Politics

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Giffords, Humanities, Politics

Calvin Trillin

Posted on by christian

Deadline Poet, Funny Guy, Serious Reporter

Calvin Trillin has covered the civil rights movement, produced some of the best long form journalism in recent times for The New Yorker, and written about food, travel and politics.

And oh, yes, he just may be the funniest guy in print in America. He’s coming to Boise next week.

Here is one of Trillin’s latest “Deadline Poems” from the Nation magazine.

Newt’s Surge

The pundits all can confidently speak

Of Gingrich as the flavor of the week.

The people who want anyone but Mitt

Now say, in desperation, Newt is it.

Yes, Newt’s astute – a crafty wheeler-dealer.

His baggage, though, would fill an eighteen-wheeler –

Affairs and ethics problems and, to boot,

His mouth is something often he’ll shoot.

And if he’s scratched because he lacks decorum?

What happens then? Get ready, Rick Santorum.

 

Trillin will present the Idaho Humanities Council’s 15th annual Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities on December 8 at the Boise Centre. Tickets are still available.

Trillin’s humor may be his trademark, but his body of work is truly impressive, including one of his U.S. Journal pieces for the New Yorker written from Boise in 1979. His little book on his late wife – About Alice – will have you laughing on one page and tearing up on the next. It is one of the sweetest pieces of writing you will ever hope to read.

Trillin relates the story of first meeting Alice at a party and pursuing her to another party days later.

“At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. … Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, ‘You have never again been as funny as you were that night.’

“ ‘You mean I peaked in December of 1963?’ I’d say, 20 or even 30 years later.

“ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ”

Many of Trillin’s essays on food are classics of the genre. He once said: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

He completely subscribes to the sensible notion that the higher the restuarant the more mediocre and costly the food. “I never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still,” he says.

Trillin was Johnny Carson’s guest 30 times on the old Tonight Show and he’s a semi-regular now on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.

If you want some fun in the company of an American original, order up a dose of Calvin Trillin next week. His latest book – Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin– is a collection of pieces dating back 40 years. It’s funny, profound, literary – all quite like Calvin Trillin.

 

Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Election of 1944, FDR, Lincoln, Otter, Paul, Politics, World War II

Historic Politics

Posted on by christian

A Very Old, Very Modern Campaign

Thomas E. Dewey, the one-time mob busting New York City prosecutor and later governor of New York, made three different runs at the White House, twice winning the Republican nomination. He never won the biggest election and the question of why is pertinent to our political life now, long, long after Dewey is mostly forgotten.

On a handful of occasions in American history – 1864 during the decisive year of the Civil War being one of the earliest and 2004 during the tough early days of the Iraq war begin the latest – the country has chosen a president during wartime.

I’ve long argued that Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864 was the most important presidential election in our history. Had Lincoln lost that election to Gen. George McClellan it is altogether possible that the winner would have sought a negotiated end to the War of Rebellion, while maintaining the status quo regarding slavery. Lincoln won, thanks in part of Sherman’s timely victory at Atlanta, and refused to consider anything other than the complete capitulation of the rebellious states. America history was set on a course as a result.

In 1944, Tom Dewey won the Republican nomination for president and with it the chance to deny Franklin D. Roosevelt a fourth term. That election occurred at a decisive moment during World War II. As an insightful new book on that election – FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944 by David M. Jordan – makes clear, Dewey failed to make a compelling case against either Roosevelt’s handling of domestic or war issues and instead ran a campaign, one of the first, that attempted to exploit the threat of Communism influencing the federal government.

As Jordan notes, the “campaign of running against the Communists” was “a preview of what would become a standard of Republican campaigns in the years ahead, but in 1944 it did not play all that well.” In 1944, after all, Soviet Russia was a U.S. ally and the Red Army was bleeding the Nazi Wehrmacht white on the Eastern Front.

Jordan’s book, filled with insight into how both FDR and Dewey approached the election and particularly how FDR rather unceremoniously dumped Vice President Henry Wallace from the Democratic ticket in favor of Harry Truman, also puts the lie to the old notion that debates over foreign policy once stopped at the water’s edge. Dewey bitterly criticized FDR’s handling of the war, in particular suggesting that the administration was short changing the war effort in the Pacific to the detriment of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who willingly engaged in the sort of partisan politics that we would find completely inappropriate from a senior military commander today.

Republicans also eagerly circulated rumors, more accurate than not, regarding FDR’s health, but the GOP candidate and campaign were no match for the great campaigner – Franklin Roosevelt. By Jordan’s account, with which many historians agree, Roosevelt turned the entire 1944 campaign with one memorable speech delivered to the Teamsters Union on September 23. Today’s it’s remembered as “the Fala speech,” because of FDR’s humorous use of a story about his little Scotty dog – Fala.

Roosevelt opened that Teamster speech brilliantly: “WELL, here we are together again – after four years – and what years they have been! You know, I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to annoy some people. In fact, in the mathematical field there are millions of Americans who are more than eleven years older than when we started in to clear up the mess that was dumped in our laps in 1933.”

Dewey couldn’t keep up with such rhetoric in large part because FDR’s taunt rang so hard and true and because Dewey couldn’t begin to match Roosevelt’s personality as a candidate. Dewey suffered from a frequently deadly political malady. He was stiff and boring. Think John Kerry or today’s GOP contender Mitt Romney. Dewey also had a Romney-like tendency to quote FDR completely out of context, while modifying his own position on issues like the scope of a post-war United Nations.

At the end of the 1944 campaign, and remember that the Allied invasion of Normandy occurred just before Dewey was nominated in Chicago, American voters were unwilling to “swap horses in the middle of the stream.” FDR won his closest election polling 3.5 million more votes than Dewey. The contest was no contest in the Electoral College. Roosevelt won a 36 state landslide, including Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Utah. The war election of 1944 was also the last election where a Democrat won every state in the solid south.

There are many what ifs associated with 1944. What if the Democrats had not dumped Wallace from the ticket? The very liberal Iowan was very popular with the organized labor constituency of the Democratic Party and deeply resented his dumping. Some speculate Wallace would have been more accommodating of the Soviet Union than Truman turned out to be and that he would never have authorized the use of the atomic bomb on Japan.

And what if Dewey had won? Would the post-war world have been different? Would the humorless new president, a man unknown to Churchill and Stalin have gone to Yalta and done better – or worse – than Roosevelt who was clearly in seriously failing health?

Dewey lived to fight and lose the White House a second time. Today Dewey, who died in 1971, is best remembered as “the little man on the wedding cake,” a wonderfully snarky put down that is attributed to a half dozen wits of the 1940’s, and as the hapless candidate Truman beat in 1948.

Thomas E. Dewey, like so many who have run and lost the White House,was a fascinating, complicated man. He may have been just fine in the White House. Who knows. By the verdict of history Dewey was a two time loser, but also a victim of a great and almost always under appreciated factor of politics – timing. He ran an off key campaign against a brilliant campaigner in the war year of 1944 and, while Truman was stumping the country in a fighting mood four years later, Dewey tried to sit on a lead and run out the clock.

Where I advising any candidate today, I’d tell them to study both those elections. They each contain some enduring politic truths.

 

Baseball, Nebraska, Politics, Wall Street

Margin Call

Posted on by christian

We Never Learn

One particularly chilling scene in the outstanding new film Margin Call takes place when the CEO of a big banking house, played with cool detachment by Jeremy Irons, recounts the cyclical nature of the financial markets. As he ticks off the years when markets have tanked, including 1929, he calmly suggests it is just the way things work in the rarefied world of high, high finance. The biggest, toughest, most ruthless survive, he says.  It’s just the way the world works.

The movie, featuring a terrific cast including Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore, is an examination of one day in the life of a big Wall Street firm that finally must come to grips with its reckless speculation in the type of complicated financial instruments that even the big boss doesn’t understand. (In another great scene, the CEO interrupts a junior risk analyst to tell him that he doesn’t understand this esoteric, but widely profitable financial stuff, but to explain it so he can.)

In the end, the firm decides to unload its entire cache of toxic assets as fast as possible, settling for pennies on the dollar in order to save the firm and peddle, as Spacey’s character says, goods that they know are absolutely worthless. We are left to believe that the firm does survive, because as Irons’ character says at one point, there are three ways to make money in his business: be first, be smarter or cheat. He convinces himself that he is being first and smart – dumping the toxic investments before the markets wise up – but, of course, he is really cheating. We last see the self assured, but completely unself aware CEO lunching alone, enjoying undoubtedly an expensive bottle of wine, in the Executive Dining Room.

Lehman Brothers wasn’t so lucky. Writing in The New Yorker, film critic David Denby said Margin Call is the best film ever made about Wall Street. And Jake Bernstein, a reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing Wall Street practices that helped fuel the current economic mess, says the filmmaker J.C  Chandor actually doesn’t tell as corrupt a story as played out in real life. Bernstein does note that the CEO character in the film is named Tuld. Lehman’s CEO was Dick Fuld, a man that TIME has suggested should be remembered as one to blame for the current mess.

Chandor is “mining deeper truths than the intricacies of credit default swaps,” Bernstein wrote in a review of the film. “The societal costs of high finance, the power of self-rationalization, and the easy embrace of personal corruption is his terrain.”

Margin Call gets high marks not only for the superb cast and believable script, but, as Bernstein suggests, for the larger points it makes, including that the people who work on Wall Street, at least most of them, are decent, striving, ambitious and incredibly competitive. All the stuff of success in business. What is missing is any sense of proportion; any real self reflection. These folks convince themselves that what they do and how they do it is necessary and that they are worth the million dollar bonuses that they are promised for deceiving their customers. This lack of self awareness is at the center of the film and at the heart of the continuing utilization of massive Wall Street salaries and bonuses derived from essentially creating nothing but a market for investment vehicles even the CEO’s don’t understand.

Also near the heart of the Wall Street-inspired economic crisis that is soon to extend into its fifth year are two elements that history has repeatedly shown are always at the core of a crisis of capitalism: vast money and vast inattention; inattention by both the financial players benefitting from the “system” and the sleepy regulators who always seem a day late. In the end unbelievable risk is tolerated long past the point of reason and ethics and personal values are corrupted because the money is so incredibly appealing. And, as one character in the film notes, the firm should be able to dump its steamy mass of worthless, well, investments because the “feds” won’t wake up until it’s too late to act.  This level of inattention really is art imitating life.

The Hollywood press is abuzz with the notion that the Occupy movement will push Margin Call into serious Academy Award contention. Maybe. Hollywood is often as clueless about the real America as Wall Street, still as Denby wrote, “If Wall Street executives find themselves at a loss to understand what the protesters outside are getting at, they could do worse than watch this movie for a few clues. “

I came away from watching Margin Call thinking again that of the many, many tragedies in the current economic meltdown the one with potentially the most lasting consequence has been the abject failure of the current political class to explain what really happened, why it happened and to hold anyone accountable. Already what “reforms” were put in place in the wake of the Lehman collapse, the TARP bailout, etc. are having their hard edges sanded away. Gretchen Morgenson, another of the journalists who understands more about the ways of Wall Street than most members of Congress, reports, for example, that efforts to create greater transparency in the shadowy derivatives market are currently under attack in Washington. In other words, the people who helped bring about the current economic meltdown are resisting efforts to change their behavior. Self reflection works about as well on Wall Street as self policing.

“Wall Street,” Morgenson observes, “loves to do business in the shadows. Sunshine, after all, is bad for profits.” She quotes the great Wall Street investigator of the 1930’s, Ferdinand Pecora, as saying that then, as now, pitch darkness was the bankers’ stoutest ally.

Here is the real and lasting threat of the real life margin call we continjue to deal with every day: No real and comprehensive Congressional investigations have been done. No candidate for president – in either party – has offered a coherent explanation about what happened in 2008 and earlier. Americans across the specturm from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street are mad, and for some good reason, but not out of any comprehensive factual notion of what they should be mad about. Our political system has not, perhaps because of its own vested interest in the essential status quo, offered taxpayers and investors of the nation the explanation that is needed in order to try and correct a system that still presents tremendous risk to the national and world economy.

When members of Congress can speculate and personally benefit from insider information as CBS recently reported several members, including the House Speaker and Minority Leader, have there isn’t much Congressional incentive to crack down on the many, many abuses on Wall Street and in the financial markets.

So, we have once again set ourselves up to experience the obvious consequences of the cyclical nature of the way markets work. What goes up must come down. To the buyer beware. The markets self correct, even if there is a tad bit of economic dislocation associated with the correction. This hard time too will pass, as the Jeremy Irons character says in the movie, and we will go back to making money – by being first, being smarter or cheating. The old ways of money and inattention win again and always.

 

Baseball, Federal Budget, Immigration, Politics

No Surprise Here

Posted on by christian

Super Committee Fails, Country Burns

At its birthing the Super Committee seemed to have it all – bi-partisan endorsement from both houses of Congress, senior and generally respected bi-partisan leaders, a sense of urgency and a hopeful nation, if not exactly hanging on its every move, at least positioned to accept its verdict.

As was probably all too predictable, it came to ashes. No one – Democrat or Republican – was willing to risk the wrath of the most unreasonable in their party. The entire idea of a Super Committee was badly flawed, possibly even unconstitutional, but what to expect from a Congress that can only think as far ahead as the next CNN debate or next week’s Sunday talking head shows?

It hasn’t always been so. In the spring of 1964 it seemed to many observers utterly impossible that the United States Senate, still dominated by southern conservatives who held key committee positions, could possibly join the House of Representatives and pass a civil rights bill. But, in 1964, the U.S. Senate had real leaders: Mike Mansfield of Montana for the Democrats and Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois for the Republicans. Utilizing his mastery of Senate rules, Mansfield first prevented the civil rights bill, a legislative priority of President Lyndon Johnson, from being referred to the southern-dominated Judiciary Committee where the wily former copper mucker from Butte knew that it would die a quiet death.

With the bill on the Senate floor for consideration – and filibuster – Mansfield patiently puffed on his pipe, let the Senate work it’s will and effectively involved his Republican counterpart in every step of strategy. By the time the bill passed after a 54 day talkfest, Dirksen thought the whole thing had been his idea. Mansfield used quiet persuasion, senatorial courtesy, time and history to pass the bill with 73 “yes” votes.

Mansfield’s aides objected that their boss had let Dirksen have too much of the credit, even going so far as to – perish the thought in today’s Washington – walk to Dirksen’s office for meetings and press availabilities. Dirksen made the daily comments to the press. Dirksen was quoted. Dirksen was engineering the strategy. Or so it seemed. Mansfield even stood in the back when LBJ signed the landmark legislation in order to stay out of the celebratory photographs. The great Senate leader explained to his staff that he needed Dirksen more than he needed the publicity. That is how history used to be made, at least once in a while, in the United States Senate.

It has been the good fortune of the United States of America when faced with moments of great challenge, indeed even peril, to have emerge from our messy politics the right leader at the right time. Would independence have come in the first place without a Washington? Would the Union have survived without a Jackson and a Lincoln? Would a Great Depression and a world war been wiped without a Roosevelt? The times we face are hardly as tough as the Civil War or waging World War II, but the lack of real leadership –  leadership in the broad public interest –  has rarely seemed as lacking as it does today.

A real test of leadership – political or otherwise – is to have the courage to go against the dominate direction, especially the dominate direction of your friends. Some would argue that the folks on the Super Committee never had a chance since the Congress is such a toxic place and the influence of those with single and very special agendas so dominate our politics. Maybe. Then again, if you go back over the record of the last several months of effort to craft a budget and debt deal, you’ll find that neither side really tried to get a deal. The talking points were so predictable, so scripted, that this show might as well have followed the Kardashians on reality TV.

As Politico’s Mike Allen noted on Sunday, the last time the Supers met as a committee was on November 1st! Allen, who admits he was initially optimistic, as I was, that the group would find some common ground, now concludes the whole thing was a bit of a sham.

The deficit remains. The nation’s fiscal house is not only not in order, but remains in a seriously fragile state. All political eyes, meanwhile, are singlemindedly fixed on 2012 and how to carve the narrowest possible advantage from the politics of the moment. Yet a serious sense remains that the broad middle of the country is truly ready for serious leadership; leadership that takes risks, makes decisions, talks truth to the fringes of both parties and compromises with the other side.

Is that person – persons – out there? Let’s hope so. The nation yearns for the kind of leadership Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen once provided. We need it again.

 

Baseball, Federal Budget, Immigration, Politics

Super Committee

Posted on by christian

Turkey and Dressing

You thought perhaps that Thanksgiving was all about Grandma’s cranberry relish, Aunt Mae’s pumpkin pie and a nap on the sofa while a football game hums in the background. Not this year. The Super Committee, the 12 Senators and Representatives charged with saving the Republic, may finally prove decisively that turkeys can’t fly. The Committee, ceded the authority of the rest of the Congress in order to come up with a deficit, budget and revenue deal, is due to report November 23 just in time to spoil the real turkey day. Gobble, gobble.

Senior lawmakers are already predicting failure for the scheme that was hatched as part of the dubious deal earlier this year to raise the debt ceiling. It looks like the Gang of Twelve won’t fare any better than the other 523 members of Congress in crafting a sensible, bipartisan plan to control federal spending without destroying the still fragile U.S. economy.

Give some serious credit to guys like Idaho’s Mike Simpson and North Carolina’s Heath Shuler for seeming to buck their leadership while calling for the Super Committee to “go big” with a plan that will actually accomplish something for the long term. Simpson and Shuler are signers, along with 98 other bipartisan House members, of a letter to the committee that urges them to be serious about finding middle ground, while leaving – Thanksgiving-style – nothing off the table. No sign the Super Dozen are listening.

As we edge closer to the actual Presidential Election Year, expect to hear more and more references to two other elections in the 20th Century – 1936 and 1984. In both those years, incumbent presidents – Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan – were facing re-election hampered by high unemployment  and a sluggish economy. Both won re-election with historic landslides. (The White House loves this history lesson, you can bet.)

In Roosevelt’s case he squandered his mandate with an ill-consider and historically awful idea about expanding the Supreme Court. Reagan turned his attention to foreign policy. Reagan did little, despite much revisionist history today, to control federal spending. FDR, pushed by his conservative Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, got nervous about the growing budget deficits spurred by New Deal spending and he quickly applied the brakes in 1937. The resulting Roosevelt Recession sent unemployment back up and the economy stalled. More agile than any politician today, Roosevelt quickly reversed course and start spending money again to create economic activity.

There is a school of economic thought that holds that the Super Committee would do the economy a favor by failing to concoct a grand plan since any grand plan will ultimately reduce federal spending – think defense – and eliminate many jobs. That may prove to be just the combination of policy solutions that the U.S. economy doesn’t need right now. I’d be happy with almost any plan the Supers deliver before turkey day, because no plan means no certainty, no political direction, more drift and more disillusionment for voters.

Even Greece – Greece? – has found a way to create a new coalition government aimed at addressing that country’s severe fiscal and budget challenges. Enjoy the turkey this year and be thankful for any abundance, but don’t look to Washington for sane and sober thoughts on the future of our economy. Maybe the Super Committee ought to spend Thanksgiving in Athens.

 

Baseball, Politics

Prophets Without Honor

Posted on by christian

We Should Make Use of the “Formers”

I have always thought it was a statement of the character, decency and political astuteness of Harry Truman that he developed a genuine working friendship with the former president that Democrats still love to vilify – Herbert Hoover.

The photo is of Truman and Hoover chatting it up in the Oval Office about the time President Truman tapped the former president to head what became known as the Hoover Commission; a vast effort in the late 1940’s to reorganize the Executive Branch of the federal government. When Truman asked Hoover, a man still regarded by many as the do nothing administrator who timidly looked on as the Great Depression ravished the economy in the early 1930’s, to head the commission many regarded it as a very strange choice. It was unusual and also brilliant.

Truman also called upon Hoover at the end of World War II for his advice about food relief for a Europe devastated by war. Hoover had made his reputation as a skilled manager of the massive effort to provide emergency food assistance at the end of World War I.

Both men were sharp tongued partisans. Both suffered by comparison to Franklin Roosevelt. Each had something to prove. They became close friends. By the time Truman left office in 1953, the Executive Branch of the federal government has come to look pretty much as it looks today. Truman, with Hoover’s help, had created the modern Department of Defense, the Joint Chief of Staff, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Truman needed Republican help to get those jobs done and he was smart enough to seek the help – and political cover – the former Republican president could offer.

This little bit of political trivia begs a question: why don’t we use the talents of “former” political leaders more often? In every other human endeavor, experience – having been there and done that – is considered among the most necessary and desirable characteristics. In politics and public policy, once out of office the “former” typically becomes a relic, a footnote of history. It shouldn’t be so.

Think about some of the national politic figures of the recent past whose experience and judgment would be valuable in some capacity today. Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska governor and senator, served as a college president. Former Oklahoma governor and senator David Boren runs the University of Oklahoma. He’s has a master’s degree from Oxford and was a Rhodes Scholar. Do you think they might have something to add to the national debate about educational improvement?

President Obama did press former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson into service to co-chair a deficit commission and then promptly ignored his recommendations. Simpson ought to be in the Cabinet, regardless who sits in the Oval Office. His recent salty opinions about Obama’s “abrogation of leadership” on the deficit make it certain he won’t be asked for more advice by the current White House resident, but I seriously doubt whether any Republican would call on the lanky guy from Cody, either. He’s too blunt, too outspoken, which is just one of the characteristics that would make him so valuable to any president.

I have never been a great fan of former California governor, senator and San Diego mayor Pete Wilson, but his resume alone should get him on any list of “formers” who could help with something somewhere.

The list could go on and on: former governor like Jim Thompson, Mike Sullivan, Marc Racicot, Mike Dukakis and Tom Kean and former senators like Evan Bayh, Bob Graham, Bill Bradley (perhaps he should be NBA Commissioner), Elizabeth Dole and Gordon Smith would all have something to add as formal or informal advisers to any president of Cabinet secretary.

All of these folks have other lives, of course, in law, lobbying, running policy centers. etc. and some have done the occasional stint on this or that blue ribbon commission. Most would gladly answer the call again, particularly if their work and advice were really taken seriously by current elected officials. Ignoring such talent, expertise and experience is a little like being a high school football coach with a retired Vince Lombardi living down the block and not being smart enough to invite him to practice.

I’ve always thought one of the real and enjoyable powers of being president would be the ability to issue an invitation to anyone, literally anyone in the world, to come to the White House for dinner and a talk. If I had that power for just one day, I’d invite the cast of former political characters I’ve mentioned just to hear their take on the issues of the day, which is pretty much what Truman did with Hoover back in 1945.

As historian Donald McCoy wrote in 1990 in the newsletter of the Truman Presidential Library, the two old, experienced, partisan, but very decent public servants forged a lasting bond.

“During the winter of 1962-1963, two old gentlemen exchanged deeply moving letters,” McCoy wrote. “Herbert Hoover wrote Harry Truman that ‘yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know … When the attack on Pearl Harbor came, I at once supported the President and offered to serve in any useful capacity … However, there was no response … When you came to the White House within a month you opened the door to me to the only profession I knew, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in the prior years. For all this and your friendship, I am deeply grateful.’ Truman replied, ‘You’ll never know how much I appreciated your letter … In fact I was overcome, because you state the situation much better than I could. I’ll quote you, ‘For all this and your friendship, I am deeply grateful.'”

It takes a particular type of political courage – perhaps character is a better word – to ask another politician for advice, particularly advice across the partisan boundary, but a little more of that type of courage would make our politics a whole lot more productive.

For that we would all be deeply grateful.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Britain, Christie, Economy, FDR, Lincoln, Minnick, Obama, Politics, Reagan

Trying Times

Posted on by christian

Leadership? Not So Much

At pivotal moments in American history it has often been the case that the right leader somehow emerged from the chaos of the moment and the nation was able to pass through trying times and set course for a better future.

Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan lacked the vision and courage to head off the steady drift in the direction of sectional strife in the 1850’s and, while there is a good argument to be made that Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 was the tipping point toward civil war, there is hardly any disputing that Lincoln brought to the presidency the powers of leadership that ultimately saved the country.

Likewise Franklin D. Roosevelt proved to be the right leader at the worse time in the 20th Century. FDR restored confidence and, I’m convinced, reformed American capitalism enough to save it. He was a leader made for his times.

There are a handful of other examples in our history. Andrew Jackson, with all his flaws, may qualify for a leadership award. More recently Ronald Reagan, invoked by every current GOP candidate for president as the leadership gold standard, had some of the FDR in him. He was a confidence builder when the nation needed a big dose. Washington stands, of course, in a special class of right leader at a trying time.

It’s hard to escape the reality that the nation is at another such crossroads and our politics and politicians hardly seem up to the task. The litany of problems is almost too big to fathom: stagnant economy, double-dip recession looming, crippling unemployment, increasing poverty and income gap, a national and international debt crisis, declining quality of public education, the need for entitlement reform, the European fiscal crisis, the uncertainty and unpredictability of the Arab Spring, climate change, terrorism, even the Red Sox have melted down.

The thinking man’s conservative, David Brooks, identified the heart of the problem in his New York Times column yesterday: “the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic, emergent ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.”

The Democrats are all about tax increases on the most wealthy and increased spending to stimulate consumer demand. The Republicans can’t shake the gospel of tax cuts, controlling the deficit and whacking at regulation. What both sides miss is that we need to do all of that and more.

It may well be recorded at the supreme moment of missed opportunity in the Obama Administration was the president’s failure to grasp and champion the most important political and policy work to come out of Washington in a long, long time – the recommendations of Simpson-Bowles Commission. In the end, the discarding of the work of the former Wyoming Senator, Alan Simpson, and the Clinton-era White House Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles, will be recorded as a failure of leadership. The bi-partisan commission called for doing it all – tax and entitlement reform, spending cuts, deficit reduction. The Commission prescribed exactly what every thinking American knows in their partisan heart must be done. Obama punted and Congressional Republicans did as well.

And meanwhile the country is hungry – desperate even – for real leadership. Many Republicans salivate over the prospect that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will turn his consistent “no” into an announcement that he’ll enter the GOP battle and it’s easy to see why. Christie delivered an inspirational speech last night at Republican hallowed ground, the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. His indictment of Washington leadership will surely resonate with Democrats and Republicans who long for leadership from someone.

“In Washington,” Christie said, “we have watched as we drift from conflict to conflict, with little or no resolution.

“We watch a president who once talked about the courage of his convictions, but still has yet to find the courage to lead.

“We watch a Congress at war with itself because they are unwilling to leave campaign style politics at the Capitol’s door.  The result is a debt ceiling limitation debate that made our democracy appear as if we could no longer effectively govern ourselves.”

Christie specifically jabbed President Obama for failing to embrace the Simpson-Bowles work noting pointedly that it was “a report the president asked for himself.”

I’m not at all convinced Chris Christie is the Lincoln or FDR we need, but I am convinced that genuinely honest talk about the enormous problems facing the country, with an unstinting focus on big solutions to big problems rather than what David Brooks calls “proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand,” would be the beginning of the leadership the country needs and hungers for.

The electorate is deeply unsettled. The evidence floats about everywhere you look. A new CNN survey says only 15% of Americans have confidence in their government; an all-time low. The Coca-Cola chief says China is a better business bet than the USA. There is an unmistakable sense that American power and influence is in decline.

Is anyone up to the task? Can anyone see beyond the next election? I’m betting if someone could look that far ahead – see ahead to real leadership – it would be the best possible strategy to win.

 

Afghanistan, Baseball, Churchill, Intelligence, Iraq, O'Connor, Politics, September 11

Reflections

Posted on by christian

Ten Years On…

Amid the tenth anniversary reflections over the terror attacks on New York and Washington there is much to ponder, remember and regret, including our response and its effectiveness.

Bill Keller, just stepped down as the top editor at The New York Times, used the tenth anniversary to revisit his own cheerleading for the Iraq war. Keller concludes “I think Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder.”

No such reflection or any second thoughts from former Vice President Dick Cheney who told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I think we made exactly the right decision (regarding the invasion of Iraq.)”

The weekend’s commemoration of September 11, 2001 was remarkably free of politics, but 9-11 and the war on terror, as Politico points out, continues to infuse our politics.

“Even as voters grow weary of the nation’s wartime footing,” Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman write at Politico, “Democrats and Republicans continue to seek out opportunities to wield the memory of 9/11 for electoral gain — whether that means using the Guantanamo Bay detention center as a wedge issue, courting the support of firefighters and police or attacking a proposed Islamic center near ground zero.”

So much was lost ten years ago and it is altogether fitting and proper that we regret and mourn that loss. We will do so for as long as people are alive who remember that day. But, we might do well to also reflect on the fleeting nature of the profound desire that existed in the days immediately after September 11 to come together as a country, share both grief and sacrifice and get our national response correctly calibrated. The Spirit of September 12, needless to say, did not last long.

Historian Julian Zelizer writes that our passion for partisanship couldn’t be overcome even by the tragedy of 9/11.

“Could the promise of September 12 ever be fulfilled,” Zelizer asks. “Certainly today there are enormous areas of consensus between the parties, such as over most counterterrorism policies, over the need for strong homeland security programs and even for strong military vigilance with countries such as North Korea and Pakistan.

“Nonetheless, the partisan forces that play out on the campaign trail are simply too great to overcome. If 9/11 taught us anything, it’s how deeply rooted partisanship is in our modern political culture. Even a tragedy of its magnitude could barely contain the forces that perpetually rip apart members of the two parties.

“Ten years ago, the parties came together. But they came together just for a brief spell. In the long span of history, it was as if the moment ended before either side could even blink.”

More serious than even the partisanship of our politics is the general failure of real reflection and analysis in the wake of that terrible day ten years back. A Dick Cheney can’t even hint that he has had a moment of pause considering all that has happened in a decade, including wars costing thousands of lives and perhaps $4 billion in treasure.

But reflect we must and not just on the horrible losses of a decade ago. Fareed Zakaria and others ask are we safer, was our response to 9/11 truly effective, have we improperly compromised our civil liberties and the American reputation for respecting the “rule of law,” has the re-ogranization of our intelligence system worked, and are we fated to wage an endless “war on terror?”

It is worth remembering, as Zakaria does, that “on the day before 9/11 the U.S. was at peace, had a large budget surplus, and oil was $28 a barrel. Today the U.S. is engaged in military operations across the globe, has a deficit of 1.5 trillion dollars and oil is $115 a barrel.”

A new Rasmussen survey says 66% of Americans think the country has “changed for the worst” since 9/11 and fewer than 50% think we’re winning our war on terror. To believe such surveys is to believe that the American people know that we haven’t gotten it right. As the past weekend illustrates, we remember well enough, but do we accumulate much knowledge along with the memory?

Bin Laden is dead and by most accounts his vastly diminished terror network is on the run, but it’s impossible to think – ten years on – that we are anywhere close to the end of the era that began on that spectacular September day a decade ago. Where do we go now? How will we know without more real reflection, without more effort at taking stock and admitting that maybe – just maybe – we have more learning to do?

A question for us – a question that really honors those who perished on 9/11 and in the wars that followed – is whether we will be smart enough to really assess the effectiveness of our response to the tragedy, and adjust as necessary, so that 20 or 50 years on the children of the victims of 9/11 will live in country that not only remembers their loss, but has learned from it as well.

 

American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Christie, Economy, FDR, Obama, Politics

Confidence

Posted on by christian

When Its Lost Can it be Found Again?

I’ve had a good deal of fun over the last few weeks teaching a college-level political science course at Boise State University.

The course is built around the politics and policy of the New Deal period in the 1930’s and we focus a good deal on the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt (and others) as well as the lasting impact of those challenging and dramatic days on life here in the American West.

For a young adult in college today the 1930’s might as well be the 1730’s. It is ancient history, but considering the economic and political challenges we face today, I continue to be struck by the parallels between the political and policy discussion that took place in the 1930’s and the on-going debate we’re having in the country right now.

To prepare for a recent class, I went back and read and then listened to the very first Fireside Chat Franklin Roosevelt delivered in March of 1933. FDR, inaugurated eight days earlier, had closed the nation’s banks and gotten Congress to pass emergency banking legislation to facilitate the orderly re-opening of the nation’s financial institutions. He talked to the nation by radio on Sunday evening, March 12. The historic speech was a model of clarity, description and, most importantly, confidence building. If you have never read or heard the speech, it is worth your time. The brief talk stands the test of time as an example of the power and importance of effective political rhetoric.

Roosevelt patiently explained during his talk how banks work, why some banks had failed and why some Americans had made a run on banks to convert their deposits to currency or gold. He then explained what he had done and why and that Congress had supported his bold efforts to stabilize the banking system. He then explained how banks would begin to re-open.

Here is one of the more memorable sections of the speech:

“I hope you can see, my friends, from this essential recital of what your Government is doing that there is nothing complex, nothing radical in the process.

“We have had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds. They had used money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was, of course, not true of the vast majority of our banks, but it was true in enough of them to shock the people of the United States, for a time, into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. And so it became the Government’s job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible. And that job is being performed.”

I thought of Roosevelt’s simple, elegant words as I listened to Barack Obama speak to Congress this week. In a fundamentally important way, Obama has the same challenge FDR faced during that banking crisis in 1933. He needs to begin to restore confidence – in himself, the government and in the country’s ability to move ahead.

It’s not at all clear he made much headway.

Obama did use his speech to educate, the approach FDR mastered. At one point, for example, he said in speaking of the reality of cutting spending:

“So here’s the truth.  Around two-thirds of our budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security.  Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans’ benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20%.  What’s left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That’s 12 percent for all of our other national priorities like education and clean energy; medical research and transportation; food safety and keeping our air and water clean.”

A good approach, I think, but maybe too late to be effective. I kept feeling that the President should have given this speech two years ago, or at the beginning of the mostly senseless recent debate over the debt ceiling. The words Obama spoke seem more directed at the Congress than at the American public and that comes as most Republicans, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank points out, no longer take Obama seriously. As for the public, the polls say they are losing or have lost confidence.

Credibility, confidence and competence are the Big Three of politics. Once the notion settles with voters that a politician lacks one or more of the Big Three, it’s pretty close to impossible for that person to get back in command. Just ask Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush during his last two years.

The brilliance of Franklin Roosevelt was contained in his ability to connect and explain and the abiding sense that he had confidence so the country could have confidence, too. He never lost the confidence of a sizable majority of the American people, so never had to try to regain it. Maybe that is the true measure of greatness in politics.

 

Baseball, Biomass, Christie, Climate Change, Economy, Energy, Kennan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Politics

Oil and Water

Posted on by christian

Very Strange Bedfellows

I don’t normally pay a great deal of attention to the political opinions of Hollywood personalities. So I confess I missed the initial news reports that the actress Daryl Hannah, perhaps best known for playing the mermaid in Ron Howard’s movie Splash, was arrested a few days back for protesting the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

The lovely Ms. Hannah, talented too, for all I know, isn’t the real story here, however. The politics of jobs is at work. in this international pipeline.

The pipeline project is designed to carry oil recovered from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas and the pipeline, its purpose and route, has been increasingly in the news lately. The U.S. State Department recently released an environmental impact statement that said, in essence, the project could be completed without major environmental problems. Needless to say, not everyone, including Ms. Hannah, agrees.

Most major environmental groups have expressed disappointment that the Obama Administration seems on the verge of approving the pipeline. The President’s mostly natural allies in the environmental movement are also torqued that the administration recently and abruptly dropped new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules related to smog. These two events, separate and linked at the same time, really constitute Exhibit A that the political imperative to grow the economy and create jobs, particularly during a period of prolonged economic turmoil, eventually trump most every other consideration.

My old boss former Idaho Gov. and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus, no slouch when it comes to possessing an environmental ethic, used to say: “First, you must making a living and then you must have a living that is worthwhile.” That is just another way of saying that without a job you don’t have much time or ability to enjoy the great outdoors, clean air and water. Needless to say not everyone in public life agrees about the political priority of jobs first. For some being “pure” on the environment is simply a higher calling that transcends all else, including finding some way to jump start a stumbling economy.

Put former Vice President Al Gore in this category. Gore recently, and perhaps entirely predictably,  came out in opposition to the Canada to the Gulf pipeline. The motivations of the Republican Governor of Nebraska Dave Heineman, who says he also opposes the pipeline because of its route through Nebraksa, appear more interesting. Republicans don’t normally oppose pipelines.

Daryl Hannah may look better getting arrested, but Republican Heineman and Democrat Gore as an anti-pipeline dance team may have a lot more impact on this increasingly complex and contentious environmental issue.

Development of Canada’s oil sands resource has long be contentious. Gore, never bashful about hyperpole, calls it the dirtest energy on the planet. Heineman says his opposition is based on the pipeline’s threat to the huge Ogallala aquifer that lies deep below Nebraska and several other states. The route through Nebraska’s special Sand Hills country, where my grandfather homesteaded more than a hundred years ago, is also problematic according to Gov. Heineman.

In Idaho and Montana recently the long public debate and substantial opposition to huge shipments of oilfield gear from the Port of Lewiston to the Canadian fields has been much less about the articulated reasons of shipment opponents – safety, disruption of traffic, etc – than about the mostly unspoken reasons, a strategic desire by environmental groups to prevent, or at least delay, further tar sands development.

As is most often the case, the debate over the pipeline from the Great North is waged with soundbites from all sides that simplify the discussion to the point of distortion.  There is plenty of substance here on all sides, but we never hear much that isn’t the rhetorical equivilent to Daryl Hannah getting arrested in front of the White House.

For example, how many Americans know that we already import more oil from Canada than any other country, in fact, nearly twice as much as we import from Saudi Arabia and four times as much as we ship in from Iraq. What happens without the pipeline? What happens with it? Good luck getting those answers.

The pipeline debate, the fight over the smog rules and the future of nuclear power, just to name three energy issues of the moment, are all symptoms of a failure of national political leadership to confront the fundamentals of how we use energy and where it comes from.

Many on the left of our politics can hardly fathom a serious debate about how we actually might alter the nation’s energy consumption and mix of resources because they know – heck everyone knows – that it can’t be done overnight or without real pain and dislocation. These folks are increasingly locked into a short-term, tactical mindset that creates a environmental emergency about this pipeline or that power plant. Vast expansion of wind energy production in the American West is now seeing the predictable pushback from many of these folks. Real debate and establishment of priorities goes begging with such short-term thinking.

At the same time, the hard right of our political flank pays a premium to someone like Texas Gov. Rick Perry who rejects the notion, now the overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientic community, that climate charge is a real and urgent fact. Or, closer to home, the short-sighted bemoan the public subsidies “lavished” on public transportation, while completely ignoring that the American system of air service is built on truly vast public subsides for airports, facilities, personnel and equipment.

It’s increasingly hard to have a sensible discussion about public priorities in the United States because we can’t often agree on a common set of facts and assumptions. Is a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf an environmental disaster in the making or a critical piece of infrastructure that keeps the oil following from a nearby neighbor that we haven’t recently had a war with?

Is the delay of $90 billion in smog rules a cave in to the dirty air crowd or a prudent, temporary move that my help the economy get back on its feet?  Jobs versus the environment is a long-term reality of American political life – just not a very constructive debate.

I have this naive notion that the American public is really capable of grappling with the complexity and nuance of these kinds of issues. It’s just been so long since anyone talked to us about complexity and trade-offs that we are out of practice.

Maybe Daryl Hannah can explain.