2012 Election, American Presidents, Minnick, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Handling Adversity

A One Day Story That Wasn’t

Google “Mitt Romney” today and the first thing that appears is “Mitt Romney bullying,” which says a lot about a lot of things. It may just be that a lot of folks think a story about the GOP presidential candidate’s prep school years is an interesting story, or perhaps a silly story about the silly pranks of 17-year olds, or maybe a telling story about the candidate’s privileged upbringing, or just a mild distraction from debate about the economy and war and peace, or maybe it signifies something else entirely.

The story that broke yesterday in the Washington Post may yet prove to be a passing blip on the presidential political radar screen, but it may also be the first of a prolonged series of tests of Romney and his campaign concerning just how well they handle a little adversity. What interests me today is how the Romney camp has responded, as well as the candidate’s first instincts when presented with an inconvenient story.

Romney’s first response, in a radio interview, was to issue a blanket apology for youthful indiscretions and a specific response that he couldn’t remember the incident – an alleged Romney-led pack of high school guys who set up a frightened, long-haired, supposedly gay kid and then cut his hair – that was the basis of the Post story.

I don’t know about you, but I remember too much of my school years, particularly the embarrassing stuff. I remember back to the sixth grade when the tough kid in class pushed me down and sat on my chest as I was trying to walk home from school. I had my glasses in a case in my hip pocket and they were broken when I hit the deck. You tend to remember stuff like that, even 40 or more years later. So, the “I don’t recall” answer Romney initially offered and then repeated just doesn’t have the ring of reality about it.

So what, you might well say. Who cares about prep school antics? If we were all held to account for dumb things we did in high school we would all have some explaining to do, particularly to our parents. And in the end the bullying story may be just such an event, but it will not be the last bit of personal adversity Romney faces as he endures six months of vetting before the November voting. This is why Romney’s tin ear response, time and again, to adversity is a problem for his campaign.

Each one of these episodes – bullying, corporations are people, I like firing people, the wife’s two Cadillacs – paint an unflattering picture of a guy who is being defined before our eyes and he, so far at least, lacks the basic political skills to slip away from the characterizations.

It is striking in a way that Mitt Romney has been running for president for six years straight, served as a governor of a major state, and still offers such an incomplete picture of himself. Romney told an interviewer recently that one hard lesson he has learned from his years in politics is that you must define yourself before others do the job for you. If he learned that lesson, he seems to have forgotten it again.

The bullying story is interesting less for what it says about Romney’s youth, than for what it says about how he handles his present circumstances. Had Romney said, as Time’s Joe Klein wrote today, “I did a really stupid and terrible thing” 50 years ago and I’m sorry and wish I could take it back, he’d be back to talking about the economy today. Instead, lacking the instincts of a genuinely accomplished pro, he flubbed his lines and has invited a vast amount of follow up analysis and scrutiny.

Good campaigns – winning campaigns – handle adversity. Barack Obama did in 2008 with his outrageously outspoken preacher. John Kerry didn’t with his swiftboat critics in 2004. George W. Bush did with his Vietnam record and Al Gore didn’t with his fundraising at a Buddhist temple.

Romney got through a long primary campaign against a remarkably weak field by, as Newt Gingrich said, “carpet bombing” his opponents with expensive television advertising and by appearing to be the one guy who might have a chance to win the White House. It’s a new day. Obama may not be the strongest candidate, but he’s no Rick Santorum either. Romney’s adversity is just beginning. If he can’t handle quickly and deftly a story about his 17-year old life what will he do about something really important?

 

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

Old Lessons

Where’s the Puppy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purges can have some of the most unintended consequences.

 

Intelligence, Oil Spill, September 11, Terrorism

KSM’s Circus

Justice or a Show Trial?

Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s attorney has his hands full.

Idahoans who know Boise criminal defense attorney David Nevin, a quiet, well-spoken, extremely thoughtful fellow, will instantly identify with the challenges he confronts in a courtroom in Cuba as he attempts to mount a defense for the world’s most notorious terror suspect. Nevin, a University of Idaho law grad, would be the first to acknowledge that the sense of fairness that is supposed to be at the heart of our adversary-based judicial system, coupled with a commitment to the “rule of law,” is at the very core of what Americans mean when they think about the concept of justice.

Yet, the circus-like atmosphere that prevailed last Saturday during the long awaited arraignment of KSM and three other defendants seems to have little to do with the American system. “The system is a rigged game to prevent us from doing our jobs,” Nevin complained at the end of the 13 hour proceeding last weekend conducted before the military commission that will, probably years from now, put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial.

Specifically, attorneys for the terror suspects can’t have anything like a normal attorney-client relationship with the men they are supposed to be representing. Everything that KSM says, even to his lawyer, is apparently being considered by the government to be a state secret. And torture, specifically the allegation confirmed by the CIA that KSM was waterboarded 183 times, and that torture may have led to a confession is, so far, off-limits in the proceedings.

“The government wants to kill Mr. Mohammed to extinguish the last eyewitness to his torture,” Nevin said, as reported by McClatchy’s Carol Rosenberg.

Nevin is living out the highest calling of the American criminal justice system; the notion that everyone – even the man accused of plotting to bring down the twin towers – deserves a fair trial, a chance to hear all the evidence against him and to introduce evidence, including evidence of torture, if it may help his defense. The trouble for Nevin is simply that he’s been asked to supply an adequate defense for his client in an environment of secrecy and possible torture, while the awful wounds of 9-11 still haven’t begun to heal.

Here’s the real rub: the government of the United States wants to bring these guys to justice – we all do – but for largely political reasons has determined it cannot trust the normal, open American judicial process to work as it should. A decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct the legal proceedings in a New York federal courtroom ignited a firestorm of protest, the Congress got involved and the Obama Justice Department backed down. The military commission with its secrecy, determination to protect “state secrets” and Kafkaesque rules is now what David Nevin and the other lawyers at Gitmo must deal with.

One of the toughest critics of the Gitmo process is the now-retired Air Force Colonel and one-time terrorist case prosecutor, Morris Davis, who resigned his commission and retired rather than go along with a Pentagon ruling that waterboarding was permissible in dealing with terror suspects.

“After a decade of starts and stops and revisions and failures, the system is already presumptively discredited,” Davis said in an interview recently with the Los Angeles Times. “That the apologists for the commissions say they are essentially the same, or virtually the same, or nearly the same as federal court — the fact that they have to put a qualifier on it proves it is not the same.”

Davis predicts that KSM will eventually be executed, a martyr’s death he wants, after wringing the maximum propoganda value from the proceedings. “If we execute him, we will be giving him exactly what he wants,” Davis said.

Our government’s zeal to protect secrets almost always leads to bad outcomes. The desire to protect the secrets tends to pervert the very process that the secret allegedly protects. In the Gitmo cases, the most likey outcome is conviction of KSM and the others for the unspeakable crimes of September 11, 2001 and, while that might feel like justice it also might look to the rest of the world as an outcome derived by means of a distorted and unfair process.

The fundamental strength of the United States, including a justice system that has rules, procedures and methods to protect even the guilty, ends up looking to our enemies like an updated Stalin-era show trial. If the 9-11 mastermind is guilty – and I have no doubt he is – then show the world the evidence in open court. Try him as the suspected criminal he is, not some super human hoarding great secrets, and use the strength of the American justice system to show just what kind of man he is.

We must have a system of justice that is better than those individuals to whom we apply it. It’s doubtful these commissions will pass the test of history and let’s hope we don’t regret that failure to live up to our own best standards.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

No Crying, Just Pain

The Great Rivera Is Out

I’m no Yankee fan and Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) said it for all time in A League of Their Own, “there’s no crying in baseball,” but every fan has to be moved by the awful image of the greatest closer in the history of the game grimacing in pain on the warning track in Kansas City with a torn ACL.

What a way for the season – and perhaps the career – of the great Mariano Rivera to end.

By most accounts, Mo Rivera has been the guts of the great Yankee teams of recent years; the guy who got the ball in the ninth inning and delivered time and again for the pinstripe set. For non-Yankee fans everywhere the sight of Rivera jogging in from the bullpen to save another game was about enough to prompt a switch of the dial to the Home Shopping Channel. Game over. Mr. Automatic has the ball and no one was going to lay a bat on him.

Tyler Kepner writing in the New York Times makes the case, if it need be made, for Rivera’s greatness:  “Joe Torre, the manager for most of Rivera’s career, always said that the postseason elevated Rivera over everyone else. The evidence is staggering. At a time when the stakes are highest, and the competition is strongest, the man with the best E.R.A. of the live-ball era is actually better. By a lot.

“Rivera’s postseason E.R.A. is 0.70. He has not allowed a postseason home run in 81 innings, since Jay Payton in the 2000 World Series, in a game the Yankees won,” Kepner wrote. “Rivera’s ability to pitch multiple innings in October, the way the pioneering closers did, has made him invaluable.”

Indeed. The guy is the best kind of baseball player – and teammate – he led by example, including shagging batting practice fly balls every day until yesterday.

Rivera need not come back – although I hope he can – to have his career affirmed with a lead pipe cinch first ballot selection to Cooperstown. Six times in his 18 year career he has saved 30 or more games, seven times 40 or more.

It is fitting in so many ways that Mariano Rivera is the last active player to wear Jackie Robinson’s number 42, the number that has been retired in all of baseball. Like the great Robinson Rivera, too, has been a pioneer. A quiet, gifted practioneer of excellence who has defined what it means to take the ball every time with a win on the line. If this is the end, he deserved better, but no matter since he is still the best.

 

Afghanistan, American Presidents, Churchill, Foreign Policy, Iraq, John Kennedy, O'Connor, Obama, Pete Seeger, Romney

Obama the Warrior

No More Soft on National Security

One of the great strategies in politics is to take your opponent’s greatest strength and turn that advantage  into a liability. It’s not easy to do, but when it’s done well it can be brutally effective.

The “swiftboating” of Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for president, is perhaps the best example in recent memory of how effective attacking the strength of an opponent can be. 

In Kerry’s case, a legitimate war hero – the guy was awarded the Silver and Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts for service in Vietnam – became, thanks to attacks on that military record, a questionable patriot, a liar and, in some minds, a fraud. “Swiftboating” has now entered the political lexicon as a verb meaning – to smear effectively.

You may remember that when Kerry accepted the presidential nomination in 2004 he stepped to the podium and saluted, military style. That was the beginning of the end. While it was obvious to most independent observers that Kerry didn’t deserve the swiftboat attacks and was obviously caught off guard by charges that turned the truth on its head, it’s also true that he  and his campaign did a horrible job responding. Still, the well-bankrolled truth turning – an early glimpse of what we’ll see this fall from Super PAC’s – worked remarkably well and George W. Bush, the guy who actually had avoided Vietnam service, got re-elected.

[I’ll offer the not terribly original prediction that the “swiftboating” of John Kerry will be studied years from now by political analysts as a classic example of a big smear that was improperly handled by the candidate-victim.]

The 2004 attacks on Kerry also worked, in part, because they seemed to confirm a narrative, dating back to George McGovern in 1972, that Democrats just aren’t as truthworthy when it comes to the nation’s security as Republicans. Ironically, McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot who opposed the Vietnam War, also did not – or chose not – to make a virtue of his distinguished military record. Not until Stephen Ambrose’s 2001 book – The Wild Blue – that featured McGovern’s story did many Americans know that the South Dakota senator and presidential candidate was a genuine, if deeply conflicted, hero of the Greatest Generation.

Now comes Barack Obama and the anniversary of the Navy Seal mission to – use the President’s term – “take out” Osama bin Laden. As TIME’s Jon Meacham has written, Republicans are “shocked, shocked” that the Obama team is taking credit, politicizing if you will, the bringing to justice of the world’s foremost terrorist.

“Here, however, is the issue,” Meacham writes. “Since at least 1968, Democrats have traditionally been more circumspect than their Republican foes in presidential politics. The lesson of the Clinton years and of Obama’s win of both the nomination and the general election in 2008 is that Democrats need to be as tough as JFK was (tough was a favorite Kennedy term). Is the bin Laden ad fair to Romney? No, not really. But politics is not for the faint of heart.”

Here’s my take: Obama has so far been successful in taking away from Republicans one of the historically sharpest arrows in their quiver. Try as they might, Republicans and their presidential candidate can’t pull a Kerry or McGovern on Obama. The GOP and some commentators charge that Obama has overplayed the bin Laden events of a year ago and maybe so, but here’s the issue in that regard: any day Mitt Romney is talking about foreign policy, and he’s been talking about it for days, is a bad day for his campaign.

Obama owns these issues in a way that no Democrat has favorably owned a set of foreign policy issues since Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House. Count on Obama to make the case as the campaign goes forward that he inherited two wars, shut one down in the face of critics who said he was wrong to do so, and then gave the order to take out the guy who made the other war, Afghanistan, necessary.

Frankly, Republicans and Romney, in particular, are committing political malpractice by attempting to compete with the president on these issues. Rather than going to a New York City firehouse yesterday to remember 9-11, Romney should have gone to a military hospital and quietly met with a few soldiers after issuing a statement congratulating the Navy Seals for getting bin Laden. He looks weak and guilty of “me, too” when he says he’d have given the order to go after the Al Quada leader, particularly since he suggested during the last campaign that he wouldn’t.

Romney’s campaign will succeed or fail on the basis of whether he presents a coherent economic message backed by a strategy for growing jobs and economic security for Americans. The Obama campaign has rope-a-doped their opponent into punching below his weight on foreign policy, certainly not the issues Romney wants to run on, and every day that happens, Romney loses.

 As for the charge that Obama is overplaying the bin Laden success, give that great political analyst Jon Stewart the last word. After all, George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and proclaimed Mission Accomplished in Iraq, or as Stewart said, “he spiked the ball before the game began.” Stewart’s point: Bush, like Obama, would have ridden the issue of being the good guy who got the bad guy as far as possible. In a very basic sense, Obama is again capitalizing on statements from Romney’s past that today look less than, well, astute.

Obama may be overplaying the events of a year ago, but as the baseball great Dizzy Dean once said, “it ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.”

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Moyeritis

Age Wins…

Jamie Moyer, the 49 year old left-hander who is now throwing his junk for the Colorado Rockies, recently became the oldest pitcher to ever win a major league game. Moyer may be the baseball personification of the old line that “age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.”

Moyer faced 25 year old Pittsburgh Pirate standout Andrew McCutchen three times Tuesday night. Moyer was pitching in the Majors before McCutchen was born and the kid never reached base against the old man. McCutchen couldn’t believe it.

“I can’t believe he got me out,” McCutchen told the Associated Press. “You know he has nothing to throw by you, but he just nitpicks.” No, actually Andrew, he pitches – well – and has for a long, long time.

An admiring Hall of Famer and former Moyer teammate, Goose Gossage, said it well: “He throws slow, slower and slowest. How else would you describe it?”

Moyer is an inspiration to aging jocks everywhere. I’ve probably seen him pitch more games in person than any other pitcher of his – or my generation – and like most fans I’ve sat in the stands thinking “even I could hit this guy.” Nope.

Moyer’s fastball screeches in at a top speed of 79 miles an hour. Goose Gossage brought it closer to 100, but it’s really not the speed that matters with the cagey Moyer. It’s the competitiveness, the smarts and the experience that matter. Moyer has taken care of himself, been a student of his craft and, no big surprise, has learned a lot in 25 years with nine different teams.

And, aging jocks take notice, a 79 mile an hour fastball is still beyond the reach of most people. Don’t believe me? The Fort Myers Miracle, the Minnesota Twins affiliate in the Florida State League, are running a promotion where a fan can win a ticket to a future game if they can top 79 on a radar gun. More than 80 folks spent a buck a piece the other night to crank up three pitches in hopes to throwing harder than the ancient Moyer. No one did. One frustrated pitcher spent $50 on the promotion and no doubt left with a sore arm, heckling from his buddies and a hole in his wallet.

Moyer is proof that age is, in many respects, a state of mind. Winston Churchill was 65 when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain and 77 when he took over the second time. Christopher Plummer won as Oscar at 82 and the great Jack Nicklaus was 46 when he won the Masters. Experience and perspective matter in so many ways. It helps to hit the exercise bike, too.

Moyer says the key for him is how he feels the day after he pitches. Considering the typical aches and pains most of us start to feel on the long side of 40, it’s hard to imagine rolling out of the sack at age 49 the morning after throwing 100 pitches. My back hurts just thinking about it.

Think you can hit a Moyer fastball? Most of us would be lucky to foul one of his pitches off. Think you can throw a Moyer fastball? Not gonna happen for most. At the ripe old age of 49, Jamie Moyer gives all of us cause to marvel at those who play the boys game so well when the arrival of the AARP card is just around the corner. Age and treachery, indeed. But don’t count out experience and desire, important ingredients for success at any age.

 

2014 Election, Al Gore, Borah, Bush, Christie, Church, Economy, Nebraska, Theodore Roosevelt, Wall Street

Bigness

An Old Notion Relevant Again

On the downhill side of the Gilded Age in American political and business life – that would have been in the late 1800’s – progressive reformers from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Louis Brandeis found fault with the idea and reality of a concentration of economic power.

Brandeis, a great legal advocate before he went on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, described the threat of economic concentration by a single, simple word “bigness.” Brandeis entitled one of his greatest works, published in 1913, Other People’s Money and one chapter in that book was called “The Curse of Bigness.”

“Size, we are told, is not a crime,” Brandeis wrote, “But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it was attained or the uses to which it is put. And it is size attained by combination, instead of natural growth, which has contributed so largely to our financial concentration.”

Today it is almost an article of faith that “bigger is better,” but the early 20th Century focus on means and uses of economic concentration are just as relevant today as when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House.

Our political and regulatory system seems unable to address the “too big to fail” syndrome and the human abuses that can follow. Much of corporate America seems one big merger followed by another and meanwhile, Walmart, one of the biggest of the bigs, seems to be engulfed by a major foreign bribery scandal in Mexico, Rupert Murdoch’s vast media empire is now defending its political clout in Great Britain as Murdoch execs fend off criminal charges for violating privacy. Criminal charges have been leveled against a BP engineer involved in the Gulf oil spill. You could go on, but the situation is clear – too big to fail can also be too good to be true.

Idaho Sen. Frank Church – he served in the Senate from 1957-1981 – is remembered today primarily for his headline generating investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970’s, but Church always considered another of his Senate investigations equally, if not more, important. As chairman of a subcommittee on multinational corporations in 1973, Church delved deeply into the practices, some of them corrupt, of some of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world.

Church’s work cast light on International Telephone & Telegraph’s involvement in the fall and murder of Chilean President Salvador Allende and Lockheed was exposed for its role in a bribery scandal in Japan. Lockheed’s CEO at the time admitted to spending millions on bribes to foreign officials and a Japanese prime minister went to jail in the resulting scandal. The entire chain of events led to passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977, the U.S. law that Walmart may find itself on the wrong side of today.

Frank Church discovered in that long ago investigation that human nature, driven by an imperative to constantly expand and concentrate economic power has its dark side. In such a world corners get trimmed, ends justify means and we experience an Enron or we end up bailing out a financial institution that can only justify its continued existence because it’s too big to fail.

A thinking man’s conservative, New York Times columnist David Brooks, had a fascinating column this week in which, in a way, he came at this bigness issue from a novel angle. Brooks’ point was that a blind focus on destroying the competition – Brandeis might have termed it how businesses become always bigger – is the flip side of a lack of innovation. When the focus is on constantly and relentlessly growing, creativity goes begging. The need to be bigger inevitably trumps everything, including finding a better way to make a widget.

Brandeis argued a hundred years ago – his was the age of Standard Oil and the House of Morgan – that eventually bigness, that which “is attendant of excessive size,” is inefficient. Eventually, he wrote, “Decentralization will begin. The liberated smaller units will find no difficulty in financing their needs without bowing the knee to money lords. And a long step will have been taken toward attainment of the New Freedom [a reference to Wilson-era reforms in banking and business.]

It may well be in this age of globalization with a bank in Rhode Island tied to the fate of a housing development in Ireland that there is no going back from bigness, but there may be more than nostalgia in longing for a simpler, smaller time.

Frank Church, a liberal Democrat, helped expose the evils of bigness and concentrated power in the 1970’s, just as his role model in the Senate, William E. Borah, had done in the 1930’s. Borah, a Republican progressive, hated bigness, monopoly and concentration of power. He championed small business and decentralization and once said, “When you have destroyed small business, you have destroyed our towns and our country life, and you have guaranteed and made permanent the concentration of economic power, [which in turn ensures] the concentration of political power.  Monopoly and bureaucracy are twin whelps from the same kennel.”

I don’t know about you, but I long for a political leader willing to call bluff on concentrated power. Bigger isn’t always better, it may just be bigger.

 

Air Travel, Baucus, Books, U.S. Senate

Once it Worked

The Last Great Senate

Given today’s persistent gridlock in Congress, it’s easy to forget that the United States Senate was once a place where bipartisan lawmaking actually occurred on a fairly regular basis and not that long ago.

A fine new book – The Last Great Senate by Ira Shapiro – remembers a Senate full of great and gifted legislators, including Washington State’s Scoop Jackson, pictured nearby. Shapiro, a former trade official in the Clinton Administration and Senate staffer, makes a compelling case that the U.S. Senate in the 1960’s and 1970’s was a great place. A roll call of the great ones of that period, Scoop included, reads like a roster of some of the institutions very best.

Mansfield from Montana, Baker from Tennessee, Church from Idaho and Hatfield from Oregon. And there were more, Javits of New York, Rudman of New Hampshire, Byrd of West Virginia, Cooper of Kentucky and Case of New Jersey. Most are lost to memory now, but the Senate they occupied was a far different place than today’s where party leaders seem only to traffic in partisan sound bites and elbow each other for each day’s tactical political advantage.

Writing last week in the Seattle Times, Shapiro remembered the great Scoop as a fully formed, well informed and well intentioned Senator.

“Jackson was also a master legislator,” Shapiro wrote, “able to reach principled compromises to further the national interest. During the late 1970s, as energy dependence became a central concern for America, Jackson was the chairman of the newly formed Senate Energy Committee. Jackson loathed President Jimmy Carter (the feeling was mutual), who had defeated him for the Democratic nomination in 1976. Jackson doubted Carter’s readiness to be president and also disagreed with the thrust of his energy proposals, believing them to be too generous to the oil and gas industries.

“Yet, despite all these factors, and even while leading the fight against Carter’s effort to negotiate the SALT II arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union, Jackson worked tirelessly for three long years to produce a national energy policy. He respected the presidency, if not the president, and saw the need to forge compromises between consumer and producer interests, and the various regions of our country.”

Talk privately to any thinking member of Congress and they will tell you that the country faces serious challenges that aren’t difficult to identify. We must gain control of fiscal policy and the tax code is a mess and must be reformed for reasons of both fairness and increased revenue. We face serious competitive issues that are only met by world-class trade, education and infrastructure investment. Immigration policy must be re-structured and – brace yourselves – even gun violence in America must be addressed.

The problems are readily apparent, what is failing is our institutions, beginning with the federal legislature and particularly the United States Senate. Gone is the sense that a six-year Senate term gives 100 elite Americans a license to operate just a little above the partisan hustle. For the better part of three decades, as Shapiro’s must read book makes clear, many of the nation’s most pressing problems have gone begging, while the Senate has fallen into a frozen, partisan swamp of inaction.

It would be comforting to think that the institution can reform itself from within and regain some of its historic luster, but in today’s Twitter-infused partisanship that is probably asking too much. The fault, dear friends is not in the Senate, really, but in ourselves. We settle for gridlock rather than demand a Senate of Scoop Jacksons.

 

2012 Election, Minnick, Pete Seeger, Romney

Rolling the Vice

Who Will Mitt Pick?

There is an old truism in politics that holds that one can go from hero to zero just like that – meaning quick, very quick. The reverse is also true. Struggling front runner becomes nominee literally overnight  and our incredibly short political attention span moves on to the next decision.

Three weeks ago the pundits were wondering if Mitt Romney could beat Rick Santorum on Santorum’s  home turf in Pennsylvania. Today they’re suggesting he select, take your pick, Condi Rice, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio or half a dozen others, as the perfect running mate. For the GOP candidate the focus has shifted and now American voters, to the extent they are paying attention, can assess Romney’s real ability as a CEO. Can he pick the right person for his Number Two? History would tell us there are no perfect running mates, but Romney’s pick, whomever it turns out to be, will be sliced and diced to the last soundbite for hints of whether he has done what few would be presidents have ever done – pick the absolutely right person.

In 1964, in part to counter his ultra-conservative, southwestern cowboy, bomb throwing (or dropping) image, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater selected a little-know northeastern, GOP establishment Congressman named William E. Miller to run with him as vice president. We know how that turned out. Miller is now best remembered as the star of an American Express commercial that asked “do you know who I am?” Most people didn’t. Give yourself extra credit if you know the answer to the political Jeopardy question – Who was Bill Miller?

The conventional wisdom holds that the second spot on the ticket is all about  “balance” – regional, ethnic, religious or ideological – and while such reasoning has factored into vice picks historically, the more common consideration is more personal and practical and often turns a mirror on the candidate rather than focusing a spotlight on the running mate.

The balance arguement put Lyndon Johnson on the Democratic ticket in 1960. John Kennedy absolutely had to carry Texas and Lyndon delivered. Franklin Roosevelt put Texas Congressman John Nance Garner on the ticket in 1932 less for regional balance than to remove Garner as a rival in the Democratic nominating process. Garner swung his convention delegates to FDR in exchange for a spot on the ticket. In 1948 Harry Truman picked Alben Barkley, another trivia question who actually was vice president, mostly because he felt comfortable with the older Barkley who was the Senate majority leader.

The desire not to be in any way overshadowed probably led George H.W. Bush to make one of the truly curious selections in modern times in 1988 when little-know Dan Quayle, a very junior, deer-in-the-headlights senator from Indiana, joined the GOP ticket. The same could be said of Richard Nixon’s pick of Spiro Agnew in 1968, although Nixon knew the former Maryland governor was capable of  carrying out the attack dog role that typically falls to the second fiddle.

Did Joe Biden help Barack Obama win in 2008? Or did Dick Cheney deliver for George W. Bush in 2000? Each may have helped the presidential candidate assume a veneer of foreign policy experience, but for the most part neither pick did any harm to the candidate’s electoral prospects, which in the end is the most reasonable criteria for the second pick.

John McCain may have had no choice but to roll the vice and pick Sarah Palin in 2008, a decision that looks in retrospect as reckless now as was unconventional at the time. Palin, I would argue, did do harm, because her choice by the supposedly mature, sensible McCain reflected badly on his judgment. I’m guessing Romney, the buttoned-down, data-driven former CEO won’t make that mistake. He’ll go safe and sober and hope to do no harm.

 Ohio Sen. Rob Portman would be safe and sober and Romney needs to win Ohio. If Romney is going to run his campaign based upon the twin pillars of his corporate experience and his allegation that the incumbent just isn’t up to the job, then he best use the vice presidential selection process as if he were picking a vice president at Bain Capital. Flash and dash isn’t what he needs, competence is. Romney needs a veep who helps build the CEO-brand, since that is the rationale he has adopted for his campaign.

In rare ocassions in American political history a vice president has helped win an election. More often the best they do is to accomplish the minimum, they do no harm. And – remember William E. Miller –  in the best case the vice presidential candidate doesn’t become the answer to a trivia question.

 

Britain, New York, Otter, World War II

Keep Calm

And Carry On…

I just bought a nifty coffee mug emblazoned with the five words – Keep Calm and Carry On. (It seemed like the right kind of mantra at home and the office!)

After the second cup from the handsome mug, I got to wondering about the origins of that phrase. Turns out the British government during some of the toughest days of the Second World War commissioned a limited series of posters aimed at keeping the British upper lip adequately stiff.

The “Keep Calm” poster was the third of the trio and would have been rolled out only under the most dire circumstances, like the Nazis invading across the English Channel. While the other posters – Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, Will Bring Us Victory and Freedom is in Peril, Defend it With All Your Might – were widely used to buck up the hard pressed population of the Empire, the Keep Calm slogan was never used publicly.

The third poster disappeared for years until discovered, wouldn’t you know, by a used bookstore owner in a box of old books in his shop in the north of England.

Bookstore owner Stuart Manley told the Guardian that he originally thought the poster was, “a big piece of paper folded up at the bottom [of a box]. I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That’s quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that’s where it all started.”

The British version of the public television series Antiques Roadshow recently featured a woman who had been given 15 of the original posters by her father. It was estimated the posters – maybe the largest stash of originals – are worth several thousand pounds.

Now the slogan – approp in almost any circumstance and really great simple, positive messaging – has a whole new lease on life. In many ways, its the perfect melding of message, design, simplicity and elegance and you see the wording everywhere, on coffee mugs, tee shirts, wallpaper, posters, even in parody.

My favorite parody, complete with an image right out of the old Hitchcock film North by Northwest, is “Keep Calm and Cary Grant.”

Here is a link to a neat little video history of the posters. Keep Calm, an iconic image from the darkest days of the 20th Century and a testament to how something classic never goes out of style.