2012 Election, Andrus, Baseball, Biden, Election of 1944, FDR, Lincoln, Minnick, Paul, Pete Seeger, Politics, Romney

Dumping the Veep

Posted on by christian

Pulling a Garner or a Hannibal Hamlin

John Nance Garner is mostly forgotten now days. If he’s remembered for anything it was for his alleged pity comment that the “vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” There is some debate around whether he actually said that or whether spit was what he was really talking about.

In any event, Garner – Cactus Jack – was Speaker of the House, a two-term vice president, a serious presidential candidate in 1932 and one of the few incumbent vice presidents in American history to be dumped from the ticket. Garner didn’t think much of his boss Franklin Roosevelt running for an unprecedented third term in 1940 and would have run himself had FDR not run. That challenge to FDR’s leadership coupled with Garner’s generally conservative political outlook, was enough to convince the supremely confident Roosevelt to send Jack back to Uvalde, Texas in 1941.

I’m reminded of this little history lesson by virtue of the political story that won’t go away – should Barack Obama dump Joe Biden from the 2012 Democratic ticket and replace the somewhat gaffe prone Veep with, say, Hillary Clinton?

Dumping a running mate is rare, but FDR – one of the greatest presidents by most measure – actually did it twice. Abraham Lincoln did it too in 1864 when he dumped a down east Republican from Maine with the wonderful name of Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket and replaced him with a Tennessee “war” Democratic by name of Andrew Johnson. The rest is history as they say.

Roosevelt second dumping took place in 1944 when the man he had handpicked to be vice president four years earlier, Henry Wallace of Iowa, was demoted and a not very well regarded Missouri Senator name of Harry Truman replaced him. On such decisions history turns.

In each case, the incumbent president made the decision to change vice presidents in order to strengthen the ticket. FDR wanted to run with a known liberal in 1940 and by 1944 Wallace had become a liability to the Democratic ticket so the safe Truman was ushered in. In 1864, facing a serious challenge from a “peace” Democrat Gen. George McClellan, and with the Civil War not going all that well, Lincoln aimed to create a national unity ticket by inviting a loyal Democrat from a southern state to balance the ticket. Once could argue that in each case the reshuffling strengthened the ticket and the president who made what must be a tough call was re-elected.

(Gerald Ford dumped Nelson Rockefeller in 1976 and replaced him with Bob Dole, but the circumstances were much different than the FDR or Lincoln scenarios. Neither Republican was elected for starters.)

So, will – or should – Obama shuffle the ticket this year? New York Times columnist Bill Keller says he should since the move would do “more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do.”

Columnist Jonathan Alter wrote last October that “if it’s clear that Democrats need to do something dramatic to avoid losing the White House, the Switcheroo will happen” simply because everyone involved will bury their pride to keep the GOP from taking over all three branches of the federal government in the next election.

Most of the speculation about “the Switheroo” has Biden getting a better consolation prize, the State Department, than Garner, Wallace or Hamlin did. Garner left public life in 1941, Wallace took the less than glamorous job of Secretary of Commerce and later ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, and Lincoln briefly considered, and didn’t follow through, on the notion of making Hamlin Secretary of the Treasury. Hamlin eventually returned to Washington for two terms in the U.S. Senate before retiring for good in 1880.

For her part Clinton – and her husband – seems to disavow any interest in making the big switch, even while folks like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich make the case for it.

So what will President Obama do? Hold tight with Biden? Make a big splash with a switch? Obama, apparently not much of a hands on manager who clearly doesn’t like drama, will want to practice the first rule of vice presidents – do no harm. If he thinks he can win with Biden he’ll stick with him.

If, on the other hand, come July Republican nominee Mitt Romney has the lead in the polls and momentum, Obama might go for the big gesture. He is a student of history and surely knows that dumping a vice president, if done with a certain calmness and style, actually helped the two presidents he most admires – FDR and Lincoln. Putting Hillary on the ticket would, of course, generate as much buzz as John McCain sparked when he plucked Sarah Palin out of Alaskan obscurity. But Obama won’t have to worry about Clinton answering Katie Couric’s question about what newspapers she reads.

Hillary just might be a game changer.

 

2012 Election, Campaign Finance, Minnick, Poetry

Colbert Explains It

Posted on by christian

Super PAC’s: Crazy + Funny = Absurd

Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert eased, sort of, into the South Carolina primary on his show last night, but not before first handing off his Colbert Super PACto his buddy and equal opportunity political funster Jon Stewart.

The exchange the two brilliant satirists had about Super PAC’s, how they can’t be coordinated with a candidate (har, har), but can be run by a business partner or even, as is the case with Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, former staff members, is a better – and more damning – indictment of the absurd state of American political campaign finance than you’ll find on any “real” news broadcast.

Colbert signed off his show last night, following a balloon drop, by throwing a kiss to Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2010 that opened the flood gates for unregulated, mostly undisclosed spending in our political campaigns.

Laugh along with Colbert, but worry at the same time about the state of our politics where the loudest voice on television – defined by who can collect the most money and keep its source the greatest secret – is shaping our elections.

 

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Baseball, Campaign Finance, Clinton, Minnick, Montana, Obama, Pete Seeger, Poetry, Politics, Romney

Following More Money

Posted on by christian

Are Corporations People, My Friend?

It is rare – very rare – that a state Supreme Court rises up on its hind legs and says to the United States Supreme Court we think you blew it.

Yet, that is pretty much what the seven member Montana Supreme Court said just before the New Year with a decision that seems sure to get the ultra-controversial Citizens United corporate campaign finance case back before John Roberts and Company very soon.

Citizens United is the case, you will recall, that President Obama denounced in his State of the Union speech. The U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision, decided 5-4, not only overturned a century of settled campaign finance law, but served to midwife the unprecedented level of unregulated and mostly undisclosed spendingof the so called Super PAC’s in the current Republican presidential primary process.

According to recent news reports, Newt Gingrich was on the blunt end of more than $4 million in such spending by a group with close ties to Mitt Romney that certainly contributed, if not caused, Gingrich’s dramatic shellacking in the Iowa caucuses. This political nuclear warfare has now moved on to South Carolinawhere Super PAC’s aligned with Gingrich, Rick Santorum and other candidates are going after Romney.

As Romney might say, “politics ain’t bean bags,” so what’s the problem here? The Montana Supreme Court tried to answer that question in its recent ruling involving similar, shadowy, state-level, secret groups intent on influencing election outcomes in a state that historically knows a thing or two about political corruption.

The Montana Court, in a 5-2 decision, upheld the constitutionality of the state’s 99 year old ban on corporate contributions in state races. In doing so, Chief Justice Mike McGrath delved deeply into the history of political corruption in Big Sky Country citing historical works by the great Montana historians K. Ross Toole and Mike Malone. The Judge referenced the notorious Montana “war of the cooper kings,” the extraordinary corporate influence that the Anaconda Mining Company once held over Montana, and the notorious case of William Andrews Clarkwho used his vast corporate wealth to bribe his way into the United States Senate. Here’s one section of McGrath’s opinion:

“W.A. Clark, who had amassed a fortune from the industrial operations in Butte, set his sights on the United States Senate. In 1899, in the wake of a large number of suddenly affluent members, the Montana Legislature elected Clark to the U.S. Senate. Clark admitted to spending $272,000 in the effort and the estimated expense was over $400,000. Complaints of Clark’s bribery of the Montana Legislature led to an investigation by the U.S. Senate in 1900. The Senate investigating committee concluded that Clark had won his seat through bribery and unseated him. The Senate committee ‘expressed horror at the amount of money which had been poured into politics in Montana elections…and expressed its concern with respect to the general aura of corruption in Montana.'”

Chief Justice McGrath then continued his fascinating history lesson, “In a demonstration of extraordinary boldness, Clark returned to Montana, caused the Governor to leave the state on a ruse and, with the assistance of the supportive Lt. Governor, won appointment to the very U.S. Senate seat that had just been denied him. When the Senate threatened to investigate and unseat Clark a second time, he resigned. Clark eventually won his Senate seat after spending enough on political campaigns to seat a Montana Legislature favorable to his candidacy.”

You have to wonder if John Roberts or Samuel Alito has ever read that little bit of American history. The Montana law upheld in the state court’s decision was passed in the wake of the Clark scandal and has been on the books for nearly a century, a detail with wicked similarity to the Teddy Roosevelt-era federal law banning corporate money that was overturned in Citizens United.

In his opinion in the Montana case, McGrath asks the obvious question that applies at both the state and federal levels. “The question then, is when in the last 99 years did Montana lose the power or interest sufficient to support the statute, if it ever did. If the statute has worked to preserve a degree of political and social autonomy is the State required to throw away its protections?”

The group that sought to skirt the Montana corporate ban wasn’t very subtle about its aims. “As you know,” the group called American Traditions Partnership said in its appeal for money, “Montana has very strict limits on contributions to candidates, but there is no limit to how much you can give to this program. No politician, no bureaucrat, and no radical environmentalist will ever know you helped make this program possible.”

American Traditions has said it will appeal the Montana decision.

Two Montana Supreme Court judges dissented and made the case, as indeed may be all too correct, that a state level court is bound to live with a U.S. Supreme Court decision, even as it tries to reason its way around why a state has a compelling interest in regulating its own elections with laws based on its own unique history.

But even in dissent, Montana Justice James C. Nelson expressed outrage at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision. “Corporations are not persons,” Nelson wrote. “Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government.”

Incidentally, Nelson was born in Moscow, Idaho and graduated from the University of Idaho.

The faux talk show host Stephen Colbert has created his own Super PAC to poke serious fun at this supremely serious business. Even the name of Colbert’s PAC, – “Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow” PAC – is an effort to show how the uplifting sounding names of these entities usually hide real motives. They might better be called “The Committee to Assault Mitt Romney” or “The Barack Obama Walks on Water PAC.”

The whole point here – re-enforced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United – is secrecy and unlimited money.

Colbert’s PAC, to make a point with absurdity, recently put up television ads supporting the owner’s side in their dispute with the N.B.A. players association. As the New York Times reported in a fascinating magazine cover story on Colbert last Sunday:

“These [ads] were also sponsored by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, but they were “made possible,” according to the voice-over, by Colbert Super PAC SHH Institute. Super PAC SHH (as in “hush”) is Colbert’s 501(c)(4). He has one of those too — an organization that can accept unlimited amounts of money from corporations without disclosing their names and can then give that money to a regular PAC, which would otherwise be required to report corporate donations. ‘What’s the difference between that and money laundering?'” Colbert delightedly told the Times.

“In the case of Colbert’s N.B.A. ads, the secret sugar daddy might, or might not, have been Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who has appeared on the show and whom the ads call a ‘hero.’ We’ll never know, and that of course is the point. Referring to the Supreme Court ruling that money is speech, and therefore corporations can contribute large sums to political campaigns, Colbert said, ‘Citizens United said that transparency would be the disinfectant, but (c)(4)’s are warm, wet, moist incubators. There is no disinfectant.'”

Exactly. Montana knows something about the need for political disinfectant. Stay tuned and, if you want to understand Citizens United in actual practice, read the reasoned, informed, context rich, real world opinions of the Montana justices on both sides of this fundamentally important issue.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Campaign Finance, Minnick, Obama, Paul, Pete Seeger, Poetry, Political Correctness, Romney

$$$$$

Posted on by christian

Following the Money

With two wins in a row in the hip pocket of his blue jeans, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney heads to South Carolina today to try and wrap up the GOP contest. Gauging by the most recent information from the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), Romney already has won the Republican money race in the Pacific Northwest.

The Republican nominee-in-waiting far outpaces his GOP rivals when it comes to raising money in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

Idaho is clearly Romney country. As of the end of September last year, Romney had raised more than $336,000 in Idaho with more than a third of that total coming from heavily Mormon eastern Idaho. Romney, who hails from a pioneer LDS family in Utah, has raised about $130,000 in the Idaho Falls and Pocatello media markets and nearly $60,000 more in south central Idaho’s Magic Valley.

[I’m not always sure what the FEC really does, but the Commission has created a spiffy website where you can track contributions by zip code and find the names of individual contributors. At the site, you can click on a map of any state, select the drop down menu for the candidate you want to check and see details of the candidate’s haul in that state.]

Romney is doing almost as well raising money in Idaho as he is in much more populous, but much more Democratic Washington State. Romney leads all the GOP candidates there with $346,000 raised through the end of September, even though the Washingtonians for Mitt Romney blog hasn’t been updated since 2007. Romney’s total in Oregon is $176,000, with a not terribly impressive $41,000 collected in Montana.

[The Romney website has a state-by-state list of endorsements – Gov. Butch Otter in Idaho and former Sen. Gordon Smith in Oregon, for example – but the Idaho section carries a strange reference to former Sen. Larry Craig, a 2008 endorser of Romney. The site says Craig “was caught in a sex scandal and forced to resign from office and the campaign.” That quote requires a  Rick Perry “oops” response. Craig, of course, initially said he would resign in the wake of his 2007 “scandal,” but then went on an served out his term in the Senate which ended in early 2009.]

Proof that the so called GOP establishment is lining up behind Romney can be found inside the FEC numbers. Former Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood is in for Romney to the max – $2,500 – as is Idaho’s premier funder of conservative causes Frank VanderSloot of Idaho Falls.

Barack Obama remains, of course, the fundraiser-in-chief. The president has raised $1.4 million in Washington, nearly $390,000 in Oregon, nearly $98,000 in Montana and $49,000 in Idaho. That last number – $49,000 in Idaho – means Obama has raised more in the reddest of the red states than any of the rest of the GOP field, including Ron Paul. Paul’s total in Idaho is just north of $40,000. The Texas Congressman has raised $174,000 in Washington, $84,000 in Oregon and $32,000 in Montana.

The New York Times today reports that Romney pulled in $24 million more in the fourth quarter of 2011. He’ll likey need to spend a good deal of that in South Carolina where Super PAC’s supporters of his now on life support opponents will spend big to try and keep the GOP race going.

 The FEC site contains other nuggets of political trivia that reveal a good deal. One Paul contributor Harmut A. Leuschner of Hayden, Idaho, who is listed in the reports as a mechanic at Alpine Motors, had written 13 checks totally $425 to Paul’s campaign through September 2011. The largest check was for $100. That, my friends, is a committed supporter.

 

2012 Election, American Presidents, Baseball, Baucus, Minnick, Obama, Politics, U.S. Senate

Assessing the Recess

Posted on by christian

Constitutional Crisis or Political Gamesmanship?

Republicans and many conservative legal authorities are outraged by President Obama’s recent recess appointments to install Richard Cordray at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. Congressional Republicans and their allies say Obama has acted unconstitutionally with the appointments since the Senate, which constitutionally has the power to advise and consent on presidential appoinments, has now suffered an Obama end run.

Conservative legal expert John Yoo, author of the legal analysis allowing President George W. Bush to employ “advanced interrogation methods,” and now a University of California law professor, speaks for most Republicans when he says, “Some think me a zealous advocate of executive power, and often I am when it comes to national security issues. But I think President Obama has exceeded his powers” by making the Cordray appointment. 

Congressional Democrats and the White House contend the president acted within his Constitutional powers since the Senate was “functionally” in recess and only meeting on the most perfunctory basis – sessions every three days that often last for less than a minute – and therefore unable to consider and pass judgment on his nominees. The issue seems certain to end up being decided by the third branch, the judiciary, in a legal battle that could take years.

Around such obscure details constitutional governments determine how the often sticky gears of governance turn. Both sides in this dispute have good talking points. The administration argues, in essence, that Congress is using a legal gimmick to limit the president’s power to fill vacancies or, put another way, impeding his ability to carry out his sworn duties to execute the laws passed by Congress. Congressional Republicans counter that it is a fundamental power of the Congress to determine when it is in session and when it is not in session. It’s a good constitutional law seminar subject, but the back story is also important.

The recess appointment process was analyzed in the Federalist Papers and is included in the Constitution in the section dealing with presidential power. Here is the language: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”

Presidents since George Washington have used the recess appointment power, sometimes controversially, such as when Bush 43 appointed the conservative firebrand and United Nation’s critic John Bolton to be the U.N Ambassador. Bush made 171 recess appointment and Ronald Reagan more than 240. Bill Clinton was no slouch during recess. He made 140 such appointments during his eight years in the White House.

So while Republican National Committee Chairman Rance Preibus can bluster that Obama’s recess appointments are proof of the president’s wanton disregard of the Constitution – “one more chapter in Barack Obama’s trampling of the Constitution” – the real issue a court will likely decide is whether the president has been hampered by Congress from carrying out his duties. Can Congress, in effect, prevent the executive branch from functioning by refusing to act on the appointment of key individuals?

No serious person, including a dyed-in-the-wool Constitutional originalist, would argue that the Founders – Alexander Hamiliton wrote the relevant Federalist Paper – envisioned a Senate that would perpetually stay in session by having one member show up ever three days, gavel the session to order, announce that there was no business and be off to lunch in under 60 seconds.

The Founders clearly established a process that contemplated that any president would have the right – indeed the responsibility – to appoint officers to carry out the work of the government. The balance of power would be ensured by giving the Senate the right – indeed the responsibility – to advise and consent to those appointments.

A key part of the breakdown of the basic workings of our government – proven in many ways, including the abysmal Congressional approval ratings – has been the exercise of raw partisan power in the Senate, and both parties are guilty of this, that prevents even consideration of an appointment when a minority object to the appointee, or in the case of Cordray, objects to the very existence of the agency that he has now been appointed to lead.

It is well documented that Richard Cordray, the former Attorney General of Ohio, is not the real issue with Senate Republicans. They oppose the very idea of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or at least many of the details about how the bureau will operate. Still, the agency was created by the passage of legislation that was legally signed into law by the president. The real issue then is the operation of a duly constituted agency of the federal government, not a recess appointment. Smell a whiff of politics in the air?

As Richard H. Thaler, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago, notes in a New York Times essay, the real problem here, and it does threaten if not immediately then eventually a genuine Constitutional crisis, is the inability of our political institutions to make a responsible bargain.

Professor Thaler reminds us that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said a few months back that his overriding objective running up to the 2012 election was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. A part of that strategy, it seems pretty clear, is to deny the president some of the key personnel he needs to run the government.

Senate Republicans have refused to consider confirmation, for example, of a Nobel Prize winning economist to serve on the Council of Economic Advisers. Donald Berwick, a nationally recognized expert on health care, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, did get a recess appointment from Obama to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but recently left when it was clear that he would never get confirmed by the Senate.

Thaler says refusing to make use of such expertise is like saying “no” when Phil Jackson wants to coach your kid’s grade school basketball team.

And the professor has a question for McConnell and, for that matter, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada who first hatched the “gimmick” of keeping the Senate perpetually in session. Reid’s motive was partisan, too. He intended to thwart George W. Bush’s recess appointments.

“I have a question for Senator McConnell,” Thaler wrote. “If you achieve your goal and a Republican is elected president. what will happen then? Won’t Senate Democrats take it up a notch? If they don’t like the new president’s foreign policy, for example, they could refuse to confirm a secretary of defense, citing the Cordray case as a precedent, and leading to either more recess appointments or 24/7 sessions for the Senate.”

This is no way to run a government. Senate Democrats and Republicans are set on a path of what can only be called a political form of MAD – mutually assured destruction – the nuclear war fighting strategy that assumes no sane person will use the ultimate weapons because they face certain destruction from the other side.

But MADness is precisely what is going on here. Neither side trusts the other, both are willing to stretch and abuse the rules of the Senate (including the filibuster) in order to thwart the other side and, of course, practical government based upon trust and mutual respect breaks down and is replaced by overheated political rhetoric, more dysfunction and gridlock. Little wonder Congressional approval ratings are in the ditch.

Here is a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution: any president is entitled to select his nominees for important governmental posts and the Senate is entitled to “advise and consent” to those nominees. The Constitution is, in essence, the rulebook for running the government and the rulebook does not contemplate that either side will game the system. The Constitution must be implemented in an environment of trust and mutual respect and, if things are to work, one side is not entitled to use gimmicks to thwart the other.

When it comes to recess appointments, both sides are wrong. The responsible path is to give the president – any president – an up or down vote on his nominees unless, in those extremely rare cases, a president appoints a total loser to a government job. Only then will presidents do what they should do, which is to consult widely on important appointments before they are made. The point ought to be bipartisan support for an important nominee.

At the same time, the Senate should seriously re-examine its “advise and consent” role, which requires that individual senators – acting in the broad public interest, not merely partisan political interest – look deeply into the qualifications of nominees and give these folks who put themselves through a public and political ringer in order to serve their country a fair and honest hearing.

 

Arizona, Baseball, Church, Civility, Giffords, John V. Evans, Justice Department, Politics

Tucson

Posted on by christian

One Year On

A year ago this weekend Tucson, Arizona was at the center of the world. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a vibrant up-and-coming moderate Democrat, was shot during a saturday morning meet and greet with her constituents at a Safeway store a mile or so from where we retreat whenever we can from southern Idaho’s winter inversions. Six other people who were nearby the Congresswoman that day, including a nine year old girl and a respected federal judge, died. Many others were injured.

Those events just a year ago seem as though they happened last week, and at the same time, they seem – our attention span being what it is – like ancient history.

In Tucson, a genuinely civilized place an hour north of the Mexican border, seemingly everything might have changed and regretably perhaps very little has changed over the last year. Gifford’s remarkable recovery from her brain injury that awful January day seems to me a miracle. She’ll appear with her husband Mark Kelly at a candle light vigil memorial service on Sunday. She is still a Member of Congress, undecided on whether to seek another term in a swing district that both parties would love to have come November. A moving ceremony was held in the Catalina foothills this week to dedicate a monument to one of Giffords’ young staff members, Gabe Zimmerman, who did not survive the attack. A series of other activities are scheduled to mark the events of January 8, 2011.

The Tucson community seems, in many respects, committed to remembering, and finding a way forward from, what is widely called The Event. The University of Arizona, for example, has established The National Institute for Civil Discourse and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush are the national co-chairs.

Still, as the Tucson Weekly notes, so much about the shooting remains either a mystery or unresolved a year later. The shooter, a deeply troubled young man, continues to be evaluated as he waits to stand trial. The passionate discussion in the aftermath of the shooting about the desperate need for better mental health services in Arizona and the nation seems to have passed quietly away. The determined calls for calmer and more civil political discourse, calls that seemed so sensible in the wake of January 8, have been overtaken by another political election cycle that is destined to dump millions of dollars– maybe more – into the dissimination of some of the nastiest, most anonymous political attacks in the history of the republic. Sensible ideas about keeping weapons from the potentially deadly hands of the mentally ill are unthinkable as subjects for debate in the presidential election campaign. The Congressional newspaper, The Hill, reports that security concerns in Congress have largely given way to a return to business as usual.

Life in America goes on and so does the peculiar kind of American death that visited Tucson a year ago.

Last month, according to FBI data, 1.5 million Americans acquired a hand gun. A female U.S. Park Service Ranger, the mother of two young daughers, was shot and killed days ago at a roadblock in Rainier National Park in Washington. The shooter was an Iraq war veteran. Last fall, a mentally troubled faculty member at the University of Idaho shot and killed one of his students. Six police officers were shot, one killed and two are still critical, during a drug raid in Utah in the last week.

Americans have embraced wars on drugs, illegal immigration, radical Muslim terrorists, even wars on cancer and heart diesease, but no war on gun violence. Washington Congressman Norm Dicks, a proponent of a sensible and extremely limited policy to ban guns from the national parks, says such a move, limited as it would be, is impossible given that the “NRA (the National Rifle Association) has a majority in the House and the Senate – that’s the reality of it.”

No tragedy, not Gabby Giffords’ wounding and six deaths in Tucson a year ago, not the senseless murder of a Park Service Ranger, not massacres at Virginia Tech University or Fort Hood, can cause the nation’s leaders to even pause and consider a better course for guns. The public policy response to American handgun violence is simply non-existent and the candle light vigils will continue, year after year.

The Arizona events are remembered this weekend with deep sorrow and with the peculiarly American response to such senseless violence – hope for a better future. Hope, regrettably, is not a strategy. A candle light vigil, as important and heartfelt as it will be, is not enough.

The Tucson dead, nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Greene, Judge John Roll, Dorothy “Dot” Morris, Phyllis Schneck, Dorwin Stoddard and Gabe Zimmerman, along with all the other victims of our unique epidemic of gun violence, deserve to be remembered every day, but they deserve better from their leaders, as well.

 

Air Travel, American Presidents, Andrus, Baseball, Books, FDR, Obama, Politics

Confidence Men

Posted on by christian

No Passion for Anonymity Here

So many things we associate with the modern American presidency, including its imperial nature, where created by Franklin D. Roosevelt nearly 80 years ago. Roosevelt perfected the presidential news conference, used the mass media skillfully and repeatedly, polished the symbols of the office to a new sheen and he invented the modern White House staff and Cabinet machinery.

After reading Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men over the holidays, a sharply critical assessment of Barack Obama’s first two years in office often fueled by the mistakes of his dysfunctional economic team, I’m betting that the president has quietly cursed FDR for that last invention – the White House staff and Cabinet operation.

The overarching theme of Suskind’s book – a president who can’t or won’t control his own staff is going to have a tough time running the country – is, at its core, an indictment of the modern way of politics in our nation’s capitol. Big egos, retained minds, power for power’s sake and a supreme level of confidence in one’s own view of the world are, in Suskind’s telling, at the heart of the original Obama economic team and its response to the Great Recession.

The two principle (and bad) actors in Suskind’s tale are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former Clinton Treasury official Lawrence Summers. Now-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was then White House chief of staff, plays a less central role, but still comes off like the opinionated, profane bully that everyone – admirer and not – seems to agree he is. For whatever reasons those unsvaory traits endeared him to the cool, no drama president.

Suskind’s book has had its detractors, including Geithner and the White House press office. Reviewing the 515 page tome in the New York Times, columnist Joe Nocera, a guy who almost always writes with insight and balance about the economy and politics, called the book “bloated” and “reeking of self-importance.” I agree. But Nocera also says the book “is an important addition to the growing library of books about this president. It tells you things — lots of things — that you didn’t know before. Very few of those things reflect well on Obama and his initial team.” I also agree.

Suskind’s book came out last fall at almost the exact time that Joe McGinniss’s much maligned hit piece on Sarah Palin arrived in book stores. Five months later no one is talking about The Rogue, but Confidence Men has lasted, perhaps because the subject is so much more important.

The history of the modern presidency dating back to FDR provides a guide to some of Obama’s missteps. He made two fundamental mistakes in staffing his White House; mistakes of inexperience committed by a rookie perhaps. First, he failed to appreciate that past behavior almost always forecasts future behavior. Summers, a man who had accumulated enemies during his tenure in the Clinton Administration, went from there to Harvard to serve as president and bombed. Summers’ comments about and inability to work with women cost him his job in the Ivy League and he brought, if you believe Suskind, all that baggage to the West Wing of the White House. A sub-theme in Suskind’s book is that the White House is a “boys” domain where Summers and others systematically kept senior women advisers, including current Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, out of the loop as they struggled to right the economy. 

As for Geithner, it’s difficult to think of a more inappropriate choice to help steer the economy out of a housing-inspired collapse fueled by Wall Street greed than the guy who presided over the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the meltdown. There is a chilling account in Suskind’s book of Geithner socially and comfortably rubbing shoulders with his Wall Street friends, while being almost completely uncomfortable with reporters, members of Congress and most of his administration colleagues. You can’t help but wonder what Obama was thinking with this appointment, particularly since he had the full support of people like the tough and independent former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who would have made a perfect Treasury Secretary in Obama’s early days.

Instead Obama went for big egos, big resumes and big Wall Street connections and Summers and Geithner brought big problems with them.

The second lesson of Obama’s initial years is the importance of discipline and loyalty and by that I don’t mean the blind loyalty of an H.R. Haldeman, but rather the kind of loyalty that requires you, as a White House staffer or Cabinet member, to carry out the boss’s orders or leave. By Suskind’s account, the Obama White House was endlessly “re-litigating” decisions that should have been made and implemented, apparently because guys like Summers and Geithner were convinced they knew more than the president. In short: no discipline, little loyalty.

One of the hotly disputed stories in Confidence Men is Suskind’s detailed reporting on Geithner’s failure to carry out Obama’s ordersto implement an orderly take down of Citibank. Geithner”slow walked” the Treasury process for weeks, according to Suskind, to avoid carrying out a decision that his boss had made. Suskind properly points out that such behavior is a firing offense everywhere but Washington, D.C.

Imagine how Obama’s fortunes might have changed had he called in his Treasury Secretary and told him of his disappointment in Geithner’s failure to carry out a direct order and that the price for that insubordination would be public humiliation and dismissal. A president with steel in his spine – Harry Truman say – would have called a news conference, laid out the story and said as of this moment we have a new acting Treasury Secretary. A public firing is a thing of the past in national politics. It shouldn’t be. In the hands of a young, inexperienced president it was a valuable tool that Obama apparently chose not to wield.

Roosevelt, of course, assembled a White House staff and Cabinet that was far from harmonious. Harold Ickes, the imperious Interior Secretary, warred openly with Henry Wallace the brainy and unconventional Agriculture Secretary. Both of them fought with FDR’s trusted insider Harry Hopkins, but none of these guys ever overshadowed the president. Roosevelt saw too that. Insubordination was not a subtext of Roosevelt’s presidency.

For his White House aides, Roosevelt sought, as it has been famously said, men with “a passion for anonymity.” They were there to serve the president – and the country. The young president seems to have selected men, at least on his economic team, with their own agendas and no passion for serving in his shadow. Obama has now re-shuffled his White House staff to get ready for the re-election battle and a hoped for second term. We’ll see if he’s learned any management lessons from his ragged first term.

Again a Roosevelt comparison is apt. Roosevelt clearly learned on the job in the 1930’s. Repeatedly throughout his presidency, FDR shuffled and re-shuffled his Cabinet and personal staff. Some, like Ickes became indispensable and stayed for the duration, but others like Gen. Hugh Johnson, who controversially headed the National Recovery Administration, and Joe Kennedy, the first SEC chief and Ambassador to Great Britain, were sent packing when their judgment or usefulness came to question. Twice, in 1940 and again in 1944, Roosevelt dumped incumbent vice presidents from the ticket he headed.

FDR managed and led his staff and Cabinet even as he remade the modern presidency. Every president since – including the inexperienced Obama – could learn from his approach that insisted on discipline, loyalty and a firm understanding of just who was in charge.

 

2012 Election, Minnick

Iowa

Posted on by christian

Take Aways and Next Steps

As a political junkie how can you not love the Iowa Caucus?

Last summer when it all started, Iowa native Michele Bachmann was riding high as the winner of the Iowa straw poll. Today she is out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, a victim of a sixth place showing last night when 122,000 Iowans bundled up and went out in the cold to thin the field. This is Iowa after all, winnowing the field goes on a lot in these parts.

So, at the danger of participating in the morning after “everything has been said” department, here goes with a few observations on the Iowa process.

1. Mitt Romney won and is still likely to be the ultimate Republican standard bearer. Not much in the way of bragging rights attach to an eight vote win over a guy who was last heard of as the 18% loser in his own U.S. Senate re-election, but a win is a win. Watch for the GOP establishment to try hard to make sure he doesn’t stumble in the next two weeks.

2. While the mainstream press was watching the breathless rise and ultimate free fall of Newt Gingrich, a serious observer of politics, The Nation’s deadline poet Calvin Trillin, was forecasting Rick Santorum’s minutes of fame. It seems inevitable given the serial nature of the GOP front runners this time, that the ex-Pennsylvania Senator would get his moment. It has arrived. What will he do with it?

3. At his core Santorum is a social issue conservative. Catholic, profoundly pro-life and anti-gay rights he undoubtedly appeals to the social conservative wing of the GOP and that should help him in contests to come like South Carolina, but does it help him attract moderates and independents?  Let the vetting begin. Santorum has been running below the radar screen of the national press for months. That ended today.

4. Mitt Romney’s super PAC supporters, with more than a little help from Newt, ended the Gingrich boom in Iowa, but the caucus results did not eliminate the snarling former Speaker of the House. Gingrich, not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, but a fundamentally skillful and aggressive political gut puncher, is now going to do all he can to savage Romney who, it is clear, he detests. Gingrich is now like the injured elephant in the brush of New Hampshire; more dangerous when wounded. [One of the fascinating story lines from Romney’s now seven years of running for president is that his follow contestants really, really dislike him and Gingrich, with nothing to lose, will give the chattering classes all they crave over the next week. Red meat will be on the New Hampshire menu.]

5. Iowans are traditionally hospitable people, but Rick “Oops” Perry seemed to just get under their skin. Perry will go down in presidential history as the worst debater with the most money. Note to political junkies: study this campaign for all the clues you need for how not to do it. Perry turned out to be an awful candidate on the national stage and Iowa – remember Chris Dodd from four years ago – has a way of sending such folks home on a Southwest flight.

6. Ron Paul is in until the end. With money and a loyal following the cranky Texas congressman will take this all the way to the convention, a la Pat Buchanan in 1996. I can see the debates now over whether Paul gets a prime time slot to deliver a speech to the GOP convention. And, will he eventually endorse Romney? Why would he? I’m betting he won’t.

7. Iowa means nothing and everything. Four years ago, Barack Obama put himself on a rocky path to the Democratic nomination and eventually the White House with a win in Iowa. Mike Huckabee won on the GOP side four years ago and is now a Fox News talk show host. George H.W. Bush won in Iowa in 1980 and lost to Ronald Reagan. In fact, the only two eventual nominees to win in Iowa were Obama and George W. Bush. Even Jimmy Carter, who exploited the Iowa caucus for the first time in 1976, finished second to “uncommitted.” Iowa tells us who won’t be president – Bachmann and Perry for sure won’t be. Gingrich will need another Phoenix moment to come back and won’t get it. Jon Huntsman? Consult Calvin Trillin as to whether his New Hampshire moment has arrived. That leaves Mitt and Rick. Don’t bet against the one-time corporate turn around artist. Republicans aren’t crazy about him, but he’ll be the last man standing.

 

Baseball, Baucus, Politics, U.S. Senate

It Gets Worse

Posted on by christian

Congress – Not the People’s Choice

Has there even been a time when the United States Congress ranked lower with the American public or when dysfunction more profoundly gripped the institution? Hardly.

University of Tennessee historian Daniel Feller says we need to go all the way back to before the Civil War to find a Congress quite so much at war with itself as today’s bunch. Feller is among a group of historians that NPR surveyed to determine if the current Congress is just bad or among the worst in the nation’s history. Historically bad is, according to the historian, the correct answer.

Professor Feller cites the Reconstruction period immediately after the Civil War when Andrew Johnson struggled, with little success, to replace Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson’s fight with Congress over the League of Nations and Harry Truman’s battles with the “do nothing 80th Congress” as historic examples of when a president and a Congress were deeply divided. Still, Feller told NPR, “None of those involved the level of conflict within Congress itself that we see today.”

Just this week came further evidence that Congressional dysfunction and serial partisanship has claimed another victim. Nebraska’s conservative Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, already the subject of intense negative attacks in his state, opted to quit rather than fight for another term. While coverage of Nelson’s decision has focused on the undeniable fact that Senate D’s will now be even harder pressed to hold the Senate next year, the real story here is the crumbling of the institution.

As Politicos Mike Allen reported in his newsletter, quoting an email from a Senate insider, “The retirement is a reflection of the growing polarization of the body. Nelson could work with anybody in the senate. Either side. His growing frustration with the domination of partisanship within the body lead to this decision. He blames both sides for letting things get out of hand and he often laments the willingness of anyone to really focus on the issues and develop a bipartisan solution anymore. Not since he put together the judicial nominations agreement in 2005 has there been any bipartisan accomplishments in the Senate. Since then a Fat Tuesday parade of exits have left moderate dealmakers like Nelson on the sidelines. Lott, Chafee, Breaux, etc. all left for the same reason. There is no comity to be found in the upper chamber anymore. … [T]he tea saucer is losing more of its cooling element and is becoming indistinguishable from the tea pot.”

Ben Nelson wasn’t a great senator, but then few in the Senate today would qualify to carry Robert Taft’s or Mike Mansfield’s briefcase. Nelson was a person, by political necessity and personal inclination, able to work across the partisan divide. But, there is no place for such people in today’s Senate.

It make me, an amateur historian of the Senate and its quirky ways, wonder what motivates people to reach the near absolute top of the American political system – the Senate – and then spend most of their time there trying to make certain the institution cannot function?

The late Sen. Robert Byrd revered the Senate as an institution. Byrd studied the history, knew the rules, understood what the Senate was designed to be and had to struggle to be. He even wrote a massive history of the institution that is remarkable for its lack of partisanship and its appreciation of compromise.

The retirement of Ben Nelson, whether or not his brand of conservative, Midwestern politics was your cup of tea, does mark yet another rubbing out of a “moderate.” As Jon Avlon notes in a piece at The Daily Beast, “at a time when our politics is looking like a cult, there is no tolerance for principled dissent. Dissent is disloyalty and punishable by either the threat of excommunication or electoral execution.”

Two things need to change. Those in the Senate – there must be a few – with some respect and understanding for the institution’s role in our democracy need to begin, through action and word, to restore a sense of civility and common purpose and voters need to quit rewarding people with high public office who seem to merely want to destroy the other side rather than work on the real problems of the nation.

 

2012 Election, Minnick

Who Wrote That

Posted on by christian

Politicians Run From Their Words

Imagine this scene: It’s May 14, 1940 and Winston Churchill has just walked off the floor of the House of Commons and is surrounded by a gaggle of jousting British journalists.

“Mr. Prime Minister, the opposition has been extremely critical of your speech yesterday in which you said: ‘We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.’ Did you really mean to make such a pessimistic assessment and is your policy merely ‘victory…victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be?’ Do you really stand by those words, Mr. Prime Minister?”

In an alternative reality – maybe – we can imagine the great British Lion disavowing his famoous words and saying, as presidential candidate Ron Paul did recently about some writings that appeared in newsletters under his name, “I never read [or said] that stuff.”

The Paul excuse, lame and unbelievable at the same time, has been used to cover racist and anti-Semitic rants that the Texas Congressman now says were never his views and must have been the shoddy work of someone else that just happened to have access to his newsletters and could publish under his name without his approval.

As the old line goes, “I was born at night, but not last night.”

Churchill, even had he wanted to, couldn’t disavow his words because he wrote them himself, but in the Internet age a candidate like Paul or Newt Gingrich can merely try to duck a past statement with, “Hey, that must have been written by some staffer and obviously it doesn’t represent my views.” Don’t buy it.

Gingrich latest explaining is his praise for Mitt Romney’s health care plans. Back in 2006, Newt said in one of his newsletters, “We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans. Individuals without coverage often do not receive quality medical attention on par with those who do have insurance. We also believe strongly that personal responsibility is vital to creating a 21st Century Intelligent Health System. Individuals who can afford to purchase health insurance and simply choose not to place an unnecessary burden on a system that is on the verge of collapse; these free-riders undermine the entire health system by placing the onus of responsibility on taxpayers.”

Gingrich’s spokesman said, drum roll please, “the Newt Notes essay wasn’t written by Mr. Gingrich himself.”

Here is a practical lesson in Politics 101. In every political office and campaign I’ve ever worked in, been close to or observed from afar, the candidate – or on a rare occasion an extremely trusted staffer – signs off on everything that is written down and committed to a speech draft. There is no margin of error on such statements, particularly since they now find an instant home on the Internet and can easily come back to haunt. That’s how it works.

Of course most politicians don’t write their own press releases and speeches, although they once did, but rather they have their people handle that time consuming labor. Still no candidate worth his or her salt would trust an unnamed, unsupervised staffer to issue statements in his or her name without first granting a sign-off. That simple fact of political and campaign life makes the Paul and Gingrich “I didn’t write it” defense indefensible.

The Republican primary season has been a rolling exercise in disavowing past stands. Nothing wrong in my book with a principled evolution of political positions. No less a politician than Abraham Lincoln went from a position of tolerating slavery in the interest of preserving the Union, and figuring that the practice would eventually wither and die, to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Like Churchill, Lincoln didn’t try to disavow previous statements since he had written them and he had the integrity to explain the evolution.

It’s OK to change positions in politics, but not OK to disavow statements made in publications that you actually control. It’s not really a question of authorship. It is a question of character.

“I never read that stuff” just doesn’t fly. It doesn’t even flap its wings.

An honest answer when confronted with a past statement that is, in the immortal words of Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, “no longer operative,” would be along the lines uttered by the legendary Earl Long, the one-time Governor of Louisiana. Confronted by an aide with the fact that a campaign promise made to his supporters would not be fulfilled, Uncle Earl honestly told the aide to tell those supporters the truth.

“Tell ’em I lied,” he said.