Idaho Politics

Egan, Guns, Idaho Politics, Stevens

For ‘Em, Or Agin ‘Em

Posted on by christian

Normally there is something to be said for consistency in politics. No one likes a flip flopper. Just ask Mitt Romney. And when it comes to consistency, blind, unyielding, not one inch consistency, no one does it better than the National Rifle Association – the NRA.

As it has accumulated political power over the last 25 years and become the most feared lobby in the country, the NRA has been nothing if not brutally consistent. For the NRA there is no room for compromise on guns and gun issues – none. If you’re in public office you are either for the NRA down the line or you are soft on the Second Amendment and not to be trusted with public responsibilities and very likely a one of those willing to standby when the government comes for the guns.

Maybe, just maybe, in light of the horrors of Sandy Hook Elementary where some of the six-year-olds suffered 11 gunshot wounds, the NRA’s brutal commitment to consistency has, at last, become a liability.

My one direct and personal engagement with the NRA’s brand of no prisoners, no negotiation politics dates back to 1986 and the moment has left a deep and jagged scar where I once naively thought actions and intentions meant more than blind allegiance to an NRA that has clearly become little more than a front group for gun manufacturers.

For those old enough to remember the 1986 race for governor of Idaho was a tough, competitive and ultimately extremely close election. As a newcomer to politics – I’d covered the business, but not been of the business – the campaign and election were a graduate education in bare knuckles, character assault and, with regard to the NRA, old-fashioned smear politics. The candidates were my boss, Cecil D. Andrus, a Democrat and as big a hunter, sportsman and gun owner as anyone I have ever known and then-Lt. Governor David H. Leroy, a young man definitely on the rise in Idaho GOP politics. Andrus had an edge with experience – he’d twice been elected governor and served in the Carter cabinet – and he spent most of the campaign emphasizing his desire to boost economic development and improve schools. Leroy, who had already been a successful statewide candidate as both Lt. Governor and Attorney General, was smart, ambitious, both well-spoken and well-funded, and determined.

The candidates and their campaigns displayed many differences, one being that in a state where hunting and fishing defined many voters’ weekends, Dave Leroy wasn’t really a hunting and fishing guy. Andrus was and still is. Enter the gun lobby.

The NRA came close – very close – to playing the spoiler in that 1986 race and, as they are wont to do, they entered the contest at the absolute 11th hour with what seemed then, and still seems, a blatantly dishonest smear.

As I look back on the race, with some years of accumulated political experience, I can see clearly now that the campaign was a see-saw affair throughout the summer and into the fall. I distinctly remember a weekend of panic in October when Andrus quietly and determinedly disappeared from the campaign hustings for three long days in order to disappear deep into the Idaho hill for his annual elk hunt. I lived in fear that some enterprising reporter would demand an interview or insist on knowing why the candidate wasn’t campaigning given how close the race had become. Knowing now what I didn’t fully appreciate then, I should have issued a statement announcing that in keeping with annual tradition the Democratic candidate for governor was, for the next few days, only making campaign appearances at his elk camp.

Andrus had not missed an Idaho elk hunt for years and nothing, not even Dave Leroy breathing down his neck, would keep him out of the hills. He’s been known to joke – yes he filled his tag last fall – that with a full freezer and a little luck he might make it through another winter. (I called the former governor yesterday to check my recollection of the NRA’s involvement in the ’86 race and it took him a while to get back to me. He was in a goose pit most of the day.)

Some people live for work, or boats, or football, or skiing, or book collecting. Andrus lives for his hunting and is proud of his gun collection, but that didn’t keep the all-knowing, all-powerful NRA from branding him as “soft” on the Second Amendment doing so at a stage in a political campaign where he barely had time to refute such lunacy.

One of the major gun-related issues at the time involved a robust national debate over the legality of so called “cop killer bullets,” Teflon-coated ammunition that it was said could penetrate a bullet-proof vest, the kind of body armor police officers had begun to routinely wear. In responding to the NRA’s always over simplified and overly dramatic candidate questionnaire, the once and future governor allowed that he hadn’t much use for Teflon-coated bullets or rapid fire assault rifles for that matter. He would later joke that he had never “seen an elk wearing a bullet-proof vest,” but such a policy position, even one coming from a life-long hunter, gun owner and supporter of the Second Amendment was heresy to the “our way or the highway” crowd at the NRA.

On the final weekend of the 1986 campaign, anti-Andrus NRA propaganda started appearing in Idaho mailboxes. Radio ads told Idaho hunters that the hunter-governor had earned a “D” rating from the gun lobby and the political operatives at the NRA had endorsed his non-hunter opponent. I spent that last weekend of that campaign writing and slapping together response ads attempting to refute the smear. In the days before email and the Internet, getting a radio ad on the air on the Saturday before an election was no mean feat, but we did it and by a narrow margin Andrus won the election.

I’ve always taken some satisfaction in knowing – Idaho is a small state – that many Idahoans who might have been inclined to vote in that election solely on the basis of gun issues had firsthand knowledge that their once and future governor actually owned and used guns. In this case the NRA’s smear didn’t work, but it left an impression. These guys don’t know the meaning of nuance and they are blindly partisan. You’re either for ’em, or agin ’em.

In the years since, the NRA has, if anything, become even more dogmatic, shriller and less open to any discussion of policy. As we now see, even in the wake of the first grade massacre in Connecticut and even given the stark realization that more than 1,000 Americans have died at the barrel of gun just in the days since Sandy Hook, the NRA tolerates no deviation from its hard line in the dust. The suggestion that constraints on military-style weapons and high capacity magazines or that national firearms policy might include sensible background checks on gun buyers brings the immediate charge that the sacred Second is being trampled, the president ought to be impeached and the “jack booted thugs” are coming to take the guns. It’s a level of political paranoia and fear mongering completely devoid of reality and on par with theories that the moon landing was faked or that an American president was born in Kenya.

The Andrus Idaho experience nearly 30 years ago, as bitter as the taste remains, actually seems pretty tame compared to the NRA’s response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary. The NRA leadership seems to believe that it can just ignore a moral issue that requires sober, reasoned, civilized response. Time will tell whether the real sportsmen who climb into Idaho’s hills every fall and crouch in goose pits in sub-freezing weather will continue to agree.

Americans have a way of coming around to change policy and even change society in ways that once seemed impossible. Moral questions from ending slavery to establishing child labor laws to ensuring voting rights of African-Americans took years – even generations – to be addressed and some of society’s big challenges clearly remain. But perhaps, just perhaps, a civilized, moral nation can come to the realization that a constructive debate about how to try and prevent a future Sandy Hook is a mighty low threshold for a decent people to step across.

The most feared lobby in Washington did not become so feared by being constructive, reasonable, rational or fair. The NRA amassed power the old fashioned way using the same kind of intimidation and arrogance that it accuses its opponents – and even its opponent’s children – of practicing.

Emerson famously said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” The NRA’s foolish consistency in the awful aftermath of the assault gun murders of 20 innocent children does not yet mark the end of the gun lobby hold on our politics, but it may – just may – mark the beginning of the end.

 

2012 Election, Egan, Idaho Politics, Minnick

A Lesson, A Plan

Posted on by christian

It has been difficult the last few days to separate the lessons of Campaign 2012 from the recriminations. Among national Republicans the blame game, predictably and understandably, is in full flower.

In the first blush of political defeat the tendency of many partisans – this is true on the right and on the left – is to take the wrong lessons from rejection by the voters. Making sense of what happened is never as simple as some make it out to be and no national party that has existed since the 1850’s is ever as far down as some now claim.

To paraphrase David Axelrod, one of the architects of Barack Obama’s stunning second term victory, in politics you’re never as smart as you seem when things are going well or as stupid as you appear when things are going badly. But all campaigns do have lessons – if you look deeply enough. At the moment I’m interested in whether the long down-and-out Idaho Democrats take any clues from what happened in their party as well as in the GOP last week.

A few modest suggestions for Idaho Democrats:

1) The party should pick out three or four of its best young minds (this would include some elected last week like Representatives-elect Mat Erpelding and Holli High Woodings in Boise), buy them an airplane ticket to Chicago and let them debrief with the technology and GOTV people who helped power Barack Obama to a second term. Once he wakes up from a week of sleep Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who grew up in Boise and has relatives in the state, could put that meeting together in a heartbeat. In short, Idaho Democrats must start to turn over thinking about the future to the party’s next generation of leaders and give them some room to understand and apply the new skills of the digital age to the old game of politics. While they’re at it, Idaho Democrats should seek counsel from the other Idahoan highly placed in the Obama world – Bruce Reed. Among other things, Reed, who is Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff, helped write Bill Clinton’s devastatingly effective convention indictment of Mitt Romney.

2) The party must adopt a new approach that can, over time, broaden its appeal. This new approach should focus like a laser on the demographics that have propelled the first African-American president to two broad-based electoral victories. The future for Idaho Democrats is contained in a few well chosen words: moderates, women, Hispanics and younger voters. As NBC’s Chuck Todd said of the Obama campaign’s targeting and GOTV efforts, they took a novel approach they read the census.

Three quick facts from the 2010 Idaho census: Hispanic citizens (who voted nationally for Obama by more than 70%) now make up 11.5% of the state’s population and Idahoans under 18 years of age (who voted for the president by 60%) comprise 27% of the state’s population. Idahoans 65 and over (a population group that nationally went heavily for Romney) now makes up less than 13% of the Idaho population.

All of which is not to say that turning Idaho Democrats into a truly competitive party will be easy or quick, but those numbers point to the beginning of a long march approach.

3) Education must again become the bread and butter issue of Idaho Democrats. If the recent Idaho election proved anything it is that Idahoans, across the political spectrum, want their students, teachers and schools treated carefully, intelligently and not politically. There is an opening here for new ideas, inclusion and electoral appeal. If future Democratic candidates can’t make an issue of year-after-year real reductions in financial support for education at every level, coupled with education “reform” that Idahoans overwhelmingly rejected, they won’t deserve to be taken seriously as a political party. A simple question should drive the Democratic message – how can Idaho have a 21st Century economy and the jobs that support such an economy without investing more and more wisely in higher education, skills training and better public schools?

4) As I have written here before, Idaho Democrats – at least at the statewide level – need a new organizing principle that focuses on the great unifying issue – education. Trying to build a statewide party around a handful of dependable liberal strongholds – the north end of Boise and Blaine and Latah Counties – will continue to be a losing strategy. A better path is to build from the ground up in Idaho communities – Moscow, Boise, Pocatello, Coeur d’Alene, Lewiston, Nampa and Twin Falls – were education is a significant hometown industry. Democrats should strive to “own” the issues of the local community college and the university. Folks who love the University of Idaho or Boise State, for example, bleed for their schools on the athletic field, for sure, but increasingly they also care the academic classroom. Idaho Democrats should master these many and varied relationships – and, yes, it will take time – and organize, organize, organize with students, alumni, staff and faculty.

Politics is often a game of getting voters to give a candidate or a party a second look and to re-think assumptions. A single minded focus on education, an issue Idahoans have displayed all over again that they care deeply about, is a solid foundation on which to build a political future. This is particularly true now that the GOP has given Idaho D’s a big opening with the failure at the ballot box of controversial education reforms.

5) Finally, Idaho Democrats would do well to remember one of the tactics employed so successfully years ago by the recently departed George McGovern. In the 1950’s the South Dakota Democratic Party hardly existed. McGovern quit his teaching job and became the executive director of a party in name only, but he had ambition. He relentlessly traveled the state, building relationships, identifying supporters, building lists and building a party from the ground up. It’s no accident that McGovern entitled his autobiography Grassroots. What McGovern did in South Dakota in the 1950’s laid the groundwork to get him to the U.S. Senate in the 1960’s and built a long-term sustainable Democratic Party in a very conservative state. One person can make a big, big difference.

Some of my Idaho Democratic friends will take issue with my characterization of the Idaho party as barely alive, but the first rule of climbing back into contention is to see clearly the situation you face and then settle on a strategy, a real plan, that once again can make Idaho more than a one party state. The recent national victories offer some clues of what might be done.

 

Egan, Grant, Idaho Media, Idaho Politics

One of a Kind

Posted on by christian

Perry Swisher – 1923 to 2012

It was nearly impossible to have a neutral feeling about Perry Swisher. If you expressed admiration for one of his ideas or newspaper columns he would find a way to say or write something the next time that he knew would be highly contrary, bitingly caustic or searingly funny. He was truly one of a kind.

What can you expect after all from a guy who had been elected as both a Republican and a Democrat and ran for governor of Idaho in 1966 as an independent; with the last label perhaps being the most accurate. Swisher, who died Tuesday in Boise at 88, was truly a one of a kind independent – candid, brilliant, opinionated, humorous, not an easy sufferer of fools. The old line “not always right, but never in doubt” fit Swish like a glove.

I have a personal recollection of Swisher as an independent that perhaps summarizes his life of intelligent, not always gentle, commentary on the world and the hapless mortals who inhabit the place. In 1979, then-Democratic Gov. John V. Evans, who had ascended to the governorship when Cecil D. Andrus went off to serve as Interior Secretary in the Carter Administration, appointed Swisher to fill a vacancy on the Idaho Public Utilities Commission.

It was a bit of a surprise appointment and one sure to ruffle feathers down at Idaho Power corporate offices. Swisher was, shall we say, not a champion of big business. He was the kind to make sure that the “regulated” in regulated utility received his full attention.

I interviewed Swisher the day of his appointment to the Commission and, knowing I would get colorful, candid responses, devoted the last few minutes of the interview to asking him for quick comments on various political people he had know as allies and adversaries over so many years. I asked him about Evans, the man who had just given Swisher a new career and a new platform from which to influence public policy in Idaho. I remember the quote verbatim.

“John Evans,” Swisher said, “is the Mayor of Malad who by a quirk of political fate has become governor of Idaho.” Now that is candid.

He might have said Evans is a nice guy, as he is. Or that his benefactor was fast learning the ropes of the governorship, which he was. But Swish, never one to mince words, essentially said the governor who had just given him a plum appointment was a small town mayor who had risen to high office by being in the right place at the right time. Interviewers seldom get such answers. You always got them from Swisher. Politically correct he was not. He once showed up a post game rock concert at Boise’s Memorial Stadium in his bathrobe – he lived nearby – waving a hatchet and threatening to hack the power cables if the noise didn’t abate. He made waves.

The obituaries will chronicle Swisher’s accomplishments, which are not insignificant as a legislator – he championed the establishment of the sales tax – or as a utility regulator – he helped transition us from the old Ma Bell days to fiber optics and cell phones.

Swisher once said of the decision by federal Judge Harold Greene that caused the Bell System divestiture and heralded the deregulation of telecommunications, “Judge Greene took the only perfect thing in the world and screwed it up.” As I said, no lack of opinions from this old newspaper guy.

Swisher would have been a force in Idaho political and economic life had he never served in the legislature or presided at the PUC. He was, and this is not hyperbole, a true public intellectual. The guy had ideas, lot of them. Not everyone in public life thinks enough to actually have ideas about big issues. He did.

If you want to know what a newspaper looked like 25 years ago go back and look at the Lewiston Morning Tribune when Swisher ran the night desk. The paper was breaking news – real news – almost every day. He paid attention to institutions, like the State Board of Education, the PUC and House Business Committee. He’d been on the inside and knew were the public might get shafted and as an editor he was comfortable pulling back the veil.

Former Gov. Andrus told Idaho Statesman reporter Rocky Barker that Swisher was “an Idaho icon,” although he probably cost Andrus the governorship in 1966 with his independent run. Swisher polled almost 31,000 votes in a four-way race and Andrus lost to Republican Don Samuelson by just over 10,000. Both Andrus and Swisher supported the newly enacted Idaho sales tax that year, the issue that dominated the race, and Samuelson didn’t. It doesn’t require a political science degree to conclude that Swisher took pro-sales tax votes from the Democrat Andrus, particularly in Democratic leaning counties like Bannock and Nez Perce.

Another former governor, Phil Batt, told Barker that Swisher was an outstanding legislator, which I took to mean Swish knew how to get to “yes” and it didn’t often require a heavy dose of partisanship.

Perry Swisher was old school. He liked a drink and a good story. He read everything and applied his knowledge. I never had a sense he cared what anyone thought of him or his ideas. He was comfortable being what he was – smart, opinionated, candid and funny. Not always right, but never in doubt.

I’m glad I knew him. Idaho should be glad he flashed across our political and journalism sky. He lived a full life and left a mark, a measure for anyone to aspire to. When people remember Swish I’m betting they bemoan that there aren’t more like him; more true, intelligent, candid independents.

 

2012 Election, Egan, Idaho Politics, Minnick

Winners/Losers

Posted on by christian

Idaho Voters Stay Home in Droves

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Old Lessons

Posted on by christian

Where’s the Puppy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purges can have some of the most unintended consequences.

 

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

One of the Good Guys

Posted on by christian

Clancy Standridge, 1927-2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Climate Change, Egan, Human Rights, Idaho Politics

A Moment in Time

Posted on by christian

The Wrong Side of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Afghanistan, Grant, Idaho Media, Idaho Politics, Journalism, Public Lands

J. Robb Brady

Posted on by christian

A Rare Breed

Loyal readers at this spot know that I occasionally rage against the dying of the light of local journalism. The days of independent, community-minded and engaged newspapers, television and radio stations does seem to me more and more imperiled, which makes the passing of J. Robb Brady, the long-time publisher and editorialist of the Idaho Falls Post Register, a singularly sad milestone.

Brady was a young 92 when he died Sunday in Idaho Falls. His wife Rose – they were married for 69 years – died earlier this year.

Robb Brady was, as the younger set might say, “old school.” His office looked like it could have been at home on the set of the old television show “Lou Grant.” Robb truly had printer’s ink in his veins and it was obvious he took great pride and satisfaction in running a family-owned newspaper.

Robb Brady was also a conservationist, occasionally at the expense of his objectivity, but had I the chance, as he did, to buy ink by the barrel, I would want to have the same kind of opinionated, passionate editorial page he presided over at the Post Register. I remember taking a client in some years back to “background” Robb and others at the paper on a new mining venture in Lemhi County. I warned the client that it would be a tough session full of pointed questions. Robb, as far as I know, never met a mine he liked and the editorial board meeting was tough and pointed, but never lacking in civility.

Brady simply wanted folks to justify their plans and most of all answer how they would take care of the Idaho environment he came to champion. The answers he got were seldom good enough, but his judgments were rarely nasty, rather more concerned and dubious. In other words, his was the newspapering mind of a skeptic, not a cynic.

He wasn’t a booster – OK, well maybe a little bit of a hometown booster of the Department of Energy. All politics is local after all. Not many mines in Bonneville County, Idaho, but thousands of jobs at the Idaho National Laboratory.

For example, in a 2006 editorial Brady lamented the power of oil and gas companies to dominate the Bush Administration’s public lands leasing policies and suggested that global warming had an answer – develop a newer, safer generation of nuclear reactors rather than exploit more dirty carbon-based energy. At least Brady, unlike too many who possess a strong conservation ethic, had a real alternative to more oil and gas exploration – invest in nuclear power.

The tributes to Robb Brady will flow in now from those who will remember his spirited, passionate editorials about the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains, about his championing of protection for the magnificent Sawtooth Range and the River of No Return Wilderness. But some of the best and most important memories will come from the generations of ink-stained wretches he touched and trained.

Marty Trillhaase, now the editorial page editor of another family-owned newspaper in Lewiston, once worked with Brady in Idaho Falls, as did the Idaho Statesman’s Kevin Richert and Rocky Barker. Calling Brady kind, generous, opinionated and courageous, Trillhaase concluded his editorial today with the all-too-true observation: we’ll not see his like again.

 

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

Drawing the Lines

Posted on by christian

Here’s an Idea…Let Ben Do It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

What Goes Around

Posted on by christian

A Communist Under Every Bed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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