Politics

Baseball, Justice Department, Politics, Santorum

The Problem Post

Posted on by christian

Corruption at the Justice Department

When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, as now seems likely, is held in contempt of Congress in the next few days he will join a long list of the nation’s chief law enforcement officers who have run afoul of Congress and/or the law.

Whether the fast and furious controversy surrounding Holder is really sufficient to warrant finding him in contempt of Congress is a subject for another day. I will note that in most cases were an Attorney General has gotten seriously crosswise with Congress have been decidedly more bi-partisan affairs than Holder’s. History remembers when the AG offends both parties, not so much when the alleged offense seems more political than pernicious.

At that other extreme, consider the case of Attorney General Harry P. Daugherty. That’s him in the photo. Daugherty was an Ohio pol, campaign manager for Warren G. Harding and up until John Mitchell, Nixon’s AG who went to jail over Watergate, arguably the most corrupt head of the Justice Department in our history.

Harding, of course, is often at or near the bottom of those surveys of the country’s worst presidents. He can thank his friend Harry Daugherty for a good deal of that reputation.

Daugherty was forced to resign as Attorney General in 1923 after a bi-partisan Senate committee conducted a free-wheeling investigation into his leadership at the Justice Department.  Progressive Democratic Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana led the Senate probe even though the Senate was controlled by Republicans. The nominal chair of the Senate Select Committee, a figure now lost to history, but worth remembering, was Iowa Sen. Smith Brookhart, a liberal Republican in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition. Brookhart and Wheeler knew each other, trusted each other and were pretty sure Daugherty was oily or worse. He was.

Wheeler’s investigation was sensational in the full tabloid meaning of the word, including testimony about gambling, girls and bootleg gin. The fact that the investigation of Attorney General Daugherty came in the wake of the equally sensational, and ultimately more important, Teapot Dome investigation, guaranteed that Wheeler and his motley cast of witnesses – a gumshoe, a call girl and various small-time confidence men – would get front page coverage. Daugherty resigned just ahead of an impeachment effort, but went out with his verbal guns blazing. The former Attorney General convinced himself Wheeler was a Communist agent – the foremost commie in the Senate, he said – and a seriously dangerous man. He wasn’t.

In the annuls of Senate history the Daugherty investigation helped establish an enduring principle that ironically allows California Rep. Darryl Issa to put Eric Holder through the wringer today. As part of the Senate investigation of Harding’s attorney general, Daugherty’s brother Malachi or Mal, a small-town, small-time corrupt Ohio banker, was called to testify before Wheeler’s committee. Mal Daugherty refused and was held in contempt. (He eventually went to jail for stealing from his own bank.)

Mal challenged the constitutionality of a Senate committee being able to compel his testimony, the case went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Court held in a unanimous ruling that the power of Congress to investigate and compel appearance by witness was an essential part of the legislative process. Thank a crook and a crooked Attorney General for the enduring principle of the Congressional investigation.

The job of Attorney General is arguably the most controversial in the Cabinet. Harry Daugherty was a small-time pol, likely profoundly corrupt, who should never have had the job. John Mitchell, Nixon’s finance guy, was similar with no particularly distinguished legal career and seeing the job as more about politics than policy or justice. Robert Kennedy, one of the most famous and powerful AG’s, was his brother’s political enforcer and chief confidante. (Can you imagine a president being able to get away today with having his brother at the Justice Department?)

Franklin Roosevelt’s first AG, Homer Cummings, was a political operative first and a not very skillful administrator second. Woodrow Wilson had three AG’s, including the infamous A. Mitchell Palmer, architect of the Palmer Raids that rounded up, mostly under highly dubious circumstances, various alleged radicals in 1919 and 1920 and set off the Red Scare.

The list of truly great Attorneys General is a good deal smaller than those who failed to distinguish themselves in the job. Judge Griffin Bell in the Carter years comes to mind as well as Nicholas Katzenbach in the Johnson Administration and Edward Levi, who distinguished himself in the Ford Administration.

Eric Holder may or may not be the target of an unfair and purely partisan election year attack, laced with just enough gun background noise to really appeal to the GOP base, but if he has studied the history of the Justice Department he should know that being AG almost always entitled the holder of the job to be vilified and hauled before Congress to account for all sorts of misdeeds both real and imagined. Perhaps the current Attorney General can take some comfort in knowing he’s not the first.

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Britain, FDR, Lincoln, Obama, Politics, Reagan, Reapportionment, Truman

Action This Day

Posted on by christian

The (Almost) Case for Unilateral Action

In September 1940, just in front of the election that would make Franklin Roosevelt the first and only third-term president, FDR engineered an audacious deal with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

In exchange for gifting 50 aging, World War I vintage U.S. destroyers to the besieged British, Churchill granted the American president 99 year leases on a number of military bases in the Western Hemisphere. The destroyers for bases deal was loudly condemned by FDR’s critics who called it a raw presidential power play. As critics correctly pointed out, Roosevelt acted on his own motion, going behind the back of Congress to cut his deal with Churchill. History has for the most part vindicated FDR’s power play and many historians think the U.S. actually got the better of the deal.

The 1940 action by Roosevelt may be one of the greatest examples of a president acting unilaterally, but our history is replete with similar examples of presidential action on a unilateral basis. One of Theodore Roosevelt’s gutsy unilateral moves as he was nearing the end of his term created millions of acres of forest preserves – today’s National Forests – and protected the Grand Canyon. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was an act of presidential leadership that is almost universally praised today, but at the time the Great Emancipator cut Congress out of the loop and acted alone.

Now come criticism of Barack Obama’s unilateral action to order the end of deportations for certain young people who might otherwise be sent packing for being in the country illegally even as they have gone on to get an education, or work in order to become contributing members of our society. Critics charge the president acted for the most transparent political reasons or that he acted unconstitutionally or that he has now made legislative action on immigration more difficult. That last charge seems a particularly hard sell given the inability of Congress to act at all regarding immigration, but the real beef with Obama is that he acted alone.

Jimmy Carter used presidential action to protect the environmental crown jewels of Alaska, an action that ultimately forced Congress to get off the dime on that issue. Harry Truman informed Congress, but did not seek its approval regarding his 1948 decision to desegregate the U.S. military.

Of course all presidents overreach, but most do so by acting unilaterally in the foreign policy field, and that a place were unilateral action is often decidedly more problematic, at least in my view. It may turn out that Obama’s immigration action will be successfully challenged in a court of law or the court of public opinion, but don’t bet on it. I’m struck by how often in our history when a president has taken a big, bold step on an issue were Congress can’t or won’t act that the bold step has been vindicated by history.

The American people have always tended to reward action over inaction. Ronald Reagan’s unilateral decision to fire striking air traffic controllers near the beginning of his presidency in 1981 is a good example. Now celebrated, by conservatives at least, as a sterling example of a president acting decisively in the public interest, the decision was enormously contentious at the time it was made. Now its mostly seen as an effective use of unilateral action by a strong president.

The early polling seems to show that Obama’s recent “dream act-like” action on immigration is widely accepted by the American public. The lesson for the current occupant of the Oval Office, a politician who has displayed little skill in getting Congress to act on many issues, might be that a little unilateral action on important issues is not only good politics, but good government.

George W. Bush got this much right about the power of the presidency: the Chief Executive can be, when he wants to be, the decider on many things. The great Churchill frequently demanded “action this day” in his memos to subordinates. The great wartime leader knew that power not used isn’t worth much; but action properly applied is indeed real power.

 

 

Andrus, Baseball, Christie, Economy, FDR, Pete Seeger, Politics, Romney

House of Morgan

Posted on by christian

Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Manage

A little over one hundred years ago J. Pierpont Morgan ran much of the world’s business from an elegant office at 23 Wall Street in New York. The investment and commercial banking operations that J.P. oversaw financed railroads, mining, energy, steel and insurance companies. Morgan was big, so big that when the U.S. economy was on the verge of tanking in 1907, Morgan put a wad of money on the table and saved the day.

In the days before “too big to fail” became part of the national dialogue, the House of Morgan literally was too big and too powerful to fail. Morgan was the banker to the robber barons of the Gilded Age and as such earned the scorn of many a progressive politician. By the early 1930’s, with the old man, J.Pierpont dead since 1913, the House of Morgan finally got its comeuppance. The Glass-Steagall Act, also known as The Banking Act of 1933, passed the Congress, was signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the big banks, particularly The House of Morgan, had to separate investment and commercial banking. Glass-Steagall was a clear cut response to The Great Depression and the widespread belief that reckless speculation by some bankers had played a contributing role in the international economic crisis that began in 1929.

It’s worth noting that the Glass in Glass-Steagall was Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia one of the old-style southern conservative Democrats who dominated Congress during much of the New Deal period. Glass, a newspaper editor by profession, served in the U.S. House of Representatives, helped write the Federal Reserve Act and then served as Treasury Secretary under Woodrow Wilson. Franklin Roosevelt wanted the tough, no nonsense, very conservative Sen. Glass to come back to the Treasury in 1933, but Glass preferred to stay in the Senate and devote his attention to improving banking regulation and modernizing the Fed. In short, Carter Glass was an expert legislator in these areas who applied decades of experience to sorting out how the federal government – and this guy was no big government liberal – ought to regulate banking.

American banking was governed by Glass-Steagall until 1999 when the Clinton Administration led the charge to eliminate the last visage of the New Deal-era regulation that separated traditional banking activity – loans, credit cards, deposits – from the substantially more speculative and riskier investment banking that centers on underwriting securities. Then-Treasury Sec. Lawrence Summers called the elimination of the 1930’s law an “update” of old rules, which would create a banking system for the 21st Century. Just how is that “update” working out so far you’d be smart to ask.

Enter Jamie Dimon the man who now presides over the 21st Century firm that J.P. Morgan invented in the 19th Century. Dimon, whose bank lost at least $2 billion recently by speculating in what are not incorrectly called financial “bets,” will testify before the Senate Banking Committee on June 7th to provide, as chairman Sen. Tim Johnson (D-South Dakota) said, “a better understanding of this massive trading loss so we can take the implications into account as we continue to conduct our robust oversight over the full implementation of Wall Street reform.”

Sounds like Congress is finally set to get to the bottom of all this risk taking by Wall Street banks, but wait, don’t bet the house payment just yet.

So far Dimon’s explanation for the big losses his firm suffered has been what we might call the “we were stupid” defense. This from the guy universally regarded as the smartest operator on The Street. Dimon has called the trading – bets more precisely – on extraordinarily complex corporate-bond derivatives – hope Sen. Johnson knows what those are – a “terrible, egregious mistake” and he’s humbly admitted JPMorgan Chase has “egg on our face.”

Dimon is displaying excellent crisis management skills by admitting the obvious, his bank screwed up, but he is also the guy who has repeatedly condemned the Wall Street reforms contained in the Dodd-Frank legislation. That legislation, passed in the wake of the most recent economic collapse, stopped well short of re-imposing the kind of controls that once existed with Glass-Steagall, but Dodd-Frank nevertheless earns the widespread scorn of most Wall Streeters as well as conservative politicians beginning with Mitt Romney. Romney has condemned the JPMorgan risk taking, but also says he’ll work to repeal Dodd-Frank.

Here’s a guess – call it a policy bet – the Dimon appearance before the Senate committee will involve a great many speeches both chastising big bankers and federal regulators, but nothing much will change. Dimon will gracefully sidestep any real responsibility for the betting errors, in part, because everyone knows that even the smartest guy on Wall Street can’t possibly keep track of all the esoteric trading his minions are engaged in across the globe. Many commentators will again bemoan the reckless greed that drives the kind of speculation JPMorgan and its competitors engage in but, when all is said and done, legislators will not be able to tighten the regulatory screws on the excesses of Dimon’s firm and other banking houses, because they too have placed a bet. The Congress – both parties – are gambling that continuing to woo the campaign financial largess of Wall Street, while not engaging in real regulatory reform won’t continue to imperil the American economy. I hope they win the bet, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Two things to know from the messy details of this new Gilded Age: vast amounts of money is being made by what can only be called the wildest, most uncontrolled speculation since J.P. Morgan reigned on Wall Street and, through all the months of anguish and pain that followed the financial meltdown in 2008, not a single Wall Street player has had to face the legal, let alone the moral, consequences of the kind of reckless behavior that Jamie Dimon says put egg on his face.

The New York Times reports that the fellow who made a bundle while JPMorgan was losing a bundle is Boaz Weinstein, an aggressive hedge fund manager – he made $90 million last year – who was smart enough and gutsy enough to understand that JPMorgan’s “egregious mistake” was another gambler’s opportunity. The Times says of Weinstein: “In the hedge fund game, a business in which ruthlessness is prized and money is the ultimate measure, Mr. Weinstein is what is known as a “monster” — an aggressive trader with a preternatural appetite for risk and a take-no-prisoners style. He is a chess master, as well as a high-roller on the velvet-topped tables of Las Vegas. He has been banned from the Bellagio for counting cards.”

If you believe modern capitalism is a zero-sum game where someone wins and someone loses, little of value is produced, few jobs are created, and vast amounts of money are at stake for a handful of gamblers, then the capitalism of Dimon-Weinstein is just what the regulator ordered. If, on the other hand, if you believe in what I’ll call old fashion capitalism where money is borrowed and invested in real enterprises that employ people and make things, then you might think that Washington, D.C., with its unwillingness to confront Wall Street gambling, is continuing to whistle past the next economic meltdown graveyard.

How else to explain that no one – not a person – has suffered even mild public rebuke, let alone jail time, for the series of decisions in housing and finance that brought much of the American middle class to its knees in 2008 and since. Not only has no one been held accountable, fundamentally – as the JPMorgan bets confirm – nothing has changed with the big banks. In fact, as David Rohde explained recently in The Atlantic, “The country’s biggest banks are getting bigger.”

“Five U.S. banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs – held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011,” writes Rohde, “equal to 56 percent of the country’s economy, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the biggest banks’ holdings amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. Today, they are roughly twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy.”

Using World Bank numbers, JPMorgan Chase’s market capitalization is greater than the GDP of 130 of the world’s countries, including New Zealand, Iraq and Vietnam. Given such size and scope, it’s little wonder the big banks behave like sovereign nations.

So, the biggest get bigger and ensure their position as “too big to fail” and even alleged smart guys like Jamie Dimon admit that banks too big to fail are, by definition, too big to manage. The big winners in this modern capitalism are guys like Boaz Weinstein who is a good enough gambler to get himself banned from Las Vegas, a place that really knows how to manage risk, but is, as the Times article says, “practically a featured attraction on Wall Street. [Weinstein] attends galas and charity events, and is sought out to speak at big events. Pictures of him clasping a drink at last night’s party appear with regularity on business Web sites.”

By comparison old J.P. seems like a genuine piker.

 

American Presidents, Baseball, Obama, Politics

Never Ending

Posted on by christian

What We Know That Just Ain’t So

Mark Twain is reported to have said, “It isn’t so astonishing the things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”

This just may be the single biggest problem with civic life in the country today. We all tend to remember things that just aren’t so. Couple that with an astonishing inability to simply agree on a common set of “facts” around major issues and you have arrived at bedrock in the current unproductive state of politics in America.

An entire cottage industry in political journalism has grown up around the need to “fact check” everything candidates say. This is a welcome development in my book, but unfortunately too many of us simply will not take a fact, even one carefully checked by a pro, at face value.

Is Social Security about to go broke? Is Barack Obama a Muslim? Is the president’s birth certificate a fake? Did the stimulus save jobs or just cost money? Is Fox News fair and balanced? How about climate change, is it really happening? All questions that we have the ability to answer with what an old editor once called “the steady accumulation of facts.”

Scientists have done a lot of work on why people cling to beliefs that are clearly contradicted by evidence, by facts. I’m no behavioral scientist, but my read of the analysis is simple: we believe in things – political opinions included – that tend to reinforce our world view. Don’t like Obama: he must be a Muslim or not born in the U.S.A. Don’t like Romney: must be a heartless corporate raider or a hopelessly rich guy completely out of touch.

You can believe that Obama is a Muslim or Romney out of touch, but opinions are not facts. Facts should help shape opinions, facts should not be cherry picked to support a fully formed opinion, which explains much of our political discourse.

At the heart of this “my opinion is better than your opinion” approach to politics is the widespread inability to see the other side’s point of view and to even consider whether the guy across the aisle just might have a valid perspective. When the opposition is so easily written off as misguided and lacking in seriousness what is the motivation to listen, consider and compromise? There isn’t one. Perhaps the highest form of self awareness, a good thing in any leader, is the constant, nagging suspicion that, hey, I might be wrong.

Consider briefly the “birthers,” those folks who in the face of all evidence continue to insist that the duly elected president of the United States is unqualified for that position because he was not born in the country. Note to history buffs: Hawaii has been a state since August 21, 1959. Obama’s long-form birth certificate, affirmed by every responsible official in Hawaii and released by the White House to put a sock in Donald Trump, is dated August 4, 1961. Maintaining the fiction about the president’s birth in the face of such evidence is a little like arguing that the moon is a flat disc because, hey, it looks that way from my neighborhood!

To continue to believe the birther nonsense requires belief in a conspiracy so immense even I must be in on it. Don’t tell anyone.

Yet, as CNN political reporter Peter Hamby points out, people with seriously responsible positions – I’m not counting The Donald – continue to traffic is the “opinion” that the birth certificate is questionable. The Iowa GOP is including such opinion in its platform and the blowhard sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona is of the opinion that he needs to investigate.

Mark Twain would probably remind us – he can’t since the rumors of his death are no longer exaggerated – that people have always held fast to crazy beliefs. It is a bipartisan problem.

Some of Franklin Roosevelt’s enemies persisted in believing he was Jewish and part of a vast international Jewish conspiracy. You can find the “evidence” to support this opinion all over the Internet. And, of course, Sarah Palin didn’t give birth to her baby Trig and George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president. These “opinions” serve one really handy purpose – they delegitimize, they say you can’t take that person seriously because of some dark truth that, were it to come out, would show the world that – fill in the blank – is an imposter.

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic,” so said John F. Kennedy. Of course, JFK didn’t really die in Dallas in 1963, but is probably living in a retirement home in Florida or Lyndon Johnson killed him, even better the aliens got him.

Persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic. Kind of like our politics, all opinion and not many facts. Of course, we can chalk some of this up to simple old partisan mythmaking; the tried and true political strategy of telling an outrageous lie about your opponent and making them try to explain it away.

Little wonder we have such trouble addressing the country’s real problems, but that’s just an opinion.

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Britain, Brother, Football, Johnson, Politics, Reagan, Religion

Weekend Reads

Posted on by christian

Robert Caro, Jerry Kramer and More

There is a fascinating piece planned for publication Sunday, and already online, in The New York Times on legendary Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro. Caro is about to release volume four of his projected five volume bio of LBJ. To date he has produced 3,388 fascinating pages.

Caro’s work is one of the greatest studies ever of the accumulation and use of political power. The piece also has great insights into the author’s methods, which could properly be described as “old school.” He dresses for work every day in jacket and tie, for example. Great piece.

Northwest Nazarene University political scientist Steve Shaw and one of his colleagues, English Department Chair Darrin Grinder, have just released an important new book that I highly recommend. The Idaho Statesman’s Dan Popkey wrote about the book – “The Presidents and Their Faith” – earlier this week. From Jefferson’s own version of the Gospels to Woodrow Wilson’s Presbyterian minister father to Richard Nixon’s Quaker roots, Shaw and Grinder give us wonderful mini-portraits of 43 presidents and their personal and political faith. With so much talk of politics and religion, the book couldn’t be timelier. Highly recommended.

Insightful piece in The Atlantic by staff writer Conor Friedersdorf that explains why national Republicans have spent 20 years searching for the next Ronald Reagan and haven’t found him.

“Today, would be Reagans with less charisma, less executive experience and less time spent honing their thinking and communication skills are somehow expecting to succeed even as they operate in a less advantageous political environment. Of course it isn’t happening. And it’s no wonder conservatives are divided in who they support.”

And finally, I am very aware (and happy) that baseball is back in action. My Giants open today in the city by the bay. But, the best sports book I’ve read in a while is an older book, published in 1968, Instant Replay by Green Bay Packer great and University of Idaho grad Jerry Kramer. The New York Times called Kramer’s book the “best behind the scene glimpse of pro football ever produced.”

Some think the book’s candor has contributed to Kramer being passed over for the NFL Hall of Fame. If so, that’s ridiculous. Kramer is the most deserving NFL player not in the Hall and that oversight, at long last, should be corrected. Get a copy of the book and read it. It’s great.

 

Baseball, Civility, Justice Department, Organized Labor, Political Correctness, Politics

Stupid Times Three

Posted on by christian

Ozzie, Commies and Stay at Home Moms

Bad luck like stupid comments seems to come in threes.

Ozzie Guillen, the mouth-running, currently suspended manager of the Miami Marlins baseball team is at once the most politically incorrect man in America and the luckiest. He desperately needed to get off the front pages after taking Miami’s re-branded team, cozy in its new stadium, and running his mouth straight into south Florida’s visceral hatred of Fidel Castro.

Ozzie says his comments in Spanish praising Fidel lost something in translation, but what Guillen really mangled with his ill-considered comments about the country’s least favorite commie was an old and simple rule. Loud mouth baseball managers really should never comment on anything other than what happens between the lines. Danger lurks out there beyond the friendly confines – remember Marge Schott – where men play the boys game.

But thanks to cable television, just as it looked like Ozzie might still pay for his Fidel praising with his job, two other stupid comments make Ozzie seem so last season.

Enter Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida – what is it with Florida, anyway – and Democratic political operative and CNN talking head Hilary Rosen. Consider them the duo with the crazy opinions today. Ozzie Guillen must be smiling as he sits out his suspension somewhere. Nothing spikes a stupid political comment like another stupid political comment.

In West’s case it was the astounding contention that a majority of the Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives – West said 78 to 81 members to be imprecise – are communists or socialists. And Rosen popped off on cable to the effect that Mitt Romney’s obviously smart and appealing wife had never worked a day in her life.

Two things, I think, are at play from Guillen to West to Rosen, and no that is not a double play combination. The first is the modern media age’s unrelenting pursuit of opinion as opposed to fact. Everyone is expected to have an opinion on absolutely everyone and everything and be prepared to offer it up at the drop of a question. It has become socially unacceptable to say, “Geez, I don’t know that I have anything to say about that subject.” Or even this: “You know, that’s really a silly question and I chose not to respond to silly questions.”

The other problem is a growing inability on the part of many in public life to tell one of their friends that they are just flat wrong. This has become a particular problem for politicians. Congressman West made his silly comment – opinion devoid of fact really – at some type of a friendly town hall meeting. The question that prompted his opinion came from the audience and, I’m guessing here, he wanted to play to the crowd so he answered in a way that he thought the crowd would appreciate. Maybe West believes what he said, too, but he was clearly playing to the crowd. He might have simply said in response to a silly question, “That is a silly question” and moved on. Rather he offered the alternative, an ill-considered opinion that helped move Ozzie off the front page.

Same with Rosen. She was trying to make the point that the Romney’s aren’t like most Americans who worry about mortgage payments and buying groceries, but she couldn’t stop there. Opinions being the coin of the talking head realm, she couldn’t resist offering a further opinion about Ann Romney. Not having a “real job” would, by the way, be news to any woman who has raised five sons and been a partner to a corporate CEO and a governor. The comment was, well, stupid, but Rosen was behaving the way a partisan TV talking head is expected to behave. She has to have a million of them, opinions that is.

So, as author Steve Rushin has pointed out, I am myself dangerously close to failing to practice what I preach against since – hold on – I’m having an opinion. Rushin calls such behavior a sequel to the movie Blowhard, which I confess I have never had the pleasure of seeing. The sequel, however, would be called Blowhard 2 – Blow Harder.

I long for the moment when some talking head or politician or sports figure just doesn’t go there. And it’s not about political correctness or free speech. My mother would have called it good manners. I can almost hear her, “You don’t have to comment on everything,” she would say. “Did it ever occur to you that other people may not care what you have to say.”

I’ll bet Ozzie’s mom told him something similar and he just forgot. And that’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it, while searching for that movie sequel on DVD – Blow Harder.

 

2012 Election, Baseball, Baucus, Minnick, Politics, Prostate Cancer, U.S. Senate, Wheeler

Primary Colors

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Defeating the Incumbent…in Your Own Party

Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas– that’s him in the photo when he was at the height of his influence – still holds the record as the longest serving Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He created the Fulbright Scholars program, was himself a Rhodes Scholar, at a young age the president of the University of Arkansas and in the 1960’s an early opponent of the Vietnam War. None of that seemed to matter much when he lost re-election in his own party’s primary in 1974. When Bill Fulbright died in 1995, The New York Times called him a “giant” of the Senate, but he’d once been rejected by his own kind.

Burton K. Wheeler of Montana was arguably the most powerful politician that state has ever produced. Elected four times from 1922 until 1946, he was one of the Senate’s great mavericks, battling presidents of both parties and forging a bi-partisan political movement in Montana. He lost re-election in 1946 in his own party’s primary.

In 1946, Sen. Robert M. La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin seemed like a sure thing for re-election. He’d been in the Senate since 1925 having replaced his famous father who was regarded by many as one of the Senate’s greats and hated by some for being a dangerous radical. Young Bob lost his re-election by just a shade over 5,000 votes to a young, mostly unknown Republican by the name of Joe McCarthy.

An incumbent United States Senator losing in his own party primary is rare in our history – very rare – but that may be about to change as more and more Republicans face challenges from the far right of the GOP.

I wrote yesterday of the struggle Sen. Richard Lugar is facing in Indiana. Sen. Orrin Hatch is in trouble in Utah where his former colleague Bob Bennett was taken out two years ago. For a while it appeared Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the least conservative GOP Senators, would also have a tussle with a Tea Party-inspired opponent this year, but that challenge seems to have faded. Still, Maine may be the exception that proves the rule.

[BREAKING NEWS: Late today, Sen. Snowe announced she will not run for re-election in Maine.]

Of the historic and contemporary examples I’ve cited, only Wheeler’s post-war experience in Montana, is an outlier. In every other case, the incumbent senator faced a challenge from the right. Wheeler’s demise was orchestrated from the left, primarily because he fell out of favor with some elements of organized labor in Montana. Generally speaking – and of course there are exceptions like Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut – imposing party discipline in the form of a primary challenge is a tactic employed by conservatives against someone who isn’t perceived as being conservative enough.

With the GOP more and more a branch of the Tea Party, look for more primary challenges to Republican incumbents and color the vast majority of them bright red.

 

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

They Also Ran

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These Guys Never Made it to President’s Day

If you recognize the fellow in the photo as the 1924 Democratic candidate for President of the United States you are a trivia master. That smiling, prosperous looking fellow was John W. Davis and he lost the presidency in 1924 to Calvin Coolidge.

It somehow seems appropriate – the day after President’s Day – to remember the also ran’s who also ran, guys like John W. Davis. Who knows whether Davis would have been a good president? He certainly had the resume. Davis was born and grew up in West Virginia where he practiced law, served in the state legislature, got elected to Congress, became Solicitor General and U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain. So far, he seems over qualified.

When Democrats nearly destroyed the party in 1924 with a convention battle over the Klan and booze – the wet, anti-Klan crowd wanted New York Gov. Al Smith, the dry, pro-Klan faction favored the former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo – Davis emerged on the 103rd ballot as the compromise nominee.

[Could a man named McAdoo have ever won the presidency? Well, a guy named Obama did.]

When that 1924 convention entered its 16th day without a nominee, Will Rogers joked that New York had invited the Democrats to visit the city for their convention not to live there permanently. When Davis finally had the nomination, it wasn’t worth much. He lost everything but the solid south and Silent Cal polled 54% in an election that also featured a Progressive Party ticket lead by Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin.

Davis gets his own chapter in one of my all-time favorite political books, which is appropriated called They Also Ran. Irving Stone wrote the profiles of the men who ran and lost in 1943. The book covers the losers from the beginning of the Republic until 1940 and it’s a great read with Stone often suggesting that the guys who lost – Davis, Winfield Scott Hancock, etc. – might have been a good deal better than the guys who won.

The book also bunches the also ran’s into parallel lives with the military men grouped together, the newspaper men considered together, etc. It is a very effective technique and a unique perspective on those who ran and lost.

It’s fun to think about the presidents we might have had – Henry Clay, for instance – or we should have had – Horace Greeley rather than a second Grant term. David Frum played the game yesterday by focusing on three important elections.

While the also ran’s failed to make it to the White House a number of them still influenced history. Davis, for example, became one of the most famous lawyers of his day. No less an authority than Justice Hugo Black considered him one of the two or three greatest advocates of the 20th Century. By the end of his legal career, Davis had made 139 oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, including representing the state of South Carolina in one of the most important cases in court history – Brown v. Board of Education.

In that case, just as in his moment of presidential fame in 1924, John W. Davis lost. But, fair is fair, losers deserve to be remembered, too, and who knows what might have been.

 

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus Center, Baseball, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Politics, Romney

Monday Reads

Posted on by christian

All the News That’s Fit to Recommend

Should you desire to get caught up on your political reading, here are several “must reads” to start the week:

Walter Shapiro has a tough take down of Mitt Romney in The New Republic. Shapiro makes the case that there hasn’t been a major party likely nominee since Mike Dukakis (another Bay State governor) who has been so unable to excite the electorate. Here’s a line from the piece: “A new marketing campaign or a clever slogan cannot save a dog food that the dogs don’t like. So too is it with the Romney campaign. At this point, his only hope is to prevail by using about the oldest argument in politics: ‘The other guys are worse.'”

Old rule of politics: when you’re an operative – stay out of the news, which means off the front page of The New York Times. The old grey lady profiles Barack Obama’s alter ego David Plouffe in a not all together positive way.

Plouffe refused to be interviewed for the piece, a no win position, and it’s clear he’s not a favorite of the press herd. Reporter Mark Leibovich pointed out twice that Plouffe refers to the White House press as “jackals.”

Here’s a sample: “Mr. [David] Axelrod [a former business partner of Plouffe and another Obama operative], who compares his yin-yang with Mr. Plouffe to that of Oscar and Felix in the Odd Couple, is the expansive slob to Mr. Plouffe’s fastidious detail man. At a going-away party for Mr. Axelrod last year that was attended by numerous White House officials (including the president) and Axelrod pals (including the jackals), Mr. Plouffe looked as if he would rather be cleaning a litter box. He slipped out early.”

I’ve always thought it must have been both hell and irresistable trying to work in Lyndon Johnson’s White House. Harry McPherson, a gifted writer and thinker, and like Johnson a Texan, did it for most of LBJ’s presidency. By all accounts he regularly told the boss the unvarnished truth. Terence Smith at The Atlantic website has a warm tribute to McPherson who died recently at age 83.

Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast has a preview of the two-part American Experience bio of Bill Clinton that starts tonight on PBS. Grove says: “More than a decade after leaving the White House, Bill Clintonhas yet to release his grip on our collective imagination.  The country bumpkin who makes it big in the big city, only to stumble over his own appetites and ambitions—be he Youngblood Hawke, Lonesome Rhodes, or (an utterly sinister specimen) Flem Snopes—has long been a central theme of American mythology, at once inspiring and tragic.”

Now that’s good stuff. Part one airs tonight at 8:00 pm Mountain on PBS.

And, pitchers and catchers are in camp. The great young catcher of my beloved Giants – Buster Posey – was taking throws yesterday. It’s reported he’s been told by the front office not to block the plate. Yea, right.

The weather in Idaho is grey and cold this morning, but somewhere the sun shines and grown men play the boy’s game again. Maybe winter is close to being over. I hope.

 

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, FDR, Hoover, Minnick, Obama, Politics, Polling

Where’s George?

Posted on by christian

The Delicate Dance of a Former President

For 20 of the last 31 years a Republican president has occupied the Oval Office. Two of those presidents – the first and second George Bush – served for a combined 12 years, yet in the current political environment they seem as distant from the partisan hubbub as, well, Republicans of an earlier day wished Herbert Hoover would have been in 1936. More on that in a moment.

George H.W. Bush – Bush 41 – has offered an “unofficial” endorsement, whatever that means, to Mitt Romney, but Bush 43 is virtually invisible in Republican politics or public life. While Romney and Newt Gingrich fight to inherit the mantle of Ronald Reagan, no candidate makes the trek to the Texas ranch to seek George W.’s advice or endorsement. It’s almost as though his presidency, at least for GOP candidates, has been erased from the blackboard of the current campaign. It will be interesting to see if Bush the Younger has any role at this summer’s GOP convention.

Meanwhile, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has refused to endorse a candidate in today’s Florida primary and that decision has been the subject of much tea leaf reading. By most accounts a few words from the third Bush would have been very helpful to any candidate, but beyond jabbing the candidates for their anti-immigration rhetoric, the next Bush in line has stayed above the fray.

Writing for the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes suggests that Jeb Bush may be playing his cards so close because he can foresee a role for himself as a compromise and unifying GOP candidate in the unlikely event the Republican nominating process becomes deadlocked. Or, Barnes says, Bush could be a unifying choice as vice president on a Romney or Gingrich ticket. I say don’t count on it.

With no Kennedy now in significant public office, the Bush family is the closest thing we have to a dynasty in American politics. Still the elder Bush, now 87, is clearly in declining health and George W. is so politically radioactive after two controversial terms that no current candidate wants to be close to him. Many Republicans long for a Jeb Bush candidacy, but he demurs. He recently provided a glimpse into his thinking when he told an interviewer that 2012, given his age and the state of the country, was probably his year, but for whatever reason he has taken a pass, which takes us back to W.

If many Democrats see Bush 43 as the modern day equivalent of the Great Depression scarred Herbert Hoover, he is certainly behaving much differently than the discredited Hoover did four years after his defeat at the hands of Franklin Roosevelt.

Perhaps the difference can be explained by the fact that Hoover still hungered for another term in the White House. George W. had his eight years. In any event, the two men – tremendously unpopular when they left the White House – played their post-presidential years very differently.

In February 1936, just as FDR’s re-election campaign was beginning to take shape, Hoover gave a Lincoln Day speech in Portland, Oregon. By many accounts the former president, who had lost in a landslide to Roosevelt in 1932, saw himself as the best possible candidate for the Republicans in 1936. Hoover used the occasion of his Portland speech to rip into Roosevelt’s program and he sounded like a man eager for a rematch.

“The issue [facing the nation in 1936],” Hoover said, “is the attempt to fasten upon the American people some sort of a system of personal government for a government of laws; a system of centralization under a political bureaucracy; a system of debt; a system of inflation; a system which would stifle the freedom and liberty of men.  And it can be examined in the cold light of three years’ experience.”

Hoover was referring, of course, to the first three years of FDR’s term during which the Great Depression continued to create extremely high unemployment, a high rate of home and farm foreclosures and a general lack of confidence in the economy. At the same time, Roosevelt was assembling an unprecedented amount of personal power in the Executive Branch, or at least Republicans said he was.

In his Oregon speech 76 years ago, Hoover used some language that might have been ripped from today’s headlines. Critiquing FDR’s State of the Union speech, Hoover lambasted FDR’s references to “dishonest speculators” and “entrenched greed.” He said Roosevelt was issuing a call to “class war” and, of course, he criticized Roosevelt for deficit spending.

Despite his interest and availability, Hoover was never again considered a serious presidential contender after losing so badly in 1932. Tainted by the stock market crash of 1929 and what has widely be seen, then as now, as his less than effective response to the economic crisis of the early 1930’s, Hoover nevertheless continued to speak out on public issues. He was invited to the 1936 GOP convention and he gave the New Deal and FDR hell in a speech that featured language strikingly similar to what we hear from GOP candidates today.

Hoover lamented that the “New Deal is a definite attempt to replace the American system of freedom with some sort of European planned existence.” Sound familiar? Romney has repeated said that Barack Obama wants to create “a European style welfare state.”

“Billions have been spent to prime the economic pump,” Hoover said to the 1936 GOP convention.  “It did employ a horde of paid officials upon the pump handle.  We have seen the frantic attempts to find new taxes on the rich…Freedom to work for himself is changed into a slavery of work for the follies of government.”

Two things are worth noting about Hoover’s aggressive long ago critique of the man who beat him. The former president certainly didn’t help Republicans in 1936 and many Republicans simply wished the former president would have just pulled a George W. and disappeared.

Secondly there are really very few new attack lines in American politics. Republicans have long been accusing Democrats of “socialism” and Democrats have forever labeled the GOP the party of Wall Street.

In 1936, Roosevelt used tough language and a great deal of humor to carefully weave the Hoover legacy, if not the former president’s name, into his stump speeches. He was most effective with his mocking references to what the Republicans and their candidate Kansas Gov. Alfred Landon would do to his New Deal.

Obama has been regularly criticized for invoking Bush’s record and as of last fall he had stopped making references to “Bush’s failed economic policies” or “Bush style foreign policy.”

If history is any guide to what to expect in politics, and it often is with Hoover’s 1936 speeches being a good example, then expect the references to George W. to creep back into Democratic campaign rhetoric as we get closer to November. If Obama is as skillful as the Democratic president all Democrats love to invoke – Franklin Roosevelt – he’ll use a mixture of tough talk and dismissive humor to connect the eventual Republican nominee to the silent, but hardly forgotten George W. Bush.