Fairborn commencement
Badin graduation
Division I regional track finals
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2007 > August
August 2007
DDN alum pens Obama book
Just a piece of info that some people might find of interest:
A new book about Barack Obama has appeared and is being prominently displayed in local bookstores. Unknown to many, I assume, is that the author is a former political reporter for the Dayton Daily News: Dave Mendell. He has covered Obama as a reporter for Chicago Tribune. I think the book is called “Obama.”
Mendell is a mild-mannered guy who did some excellent work here on, among other things, corruption in Community Action Agencies (which run some poverty programs) statewide.
Says editorial page editor Ellen Belcher:
For a short time, I was Dave’s editor. He was an editor’s dream — smart, well read, quick thinker and writer, even-keeled, humble, decent and more.
Dave wrote a lot of memorable pieces for the Dayton Daily News, but among my favorites was one about James P. “Sully” Sullivan, a close friend of Joe Shump, and a fixture in local Democratic politics. Dave had wonderfully captured one of Dayton’s real characters — the kind they don’t make any more.
One night we were leaving work together. It was late and cold, and I was giving him a ride home. Without even thinking, he took off his jacket and told me to put it on. I laughed at his chivalry, and told him he was living in the wrong era. Then he laughed at me when I told him that he was the kind of guy I hoped my then-very young daughter would one day marry.
He was one of the truly special journalists to pass through Dayton.
Mendell is a mild-mannered guy who did some excellent work here on, among other things, corruption in Community Action Agencies (which run some poverty programs) statewide.
Says editorial page editor Ellen Belcher:
For a short time, I was Dave’s editor. He was an editor’s dream — smart, well read, quick thinker and writer, even-keeled, humble, decent and more.
Dave wrote a lot of memorable pieces for the Dayton Daily News, but among my favorites was one about James P. “Sully” Sullivan, a close friend of Joe Shump, and a fixture in local Democratic politics. Dave had wonderfully captured one of Dayton’s real characters — the kind they don’t make any more.
One night we were leaving work together. It was late and cold, and I was giving him a ride home. Without even thinking, he took off his jacket and told me to put it on. I laughed at his chivalry, and told him he was living in the wrong era. Then he laughed at me when I told him that he was the kind of guy I hoped my then-very young daughter would one day marry.
He was one of the truly special journalists to pass through Dayton.
Permalink | | Categories: National politics
Moving into blogging, with qualms
This is an edited version of a column of mine that appeared in the Friday paper. Thought I’d post it here, since it’s about the blog:
The thing about not liking something is you frequently can’t really make a case against it, because you don’t pay any attention to it, because you don’t like it.
Take, for example, a television series. I’m a sucker for a certain kind of sitcom. But I can tell in five minutes whether a new entry is of the kind, whether it’s for me. If it isn’t, I’m gone forever. But I couldn’t write a review.
So maybe my attitude about the Internet and what it contains in the realm of politics is warped. All I know is I decided long ago that it wasn’t for me, pretty much.
There just seemed to be an awful lot of narrow-minded opinion mongering; an awful lot of misinformation; a lot of hot air; a weirdly worshipful belief in mere attitude as some sort of accomplishment; partisanship of psychotic levels; and a generally sophomoric, purposeful stupidity. And rudeness.
The misinformation was a particular problem. What, after all, is the point of looking for more input if you never know whether you can believe it? I developed a rule-of-thumb: If a “fact” comes from somebody whose name you don’t recognize, don’t believe it.
Call me an elitist. But I have found that typically when somebody directs my attention to something useful on the Web, it turns out to be from the online version of an established publication that I’ve heard of. (Not always.)
Anyway, there was another reason for not paying much attention: I don’t know who these people are who didn’t have enough to read before the Internet came along. I was pretty much backed up by about 1997. When I get my reading table cleaned up, maybe then I will have time to develop a more expert view of what’s out there on the Web.
But the world doesn’t wait for me. As some readers of this page may have noticed, we on the editorial page have started a blog. It’s the right thing to do, of course. So many people are online. And this is a way of fostering more give-and-take, both between us and readers, and between readers.
Fine. But some of us do have certain qualms.
So far the blog is a hodge-podge: discussions of some hot local issues. Some national political stuff. A few links to articles some readers might be interested in. Even an occasional news item. Some of what’s there has also appeared on the editorial page in some form. Some hasn’t.
Nobody knows what the blog will look like in a year.
It’s been interesting to try to gauge reader interest in the various items. For example, I had the bright idea of making the blog a place for discussion of the presidential election. I’ve had some fairly prominent people make the case for their candidates. Near as we can figure, this has generated no reader interest whatsoever, perhaps because the postings have been kind of bloodless so far.
Maybe as the elections nears, this will change.
Meanwhile, editorial page writer Eddie Roth has generated lots of interest č as measured by comments from readers č with posts about the public housing issue in Oakwood and Kettering. And Ellen Belcher, who is in charge of the blog and of these pages, stirred things up with commentary on Kettering’s decision to opt out of the budding regional 911 system. And, surprisingly enough, a string about strippers did pretty well.
As a fellow recently wrote in The Washington Post, most of us old-time newspaper people have spent our lives being accused of putting things in the paper just to sell papers, when it wasn’t true. We had no idea what sold newspapers. And we were under no pressure to worry about it.
Now there are actual measurements of what “sells” on the Internet. (Page views can be counted.) And, yes, our whole industry is under more commercial pressure.
Still, page views aren’t the only consideration. We’d like the blog to be a place for reasonably civil, useful discussion of important stuff. But not stuffy.
If you have ideas for a general direction of the blog or for specific subjects, we’re open. This string would be one good place to offer them.
One thing hasn’t changed: An editorial page’s most useful role has always been fostering the exchange of perspectives, not selling its own. The Internet seems to offer a chance to do that better than ever.
A chance. We’ll see if we do it right.
Historic preservation and public reputation
Lost in the public housing hullabaloo at the Oakwood City Council’s Aug. 27 meeting was a sublime report on the status of the Wright Family home at Hawthorn Hill.
It offered an interesting lesson in historic preservation and public reputation.
Stephen Wright briefed the council on the impending public opening of the historic gem. Mr. Wright’s renowned great uncles Wilbur and Orville helped design Hawthorne Hill, and younger brother Orville called it home from 1914 until his death in 1948.
Public tours are set to begin Sept. 1. By no means were they a sure thing. Nearby neighbors tried to prevent public access, and the city planning commission deadlocked over whether to grant a special use permit.
All this generated a lot of lively discussion and commentary (including a visual satire by recently retired Dayton Daily News aviation writer Tim Gaffney, which imagines the Wright Home’s removal from the community).
The city council overrode the planning commission at its July meeting — good news that got better with Mr. Wright’s report this week.
It appears Hawthorn Hill quickly is becoming both an icon for Dayton’s past and inspiration for its future. It “scores points with people from all walks of life,” Mr. Wright said, and also is becoming a destination for people of high accomplishment.
Mr. Wright noted that Hawthorn Hill recently played host to the president of Cirrus Design Corp. — an innovative company started by brothers that, according to one commentator, “has managed to produce the best selling plane on the planet.”
The Wright heir also tantalized the council with news that he and his sister, Amanda, are making plans to open the house to other “important people” expected to be visiting Dayton.
The mayor and council members obviously were pleased by the report. They seemed to recognize that they long would be remembered for, indeed their reputations in public life could well turn on what happened with Hawthorn Hill.
They will be remembered for helping to preserve this great symbol of local and world history and to transform it into a shared legacy.
Permalink | | Categories: Local History
More about Joe Shump
Joe Shump died Wednesday night at Kettering Medical Center. He had battled leukemia for more than a decade.
Mr. Shump, the Montgomery County Democratic Party chairman for a quarter of a century, was a fixture in local politics, and he groomed a generation of local politicos, including former Dayton Mayor and Ohio Lt. Gov. Paul Leonard, and Dennis Lieberman, who unseated Mr. Shump for his party post in 1994. At the time, Mr. Shump was 70.
Mr. Shump began his career as a union negotiator, rising to become president of Local 801 of the IUE-AFL-CIO during a a contentious period when the former Frigidaire Division of General Motors was cutting jobs here.
Lieberman, who recently stepped down as Montgomery County Democratic Party chairman, recalled seeing the outpouring of affection for Shump at this year’s Frolic for Funds fundraiser, where Shump was honored.
“People were lining up to talk to him. It was like they were coming to kiss the ring of the ruler. Even after I beat the guy, I always felt humbled and intimidated by him. He just had a wealth of knowledge.”
Tony Hall makes case for Hillary
In our string of endorsements of various presidential candidates by local figures, comes Tony Hall, the congressman from Montgomery County from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, and the chief Bush-administration ambassador in the field of humanitarian aid.
Q: So tell us who you’re supporting for the presidency and how you know him or her?
A: I’m supporting Hillary Clinton. I know her from the many times I met with her as a U.S. congressman when she was the First Lady, and of course I’ve had the chance to also visit with her while she has been serving as a US Senator.
Q: Why is she better than Barack Obama or, say, Bill Richardson, who has quite a resume?
A: Anybody who has lived in the White House for eight years has had lots of important experiences. I can’t imagined the amount of testing and complex and difficult situations that the president and first lady most go through on a daily basis while the whole world is watching. She has been tested in many political and diplomatic circumstances and has represented our country admirably. She also has received high marks for her service in the US Senate as a legislator. Also, people forget she served in the Governor’s mansion for eight years; so she understands state problems as well. She’s more prepared to be the President than any of the candidates!
Q: What about her persona? Obama says he could govern better because he wouldn’t be do divisive because he doesn’t have all her baggage. Others have said voters just won’t like her personality.
A: Well, I like her! Anybody who’s been on the front line and out front on so many issues is bound to have negatives. I think because she’s been tested,so many times in so many situations, makes her a much stronger person. I want my president to be tested, strong, and compassionate. She fits what I want in a President.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: 2008 endorsements, Elections, Local politics, National politics
Kettering wised up to housing scare
Tonight it was the Kettering City Council’s turn to take up questions about public housing and Section 8 rental subsidies. Dayton Metropolitan Housing Authority Executive Director Greg Johnson was asked to make a repeat performance just 24 hours after last night’s intense public meeting in Oakwood.
Kettering residents seemed nervous in their seats as the meeting was called to order.
But their moods lifted considerably after they had been called to the front of the council chamber, were handed a handsome certificate, and finished posing for a picture with Mayor Donald Patterson.
They and their friends and family members got to go home.
Because the big draw in Kettering tonight wasn’t grave discussions about subsidized housing and the end of the world as we know it. It was the city’s June and July “Neighborhood Pride Awards” conferred on homeowners and businesses for property beautification. And when the ceremony ended only a handful of people remained.
Greg Johnson’s presentation on public housing might as well have been the third reading of an ordinance to change paint specifications for parking lot stripes. Not a single resident asked a question. Only one made a comment: You are doing fine. Keep up the good work.
How could that be?
According to Kettering City Manager Mark Schwieterman it’s because Kettering residents already looked into the big scare about public housing and Section 8 vouchers. They found out it was a big nothing.
Yes, DMHA had purchased four Kettering apartment buildings, each with four units. But what makes the properties stand out is that they arguable are the finest in the complex. That’s because the agency invested $90 thousand per apartment unit in combined purchase price and renovation costs.
But what about reports that crime increased in the area of the DMHA units? Turns out the alleged surge occurred while renovation work was ongoing — and before tenants had moved in.
And the impending exodus from Parkside Homes, the public housing project slated for demolition? Most of the complex already is vacant. Only about 65 to 75 residents remain.
Sixty or so households have left Parkside over the past three years. How many took their Section 8 vouchers and moved to Kettering? One.
And how many households among Kettering’s 57,000 people hold Section 8 vouchers? 71. And how many are in apartments off Shroyer Rd.? Six.
How many Section 8 vouchers are used in all of Oakwood? Six.
Kettering residents, in other words, had no interest in the meeting. They already were wised up. They got to stay home and listen to the Reds lose to Pittsburgh.
Oakwoodites need to get out more.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Local politics
Is the country turning left?
“Is America Turning Left” is the title of a recent editorial in The Economist, the British-based newsweekly. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_ID=9621579
Meanwhile, “The Re-Emergence of the Emerging Democratic Majority” was just in The American Prospect magazine. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=backtothe_future061807
And “Blue Period: Can the Democrats succeed where Rove failed?” (that is, succeed in shaping the political times) is in the current Atlantic Monthly. (It was written before Karl Rove exited.) http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200709/realignment
Of these outlets, only The American Prospect is a liberal warrior. But clearly this is a time of great Democratic and liberal hope.
It’s misplaced.
Of course, that judgment comes from somebody who doesn’t accept The Economist’s premise: That the previous era has been profoundly conservative.
The magazine insists that in recent decades the Democrats sometimes seemed to need “divine intervention” to win. Really? Who needed divine intervention in 2000?
And the magazine has to stretch to deny meaning in Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 and in other signs of Democratic life.
At this stage, any effort to paint the times as Republican or Democratic — conservative or liberal — entails a lot of hairsplitting. Some analysts in the articles mentioned above point to polls and trends in such things as party affiliation.
What we have is rough equality — wherein one party gains a small advantage with the outcome of an election or two, but has trouble doing much with it, because there’s no ideological mandate. My guess is that this standoff will continue, even if 2008 is as good a year for the Democrats as 2006 was.
Here’s the main thing about this stage in American history, in the realm of domestic affairs: The people are open to change, but very skeptical if a proposed change is passionately opposed by a major party.
The Democrats promoted universal health care in the 1990s. The Republicans opposed it. It lost. The Republicans promoted partial privatization of Social Security; the Democrats opposed it; it lost.
Large parts of both parties supported “the end of welfare as we know it.” It won, and nobody paid a political price. That is the most promising model for the future.
(One major kind of partisan initiative has had success: tax cuts; but come on.)
For an era — such as the current era of standoff — to come to an end, something big has to happen: a depression; some great demographic change; a huge political upheaval, like the civil rights movement and its backlash.
Something. I don’t see what it is.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: National politics
A word about posting comments
Some people are sending their comments two or three times. I’m guessing this is because they expect to see them posted as soon as they send them. When they don’t see them, they try again.
However, this blog is moderated. That means a comment doesn’t get posted until somebody on at our end posts it. And we can only check for new comments when we have a chance.
The idea behind moderating is to avoid obscene or otherwise ugly stuff, not to stifle any points of view. Nobody has any interest in doing the latter. The whole idea of the blog is a free exchange of views.
Oakwood meeting’s surprise ending
The defining moments of tonight’s Oakwood City Council meeting, with its standing room only house, came just before the crowd disbursed at 10:15.
The main event was a presentation by and questions posed to Dayton Metropolitan Housing Authority Executive Director Greg Johnson about public housing and Section 8 rental subsidies. Much of what transpired was predictable.
The crowd’s silent majority wore concerned expressions throughout the evening. They worried about reports that Dayton’s troubled public housing projects might empty into their backyards. A few resentful residents made dire predictions of crime, instability, declining home sales, and a deterioration of this affluent community’s idyllic quality of life — because, they argued, that’s what happens when the poor move nearby.
Some atmospherics were a pleasant surprise: All three members of the Montgomery County Commission — Debbie Lieberman, Dan Foley, and Judy Dodge — came to the meeting, along with County Administrator Deborah Feldman. So did the entire DMHA board. Kettering Mayor Don Patterson and City Council Member Peggy Lehner were there, too.
They seemed to offer an example of solidarity, of how sensible people who keep their heads can work things through.
Mayor Judy Cook set a dignified tone. She and council members who spoke clearly understood the sensitivity of the topic. They supported the public right to exhaust their questions and be fully informed, but pushed for a rational discussion driven by facts.
DMHA Director Greg Johnson made a careful presentation anticipating the deepest concerns and offering credible answers that should have brought some comfort. He met even the most pointed and least friendly questions with endless patience.
But these things did not move the crowd in any noticeable way.
Rather, it was a sincere, 40-something women who came nervously to the podium toward the very end of the meeting. She said she had lived on Irving Avenue for 10 years near a building with publicly subsidized apartments. She said she never had one minute’s trouble. She said the problems on her street came from upper middle class kids attending UD.
The crowd acknowledged her powerful point with a laugh and a nod.
This was followed by a most remarkable mea culpa.
Lance Winkler, editor of The Oakwood Register, said his recent reporting about potentially hundreds of section 8 tenants flooding the area near the Oakwood-Kettering border had been faulty. He called what he wrote “the journalistic equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
He apologized — a brave and responsible act from the editor of an otherwise bright community weekly.
Mayor Cook concluded with these remarks:
“Anyone is welcome in our community who shares (our) standards and values as demonstrated by their willingness to maintain our property maintenance standards and obey our laws.
“Knowing this to be true, we need to offer support to efforts aimed at improving the quality of life for those in need. It would not be characteristic of our community to add to the problem.”
Romney a conservative, supporter says
We continue with our endorsements of presidential candidates. Today: Mitt Romney, by Nathan Burd. I didn’t know Mr. Burd before the little e-mail exchange below. He’s 29 and a veteran of a bunch of Republican campaigns. He’s running for the Ohio house of representatives in Reynoldsburg and eastern Franklin County and is the founder of Americans for Mitt: http://www.americansformitt.com
Q: What is it that attracts you to Romney and why do you support him?
A: As voters continue to become familiar with Governor Romney, they’ll see that he’s far and away the most accomplished candidate in the field. As governor, Romney has erased a $3 billion budget deficit by reducing waste and cutting taxes. Massachusetts can no longer be called “Taxachusetts” due to Romney’s bold leadership. The principles of fiscal discipline that he has shown in Massachusetts are sorely needed in Washington, D.C.
Romney has also earned praise for applying conservative principles to his landmark plan to provide universal health care coverage to every citizen in Massachusetts.
On education, Romney created the John and Abigail Adams scholarship program that allows high-achieving students to attend state colleges tuition-free for four years. The result of this incentive? Students in Massachusetts rank at the top of nearly academic category.
And on the vital social issues of the day, Romney has been a champion for traditional marriage and for protecting the unborn. By vetoing efforts to expand embryonic stem-cell research and emergency contraception, Romney has made defending human life a top priority. No leader has been as outspoken as Romney on the need to protect traditional marriage. By openly criticizing the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage and by vocally supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment, Romney has been one of the strongest voices for the traditional values movement in America.
Prior to becoming governor, Romney ran the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. These games were held just months after 9/11 and Romney oversaw the massive security effort to keep the games safe. He has also traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan to encourage our troops and to get a first-hand look at the challenges we face. He has spoken clearly on the need to defeat the radical Jihadists who aim to destroy our way of life.
Mitt Romney should be our next president because he’s taken action on all of the major issues of our time and he has the leadership ability to ensure that America remains the world’s economic and military superpower.
Q: A central part of your case is that he’s the best candidate for conservatives. As you know, that’s precisely the matter about which most questions have been raised. In truth, he has always been known as a moderate before. He ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994 as the moderate alternative. There was simply no way a Republican in Massachusetts would run as a conservative. As recently as his governorship, he was known as a moderate. Health care is a case in point. He might apply conservative principles, but he’s still proposing universal care, with a government mandate that a person get coverage. As for gay rights, yes, he opposes gay marriage. But gay rights were a hot issue before that particular issue arose, and he was on the moderate or liberal side. He acknowledges that he was pro-choice until very recently. Tell me the truth: Aren’t you and other conservatives backing him simply because there isn’t any really authentic conservative among the announced major candidates?
A: The idea that Governor Romney isn’t a true conservative is laughable.
Much has been made of the alleged “flip flops”, but the truth is that Romney has only had one major change of opinion: from pro-choice to pro-life. And as lifelong conservative pro-lifer, I can assure you that we want people to convert to our cause. Governor Romney has clearly explained his conversion and, most importantly, he has taken action by vetoing every pro-abortion bill sent to him by the Massachusetts legislature.
Governor Romney has always been against gay marriage. When he ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994, gay marriage wasn’t on the agenda. He spoke of the need to treat gay Americans respectfully then and he speaks of the need to treat gay Americans respectfully now. But Romney agrees with the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that marriage is an institution between one man and one woman.
Conservatives don’t oppose finding new ways to provide health insurance to uninsured individuals. We oppose a single-payer system, a.k.a. Hillary Care, that would put the federal government in control of all health-related decisions. Governor Romney understands that market-based health care reform is the responsible solution to this problem.
As governor, Romney cut taxes and slashed duplicative and wasteful government programs. That is something that is sorely needed in Washington, D.C. today and conservatives recognize that Romney is the man to make it happen.
There are authentic conservatives in this race and Governor Romney is at the top of that list. His record speaks for itself.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: 2008 endorsements, National politics
Dayton, Kettering, Centerville, Huber Heights: Check out 911 dispatch up north
If you’re keeping up with what’s happening around the state on 911 emergency dispatch, check out this from The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.
Kettering City Council responds
In Sunday’s Opinion section of the newspaper, we published a response from Kettering City Council about its decision to quit talks on a regional emergency dispatch system. Here’s how it began.
We rarely engage in editorial sparring, but we feel compelled to set the record straight regarding our decision to withdraw from the proposed regional dispatch center.
A recent blog posting by Ellen Belcher, editorial page editor for the Dayton Daily News, accused Kettering City Council of taking the easy way out; she said that the council was not as “enlightened” as previous councils; and mentioned that the current council did not want to fight a ballot issue that was forthcoming.
Belcher should have watched our last council meeting in its entirety.
Click here to read the entire article.
Permalink | |
Who speaks for Oakwood?
The Oakwood Register, which lands on the front porch of my house in Oakwood, has been the site of some lively conversation about the Dayton Metropolitan Housing Authority’s purchase and renovation of five apartment buildings (four in Kettering, one in Oakwood) on the city’s border for use as affordable housing for lower income families.
Not all of it has been has been attractive.
The community weekly seems intent on sounding an alarm over what it sees as a worrisome trend and impending source of instability — even a threat to public safety — in the City of Oakwood.
(Read its latest coverage and commentary here).
There is some superficial appeal to this, but it’s pretty thin and doesn’t hold up very well when viewed in the light of obvious facts.
Drive down the hill from Oakwood in any of several directions and within minutes (easy biking distance) you are in neighborhoods with fairly high concentrations of people living in poverty.
That has been a reality for some time.
Does making a small number affordable apartments available in more stable, adjacent communities really add to the risk that long has been just down street in a more concentrated and highly mobile form?
Or is it a reasonable strategy for Oakwood and Kettering and other communities to help reduce pressure in areas of concentrated poverty by providing some modest opportunity for families to become part of a middle class mainstream?
So far as I can tell, the alarmists have a loud voice but little imagination — and even less confidence in the ability of spectacularly resourceful communities with so many talented residents to handle and deal productively with some economic diversity.
The community newspaper reports that DMHA’s Executive Director Greg Johnson (whom I have found to be a thoughtful and capable leader) will be at the Oakwood City Council meeting on Monday, Aug. 27 at 7:30 p.m.
It reports he will be fielding questions both from the council and the public.
The kind of reception he receives will offer some indication of who’s speaking for Oakwood these days — the alarmists or the talented, imaginative many.
A third presidential ticket?
Not satisfied with current crop of presidential candidates, or with their campaigns?
Who would be better?
Here are two recent columns by David Broder. Both are both about alternatives. The second talks about a possible third-party ticket. But is it the best possible third ticket? The floor is open to suggestions.
THE FIRST COLUMN:
When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly. Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats — and prescribing tough cures he says others shrink from offering.
In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he “will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it’s going to cost” to assure the nation’s future.
After spending most of the last few years on television’s Law and Order, and starting a new family with two children under 4, the 65-year-old lawyer says he finds himself motivated for the first time to seek the White House.
“There’s no reason for me to run just to be president,” he said. “I don’t desire the emoluments of the office. I don’t want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there — different, more far-reaching ideas — that is worth doing.”
Thompson has caught a strong whiff of the public disillusionment with both parties and the partisanship that has infected Congress.
But he says he thinks that the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. “I think a president could go to the American people and say, ‘Here’s what we need to be doing, and I’m willing to go half-way.’ Now you have to make them (the opposition) go half-way.”
The approach Thompson says he’s contemplating is one that will step on many sensitive political toes. When he says “we’re getting a free ride” fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, “wearing out our people and equipment,” it sounds like a criticism of the president and the Pentagon.
When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription-drug benefit to Medicare, “a $17 trillion add-on to a program that’s going bankrupt,” he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the previous Congress.
When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic-security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow.
Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country’s future. One is “Government at the Brink,” a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president’s budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems in Washington.
The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain today, Thompson said, and increasingly “threaten national security.”
His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending “unsustainable” and warns that, unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government’s fiscal ledger — spending and revenues — the next generation will suffer.
“Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it,” Thompson said. “So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges.”
Thompson readily concedes that he does not know “where all those chips are going to fall” when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could assure a better future for their children.
But these issues — national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath-care costs — “are worth a portion of a man’s life. If I can’t get elected talking that way, I probably don’t deserve to be elected.”
Thompson says “I feel free to do it” his own way, and that freedom may just be enough to shake up the presidential race.
END
THE SECOND:
Chuck Hagel, the senator from Nebraska, describes himself as a “tidal” politician, one who believes that larger forces in the society shape careers more than the ambitions of individuals.”The only mistakes I’ve made,” he told me last week, “were when I tried to go against the tide.”
Today, that tide may be carrying him away from his Republican Party and toward a third-party or independent ticket with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — a development that could reshape the dynamics of the 2008 presidential race.
Next month, Hagel will make a threshold decision — whether to run for a third term in the Senate. He gave me no definitive answer, but my guess is that he will say that 12 years of battling the institutional lethargy of Capitol Hill will be enough. Certainly he is under no illusions about how much he can achieve as one of 100 lawmakers.
On the contrary, while Washington is gridlocked in partisan battle between two equally spent parties, the country is moving rapidly, he thinks, to the conclusion that neither Republicans nor Democrats have the answers to the problems people see. The war in Iraq is the prime example, a war on which Hagel was perhaps the first prominent Republican to break with the president. Credit problems that have shaken the mortgage markets and fed the decline in housing add to the sense of anxiety. And the abject failure of Washington to deal with the issue of illegal immigration is fueling further frustration.
The common thread to all these problems, he says, is leadership — and leadership is precisely what Bloomberg demonstrates every day as mayor of New York, following his success as a financial publisher. “A guy like Bloomberg could have deep credibility as a candidate,” Hagel said. “He’s a fresh face and a proven leader. It could be he’d release a dynamic that would be an answer for many people.”
Hagel said he and Bloomberg have “had some talks,” but that neither of them is ready at this moment to form a partnership or stake out a strategy. Like everyone else, Hagel understands that the mayor’s personal wealth would permit him to organize a campaign, starting next winter or spring, and still have time to gain ballot access in sufficient states to make him a credible national candidate.
But wealth alone will not bring him within reach of 270 electoral votes, and Hagel shares the view that Bloomberg is not interested in being “a spoiler” whose only effect would be to hurt one of the major-party candidates.
So it really comes down to a question of the strength of those tidal forces moving out there in American politics. Hagel’s sense, reinforced by a recent trip to California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is providing a demonstration of the powerful appeal of “post-partisan” politics, is that”the tide is really moving fast.”
The imperative the public will impose on the next president, Hagel says, “is to lead the country and restore the sense of national purpose.” But the early start on campaigning for the GOP and Democratic nominations, and the prospect that the battles on one side or the other or both could continue right through next summer’s conventions, could make it harder for the survivor to be that unifying figure.
Bloomberg is, on the face of it, an implausible alternative. A lifelong Democrat — he became a Republican only to avoid running in a tough primary race for mayor and now has quit the GOP and declared himself an independent — Bloomberg has no institutional support in any camp. As a divorced Jewish city guy, his appeal to the South, the Midwest and rural areas is questionable.
Hagel is, on the surface, a much more conventional politician. A Vietnam vet, a businessman and a career Republican from the Midwest, he is as mainstream in manner as can be imagined.
But he has gone his own way, not just on Iraq but in supporting a comprehensive balanced approach to immigration and on other contentious social issues. John Kennedy liked to say a rising tide lifts all boats. The Bloomberg-Hagel pairing would test that proposition.
Voinovich tie to Spitzer/Stone story
I don’t suppose many people around here are following the flap in New York involving Democratic Gov. Spitzer and a certain Republican political consultant. But there’s a local angle that some might find interesting.
The consultant, Roger Stone, is accused of leaving a phone message threatening Spitzer’s father. Stone has said that somebody might have broken into his living quarters to place the call. But the Republican leader in the state senate quickly fired Stone.
The local angle: In 1988, George Voinovich, known then as a mayor of Cleveland, ran against incumbent U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum for the Senate. Trailing badly, Voinovich aired two weeks of television ads denouncing Metzenbaum for his position on, of all things, child pornography. The ads were widely denounced as unfair. But at a certain point, they showed up again. At that point, there was an uproar that caused Voinovich to pull the ads and sever ties with Stone.
Voinovich’s office is quick to note now that those ties have never been de-severed. In fact, it turns out that Stone was on the other side in last year’s fight over a gambling issue on the November ballot. The fight turned quite bitter. The Stone, pro-gambling side made late charges about Voinovich’s behind-the-scenes participation that the Voinovich side says were extremely untrue.
It is kind of interesting that the Stone episode is the only one that sticks in memory about Voinovich campaigning in an out-of-the-ordinary offensive way.
Homelessness and public champions
As a relative newcomer to Dayton (since 2002), I have marveled at how well respected citizens can drive change in this community when they decide to champion a cause.
Think Victoria Theatre or child protection or the human services levy — to name just three — and you will find Virginia Kettering, Brother Ray Fitz and Fred Smith. Each made big things happen.
Now is the case with homelessness in the Dayton region.
Lots of talented people have worked hard for long time in behalf of this needy population. Many millions of dollars in private and public money are devoted to the problem each year. This has led to some serious accomplishments, but has done little to alleviate homelessness.
In 2005, County Administrator Deborah Feldman said we need to fix this problem, and proceeded to put her considerable talents toward the task — not least her ability to bring accomplished people into the process.
The result has been a 10-year plan to end homelessness in this community, an effort about to reach a major milestone. I produced a video on the topic, which you can watch by clicking here.
What causes in this community do you think are begging for prominent champion to make a big difference?
Post your ideas here, or send me an email.
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Paula MacIlwaine supports…
As part of our continuing series on local people who support various presidential candidates, today we hear from Paula MacIlwaine, who was a Montgomery County commissioner in the 1980s. (Questions and comments welcome, of course.)
Q: So you’re for Bill Richardson? How do you know of him?
A: I met him during the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. I
served on the Democratic National Committee and was one of the drafters
of the Democratic Platform. He was also involved in those two endeavors.
Q: Why do you support him?
A: Bill Richardson is the most qualified candidate running in either
party. His record as a congressman, U.N. ambassador, Energy
Secretary, hostage negotiator, and governor is outstanding. He is
very positive and personable, and I like his stand on the War in Iraq.
Q: Do you really think he’s got a chance?
A: I think he is starting to impress many people, and hopefully his
experience will make him a dark horse. I never give up on any
candidate, because in my career I have seen things change very
rapidly. Anything can happen, and I see him as third after the
earliest primaries. The press is starting to give him more coverage
and that will help.
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Welcome new readers; offer suggestions here.
This blog is only a couple of weeks. It’s still in its formative stages. We’re open to suggestions about a general direction for it and about specific subjects you think it should take up. This is one good place to offer those suggestions, in the form of a comment. Thank you for participating.
Your friends and your politics
(Ed. note: Here’s a column by Clarence Page from today’s Dayton Daily, followed by at least one comment.)
There they go again. I’m listening to a political call-in program on the radio and a caller says he doesn’t believe the major opinion polls. That’s his right, but I wait to hear some evidence.
Instead I hear this: “And everyone I’ve talked to feels like I do.”
Wow. Somebody break the news to Gallup, Harris, Roper, Zogby and all those other pollsters. They’re all washed up. Politicians and major corporations don’t need to keep spending gazillions of dollars on polls and focus groups. All they have to do is talk to this guy’s pals.
One of my pet peeves is people who don’t stop to realize that the whole world might not be thinking about the world or experiencing it the same way that they and their friends do. In politics, economics and other current affairs, people often are influenced less by facts than by their friends. Increasingly sociologists are finding that, whether we intend to or not, birds of a political feather flock together.
Almost 20 years ago, sociologist David Knoke at the University of Minnesota found that you can predict someone’s politics with great certainty if their closest two or three friends all leaned in one political direction. “The more homogenous that someone’s personal networks are,” Knoke told me in a recent interview, “the more likely they share the partisanship of other people.”
As another presidential election heats up, it’s wise to understand the subtle but important role that the attraction of like-minded individuals plays in our political attitudes.
To the political strategists who make their living in such matters, we’re not really “red state” or “blue state” America, according to Douglas B. Sosknik, Matthew J. Dowd and Ron Fournier, the bipartisan authors of “Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community.” Instead, they argue, we’re a bunch of “Red Tribes, Blue Tribes and Tipping Tribes,” shaped by our lifestyle choices and persuadable by anyone who makes a “Gut Values Connection” with us.
But do our views shape our friendships? Or do our friends shape our views? “It’s not an either/or question,” Duke University sociologist Lynn Smith-Lovin said in a telephone interview. “But if I had to choose, I would say most of what we learn is shaped by our associations, and that our associations are shaped more by the structures in which we live — our neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, the clubs we join and so forth.” Normally, she said, “you don’t set out saying you are going to hang out with these people because they are all supporters of one candidate or another. You go because a certain place is full of people who are like you in a lot of other ways. Political beliefs become just another part of the soup of information that you share with one another.” Critical ingredients in that soup, says sociologist Mario Luis Small of the University of Chicago, are our demographics and our shared experiences. People with similar incomes, backgrounds, work categories and family situations gravitate to the same places, activities and, ultimately, friendships.
For example, his research for a forthcoming book turned up this unexpected revelation: The care of children is only one of several benefits of child-care centers. Thanks to the friendships they form, mothers suffer less depression, social isolation and material hardship than comparable mothers who do not use the centers. “We participate in organizations that provide what we are looking for and end up with people who share our needs,” Small said. “The implication for our political attitudes is that these activities end up reinforcing the attitudes I already have.”
These days, Smith-Lovin noted, we are more likely than ever to have our group-shared partisanship hardened by a growing array of Internet sites and other media dedicated to very specific tastes and viewpoints. Increasingly, if you so desire, you and your friends can cruise through an entire day of media without ever sharing the viewpoints or experiences of someone unlike yourselves.
Many find that narrow sampling of the world to be comforting, no doubt. Complexity makes some people nervous. But the world is complex, and sometimes discomfort is good. We learn things not only by reinforcing our cherished beliefs but also by seeing how well those beliefs stand up next to somebody else’s views.
In other words, it’s not easy for birds of a feather to leave their flock, but sometimes it’s worth the flight.
Clarence Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Address: Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611. E-mail address: cpage@tribune.com.
Belcher responds on Kettering/911
Just thought I’d note here that, what with a bunch of people having trashed the Dayton Daily News editorial page on the subject of Kettering’s decision not to enter into regional 911 system, Ellen Belcher, editor of the page, has offered a response. It’s in the string about Kettering, below.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Law Enforcement and Public Safety
Edwards worse than others
I haven’t been watching the presidential debates much. I think the reason is that when you get to a certain age, you just can’t take it any more.
By “it,” I mean these cattle-call exercises in hair-splitting that characterize the early debates.
I couldn’t possibly muster the enthusiasm for hair-splitting that, for example, the ever-enthusiastic David Brooks displays in today’s DDN (8-22-07) in analyzing John Edwards.
There is a more respectable reason for not watching: Any political columnist who watches them ends up writing about them. Then we have the strange spectacle of a debate which almost nobody in the general public cares enough about to watch being treated as one of the great news stories of the season.
Case in point: me. I did tune into one D debate the other night. So, of course, I have to write about it. (At least I’m not wasting newsprint, though. Give me that much.)
Brooks’ enthusiasm notwithstanding, I found Edwards to be the one who is most, shall we say, full of it. At least among the major candidates.
On health care, for example, he unctuously gave Hillary “credit” for fighting for universal health care in the 1990s. He didn’t have to say that her effort was a colossal failure, something she would like to erase from her resume.
Then he said that if he were president he wouldn’t compromise with the other side on health care. I can’t remember exactly what he called the other side. “The corporations” or something like that. But, of course, he meant the Republicans, pretty much. He said, in effect, you just have to plow right through them, because they are the enemy of anything good in this realm.
That is utter nonsense. The liberal Democrats have to face the possibility that they will not take over the world and be able to do whatever they want. They’re going to have to work with others.
Anyway, to the degree they take a my-way-or-the-highway approach, they unite the Republicans in opposition. That’s courting disaster. Any time a whole political party opposes major change, that change fails to happen: universal health care in the 1990s; the partial privatization of Social Security in this decade. This society is conservative enough and successful enough that any party that sets out to convince people that a major change will do more harm than good has a pretty easy sell, at least if you’re not talking about tax cuts.
On Iraq, when moderator Stephanapoulos (or thereabouts) tried to split hairs between the candidates, Edwards was eager to say that the Ds were generally united in their determination to get out, and that they were all dramatically different from all the Rs, who, he said, were “Bush on steroids.” (I’m ALMOST certain he’s the one who used that phrase. At any rate, he made that point.)
This is baloney. The Republicans know the war is devastating to their party. They want a way out, no matter how they might sound now, as they pursue the most conservative voters. To treat the choice facing voters as being about whether one is for or against the war is to fight a political fight that is over. Now the question is not whether to get out, but how and when and to what degree and with what acceptable level of negative repercussions. Some of the Democrats — Clinton, Obama, Biden — were pretty good about emphasizing this. (Edwards settled for granting that withdrawal is not something that can be accomplished in a matter of months from now.)
Strippers wars
You’ve got to hand it to the Ohioans who have signed the petition to block the new law regulating sex-oriented entertainment. They apparently aren’t afraid to stand up, despite social pressure.
Of course, there’s a dispute about just how many of them have known what they were signing.
The conservative group that got a law passed that shuts strip clubs at midnight (and has rules about touching), says that the strippers who are trying to get the law overturned have been misleading people about what their petition says.
In response, the organization behind the strippers cops to the plea in a very minor degree, but says the offending signature-gatherers have been fired.
Whatever. At last count, the strippers were claiming roughly the quarter-million signatures they will need to put a hold on the new law and get a referendum on the November ballot.
It has always seemed to me that crusaders against strip clubs and other forms of sex-oriented entertainment take advantage of the fact that people who enjoy such entertainment — apparently a huge portion of the population — would just as soon not tell the whole world about their tastes.
Those who are eager to judge them might say that reticence reflects their own feeling that their tastes are shameful. But, really, who doesn’t have some little secrets?
When the legislative fight was happening this summer in Columbus over the new restrictions, the people who were visible in opposition were those whose livelihoods depend on the businesses. The strippers themselves were there. The club owners were outspoken.
But, as is typical in these things, not many people in the general public spoke up.
That is probably one reason the new restrictions were enacted.
Polls showed that most men have actually patronized these clubs at some point. But the politicians worry most about people who feel so strongly about an issue that they get involved in politics . The legislators noticed where the pressure was coming from.
The new restrictions are not extreme and are not unconstitutional. They are certainly no threat to the ability of Ohioans to find sex entertainment.
(By the way, let’s pause over that phrase “sex entertainment.” The more common phrase is “adult entertainment.” Gimme a break. In this context, “adult” means “obsessed with sex.” In other contexts, though, “adult” means something like “not obsessed with sex.” The latter is the better definition.)
And yet it is good to see the group Dancers for Democracy fighting for their rights and those of their customers. After all, they were not bothering anybody when Citizens for Community Values came along and started political trouble. Local communities were not complaining that the strip clubs were bringing crime or anything else. No local officials were in Columbus looking for help.
All that happened was that CCV gathered enough signatures to put the issue before the Legislature.
If that’s the way the game is to be played, there does have to be some countervailing political force. Tit for tat.
And that force can use some help from average citizens who are willing to stand up for the all-American value of living and letting others live.
Not the Kettering Council of old
Kettering city government has always fancied itself as a leader in all things progressive.
When other communities were closing their doors to low-income housing back in the ’70s, Kettering’s elected officials courageously said that was wrong. When more recently some jurisdictions wouldn’t agree to share taxes as part of an effort to limit internecine competition over new businesses, Kettering, the second-largest community in Montgomery County, signed on.
The city also has been a good friend to Dayton, even as others haven’t been so warm to the center city. Whether the cause was minor league baseball, RiverScape or the Schuster Performing Arts Center, Kettering officials consistently have been among the people out front, saying that the wider community needs to keep Dayton strong, and that what’s good for it is good for everybody in the region.
This sense of enlightenment was nowhere to be seen Tuesday night when Kettering City Council voted unanimously to quit talks about creating a consolidated emergency dispatch system for Montgomery County.
The system would save money by eliminating duplication of equipment and people, and, more important, it would assure better communication for first-responders across the region if, say, a tornado or other major disaster struck.
Ignore the rationalizing that Kettering’s concerns and questions weren’t being adequately addressed in the talks. They were. The decision to get out was made simply and solely because a citizens’ group has enough signatures to put the issue of participating in a consolidated system on the ballot.
The council just didn’t want to spend the fall election season contradicting the citizens’ group and spelling out how its members have been misleading people, saying service would suffer if a dispatcher actually sitting in Kettering wasn’t taking their emergency calls.
Sadly, there also was a lot of anti-Dayton sentiment barely below the surface, with some Kettering residents complaining to some officials that they didn’t want Dayton police coming to their door or to their rescue. (That isn’t what central dispatching is about — each city still keeps its own police department.)
If everybody really told the truth, this controversy is about reducing jobs and sharing control. Kettering’s police and fire chiefs like being in charge of their dispatchers, and 11 Kettering employees would have to re-apply for their positions at the county sheriff’s office under a consolidated dispatch operation. The top pay for county dispatchers in 2006 was $40,706; in Kettering, top dollar was $7,000 more.
So, even though the Kettering city manager concedes the city would save a minimum of $300,000 a year under a centralized system, the council walked away. The elected officials and the administration chose instead to avoid the aggravation that comes with putting down rumors and putting out facts.
This was not Kettering or local government at its best. A few public employees called the shots.
— Ellen Belcher,Editorial Page Editor
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Law Enforcement and Public Safety
Sometimes it pays to steal
Out of touch is the phrase that comes to mind about an arbitrator’s decision that a guard at the Montgomery County Jail shouldn’t have been fired for stealing about $3,000 from a West Carrollton youth organization.
The 11-page decision from this spring by Margaret Nancy Johnson was an inexplicable exercise in splitting the baby. She conceded points that Sheriff Dave Vore made, agreeing, for instance, that he could be embarrassed and mad that one of his employees was stealing, even if it wasn’t on the job.
But in the end, Johnson sided with the employee, Alyssa Ridgeway, and her union, the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. She bemoaned that if Vore was allowed to fire Ridgeway, the employee couldn’t successfully complete the prosecutor’s diversion program, which required her to stay employed and pay back most of the money she took.
(Diversion programs, which are common nationally, allow first-time, nonviolent offenders to avoid a felony conviction, provided they do what a judge says, pay any damages and sin no more.)
Arbitrator Johnson said that in light of this, termination would be too harsh. She decided that a seven-month suspension — the time from when Ridgeway was let go until when Johnson ordered that she get her job back — was penalty enough. You’ve heard of getting three days or two weeks off, but seven months?
Montgomery County commissioners agreed with a stunned Vore that keeping the employee was not an option, so they paid her $47,500 to go away. That sounds crazy, but the choice was to settle with her or to accept the arbitrator’s decision.
A killer clause in the union contract, which the arbitrator said she was bound by, prevented her from holding any previous disciplinary action against the employee if the misbehavior was older than two years. Ridgeway had been demoted from sheriff’s officer to corrections officer in 2003, but her last two evaluations had been good.
Maybe in the next round of union negotiations, Vore can insist that when he agreed to not hold disciplinary actions against employees forever, he wasn’t talking about forgiveness for felonies.
The incident is reminiscent of the time when former Dayton Police Chief Jim Newby had to publicly announce that, henceforth, lying to internal affairs investigators would be a firing offense. That was 1990, and an officer had been involved in the infamous “hot iron case.”
The officer had put a hot iron on a suspect, and he and others who had seen the incident lied about what had happened, never mind that the suspect had tell-tale burn marks. There was disagreement about whether those who hadn’t actually participated in the act could be fired only for lying.
Arbitrator Johnson got lost in an uncomplicated forest of facts. All the case really came down to was whether a thief — whom the prosecutor had given a break — should be allowed to keep her keys to the jail house door.
Bad choice.
— Ellen Belcher, Editorial Page Editor
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DeWine offers case for McCain
This continues our series on the presidential election, in which try to get people to make their case for their candidate. Today former Sen. Mike DeWine answers a couple of questions about Sen. John McCain, whose campaign he formally heads in Ohio. Check it out, respond if you like, and maybe offer a question.
Q: Things are not going well, are they? Do you think he can make a comeback?
A: John will come back, get the nomination and be elected President. He survived years as a POW and has taken many tough stands throughout the years. John is a fighter. He will win.
Q: Basically, what’s your case that he’s the best pick. In 2000, you supported him over George W. Bush on the grounds primarily that he was more qualified in the realm of foreign policy. But he’s has been the staunchest of supporters of the Iraq war.
A: The next President will face a very dangerous world. John McCain is the person with the experience and background to be the commander in chief. McCain said from the beginning that we did not have enough troops in Iraq. Tragically, he was right. as he was in the 1980’s when he cautioned against committing our Marines to Lebanon. McCain will provide the tough, visionary leadership we need .
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: 2008 endorsements, Local politics, National politics
GOP chief offers reasons for Fred Thompson
Today we begin a long-term project: Hearing from supporters of the various candidates for president. I’ve been inviting the participation of specific official spokespeople, as well those in no official position. We’re interested in hearing from anybody, and you are invited to pose questions to these advocates or disagree with them.
I’m not going to let any one campaign dominate by sheer numbers of postings. I’ll be moderating. Keep it civil.
We start with Montgomery County Republican Chairman Greg Gantt making a case for Fred Thompson. I conducted this brief e-mail exchange with him:
Q: So you’re intrigued by this whole Thompson thing. Why?
A: The top three reasons I favor Fred Thompson over the other Republican presidential candidates:
1) His Resume: from an assistant U.S. Attorney to United States Senator to actor, he has a diverse background in both the public and private sectors;
2) Straightforward: If you go to his web site and look at his statements on the issues, you will see short and to the point statements on the issues. I would rather know what a candidate thinks than agree with everything a candidate says;
3) Electable: he continues to do very well in polls and he has not declared his candidacy. The people that I know who support Fred Thompson call themselves, “Fred Heads.” It would be great to see Republicans wearing tie dyed t-shirts while “Sugar Magnolia” is played at a Thompson for President campaign event. Conservative political philosophy is often misunderstood and “Fred Heads” could help correct that misunderstanding.
Q: Hmmm. I’m not sure how well those particular cultural references
Will resonate with Republicans. But ok. I suppose my main question is this:
Giuliani led the nation’s biggest city through a national trauma, and had a general record as mayor that most people seem to find admirable. McCain has been at the center of national affairs for years. How can one make the case that Thompson is as proven, as qualified.
A: Giuliani is my second choice. Unfortunately, I feel that McCain is
viewed too much as a career politician and does not resonate with the
Republican base. McCain is like Richard Gephardt in that he has been
in the mix too many times and not been the candidate. Thompson
resonates with Republicans and is often compared to Ronald Reagan.
It was the combination of the Republican base with the Reagan
Democrats that resulted in victory. I favor Thompson because I
believe he appeals to both the base and others. I understand that
Giuliani is a little stronger in terms of the primary campaign, but
Thompson is stronger for the general election. After all, the goal is
to win both the primary and the general elections.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: 2008 endorsements, Local politics, National politics
Krugman way over the top
Re the Krugman column on today’s op-ed page (8-16):
As Paul Krugman might say — does say, in fact, in his column on the opposite page — wow.
It is simply amazing that he thinks he can reasonably declare that, “It has long been clear that President George W. Bush doesn’t feel other people’s pain.”
Not only that, but the two leading Republican candidates to replace Mr. Bush are, in that sense, “cut from the same cloth.”
Mr. Krugman has no more knowledge of what these guys feel than you or I have. He has no idea how Bush relates, behind closed doors, say, to the survivors of Americans killed in Iraq or to injured vets themselves.
Surely if the columnist had some powerful reason to feel he knows what the heck he’s talking about, he would offer it. But you are free to search his column for it.
All he does is wallow in some embarrassing, stupid statements these Republicans have made, as if Republicans are the only ones who say stupid things in a campaign. The game here is “Gotcha!” and Mr. Krugman is playing it with awful, childish enthusiasm.
For him, rejecting the views and values of Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush is apparently not enough. He must present these guys — all of them — as defective people, as humanoid forms that lack so basic a human characteristic as empathy.
It’s a sign of the times that The Times — of New York — provides a commentator so crazed by partisan passion. It’s an embarrassment to liberals that their people sound so much like the hate machines of right-wing talk radio.
For some, the mere fact that Republicans are Republicans is evidence of an absence of empathy. Mr. Krugman hints at this view when he says we shouldn’t be surprised that Republican presidential candidates turn out to be “monstrously self-centered.”
So perhaps it should be noted that President Bush has actually been good on, for example, aid to the world’s most desperate countries and on AIDS in Africa.
To equate Republicanism with heartlessness is on a par with equating it with racism. Surely, we can move a little beyond that.
Some people have dared to hope that the mindless partisanship of the Bush years might give way to something a little kinder and gentler. Apparently not if Mr. Krugman has anything to say about it. He seem to relish that passions that were fostered by Florida, 2000.
Oh, well. Maybe he’ll say his “doesn’t-feel-other-people’s-pain” crack was just one of those dumb things that people say in the course of an endless, brutal political campaign.
Give Rove His Due
Karl Rove stayed too long at the fair. He stayed long enough to demonstrate he was not everything he was cracked up to be.
Long given much credit for every success of George W. Bush — in both politics and government — he now has the distinction of being the political genius behind a presidency on which, let’s face it, the Republicans would like a do-over.
Rove has been involved in a jillion juicy controversies, and people like me have always enjoyed writing about him. The whole evil genius thing.
As he departs (to spend more time with his family, of course), let’s look at the big, big picture.
Rove has become a Democratic whipping boy — a symbol of evil and partisanship, a target juicer than almost any other, because of his successes and his methods. In fact, however, he started out with a fairly benign big-picture goal. He was going to shape a president who would usher in an era of Republican dominance by being a “new kind of Republican.”
That phrase entailed a move away from Reaganesque, white-based conservatism and toward “compassionate conservatism.” It entailed a certain moderation.
The change would be designed to, among other things, add Hispanic voters to the Republican base.
Rove (and his boss) felt that Hispanic voters, who would be growing in numbers, were natural Republicans, given their alleged conservatism on social issues.
However, Rove and Bush also believed that the party must not be seen as anti-immigrant if it wanted Hispanic votes.
Their dream went the way of many other dreams of the Bush years. The dream seems in retrospect remarkably naive, of all things. The allegedly hard-headed Rove got all romantic.
He didn’t foresee the strength of ethnocentric forces in a nearly all-white Republican Party. He didn’t foresee what fun the right-wing talk show hosts would have rallying their listeners against foreigners.
Why not? Foreseeing that stuff was his job. After all, in retrospect, nothing seems surprising about it.
Still, it is to Rove’s credit that he thought in such big, high-purpose, distinctive terms. Whoever replaces him will just be getting from day to day. He, she or they will be mere functionaries.
Maybe the president needs some functionaries now, rather than grand thinkers, given the grand debacle on immigration and the war in Iraq.
But the grand thinkers deserve some credit for venturing boldly. And they’re more fun to write about.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: National politics
Interview with Antioch College president
Outgoing Antioch College President Steve Lawry accepted an invitation to talk with the editorial board. He came in last Monday. He is very eager to deliver the message that Antioch University has to reorganize if it wants to revive the college. He says that the first order of business must be to create a board of trustees for the college, rather than having one only for the university. He says his experience in trying to raise money from alums is not so much that they don’t have money (though that is often said about Antioch alums). He says the problem is that they don’t have confidence in the way the school is run, and aren’t sure enough about how their money will be used. He says they’re willing to contribute a little, but not a lot.
He has already said much of that publicly. We got a chance to question him, however, on some other subjects that have gotten less attention. Most specifically, there was the matter of Antioch’s political atmosphere. He said Antioch has an unusually high number of undergrads who leave after a year. He said he tries to interview those who leave as to why. And he said that one of the main reasons they give is a sense of being pressured to hold certain political views. He says they come to Antioch out of a sense that it is a place given to questioning, but that they find that the questioning may only be directed in a certain way.
As he has in other interviews, he said he stopped the campus newspaper’s practice of printing unsigned denunciations of specific students over politics, denunciations with threats in them.
At the same time, however, he was eager to put the political issue in context. He didn’t suggest that it was much of a problem in recruitment. He said the big issue there seemed to be the quality of campus facilities. And he suggested that the atmospheric problem had been coming under control recently.
On a related subject, he was emphatic in his view that Antioch University McGregor never should have been broken off from the college. He suggested that that was done largely out of a concern about the college’s political reputation and the problems it would cause McGregor. He said the better approach would have been to fix the political reputation. He said the two schools have to be recombined now.
This was the first time I and at least some other people at the DDN had met him. I think he impressed most people as straightforward, easy to talk to, clear-headed, and obviously knowledgeable.
He was a little fuzzy on why he’s leaving the job, rather than try to help the school re-launch in 2012. When I suggested that the re-launch seemed like an interesting challenge, he said he had been challenged enough for a while. He said he has enjoyed being here, but has family on East Coast and expects to end up there.
A few days after his visit, Eric Fingerhut, the new chancellor for higher education in Ohio, was at the paper. Antioch came up. Fingerhut said the school’s financial situation had been creating “angst” at the Board of Regents, which is required to give all schools in the state, both private and public, its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. With the school losing enrollment and faculty, he said that was becomingly increasingly difficult. So he was pleased to see the trustees do what was necessary now, even if the possibility of eventual rebirth is there.
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Broder on ‘08 campaign
RE David Broder column of 8-9 saying the Republican presidential candidates have to separate themselves from Bush, especially on the war.
Broder points to 1988 as an example of an incumbent-party strategy that led to a third presidential term for that party, and to 1968 as an example of a strategy that failed.
For my money, the difference between the two years is simply that incumbent party couldn’t win in 1968 and couldn’t lose in 1988.
In ‘68, the Democrats were the party that had flopped in Vietnam. Parties that flop on the big project pay a price. They can’t avoid that by turning against their own policies. For one thing, the turning is seen as politically motivated. For another, it divides the party all the more.
Ken Blackwell tried the strategy of running against an unpopular governor of his own party. Look how that worked out for him. True, the way he tried to separate himself was by moving away from the political center, rather than toward it. But anybody who looks at the race in retrospect concludes there was simply no way.
As things stand now, the Republicans are the party that flopped in Iraq. The only thing that might keep the war from working against the Republican candidate in ‘08 would be a dramatic change in Iraq. There’s no good strategy.
Murdoch and all that
If Cal Thomas likes Rupert Murdoch, fine. Let him make the case.
But please spare us this crybaby stuff about “the grotesque amount of condescension from the elite media.” That condescension is the theme of Thomas’ column in the Aug. 7 Dayton Daily News.
What are his examples? Well, Andrea Mitchell called Murdoch “a controversial press lord.”
Never mind that Murdoch happens to BE a controversial press lord. Never mind that precisely the same point might be made in precisely the same words by The Weekly Standard, The National Review or another conservative publication.
Thomas is also upset that Mitchell called Murdoch “deeply conservative.” Thomas is dead certain that she meant it as insult. But that’s on him. She doesn’t have to apologize for reporting a simple fact.
Thomas goes one:
“The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta claimed Murdoch ‘often’ uses ‘his publications and his media to advance his business or his political interests.’”
Thomas insists that the media would never say the same thing about the owner of The New York Times. In fact, however, if somebody could catch Arthur Sulzberger using his paper to advance his business interests, the mainstream media would absolutely love the story.
Thomas also doesn’t like a Mike Wallace quote from 60 Minutes 10 years ago: “On Murdoch’s new cable channel, the news comes with a conservative spin.”
Yet Thomas goes on to make essentially same point: Fox is done by conservatives, for conservatives: “These people,” he quotes himself as saying about the viewers who he predicted would materialize, “hate the liberal media.”
His only complaint about the Wallace quote appears to be that Wallace wouldn’t charge CNN with being liberal. OK, but, really this constant effort to portray the mainstream media as leftish gets awfully, awfully stretched.
Here, for the record, is what the NYT editorial page last said about Hugo Chavez (whose views Thomas ascribes to the Times):
“President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela had an especially good time baiting President Bush during their recent competing tours of Latin America. But demagoguery and showmanship will do nothing to solve Venezuela’s 20 percent inflation rate — now the highest in Latin America — and growing food shortages that are punishing the poor whose interests Mr. Chavez so loudly declaims.
“Venezuela’s biggest problem is that there is no one to question Mr. Chavez’s increasingly erratic decisions….
“Government spending — fueled by the nation’s oil wealth — rose an extraordinary 48 percent last year, and is one of the main forces driving inflation. Private-sector investment, meanwhile, has weakened since Mr. Chavez decided to nationalize utility companies earlier this year.
“Price controls intended to help the poor buy food and hold down rising prices have led to a scarcity of staples like beef, chicken and milk. Threats to nationalize grocery stores and jail their owners — whom Mr. Chavez accuses of hoarding — have only made the situation worse.
“Venezuela still has billions of dollars in foreign currency reserves. And Mr. Chavez has used some of the oil wealth to push social programs — including for literacy and health clinics — to improve the lives of Venezuela’s poor. But we fear that any good is quickly being undone by the old strongman formula of cronyism, corruption and incompetence.”
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: National politics
“The Myth of the Rational Voter”
The Sunday Dayton Daily News has a column by Jonah Goldberg promoting knowledge tests for prospective voters. He made the same proposal in a column last summer, and I wrote a response here. Here is that response:
The Kristof and Goldberg oped columns in today’s DDN on the book “The Myth of the Rational Voter:”
My parents were never quite clear on the difference between a U.S. senator and a state senator. And, not having high school diplomas, they couldn’t have named the three branches of government. But they knew what they thought of Reagan, Bush 1 and Clinton. If Goldberg had tried to test them to see if they should be allowed to vote, I would have killed him. Well, no. Figure of speech. But it would be the kind of provocation against which Americans would be obliged to take up arms under other circumstances.
Maybe, in the case of Goldberg, I’d settle for lecturing my parents to the effect that this shows why people like them should not be trending conservative in their advanced years.
I haven’t read the book, but I have well-aged views on the rationality of voters. If you look at the historical pattern in presidential elections, you see a clear logic to the way the decisive voters are voting: parties keep the presidency when the country and the government are doing about as well as can be expected by a rational, non-partisan, non-ideological voter looking at the big picture. Otherwise, the other party wins.
The voters who determine the outcome aren’t typically voting for “policies,” but for people. And they’re passing judgment on the parties on an election-by-election basis, with an eye on the big picture.
Of course, that’s not to say that policy views don’t matter in elections. The people who vote for the same party pretty much all the time — the majority of voters — are often motivated by policy views, or at by values. Whether the views are rational can be debated. But the values have to be respected.
On turnout: Goldberg makes an assumption that I’ve heard from others who are against efforts to maximize turnout: that the people who aren’t voting are the ones who don’t know anything. It’s as dubious as the assumption that those people are mainly potential Democrats, an assumption he derides. A study by Cox Newspapers some years ago concluded that non-voters have about the same amount of information as voters.
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask this question: why should a person who declares his own ignorance about political stuff and his own lack of opinions be urged to vote, even if his instinct is not to? But what about the people about whom it can be said that they know a lot, but it’s all wrong. They seem to be more prevalent. I’ll take uninformed vacillation over uninformed certitude. Put the vacillators in a voting booth, and they might make some bad choices. But, as Kristof suggests, add up all the choices, and you’re likely to find something worth respecting.
Permalink | | Categories: National politics
The embarrassing public housing flap in Kettering and Oakwood…
We’ll have an editorial on Thursday’s Opinions page (and posted online Wednesday night) about this controversy.
Wow, do Oakwood and Kettering officials have a beef with The Oakwood Register. Check out the article that started the fuss at http://www.oakwoodregister.com/.
The headline says, “Section Eight housing going up across Shroyer Road.” That’s a lie, and it gets worse from there.
The article about “rumors” begins by quoting an unnamed resident who asks, “Did you know there’s going to be eight hundred units of Section Eight housing going up in Kettering?” If that were true — it’s not — that would mean more than 20 percent of the people in Montgomery County who are getting housing subsidies under the Section 8 program were going to rent in Kettering or Oakwood. It’s preposterous.
Another unnamed resident is quoted as saying that he’s worried about the “complexion” of the neighborhood changing.
What can you say?
Permalink | | Categories: Public Housing
