger Hiss, the John Birch Society…Oh, My…
After World War II and into the Cold War, Harry Truman, in so many ways an exemplary president and person, instituted “loyalty oaths” to root out communists (who now interchangeably were also called socialists), state legislatures debated the so-called “Liberty Amendment” to the Constitution in the interest of making America more American, the John Birch Society equated American political liberalism with Stalinist communism, and we fought a war in Southeast Asia designed to stop the insidious expansion of the socialist/communist ideology.
Richard Nixon owed his national profile while still a very junior member of Congress to his pursuit of Alger Hiss, one of the few people from the 1950’s who actually did have questionable allegiance to his country. Nixon, according to his most recent biographer, clung to the memory of his victory over Hiss, ironically, all the way to détente with Moscow and his historic opening to China.
You can write your own 21st Century sentence about what we used to call “Red” China, and as you do, remember that the Chinese president recently dined at the White House with the CEO’s of Microsoft, MasterCard, Netflix, Oracle, Walt Disney, and Morgan Stanley – socialists all, I’m sure.
Bernie Sanders probably won’t be president and you didn’t hear it here first, but like many democratic socialists in America’s past – from Debs to Norman Thomas, one of the most impressive Americans of the last century, to Michael Herrington to the old mayors of Milwaukee – his ideas have relevance and, if you listen closely, contain an important message about what America says it is, but has not yet fully become.
None of these socialists advocated or even privately believed, Sanders included, in violent revolution or the kind of reprehensible system Stalin built in Soviet Russia. They believed in using the tools of democracy, including persuasion and elections, to bring about societal and political change.
But, given our often-tenuous grasp of our own history, not to mention inability to consider nuance, that message gets lost, while the label – “he’s a socialist-slash-communist” – stings and sticks.
“In America today, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the millions of families in the middle are gradually sliding out of the middle class and into poverty,” Sanders says. ”In the final analysis, the people of America are going to have to say that the wealth, labor and natural resources must be used to benefit all the people, not just a few super-rich.”
That is not much different than what the old railroad union member Gene Debs said on the eve of going to prison in 1919 for speaking his mind: “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
The Worst Features of Petrograd and the Gilded Age…
It has long been un-American to embrace such language – the workers versus the governing class – but in an age when the super wealthy and super powerful at the very top of our social order display, as historian Jack Ross has written, the “worst features of both Petrograd and the Gilded Age,” the guy who will not win is making lots of noise and lots of people, including many younger Americans, judging by the polls, are listening.
“The concept that motivates us is a community good as opposed to the concept of an individual pursuing their own self-interest and that somehow the public good comes out of that,” Frank Zeidler, the one-time Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee once told the Nation magazine. “Our concept is that a pursuit of the good of the whole produces the best condition for the good of the individual.”
Sounds like a radical idea, doesn’t it? Eugene Debs went to his grave believing, as he often said, “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.”
Bernie Sanders may not get to the White House, but he may convince a new generation of Americans – a generation sick and tired of too much money in politics, too much power in too few hands, and too little hope for a shrinking middle class – to think seriously about what that dreaded word – socialism – might really be all about.
It would be easy – even inevitable – given the dysfunctional state of American politics to just say the heck with it – nothing works any longer and nothing much gets done. I’ve been in that funk and may well slip back soon enough, but today I take heart that politics can still work.
The Boulder-White Clouds in Idaho
The United States Senate this week completed action on a piece of legislation to protect more than a quarter million acres of some of the most spectacular landscape on the North American continent as Wilderness – with a capital W. The action, eventually coming as the result of a unanimous consent request in the Senate, follows similar approval in the House of Representatives. President Obama’s signature will come next.
The Politics of Effort…
The legislation is largely the result of determined, persistent effort by Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson, a legislator of the old school who actually serves in Congress in order to get things accomplished and not merely to build his resume and court the fringe elements of his own party. Simpson is not the type of lawmaker that many in his party might wish him to be – one of those nameless, faceless members who vote NO, do as little as possible, get re-elected every two years and blame Washington’s shortcomings on “bureaucrats” and “Democrats.”
Rep. Mike Simpson
For the better part of fifteen years Simpson has, often single-handedly, championed greater environmental protections for the high peaks, lush meadows and gin-clear lakes of the Boulder-White Clouds area in his sprawling Congressional district in eastern Idaho. Rather than churn headlines denouncing the environmental movement, Simpson invited them to the table along with ranchers, county commissioners and a host of other interests to find a way to resolve controversies in the Idaho back country that date back decades. None of the parties trusted the others, but Simpson made them reason together with the quiet hard work that is the essence of real politics.
Blessed with a fine staff and the instincts of a patient dealmaker, Simpson worked the problem, understood the perspectives of the various interests and pushed, cajoled, humored, debated, smiled, and worked and waited and never gave up. At any number of points along the way a lesser legislator might well have lost patience, gotten discouraged or just said the hell with it, but Simpson never did, even when blindsided by members of his own party who once unceremoniously knifed his legislation after publicly indicating their support.
I wasn’t alone in concluding that the political process in Washington and the “Hell No Caucus” in Mike Simpson’s own party would never permit passage of another wilderness bill in Idaho. Over time the discouraged and disgruntled placed what little of their faith remained with President Obama. Obama, who has only gotten grief from Idaho Republicans the last seven years and owes the state nothing except maybe a thank you to a handful of Democrats who give him a 2008 caucus victory over Hillary Clinton, hinted that he would use “executive action” to declare the Boulder-White Clouds a National Monument. That potential provided the grease needed to lubricate Simpson’s legislative handiwork and the stalemate was broken.
There is an old maxim that dictates that you can keep your opponents off balance and disadvantaged in politics by displaying just enough unpredictability – even recklessness – that they think you just might be crazy enough to do what they most fear. Idaho Republicans, who had mostly not lifted a finger to help Mike Simpson over the years, came to believe that Obama just might be crazy enough to stick his proclamation pen in their faces and create a monument twice the size of the wilderness Simpson’s proposed.
Make no mistake, whatever they might say now, the determined congressman would not have received the support he ultimately did from other Idaho Republicans had they not feared – really feared – action by the president that would have created an Idaho national monument. It also didn’t hurt that Simpson and conservation-minded Idahoans in both political parties demonstrated broad public support for action on the Boulder-White Clouds.
Victory has a thousand fathers…and mothers…
While it is tempting to gloat about the late comers to the grand cause of environmental protection finally having to cave, it is more important to remember that political victory always has a thousand fathers and mothers. This is a moment to celebrate. Mike Simpson deserves – really deserves – to savor what will be a big part of his political legacy. Idaho conservationists, particularly the Idaho Conservation League and its leadership, deserve to celebrate the role that Idaho’s oldest conservation organization played in creating what some of us thought we would never see again – a wilderness bill in Idaho.
Cece Andrus in the shadow of the White Clouds – Idaho PTV photo
There must be praise for visionaries who came before, particularly including former Governor Cecil D. Andrus who campaigned against an open pit mine in the area in 1970 and later attempted to do what has now been done. The late Idaho Senators Frank Church and Jim McClure deserve a big acknowledgement. Both knew the value of protecting the area and never flagged in their determination to see it accomplished. Countless other Idaho hikers, hunters, fishermen and outdoor recreationists played their indispensable roles as well.
Best of all, unborn generations of Americans will now have a chance to experience one the most remarkable, pristine, and beautiful areas in the entire country, if not the world. American wilderness is landscape and habitat and majesty and solitude, but it is also a state of mind. Knowing we have conserved something so special and so valuable not just for ourselves, but also for the future is truly a priceless gift.
On this one occasion and after decades of work, the good that politics can do reigns supreme. A piece of heaven right here on earth has been saved and we are all the richer for it.
It is hard to find a parallel in American political history when one news organization – perhaps I should put that word “news” in quotes – has played such an outsized role in determining who gets covered and ultimately who gets nominated by one of the major political parties.
Roger Ailes, the Big Boss at Fox News
For good or bad much of the Republican presidential primary process is now largely in the hands of Fox News boss Roger Ailes, a profoundly partisan fellow who displays a deft touch for marketing the outlandish and who has built a brand and banked a bundle by zealously appealing to the shrinking band of very conservative older white voters who will decide who wins the Republican nomination in 2016. Ailes will ultimately determine which of the GOP candidates crowd on to the debate stage in Ohio on Thursday just as he will decree who watches from the wings.
There have been occasions in American political history when one media big foot or another have wielded disproportionate sway over a nomination or a candidate, but there has never been anything like Fox News.
William Loeb made his Manchester, N.H. paper both feared and hated
Crusty old William Loeb ran his hard right Manchester Union Leader newspaper in New Hampshire like the tyrant he was and often shaped the outcome of his states first in the nation primary. Loeb used his front-page editorials to call Democrats ”left-wing kooks,” John Kennedy ”the No. 1 liar in the United States,” Nelson A. Rockefeller a ”wife-swapper” and Dwight Eisenhower a ”stinking hypocrite.” Loeb wasn’t above publicizing a phony letter designed to diminish Maine Senator Edmund Muskie’s 1972 candidacy. The letter was later shown to be part of a “dirty trick” effort promulgated by Richard Nixon’s campaign, which not incidentally employed Roger Ailes to help Nixon win in 1968. Loeb, a bully with barrels of ink, even attacked Muskie’s wife. It was one of the great smears in American political history and it worked.
In earlier decades press barons like McCormick and Hearst controlled their home state delegations and fancied themselves kingmakers, but none had the national reach of Fox and the personal sway of Roger Ailes.
Fox and Republicans Captives of Each Other…
Fox has become the Republican brand and vice versa, which seems to delight the most passionate and most conservative voters, but also means the network and those favored with its air time are mostly preaching to the Tea Party choir – 30 or so percent of the American electorate that thinks the last great president was Barry Goldwater. As if to underscore the tangled lines among Republicans and Fox News, Governor John Kasich over the weekend “walked back,” as they say, which is to disavow the pithy tweet from his strategist that begins this piece. John Weaver’s comment was funny, aimed it would seem at both Donald Trump and Fox and had the added benefit of being true. You won’t be surprised to know that Kasich did his walking back during an interview on Fox.
Meanwhile, a fascinating new report from the Shorenstein Center for the Media, Politics and Public Policy explains in vivid detail how conservative media in general and Fox in particular, “shapes the agenda of the [Republican] party, pushing it to the far right – at the expense of its ability to govern and pick presidential nominees.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice
Fox fans will instantly dismiss the informed critique as the work of eastern elites – the Shorenstein Center is at Harvard, after all – but it’s difficult to dismiss comments like this from academic Geoffrey Kabaservice: “These people,” Kabaservice says in speaking of right wing media in all its forms, “practically speaking, are preventing the Republican Party from governing, which means they’re really preventing it from becoming a presidential party as well.
[Kabaservice is the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. He is a Republican.]
The Shorenstein report was authored by one of the better “old media” political reporters Jackie Calmes, a New York Times national correspondent, who did a stint as a fellow at the Center.
No Incentive to Bother With Reality…
Here’s one quick take from her report where she quotes a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, “who has worked in the top ranks of congressional and presidential politics, but, like some others, asked to remain unidentified lest he provoke the far-right messengers against his current boss: ‘It’s so easy these days to go out there and become an Internet celebrity by saying some things, and who cares if it’s true or makes any sense. It’s a new frontier: How far to the right can you get? And there’s no incentive to ever really bother with reality.’ Or to compromise: ‘There’s no money, ratings or clicks in everyone going along to get along.’”
In other words, the Fox approach, exemplified by the self righteous bomb-thrower Sean Hannity, as well as dozens of others on right wing talk radio and in the blogosphere, is to crank up the outrage meter, pour ideological gasoline on any smoldering fire – immigration, Benghazi, Obamacare, shutdown the government, Iranian nuclear deals, etc. – and stand back and watch the flames scorch anyone left of Ted Cruz who might offer a sane, moderate, middle ground approach. The influence of right wing media on hard right and more moderate Republicans has served to substitute indignation and anger for anything like a real political agenda. Real policy that involves anything other than saying “NO” in a very loud voice is as foreign to Fox and friends as are real facts.
Calmes asked one Capitol Hill Republican if he could offer examples of legislative outcomes affected by conservative media. His response: “Sure. All of ‘em…the loudest voices drown out the sensible ones and there’s no real space to have serious discussions.”
Export-Import Bank: the Latest Litmus Test…
Take, for example, the current controversy involving re-authorization of the Export-Import Bank, a little known government agency that provides loan guarantees for foreign purchases of American goods. Tea Party-types – read Fox News viewers – see the program as a prime example of “crony capitalism” even though as New York Times columnist Joe Nocera points out the bank “generated enough in fees and interest to turn over $675 million to the Treasury. Why would anyone in their right mind want to put such a useful agency out of business?”
Why indeed, but you need look no farther than the right wing media to see the issue is perfect for the politics of outrage that are the staples of Fox, Rush Limbaugh and a hundred others who have made it difficult – if not impossible – for a Republican Congress to actually make sensible decisions, embrace the occasional compromise and, well, govern.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gestures as the key speaker at the annual Reagan Republican Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, October 25, 2013. (David Peterson/MCT via Getty Images)
“This is a battle,” Ted Cruz proclaims, as he attempts to elevate his presidential candidacy with a constant stream of attention getting hyperbole. “Do you stand for the rich and powerful who corrupt Washington,” the senator asks, “and use this institution against the American taxpayer, or do you stand with the taxpayer?”
Don’t debate the facts, the hell with nuance, Cruz knows “there’s no incentive to ever really bother with reality.”
In the Import-Export Bank issue Cruz is, by the way, standing with the no taxes, ever Club for Growth, the billionaire Koch Brothers, the Tea Party Patriots, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action for America. All are fervent practitioners of the politics of outrage and a governing strategy based on “NO.” The “corrupt Washington” Cruz attacks includes such obviously rotten Americans as Boeing, GE, the United States Chamber of Commerce and a small business guy by name of Michael Hess in little Malad, Idaho.
Hess wrote recently in the Idaho Statesman that the demise of the Export-Import Bank will damage his and other Idaho small businesses. “We’ve been mining, processing and distributing pumice in Idaho for almost 60 years,” Hess wrote. “And with the bank’s insurance, we’ve been expanding our business abroad. Our products are now distributed in 23 countries across six continents. Since 2009 alone, the bank has helped Hess Pumice generate more than $16 million in sales. That new revenue enabled us to hire more employees and further support the local economy.”
And Hess correctly nails the ideologues in his own Congressional delegation, elected officials more and more afraid or unwilling to stand up to the outrage caucus, which more and more takes its marching orders from conservative media. “Despite the bank’s obvious benefits,” Hess pointed out, “some critics want to keep it shut down. Senators Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, along with Representative Raul Labrador, are in this camp, contending that Ex-Im represents an unnecessary government intrusion into the private sector.”
It is worthy noting that Idaho’s other federal office holder, Congressman Mike Simpson, has not be part of the effort to stop the Ex-Im Bank. Simpson, the one Idaho Republicans to actually face a Tea Party-inspired opponent, who he beat handily, has often stood up against the most far out elements in his own party and attempted to be a legislator who governs. For that Simpson deserves bi-partisan praise.
Right wing media, particularly Fox, have created a political environment on the far right that disdains the type of reality that small businessman Michael Hess represents. Otherwise sensible people like Mike Crapo, who must know better, embrace the extremist line afraid to buck the hard, hard right and not surprisingly the wheels of government crank to a halt.
The Loudest Voice in the Room…
Reviewing Gabriel Sherman’s book on Fox and Boss Ailes last year in the New York Review – the book is appropriately entitled The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country – Steve Coll connected the dots this way: “Fox owes its degree of profitability in part to its most passionate, even extremist, audience segment. To win national elections, the Grand Old Party, on the other hand, must win over moderate, racially diverse, and independent voters. By their very diversity and middling views, swing voters are not easy to target on television. The sort of news-talk programming most likely to attract a broad and moderate audience—hard news, weather news, crime news, sports, and perhaps a smattering of left–right debate formats—is essentially the CNN formula, which Fox has already rejected triumphantly.”
When you tune into Thursday’s debate – how can you not tune in – in order to monitor the vitriol from Trump and Cruz and Walker and the rest, Roger Ailes, the majordomo of the outrage wing of the Republican Party, will be nowhere to be seen. But he’ll be there determining who plays and under what rules. He’ll be calling the shots, pouring the gasoline and fanning the fire. Like a good ventriloquist, Ailes no longer needs to move his lips in order to get the words to leave the mouth of an outraged Republican.
“Even inside Fox,” as New York Magazine reported last week, “some are awed that a presidential race is being influenced by a television channel. ‘Crazy stuff,’ another personality told reporter Gabriel Sherman, ‘you have a TV executive deciding who is in — and out — of a debate!’”
Who is the Dummy Here?
Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy
Crazy stuff? Of course it’s crazy, but it’s also the reality Republicans have bought into by handing policy development and candidate vetting to Roger Ailes and a handful of other outraged voices who make a living trying to blow things up. Jackie Calmes’ Shorenstein report quotes another exasperated Republican as saying of the right wing media, “they don’t give a damn about governing.”
Edgar Bergen, the brilliant and elegant ventriloquist of my youth, had his Charlie McCarthy, a wisecracking dummy sitting on his knee. We all knew Charlie was just a wooden prop given life and opinions by the man with the hand in his back, but it was still an entertaining act. Roger Ailes now has his Republican Party in pretty much the same position. I leave it to you to complete the analogy as to who plays the dummy.
Years ago I enjoyed a delightful series of conversations with John Corlett, a true old-school newspaper reporter in Idaho who could recall political anecdotes with the sharpness that a gambler brings to counting cards in a Las Vegas casino. John’s career spanned a good part of the last century, from Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency to Ronald Reagan’s. He covered political conventions, wrote about statesmen and scalawags and he relished sharing his storehouse of memories every bit as much as I enjoyed hearing those memories.
Judge Chase Clark
One of many stories I remember involved former Idaho Governor and U.S. District Judge Chase Clark, the father-in-law of Senator Frank Church. Clark was part of a genuine Idaho political dynasty that featured two governors and a congressman who later became a U.S. Senator. Church married into the dynasty when he wed Bethine, the politically astute daughter of Chase Clark. The Clarks were mostly Democrats, but for bipartisan flavor the family also includes the remarkable Nancy Clark Reynolds, the Congressman’s daughter, and a Ronald Reagan confidante and D.C. power player.
Chase Clark ran for re-election as Idaho governor in 1942 and narrowly lost a re-match election with former Governor C.A. Bottolfson, the man Clark defeated in 1940. But 1942 was a Republican year, the country was at war, Roosevelt was in the second year of his third term and voters everywhere seemed to hanker for change. Corlett remembered that Democrat Clark considered his re-election chances to be less than stellar under those circumstances; so much so that Clark seems to have taken steps to create for himself a soft landing should the election turn out badly from his point of view.
As returns trickled in on election night 1942 it soon became clear that the governor’s race in Idaho would be a cliffhanger. Bottolfson eventually won by 434 votes out of more than 144,000 cast.
The Governor Who Wanted to Lose…
Late on election night as Corlett monitored the vote counting and tried to determine who was winning the very tight contest his phone rang. Governor Clark was on the other end of the line. “John,” he said, “it’s time for you to call the election for Bottolfson.”
Corlett could hardly believe what he was hearing. The incumbent Democrat was effectively conceding the election and doing so hours before it would become clear who the real winner might be. The curious phone call only made sense a few weeks later when Roosevelt announced Clark’s appointment to fill a vacancy on the federal bench in Idaho. A little over a month after leaving office in January 1943, Clark was nominated for the judgeship. He was confirmed by the Senate fifteen days later and served on the federal bench until his death in 1966.
Franklin Roosevelt
Corlett was convinced that Clark had made a deal with Roosevelt before the election in 1942, a deal to have the president appoint him to the court should he lose, and John believed Clark actually wanted to lose, maybe even planned to lose. For Corlett, Clark’s election night telephone call concession was a political smoking gun. The governor wanted to be a federal judge a good deal more than he wanted to be a governor.
The life tenure of a federal judicial position (assuming good behavior) is just one attractive aspect of the job. The pay isn’t shabby, the working conditions are typically first rate and the retirement benefits quite nice thank you. As they say, “it’s indoor work with no heavy lifting,” unless you consider hours of sitting, listening, reading and writing strenuous. Done correctly, however, the job really should be demanding. It requires a certain temperament and a scholarly demeanor, experience, perspective, learning in the law and an abiding sense of fairness. It helps, as well, to be a real person with an ego in check, someone who is not overly impressed when everyone refers to you as “your honor.”
Idaho’s Next Judge…
I remembered the old John Corlett tale recently as I read the news of the unfolding and very secret process being managed by Idaho’s two Republican United States senators to fill the vacant judgeship on the federal district court in Idaho. As the Spokesman-Review’sBetsy Russell first reported, Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch have been quietly – very quietly – interviewing prospective candidates for the federal court position, but, as Russell also reported, two of the most obvious women candidates have not been interviewed, at least not yet.
The senators subsequently released a short statement to the effect that the confidential process was in everyone’s best interest and that men as well as women would be considered. Russell also reported that the current process is a dramatic departure from that used the last time Idaho had a federal court vacancy. In 1995, with Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House, Republican Senators Larry Craig and Dirk Kempthorne created a nine-member bipartisan panel made up of five Democrats and four Republicans. The partisan split was in deference to fact that Democrat Clinton would make the appointment. That process ultimately produced three stellar candidates, including current federal District Judge Lynn Winmill, who was nominated and confirmed and continues to serve with great distinction.
Judge Edward Lodge
Crapo and Risch could have adopted a similar approach when respected Judge Edward Lodge announced his decision to move to “senior status” in September of last year. That they did not, and that only in the last few days has there been any news about the judicial position, might indicate that the senators aren’t really much focused on producing a candidate that will be both acceptable to them and to the person who under the Constitution actually makes the appointment, Barack Obama.
While its clear under the Constitution that the president “shall nominate, and, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint” federal judges, it is an unwritten fact of life in the United States Senate that no nominee gets approved by the Senate unless the senators of the state involved green light the appointment. This is particularly true when the Senate is controlled, as it now is, by one party while the other party holds the White House.
This political reality cries out, if indeed Idaho’s senators really want to see a judicial appointment while Barack Obama is still in office, for something like the bipartisan approach Craig and Kempthorne employed twenty years ago. It is entirely conceivable that the process now being used will produce a candidate that will turn out to be unacceptable to the White House and that may be what the senators truly desire. In the hardball of Senate politics the Idaho Republicans may have decided, as an Arizona Congressman actually said recently, that Obama should have not more appointments approved – period.
Idaho’s senators may have simply made the political calculation that they will “run out the clock,” while betting that a Republican wins the White House in 2016. Under this scenario Crapo and Risch will have teed up the candidate they want for early consideration by President Jeb Bush, Scott Walker or someone else.
With no more than seventy working days remaining on this year’s Senate calendar and with the Senate surely going into paralysis mode next year with a presidential election looming time will soon dictate whether an Idaho appointment is even possible. Even if Crapo and Risch were to produce a candidate relatively soon the White House and FBI vetting process could take months and extend into next year’s presidential morass. For the two senators this approach could neatly, if unfairly, place the blame for failing to fill the vacancy on the president’s desk.
The statement from Crapo and Risch last week made much of the need for an “entirely confidential” process. But it’s worth asking why? At least two widely mentioned, not particularly political and eminently qualified female candidates – U.S. Attorney Wendy Olson and federal Magistrate Candy Dale – have publicly acknowledge their interest in the appointment. Idaho, of course, is unique in that the state has never had a woman federal district judge. One suspects it is the senators insisting on the confidentially, since applying to become a federal judge, even if you are not selected, is hardly something most Idaho lawyers would hide under a bushel. Merely applying puts one in rare company.
One can certainly understand senatorial prerogatives and the Constitution wisely provides for “advice and consent” from the Senate, but a vacant federal judgeship that comes around maybe once in a generation really doesn’t belong exclusively to two U.S. senators or even to a president. The important job belongs to Idaho and given the nature of Idaho and national politics shouts out for a high degree of transparency.
Advise and Consent…Not So Much…
As this process stumbles forward the White House might consider these political facts:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch
Idaho’s two senators recently voted against the confirmation of a highly qualified African-American woman to become the first ever attorney general. They based their votes on the fact that Loretta Lynch, a seasoned federal prosecutor, merely said that she agreed with her boss, the president, on his immigration actions; actions admittedly controversial, but also currently under judicial review. Such conservative Senate stalwarts as Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch and Jeff Flake voted to confirm Lynch as attorney general, but not Crapo and Risch.
Additionally, from health care to Iran, Idaho’s senators have opposed virtually all of Obama’s policy actions. They regularly lambast the administration for everything from underfunding the Idaho National Laboratory to over regulating Main Street businesses. Obama’s budgets, they have said repeatedly, are awful, his foreign policy a disaster and the president regularly engages in extra-constitutional behavior. Little wonder then that Idaho’s senators, as reliably opposed to anything the White House proposes as any two senators in the nation, have shown so little interest in actually working with the president on the rare Idaho judicial appointment.
What Would FDR Do…
As the old story about Judge Clark in the 1940’s proves, being appointed a federal judge is a highly desirable job. Franklin Roosevelt placed the just defeated Chase Clark on the federal bench in 1942 without, near as I can tell, much if any involvement by Idaho’s two senators at the time.
Senator D. Worth Clark
In fact it’s very likely that Roosevelt could have cared less about the opinion of Senator D. Worth Clark, Chase’s nephew and Nancy Clark Reynold’s father, since Worth Clark was an outspoken opponent of FDR’s foreign policy. Coming as it did from a member of his own party, Roosevelt bitterly resented Clark’s harsh isolationist critique and let it be known that he did.
Senator John W. Thomas, a Republican, who was appointed to replace William Borah when he died in 1940, was, with the exception of foreign policy, philosophically far removed from the man he replaced. Roosevelt both liked and respected Borah even though the two men clashed on many things and had Borah, a long-time member of the Judiciary Committee, lived he certainly would have had a say in filling the Idaho judgeship. With a war to run it’s not hard to speculate that the opinions of Clark and Thomas counted for next to nothing in Roosevelt’s White House. While the Senate did “advise and consent” on Judge Clark, it can safely be said that Idaho’s two senators had very little to say about his appointment.
Perhaps in the current case Mr. Obama ought to engage in some of that dictatorial activity he is so often accused of and go ahead and appoint one of the highly qualified and non-political women candidates to the federal bench. Let Idaho’s senators explain why a sitting U.S. attorney already confirmed by the Senate, or a federal magistrate vetted by her peers, or any number of other qualified women aren’t acceptable. The way things look today President Obama has nothing too lose as the clock winds down on his term and he confronts a judicial selection in Idaho vetted and suggested by two senators who can hardly mention his name without a sneer.
Barack Obama might enjoy, just as Franklin Roosevelt often did, seeing some of his greatest opponents in the Senate squirm just a little. At the very least, Mr. Obama could go down in history as the first president who tried to appoint the first women to the federal bench in Idaho.
Somewhere, maybe, there is a political operative for one of the Republican presidential candidates who is sitting at a desk, hunched over a computer smiling at the viral news that the Grand Old Party has taken a another hard right turn into the war zone of culture, but some how I doubt it.
The #indiana has, at least for a few more days, reshaped and shuffled the pre-primary primary season for the Republican Party and I’m betting no one from Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz was really looking to be defined by the actions of the Indiana state legislature. But, you try to go to the White House with the issues you have, as Donald Rumsfeld might say.
Indiana, home to great basketball, fast motor racing and St. Elmo’s Steakhouse (one of the greatest I’ve ever visited), has discovered the power of social media this week. When Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a “religious freedom” law into effect a few days ago he set off a national debate vastly beyond anything the Hoosier state has seen in a long, long time. The time that former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight threw a chair hardly registers compared to the shock of Pence and Indiana Republicans touching a new third rail of American politics – discrimination couched as expressions of religious belief.
But first, let’s consider the politics. According to the Gallup polling organization, the level of acceptance of homosexuality in the country is at an all-time high – more than 60 percent – and even higher among younger Americans. Support for same sex marriage has crossed the same threshold of acceptance. According to Pew Research, opposition to same sex marriage stood at 65 percent in 1996, but by last year public opinion had shifted dramatically with 54 percent of Americans now approving of the idea.
It is not necessary to be an MIT math whiz to see that the world has changed and the pace of change is only likely to accelerate as younger Americans, vastly more accepting of all types of diversity, assert themselves in the economy and politics. The modern Republican Party is on the wrong side of this divide.
Second, in the wake of the still unfolding Indiana firestorm, Republicans find themselves in the almost always uncomfortable political position of debating the technical, legal aspects of a law. When a politician is forced, as Pence was, to say that a law he signed is not a license to discriminate against gay and lesbian Americans and then forced to explain legally how that is possible, you have the political equivalent of explaining how a watch is made when the public just wants to know what time it is.
Whether it has been completely fair or not, the Indiana legislation has been forever defined as at a minimum, opening the door to discrimination based on sexual orientation. Republican candidates have been reduced to explaining what the law doesn’t do rather than what it was reported to accomplish. So far they have mostly botched the task.
The backlash, both politically and otherwise, has been intense. One of the best Tweets I’ve seen was from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the legendary 500 mile race. The Speedway’s famous sign simply spelled out: “We Welcome Everyone.”
A lengthening parade of some of the biggest business brands in the country – Nike, Walmart, Apple, Twitter, Yelp, Levi Strauss, Eli Lilly and Accenture, among others – have publicly opposed the Indiana law. The NCAA has essentially said it will not allow future big-time college athletic events in Indiana. (When the NCAA looks good in comparison, #indiana, you have a problem). All this, too, creates political fallout, as Bush will undoubtedly find when he goes calling for campaign cash in Silicon Valley this week. More importantly, business is signaling that discrimination is bad for, well, business.
So, if the politics of discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans – or even the appearance of discrimination – doesn’t make political sense, and with many of the usual business allies of the Republican Party in revolt against an Indiana-type law, why do it? [Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchison apparently asked that question when presented with a similar proposal in his state. Hutchison, after first indicating he would, now says he’ll not sign the legislation.]
“The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made strangely powerful, in ways that haven’t yet been fully tested, by the Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions.” She was correct.
In short, the efforts in Indiana and Arkansas involve crafting laws sufficiently vague and open to wide interpretation expecting that the new statutes can serve as a vehicle to get a case in front of a judge who might rule in a way that creates an eventual avenue to the Supreme Court. The Indiana law is not so much about making public policy that can be debated and clearly understood, as it is about teeing up a legal argument that leaves the dirty work of defining the line between religion and discrimination to five conservative justices. Any bets on how that comes down?
Indiana’s governor, in denying the discriminatory intent of the law in his state, said the new statute, “only provides a mechanism to address claims, not a license for private parties to deny services.” Or perhaps more correctly, as Davidson writes, the Indiana law provides “a mechanism to discriminate, rather than a license. What it certainly will do is give some people more confidence to discriminate. But is that what Indiana really wants? And is that what the G.O.P.’s 2016 candidates should be looking for?”
Interestingly, in a debate that mirrors the on-going debate in Idaho (and elsewhere) over creating specific state-level prohibitions against discrimination directed toward gays and lesbians, the perfect fix for the Indiana dilemma is merely for the legislature to create such protections in law. So far that remedy, a specific statement of public policy opposed to discrimination, hasn’t been a serious part of the discussion in Indiana. Of course, Idaho continues to dance around that clear choice, as well. As this debate continues to unfold, Idaho policy makers might want to listen closely. It is not completely farfetched to think that Idaho could become Indiana.
But here is the ultimate political, indeed moral, bottom line: If you are reduced to arguing that something you have done in the name of “freedom” isn’t really designed to create an ability for some people to deny freedom – that’s what discrimination is – against some other people, while couching it all in the smoke of “restoring religion” you are likely on the wrong side of a very dubious argument, not to mention history.
He was one of the most polarizing political figures of the last half-century in Idaho, a union and gay rights basher who was part of the Tea Party before we called it that and before the Republican Party came to be too dominated by, well, guys like Gary Glenn.
Long-time observers of Idaho’s politics – and now Michigan politics – will recognize his name and his tactics, including the brash one-liner, the scorched earth approach to every issue, the politics that reduce your opponent to a beast determined to ruin the culture. Those who long for a politics where opponents aren’t routinely demonized will not be surprised that Glenn, the one-time Idaho bomb thrower, is these days lobbing his grenades as a duly elected state representative in Michigan. You can be forgiven for thinking Idaho’s gain has become Michigan’s loss.
At a state university in Saginaw, Michigan recently two dozen students showed up to protest an appearance by the former Idaho firebrand. According to the local newspaper the students, taking exception to Glenn’s harsh anti-gay rhetoric, chanted, “Hey, ho, Gary Glenn has got to go” and “2, 4, 6, 8, Gary Glenn is full of hate.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights group that once had a hand in driving the Aryan Nations out of Idaho, reports on its website that Glenn offered these helpful comments about gays in 2001: “As with smoking, homosexual behavior’s ‘second hand’ effects threaten public health….Thus, individuals who choose to engage in homosexual behavior threaten not only their own lives, but the lives of the general population.” Some things never change.
The Hired Gun…
If you want to mark a date on the calendar when Idaho politics truly began to change for the worse you could start with the day in 1985, when the Idaho legislature, after a bruising political battle, passed anti-labor “right-to-work” legislation over the veto on then-Governor John V. Evans. When unions succeeded in getting the issue on the ballot in 1986 the resulting campaign was particularly ugly. Glenn, a fresh-faced newcomer to Idaho – some called him not incorrectly a “carpetbagger” – orchestrated that nasty battle utilizing the kind of over-the-top tactics of intimidation and exaggeration – union “thugs” where threatening western civilization – that have become the norm in politics.
Before Glenn and the National Right-to-Work Committee targeted Idaho with bundles of outside money and deployed the politics of “if you’re not for us, you are against us,” Idaho was an organized labor backwater. In modern times the state had little history of labor unrest, but the unionized miners, timber workers and electricians tended to support Democrats who advocated for better schools and better paying jobs. Labor’s foot soldiers and campaign money never – at least not since the early 1950’s – gave Democrats a majority in the Idaho Legislature, but they did help keep the party competitive and helped elect guys like Evans, Frank Church and my old boss Cecil Andrus.
There are endless debates about the economic impacts of right-to-work on wages, job creation and the quality of employment opportunities and you can find studies and experts to support almost any point of view, but it’s beyond denial that the passage of the law in Idaho dealt a big blow to the Democratic Party. This was, one suspects, a big factor in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s recent push to make that once labor friendly state the latest to put the state between union members and management.
It is also clear that Idaho’s ranking in one important economic category – personal income – is hardly an advertisement for the wonders of anti-labor public policy. According to Department of Labor statistics, “Idaho ranked dead last in 2013 with individual median income at $27,932 — likely aided by the fact it was at the bottom of all the states for the median income for women, $21,908. The Idaho median income for men was $33,623 — good for 48th place.”
If you like one-party government populated by a crop of legislators who now pass resolutions calling for the “impeachment” of federal judges who rule “incorrectly” on same sex marriage, oppose a Hindu prayer to open a legislative session, continue to defund education and deny basic human rights protections to the LGBT community then Gary Glenn deserves honorary Idaho citizenship. The do-almost-nothing Idaho legislature (remember, it wasn’t always so), is a monument to the lack of a political middle in the state and that too has roots in the long ago battles that Glenn and like minded allies stoked for maximum partisan mileage.
As an historical footnote, I remember some Idaho Republican legislators in the 1980’s who were dubious about right-to-work asking why it was OK to mandate that every Idaho hop or potato farmer pay an assessment to support a state-mandated commodity commission, but the principle of every union member paying dues to support has bargaining organization was “coercion” and “a denial of freedom.” One man’s freedom is another’s “compulsory” union dues or, if you prefer, mandatory, state-sanctioned assessments on pea and lentil growers. I’m still waiting for the Idaho “freedom” movement to outlaw mandatory assessments on farmers, which exist, of course, in order to market products and advocate political causes for a special interest group. Journeymen plumbers are obviously in a different class. Talk about a closed shop.
Right-to-work legislation has never about “freedom,” as Glenn peddled the concept, but rather represented a cynical two-pronged strategy to weaken collective bargaining and erode support for Idaho Democrats. It worked like gangbusters and had the additional benefit of depressing wages.
After steamrolling the right-to-work effort in Idaho, Glenn was hired as the political operative for the state’s cattle ranchers and tried, with some success, to use that platform to create his own path to political power. The cattle lobby was a “voluntary” organization were members paid “dues,” but you won’t find many cowboys who don’t volunteer and ante up. More freedom, I guess.
Cece Andrus famously refused Glenn admission to the governor’s office in those days and did not, as Glenn’s partisans incorrectly claimed, “throw him out” of the big office on the second floor of the Idaho Statehouse. Andrus, with no use for completely partisan hired guns like Glenn, loved to say that he most certain did not “throw” Glenn out, which would have been impossible since the hired gun never got his brand new Tony Lamas across the door jamb.
Glenn next brought his polarizing brand of partisanship to the Ada County Commission and spent two contentious terms mostly preening for television cameras and fighting with other elected officials. Before long he lost a Republican primary for Congress and decamped for Michigan and, one might hope, obscurity. But not so fast. In 2012 Glenn unsuccessfully sought the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Michigan, but that run merely served to open his third act and he captured a seat in the state legislature in 2014. You have to give the guy credit; he is a political survivor.
The Third Act…
I believe Glenn when he says, as he did in an Idaho Statesman piece marking the 25th anniversary of right-to-work coming to Idaho, that he is a “true believer” in his brand of ultra-conservative politics, the kind of politics that gains him regular attention from civil liberties groups who monitor the hateful drivel of Glenn and other divisive personalities like Glenn Beck and the radio preacher Bryan Fisher, two more professional agitators with Idaho antecedents.
Glenn is a true believer, but also a first-class opportunist, one of those people in politics who live to divide and chide. He’s made a living pumping out his anti-gay, anti-union, anti-tax mumbo jumbo, but beyond being against people not like him you have to wonder what he has to show for a lifetime of agitation?
Gary Glenn reminds me all these years later of the great question Lyndon Johnson asked of another fear and hate monger, George Wallace, during the darkest days of the voting rights struggle in 1965. “George,” LBJ said to the blustering Alabama governor, “what do you want left after you when you die? Do you want a Great…Big…Marble monument that reads ‘George Wallace – He Built?’…or do you want a scrawny pine board laying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, ‘George Wallace – He Hated?’”
Glenn left a questionable and negative mark on Idaho and now builds a dubious mark, as successful opportunists tend to do, in a new venue where, one suspects, all his nasty history is little understood. Still, his long “career” begs the question of just what has he built and what has his disdain for those who think differently really accomplished? He has certainly succeeded in keeping himself in the public eye and, ironically for someone who has so consistently preached the anti-government gospel, Glenn has once again landed on the public payroll, a perfect place from which to lament all the evils of government. As the same time, and in the name of “liberty” and “freedom” he has long championed causes that deny rights to others, while helping breed the absurd levels of animosity that are at the center of what passes for politics these days.
Michigan must be proud. Hate has a new lease on life. Mr. Glenn has opened his third act.
“Study history, study history,” Winston Churchill said long ago . “In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.”
I was reminded of those wise words from the great man recently during the latest dust up concerning the state of Idaho, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and two former Idaho governors.
I’ll leave it to the former governors, Phil Batt and Cecil D. Andrus, to press their case as to why top Idaho officials are mistaken in granting DOE a second “waiver” permitting shipments of commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). My perspective, as Churchill would suggest, is to remind us of the “history” behind the current and historical controversies. The two former governors share a lot of history with the Department of Energy.
Full disclosure requires that I mention for anyone who doesn’t know that I worked for Cece Andrus years ago, covered both men as a reporter, admire them greatly and consider both among the very best public officials Idaho has ever produced. Rather than a defense of their recent objections I offer some history that helps explain, I think, why Batt and Andrus feel as they do.
Begin at the beginning…
Truman’s initial effort to find out what was going on in great secrecy at Hanford was politely rebuffed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Truman persisted, going so far as to send a committee investigator to the Hanford site. His investigator was turned away. As Truman biographer David McCullough has written in his extraordinary book Truman, the feisty Missourian grew annoyed at the stonewalling and became determined to press hard for answers about what his government was doing. Stimson, now annoyed himself, refused to tell the senator anything while writing in his diary, “Truman is a nuisance and a petty and untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but acts meanly.” Truman would not learn about the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb until he had been President of the United States for twenty days.
As McCullough writes regarding the development of an atomic weapon, “In less than three years the United States has spent $2 billion, which was not the least of the hidden truths, and, one way or the other, 200,000 people had been involved, only a few having more than a vague idea of what it was about. That the diligent chairman of the Truman Committee had known so little was a clear measure of how extremely effective security had been.” McCullough notes that neither General Douglas MacArthur or Admiral Chester A. Nimitz “or a host of others in high command” knew what was going on.
As I said, the nuclear age was born in secrecy without even the most basic degree of oversight. War time security certainly demanded a high degree of secrecy around the Manhattan Project, but in hindsight it seems impossible to justify that such a massive undertaking with such world-changing consequences should have been conducted completely in the dark. A bomb was born along the Hanford Reach of the Columbia in the 1940’s, but so too was a culture. Remnants of that old culture of secrecy, fueled by a belief that only a handful of highly trained people can know what’s best for the country and that pesky oversight is a “nuisance,” survived long into the Cold War.
For decades as the U.S. nuclear weapons program developed, the arid high desert in eastern Idaho became the home for much of the detritus of the nuclear age. Much of the weapons production was done at the Rocky Flats DOE site just north of Denver, Colorado. Tools, protective clothing and other materials contaminated during the weapons production process was routinely sent to Idaho for “disposal.” In the early days, the disposal was something less than “state of the art” with flimsy boxes dumped in ditches scratched out of the desert soil and covered over. Later the material was packed in 55 gallon drums and stacked more safely on pads. The nuclear junk, often referred to as transuranic or TRU waste, piled up in Idaho for years.
Seeking Answers…
When then-Governor Andrus started asking questions in the 1970’s about why any waste was being “stored” in Idaho above the vast Snake River Aquifer he was told that the “storage” was “interim” pending the development of a suitable permanent repository. Andrus exchanged correspondence with the director of what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a forerunner of the current Department of Energy. The AEC was run at the time by a pugnacious, opinionated woman named Dixie Lee Ray, a marine biologist by training and an unabashed champion of nuclear energy. Ms. Ray, whose personality and to be truthful physical appearance, resembled a bulldog, later served one contentious term as governor of Washington. Her toxic spats with the Olympia press corps were legendary in those days. She named the pigs she kept at her Fox Island farm after individual Statehouse reporters. You get the idea. Dixie Lee Ray was one of those smart people who knew what was best for the country.
Shortly before Andrus went off to Washington to serve as Secretary of the Interior in Jimmy Carter’s Cabinet, Dixie Lee Ray wrote the governor that the AEC had a plan to dispose of the waste material stored in Idaho and it would be “removed by the end of the decade.” Usually public officials don’t make such certain claims unless they are sure they can follow through, or they are merely dissembling. Andrus assumed the best regarding the assurances from the head of the AEC even though he had crossed swords with federal officials in the early 1970’s when Idaho turned up on a short list of states being considered as national waste disposal sites. Andrus convened a “blue ribbon commission” at the time, which not surprisingly made the case that eastern Idaho – in large part because of the aquifer and active seismic activity – was a horrible place to dispose of waste. Seeds of distrust were deeply planted.
It’s worth a short digression here to note that the historical lack of oversight of DOE and its predecessor agencies has been a completely bi-partisan failing. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and in Idaho, as well as presidents of both parties, largely let the nation’s nuclear policy, including what to do with all the waste material, basically become an issue that was out of sight and therefore out of mind. It has long been an article of faith in Idaho politics that any statewide candidate had to embrace the state’s DOE site and welcome virtually any decision DOE made regarding the facility. Idaho is far from unique in this regard. The same dynamic exists in other states like Washington or South Carolina were a big DOE influence is felt in the economy. To use Tip O’Neill’s famous phrase, the DOE jobs and budgets make all politics local. That is both understandable as politics and regrettable as public policy. It’s far easier, of course, to praise the economics and avoid the oversight. As an historical matter this really only started to change in the 1980’s.
Creating a New Agency…
One of Jimmy Carter’s lasting legacies was to propose and sign into law the legislation creating of the U.S. Department of Energy which took place in August 1977 early in Carter’s administration. As DOE notes on its website, “The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 created one the most interesting and diverse agencies in the Federal government.” The scope of the DOE mission from weapons to waste, from research to reactor safety is about as “diverse” as any in the federal government. Carter made the new expansive agency even more interesting by putting the arrogant, pugnacious empire builder James Schlesinger in charge as the first secretary. It wasn’t one of Carter’s better personnel decisions.
Schlesinger, an economist by training, cut his political teeth in the Nixon Administration as a budget official and for a brief time as director of the Central Intelligence Agency before Nixon moved him to the Department of Defense. When Gerald Ford became president Schlesinger stayed on, but Ford – a better judge of character than Nixon – quickly came to dislike him.
As the Washington Post noted in Schlesinger’s obituary last year: “His aloof, arrogant manner,” as Ford described it, was off putting to the president. “I never could be sure he was leveling with me,” Ford told historian Walter Isaacson, and soon he was gone.
Schlesinger, a Republican, then supported Ronald Reagan against Ford in 1976 and when Reagan lost the nomination Schlesinger switched sides to support Carter and become his energy adviser. On such turns of history are historically bad appointments made. The pipe smoking Schlesinger, a man steeped in the petty intrigues of Washington and the culture of secrecy at the CIA and the Pentagon, was just the man not to take a fledging Department of Energy into a new era of transparency and public accountability.
Andrus, I should note, observed a good deal of the creation of the new agency from a front row seat in the Carter Cabinet. The Interior Department had to assist with the birthing of DOE by transferring personnel and programs, including the northwest’s great legacy of the New Deal the Bonneville Power Administration, to the new Department of Energy.
Fast forward to 1987 and Andrus’ return to the Idaho Statehouse. During his first visit after returning to the governorship to what was then called the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, Andrus began asking questions, the same kind of questions he had asked in the 1970’s about that old Rocky Flats waste. Recall that he had been promised by Dixie Lee Ray that the TRU waste would be leaving Idaho “by the end of the decade” – the decade of the 1970’s – and now it was a good ten years later. In fact, the waste wasn’t leaving, but was continuing to accumulate due primarily to DOE’s inability to jump the regulatory hurdles required to open a permanent disposal site in New Mexico. The delays in opening the so called WIPP site in New Mexico involved both mismanagement and a lack of national will. DOE couldn’t get on the same page with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the project faltered for years and years.
Andrus went to New Mexico to see for himself and understand the delays. It’s fair to say he came away frustrated and feeling deceived by old promises not kept. Upon returning to Idaho he wrote a famous letter to then Energy Secretary James Watkins, a imperious four-star Navy Admiral accustomed to giving orders but out of his depth when it came to pulling and hauling the vast DOE bureaucracy into action. Andrus informed the admiral’s DOE that he was stopping shipments of Rocky Flats waste pending progress on the New Mexico site and later took similar action to halt shipment to Idaho of spent reactor fuel from the U.S Navy’s nuclear fleet. DOE had the responsibility of permanently disposing of that material, as well. Spent commercial waste from a nuclear power plant in Colorado was next and eventually action in federal court in Idaho.
The Andrus actions were both unprecedented and politically controversial. When Navy spent fuel started piling up at the Bremerton Navy Yard, Democratic Congressman Norm Dicks, a burly former football player who represented the area in Congress, howled and threatened. Virginia Senator John Warner said the governor a tiny western state was impacted national security by causing the undesirable spent fuel to sit in a port in Warner’s home state. Idaho Senator Larry Craig blasted the actions as damaging to INEL and some predicted the demise of the facility.
The national failures of nuclear waste policy rather suddenly became a issue no longer out of sight, but on the pages of the New York Times. The politicians, like Dicks and Warner, who wanted waste out of their states and in remote Idaho had to confront troubling and thorny issues. Those who blasted Andrus for threatening the Idaho facility soon found that sensible approaches to waste management trumped political bombast.
And apparently Idahoans understood what Andrus was doing, as well as what was at stake for Idaho and the nation. He was overwhelming re-elected in 1990. Shortly thereafter he was appointed to head, along with Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey, a joint effort of the nation’s governors and attorneys generals to create a better regulatory scheme for federal facilities, including those operated by DOE and the Defense Department. Congress passed the Federal Facilities Compliance Act in 1992 as a direct result of the Andrus-Humphrey work and thanks to the personal interest of then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.
As the Environmental Protection Agency notes on its website the federal facilities law required federal agencies to do something they had not been compelled to do before – observe federal, state and local laws related to hazardous materials. The law also waived federal “sovereign immunity” allowing the government to be taken to court over compliance issues.
Andrus continued to shadow box DOE throughout his final term as governor, all the while maintaining that the agency born in secrecy and charged with such an expansive mandate could only be compelled to keep commitments through legally binding agreements. He persisted in making the case that Idaho was not a suitable place to store, even temporarily, nuclear materials. Promises, he had learned, were not enough.
Governor Batt, who succeeded Andrus in the Governor’s Office in 1995, took up the cause where his predecessor left off. Through hard work that featured several showdowns with DOE and the brass hats who ran the nuclear navy, Batt fashioned a legally binding settlement agreement with DOE. The agreement specified deadlines for waste disposal and treatment and detailed fines that might be levied on DOE. Like Andrus’ earlier actions the Batt Agreement was controversial and eventually became a ballot issue in 1996. Some thought Batt had given way too much, others thought his demands on DOE would harm the Idaho lab. But the governor had skillfully negotiated a unique deal for Idaho – deadlines and penalties – and once the issues were debated Idaho voters backed their governor and his agreement, which has now been in effect for nearly 20 years.
As the state Department of Environmental Quality notes on its website, when the Batt Agreement was signed: “there were 261 metric tons of heavy metal from spent fuel, 65,000 cubic meters of stored transuranic wastes, another 62,000 cubic meters of buried transuranic waste, approximately 2 million gallons of high-level liquid waste and 3,700 cubic meters of calcined (dried liquid) waste already stored at the INL when Governor Batt took office. Until the Settlement Agreement there was no legally binding commitment to remove any of this waste from Idaho until Governor Batt reached his agreement with federal officials.”
The current Idaho controversy has been sparked by a second “waiver” to this agreement. The waiver allows commercial spent nuclear fuel to come to Idaho for research purposes and, one assumes, storage for some period. The state says the “waiver” will only go into effect when DOE comes up with a new plan to meet milestones spelled out in the Batt Agreement, but, of course, those are milestones the agency has already missed.
It is only right and fair to acknowledge that the Department of Energy has made great progress over the last decade or so on many waste issues in Idaho and elsewhere in the DOE complex. Thousands of dedicated people are working diligently to deal with environmental problems that literally date back to Harry Truman. Not surprisingly the massive effort is far from completed and remains both complex and extraordinarily expensive. The New Mexico site that had accepted significant amounts of the old Rocky Flats waste, for example, has been forced to indefinitely suspended shipments following an accident involving a breech of a waste drum. The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported last week that the re-opening of the facility is “months behind schedule.” Obviously this impacts some of the material still in Idaho.
Additionally, the national plan to dispose of commercial reactor spent fuel, some of which will likely come again to Idaho under the agreed to waiver, has been stuck in neutral since the Obama Administration stopped work on the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada. Republicans in Congress are hoping to put the site back on the table, but for political reasons alone this seems unlikely any time soon.
The current Idaho controversy over waiving provisions of an agreement mandated by a federal court has been easily dismissed by some as simply not a big deal. Considered in isolation it might not be a big deal. But when you study the history and understand that the terms of Phil Batt’s agreement with DOE extend for 20 more years, and that Idaho meanwhile remains host to very significant amounts of material that should be disposed of some place else, the current controversy is more easily seen as part of a storyline that goes back a long, long way. This story will also continue long after many of us are gone.
The nation’s nuclear history is riddled with controversy and certainly a historic lack of planning for waste disposal. The history is also unfortunately wrapped in the legacy of an entire industry born in secrecy, which until relatively recently was unburdened by anything resembling vigorous oversight. It is a simple fact that Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington have been confounded by nuclear waste problems for generations and policy makers remain confounded today.
Churchill was right – in the study of history are all the secrets of statecraft. In the current case, one secret might be to clutch a hard fought and legally binding agreement close to the vest against all efforts to modify it, even a little. Given the long history and the timelines that extend far into the future the integrity of Idaho’s agreement with the Department of Energy will prove to be mighty important over the next 20 years. The state’s decades of experience with the DOE and the waste that hardly anyone believes should be in Idaho also helps explain why the two former governors – a Republican and a Democrat – so adamantly oppose modifications to the 1995 agreement.
DOE Secretaries come and go. Governors do, too. Legal agreements, as long as they are enforced, don’t.
