Marketing, Martin Luther King, Uncategorized

Recall

Posted on by christian

Throwing Them Out Isn’t Easy

The guy in the photo is Lynn J. Frazier. He was the first public official in the country removed from office by recall. It happened in 1921 in North Dakota.

Frazier had been elected governor three different times on the Non-Partisan League ticket, but his radical brand of progressive politics eventually got him crosswise with the state’s voters. Ironically, he advocated that the recall provision be added to the state constitution and almost immediately it was used against him.

The recall of a governor has happened only one other time. Gray Davis suffered Lynn Frazier’s fate in California in 2003. All this by way of saying, recalling an elected official, as has now been proposed in Idaho (and in Wisconsin), isn’t easy.

The Idahoans who say they want to recall State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna have a big hill to climb. First, they need to collect just north of 158,000 valid signatures (meaning they probably need to gather thousands more) and have only two and a half months to get the job done. That is a lot of standing around in Walmart parking lots and PTA meetings and it will require hundreds if not thousands of volunteers. Such efforts normally dictate paid signature gathering, but if this effort is, as it seems to be, truly grassroots, then the money won’t be readily available to finance the signature production.

Still, the group has a Facebook page up with (as of late yesterday) more than 4,000 friends and they has generated a good deal of media attention. Meanwhile, the Idaho State Journal reports that an American Falls high school senior has launched a “Stand with Luna” website to support the state superintendent.

Other than a handful of local election officials, Idahoans have been reluctant to resort to the recall. Two Idaho Falls state legislators were recalled in 1971. Efforts to recall two Boise legislators are also underway, resembling in some respects the widespread legislative recall efforts underway in Wisconsin.

A fellow often referred to at the time as “a St. Maries dog catcher” mounted a recall effort against Sen. Frank Church in 1967 until it dawned on everyone that there is no provision in the U.S. Constitution to recall federal officials. The dog catcher – he had some links to the John Birch Society – and his recall quickly faded away.

Nationally only 13 legislators, including the two in Idaho, have been recalled since 1913. Seven of the 13 recalls took place in Oregon and California.

The most obvious thing about these numbers, as Milwaukee Journal Sentinel political writer Craig Gilbert points out, “is how seldom the recall has been used successfully. Only 18 states give their citizens the power to remove their state legislators by recall, and in only five has it actually happened.  No one knows how many recalls have been attempted, but only 20 have succeeded in gathering enough valid signatures to force a recall election, and only 13 have succeeded in removing a legislator from office.”

Like I said, it’s a big hill to climb and it should be. As a general rule we have elections to get rid of politicians who fall out of favor. Still, as Gilbert notes, recalls tend to form around a not particularly partisan issue and tend to draw energy from the right of the political spectrum. Of the 13 recalled state legislators, 9 have been Republicans and some of them were recalled because they fell out of favor with their own party.

Essentially that’s what happened to Davis in California in 2003. Davis became enormously unpopular due to the state’s terrible fiscal condition and an energy crisis. The long-time Democrat, governor of an  overwhelmingly blue state, saw his approval numbers go deeply in the ditch with constituents across the board, including Democrats. Enter the Governator.

Successful recalls seem to require a cause and passion, or perhaps anger. Interestingly the very conservative Americans for Limited Government is touting expansion of the recall as a way to get at politicians who aren’t tough enough on spending, an issue that increasingly cuts across all political demographics.

Considering that Luna won re-election last November with just over 60% of the vote – more than 268,000 total votes – the cause he represents – his package of education reform bills – will have to be extremely unpopular for the recall to get real legs. To date, I know of no public polling on how Luna’s education policies are playing with Idaho voters, but  public comments in the media, on newspaper websites and in legislative hearings seem to trend pretty strongly against. Across the state local school boards are scrambling to implement changes, consider more layoffs and four day school weeks and deal with another year of declining budgets.

But it’s an open question as to whether this all adds up to the type of cause that typically drives a recall and whether the passion is deep enough to propel a grassroots signature campaign that results in an election. Having said that, education has often been a mobilizing issue in Idaho. Many voters may not care much about the big policy debates in Boise during a long legislative session, but they do care about the local schoolhouse and they have opinions about whether the students they most care about are getting the right kind of education.

Bottom line: the Luna recall will have to catch fire very fast and burn very hot to have a chance to succeed.

As a curious footnote to recall history, North Dakota’s booted Gov. Lynn Frazier wasn’t out of office for long. About a year after being recalled, Frazier ran for the U.S. Senate and won. He served in the Senate for 18 years until losing a Republican primary in 1940. Further proof, perhaps, that recalls are fueled by the passions of the moment and passion can cool quickly.

Marketing, Uncategorized

Pass/Fail

Posted on by christian

Tough Session Draws Tough Reviews

Idaho Democrats have called the just completed legislative session “the worst in memory.” Republicans, who overwhelmingly dominate in Idaho, say just a minute, it wasn’t all that bad.

Idaho’s editorial pages are weighing in with generally very tough judgements about a session that stripped collective bargaining rights for teachers, “reformed” education to move policy strongly in the direction of more on-line learning, fewer classroom teachers, “pay for performance” and less money.

The Idaho Press-Tribune in Nampa gave letter grades ranging from three A’s to two F’s and one D. Grading on the curve, the IPT comes down with an overall “B,” while praising lawmakers for meeting their Constitutional obligation to balance the budget and for cutting education spending by only $50 million.

The Twin Falls Times-News compares this year’s session to Gov. Len Jordan’s first session in 1951 when the newly elected Jordan called for, among other things, the closure of state colleges in Lewiston and Albion. The paper says that ’51 session has long been viewed as one of the worst with long-standing consequences, but then suggests the just ended session may have been worse.

“The first session of the 61st Legislature adjourned Thursday with a state bitterly divided over Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna’s education reform proposal,” the paper’s Sunday editorial said. “Lawmakers slashed state support for Medicaid by $35 million, public school funding by $47 million and higher education dollars by $8 million.

“Legislators passed a bill restricting abortion that’s probably unconstitutional, changed the Republican primary so that only party faithful may be able to vote, authorized the governor to declare a “wolf emergency,” made dairies’ nutrient management plans trade secrets, and rewrote Idaho’s Right to Farm law so broadly that it might limit counties’ ability to regulate the expansion of slaughterhouses, potato-processing operations and cheese factories.”

The Idaho Statesman’s Sunday edit was headlined “Difficult and Damaging” and concludes that history may not judge the 88 day session very kindly.

“A session to be proud of? Not even close,” the Statesman said.

Marty Trillhaase, writing on the Lewiston Tribune’s editorial page Sunday, said: “The men and women who sat out the winter under the Capitol dome have delivered a government that is radically different: Lawmakers become lawgivers — Time was, if lawmakers wanted to pass a sales tax or shift schools from local to state support, they asked you. They coaxed you. They won your support. And they took their time.

“Today’s lawgivers descend from Mount Heyburn and inform the rest of us how life is going to be.”

Meanwhile, a referendum effort has been launched to take State School Superintendent Tom Luna’s reforms to the voters and backers of a recall Luna campaign say they are ready to gather signatures.

A couple of weeks, as astute political observers say, is a life-time in politics. The heartburn over this session my fade fast, as fast as these newspaper editorials hit the recycle bin or line the bird cage. But, then again, if those who felt they got the short end of a long stick from this year’s legislature can keep the image alive that has been almost universally depicted by the editorial writers then this session may have lasting political, as well as policy implications.

Stay tuned.

American Presidents, Baseball, Mansfield, Mark Twain, Obama, Politics

Trust

Posted on by christian

Coin of the Realm in Politics

Potentially one of the side benefits to come from the budget deal struck late Friday was the development of a modicum of trust among House Speaker Boehner, Senate Leader Reid and President Obama.

It is a testament to the generally awful state of partisanship in Washington these days that Obama and Boehner, according to several accounts, spent more personal time together over the last week than they have in all the time Obama has been in the White House. Something is wrong with that picture.

Trust, built upon a genuine personal relationship, is simply critical to getting anything done in politics. Without it you can’t make a deal, shake hands and know that the pact is secure.

Boehner told a television interviewer over the weekend that he and Obama now “understand each other better.”

“Throughout these meetings over the last four or five weeks we’ve been straight up with each other, and honest with each other,” the Ohio Republican said. “Certainly haven’t always agreed, but it was a good process.”

A Boehner aide said, probably sending shudders down the spine of Tea Partiers, that the GOP leader and the president “believe the other operates in good faith. I think they are friendly, but not quite good friends at this point. Maybe some day.”

It’s easy to dismiss the personal relationship factor in high stakes politics, but our history is full of examples were the personal touch, backed not by agreement always, but always reinforced with trust, has made progress possible.

The great Montana Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield insisted that Senate GOP leader Everett Dirksen get the lion’s share of the attention when the Senate debated civil rights legislation in the 1960’s. Even though Mansfield outranked him, the important meetings were held in Dirksen’s office and Mike gave way to Ev when it came time to talk to the press.

Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill couldn’t have been different politically, but they developed personal rapport and that led to trust. Obama and Boehner would do well to study that model.

By all accounts, Obama and Boehner love their golf. As the cherry blossoms come out in Washington pointing to the end of a gloomy winter, Obama ought to call up the Speaker, pick him up at the Capitol and find a place where the two of them – maybe with one key aide apiece – can play eighteen and finish with a couple of beers.

Progress is politics is made of such small, but meaningful gestures. Now is the time to build more trust. The next budget deal will be much more difficult.

2016 Election, Campaign Finance, Health Care, Supreme Court

The Judges Decide

Posted on by christian

The Supremes and Health Care Policy

As the first anniversary of the controversial national health care reform legislation – or more correctly health insurance reform legislation – came and went a while back there was increasing acceptance of the notion that the U.S. Supreme Court will get the last word on the issue that continues to shape our politics.

That word will likely be handed down across the street from the U.S. Capitol right in the middle of the next presidential election campaign.

One of the most vocal defenders of the controversial law, New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, admitted recently what many are thinking: the Supreme Court will overturn the law, or at least the portion that mandates individual coverage. “If lightning strikes, and it turns out that as many of us believe, the Supreme Court turns out to be a third political branch of government and they strike down the mandate — big deal,” Weiner said. “Big deal!” Weiner argues that rejection of the individual mandate requirement will re-open the debate about the so called “public option.” We’ll see.

It will be fascinating if, as Weiner and others predict, the nine justices of the nation’s highest court enter this political thicket. There was for a time in our history a self-imposed reluctance on the part of the court to stick its nose far into the “political” territory of the Congress and the president. Barring a sharp question of Constitutionality, judges once thought it the “conservative” position to defer to the elected branches of government on questions of broad policy.

Conservatives would argue that those days of real judicial restraint became sand through the hour glass during the “activist” days of the Warren Court in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Liberals argue, on the other hand, that it has been “conservative” courts, beginning most importantly during the Reagan Administration, that have ranged far and wide over the political territory that some suggest is better left to legislators and to the one person in our system who is elected by all the people – the president.

But whether you consider it “activist” that the Supreme Court, almost eagerly it seemed, stepped into the Florida recount in 2000 and ultimately ruled in a way that put George W. Bush in the White House, or that Chief Justice Earl Warren worked hard to engineer a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 1954 to overturn state laws allowing racial segregation, the fact is that the Supreme Court – and particularly the very conservative majority on the Roberts Court – is poised to impact the political narrative of 2012. It has happened before. The Brown v. Board of Education decision on segregation, and subsequent Congressional efforts to enforce and expand on the decision, were arguably a catalyst for the systematic and still continuing swing of the southern United States from the Democratic to Republican parties. Richard Nixon’s now famous – or infamous – “southern strategy” in 1968 successfully capitalized on the sense that “activist” liberal judges were remaking the country in a frightening way.

Earlier in the 20th Century, another unanimous Supreme Court, this time in 1935 and with a conservative majority, happily overturned the cornerstone of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms by rejecting much of the National Industrial Recovery Act. FDR was livid, particularly with “liberal” judges like Louis Brandeis who were willing to reject his reforms that enjoyed broad public and Congressional support. Roosevelt contended the “nine old men” on the 1930’s Court were intent on imposing on the country a “horse and bugging” definition of interstate commerce, while rejecting the needs of small business and individuals. Safely re-elected in 1936, Roosevelt tried to get even by “packing the court.” He lost badly and the political bitterness and impact of that fight lingered for years.

In a splendidly provocative and highly entertaining new book, The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, Erwin Chemerinsky, the founding dean of the UC Irvine Law School, and a widely respected Constitutional scholar, argues that it is conservative judges, at least since the days of Nixon, who have done the most to change the way we think about – and judges apply – the 21st Century Constitution. “

Since 1968,” Chemerinsky writes, “conservatives have sought to remake constitutional law and they largely have succeeded. They initially set out to overturn the decisions of the Warren Court, but soon began to aggressively pursue a vision of constitutional law that consistently favors government power over individual rights … and the interests of businesses over individual employees and consumers. Because decisions come one at a time over years and because the Court never overruled the Roe v. Wade abortion decision (though it came within one vote of doing so), it is easy to underestimate how successful the conservative assault on the Constitution has been.”

Professor Chemerinskey cites numerous cases, involving everything from the rights of criminal defendants to what he calls the “re-segregation” of American schools, to buttress his point. Perhaps the highest profile recent example – Citizens United – found the Roberts Court, apparently with little hesitation, overturning a century of settled law when it allowed, on First Amendment grounds, unlimited and unregulated corporate money to re-enter American politics.

Whether you agree or not that “conservative judges” have become the real judicial activists, it’s indisputable that “liberals” have lost the battle to frame broad political battles around the court’s make-up and decisions. Richard Nixon drew the political lines that have defined more liberal justices as the activists, while conservatives talk almost exclusively of Justices like Roberts, Scalia and Thomas as staunch defenders of the Constitution, motivated by real “judicial restraint.”

We will soon see how well that framing hangs together when a conservative Roberts Court overturns the liberal health policy reform of a Democratic Congress and president. Barack Obama already had his mini-FDR moment when he directly criticized, to the justice’s faces, the Court’s Citizens decision. The president may soon have reason, in the middle of his re-election campaign, to take on the “activist Roberts Court” again and once again the Supreme Court – appointed for life and presumably insulated from the daily grind of partisan politics – could dramatically impact American politics.

Civil Liberties, Poetry

Poetry Month

Posted on by christian

Billy Collins on…What Was It?

In celebration of National Poetry Month – I love that poetry month coincides with the start of the baseball season – a great little poem for all of us growing a little older every day.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Baseball, Giffords, Guest Post, Humanities, Politics, Polling

Survey Says

Posted on by christian

Don’t Know Much About…Us

I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to travel a fair amount – Europe several times, South America, Canada – and after every trip I’ve returned thinking its good to be home, but man we sure don’t know much about the rest of the world.

I remember a trip to Canada a few years ago and engaging in serious conversation with friendly Canadians who seemed to be up on everything happening in the USA from our politics to popular culture. By contrast, most Americans couldn’t find Saskatoon with a GPS device let alone name the Canadian Prime Minister – Stephen Harper – or that the national capitol is Ottawa, not Montreal or Toronto.

Now it turns out we don’t know much about ourselves, either. Newsweek has surveyed 1,000 Americans on the most basic details of our history, government and politics. We flunked. Badly.

The questions aren’t exactly PhD level, either, but are questions that are asked in the official U.S. citizenship test. Questions like: What happened at the Constitutional Convention? How could 65% of those surveyed not know that the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution at the Constitutional Convention?

Or, how about this. Fully 88% in the survey couldn’t name one person who authored the Federalist Papers. Hint: his wife’s name was Dolley, as in Madison. Maybe those 65% know her donuts and cakes better. And, don’t ask what the Federalist Papers were.

I’ve railed in this space in the past about America’s historical ignorance, but 29% not being able to name the current vice president or 73% not know why we “fought” the Cold War. This isn’t funny. It is worrying.

Newsweek blames several factors for American ignorance, including a generally complex political system that unlike Europe tends to spread control among local, state and federal governments. I guess this is confusing and there is much to keep track of, but that hardly seems an excuse for the fundamental lack of knowledge exposed in the survey.

The decentralized education system gets some blame. What we teach in Idaho they might not teach in Maryland. Some of the blame should go, I think, to those who have de-emphasized history, social studies and the humanities in favor of science and math. Kids need it all, in big doses.

And there is the income and media reality. A growing percentage of Americans are poor, not of the middle class. Poorer Americans have less access to information and knowledge. In Europe, where a larger share of the population lives in the middle, people are generally better educated and much more knowledgeable about their politics and government.

The mass media is both part of the problem and could offer a slice of the solution, but we mostly have a pure market driven media that features much more American Idol than Meet the Press. It is, after all, difficult to take politics seriously when so much of it is trivialized over the air and on the web.

The Newsweek analysis concludes, and maybe this is the good news, “the problem is ignorance, not stupidity.“ One expert who has studied this American ignorance says, “we suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.”

The real problem here isn’t knowing James Madison authored many of the Federalist Papers, it is not knowing enough – as the current budget debate in Washington, D.C. makes so clear – about our federal government and our political system. It’s impossible to assess, for example, what must be done to fix the budget if we have no idea how the government spends and taxes.

Survey after survey says Americans want Congress to cut the budget by reducing foreign aid and by stamping out that old standby waste, fraud and abuse. At the same time they say whatever you do don’t touch Social Security or Medicare where the real money gets spent. Too many politicians pander this ignorance and we get the endless debates we now witness in Congress.

Simple fact: Americans need information and real knowledge to make sense of their government and then they must care enough to act on the knowledge. Ignorance isn’t a strategy for a great country.

Egan, Idaho Politics

Guns and Porn, Oh My

Posted on by christian

Solutions in Search of a Problem

The Idaho Senate will this week – choose your metaphor – cock the hammer, reload or take aim at the increasingly controversial issue of guns on the state’s college campuses. The House has already passed the legislation, the Senate may think twice.

Boise State University, the largest Idaho school, where football tailgate parties are arguably even more popular than guns. has played the economic card by raising concerns that events on the campus may be impacted by a proposed state law allowing students, faculty too, to pack a piece to a concert, football game or poetry reading, not to mention biology class.

Idaho is racing Texas to see which state can get the campus gun toting legislation in place first. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has said he’ll sign legislation working its way through, as Molly Ivins used to say, the Texas Leg. Perry is the same governor who suggested a while back that the federal stimulus legislation gives Texas a right to consider secession. Fully armed obviously.

The Los Angeles Times visited the huge University of Texas campus in Austin recently, a place with an awful history of gun violence, and found a mixed reception for the campus gun legislation. In 1966 a student gunman at UT climbed to the top of the campus clock tower and systematically killed 14 people. Ancient history, I guess, in an age when proponents of such legislation argue that having more guns on campus will actually improve safety.

One Texas professor told the Times he welcomed the proposed gun law and said he’d definitely consider taking his piece to class with him if it passes. Not a professor to argue with about a grade, I suppose. At another Texas school, Sam Houston State, a new research project found considerably less support among students. On a scale of zero being not comfortable at all and 100 being as comfortable as you can get, the Sam Houston students clocked in – or is it Glocked in – at 39. A similar survey at a Washington school produced a 33 comfort score. May just be that the students who are, pardon the expression, the target of this campus safety initiative aren’t feeling all that comfortable about how safe they’ll be in English 101. It used to be all you had to worry about was staying awake in class or understanding Milton.

In times of severe economic turmoil like those faced in Idaho and most other states at the moment, I’ve noticed a curious legislative phenomenon. With limited ability for legislators to think big about new buildings or highways, they tend to find solutions to problems that may not really exist. The gun legislation, stoked by the National Rifle Association in Idaho, Texas and a dozen other states, seems to fall in that category. College administrators, the State Board of Education and law enforcement leaders – those closest to the vibe on a campus – are universally opposed to the gun legislation that has only come forward because, well, the NRA says its needed to protect our Second Amendment rights.

As one Texas student said, college is already stressful enough, why add the prospect for even more worry by affirmatively introducing guns to the campus scene? State Representative Cherie Buckner-Webb of Boise said it pretty well: “One can only imagine a college classroom or a campus administrative situation where heated arguments about strongly held political beliefs or disputes about grades or even parking issues result in the use of a concealed weapon.”

Meanwhile, Idaho legislators are also debating a bill to require more actions from public libraries to filter content on computers that library patrons – as in the tax paying public – utilize in vast numbers every day. Another solution in search of a problem.

Full disclosure, I am currently the president of the Boise Public Library Board, and we have long had in place a perfectly sensible policy about computer use. If a parent is concerned that a youngster might go where they shouldn’t on the Internet, we take steps to ensure that won’t happen. But, we also stay away from being the Internet nanny for adults who presumably are smart enough to make their own decisions about how to use a computer.

Both these pieces of legislation are in the one-size-fits-all category of legislating. Not content to leave it to local library boards in individual Idaho communities to figure out the best approach in their neighborhoods and unwilling to trust a college president in Twin Falls or Moscow to know enough about their campus environment to keep them as safe as possible, legislative solutions must be found to non-existent problems.

Guns and computers. Strange that in a largely educational environment – a college campus and a public library – some legislators want virtually unlimited access to one and to substantially limit access to the other.

Hats, Lincoln

The Hat is Back…

Posted on by christian

Adjustment Bureau for Headware

I used to think it old fashioned that my dad always wore a hat. He had a gray one, a brown one, I think, and I vaguely remember a dapper looking summertime straw hat. I never remember seeing him in a cap, but hardly ever remember him not wearing a hat.

Dad would be happy to know that hats are reportedly back in style and I find I’m now just as old fashioned with my hats as I once thought him to be with his.

The new movie, The Adjustment Bureau, some say, is popular culture proof that the hat is back. Maybe. I think Matt Damon looks pretty good in a hat, but have been told his hat is better than the movie.

You can Google men’s hats and find a thousand places to buy them on the Internet. My favorite store is John Helmer in Portland. Great hats. I once bought a hat – a brown Steton “Gun Club” model – at a hat shop in Milwaukee called Jac Donges Hats and Gloves. I still have the hat, but sadly Jac’s place is now a Subway shop.

Bogart wore hats and still got the girl except when he let her go. Al Capone deserved a black one, but his were often white – the gangster fedora.

Don Draper, the mysterious ad man on Mad Men, favors the narrow brim job that sits high on his head. Johnny Depp wears a hat once in a while and looks good, even to guys.

I have a picture hanging in my office of Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to Sandpoint, Idaho. Every man in the photo, and there are a lot of them, has a hat, Teddy included. Franklin Roosevelt wore hats and Harry Truman, too.

John Kennedy reportedly didn’t like hats, almost refused to wear one and when you see JFK with a hat he’s often holding it not wearing it. Date the demise of the snap brim to Camelot. Hats made a brief return under Lyndon Johnson, but folks often made fun of his Stetson “Open Road” model. I liked it. May get one of those one day.

So, back to my hat wearing father. I cherish a picture of him taken in about 1940, I guess. He’s wearing a hat, Bogart-like, big smile on his face (hats do that) and standing in front a very shiny Model A Ford. I like to think he was about to get in that Ford, pick up mom and take her dancing. If I had a Model A Ford, I’d wear one of my hats while driving it. Like father, like son.

Maybe hats are back. But, then again, maybe they never really go out of style. Neil Steinberg wrote a book about all this. He dealt with the Kennedy hat issue and argued that hats went out in the 1960’s when younger guys decided not to conform with the styles of the older generation. What goes around comes around, they say, and today wearing a hat has become a mark of non-conformance.

Maybe you just need to be a little old fashioned, an individualist, to wear one these days. You should try it. Just take it off in a elevator, especially if a lady comes on board. Touch the brim to acknowledge a friend or someone you would like to be a friend and, like Bogart, maybe a Lauren Bacall look-alike will find you charming, witty and worthy of wearing a hat so you can doff it to her.

It couldn’t hurt.

Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Libya, Limbaugh

Another War

Posted on by christian

PhotoThe No Debate No Fly Zone

The truly amazing thing about the “no fly zone” policy adopted over the last few days by the United States and the United Nations is not that it will be imposed on Gaddafi’s Libya, but rather that it was done with virtually no domestic debate, no Congressional action and little effort to bring the American public along.

I know it has become a political non-issue, a quaint detail of American history, but Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says: “Congress shall have the power…to declare war…”

Make no mistake we are going to war with Libya. The American policeman is walking the Middle East beat, again.

Moreover we are headed into another open-ended, frightfully expensive engagement with scarcely any attempt to define the short, let alone long-term objectives. Set aside for the moment the legitimate debate over whether the “no fly zone” strategy actually works. Might it be appropriate for the president and the Congress to define, in a good deal more detail, just what we hope to accomplish by engaging in a shooting war in Libya.

American anti-terrorism experts are already warning that Gaddafi is entirely capable of retaliating with some non-conventional response – read terror attack – while we spend an estimated $100 to $300 million a week to try and use air power to enforce order on the ground in Libya. It’s estimated that the initial attack on Libya’s command and control capabilities could cost a billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the Congress is virtually paralyzed in a budget debate that may well shut down the federal government in three weeks. We’ll spend millions to enforce a UN resolution on Libya with no debate, while the Congress runs the government by continuing resolution and bogs down in a completely partisan argument over funding laughably small budget lines for National Public Radio and the National Weather Service.

While the Obama Administration can claim an international consensus to use force against Gaddafi’s military, only one guess is required in the game who will pay most of the cost. The world’s greatest deliberative body – the U.S. Senate, where foreign policy used to be a regular concern – can find plenty of time for posturing over who is responsible for the budget deadlock, but couldn’t find even 15 minutes to debate whether the country ought to send more brave, young Americans into another desert war.

We can all lament the disaster of the Libyan nut job waging war on his own people, but since we’ve equipped Arab air forces from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Jordan, why not let the vaunted Arab League deal with one of their own? Have we no leverage over the King of Jordan or the princes of Arabia? The most sensible voice in the administration, soon to be gone Defense Secretary Robert Gates, may have made his concerns about the “no fly” strategy know too early, while the rest of the administration struggled to figure out a response.

“Let’s call a spade a spade,” Gates said earlier in March, “a no fly zone begins with an attack on Libya.” He called it a “big operation in a big country” and warned of the unknown unintended consequences of yet more American military engagement in a Middle Eastern country.

We are left to hope that in a week or two no American carrier pilot is sitting in Gaddafi’s custody after being shot down attempting to enforce a no fly zone with no defined objective, no end date and no obvious concern about the human and financial cost…to the United States.

The United States time and again undertakes military action with the expectation that it will be short, painless and sanitary and that the outcome will be entirely to our liking. Funny thing: our wars never seems to work out the way we envision them.

Libya, World War I

The Great War

Posted on by christian

It Didn’t End Anything…

The “war to end all wars” didn’t.

In fact the case can be persuasively made that what before World War II was commonly called “the great war” really began a vicious spiral of nearly continuous war, killing and destruction that made the 20th Century the most violent century.

I got to thinking about this after reading a moving tribute in the Washington Post this week to the last American veteran of the great war, Frank Woodruff Buckles. Buckles died recently at the ripe old age of 110. What things he saw in his long life.

Paul Duggan’s Post story made the point that Buckles, a West Virginia boy, was among the nearly 5 million Americans who were in uniform in 1917 and 1918. More than 116,000 of them died. Frank was the last one; a link in a now broken chain back to a time when there was no GI Bill, virtually no health care for returning doughboys and little acknowledgment from either the government or the public.

By 1930 the war was thought by many in the United States to have been a great mistake, a fight not ours that had scarred – and scared – a generation. Isolationism dominated American foreign policy and the U.S. Senate even investigated the “merchants of death,” who many thought had profited from the wartime sale of American munitions.

Today, its the World War II “greatest generation” that gets the attention, but it was the war Frank Buckles and his generation fought that really defined the 20th Century. The war now mostly relegated to the dusty back shelf of American history still echoes down to us today in so many ways.

The modern map of Europe and the Middle East is the result of that war. We now have a modern democracy and a NATO ally in Turkey. The Ottoman Empire ended with the war. The last Russian Tsar was ushered out and Lenin and eventually Stalin ushered in as a result of that war. The war brought an end to emperors in Germany and Austria-Hungary and made France and Britain fearful of the rise of the Bolsheviks, but even more fearful of another European war.

An Austrian corporal injured in a gas attack in that war, used the defeat of Germany and its allies as a springboard to create what became the horrors of Nazism. Winston Churchill knew both glory and defeat in the great war and at its end helped invent the country where today American soldiers still try to create a democracy. Iraq, born of the great war and always an unnatural nation, has long been a violent and troubled place.

Woodrow Wilson, a prickly idealist about many things, thought the world – and his own nation – would study the horrors of the trenches, the gas attacks, the vast machine gun slaughter, and conclude that nations must band together to ensure a lasting peace. By 1920, Wilson couldn’t get the U.S. Senate to support his grand ambition of a League of Nations. By 1931, Japan had invade Manchuria, Hitler and his followers where marching in the streets of Bavaria and Mussolini was planning a “new Roman Empire” that would begin with the conquest of Ethiopia.

By 1939, barely 20 years after the war to end all wars had sputtered to a uneasy conclusion in muddy fields in France, most of the world was at war again.

World War I produced Captain Harry Truman, who served in France, and Lt. Col Dwight Eisenhower, who never got out of the country. George Patton saw action as the first U.S. tank commander in France and Ernest Hemingway and Walt Disney were both ambulance drivers. Hermann Goering learned most of what he needed to know to command the German Luftwaffe as a World War I fighter pilot.

It was Frank Buckles’s fate to be the last solider of the great war. We should remember him for what he did and remember his war for what it did, too.