06/25/09
Please Cry For Me, Argentina!
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Oh, the Appalachian Trail. It’s famous as the longest footpath in the nation — but now we know it’s even longer than we thought, stretching all the way from Maine to Argentina! And nobody ever encountered as many bumps along the trail as South Carolina’s Republican Governor Mark Sanford.
After Larry Craig, John Ensign, and Eliot Spitzer, zipper problems among politicians should not surprise us anymore. But, still, Sanford’s fall from grace may be the most bizarre of all.
When fellow Republican, Lt. Governor Andre Bauer first reported his absence from the state, Sanford had already been missing in action for five days, over Father’s Day weekend. He told no one where he was going. He left no one in charge. He did not phone or email. And nobody knew where he was. Not his staff. Not the Lt. Governor. Not even his wife and kids.
Spokesperson Joel Sawyer told reporters the governor had just gone off for a hike on the Appalachian Trail, to “clear his head” after a tough legislative session. That story collapsed when Sanford’s car was found at the Atlanta airport, 80 miles from the trailhead. Seven days after disappearing, a tearful governor returned to Columbia to admit he’d actually been in Buenos Aires the whole time, hanging out with his Argentinian girlfriend.
And, of course, in this age of the Internet, Sanford’s apology was immediately followed by publication of torrid emails he exchanged with “Maria.” In one of those emails he praised her “magnificent gentle kisses” and expressed his love for “your tan lines,” “the curve of your hips,” and “the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light — but, hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you, I would never do that!” Ay, caramba!
Now, I know liberals are not supposed to take pleasure in another man’s pain. Bleeding hearts, one and all, we’re supposed to feel sorry for Mark Sanford. No glee allowed.
Baloney! Yes, I feel sorry for Mrs. Sanford and the kids, but as for the governor — he got what he deserved. Lots of glee for me. I haven’t stopped grinning since I heard the news, because it means that one more Republican hypocrite bites the dust.
As a Republican member of Congress, remember, Sanford was one of the loudest voices demanding that Bill Clinton resign the presidency. Why? Because, according to Sanford, “The issue of lying is probably the biggest harm, if you will, to the system of Democratic government, representative government, because it undermines trust. And if you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.”
Once again, what goes around comes around. Now it’s time for Sanford to take his own medicine and resign as governor. He’s no poster boy for the religious right, after all. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Mark Sanford turns out to be “just another politician with a conservative mind — and a liberal penis.”
But the latest GOP scandal is not about Mark Sanford alone. It’s about the whole, holier-than-thou Republican Party. For more than 30 years, they’ve paraded themselves as America’s moral guardians, the party of family values. You’ve heard their self-righteousness: Republicans are moral; Democrats are immoral. Republicans believe in God, Democrats believe in Satan. Some even seriously argued “GOP” stands for “God’s Own Party.”
Nobody can make that argument anymore. Republicans long ago ceased being the party of small government or fiscal responsibility. Today, they’re no longer the party of family values, either.
Indeed, we now see Republicans unmasked for whom they really are: a bunch of lying, amoral, believe-in-nothing-except-
Just in the last six months, Bobby Jindal bombed and disappeared from the scene. Rick Perry urged Texans to secede from the Union. Sarah Palin was forced to repay the State of Alaska for political junkets on which she dragged her kids along. John Ensign has an affair with a campaign staffer, while keeping her, her husband, and their son on his payroll. And Mark Sanford disappears with his Argentinian bombshell.
There’s only one candidate left. In 2012, it looks like Republicans are going to have to stick with a paragon of moral virtue: Newt Gingrich!
06/18/09
More Competition in Health Care
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
As usual, the president said it best: “Millions of our citizens do not have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health care. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”
And the president was right. However, that wasn’t Barack Obama in 2009. That was Harry S. Truman, addressing a joint session of Congress, in 1945. Can you believe it? His legislation to provide universal health care failed by only a few votes, and Congress has done nothing about it ever since.
But now’s the time. Almost 50 million Americans today — working Americans, with good jobs — have no health insurance at all, because they can’t afford it. Another 25 million don’t have adequate coverage. Today we spend 16 percent of GDP on health care, more than any other nation in the world, yet the United States ranks last among 19 industrialized nations in preventable deaths. On health care, we are, in short, paying more for less — in a system that is so complicated, so multilayered that even those who can afford it find it impossible to negotiate. The status quo is no longer acceptable or affordable.
In an ideal world, a single-payer system like they have in Europe or Canada would be the best answer. You can’t deliver quality care at the lowest price when so many interests — insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical equipment manufacturers — are in the business simply to make more profit. But the sad reality is, despite the leadership of John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, and Bernie Sanders, there aren’t enough votes in Congress for single-payer legislation. It’s too easily shot down as “socialized medicine.”
That’s why President Obama proposes, instead, a “public plan option.” In what he insists must be part of any health care reform legislation, consumers would be offered a choice: to purchase any one of hundreds of competing health care plans already offered by insurance companies or HMO’s, or to opt for a new, government-run plan under which, like Medicare, the government pays the bills and private doctors perform the services.
Yet even that modest proposal is under attack: from Republicans in Congress, who have offered no plan of their own; from the American Medical Association, long-time opponent of universal health care; and from insurance companies, afraid of the competition. Fronting for them, the Heritage Foundation, grand-daddy of conservative think tanks, sent out an Open Letter on Health Care, declaring: “The inclusion of a public option is nothing more than a Trojan horse. The architects of the President’s proposals, and the sponsors of his proposals on Capitol Hill, know that once a government plan is in place, private insurance companies will be eventually run out of business.”
Nonsense. If required to compete with a public plan, private insurers won’t go out of business, but they will be forced to cut costs and offer more affordable products.
The truth is, we already have “socialized medicine” in this country. It’s called Medicare, or Medicaid, or the Veterans Administration. And those programs work for tens of millions of Americans, delivering quality, affordable medical care to those who qualify, either by age, income, or military service.
And they do so without all the expensive overhead of private plans. Take away all those who stand between you and your doctor — like the Madison Avenue advertisers trying to convince you to buy more expensive drugs, or the insurance green-shades trying to figure out how to deny you coverage — and you can achieve real savings. According to Families USA, Medicare spends only 3 percent or less on administrative costs, while private insurance companies spend an average 12 percent.
Offering a public plan alone is not the solution. Total health care reform must also require everyone to buy insurance, offering incentives for staying healthy, and paying doctors according to the results they achieve, not the number of procedures they perform.
But a public option is a necessary part of any health care reform mix, and nothing to fear. All it does is offer people more choice and more competition. Just what America’s all about. And just what American consumers need.
6/11/09
Why Doesn’t Obama Just Stay Home?
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
In the interest of full disclosure, I sometimes crave a good burger. So whenever the mood strikes, I head to the “Five Guys” closest to Washington’s Capitol Hill: on New Jersey Avenue, near the new Nationals’ ballpark.
Too bad I wasn’t there on May 29. I could’ve shared a cheeseburger and fries with the commander in chief himself, who dropped in with NBC’s Brian Williams to pick up lunch for the gang back at the White House. For the crew at Five Guys, it was a once-in-a-lifetime presidential fast-food fix. For President Obama, it was just another day out on the town.
Michelle Obama had previously taken her staff out to another Five Guys location. Obama and Vice President Biden made a surprise lunch run to Ray’s Hell Burgers, across the river in Arlington, Va. Almost every Saturday, the Obamas cheer on their daughters’ soccer games at local schools. And the President and first lady have stepped out recently for high-profile date nights in Paris and Washington — plus dinner and a play in New York City.
Not only that. On many weekends, Obama rounds up friends for a fast-paced basketball game. And, now that warm weather’s here, he can frequently escape to one of the local golf courses. In fact, Obama walked out of the White House, toting his clubs, only 90 minutes after returning from a six-day trip to Europe and the Middle East — while his wife and daughters were still doing Paris and London.
How unusual. A president and his wife who actually seem to enjoy each other’s company and, no matter how difficult it may be, love getting out of the White House. Which, of course, is driving Republicans crazy. Unwilling to criticize Obama’s public policies, they’ve decided to attack his personal lifestyle instead.
So far, Republicans haven’t condemned Obama’s time on the basketball court or golf course. It would, after all, be hard for them to do so, given the long hours George W. Bush spent on his mountain bike during some of the country’s most pressing problems. Even in hard times, presidents need their exercise.
But the date nights proved too much for Republicans to swallow — especially the First Couple’s May 30 back-and-forth jaunt to the Big Apple, for which Obama gave a very straightforward explanation. “I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished,” he said in a statement released by the White House.
That didn’t satisfy his critics. No sooner had Marine One left the South Lawn than the Republican National Committee put out a press release denouncing the president’s decision to go out for a night on the town in the middle of a recession, while General Motors was preparing to file for bankruptcy. And they accused the Obamas of wasting at least $25,000 in taxpayer dollars to pay for the trip, when they could have just as easily — and more cheaply — gone out for a play at the nearby Kennedy Center.
On Twitter, Republican Chuck Grassley even chastised the president for urging action on health care reform while still in Paris. In a message demonstrating the inanity of Twitter and Grassley both, the senator from Iowa wrote: “Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us ‘time to deliver’ on health care. We still on skedul/even workin/WKEND.”
Give me a break. This is the best Republicans can do? There are plenty of legitimate issues they can raise against President Obama, but how he spends downtime with his family is not one of them. Nor is the cost of their travel to New York. Don’t blame Obama. He’d have been just as happy taking Amtrak or the Shuttle, which the Secret Service would never allow. And jetting to New York, by the way, is a lot cheaper, and requires a much smaller plane, than jetting to Crawford, Texas, for the weekend.
If Republicans really believed in family values, they’d be celebrating a couple that spends time with their kids and each other — yes, even in the middle of a recession. I don’t get it. Eight years ago, they attacked Bill Clinton for cheating on his wife. Today, they’re attacking Barack Obama for not cheating on his wife. Why don’t they make up their minds?
06/04/09
Obama Reaches Out to Muslim World
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
One of the greatest challenges facing President Obama when he took office was restoring America’s standing among other nations, especially our standing in the Arab and Muslim world, so badly shattered, on our end, by Sept. 11 —and, on their end, by the war in Iraq.
As Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has repeatedly pointed out, rebuilding this relationship will not be quick or easy. It’s part of a long process. But, even before Cairo, Obama was off to a good start.
He gave his first television interview as president to Al-Arabiya, an Arab-language network. He called on George Mitchell to restart the Middle East peace process. He went to Turkey and addressed the Parliament. He reached out to Iran. He outlawed torture and signed orders to close Gitmo and start bringing our troops home from Iraq.
That set the stage for his historic appearance at Cairo University and what will be remembered as one of the most powerful and important speeches ever given by any American president. Obama didn’t pull any punches or duck any issues. He coupled a fervent plea for peace with direct challenges to both Arabs and Israelis. He laid out an agenda for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. And he urged Muslims, Jews, and Christians to unite against Islamic extremists.
It’s time, Obama said, to move beyond the built-in prejudices that divide us. The son and grandson of Muslims, now president of the United States, acknowledged feeling a personal responsibility to fight negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. At the same time, he told his Muslim audience, they must see America as it really is. “America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known.”
And, standing in the land that gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Obama called on Muslims everywhere to join in denouncing terrorism. “None of us should tolerate these extremists. … They have killed people of different faiths — more than any other, they have killed Muslims.” And their violence, he pointed out, is antithetical to the Holy Koran, which teaches that, “whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind.”
On Iraq, Obama repeated his commitment to remove all combat troops by August 2010 and to remove all troops from the country by 2012. To those who still resent the former presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, he vowed that the United States sought no permanent military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan. And he recognized Iran’s right to establish nuclear power plants, while again rejecting their right to build nuclear weapons.
Words are only words, of course. As many commentators have pointed out, the success of Obama’s mission to restore good relations with the Muslim world will depend on his actions to bring peace to the Middle East. So, on that issue, he spoke with unusual bluntness. He reaffirmed our special bond with Israel, while telling its leaders they had to stop building settlements and accept the inevitability of a Palestinian state. For the first time, he actually spoke of a nation called “Palestine,” but told Arabs they first had to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
In some of his most moving language, Obama called for religious tolerance, urging people of all faiths to respect the beliefs and practices of others. And, having just come from Saudi Arabia, where women still aren’t even allowed to drive, he boldly prodded all nations of the Arab world to grant equal rights to women.
One speech isn’t going to solve all the world’s problems. But this one —immediately translated into 13 languages by the State Department and broadcast around the world — has the potential, over time, to bring about dramatic change in our relationship to the Arab world.
In Obama’s vision, we no longer see Muslim nations as countries we can bomb whenever and wherever we want, but as nations whose independence and culture we respect. And they see us, no longer as a global bully, but as a friend and partner, who leads by example, not by military might alone.
Today, for Muslims worldwide, there’s no doubt the American Dream is still very much alive. They saw dramatic proof of that dream standing before them, in Cairo.
05/28/09
Obama Hits Home Run with Sotomayor
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Maybe I just have too much empathy. But I admit shedding a couple of tears, standing in the East Room of the White House and watching the first African-American president of the United States nominate the first Latina to the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone who doesn’t value the historic significance of that moment doesn’t understand what America’s all about.
As Obama’s first nominee to the court, Sonia Sotomayor is an inspired choice. Most importantly, she is exceptionally well-qualified for the post. After serving as both assistant district attorney and corporate litigator, she was nominated to the federal district court in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush and presided over some 450 cases. In 1998, President Bill Clinton elevated her to the federal appeals court, where she’s participated in more than 3,000 decisions and authored 380 opinions, only five of which have been overturned by the Supreme Court.
No one can doubt, or match, her legal qualifications. As President Obama noted in his introduction, “Walking in the door, she would bring more experience on the bench, and more varied experience on the bench, than anyone currently serving on the United States Supreme Court had when they were appointed.”
On top of her professional resume, Sotomayor has a compelling life story: raised by a single mother in a public housing project in the East Bronx, diagnosed with diabetes at age 8, working her way to head of her class at Princeton, editor of the Yale Law Review, confirmed twice by the Senate, and now — the Supreme Court.
The power of the case for Sotomayor’s confirmation is best revealed by the weakness of the three arguments right-wingers make against her: she’s a racist, a reverse racist, and an activist judge.
As evidence of her “legislating from the bench,” conservatives cite a statement made in 2005 on a panel at Duke University Law School that the “court of appeals is where policy is made.” Read in context, it’s clear that Sotomayor was explaining to future law clerks the difference between the kinds of cases they’d handle in a circuit court vs. an appellate court — which does, indeed, resolve policy disputes. No critic has yet cited even one case in which Sotomayor actually did legislate from the bench.
She’s a reverse racist, insist her critics, based on the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, now before the Supreme Court. Several white New Haven firefighters scored high on a promotions exam, but the city dropped the test after black firefighters performed poorly. White firefighters sued the city for reverse discrimination. Sotomayor joined two other judges in siding with the city. Without ruling on the merits of the firemen’s case, they held that the law was clear and they had no choice but to follow the law. Agree or disagree, her decision badly undermines the argument that she legislates from the bench.
Finally, Sotomayor’s accused of being a racist for telling a 2001 audience: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Racist? Again, context is important.
She was speaking at a University of California, Berkeley symposium on the presence of Latinos and Latinas in the judiciary — specifically, on their role in deciding race and sex discrimination cases. Even wise men like Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo voted to uphold both sex and race discrimination, she pointed out. Certainly, to those kinds of cases, she argued, a Latina would bring a different, and more relevant, personal experience — and therefore be capable of making better decisions.
Of course, conservatives don’t want to hear anything about her personal life because, they argue, the fact that she’s a Latina and grew up poor is totally irrelevant. Funny. That’s not what Sen. Orrin Hatch said back in 2005, when George W. Bush named Alberto Gonzales his attorney general.
As reported by Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Hatch said: “Look, this is not just any nomination. …This is the first Hispanic ever nominated for that position. … And to have this man come from the most humble of circumstances … and not to give him this opportunity when he is fully qualified for it, I think, would be a travesty.”
Will Republicans give this Latina the same due consideration they gave that Latino? Certainly, not to do so would be a travesty.
5/21/09
Democrats Stab Obama in the Back on Gitmo
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
You know what they say: “Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.”
Sadly, on one issue at least, that’s all too true of Senate Democrats. After praying so long for a 60-vote, filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, we’re almost there — 59 with Arlen Specter! — but already Democrats have shown an appalling lack of backbone when it comes to Guantanamo Bay.
Even John McCain agrees that Gitmo is a black mark on America’s soul. Here’s where America abandoned the moral high ground. Here’s where America imprisoned hundreds of alleged terrorists, torturing many of them, for up to eight years without ever charging them with any crime or enabling them to see a lawyer and defend themselves in court. Here’s where America threw due process out the window.
During the 2008 campaign, shutting down Gitmo was one of the rare issues on which John McCain and Barack Obama actually agreed. And on only his second full day in the White House, Obama signed an executive order closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay in January 2010, giving the Pentagon until July to come up with a plan for doing so.
That’s when the Republican propaganda machine jumped into high gear. Closing Gitmo would be a mistake, they argued, because there was nowhere else in the world where those suspects could be safely held. And allowing terrorists to be relocated to prisons on U.S. soil would endanger the lives of all Americans. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded that Obama reverse his decision. Bowing to Republican pressure, Senate Democrats dropped President Obama’s $81 million request to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, buying the criticism that the administration lacks a plan to relocate terror suspects detained there.
Now, you would expect those kinds of scare tactics from Republicans. It’s all part of their opposing anything Obama stands for, and trying to keep the war on terror alive. What is unexplainable, unacceptable, and indefensible is that so many Democrats, led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, went along with them. Forty-eight Democrats voted with Republicans to keep Gitmo open, prohibit detainees from being moved to any U.S. prison, and slap President Obama in the face with a 90-6 defeat. Reid even parroted Republican leader Mitch McConnell: “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”
Bravo for the six Democrats — Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Pat Leahy, Carl Levin, Jack Reed, and Sheldon Whitehouse — who stood strong. They know, for starters, that the remaining 240 detainees at Gitmo are not necessarily “terrorists.” After almost eight years, they haven’t even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. In fact, under George W. Bush, more than 525 detainees were released from Guantanamo because there was zero evidence of their connection to any terrorist organization. And only three out of more than 700 detainees were ever brought to trial.
Those six Democratic senators also know, even if Harry Reid doesn’t, that America has an outstanding prison system — with several maximum security facilities already holding the most hardened of criminals, including known terrorists. Among the inmates at Florence, Colorado’s famous “Supermax” prison, for example, are shoe-bomber Richard Reid; Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker; Ramzi Yousef, one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; four men convicted of bombing U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya; Terry Nichols, partner of Timothy McVeigh; and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.
There have been no escapes from “Supermax” — which, by the way, is not the case with prisons in other countries. As David Corn reported in Mother Jones, 13 terrorists convicted for their role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole were, with the agreement of the United States, imprisoned in Yemen. All 13 escaped.
Most importantly, the six Democratic senators who voted with Obama recognize the paramount importance of shutting down Gitmo. It is nothing less than a museum of torture. It has become the symbol of where America lost its way. As a consequence, its very existence has been counter-productive. “Instead of serving as a tool to counter-terrorism,” Obama said in his speech at the National Archives, “Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.”
On Gitmo, Senate Democrats had a choice of following Mitch McConnell or President Obama. Sadly, most Democrats chose Mitch McConnell. Shame!
05/14/09
Win One for the Gipper
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It’s been 81 years since legendary coach Knute Rockne urged his players to “win one for the Gipper.” But no Notre Dame football team ever faced a tougher challenge than President Obama does.
Since he was invited by university president Father John Jenkins to give this year’s commencement address, Obama has faced a growing wave of protest. Judging from the howls of some critics, you’d think the devil himself were presiding over this year’s graduation.
Notre Dame is one of our great universities, and America’s best Catholic university, but a bunch of small-minded, ignorant and intolerant religious zealots are trying to hijack it. At last count, 74 American bishops have refused to attend the ceremonies — because Obama happens to be pro-choice. For the same reason, over 350,000 people have signed online petitions in opposition. A handful of graduating seniors have vowed to boycott their own party. Alan Keyes, Obama’s former Senate opponent in Illinois, and Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue, have organized campus protests. And a small plane circles over the Notre Dame campus, towing a banner with the picture of an alleged aborted fetus. Happy Graduation!
The controversy is a monumental embarrassment to the university, the Catholic Church and the president of the United States. But it’s also an opportunity for the university and the president, by not bowing to critics, to remind the world what a great university is all about.
Obama, of course, is not the first president invited to South Bend. In fact, every president since FDR has either been honored as a commencement speaker or given an honorary degree. In his letter to the graduating class of 2009, Father Jenkins reminded students this has nothing to with politics: “It is the University’s expression of respect for the leader of the nation and the Office of the President.” As St. Peter himself told us, “We should honor the leader who upholds the secular order” (I Peter 2:17). And Notre Dame has a long tradition of doing so.
Obama’s pro-choice, but so are most Catholics. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, released May 14, 50 percent of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 44 percent disagree. And 60 percent of all Catholics say Obama should remain on Notre Dame’s program.
Which raises certain obvious questions: Are prospective Notre Dame students screened for their views on abortion? How about recruits for the football team? If pro-choice, are they banned from campus? If not, why should Obama, a non-Catholic, be held to a different standard?
And, speaking of issues: Yes, the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. But it’s also anti-death penalty and anti-unjust war. So why didn’t bishops boycott the appearance of President George W. Bush, who championed the death penalty and led this nation into what Pope John Paul II condemned as an unjustifiable war in Iraq? Clearly, the bishops protesting President Obama’s appearance are obsessed with one issue only. You could be an axe-murderer and they wouldn’t care. As long as you were anti-abortion.
To his credit, Father Jenkins refused to rescind President Obama’s invitation. Instead of heeding those 74 single-minded bishops, he listened instead to the great Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame for 35 years. A Catholic university, Hesburgh taught, is both a lighthouse and a crossroads. As a lighthouse, it stands apart and illuminates issues with the moral authority of the Catholic tradition. As a crossroads, it serves as a place where people of good will are received openly, are able to speak, be heard, and engage in responsible and reasoned dialogue. No closed doors and no closed minds.
Father Hesburgh will share the stage with Father Jenkins and President Obama — which will be significant for still another reason. Starting in 1957, Father Hesburgh also served on the United States Civil Rights Commission, fighting to end racial discrimination in America. In fact, he championed the cause of equal opportunity so strongly, making so many waves, that President Nixon fired him.
Imagine Hesburgh’s joy at welcoming President Barack Obama to Notre Dame. And imagine his shame that so many leading Catholics, who should know better, chose to boycott the first African-American president of the United States.
In the end, it’s a great day for America, a great day for Notre Dame, but a sad day for the Catholic Church.
05/07/09
ON THIS DAY (ONLY) WE PRAY
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
At some point on May 7, I trust you stopped whatever you were doing, got down on your knees and prayed. Surely you realized it was this year’s National Day of Prayer.
As every God-fearing American must know, the National Day of Prayer was first declared in 1952 by a Democrat, Harry Truman. It was observed sporadically until 1988, when a Republican, Ronald Reagan, decreed that its official celebration would take place every year on the first Thursday in May.
Now, this may not tickle your personal religious ivories, but for Christian conservatives, the National Day of Prayer is a big deal — or at least it was, until this year. In fact, on every first Thursday of May for the last eight years, President Bush invited leading Evangelicals to a prayer service in the East Room of the White House. And Christian leaders expected the same kind of exclusive welcome from President Obama.
Turns out they were wrong to do so. Obama did sign a proclamation, recognizing May 7 as the National Day of Prayer. But he led no prayer service or any public display of faith in the White House. He saw no need to because, as Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters, “Prayer is something the president does every day.”
But Obama’s refusal to throw a holy White House shindig left religious conservatives feeling betrayed. Shirley Dobson, wife of evangelical leader James Dobson and head of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, lamented: “At this time in our country’s history, we would hope our president would recognize more fully the importance of prayer.” And, in a debate with me on MSNBC, conservative TV commentator Pat Buchanan actually accused Obama of “de-Christianizing America.”
In fact, Obama’s only mistake was signing the declaration for a National Prayer Day. In so doing, he decided to follow George W. Bush instead of Thomas Jefferson, who rebuffed a similar invitation in January 1808. In a letter to Rev. Samuel Miller, he explained his decision: “I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. . . . Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise . . . has been delegated to the general government.”
In failing to stage a revival meeting in the White House, however, Obama was absolutely correct. First, let’s be honest. The National Day of Prayer has nothing to do with religion. It’s all about politics. The only reason George W. Bush held prayer services in the East Room was to reward Christian conservatives for their arguably illegal efforts to get him elected and re-elected to the White House. When you see the video of Bush bowing his head and holding hands with James Dobson, don’t think prayer. Think payback.
Second, the very idea of a National Day of Prayer is silly to begin with. What’s next? A National Day of Being Good to Your Kids? Or a National Day of Kissing Your Wife? Nothing wrong with any of the above, but you shouldn’t really wait till the first Thursday of May to do them.
Third, there should be no worship services held in the White House, period. They’re a direct violation of the separation of church and state, every bit as unconstitutional as planting a monument to the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the state house. If the president does want to host an ecumenical prayer service, any day of the year, fine. But he or she should do so in a house of worship. There are plenty of them within easy walking distance of the White House.
As for Buchanan’s charge that Obama is “de-Christianizing America,” he knows better. We have no established state religion. We are not a Christian nation. We have never been a Christian nation. And we were not founded by Christians. You can’t “de-Christianize” something that was not “Christianized” in the first place.
Rather than clamor for a White House worship service, those Christians obsessed with the need to pray in public, under the glare of TV cameras, should reread the words of Jesus, starting with Matthew 6:5-6: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray on the street corners to be seen by men. . . . But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
Let Barack Obama say: Amen!
04/30/09
A SPECTER HAUNTS THE GOP
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Once Norm Coleman ran out the clock, we knew Al Franken would become the 59th Democrat in the U.S. Senate. But who knew number 60 would end up being the senior (BEGIN ITALICS) Republican (END ITALICS) senator from Pennsylvania?
Arlen Specter’s stunning decision to switch from Republican to Democrat has turned the entire political equation in Washington upside down. Overnight, the solid wall of filibuster built by Senate Republicans has crumbled and, with it, the last obstacle to President Obama’s legislative agenda.
Specter’s decision was not about political philosophy. It was all about his own political survival. He didn’t choose to join the Democratic Party because he believed in what it stood for. He chose to leave the Republican Party simply because he took a poll and discovered he could no longer win a Republican primary. The man is nothing if not opportunistic.
As Specter himself boasts, however, switching parties doesn’t make him an automatic vote for Democrats. Specter merely goes from being one of the more moderate Senate Republicans to the most conservative Senate Democrat. He has already cast his very first vote as a new Democrat (BEGIN ITALICS) against (END ITALICS) Obama’s budget.
Specter’s reputation as an independent, in fact, belies his voting record. More often than not, when push came to shove, Specter voted with his fellow Republicans. He’s pro-death penalty. He supported the war in Iraq. He opposed the Brady Bill, the assault weapons ban and trigger locks on handguns. He complained about President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping, yet voted to make it legal. He’s pro-choice, yet he voted to confirm both John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Majority Leader Harry Reid, in his memoirs, summed up Specter’s so-called “liberal” voting record as: He’s “always with us when we don’t need him.” There’s no reason to think that will change. Democrats will end up no happier with Specter than Republicans were. At the same time, Specter’s political sex change is a bonanza for Democrats and a disaster for Republicans.
Democrats gain, not because Specter will vote with them on every issue, but because at least he will support debate on every issue. When Republicans controlled the Senate, Democrats used the filibuster very sparingly, and only to block certain extreme right-wing Bush judicial nominees. Ever since Democrats won Senate control, Republicans have abused the filibuster by turning it into a 60-vote gateway to block a vote on every issue. That gateway will be gone once Franken is confirmed. Specter may end up voting against the Democratic leadership on any given bill, but at least he’ll make possible debate and a vote on the bill.
Republicans lose not simply because they’ve lost their last bulwark against the Obama agenda, but because, with his departure, they’ve been further marginalized as a major political party. In the Reagan era, Republicans bragged to themselves as the “big tent” party. No longer. Liberal Republicans disappeared a long time ago, with the defeat of Connecticut’s Lowell Weicker. Now, as Specter, Lincoln Chafee, Chuck Hagel, Olympia Snowe and others have discovered, there’s no room for moderates anymore. Among today’s Republicans, you’re either a Rush Limbaugh clone or you’re out the door.
What’s especially bad news for Republicans is that party leaders don’t seem to recognize the danger, as evidenced by their reaction to Specter’s defection. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the news as a local Pennsylvania story. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe cited Specter’s decision as proof that the Republican Party was on its way back. RNC Chair Michael Steele angrily accused Specter of flipping the bird at his fellow Republicans. And Limbaugh sniffed: “Good riddance.”
They just don’t get it. Specter’s not the problem. Specter’s just the most visible sign of a much larger problem. Across the country, millions of people are deserting the Republican Party because it no longer speaks to their concerns.
In California, for example, Republican voter registration has sunk to a historic low of 31.1 percent. Ominously, Republicans have a majority of registered voters in not one of the state’s 53 congressional districts. In Pennsylvania, Specter discovered that up to 200,000 Republicans switched parties in recent months. In the last 10 years, Democrats gained 860,552 new voters; Republicans, only 96,895.
The lesson is clear: Republicans will either broaden their base and leave room for the Arlen Specters of this world — or perish as a party.
04/23/09
OBAMA FLIP-FLOPS — BUT IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION!
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Welcome to the real world, where not all lobbyists are bad, not all earmarks are bad, and not all flip-flops are bad — especially not when they uphold the rule of law.
On torture, President Obama faced two tough decisions. At first, he got one right and one wrong. The first decision was whether or not to release previously classified memos detailing the methods of torture — from sleep deprivation to waterboarding to planting insects in prison cells — authorized by the Bush administration. Obama correctly chose to do so.
Obama had already banned future use of such so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He decided to make the memos public, explained Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, for three reasons: a judge was about to order their release anyway; many of the torture techniques used had already been widely reported in the media; and, quite simply, it was the right thing to do.
Obama rejected the stale arguments of former CIA directors that publication of the memos would embolden terrorists, thereby making America less safe. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The fact that the United States now acknowledges the interrogation methods used, admits they were wrong and bans their future use, gives terrorists one less argument they can use against us.
But then President Obama dropped the ball. Having laid out the types of torture, which many consider illegal, used under the previous administration, he declined to authorize prosecution of those Bush officials who either gave or carried out the orders. He did so, argued Gibbs in a testy exchange with reporters that I attended, because Obama believes this is a time for “reflection, not retribution.”
That argument was simply not convincing. How could Obama detail crimes committed by members of the previous administration, then turn around and let off the hook those who committed the crimes? Prosecution is not retribution. Prosecution is enforcing the law. The failure to investigate and prosecute the architects and agents of torture is nothing less than a cover-up of war crimes of the Bush administration.
The case for prosecution was further strengthened by three related events. First, reports that some European countries, using a legal principle known as “universal jurisdiction,” have assumed authority to investigate human rights violations anywhere in the world. Indeed, Spanish prosecutors have weighted investigation of six senior Bush officials for torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. How embarrassing were Spain to act where we did not.
Second was a report by the Senate Armed Services Committee that Pentagon officials, right up to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, approved the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture by military personnel eight months before the Justice Department had ruled them legally acceptable.
Third was a New York Times report revealing the shockingly inadequate research that went into the post-Sept. 11 decision to use torture. As documented by the Times, former CIA Director George Tenet sold waterboarding — to George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and leaders of Congress — on the basis that the practice was routinely taught as part of U.S. military training programs.
He did not add that waterboarding was taught in the context of what to expect from criminal regimes that did not respect the Geneva Conventions; that the United States had convicted Japanese soldiers for use of waterboarding during World War II; that the technique was used by Chinese troops during the Korean War to coerce false confessions from Americans; and that the military itself had abandoned waterboarding because it proved ineffective. Indeed, under Bush, the CIA waterboarded two al-Qaida suspects 266 times without learning any new information.
At which point, President Obama reversed course, supported an investigation by Congress or an independent “Truth Commission” and, based on their findings, let Attorney General Eric Holder decide whether to prosecute and how high up in the Bush White House to go.
Holder must now proceed to show the world that we take war crimes seriously. Maybe those CIA agents who merely followed orders should be let off the hook. But those who wrote the memos and those who gave the orders — including Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney and George Bush — must be held responsible.
Chalk this one up as the first big learning experience of the Obama administration. Yes, Obama did a big flip-flop. But it was in the right direction!
04/16/09
WELCOME TO THE FOX NEWS ‘TEA PARTIES’
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
When is a protest not a real protest?
When it’s all about partisan politics rather than issues, when it’s staged by the media, and when nobody knows why they’re there. And that’s exactly the case with those so-called “Tea Parties” held around the country on Tax Day, April 15.
Organizers proudly called them “grassroots” protests. In fact, there was nothing grassroots about them. As economist Paul Krugman noted, they were more like Astro-turf. The tea parties were hatched, planned, and paid for by three right-wing organizations: FreedomWorks, headed by former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey; dontGo, which organized last year’s GOP public-relations blitz in support of offshore drilling; and Americans for Prosperity, headed by Ralph Reed’s former business partner, Tim Phillips.
Having organized the parties, Republicans then showed up to pour the tea. Speakers at various locations included Newt Gingrich, Armey, John Boehner, Alan Keyes, Joe the Plumber, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, several Republican members of Congress, and hooker-bait David Vitter.
The tea parties did make history, in one sense. They represent the first time a television network has actually moved from covering events to creating events. For an entire week before April 15, Fox News exclusively hailed the upcoming tea parties, broadcast their locations, and encouraged viewers to participate in “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” For those unable to attend an event in person, Fox News even conveniently hosted a “virtual tea party” on its Web site.
Host Neil Cavuto vehemently denied that he and fellow Foxers had become event sponsors, not just event reporters, insisting that Fox had given just as much advance publicity to the Million Man March in Washington. There’s only one problem with that: The Million Man March was held in 1995. The Fox News Network wasn’t launched until 1996.
The truth is, the tea parties were a Fox News creation and would never have happened without Fox. Between April 6 and April 13, as documented by Media Matters for America, Fox News featured at least 20 segments on the upcoming “tea parties” and aired over 73 in-show and commercial promotions for their coverage of the events. Not only that, on April 15, Fox anchors Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto and others actually went on the road to host various tea parties around the country. In Washington, Fox News analyst Tobin Smith welcomed participants “on behalf of Fox News Channel.” Clearly, the old slogan of Fox News — “we report, you decide” — has been replaced by the more accurate “we create, you participate.”
Even with Fox’s blessing, however, the tea parties were a bust. Organizers predicted that millions of Americans would attend over 2,000 events around the country. In actuality, there were only about 300 tea parties, and attendance, based on reports from sites across the country, was in the tens of thousands.
And no wonder. For one thing, nobody could quite explain what the assembled protestors were really protesting. Talk about confusion. I attended the rainy tea party in Washington’s Lafayette Square. Not even protestors knew why they were there. I saw signs ranging from “No Queremos Socialismo” to “Hey, Big Brother. Show us your (BEGIN ITALICS) real (END ITALICS) birth certificate” to “Obama bin Lyin.” One lone ranger even showed up to protest the programming schedule on Fox News: “Move Glenn Beck to 7 p.m.”
Since the tea parties took place on April 15, you might think they were held in opposition to higher taxes. Yet over 95 percent of those protestors just received a big Obama tax cut, not a tax increase. Others said the protests were held to release express bipartisan anger over big government spending. If so, where was this gang when George W. Bush, the biggest spender in history, racked up the biggest budgets, biggest deficits and biggest national debt ever? How many tea parties were held on April 15, 2008? Zero.
No, the evidence is clear. The Fox News tea parties were neither genuine nor spontaneous. And they certainly bore no relation to the original Boston Tea Party protest against “taxation without representation.” This year’s events were pure partisan political rallies, staged by Republicans and promoted by Fox News, to embarrass President Obama.
In the end, that’s what protestors were most unhappy about: They lost the last election.
DEMISE OF THE DAILY NEWSPAPER
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
We live in an age of rapid change, especially in the field of communications. And most of that’s OK with me.
I wouldn’t mind giving up my fax machine. I seldom use it these days. It’s been a long time since I wrote a letter; e-mail’s so much faster. And I haven’t yet, but I’d gladly do away with my land line. Who needs it, as long as you’ve got a good cell phone?
But here’s where I draw the line. Just don’t take away my morning paper. That’s too high a price to pay. Yet it sure looks like that’s where we’re heading.
Already this year we’ve lost the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times have both filed for bankruptcy. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News cancelled home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The San Francisco Chronicle is expected to fold any day now. And even the mighty New York Times is rumored to be on life support.
“Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause,” Times Executive Editor Bill Keller recently told an audience at Stanford University. Well, I wouldn’t go quite (BEGIN ITALICS) that (END ITALICS) far. Darfur is still a higher priority. But certainly, the demise of the daily newspaper is not something we should quietly accept as the price of living in the 21st century. Free and independent newspapers play too important a role in a democratic society to let them simply disappear.
And don’t tell me we don’t need newspapers any longer, because we now have the Internet. I’m sorry. I spend most of my day in front of a computer screen. I start the day checking out Huffington Post, Politico, the Drudge Report, Daily Kos, Media Matters and several other Web sites. And not one of them can hold a candle to the morning paper.
First, there’s the practical, or tactile, advantage of a newspaper over a computer. You can’t read your laptop on the subway. You can’t take it with you to the john. You can’t clip an article from it and send it to a friend. You can’t use it to start a fire or line a bird cage. And did you ever try to wrap a Walleye in a laptop?
And maybe you haven’t noticed? But where do most of those Web sites get all their original material? The daily paper. What’s their primary source? The daily paper. And when you follow the links to get more information, where do the Web sites send you? The daily paper.
Who’s going to do the research? Who’s going to put in the time, track down the sources, conduct the interviews, double-check the facts, and do the serious reporting when the journalists who work for the daily papers are gone? Nobody. And we’ll all suffer because of it.
One other point. As one who’s on the road a lot, I can tell you: The morning paper’s about the only thing that distinguishes one big city from another these days. For the most part, all restaurants are part of the same chains. Same with the big department stores. You can’t tell a Costco in Tampa from a Costco in Chico. But pick up the Oregonian and you could only be in Portland. Same with the Denver Post, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, or the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Each one is a unique reflection of its city, its people and its problems.
The imminent demise of the daily newspaper has even alarmed some members of Congress. Maryland Sen. Benjamin Cardin has introduced legislation to help newspapers survive by restructuring as nonprofits in order to qualify for special tax breaks. Newspapers could still report on all issues, but they would be prohibited from making political endorsements. Subscriptions and advertising revenue would be tax exempt.
Frankly, I hope we don’t have to go that far. I’d hate to see all newspapers turn into a print edition of NPR, afraid to take a stand for fear of losing their tax-exempt status. How much better if members of the public would come to the rescue: recognize the importance of their community newspapers, order home delivery, buy it and advertise in it.
But if the free market won’t work, then let the government step in. If it’s important enough to save General Motors, it’s important enough to save the daily paper.
4/2/09
OBAMA’S WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
History is full of ironies, but none greater than this.
In February 1989, then-Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates helped arm freedom fighters in Afghanistan with cash, weapons and intelligence to chase out Soviet troops. As Gates wrote in his memoirs, when the last Soviet soldier left — ending an occupation that lasted nine years, seven weeks, and three days — “Afghanistan was at last free of the foreign invader.”
Well, not quite. Today, as President Obama’s secretary of defense, Gates is helping send more American troops to Afghanistan, continuing a presence that has already lasted seven and a half years and is expected to outlast the Soviet occupation. The foreign invader is back. For Americans, it’s good-bye Iraq and hello, Afghanistan.
For Obama, the they were always the bad war and the good war. During the campaign, every time criticized the war in Iraq, he lamented the fact that we never did finish the war in Afghanistan.
It should have come as no surprise, then, that soon after President Obama ordered the winding down of the war in Iraq, he immediately moved to ramp back up the war in Afghanistan. What is surprising, though, is how many troops he’s sending, what their mission is, and how long they’re likely to remain.
President Obama has not only called for a significant widening of the war in Afghanistan, he has also expanded U.S. military operations into Pakistan. We are now fighting the war in both countries. And it is Barack Obama’s war.
The president unveiled his new policy the morning after receiving results of the two-month review of Afghanistan he ordered shortly after taking office. Earlier, even before the “review” began, he had ordered an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, increasing by 50 percent the number of American forces already on the ground.
On March 27, Obama announced he was sending still 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but only for the purpose of training the Afghan military (sound familiar?). An administration spokesman later said the president would decide this fall whether to send an additional 10,000 troops, growing American forces from 34,000 today to over 65,000 by the end of the year.
At the same time, Obama spelled out his new mission for American forces: “So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Note the mention of both countries. It’s now being called the “Af-Pak Strategy.” And it raises even more questions: What’s the exit strategy? Can we win this war? What constitutes victory? So far, no answers.
Granted, al-Qaida still poses a serious threat to the United States. When we turned our attention to Iraq, al-Qaida never went away. In fact, it profited from our excursion into Iraq in order to recruit, regroup, rearm and relocate in both countries. And you cannot shut down terrorists in Afghanistan as long as they enjoy safe havens just over the border in Pakistan.
Does that mean we are also sending American troops to Pakistan? The administration says no. But if not, how are we going to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaida in Pakistan? When asked that question on my radio show, experts say we’ll depend on a combination of the Pakistani government and unmanned drones.
Get serious. Over the last eight years, the leaders of Pakistan, despite $11 billion in American aid, have done nothing about terrorism but look the other way while al-Qaida and the Taliban took over territory on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Do we really expect them now to rush in and clean out terrorists? And if we can wipe out al-Qaida in Pakistan by aerial bombs only, why send any more troops to Afghanistan? Send more drones instead.
The whole Af-Pak strategy just doesn’t add up. Before we blindly veer from one endless war to the next, Americans would do well to take a long look at history. As Secretary Gates knows better than anyone, Afghanistan is known as “the graveyard of empires.”
Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, the British and the Soviet Union all attempted to control Afghanistan and left in humiliation. We’re kidding ourselves if we believe we can succeed where they failed.
03/26/09
BACK TO THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA? NO WAY!
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Looking for one of the most serious foreign policy crises facing the nation? You don’t have to go as far as the Middle East. Just consider what’s going on right next door.
Drug-related violence, especially along the U.S. border, has brought the Mexican government to its knees. Some 6,200 people died last year in Mexico as a result of the drug war, and more than 1,000 were killed in the first eight weeks of 2009. Some states are entirely controlled by drug lords and the Mexican government has proven totally ineffective in stopping the violence.
Which raises two questions: Who’s responsible? And what’s the solution?
On her visit to Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the first U.S. government official ever to acknowledge that Americans share in the blame, both by buying drugs and exporting guns. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” she said upon her arrival in Mexico City. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Indeed, Mexican authorities report that 90 percent of weapons seized from Mexican organized crime came from the United States.
As partly responsible for the violence in Mexico, we also have a responsibility to help end it. Surely, sending American troops to the border is not the answer. But, God forbid, that seems to be the way we’re heading.
For her part, Secretary Clinton pledged $80 million to equip Mexico with three Black Hawk helicopters to chase drug runners along the border. And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that the administration was open to, and indeed actively considering, a request from the governors of Texas and Arizona to deploy National Guard or Army forces along the border.
What a big mistake. For starters, you can’t patrol the border without crossing the border. Haven’t we had enough military invasions of Latin American: from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala and Grenada? By sending American troops into Mexico, even with the blessing of the Mexican government, President Obama would be begging for his own Bay of Pigs.
By deploying troops to the border, we would also be repeating in the “war on drugs” the same mistake we’ve made in the so-called “war on terror”: thinking there’s a simple military solution to a multi-layered problem. We can no more stop people at gunpoint from using drugs than we can stop would-be terrorists from hating the United States. And, besides, if military force alone could end the drug violence, why hasn’t it worked for the Mexican government?
There is, lest we forget, one other obstacle, although one too easily ignored by any administration: the law. The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in June 1878 to limit the presence of troops in the former Confederate states, prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law-enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. Only the Coast Guard is exempt. Absent new legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president, sending troops to the border would be illegal.
In the end, there are only two things we Americans can do to help reduce the drug-related violence in Mexico. First, as proposed by candidate Barack Obama during last year’s campaign, is to reimpose the ban on assault weapons, originally passed by Congress in 1994, which was allowed to expire by President George W. Bush five years ago. “I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico at a minimum,” Attorney General Eric Holder said recently.
The second part of the solution is finally to get serious about decriminalizing the use of drugs. After 30 years and billions of dollars, it’s clear the “war on drugs” is not working. Time for a whole new approach: Make all but the most dangerous drugs legal, then regulate them, tax them, and use the revenue for drug education, prevention and rehabilitation.
But keep American troops off the border. After a surge in Iraq and a surge in Afghanistan, the last thing we need is still another surge — in Texas!
3/19/09
READ OUR LIPS: NO NEW BONUSES
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
In her memoir, “Madam Secretary,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recounts an ongoing debate among members of the Clinton Cabinet about sending U.S. troops to Bosnia. After Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had repeatedly argued against the use of force, a frustrated Albright turned to him at one point and asked: “What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”
It’s too bad Albright wasn’t around a couple of weeks ago to turn to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and ask: “Why did we buy this company, Tim, if we can’t deny their executive bonuses?”
There is simply no justification for rewarding executives of AIG with those obscene, unearned and undeserved bonuses. None. And his bungling of the issue raises even more questions about Geithner’s fitness for the high office of Treasury Secretary than his failure to pay his taxes.
Frankly, Geithner’s story just doesn’t add up. He says he first learned about the bonuses on Tuesday, March 10, five days before they were due to be paid. Why? Treasury Department staff and officials of the Federal Reserve had known about them for at least three months. Once he took over as secretary, didn’t Geithner do his homework?
As soon as he found out about them, Geithner complained to AIG Chairman Edward Liddy. But he failed to inform President Obama about the explosive bonuses until Thursday evening, March 12, 48 hours later. It wasn’t until Monday morning, March 16 — the day after his top economic advisors condemned the bonuses but insisted “their hands were tied” — that the president expressed his own outrage and demanded that the Treasury Department explore every available legal option to stop the bonuses.
By that time, Obama’s expressed outrage came too little, too late. AIG had already sent out its bonus checks, by direct deposit, on Saturday night, March 14. All of which could have been avoided if only Geithner had told Liddy: “You’re fired!” Or Obama had said the same thing to Geithner.
Washington is the world capital of spin. But we’ve never heard such absurd political spin as we have from those trying to defend the AIG bonuses.
We had no choice but to pay the bonuses, we’re supposed to believe, because they were part of signed contracts and, harrumphed Obama economic czar Larry Summers, “The government cannot just abrogate contracts.” Baloney. Ask auto workers about wage and benefit contracts they were forced to break as part of the government’s rescue plan. The fact is, previously signed contracts are broken every time a company goes bankrupt. And AIG would be in bankruptcy if we hadn’t bailed it out.
Besides, lest we forget, AIG is an insurance company. Since when has an insurance company been in a hurry to pay claims? Their standard procedure is to challenge, delay and deny — which they should have done in this case.
We’re also supposed to believe that these so-called “retention” bonuses were necessary to keep skilled executives on the job. In other words, if we didn’t reward the very people who destroyed AIG, and helped destroy the American economy, they might leave and go elsewhere. Let’s hope so! And good luck finding another high-paying job anywhere in the middle of this recession. Ironically, 52 out of 418 executives did quit AIG — as soon as they picked up their bonus checks.
It would be unfair to blame this whole mess on Tim Geithner. There’s enough blame to go around. Ed Liddy should never have paid them. Congress should not have removed language limiting bonuses from the stimulus bill. Hank Paulsen and George Bush should never have allowed them in the first place.
But Geither can certainly be faulted for failing to grasp the seriousness of the issue, and failing to protect both the president and the American people. What the treasury secretary doesn’t seem to understand is that a lot has changed since those contracts were first entered into. AIG has gone from A-OK to IOU. And AIG has a new owner: American taxpayers.
As AIG’s new owners, we’re not bound by any pre-existing contracts. We have every right to say to AIG executives: We’re your new owners. We’re not going to pay those bonuses. And if you don’t like it, you can sue us.
We taxpayers own AIG. So let’s start by ending business as usual.
3/12/09
IN DEFENSE OF EARMARKS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
There are few absolute rules in Washington, but here’s one of them: When everybody’s saying the same thing, they’re bound to be wrong.
And that’s the case today with earmarks. There are 8,750 of them, totaling $7.7 billion, in the $410 billion Omnibus Spending Bill just passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. If you believe either John McCain or Barack Obama, every one of those earmarks is evil, lurking somewhere in the company of axe murderers, child molesters and poison ivy.
Nonsense! Would McCain and Obama please stop treating us like children? Yet even a child could understand that not all earmarks are evil. I defy anyone, for example, to eliminate the $150,000 sponsored by Maine Sen. Susan Collins in the newly signed Omnibus Spending Bill for “lobster research.” Sure, we could all live without occasionally feasting on Maine lobster. But who would want to?
Don’t get me wrong. Have there been widespread abuses with earmarks? Absolutely. Earmarks, or money inserted into spending bills by members of Congress for pet projects in their own states or districts, are often used to waste tax dollars on frivolous items that would never be approved were they debated in the light of day and voted on, up or down. Surely most senators would find it hard to justify Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye’s $238,000 appropriation for the “Polynesian Voyaging Society of Honolulu” — an ancient-style canoe sailing club — as worthy of your tax dollars and mine.
At the same time, you must admit, earmarks, like beauty, are in the eyes of the beholder. Or, sometimes, in the noses of neighbors. Take Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s controversial $1.7 million for “Swine Odor and Manure Management Research.” As a resident of Washington, D.C., I don’t have any problem with pig manure (bull manure’s another issue!). But if I lived downwind from a hog farm in Iowa, I’d consider that $1.7 million money well spent.
What’s especially obnoxious about the debate over earmarks today is the sanctimonious stand of Republican lawmakers. Suddenly they’ve gotten religion when it comes to fiscal responsibility. One by one, 17 different Republicans took to the Senate floor to blame Democrats for earmarks and denounce the spending bill as a “honey pot” and “orgy of spending.” What hypocrites! Every one of them had loaded up the legislation with earmarks of his or her own.
The fact is, Democrats agreed in January to limit earmark spending to 50 percent of 2006 levels. There are fewer earmarks in this year’s spending bill than in the last bill passed by a Republican-controlled Congress: 8,750 compared to over 11,000. And, for the first time, under Democrats, transparency reigns. Earmarks must be posted on committee websites. Every voter can find out who put in how much in the spending bill and for what purpose. That’s real change.
And, besides, if Republicans were really so holier than thou about earmarks, why did they sponsor so many earmarks themselves? Forty percent of all earmarks in this year’s spending bill were Republican-sponsored. While Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia tops the list, six out of 10 big spenders are Senate Republicans, led by Thad Cochran of Mississippi, with 65 earmarks, and Richard Shelby of Alabama, with 64, including $800,000 for an oyster rehabilitation grant to the University of South Alabama.
On the same day President Obama reluctantly signed the Omnibus Spending Bill, House Democrats adopted new measures to reform the earmark process even further. From now on, earmarks will be subject to a 20-day review by the relevant executive-branch agency, which can give them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Earmarks will be limited to no more than 1 percent of the discretionary budget. And any earmark for a private, for-profit company will be subject to competitive bidding.
Congressional scholar Norm Epstein of the American Enterprise Institute praised the new rules as “a solid, practical and comprehensive set of new steps.” And maybe, someday, Congress will even approve a line-item veto, enabling a president to go through the budget line by line and red-pencil expenditures he or she finds unnecessary or frivolous. Meantime, it makes more sense to continue to reform the earmark process, rather than pretend we will, or should, eliminate earmarks altogether.
President Obama should say about earmarks what President Clinton, after a similar flap, once said about affirmative action: It’s time to mend it, not end it.
2/27/09
OBAMA OUT TO BUILD A NEW AMERICA
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It’s unlikely that anyone stood up during the Renaissance and declared: “We’re living in what will always be remembered as mankind’s golden age.” Nor that any soldier on the front lines of World War II bragged, at the time, about being part of “the greatest generation.”
Perhaps none of us grasps, in real time, the contribution of the age we are living in. So we can be excused for not fully appreciating the significance of this time and place, or the ambitious agenda put forth by President Barack Obama in his address to a joint session of Congress. But the more his plan unfolds, and the more we understand it, the more we will realize its historic dimensions.
We are definitely experiencing a serious economic crisis, Obama admits. But in that crisis, he also sees incredible opportunity, provided we respond to hardship the way Americans always have. “History reminds us,” the president told Congress, “that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas.”
In the middle of the Civil War, for example, Americans built the transcontinental railroad. Out of the post-war turmoil of the late 19th century came a network of public high schools. In the aftermath of World War II, Congress established GI Bill, bringing college education within the reach of every American family. Later challenges spurred the Interstate Highway System and our success in putting a man on the moon.
They are all examples of bold ideas translated into bold action. And in our own time of crisis, Obama proposes no less. Looked at in its entirety, his economic recovery plan amounts to a radical, top-to-bottom restructuring of our entire economy.
Think about it. As part and parcel of fixing the economy, he will start by changing the way we produce and use energy in this country: spending $15 billion a year to develop wind and solar power, biofuels, clean coal technology, and research into fuel-efficient automobiles. At the same time, he will modernize electrical transmission with a new “smart grid,” in order to deliver electricity more cleanly and efficiently, and institute a “market cap” on carbon emissions to lower U.S. production of greenhouse gases. Others talked about energy independence. Obama will take us there.
Next up: As another key component of economic recovery, President Obama will tackle health care. By signing the children’s health, or SCHIP, legislation and dedicating $17 billion to health-information technology, he’s already done more to improve our health care system than George W. Bush did in eight years. But Obama didn’t stop there. In his 2010 budget, he sets aside another $634 billion for the day Congress finally passes health-care reform legislation. Others talked about universal coverage. Obama will take us there.
In the 21st century, a healthy economy also depends on an educated populace. This is why, in addition to $115 billion already allocated in the stimulus package for new school construction and expansion of early childhood education, college tuition tax credits and Pell grants for college, Obama also proposes offering college education in return for a period of national service. Again, others have talked about providing every American child with a “complete and competitive education.” Obama will take us there.
And those revolutionary changes in energy, health care and education are matched by equally bold ventures in other areas.
Manufacturing: requiring American automakers to retool in order to produce non-fossil fuel cars. Trade: eliminating tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas. Finance: assuming partial ownership of banks in return for full transparency and elimination of executive perks. Government accounting: reporting the real size of the federal budget and deficit, without hiding the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The point is, agree or disagree with his policies, you can’t deny the fact that President Obama is not just tinkering around the edges of reform. He has embarked on the biggest remaking and reshaping of the American economy since FDR brought us back from the Great Depression. President Obama understands that today’s economic crisis is also the opportunity to deliver the structural changes we need, not just to survive these difficult times, but to grow out of them stronger than ever.
What a contrast. Republicans are still talking about more tax cuts. Obama is talking about rebuilding America.
2/19/09
AFGHANISTAN: NOW IT’S OBAMA’S WAR
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It was a busy week. President Obama signed into law a $787 billion stimulus plan. He unveiled a $275 billion housing plan. He weighed a request from GM and Chrysler for a total of $39 billion in emergency federal loans to save America’s auto industry.
Oh, and by the way, President Obama also ordered an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan in order, he said, “to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires.”
The news about Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan kind of got lost in all the financial news. But it’s the most important news of all. An additional 17,000 troops increases the American presence in Afghanistan by almost 50 percent. And, we are told, there are more to come, bringing the total American troops in Afghanistan to 60,000, up from 36, 000 today. Several NATO allies, meanwhile, are pulling their troops out of Afghanistan.
Ironically, Obama’s announcement came the same day that Army Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, warned that a resurgent Taliban had “stalemated” U.S. and NATO forces, and predicted that American forces would have to remain in Afghanistan up to five more years. McKiernan also revealed that 60,000 troops represented only about two-thirds of the number of troops he requested for Afghanistan.
The ordered redeployment of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan also occurred on the same day President Obama admitted that military force alone would not do the job. “I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means,” he told reporters from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “We’re going to have to use diplomacy. We’re going to have to use development.”
Most Americans think of the war in Afghanistan as the “good” war, the war we should have finished instead of rushing off to the “bad” war in Iraq. It began as the legitimate response of the United States to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. President George W. Bush launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” in October 2001 with three stated goals: to capture Osama bin Laden, to destroy al-Qaida and to remove the Taliban from power.
Seven years later, however, not one of those goals has been accomplished. Bin Laden’s still on the loose, al-Qaida has regrouped and grown stronger, and the Taliban’s back in charge of much of the country. Not only that, violence against NATO troops has increased, the Karzai government is ripe with corruption, and, just over the border, Pakistan has made a deal with Islamic extremists allowing the practice of Sharia law — the same repressive measures enforced by the Taliban in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
In other words, things have gotten worse in Afghanistan, not better. But it’s by no means certain that sending in more American troops is the answer. In fact, President Obama, himself unsure about a military solution, has ordered a 60-day review of the situation by special envoy Richard Holbrook before adopting a new administration policy on Afghanistan. Unfortunately, in a classic case of putting the cart before the horse, the decision to send more troops was made and announced while the policy review was just getting started.
If, indeed, Gen. McKiernan is correct and U.S. troops wind up staying in Afghanistan another five years, that would mean a 12-year U.S. presence there, with no guarantee of success even by then. It would be two years longer than Soviet forces stayed. They invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and pulled out in humiliation 10 years later. Haven’t we learned anything from history?
Granted, it’s too early to criticize President Obama’s plan for Afghanistan because he either has no plan or we don’t yet know what it is. But it’s not too early to ask two important questions: What’s our mission in Afghanistan? And what’s our exit strategy?
Those are the questions candidate Barack Obama repeatedly asked of President Bush’s war in Iraq. Those are the same two questions that we must now ask of President Obama’s war in Afghanistan.
Obama insists that the war in Afghanistan is “winnable.” Maybe so. But the last thing we need is to go from being bogged down in one war to getting further bogged down in another one.
2/12/09
MAKING TALK RADIO ‘FAIR AND BALANCED’
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Well, you’d think it was, if you’ve been listening to right-wing talk radio lately. Conservative talk show hosts are positively apoplectic over calls by two Democratic senators to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.
First up, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow. While not calling for restoration of the Fairness Doctrine as such, Stabenow did assert, on my radio show: “We’re going to have to have some accountability, something that requires that in a market with owners that have multiple stations that they’ve got to have balance. . . . There has to be some community interest balance standard that says both sides have to be heard.”
A few days later, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin went even further. Referring to a column I’d published in The Washington Post lamenting the shutting down of Washington’s only progressive talk radio station, Harkin volunteered: “I ripped it out, I took it into my office and said ‘There you go, we’ve got to get the Fairness Doctrine back in law again.’”
He might as well have lobbed a nuclear bomb into conservative talk land. In typical hyperventilating fashion, Sean Hannity warned Sen. Stabenow: “But if you think you’re going to grab this microphone away from me and the American people, you’d better be prepared, because we’re going down to the last breath. And you’re going to have to come into my radio studio and rip this microphone out of my mouth. How do you like that, Senator?”
Hey, slow down, Senor Hannity. Nobody’s talking about ripping the microphone out of anybody’s mouth. The Fairness Doctrine, cancelled by Ronald Reagan’s FCC in 1987, simply required that owners of radio stations devote some time to discussion of controversial issues and do so in a manner that is “fair and balanced.”
That is clearly not the case today, in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine. Talk radio is owned, controlled, locked up by the right wing — with little or no opportunity for liberal voices. According to a study released by two think tanks, the Center for American Progress and Free Press, there are nine hours of conservative talk for every one hour of progressive talk.
Why? Station owners complain they can’t get good ratings or make any money with progressive talk, but that’s nonsense. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, independent owner Janet Robert has operated KTNF (950 AM) profitably for five years. In Madison, Wis., WXXM (99.1 FM), just scored its highest ratings ever. And KPOJ (620 AM) in Portland, Ore., soared with progressive talk from No. 23 in market ratings to No. 1. Owners of Chicago’s WCPT (820 AM) experienced so much success with progressive talk, they converted three FM stations they owned to progressive talk.
Nationwide, progressive talkers Randi Rhodes, Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller have proven that, given a level playing field, they can more than hold their own in ratings — and make money for their stations. The once-widely-held theory that liberals can’t do talk radio has been totally discredited.
In fact, the only reason there’s not more competition on American airwaves is that the handful of companies that own most radio stations do everything they can to block it. In many markets — witness Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Atlanta, Houston — they collaborate in providing not one outlet for progressive talk. Now the blackout extends even to Washington, D.C., where Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to one.
And that must change. Not necessarily by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, but by requiring owners of broadcast licenses to serve the general public. We need government oversight by the FCC of radio station owners, just like we needed government oversight by the SEC over Wall Street banks. Today, we have neither.
Forget all the right-wing hysteria about liberals trying to “hush Rush.” What the whole flap over the Fairness Doctrine boils down to is this: Companies are given a license to operate public airwaves — free! — in order to make a profit, yes, but also, according to the terms of their FCC license, “to operate in the public interest and to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance.” Stations are not operating in the public interest when they offer only conservative talk.
Make room for progressive voices on the radio. That’s what the American people want. How do you like that, Mr. Hannity?
2/5/09
DASCHLE’S LOSS IS AMERICA’S LOSS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Politics is a game of winners and losers. But there were no winners in Tom Daschle’s decision to walk away from his nomination to be the next secretary of health and human services.
President Obama lost his trusted adviser and friend. Tom Daschle lost the chance to lead the most important fight of his life. And Americans lost the best qualified, most experienced and most knowledgeable expert on universal health care to lead HHS.
But the sad fact is, it didn’t have to happen. Daschle was too quick to get cold feet and Obama was too quick to throw him to the wolves. Forced to choose between a dumb mistake and a crying national need, they made the wrong decision. It would have been far better for the country if they had both decided to stay and fight, rather than cut and run. And there’s no doubt that, had they hung in there, Daschle would have been confirmed — and his tax problems soon forgotten.
Yes, Tom Daschle made a mistake in not paying his full share of taxes. For most of us, who do pay our taxes religiously and know how unmercifully we’d be treated by the IRS if we goofed on our tax returns, it’s hard to understand how someone so smart could enjoy the services of a car and driver for three years without realizing there was some monetary value involved, and therefore some tax consequences. Or if Daschle didn’t, certainly his tax accountant should have.
It’s also true that Daschle suffered the double misfortune of being second in line. If Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner hadn’t also had tax problems and survived, Daschle could more easily have stuck it out. But, post-Geithner, Daschle’s tax woes were soon seen inside and outside the White House as one tax mess too many.
Up against that acknowledged mistake, however, was the indisputable fact that reforming health care, as an essential element of economic recovery, is the most critical challenge facing President Obama — and that Tom Daschle was the best person to lead the fight. Health care reform was the number one cause of his years in the U.S. Senate. He’s written the best book on it. And he helped shape the plan Obama campaigned on as candidate for president.
In his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis,” Daschle calls for offering all Americans the options now enjoyed by federal employees. Consumers would be free to choose from a long list of affordable health insurance plans, including a government-run plan similar to Medicare. It’s not the single-payer solution many liberals advocate, but it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get to it. Daschle also proposes creation of a Federal Health Board, similar to the Federal Reserve Board, which would take most health coverage decisions out of the hands of Congress. The book’s cover features an endorsement from none other than then-Sen. Barack Obama: “Sen. Daschle brings fresh thinking to this problem.”
To that expertise, add Tom Daschle’s legislative skills and experience as former majority leader of the U. S. Senate, and you realize the enormity of the loss we all experienced when he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration.
Of course, we expect our elected and appointed officials to meet the highest ethical standards. But in so doing, we must be careful of two pitfalls. The first is unequal treatment: David Vitter used the services of prostitutes and still serves as U.S. senator; Eliot Spitzer did likewise and was forced out of office. Tim Geithner didn’t pay his taxes, yet now serves in the cabinet; Tom Daschle didn’t either, yet couldn’t get in the front door.
The second pitfall is impossible expectations. It’s not just, as President Obama insists, that “nobody is perfect.” The question soon becomes: Is anybody good enough to meet the test? Clearly, we’ve set the bar too high when an honest, smart, experienced leader like Tom Daschle doesn’t qualify for public service. Isn’t this a classic case of the “perfect” being the enemy of the good?
In the end, it boiled down to a choice between a squeaky-clean person and the best person for the job. Unfortunately, the wrong choice was made. It’s more important to deliver quality, affordable health care to every American than find a man or woman who never made a mistake. And that cause of universal health care has now suffered a serious setback.
With 47 million Americans having no health insurance whatsoever, this country needed Tom Daschle to lead us to universal health care. We’ll have a much harder time getting there without him.
1/29/09
GOP STABS OBAMA IN THE BACK
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Barack Obama has only been president since Jan. 20, but he’s already learned a powerful lesson: Bipartisanship is a myth. At least, it’s a myth at this time in Washington, with this gang of negative, out-of-touch, calcified Republicans led by the clueless John Boehner.
God knows he tried. Even before being sworn in as president, Obama traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with House and Senate Republicans. In his first week in office, he invited Republican leaders to the White House. But he didn’t stop there. In a gesture seldom seem in partisan-bound Washington — how often did George W. Bush go to Congress to meet with Democrats? — Obama drove up to Capitol Hill to have lunch with Republican members.
Both in his speeches and actions, Obama’s extended the hand of bipartisanship to Republicans. And how did they respond? By stabbing him in the back. When his $819 billion stimulus package came up on the House floor, not one Republican voted for it. Not one. So much for bipartisanship.
Obama’s wasting his time seeking bipartisanship. Not that it’s not a worthy goal. In fact, that’s just what the American people want: for leaders of both parties to put aside their differences, sit down together, and get to work solving problems. And, clearly, working in a bipartisan manner is what Obama wants. But not Republicans. They chose, instead, to reject the will of the American people, ignore the grave economic crisis facing the nation, and slap, not shake, the hand of friendship Barack Obama extended across the aisle.
Why? Because Republicans care more about their party than their country. They can’t stand the idea that Obama might actually fix our ailing economy and get credit for it. They don’t want him to succeed. As right-wing blowhard Rush Limbaugh, the real leader of the Republican Party, recently declared: “I want him to fail.”
Think about that. If Obama fails, the economy fails even more. If Obama fails, millions more Americans lose their homes and jobs. If Obama fails, America fails. But Republicans don’t care. They care only about how best to win back political power — which they believe, misled by Limbaugh, will happen only if they oppose everything Obama stands for. They want him to fail.
What a big mistake. Didn’t Republicans learn anything under Bill Clinton? In 1993, facing a much milder economic downturn, President Clinton crafted his own economic recovery plan and also reached out for bipartisan support. But Republicans refused to cooperate. Newt Gingrich warned that Clinton’s plan would create a deep recession. So Clinton, too, had to settle for enacting an economic plan with not one Republican vote. The result? Eight years of the most sustained non-wartime economic growth in our history.
There is, however, one difference. Knowing how popular Obama is, today’s Republicans don’t blame the president himself for their problems with the stimulus. They don’t dare. Instead, they blame Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and that’s absurd. The stimulus plan was written by the Obama transition team. It was sent to Congress by the Obama White House. It’s Obama’s plan. In fact, attempting to appease Republicans, Obama dropped the only part of the package Pelosi personally championed: expanding family planning under Medicaid. He wasted his time. It didn’t win one Republican vote. Again, so much for bipartisanship.
Every explanation given by Republicans for opposing the Obama stimulus package falls flat. They say it doesn’t offer enough tax cuts. Wrong. It includes $275 billion in tax cuts for Americans making less than $250,000 a year, instead of the wealthiest Americans who benefited from Bush’s tax cuts.
Republicans also complain about spending so much money. Wrong again. Yes, the price tag is high. But only because the Bush-created economic hole we have to climb out of is so deep. And notice that these same Republicans who now complain about dollars to help Main Street had no problem spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street or over even more to “liberate” Iraq.
Indeed, it’s hard to understand what Republicans are up to. They buck the most popular president since Reagan. They do nothing to fix the economy. They fiddle while America burns. That’s not political courage. That’s political suicide.
For his part, Obama took the high road. “What we can’t do is drag our feet or allow the same partisan differences to get in our way,” he said after the vote. If only one Republican were listening.
1/22/09
AN INAUGURATION LIKE NO OTHER
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
“Is this inauguration like all the others we’ve seen, or is there anything special about it?”
On the evening of Jan. 20, that’s the first question Chris Matthews asked me on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” Earlier in the day, while watching the inauguration of Barack Obama from a seat in front of the Capitol, I’d asked myself that same question. And the answer, I’d already decided, was clear.
The inauguration of Barack Obama represents a transition in government far more profound than any we’ve ever experienced before, because of both who he is and what he stands for.
On the issues, the change from former President George W. Bush (how sweet it is to write those words for the first time) to President Barack Obama (even sweeter!) is much more dramatic than the shifting hues of gray a new administration usually brings. The difference is as stark as night and day. With the stroke of noon on Jan. 20 — even before John Roberts bungled the oath of office, forcing Obama to take a mulligan the next day — we went from a president who launched an illegal war to one who would end it; from a president who ignored universal health care to one who would deliver it; from a president who denied the existence of global warming to one who would lead the fight against it.
Obama didn’t mention Bush by name, but everybody knew whom he was talking about in his Inaugural address when he said that “without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.” And when he declared: “Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.” Our new president didn’t wait long to show evidence of his determination to act.
On day one, President Obama moved to remove one of the worst scars from the face of America. He signed an order to suspend the kangaroo courts set up by the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay, and to review the status of each of the 245 prisoners still being held there. The next day, he signed executive orders to close Gitmo within a year, to shut down what remains of the CIA’s network of secret torture prisons around the world, and to ban the CIA’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Dick Cheney’s euphemism for torture.
Overnight, we went from a lawless nation back to a law-abiding one. That in itself is a tectonic shift. But what makes the arrival of Barack Obama so sublimely different is his inauguration as America’s first African-American president. That change was a long time coming. There was much pain, suffering and injustice along the way. Still, once the seeds of equality were planted, it’s remarkable how firmly they took root. Obama was elected president 54 years after the Supreme Court’s decision ending segregation in public schools, 45 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, and 43 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Imagine: On Jan. 20, a black man stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, built largely by slave labor, and became president of the United States. Later, he and his family spent their first night in the White House, also built by slave labor. We’ve come a long way, baby. Obama’s presidency is a giant leap forward many of us never thought we would see in our lifetimes.
What great things President Barack Obama says about us, as a people, and what a powerful message he sends around the globe: that we are, indeed, a nation where every citizen has equal rights and equal opportunities. Only in America, as Obama noted toward the end of his Inaugural address, can “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”
Whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, the inauguration of Barack Obama is a milestone all Americans can be proud of, and a time all Americans join in wishing him success. Well, (BEGIN ITALICS) almost (END ITALICS) all Americans.
On his radio show, right-wing bloviator Rush Limbaugh told listeners he disagreed with fellow Republicans “who have caved in and who say, well, I hope he succeeds.” Not me, countered Limbaugh. “I hope he fails.”
How un-American can you get? These are tough times. If Obama fails, the economy fails, the Republic fails and America fails. Only Limbaugh is too small-minded to understand.
1/15/09
NO IMMUNITY FOR BUSH AND CHENEY
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
On the question of whether George Bush and Dick Cheney should be held legally responsible for crimes committed while in the White House, Barack Obama and John Conyers are playing good cop, bad cop.
Appearing on my radio show in his role as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Conyers made it clear that he believed Bush and Cheney had broken the law — in wiretapping, torture, detention, and other practices — and must be held accountable.
“I don’t want to get too speculative on that, because it’s still under review,” Conyers told me. “Now, remember, violation of the federal criminal code doesn’t end because you leave office. . . . Leaving office doesn’t free you up from what you may have done wrong. Anyone that leaves office, including the president — there’s the World Court, they have tribunals. This thing is not over with. As they say: Stay tuned.”
However, just two days later, asked by ABC’s George Stephanopolous whether he would appoint a special prosecutor to independently investigate the crimes of the Bush administration, Barack Obama seemed much more reluctant. “Obviously, we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” said the president-elect. “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
Even if they don’t agree on whether to prosecute, one thing Obama and Conyers do agree on: There’s no doubt Bush and Cheney broke the law, in several areas. Within days of Sept. 11, Bush gave orders for the NSA to tap the phones of American citizens without getting a warrant from the FISA court. That was clearly against the law, and Bush and Cheney knew it.
When Ambassador Joe Wilson embarrassed Bush by exposing the lies he told about Iraq’s seeking to purchase yellowcake uranium in Niger, the Bush White House retaliated by unmasking his wife’s identify as an undercover CIA agent. That was clearly against the law, and Bush and Cheney knew it.
When the first “terrorist suspects” were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they were brought to Guantanamo Bay, where some of them were tortured. The use of torture, in fact, has now been confirmed by Susan Crawford, the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial. Torturing prisoners of war — even if it’s called “enhanced interrogation techniques” — is clearly against both U.S. law and international law, and Bush and Cheney knew it.
And the list goes on. Clearly, George Bush and Dick Cheney violated many of the laws they took an oath to uphold. The question is whether they should be prosecuted for their crimes or simply allowed to walk away.
The answer, I believe, depends on whether we believe in the rule of law or not. If we do, there’s no choice: The Justice Department must prosecute. Otherwise, we send the dangerous message that, once you achieve a certain level of political power in this country, you can operate outside the law with impunity.
Certainly, we expect more of the United States of America. Just ask George Washington University of Law professor Jonathan Turley. “We have Third World countries that, when they found their leaders committed torture and war crimes, they prosecuted them,” he recently told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “But the most successful democracy in history is about to see war crimes committed and do nothing about it.” That, says Turley, would be “an indictment not just of George Bush and his administration. It’s the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime.”
So, in the end, the real issue is not whether war crimes were committed. They were. Nor whether Bush and Cheney should be prosecuted for them. They should be. The real issue is whether Democrats have the intestinal fortitude to live up to the rule of law and let the Obama Justice Department enforce the law equally, across the board — even if it means hauling George Bush and Dick Cheney before a court of law.
In the end, there’s only one answer. Enforce the law. Let the chips fall where they may. Even Barack Obama understands that looking forward doesn’t mean we forget and forgive the sins of the past.
01/08/09
ONCE AGAIN, DEMOCRATS EAT THEIR OWN
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Who says there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans?
When Republicans take power, they band together to fight Democrats. When Democrats take power, they split into warring camps and eat their own.
Just look at the continuing circus surrounding Roland Burris, the man named by disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill the Senate seat of Barack Obama. It is monumentally shortsighted, and political suicide, for Democrats to continue to deny him his Senate seat.
So what if Burris was appointed by Blagojevich? In judging Burris’ fitness for the job, there are only two questions. First, was his appointment legal? The answer is clearly yes. Blagojevich may have been charged with wrongdoing, but he has not yet been convicted of any crime. He is still governor. He has the legal authority to make a Senate appointment, and he did so. It is grossly unfair to hold Blagojevich’s alleged sins against anyone he so honors.
Second question: Is Burris qualified? Again, the answer is clearly yes. As required by the Constitution, he’s over 30, an American citizen, and a resident of the state he would represent. Burris is a distinguished Chicago attorney with an unblemished record who became the first African-American to be elected to statewide office in Illinois in 1978, when voters made him state comptroller. Twelve years later, he was elected attorney general of Illinois.
No one, in fact, has questioned Burris’ credentials nor suggested that he was part of any “pay to play” deal with Blagojevich — partly because, as Burris was the first to admit: “I have no money.” So why did Democrats refuse to seat him? Only because they don’t like Blagojevich and don’t want to be associated with him in any way. Hello? Nobody likes Blagojevich. That’s irrelevant. No matter who gave Burris the job, as long as he’s legally appointed and duly qualified, he should have been sworn in on day one, along with the rest of the Senate.
Instead, on live television, Democrats turned Burris away at the entrance to the Senate. (Am I the only one who flashed back to George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door?) The next day, realizing how badly Democrats had been hurt by images of Burris being left out in the rain, leaders Harry Reid and Dick Durbin met with the embattled appointee and announced they would relent and consider seating Burris after all. But only after four conditions had been met: Burris had proved his innocence of any quid pro quo with Blagojevich; the Illinois secretary of state had certified his appointment; the Senate Rules Committee had conducted its own investigation; and Burris had been approved by a vote of the full Senate.
What nonsense. Don’t Democratic leaders get it? All they’ve done by piling on these conditions is drag the issue out for another few weeks or months, meanwhile making Burris look like an innocent victim, making the Democratic Party look intolerant, and depriving the people of Illinois from one more vote in the U.S. Senate.
Besides, the Senate has no legal right to impose its own set of conditions on Roland Burris. That question was already raised and decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in Powell v. McCormack (1969). In that case, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had been re-elected to Congress despite allegations of misuse of travel funds. When the House, under Speaker John McCormack, refused to honor the election results, Powell sued and won. In a majority opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the court ruled that Congress does not have the power to add qualifications for office other than those spelled out in the Constitution. If that was true for the scandal-plagued Powell, it’s all the more true for the scandal-free Burris.
This whole thing is one bloody mess and one giant distraction that could have been avoided, if Democrats would only learn to think straight. Trying to avoid the stigma of Blagojevich, they stigmatized themselves, instead. It wasn’t racism. It was just stupidity.
How much smarter it would have been to just give Burris his seat — and then move on, with one more solid Democratic vote — to stop fighting each other and start fighting Republicans over the stimulus package. The sooner Democrats do that, the better.
12/25/08
THE UNSUNG HERO OF OBAMA’S VICTORY
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
“No good deed goes unpunished.” Those words will be emblazoned on Howard Dean’s tombstone, or should be.
Of all those responsible for Barack Obama’s successful campaign, Dean is the least recognized and most unrewarded. Yet in many ways, Dean paved the way for Obama’s victory. He was John the Baptist to Obama’s Messiah.
In 2004, then-Gov. Howard Dean — like Obama, a long-shot primary candidate and Washington outsider — didn’t have access to traditional sources of funding for Democratic candidates. He turned instead to the Internet, building a huge base of small but repetitive online donors nationwide.
Mocked at first as hopelessly naive, Dean soon shocked the political establishment by shattering Bill Clinton’s previous fund-raising record, raising over $50 million in campaign contributions from tens of thousands of supporters, 38 percent of whom gave less than $200. Dean also became the first Democrat to forego federal matching funds, and thus escape the spending limits that go with them.
Obama, of course, followed Dean’s lead in both areas. He also declined public financing and raised a significant portion of his funds from 212,000 repeat online donors, who gave $200 or more. Overall, Obama displayed a fundraising prowess that will be difficult for any future candidate to match, amassing an astounding $750 million for the general and primary campaigns. But he did it all by following a path forged by Howard Dean.
After losing the primary to John Kerry, Howard Dean settled for the consolation prize of serving as the Democratic Party’s next national chairman — whereupon he was immediately snubbed by party leaders. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid let it be known that they, not Chairman Dean, would speak for party policy. Congressman Rahm Emanuel, then chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, publicly scolded Dean for not raising enough money for congressional races. Other leading Democrats simply ignored him.
Meanwhile, Dean again broke with tradition by building what he called a “50 state” strategy. Instead of concentrating resources in big blue states to help Democratic incumbents, as Emanuel demanded, Dean hired organizers chosen by state parties in every one of the 50 states. For the first time, Democrats actually opened field offices in places where they’d never been seen before: Kansas, Utah, Montana, Missouri, Mississippi — even Alaska. And Dean visited every one of them.
To many Democrats, it seemed crazy at the time. But when 2007 rolled around, Democratic primary candidates could count on an existing political base in every state: red, blue and purple. Nobody took advantage of that resource better than Barack Obama. He also decided to build a campaign operation in every state. He wisely targeted smaller, caucus states, not just the big primary states. And when he arrived in those states, he found an existing political operation, built by Howard Dean.
Obama wasn’t the only one to benefit from Dean’s 50-state strategy. During his tenure as DNC chair, Democrats also won back control of both houses of Congress, plus the majority of state legislatures and the majority of governorships — all of which they had lost under the Clinton years. Again, Democrats found themselves winning where they’d never even been competitive before. And while those big wins cannot be solely attributed to Dean, they couldn’t have happened without him.
In one other important way, Howard Dean, perhaps unintentionally, helped Obama. When Michigan and Florida violated DNC rules by moving their primaries forward, Dean immediately ruled that their delegates would not be counted in the tally necessary to win the nomination. Without their votes, Hillary Clinton could never catch up. Fairly or unfairly, Dean’s discounting of Michigan and Florida helped make Obama appear unbeatable — and Hillary, desperate.
For all his success in rebuilding and expanding the Democratic party base, Howard Dean is being amply rewarded. Right? No, it didn’t exactly work out that way.
Once Obama was elected, Dean realized that his old nemesis, Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, would convince the new president to put his own man in the job, so he stepped down as DNC chair rather than seek a second term. Dean applied for appointment as secretary of Health and Human Services instead, but was quickly shot down. So now Dr. Dean is left with no job and few options, except returning to Vermont to practice medicine.
But who said politics is fair? No good deed goes unpunished.
12/04/08
RACING THE CLOCK FOR EVIL
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
The election’s over. In a matter of weeks, Barack Obama will be our next president. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks. But that doesn’t mean he’s fading away harmlessly.
Oh, no. Just the opposite. Bush is racing the clock to see how much more damage he can do before Jan. 20. In a way, Bush is borrowing a page from Bill Clinton’s book — except he’s turning it upside down.
Having ignored the environment for much of his eight years in office, Clinton devoted the last months of his presidency to issuing a whole slew — 26,000 pages — of executive orders and regulations that put in place strong, new environmental protections. Bush, by contrast, is using his last months in office to push new rules and regulations that gut environmental and public-safety programs.
High on Bush’s list, for example, is a rule published this week by the Environmental Protection Agency (!) allowing mountaintop mining companies to dump their waste alongside or in nearby rivers and streams. Since 1983, mining operations have been banned by law from dumping their massive piles of debris within 100 feet of any stream. The new rule overturns that law.
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson argued that filling waterways with mountaintops was no big deal, because those streams thus destroyed were not major rivers. Obviously, he’s never been to the headwaters of any river, or he would realize that big rivers are formed from the flow of hundreds of just such small streams.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I remember when the job of the EPA was to protect the environment, not destroy it. Indeed, the more fundamental question for Johnson (and Bush) is: Why are we allowing mining companies to cut off the tops of mountains in the first place?
Another “midnight regulation” proposed by Bush would relax protection for workers exposed to toxic substances on the job. The new Bush plan, strongly backed by big business groups, would replace strict national safety standards with industry-by-industry standards — allowing more asbestos in the factory, for example, than in the office.
In this case, Bush is acting in direct defiance of President-elect Barack Obama. In September, Obama and four other senators introduced legislation that would prohibit the Department of Labor from issuing the very rule it is now rushing to complete. Obama also sent a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao urging her to scrap the proposal because it would “create serious obstacles to protecting workers from health hazards on the job.” Yet DOL flunkies are proceeding with their plan, even though President Bush himself promised to cooperate with Obama in making the transition “as smooth as possible.”
The new mining and worker-safety proposals are only two of some 20 highly controversial rules the Bush administration is rushing to get in place before Jan. 20. Others include: allowing states to charge higher co-payments for hospital care and prescription drugs provided to low-income people under Medicaid; speeding up oil shale development alongside three national parks in the West; exempting family farms from air-pollution regulations; easing restrictions on lead emissions from factories near residential areas; and allowing tourists to carry loaded guns in national parks. The investigative journalist group ProPublica has published the full list of Bush’s last-minute regulations on its website: propublica.org.
President Obama, of course, will have the last word. But it won’t be easy for him to undo all the damage Bush is doing. A new president can unilaterally reverse executive orders signed by his predecessor, as both Bush and Clinton have done, but rules and regulations, which Bush is pursuing, are different. Once they’re embedded in the Code of Federal Regulations, they have the force of law and can only be changed after the new administration goes through a lengthy process of public comment and review.
Knowing that everything he does can eventually be undone, why is George Bush pushing such harmful rules and regulation? Because it completes his destructive agenda and make things as difficult as possible for Barack Obama — as though two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression weren’t damage enough.
11/27/08
JUST CALL HER MADAM SECRETARY
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Listen to the anguished cries of the purists: Never has a campaign promise been broken so soon.
As a candidate, Barack Obama promised change: a break with the politics of the past and a new galaxy of talented young leaders in Washington. And what’s the first thing he did as president-elect? Ask Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state!
What, ask the purists, was he thinking? Hillary doesn’t represent change. She’s just more of the same. Not only did she smear him during the primaries, but her nomination is a throwback to the disgraced Bill Clinton presidency Democrats have worked so hard to put behind them. Does Barack Obama really want the circus back in town?
So say the purists. They are disappointed. They are disillusioned. They are hurt. And they are wrong. Barack Obama’s choice of Sen. Clinton as America’s next secretary of state is both bold and brilliant. She is the embodiment of change, not its contradiction.
After all, in promising change, Obama wasn’t committing himself to filling his administration with a bunch of people nobody ever heard of, none of whom had any prior experience in Washington. By change, Obama meant a change of direction from the disastrous policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. He’s been searching for the best possible leaders to deliver that change. And aside from Obama himself, there’s nobody better qualified to represent America around the globe than the junior senator from New York — even though she ran against Obama in the primaries, and even though her last name is Clinton.
One argument in her favor, of course, is the old adage: “Hold your friends close; and your enemies, closer.” There’s a lot of truth to that. Certainly, Obama won’t have to worry about Hillary mounting a challenge against him in 2012 as long as she’s his secretary of state. But he probably didn’t have to worry about that, anyway.
For Obama, what tipped the scales toward Hillary was something much more important. As others have noted, in reaching out to Hillary Clinton, Obama is consciously following the model of President-elect Abraham Lincoln, so well detailed in Doris Kearn Goodwin’s marvelous book “Team of Rivals.” Lincoln actually brought four political opponents into his Cabinet, including his arch-rival William Seward — another senator from New York! — as secretary of state. Lincoln did so not because he was trying to clip their political wings, but because he was convinced each was the best person for the job. Same with Obama and Clinton.
There were other good candidates for secretary of state: John Kerry, Bill Richardson, Susan Rice. But nobody brings the same set of skills and experience to the nation’s top diplomatic post as Hillary Clinton. As first lady, she traveled to over 80 foreign nations, visiting places that heads of state would never see. In 1995, she made a famous speech on women’s rights in Beijing, reminding world leaders that “women’s rights are human rights.” She and daughter Chelsea made a historic visit to six African countries in 1997. Clinton has continued her foreign policy work as member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And she remains, together with husband Bill and Barack Obama, one of the three most admired Americans around the globe.
Perhaps, most significantly, Clinton has proved herself a real team player. Yes, she ran against Barack Obama in the primaries. She ran a spirited, but losing, campaign. And once that was over, she not only rushed to endorse her former opponent, she held some 70 Obama events — more than any other politician — and gave a rousing speech for him in Denver. She will be a loyal member of Obama’s team and, despite press speculation to the contrary, so will the former president. He won’t do anything to get in her way. He wants his wife to succeed, even if he’s still sore that she won’t be in the White House.
Obama’s thinking on Hillary Clinton, by the way, also holds true on his decision to retain Robert Gates at the Defense Department. Yes, it’s counterintuitive, but it provides continuity at the Pentagon during two wars, and it’s a clever way of silencing his critics when Gates, following his orders, starts bringing troops home from Iraq.
Hillary Clinton stepping in as secretary of state. Bob Gates staying in as secretary of defense. What we’ve already learned to expect from President Obama is the unexpected. You can’t have change without it.
WHY THE DOUBLE STANDARD ON DETROIT?
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
No wonder people don’t trust politicians. Americans just voted overwhelmingly to steer this country in a new direction, yet Congress has ignored the pleas of Barack Obama and voted instead to continue the disastrous economic policies of George W. Bush by letting the American auto industry collapse.
In the acrimonious debate over an emergency loan to Detroit, we saw some of the worst examples of political preening, pretending and pontificating ever. And not just by Republicans.
Suddenly, before approving any financial help to automakers, members of Congress demanded answers from them that they never demanded from Wall Street. Everything they wanted to know was reasonable: What kind of changes are they going to make in their day-to-day operations? What structural changes have they agreed to? What limits are they going to put on executive salaries? What guarantees exist that we’ll get our money back?
Again, those are all good questions, and questions Congress should ask. But Congress members were hypocrites in demanding answers to those questions from Detroit automakers when they had so recently approved a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks and financial institutions with nary a peep: no oversight, no accountability, no conditions, no restrictions.
Have Ford, Chrysler and General Motors made mistakes? Absolutely. For years, they stubbornly ignored all the signs and all the warnings that their business plan was headed for disaster. They fought congressional pressure to raise make more fuel-efficient cars. They dragged their feet on research into alternative fuels or electric cars. Instead, they kept turning out bigger and bigger gas guzzlers. Now the turkeys have come home to roost. Detroit automakers are stuck with outmoded plants and a huge inventory of cars nobody wants to buy. And they’re still years from producing anything close to Toyota’s hugely popular Prius.
Should Ford, Chrysler and General Motors be forced to change their ways? Absolutely. Indeed, this is the chance for Congress to force automakers to make the structural changes they have so long resisted: retooling plants to produce smaller, greener cars; dumping SUVs and Hummers; speeding up production of electric, photovoltaic or hydrogen non-fossil-fuel vehicles; and placing limits on executive compensation. Those are fair demands to make of Detroit in exchange for a federal bailout.
There’s nothing wrong with putting strings on federal dollars. But here’s my question: Why the huge double standard? Wall Street firms, remember, also screwed up. Indeed, they’re the ones that drove us into the ditch in the first place. So why should they get all the dollars they want with no questions asked and no strings attached, yet Detroit be forced to jump through so many congressional hoops? Or why, as decided by George Bush and Hank Paulson — and endorsed by Congress — should banks and financial institutions get the entire $700 billion, while automakers most likely get not a penny of federal assistance?
For Republicans, we know the answer: because Wall Street is non-union, and Detroit is all-union. Because Wall Street is white-collar and Detroit is blue-collar. Because Wall Street is upper-class and Detroit is middle-class. And Republicans would rather swallow glass than help a middle-class, blue-collar union member.
But what’s wrong with Democrats, who got re-elected with the help of labor unions and are now gleefully stabbing them in the back? Do they really want to make their first post-Obama-election move the death of the American auto industry? Apparently so. Massachusetts Democrat Michael Capuano set the tone by telling leaders of the Big Three: “Damn it, I don’t want to give you this money and have it stuffed back in my face.”
Instead, Capuano and fellow self-righteous Democrats decided they’d rather help George W. Bush kill 3 to 5 million more jobs, cause 775,000 retirees to lose their pensions, and force 2 million workers to lose their health benefits. You think the economy’s bad now? Imagine how much worse it will be when U.S. automakers go belly up, wiping out 20 percent of all retail sales in America, eliminating one out of 10 American jobs and destroying what little is left of America’s manufacturing sector.
This is the time to change Detroit, not to kill it. If Congress can suddenly find $700 billion to bail out the banks, certainly it can find $25 billion as an emergency loan — not bailout, but loan — to help the auto industry retool and regroup. Letting Detroit go bankrupt is a risk we simply can’t afford.
DISCRIMINATION STILL LIVES
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
LOS ANGELES — While the rest of the nation celebrates Barack Obama’s triumph on Nov. 4, there’s a dark cloud hanging over election night returns here in the Golden State.
The success of Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in California, is a huge disappointment and a huge contradiction. On the same day 60.8 percent of Californians voted for Sen. Obama, 52 percent voted for Prop. 8. Even more shockingly, while over nine out of 10 African-Americans voted to elect the nation’s first African-American president, seven out of 10 voted to discriminate against gays and lesbians. The anti-gay marriage initiative also won 53 percent of the Latino vote. Go figure.
Prop. 8 is the latest chapter in the California’s long-running saga over same-sex marriage. Long simmering on the back burner, it was first forced onto the front burner when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, sitting in the House gallery, heard President Bush use his State of the Union address to declare that marriage should be allowed only between a man and woman.
An outraged Newsom, as he related it to me, stormed out of the Capitol, turned on his cell phone, called his office and gave orders to draw up documents for making same-sex marriage legal in San Francisco. Just one month and some 4,000 happily-married gay and lesbian couples later, the California Supreme Court ruled that Newsom had violated state law limiting marriage to same-sex couples only.
Then on May 16, 2008, that same conservative court stunned everyone by declaring California’s anti-gay marriage law unconstitutional. People have a “fundamental right to marry the person of their choice,” the court ruled 4-3, and existing gender restrictions violate the “equal protection” guarantees of the state constitution. (And by extension, one might add, the U.S. Constitution!)
That should have resolved the issue, but gay-haters were not willing to give up so easily. They ran out, rounded up signatures and put Proposition 8 on the ballot, which, in theory at least, overruled the Supreme Court decision. But opponents of Proposition 8 are already back before the court, asking them to reaffirm their previous decision and invalidate the measure on the plausible theory that only by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature can a constitutional amendment be placed on the ballot, not by signatures on an initiative.
However the court rules, there’s no doubt that Proposition 8 is just the latest form of discrimination. That’s what’s so maddening about the support it received from blacks and Latinos. In effect, what they voted for is replacing one form of discrimination with another. There is no difference between denying people the right to eat at the same lunch counter because they’re black or brown and denying them the right to get married because they’re gay. Either way, it’s discrimination, pure and simple.
But Proposition 8 is something else, too: It’s religious bigotry. The initiative’s two main sponsors were the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church. Mormons, in fact, pumped in 77 percent of the funding for the “Yes on 8” campaign, even though they make up less than 2 percent of California’s population.
Given that churches were in no way obliged to perform gay marriages — the Supreme Court decision applied to civil ceremonies only — there is no excuse for Catholic and Mormon officials to wage war on gays. If we are all God’s children, then surely we all deserve the same rights and opportunities. And besides, religion is supposed to be about love, not hate.
The Old Testament ban on homosexuality in Leviticus has no more relevance today than its ban on shellfish, which everybody ignores. And aside from several comments attributed to St. Paul (and of questionable authenticity), there is no mention of gays or gay marriage in the New Testament. If homosexuality were so evil, don’t you think Jesus would have said something about it?
Actually, Jesus had a lot to say about helping the poor. But the Catholic and Mormon churches chose to do very little about poverty, war, torture, health care, the environment, or so many other issues on which they should be out in front. They’d rather target gays instead.
The ultimate irony is that, while rejecting equal rights for gays and lesbians, 63 percent of Californians also voted to approve Proposition 2, which requires that chickens and pigs may only be confined in cages big enough to “allow them to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs, and turn around freely.”
Welcome to California, where chickens and pigs get more sympathy from voters than lesbians and gays.
PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN AGAIN
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It’s true that every election is significant. But it’s also true that it’s impossible to exaggerate the special significance of this one.
In so many ways, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States is nothing short of revolutionary. It represents a 180-degree change of direction for American policy and politics.
At least for the next eight years — do Republicans seriously believe they can dislodge Obama with Sarah Palin? — we won’t have to fight the White House any longer. The White House will actually be fighting for us.
On the domestic front, we will soon have a president who believes in, and supports, all the issues we have worked so hard to achieve: civil rights; women’s rights; gay rights; workers’ rights; universal health care; protecting the environment; and making our schools, again, the best in the world. And, of course, we’ll welcome a president who believes in protecting our basic freedoms and respecting the important limits on executive power enshrined in the Constitution. Not to mention the joy of having a president who doesn’t mangle the English language.
On the global front, we will soon have a president who believes in, and supports, ending the war in Iraq, obeying international law, leading the fight against global warming, favoring diplomacy over bombs, and working with our allies as a partner rather than a schoolyard bully. And, most importantly, we will no longer feel embarrassed or ashamed of our president. Instead, we will take pride in a leader who is respected and admired around the world. Barack Obama’s election was not only greeted by enthusiastic crowds in cities and towns across America, it was celebrated in Paris, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Cairo.
Those policy differences are important. But what makes this election especially significant is the election of our first African-American president. It’s official. Barack Obama will be our next president. It took 40 years, but the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. — that our children would someday be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” — has finally become a reality.
This historic achievement is a particularly proud and emotional moment for African-Americans. One caller to my radio show told of her experience as a little girl, accompanying her grandfather to a polling place, only to see him turned away by men with shotguns because he was black. This year, she accompanied her son as he voted for the first time and helped make history by electing a black man as president.
But it’s a proud moment for all the rest of us, too. Despite all the warnings about the so-called “Bradley Effect,” we proved the pundits wrong — much to our own delight, and even surprise. For my part, I grew up in a segregated town in Delaware, where there were white stores and “colored” stores, white churches and “colored” churches, a white school and a “colored school.” The “N” word was everywhere, and white folks and black folks never mixed.
My parents were a rare exception. As owner and operator of a gas station, my father welcomed black customers, hired black employees and invited them to his annual Christmas reception in our home. Only one, Mr. Bootie Carter, dared accept the invitation. But even he insisted on arriving and leaving via the kitchen door. He didn’t want to cause any trouble, he said, by walking in the front door of a white man’s home.
Little did any of us dream that, half a century later, a black man would walk in the front door of the White House — a house built by slaves on land ceded by two slave states, Maryland and Virginia! — as the next president of the United States.
But that day of racial divide is gone forever. From now on, when people around the world hear us say that we believe all Americans are created equal, with equal rights and opportunities under the Constitution, they’ll know we really mean it.
It’s a new day and a new beginning. I’ve never been so proud to be an American.
10/30/08
HOW JOHN MCCAIN BLEW IT
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
In Boston and Las Vegas recently, I attended two conferences of national business leaders, at least 80 percent of whom were Republicans. Curiously enough, no one asked me who I thought was going to win the presidential election. Their only question: “How big do you think Obama’s margin of victory is going to be?”
Yes, members of his own party have given up hope — which tells you all you need to know about the McCain campaign. So even before all the votes are cast and counted, it’s not too early to reflect on how John McCain blew it.
True, everything was stacked against McCain. He had to deal with an unpopular war led by an even more unpopular president. He faced a nation desperate for change, after eight years of inept and bitterly partisan leadership. He began his campaign in hard economic times, and ended it in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Depression.
It would have been an uphill climb for any GOP candidate, but McCain made it more difficult with his own series of mistakes.
Sticking so close to George W. Bush was his first mistake. It’s hard to call yourself a maverick when you vote with Bush over 90 percent of the time — and brag about it. In the last couple of weeks, McCain has tried to put some distance between himself and Bush, but it’s been too little, too late. He supported Bush on judges, tax cuts, deregulation, wiretapping, torture and offshore drilling — and he never offered one example of something he would do differently from Bush and Cheney. The American people wanted change. McCain offered more of the same.
Being so gung-ho on the war was his second big mistake. McCain was an early cheerleader for invading Iraq, asserting it would all be over in weeks. Five and a half years later, he’s still not ready to bring our troops home. Barack Obama got it right. Americans didn’t want this war in the first place, and they’re anxious to end it now.
Blowing it on the economy was McCain’s next big mistake. When the economy started to go sour, McCain had nothing to say except to admit that he really didn’t know much about economic matters. Then, when everything finally crashed, McCain had nothing to offer except to insist that the fundamentals of the economy were strong: a hard message to sell when millions of Americans faced losing their homes, jobs and retirement funds.
In the end, McCain’s one contribution to the financial crisis was absolving Wall Street CEO’s from guilt while blaming ACORN, a nonprofit voter registration organization, for forcing banks to make high-risk loans to homeowners. That absurd argument just proved that McCain was right when he said he knew nothing about the economy and further eroded any confidence in his ability to deal with the most serious issue facing the country.
One thing is for sure: If McCain knew nothing about the economy, Sarah Palin knew even less. She was his biggest mistake. Her nomination was not only a transparently cynical ploy for evangelical and female votes, it was an insult to the intelligence of the American electorate. There is no way she can be taken seriously as a candidate for vice president, prepared to take over as leader of the Free World.
By putting Sarah Palin on the ticket, John McCain — who talked so much about putting his country first — proved he didn’t really care about his country at all. To save his political career, he was willing to risk putting the United States in the hands of a total incompetent.
And then John McCain capped it all off by running the most negative campaign since — well, since the nasty primary campaign George W. Bush ran against him in 2000. For the last two months, the McCain campaign has not aired one positive commercial about what John McCain would do for this country. It has bombarded us, instead, with a relentless barrage of negative, personal, guilt-by-association attacks against Barack Obama.
Too often, dirty politics work. But not today. Conditions are too harsh, times are too tough, and people are hurting too much. They’re looking for answers. And all they got from John McCain was mud.
When it’s all over, John McCain will look for scapegoats. He’ll probably try to lay it all on George W. Bush. But that won’t wash. The truth is, McCain will have nobody to blame but himself.
10/23/08
THE WARDROBE TO NOWHERE
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Woe is me. I needed a couple of new shirts and ties this week, so I stopped in at my favorite clothing store, Filene’s Basement. Designer clothes for bargain prices.
Too bad I’m not running for vice president on the GOP ticket. No need to shop for bargains. I could have gone straight to Neiman-Marcus — and had the Republican National Committee pick up the tab. Just like Sarah Palin.
Poor John McCain and Sarah Palin. The more they try to sell themselves off as average Americans, just like you and me, the more they find embarrassing stuff getting in the way. First, the news that McCain has nine houses, 13 cars, and wears $520 Ferragamo loafers. Then, word from Vanity Fair that Cindy McCain’s outfit on opening night of the Republican National Convention cost a staggering $313,000. And now, reports of Caribou Barbie’s $150,000 shopping spree.
As first revealed by Politico.com, Governor Palin’s first stops after being nominated by John McCain were the designer showrooms of some of America’s ritziest clothing establishments. She walked in looking like a moose hunter wearing Eddie Bauer. She walked out looking like a moose hunter wearing Valentino.
Economic crisis? Not for Palin. She dropped $49,425.74 at Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York. While in the Big Apple, she also shelled out $5,102.71 at Bloomingdale’s, and another $789.72 at Barney’s. She picked up $9,447.71 worth of rags at Macy’s. Then she really hit the jackpot, scoring $75,062.63 in new duds from Neiman-Marcus in Minneapolis. And don’t forget her $345 (frames only) Kawasaki eyeglasses. That woman has expensive taste!
Of course, you can’t have a good clothes day without a good hair day. So Palin spent another $4,716.49 on hair and makeup in September — which makes John Edwards, with his measly $400 haircut, look like a cheapskate.
Now here’s the best part, for Sarah Palin: That glitzy new wardrobe didn’t cost her a cent. She billed it all to St. Paul Republican fat cat Jeff Larson, who in turn was reimbursed by the Republican National Committee, which then reported the clothing expenses as “campaign accessories.”
That three-way arrangement may serve to get around the law — candidates are prohibited from using campaign funds for personal expenses, while political committees face no such restriction. But it also serves to undermine Sarah Palin’s carefully crafted image as a no-frills, down-to-earth hockey mom. How can you expect people to believe you’re just “Jane-the-Plumber,” the girl next door, when you blow more on clothes in one month than most women will spend on clothes in a lifetime?
Anxious to dispel any impression that Palin’s living high on the hog, McCain staffers insisted that her wardrobe windfall is only temporary. Immediately after the election, they assured reporters, the governor will donate all her campaign clothing to charity. Sure, she will. In fact, she’s already picked out her favorite charity: Alaska’s home for unwed mothers.
Palin’s clothing binge seems even more extravagant when compared to the frugality of the Obamas. Appearing as a guest on “The View,” Michelle Obama laughed when Whoopi Goldberg and co-hosts went wild over her dress. It was, revealed Obama, nothing but a $148 Donna Ricco dress, bought off the rack at a local department store. She told the audience: “You put a little pin on it and you’ve got something going on.”
Barack Obama himself admits having little interest in clothes. In a June interview on “Access Hollywood,” his wife and daughters made fun of him for wearing the same pants and belt for 10 years. He reportedly wore the same shoes every day until his campaign staff pitched in and bought him a new pair.
Before his acceptance speech in Denver, Obama agreed to buy a new suit. He paid $1,500 for a custom-made suit by Hart Schaffner Marx, an American label based in Des Plaines, Ill. Since then, he’s bought a couple more. In fact, he could buy 50 suits for what Sarah Palin spent at Neiman-Marcus alone.
So let’s get this straight. One candidate has nine houses, 13 cars and wears $520 loafers. And the other wears the same pants, same belt, and same shoes for 10 years.
Tell me again: Which one’s the elitist?
10/16/08
KNOWN BY THE COMPANY HE KEEPS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
First, this confession. Many years ago, while teaching high school in San Francisco, I lived in the same precinct as former Black Panther Angela Davis. I may even have said hello once or twice. Yes, I am a terrorist.
But I’m not the only one. As a young man, former North Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh worked as a baker at Boston’s famous Parker House Hotel. All those who worked with him in the kitchen? Lock ’em up! Terrorists!
Absurd? Of course! But no more absurd than John McCain’s continuing accusations that Barack Obama is a terrorist sympathizer because of his relationship with Bill Ayers. As revealed in this column last week, their relationship is almost nonexistent.
Obama was 8 years old and living in Indonesia with his mother when Ayers helped found the Weatherman organization. By the time Obama met him, in 1995, Ayers was a tenured education professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, consultant to the mayor on education reform, and had been honored as Chicago’s “Citizen of the Year.” Along with dozens of others, Obama served on two charitable boards with Ayers and attended a political coffee in his home. Obama hasn’t seen Ayers, or spoken with him, for three years.
That’s it. End of story. But, based on that slim connection, McCain and running mate Sarah Palin accuse Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” This is the kind of guilt-by-association politics — “Are you now, or have you ever been?” — we haven’t seen since the days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. And it’s especially dangerous for John McCain, who’s been “palling around” with some pretty unsavory characters himself — starting with Charles Keating, whose fraudulent business practices triggered the S&L crisis that cost taxpayers $3.4 billion.
McCain accepted over $150,000 in campaign contributions from Keating and associates. He and his family also often vacationed at Keating’s Bahamas retreat and flew on his private jet. Cindy McCain invested in a Keating real estate project. They were business partners and personal buddies.
Then there’s G. Gordon Liddy, who spent four years in federal prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. Liddy held a fundraiser for McCain in his home. In November 2007, as a candidate for president, McCain told Liddy on his radio show: “I’m proud of you. . . . Congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”
What principles was McCain talking about? In his autobiography, Liddy admits plotting with co-conspirator Howard Hunt to kill journalist Jack Anderson. And in 1994, after the government’s raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Liddy told his listeners: “Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot. . . . Kill the sons of bitches.” Are those are the principles that “keep our nation great”?
Retired Gen. John Singlaub is another McCain sidekick. In the 1980s, as a member of Congress, McCain sat on the advisory board of Singlaub’s organization, the U.S. Council for World Freedom. Long linked to ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America, the council played a major role in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal, serving as the front group for Ollie North’s illegal White House operation of selling arms to Iran in order to arm the contras.
McCain’s own rogues gallery also includes Washington attorney William Timmons, whom McCain recently named to head his presidential transition team (as though he’ll need one). Not only is Timmons a registered lobbyist — one of many lobbyists McCain has surrounded himself with, despite his daily promise to chase lobbyists out of Washington, he also counts among his previous clients: Saddam Hussein!
For five years, Timmons worked with a team of lobbyists to ease international sanctions against Iraq. Their lobbying activities occurred in the years immediately following the first Gulf War, when the United States had already branded Iraq as a rogue enemy state and a sponsor of terrorism.
In other words, in the warped thinking of the McCain campaign, John McCain hangs out with convicted felons, a would-be murderer, an illegal arms merchant and Saddam Hussein’s lobbyist, and he’s an American hero. Barack Obama serves on a charitable board with a man who conspired to commit illegal acts 26 years before he met him, yet he’s a terrorist.
Go figure. Only Sarah Palin could follow that logic.
10/9/08
IN MCCAIN DIRTY TRICKS, LEE ATWATER LIVES!
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Coming soon to a movie theatre near you: “Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.” If you want a real insight into the McCain campaign, don’t miss it.
The legendary campaign manager has been dead since 1991, but the dirty campaign tricks he introduced into American politics live on in the person of his protege, Karl Rove, and in the campaign tactics now practiced by Steve Schmidt, Rove’s protege and John McCain’s campaign manager.
In 1988, Atwater ran President George H. W. Bush’s campaign against Michael Dukakis. As documented by historic footage in the film, Atwater convinced Bush he could not beat Dukakis on the issues, so he had no choice but to attack him personally. Bush admits he approved the plan, even though he wasn’t comfortable doing so. And with Bush’s blessing, Atwater took out his stiletto and stabbed Dukakis in the chest.
First, he painted Dukakis as an “elitist” from Brookline, Mass. Then he put out the famous “Dukakis in a tank” commercial, accusing him of voting against a score of proposed new weapons systems. (In fact, Governor Dukakis, having never served in Congress, had not voted for or against any military expenditures). And finally, Atwater/Bush portrayed Dukakis as Willie Horton’s knowing and willing accomplice in rape and murder.
Sound familiar? It should. Because Lee Atwater’s back from the grave and running the very same campaign against Barack Obama. Schmidt has even bragged about it. Asked how the McCain campaign could regain momentum, given Obama’s surge in the polls following the first presidential debate, Schmidt and other top McCain aides agreed that, like Daddy Bush, they could never win on the issues. Instead, they vowed, they would attack Obama’s character.
And they are. Word for word, it’s 1988, all over again. First, they painted Obama as an “elitist” from the South Side of Chicago. Then they lied about his voting against funding for troops in Iraq and vowing to raise taxes on all Americans. And finally, in an instant replay of the Willie Horton ad, they accused Obama of being an accomplice to former Weatherman Bill Ayers in planning to blow up the Pentagon.
The Ayers connection, especially, is an absurd stretch. Yes, Ayers and fellow Weathermen plotted to bomb public buildings as part of their opposition to the war in Vietnam. But that was in 1969 — when Barack Obama was only 8 years old.
Twenty-six years later, when Obama met Ayers, the former radical was a tenured professor of education at the University of Chicago and a counselor to the mayor of Chicago on school reform. They served on two charitable boards together, Ayers hosted a coffee for Obama’s first run for public office, and they live in the same neighborhood.
That’s the extent of their connection. Obama hasn’t seen or talked to Ayers since 2005. Yet pit bull Sarah Palin accuses Obama of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She even smiles when crowds chant “Terrorist!” at the mention of Obama’s name — which is strange, coming from a woman whose husband was an active member of a political party dedicated to having Alaska secede from the union. Isn’t a secessionist, in fact, just another form of terrorist? I think Abraham Lincoln would agree.
But Palin’s not alone. At campaign rallies today, McCain himself merely stands by as supporters denounce “Barack (BEGIN ITALICS) Hussein (END ITALICS) Obama” — the deliberate use of his middle name meant to convey Muslim, un-American, terrorist — language that McCain condemned, during the primaries, as unworthy of a presidential campaign.
But that’s what happens when you’re losing. You get desperate. You throw your principles out the window. You go to the dark side, running the dirtiest, most despicable campaign we’ve seen since . . . well, since Karl Rove used the same tactics against John McCain in South Carolina 2000. Except McCain’s campaign is even worse. At least, Bush never called him a terrorist.
Back then, McCain said: “I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out that if all you’re running are negative ads, you don’t have much of a vision for the future or you’re not ready to articulate it.”
Well said. And today, it’s pretty clear which candidate has no vision for the future. It’s not “that one,” but the other one.
10/2/08
PALIN ALONE DISQUALIFIES MCCAIN
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It used to be true that the office of vice president didn’t amount to much. Not “worth a pitcher of warm spit,” in the famous words of FDR’s first vice-president, John Nance Garner. That changed with Dick Cheney, who exercised more power than any vice president in history.
It also used to be true that nobody cast their vote for president based on the vice presidential candidate. That’s changed with Sarah Palin, who is so unqualified she’s reason enough to vote against John McCain.
And that was apparent even (BEGIN ITALICS) before (END ITALICS) her debate with Joe Biden. So far, the McCain campaign has, quite understandably, kept her hidden from the media. But the few interviews she has given reveal a woman who, even many Republicans admit, is in way over her head.
It began when she sat down with ABC’s Charlie Gibson. Palin obviously didn’t have a clue what the “Bush Doctrine” was, nor what the implications of a policy of anytime, anywhere pre-emptive war are for relations between the United States and our allies.
Alarmed at her performance on ABC, the McCain camp dispatched several top aides to force-feed her facts like a Strasbourg goose before her next big interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. Alas, it did no good. Asked to explain how Alaska’s proximity to Russia made her a foreign policy expert, she asserted: “Because our next-door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the chief executive of.” Not only that, she continued: “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s right over the border.”
The frontier governor’s foreign policy expertise is matched only by her economic insights. Invited by Couric to explain how bailing out Wall Street would rescue the American economy, Palin offered this stunning sequence of non-sequiturs: “Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the — oh, it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing.” (I dare you to diagram that paragraph!)
How can Alaskans stay informed on current events? What magazines and periodicals does she read, Couric wanted to know. “I’ve read most of them, “Palin insisted. Asked to name just one, Governor Palin protested: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.” In other words, she couldn’t name even one — and this woman majored in journalism! Don’t you think she’d be able to remember the name of Time or Newsweek?
Those two interviews alone should have been enough to disqualify Palin. In both, we saw her for who she is: a woman with a nice family who somehow got elected governor of Alaska, but who is clueless when it comes to national issues, whose head has suddenly been crammed with facts and statistics, and who believes that stringing meaningless words and phrases together is a substitute for understanding and answering a question.
They alone were enough to prompt former Bush speechwriter David Frum to tell The New York Times: “I think she has pretty thoroughly — and probably irretrievably — proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States.” And enough for conservative commentator Kathleen Parker to conclude: “Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate . . . Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.”
Unfortunately for McCain, Palin did nothing to change that impression, or improve her image, in the vice-presidential debate. True, she made no embarrassing blunder. But she also showed no command of the issues, no depth of knowledge, and no skills beyond memorizing talking points and spitting them back to the camera. No candidate has ever used so many words to say so little.
In the end, however, Sarah Palin’s nomination says more about John McCain than it does about her. Let’s be honest: You can’t have any respect for the office of president and put someone as unqualified as Sarah Palin just a heartbeat away.
9/25/08
NO BLANK CHECK FOR BUSH
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
“If Putin had written it, I would have understood it.” That’s what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had to say about the big Bush $700 billion-plus bailout plan. Echoed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “Not even Stalin was ever given so much power or so much money to spend.”
When leaders of the left and right agree on what’s wrong with Bush’s proposal to rescue Wall Street, you know it’s a bad deal. This is the largest transfer of wealth and power in history. It would put total control of $700 billion — and probably more — in the hands of one man: unelected, with no oversight, and no legal or political accountability. Assuming that’s even constitutional, it’s a dangerous undermining of our democratic form of government. No wonder some Republicans in Congress are calling the Bush plan “financial socialism.”
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson insists that Congress must endorse his super bailout intact and in a hurry — “clean and quick” — or else the sky will fall. This coming from the same man who, for the last two years, has been daily assuring us that Wall Street’s doing just fine and the fundamentals of our economy are strong. He’s always been wrong before. Why should we believe him now?
Besides, haven’t we seen this movie before? After every crisis, the Bush White House insists the end is near and demands that Congress act immediately to give the administration whatever new powers it wants, with no strings attached. They did it after Sept. 11, and Congress surrendered our right of privacy in the Patriot Act. They did it again in the buildup to the war in Iraq, and Congress surrendered its own war-making authority. And now they want Congress to surrender all regulatory oversight over Wall Street and hand all power over to the president and his Treasury secretary? No way.
Congress should not give George Bush another blank check. First of all, even though Paulson warns that the “sky is falling,” there’s no way of knowing if his plan will succeed. Government intervention may rescue the economy, or it may just lead to more government bailouts at even greater taxpayer expense. Nobody knows. So while it’s a risk to do nothing, it’s also a huge gamble to throw $700 billion at a problem without knowing whether or not it will work.
Second, Paulson’s plan of having the government buy $700 billion of worthless paper may get the banks back in business, but it does nothing to solve the underlying problems on Wall Street. As outlined by the White House, the proposal contains no structural changes, no new regulation or oversight, and no brakes on the reckless financial instruments that got us into this mess in the first place. Without fundamental reforms, we’d be just throwing good money after bad.
Most importantly, of course, it is outrageous, if not immoral, to ask American taxpayers, whose homes, jobs and retirement plans have been destroyed by those thugs on Wall Street, to turn around and bail them out to the tune of $700 billion. They knew what they were doing. They created those funny-money schemes. They were paid handsomely for it. And then their house of cards collapsed. What responsibility do we have to reward their bad behavior? Zero! After all, that’s the way the “free market” is supposed to work.
No blank check for George W. Bush. At the very least, Congress should say no deal for Wall Street that does not include equal protection for Main Street. In return for bailing out the big-bank robber barons, taxpayers deserve, at a minimum: legislation to re-regulate and restore oversight of financial institutions; tough federal oversight on how bailout funds are spent; legal authority to renegotiate mortgages of at-risk homeowners down to a level that will enable them to keep their homes; limits on interest big banks can charge on credit cards; an equity share in any bank we bail out; and limits on salaries and severance packages for CEO’s of any firm we bail out. If CEO’s won’t accept those terms, too bad. Let them fail.
Finally, there’s no need to rush into any bailout deal. Nor is there any need to commit to the entire $700 billion up front. If this is, indeed, the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, maybe Congress should stay around another couple of weeks: not just to get it done, but to get it right.
9/18/08
IT’S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Take this to the bank, if you can still find one open for business: Two months from now, we will look back and assert that the week of Sept. 15 was the week John McCain lost the presidential election of 2008.
Why? Because that’s when Wall Street collapsed, causing real economic pain to tens of millions of Americans and exposing the failure of those conservative, unfettered free-market economic policies John McCain has championed his entire career.
This isn’t the first time McCain has been caught at a financial crime scene. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “This is like deja vu, all over again.” Remember his first appearance on national radar? When the dust cleared from the 1980s failure of 747 savings and loans, there stood so-called reformer John McCain, right in the middle of it all: one of five senators investigated for pressuring the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to drop its investigation of crooked Lincoln Savings and Loan owner Charles Keating.
As junior senator from Arizona, McCain had the closest ties to Keating. He received $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating and associates. He, his wife, kids and babysitter took nine vacations at Keating’s expense, several of them on Keating’s private jet. Cindy McCain and her father were major investors in a Keating shopping center. And McCain co-sponsored legislation relaxing regulations on savings and loans and allowing them to gamble investor funds on certain highly risky financial ventures. Sound familiar?
For his role in aiding Keating, McCain received only a reprimand for “poor judgment” from the Senate Ethics Committee. But ever since, the “Keating Five” has been the symbol of how much influence money can buy in Washington. And McCain, having learned nothing from the experience, then turned around and repeated the same tricks on Wall Street.
In 2000, McCain supported legislation authored by Sen. Phil Gramm that, in effect, freed Wall Street financial institutions from federal regulation and oversight, broke down the walls between banking, insurance and fund management, and forbade federal agencies from regulating financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors. And today we are suffering the consequences.
Gramm’s legislation was the key. Without it, AIG could never have veered from the solid ground of life insurance onto the shaky ground of subprime mortgages. Nor could Merrill Lynch have stuffed its portfolio with mutual funds based on bad debt. John McCain championed that legislation, and Gramm was McCain chief economic advisor until he showed his true colors by calling America “a nation of whiners.”
Suddenly, in response to this week’s disastrous economic news, and in one of the most daring flip-flops of American politics, John McCain is trying to reinvent himself as the champion of government regulation, promising to push for new regulations on financial institutions. But it’s too late for McCain to change his spots. As recently as March 2008, he told reporters, “I’m always for less regulation.” And starting with Lincoln Savings and Loan, he has a lifetime record of fighting for big business and against necessary government oversight and regulation — for which he was richly rewarded this year by over $1 million in campaign contributions from employees of Merrill Lynch.
The McCain campaign enjoyed a bounce with the surprising appointment of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. But any glee over her nomination soon disappeared once the Wall Street meltdown began. Goodbye lipstick, hello pocketbook. With the country facing its worst economic crisis since the Depression, lines of credit frozen, unemployment at 6.1 percent, government bailouts costing taxpayers over $850 billion so far, and millions of Americans having lost their jobs, homes or savings, the very presence of Palin on the ticket suddenly seems more and more frivolous.
But if Palin can’t be trusted to fix this economic mess, neither can McCain. After all, he once admitted: “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”
We remember Herbert Hoover for saying, on Oct. 26, 1929: “The fundamental business of the country . . . is on a sound and prosperous basis.” We’ll remember John McCain for saying, on Sept. 15, 2008: “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
That statement alone cost John McCain the White House, because it proved he doesn’t understand how bad people are hurting. Or, as Yogi Berra also said, he just doesn’t understand “a nickel isn’t worth a dime today.”
09/04/08
MCCAIN WANTS MOOSE HUNTER IN WHITE HOUSE
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Here in the Twin Cities, as in every city and town across America, there’s only one question on everyone’s mind: What could possibly qualify Sarah Palin as a candidate for vice president?
The answer was provided by former presidential candidate Fred Thompson. “I can say without fear of contradiction,” he told GOP delegates, most of whom had never heard of Palin a week ago, “that she is the only nominee in the history of either party who knows how to properly field dress a moose.”
Fine. So, on your next trip to Alaska, hire her as your hunting guide. But that’s no reason for us to hire her to stand one heartbeat away from becoming president of the United States. Especially when John McCain, were he to become president at the age of 72, would, according to actuarial life insurance tables, have only a one in three chance of living to celebrate his 80th birthday.
Like you, I’m sick and tired of robotic Republicans and clueless commentators trying to spin McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin in the most positive possible light. It’s a bold move, they say. It restores McCain’s maverick status. It shows what an independent thinker he is. It’s McCain’s way of winning all those disillusioned Hillary Clinton supporters. And, besides, Palin is the only candidate on either ticket with executive experience.
Nonsense. It’s time for some straight talk. You’d have to be brain-dead or on the RNC payroll to defend McCain’s pick of Palin. It’s not a bold move; it’s a stupid move. Indeed, it’s a dangerous move. And it saddles the already-on-life-support Republican Party with the most unqualified vice-presidential candidate since Dan Quayle.
Desperately trying to defend his boss’s disastrous choice, McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt put out a statement asserting that Palin has “a record of accomplishment that exceeds, by far, the governing accomplishments of Sen. Obama.” Does he really believe he can win this election by insulting our intelligence?
True, technically speaking, Barack Obama has no “executive experience.” He’s never been mayor of a town of 5,000. Nor has he been governor of a state with more reindeer than people. Yet for four years as a United States senator, Obama has studied, wrestled with, and voted on every national issue from Social Security to health care to education. He has helped chart foreign policy from Iraq to Georgia. And for the last 19 months, as candidate for president, he has been grilled and spoken out on every domestic and foreign issue there is.
How much knowledge or hands-on experience does Sarah Palin have of any of these issues? Zero! Unless, of course, you subscribe to the theory of geographical proximity. As articulated by that master international strategist Cindy McCain, since “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia,” Palin is uniquely qualified to punch out Vladimir Putin the next time he swallows up a neighboring province or two.
Equally laughable is the McCain camp’s attempt to paint Palin as a “reformer.” Her record shows just the opposite. As mayor of Wasilla, she raised sales taxes to build a sports complex. She hired a lobbyist to snare $27 million in earmarks from Washington. (Isn’t McCain campaigning against pork?) She chaired a fund-raising committee for indicted Sen. Ted Stevens. Her husband belonged to, and she was active in, a campaign for Alaska to secede from the United States. And she was for “The Bridge to Nowhere” until last week, when she suddenly came out against it.
Most insulting of all is the McCain campaign’s argument that Palin will appeal to Democratic women voters still disappointed over Barack Obama’s failure to offer Hillary Clinton the second spot on the ticket. If that’s what McCain really believes, he just doesn’t get it. Women supported Hillary Clinton because of her vast experience in both domestic and foreign policy, her leadership on women’s rights, and her positions on the issues. Anti-choice, anti-pay equity, pro-gun Sarah Palin is no substitute for Hillary Clinton. As an outraged U.S. Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz told me, women will not support another woman just because of “her plumbing.”
In the end, what’s most troubling about the choice of Sarah Palin is not what it says about her, but what it says about John McCain. In making what is widely considered his “first presidential decision,” McCain failed miserably. He didn’t do his homework, he acted impulsively, he ignored the facts, and he exercised amazingly poor judgment by rejecting several highly qualified candidates in favor of a person who has quickly become a national joke.
Ironically, the slogan of this Republican Convention, prominently displayed in the convention hall, is “Country First.” Obviously, John McCain didn’t get the message. By proposing such a hapless candidate for the nation’s second highest office, McCain shows that what he believes will help his political career comes first. His country comes last.
8/28/08
NEW DAY, NEW WORLD, NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
DENVER — We are all part of history, and we experience it every day without thinking about it until, every once in a while, history hits us between the eyes — as it has in Denver this week.
My dream, growing up, was someday to attend a party’s national convention. Little did I know what lay ahead. This year’s Democratic National Convention is actually the 16th of either party I’ve attended as a player or member of the media. None has been so charged with history.
Every day in Denver has demonstrated this remarkable turning point, both in the Democratic Party and in the country — starting Monday night, with the powerful passing of the torch from Sen. Ted Kennedy to a new generation of party leaders. Watching Caroline Kennedy introduce “Uncle Teddy” and Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. supplant his father, I knew the stage at a Democratic national convention would never look the same again.
And that was immediately obvious when Michele Obama walked onstage and began to introduce the party’s new first family. Nobody remarked on the significance of the moment. They didn’t have to. Everybody in the convention hall or sitting in front of their television set knew they were watching history being made.
American political history reigned again Tuesday night with Hillary Clinton’s dramatic address to the convention. With conviction, she dashed the hopes of the McCain campaign — and the media — that Democrats would leave Denver hopelessly divided. With passion, she listed all the reasons why she had run for president and reminded her supporters that they were the same reasons why they must join her now in supporting Barack Obama.
Clinton’s convention appearance transcended the political realities of the 2008 campaign. It also signaled the increasingly prominent role of women in American politics. Even if a woman didn’t make it this year, it won’t be long, thanks to her campaign, before a woman does become her party’s nominee and takes the oath of office as president. Indeed, earlier in the day, Clinton helped advance that goal by helping launch a new women’s political action committee, Womencount.org.
On Wednesday, the convention took another historical leap. John Kerry, who led the party four years ago, was given a spot at the podium, but not in prime time. Bill Clinton, who was charged, yet again, with burying past differences and uniting delegates behind Barack Obama, delivered the goods. But he didn’t get to do so in prime time, either. That night’s spotlight went to vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden, an energetic, yet elder party statesman himself, named by Obama to bridge the gap between the old and the new.
But the new is clearly in charge, as evidenced by Obama’s scheduling his acceptance speech at Invesco Field on Thursday evening — the first time that any presidential candidate decided to accept his party’s nomination anywhere other than in a closed convention hall since John F. Kennedy did in 1960. That decision alone telegraphs a new day and a new, more inclusive, political process. But, of course, the fact that Barack Obama is the nominee marks the week’s most significant milestone.
It wasn’t planned that way, but, had it been, it couldn’t have been planned any better. As was widely noted, Obama’s Invesco triumph occurred on Aug. 28, the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. And that was more than a happy historical coincidence. Seeing the first African-American accept the nomination of a major political party for president of the United States is a moment that all Americans should celebrate. King dreamed the dream. Obama is living it. And so, with his success, are all the rest of us.
Yes, history was made in Denver. The torch has been passed to a new generation of leadership. The Democratic Party will never be the same. And, with the emergence of new women and minority leaders, neither will American politics.
The march of history doesn’t stop here, of course. It now moves from Denver and St. Paul into the final two months of the campaign: an election in which the differences have never been more stark. American voters clearly face a historic choice on Nov. 4: a choice between Barack Obama, who will make history, and John McCain, who will continue the failed policies of the past.
08/22/08
IT’S HARD WORK, CLEANING ALL THOSE HOUSES
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
No politician can claim to be your average American, but some do a better job of faking it than others. And when they’re exposed as being out of touch with average Americans, the results can be fatal.
Remember George H. W. Bush, visiting a supermarket and expressing his amazement at those new-fangled checkout scanners, which most Americans — who go to the market more than once every 10 years — were long accustomed to? Remember John Kerry, windsurfing off Nantucket in his shiny, fancy body suit, not exactly projecting the image of the man next door? Or John Edwards’s $400 haircut? In each case, the candidate was forever branded as unable to relate to the middle class.
But give Bush, Kerry and Edwards credit for this: As rich as they are, at least they knew how many houses they owned.
McCain’s had a field day recently, trying to paint Barack Obama as an elitist. In paid TV commercials, McCain compared Obama to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who live in their own zone of fame and can’t relate to ordinary Americans. Unfairly or not, those ads were taking their toll on Obama, until McCain’s gambit blew up in his face — and he proved himself to be the most out touch politician of all.
Clearly, Politico’s Mike Allen was not trying to entrap McCain when he asked him a very straightforward question. Earlier in the week, on the Web, the AFL-CIO had circulated a video claiming that McCain and his wife owned 10 homes. Wanting to set the record straight, Allen asked the obvious: “Senator, how many homes do you and your wife own?”
OK, stop right there. I admit, Carol and I own two homes: one in Washington and one in California. In fact, I don’t know anybody, no matter how rich, who could not answer that question. Even Teddy Kennedy knows how many houses he owns. But John McCain, looking more than ever like a confused old man, could only blurt out: “I think — I’ll have my staff get to you. It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”
Quickly attempting to defuse the situation, McCain’s staff soon reported that he owned four homes. They were off by half. As The Washington Post documented, the McCains actually own eight homes: a condo in Arlington, Va.; three condos in Phoenix, Ariz.; two oceanside condos in Coronado, Calif.; one condo up the road in La Jolla, Calif.; and a ranch in Sedona, Ariz. (which actually has five houses on it). Altogether, these eight properties are worth over $13 million.
By any stretch, that’s a lot of real estate. How could McCain own so much but know so little about it? There are four possible explanations: Either he really didn’t know . . . or he couldn’t remember . . . or he knew, but didn’t want to embarrass himself . . . or he couldn’t count that high.
However his campaign tries to explain it, the housing gaffe is bad news for McCain. Most Americans didn’t know he is one of the wealthiest and most pampered members of the Senate. They do now. And, as Obama was quick to point out, hard-working Americans can’t trust McCain to understand their economic woes when, on top of thinking you have to make $5 million to be considered rich, he can’t even remember how many houses he owns.
Knowing their candidate had shot himself in the foot, the McCain campaign lamely attempted to tie Obama’s one house to indicted political fixer Mark Rezko. But that, too, backfired. Aside from the fact that Rezko had nothing to do with the purchase of Obama’s residence (Rezko purchased an adjoining piece of property), the mention of Rezko only served to remind voters of McCain’s previous close association with crooked Savings and Loan chief Charles Keating.
Most seriously for McCain, his senior moment also destroyed his chances of painting Barack Obama as an elitist. The truth is now out there for all to see. Barack and Michele Obama own one house, not eight. Their net worth does not exceed $100 million. Michele Obama does not own even one corporate jet. And Barack Obama does not wear $520, hand-made Ferragamo loafers. There’s only one elitist in this race, and it’s not Barack Obama. It’s the plutocrat John McCain.
HILLARY’S THE ONE!
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Nearing the end of a week’s vacation, Barack Obama now faces the toughest decision of his life. He has to come back from Hawaii ready to announce his running mate. And for me it’s a no-brainer.
Forget Tim Kaine. He’s an impressive young governor of a key swing state, but he has even less foreign policy or national security experience than Obama. Forget Evan Bayh. Again, a popular former governor, now senator, of a key Rust Belt state, but a big, early supporter of the war in Iraq and not exactly a firecracker on the stump. By the same measure, and for similar reasons, forget Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd.
They are all good people. Each of them would make an outstanding member of Obama’s Cabinet. But there’s only one person with the firepower needed in a vice-presidential candidate. If Barack Obama really wants to blow John McCain out of the water, the best candidate by far is . . . Sen. Hillary Clinton.
It’s all about winning in November. So think about the math. She got 18 million votes in the primaries; he got 18 million votes. She won the women and working-class vote; he won the African-American and white-collar vote. Put the two of them together and you have an unbeatable ticket: experience and promise, inspiration and perspiration, change squared. It’s the one sure way to unite and excite the party.
Nobody else would bring what Hillary Clinton does to the ticket. So why is there so much opposition, even among Democrats, to her nomination? There are three reasons I hear, from my radio listeners and others: Hillary was mean to Obama during the primaries; Hillary still hasn’t fully embraced Obama; and Hillary brings too much negative baggage, especially husband Bill. Come on, let’s get real.
Sure, Hillary said some tough things during the primary. She insisted she’d be a stronger candidate against John McCain, for example, and she once famously stated that, while she and McCain offered extensive foreign policy experience, all Obama could offer was one speech. But that’s what primaries are all about. She was running to win, she gave it her best shot, she made her best arguments — and she lost.
It’s extremely short-sighted of Obama supporters to reject Clinton as a potential running mate, simply because of something she might have said during the primary. Don’t they realize? She lost. Their man won. It’s foolish to cling to the differences of the past. The focus now must be on how to win in November and who would help Obama the most.
Nor, in all objectivity, could anyone seriously question Clinton’s support for Obama today. She endorsed him, graciously and enthusiastically, on the stage in Unity, N.H. She has asked her followers to support him and write checks. She campaigned for him twice this month. She’ll make the case for Obama on the second night of the Democratic convention, and has agreed to campaign for him and with him this fall, whether she’s on the ticket or not. There’s no doubt she’s on Obama’s team.
But what about all that negative baggage? What negative baggage? Those who make that argument are the same voices who said Hillary Clinton could never be elected, or re-elected, senator from New York. And it’s nonsense, as well as sexist, to suggest that her effectiveness as vice president would be compromised by husband Bill, looking over her shoulder, and telling her what to do. Hillary’s much too strong a woman for that. And I’ve asked several of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate how often, in the least eight years, they’ve seen Bill Clinton stick his nose into Senate matters. Answer: Never.
Isn’t it obvious? Among Obama supporters, there’s more than a touch of sour grapes in all three of those arguments against Hillary. Even worse, they’re all focused on yesterday, not tomorrow. To allow past differences or personal pique to dictate the strategy of the general election campaign would be a colossal mistake.
Again, the only questions now are: How is Obama going to win in November? And who will best help Obama win? Looking at it coldly in terms of winning — based on her experience in the White House and Senate, her popularity, her skills as a campaigner, her proven vote-getting ability — Hillary Clinton’s the one.
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8/7/08
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS?
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
As the co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” I was in New Hampshire in 2000. I covered John McCain’s insurgent campaign against frontrunner George W. Bush. I rode the “Straight Talk Express.” I interviewed the candidate. I attended several McCain town halls.
Take it from me, the John McCain we see today is not the same John McCain we saw in 2000. Indeed, he’s not even the same John McCain we saw during this year’s Republican primary.
The old John McCain talked about the issues. He refused to sink to personal attacks, even when he himself was smeared by Bush. He denounced negative campaigning. In 2004, he condemned the Swift Boat ads against Democrat John Kerry. Many times during this year’s primary, he promised to run a positive campaign, based solely on differences in public policy.
Then McCain clinched the Republican nomination, and his Straight Talk Express ran into a ditch. Or was it the gutter? It appears that McCain did, indeed, learn something from the vicious personal attacks launched against him by George Bush in South Carolina back in 2000. He learned that dirty politics works. And he’s adopted the same ugly tactics.
The so-called “reform” candidate doesn’t talk about issues anymore. He offers no ideas on what to do about health care, Social Security, jobs, education, the economy or energy (other than to drill, drill, drill). His campaign has degenerated, instead, into a steady drumbeat of personal attacks against Barack Obama. Unable to build John McCain up, in other words, they have decided the only way to win is to tear Barack Obama down.
Phase One: Question Obama’s patriotism. “I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war,” McCain told those attending a July 22 New Hampshire town meeting. “It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” A serious charge, especially coming from one who promised never to question his opponent’s love of country.
Phase Two: Mock Obama’s celebrity. Three subsequent McCain ads portrayed Obama’s face on Mt. Rushmore and the $100 dollar bill, compared him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, and painted him as the political equivalent of the Second Coming, or “The One.” Don’t vote for Obama, McCain seemed to be saying, because he’s too famous. Again, a strange argument for a candidate who promised a substantive debate on the issues.
Phase Three: Tell outright lies. In one ad, McCain accuses Obama of not visiting wounded troops in Germany because he couldn’t take network cameras along: a charge The Washington Post proved was false. In another, he claims his opponent wants to “raise taxes on electricity,” when Obama has no said no such thing. At least McCain has not accused Obama of fathering an illegitimate black child. Not yet.
Phase Four: Play the race card. It was outrageous for Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, to accused Barack Obama of “playing the race card” when, in fact, it was the McCain campaign, in June, that first showed Obama’s face on the $100 bill. And it was the McCain campaign, in a diabolical replay of the famous anti-Harold Ford commercial, that deliberately paired Obama with two white, blonde, bimbo celebrities. The message they were sending was clear: Black man plus white girls equals trouble. Who’s playing the race card?
Granted, this may not be the dirtiest campaign in American political history. In 1800, John Adams was vilified as a “gross hypocrite,” a “repulsive pedant,” “one of the most egregious fools upon the continent,” and a man of “hideous hermaphroditical character.” And Thomas Jefferson was accused, if elected, of wanting to round up and burn all Bibles. In 1828, Andrew Jackson’s opponents attacked his wife Rachel with signs reading: “Don’t Put A Whore in The White House.”
But John McCain’s gutter attacks against Barack Obama are not what the American people are looking for in this presidential campaign, with so many serious problems facing the country. And they are certainly not what we expected from a man who has spent his entire public career painting himself as a different kind of politician. Sadly, negative campaigning is now one more way in which John McCain shows himself to be nothing more than an extension of George W. Bush.
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7/31/08
MCCAIN WINS GOLD FOR FLIP-FLOPS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
The 2008 Summer Olympics haven’t even begun, but the first gold medal has already been awarded to John McCain: for trouncing all contenders in the International Flip-Flopping competition.
Indeed, even though he’s almost 72 years old, McCain is still remarkably agile. He’s performed more flip-flops than any other presidential candidate in history. This week alone, McCain flipped on three issues: taxes, affirmative action and offshore drilling.
As recently as July 7, McCain told a town hall meeting in Denver: “Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t.” And on March 16, he had promised radio talk show host Sean Hannity he would never raise taxes. “Do you mean none?” Hannity asked. “None,” McCain replied. Yet on July 27, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” McCain indicated he was open to raising Social Security taxes. “I don’t want tax increases,” he told George Stephanopoulos. “But that doesn’t mean that anything is off the table.” Conservatives howled. So two days later, McCain reverted to claiming he would never raise taxes. Flip, flop, flip.
Ten years ago, McCain opposed a resolution in the Arizona legislature that would have asked voters to eliminate affirmative action programs in the state based on race, gender or ethnic origin. At the time, he called such ballot initiatives “divisive.” But this year, McCain has endorsed an identical measure, now on the ballot, to ban affirmative action. Flip, flop.
It’s the same with offshore drilling: McCain was against it before he was for it. He has always opposed drilling for oil in ANWAR. In late May, he repeated his opposition to drilling for oil anywhere off the coast, telling a Greensdale, Wis., audience: “With those resources, which would take years to develop, you would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels. We are going to have to go to alternative energy.” Yet today, McCain has made offshore drilling the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Flip, flop.
That’s three big flip-flops in one week! But they’re not the only ones. They come on top of earlier flip-flops on major issues. For example, McCain was once the leading opponent of the Bush tax cuts. “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief,” he said in February 2006. That was then, this is now. Today he’s the biggest champion of extending the Bush tax cuts.
Running for president in 2000, McCain disparaged the influence of religious conservatives on the Republican Party, labeling Rev. Jerry Falwell and others “agents of intolerance.” Today, he has crawled into bed with them. In 1983, as a freshman congressman, he voted against creating a federal Martin Luther King holiday and opposed an Arizona state holiday honoring King in 1987. In hindsight, McCain now says he was mistaken. Give him credit for finally seeing the light, but it’s still a flip-flop.
Believe it or not, McCain has even waffled on torture. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, Senator McCain, a torture victim himself, authored legislation to make all forms of torture against prisoners of war illegal, including waterboarding. Yet this year candidate McCain opposed Sen. Diane Feinstein’s legislation to make waterboarding illegal, and then voted to uphold President Bush’s veto of the bill.
In his biggest flip-flop of all, John McCain has abandoned his pledge to run a positive, issues-based campaign. Instead, he’s waging a totally negative campaign, aimed at tearing down Barack Obama. Calling him unpatriotic and accusing him of not caring for the troops are the kind of campaign tactics McCain once denounced, but now practices daily.
Of course, some may criticize McCain for his inconsistency, but they don’t understand. McCain is just trying to make it easier for voters. The way things stand with McCain today, there’s no need to despair if you disagree with McCain on any issue. Simply be patient. Within a couple of days, McCain will probably change his mind. He’s already flipped more than a hotcake at IHOP.
It’s hard to believe they once called John Kerry the great flip-flopper, based on one lousy comment about voting against funding for war in Iraq. John McCain has flip-flopped so many times, on so many issues, he makes John Kerry look like the Rock of Gibraltar.
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7/24/08
MCCAIN MASTERS COMMAND OF BUSH-SPEAK
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Ever since it became clear that John McCain would be this year’s Republican nominee, reporters wrestled with a serious decision. In covering the campaign, should they or should they not reference his age?
In the end, McCain let them off the hook. They didn’t have to decide, after all. Through an unending series of gaffes, McCain did it for them.
As first reported on Politico.com by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, in the past few weeks John McCain has stumbled verbally from one embarrassing misstatement to the other. Most recently, for example, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that the situation in Afghanistan was still very serious. “I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle,” McCain acknowledged, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border.”
Oops! There’s only one problem. There is no Iraq/Pakistan border. Fifteen hundred miles separate Islamabad and Baghdad, the capitols of the two countries. Not only that, one important piece of real estate lies between Iraq and Pakistan. It’s called Iran.
But that’s just the latest McCain malapropism. On his last visit to Iraq, he famously confused Shiites and Sunnis, until corrected by sidekick Joe Lieberman. On Fox News, Brit Hume didn’t exactly help McCain by excusing this slip of the tongue as a “senior moment.” McCain also bragged about getting the number of American troops down to “pre-surge levels,” when in fact there are 20,000 more troops in Iraq than when the surge began.
And still, that’s just the beginning of McCain’s verbal pratfalls. On June 30, while discussing Darfur, he asked: “How can we bring pressure on the government of Somalia?” Darfur is actually in Sudan. Three times recently, he talked about the importance of U.S. relations with Czechoslovakia, which was broken up into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, way back in January 1993. And he stunned reporters by telling them what a great conversation he’d enjoyed with President Vladimir Putin of Germany!
McCain can’t even get his football teams straight. Earlier this month, speaking of his time spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he talked of trying to confuse his captors by giving them the names of the starting lineup of the Pittsburgh Steelers when asked to identify his squadron mates. This is a story McCain has told many times over his years as a candidate. But, before, he always correctly identified the names of players he gave his captors as players for the Green Bay Packers.
The McCain campaign insists these gaffes are no big deal, simply the inevitable result of McCain’s making himself available to reporters from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day. But when you add them all up, they are a big deal – especially for a candidate who will be 72 years old next month. The more McCain talks in this campaign, the more he reminds us of that senile uncle who falls asleep in his mashed potatoes at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Or the more he reminds us of candidate George W. Bush. In 2000, it was Bush who promised to maintain “good relations with the Grecians.” While admitting he couldn’t find Kosovo on the map, he said he nevertheless looked forward to the day when “Kosovians can move back” into their homes. And foreshadowing later confusion by John McCain, he confessed to a Slovak journalist: “The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned firsthand from your foreign minister who came to Texas.” Bush obviously didn’t learn much. His meeting had actually been with the foreign minister of Slovenia.
Who could have predicted this turn of events? When Barack Obama accuses John McCain of promising nothing more than a third term of George W. Bush, we thought he was talking about continuing Bush’s failed policies. Little did we realize he was also talking about McCain’s continuing Bush’s tortured abuse of the English language.
McCain-speak is even less forgivable than Bush-speak. Everyone knew Bush was a total virgin on foreign policy. But McCain’s primary qualification is supposed to be his experience.
One thing for sure: Reporters won’t have to worry anymore about whether or not to make John McCain’s age an issue in this campaign. He’s doing a fine job of it all by himself.
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RENEW THE NEW YORKER — FOR LIFE!
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Barack Obama’s campaign denounced it as “tasteless and offensive” and an insult to all Muslims. John McCain called it “totally inappropriate.” They both take themselves too seriously.
Pardon my political incorrectness, but when I saw the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine, I laughed out loud — as Obama should have, too. First, it was LOL funny. The image of Barack and Michelle Obama invading the Oval Office in Muslim garb, while giving each other what Fox News dubbed the “terrorist fist jab,” highlights the absurdity of the fear campaign which Republicans are trying to stir up against Obama. Indeed, cartoonist Barry Blitt named his artwork “The Politics of Fear.”
Not only that, the cover makes a great point, which is to dig up all those rumors about Obama circulating on the Internet, expose them to the light of day and show just how ridiculous they are. Obama’s tried to knock them down with his own Web site, fightthesmears.com, but satire and humor are much more effective tools for fighting bias than outrage. What better way to illustrate the ignorance of those who spread rumors about “Obama the closet Muslim” than by dressing him up in Muslim garb in the Oval Office, with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall and the American flag burning in the fireplace?
Bravo for the editors of The New Yorker! In the all-American tradition of political humor dating back to Colonial times, they poked fun at and destroyed the credibility of those who are desperately trying to make Obama the scary man he is not. They deserve a Pulitzer. Instead, all they got was manufactured outrage from every side.
Obama supporters cried foul. How dare they make fun of our sacred candidate? TV commentators howled over what they condemned as one more example of religious and racist bias. Editorial writers lamented the lowering of standards for political discourse.
Give me a freaking break. This presidential campaign has been taken over by the political niceness police. You can’t say anything clever about anybody anymore. Obama’s criticized for calling Phil Gramm “Dr. Phil.” McCain’s slammed for calling Obama “Dr. No.” The New Yorker’s condemned for running a political cartoon on its cover. We’ve suddenly become a nation of insufferable political snobs.
Come on, people, lighten up. All politicians, including Barack Obama, are fair targets for late-night comics and editorial cartoonists. And The New Yorker, especially, has a history of skewering politicians on the left and right. As Bill Maher wonders: “If you can’t do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?” Stephen Colbert had perhaps the best take on the whole cover flap: “It’s a completely valid satirical point to make — and it’s perfectly valid for Obama not to like it.”
What’s even more offensive is the argument that, while regular New Yorker readers will get it, the joke will be lost on most average Americans. Or, as one of my radio listeners put it, “I can just imagine my redneck brother-in-law picking up that magazine and saying: ‘See, even you damned Yankees get why we’re so worried about Barack Obama.’”
Talk about elitism! That argument, usually made by people who live in New York or Washington, assumes that most people living in the heartland are boobs, which is simply not true. There is wisdom to be found west of the Hudson and Potomac. It also assumes that rural Americans will vote against Barack Obama simply because he is black, which isn’t true, either. In fact, polls show Obama leading McCain or close to him in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, where blacks make up less than 2 percent of the population.
Nervous nellies need to relax. It doesn’t matter what part of the country we’re talking about. Everyone gets it. There’s nobody anywhere dumb enough to take The New Yorker cover seriously.
Most commentators have it backwards. Instead of condemning or complaining about its controversial magazine cover, people should go out, buy this week’s New Yorker and enjoy a good laugh. God knows we won’t have many more of them between now and November.
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Note: In last week’s column, I may have given the wrong impression that founders of the Web site LiebermanMustGo.com are seeking the immediate expulsion of Joe Lieberman from the Senate Democratic caucus. Not so. They are responsibly seeking his ouster, but not until after the November elections.
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7/10/08
WHAT TO DO ABOUT LIEBERMAN?
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
How do you recognize John McCain in a crowd? He’s the guy walking alongside Joe Lieberman.
Why doesn’t John McCain have a cell phone? He doesn’t need one. Joe Lieberman’s always by his side.
Did you ever see such an odd couple? They’re joined at the hip. In Iraq, whispering the difference between Shiites and Sunnis into John McCain’s left ear, it’s Joe Lieberman. In Colombia, joining John McCain in praising another trade deal to steal American jobs, it’s Joe Lieberman. In Mexico’s sacred Lady of Guadalupe shrine, being blessed alongside John McCain by the Roman Catholic bishop, it’s Joe Lieberman. They’re so inseparable, you’ve got to wonder: How did John McCain survive six years at the Hanoi Hilton without him? And what does Cindy think?
As for all that gossip about a shakeup in the McCain campaign, fuhgetaboutit! No new campaign manager would ever have the clout Joe Lieberman currently enjoys. The first senator to endorse McCain, he not only travels with him everywhere, he’s McCain’s number one cheerleader; he pumps him up and runs Obama down on the Sunday talk shows. Lieberman has been invited to address the Republican National Convention and he’s even on McCain’s short list for vice-presidential nominee.
And to think, this same man was the Democratic candidate for vice-president just eight years ago. Oy vey!
Of course, there’s something to be said for bipartisanship. Americans are tired of the partisan bickering in Washington. They like to see politicians reach across the aisle and work at solving problems with members of the other party. And Lieberman was always that kind of Democrat. But there’s a difference between bipartisanship and selling out.
Now, the Democratic Party has seen traitors before. Who could ever forget crazy Zell Miller? He addressed the Republican Convention in 2004. But even Miller showed some restraint. He didn’t campaign fulltime for George W. Bush. Joe Lieberman is Zell Miller on steroids.
What should Democrats do about Joe Lieberman? The party’s net roots are demanding that he be unceremoniously tossed overboard. They’ve organized a new Web site — LiebermanMustGo.com — and they’ve delivered over 43,000 signatures so far to the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, asking them to strip Lieberman of his rank in the Democratic caucus and dump him as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
It is, indeed, strange that Democrats continue to reward Lieberman with a committee chairmanship while he’s daily stabbing them in the back. But no matter how satisfying it would be to throw Lieberman from the train, there are two problems with doing so. One, he’s no longer a Democrat. He switched to Independent after losing the Connecticut Democratic primary to Ned Lamont and, unfortunately, then won re-election.
The second problem is: Without Lieberman’s vote, Democrats would lose control of the Senate. Republicans and Democrats are tied today with 49 votes each. Harry Reid is Majority Leader only because both Independents, Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, caucus with the Democrats. Removing Lieberman from the equation would end Democratic control and, in effect, hand Republicans the keys to the kingdom.
So what to do about Lieberman? No matter how obnoxious he is, for Democrats today there is little choice but to grin and bear him. In the short term, that is. Once, as expected, Democrats pick up more seats in November, they can quickly show Lieberman the door — and should.
Unless Lieberman makes the first move. He has, after all, never ruled out joining the Republican Party. He’s already a Republican today, in everything but name. Why not make it official?
By becoming a Republican, Lieberman would solve everybody’s problems. Doing so would get him out of the Democrats’ hair. It would make his life more honest. And he’d be in a perfect position to become John McCain’s running mate, and thereby become the first politician in history to lose the vice-presidency twice.
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7/3/08
THE RELEVANCE OF BEING SHOT DOWN
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It's only July, but already we know the rules of this year's presidential campaign. Actually, they're the same rules that apply every election: You can say anything you want about the Democratic candidate, but you have to treat the Republican candidate with kid gloves.
In 2000, for example, you could accuse Al Gore of taking bribes from
Here we go again. In 2008, it's OK to suggest, as conservative bloggers do daily, that Barack Obama is a gay, American-hating, chain-smoking Muslim. But not OK to suggest that just because John McCain was shot down and spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton does not, in itself, qualify him to be president. Unfortunately, Gen. Wesley Clark learned that lesson the hard way.
Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation,"
Host Bob Schieffer persisted. Didn't his being shot down give McCain an advantage over Obama? Whereupon Gen. Clark gave his now-famous answer: "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."
Ironically,
But for his comment,
Again, what counts is judgment. How much judgment did John McCain show when he suggested it would be OK for American forces to remain in
The way Gen. Clark was treated was unfair. But what's more unfair is the double standard applied to Democratic and Republican candidates. Why is John McCain's military service out of bounds in 2008, when it was considered perfectly fair to challenge John Kerry's war credentials in 2004, or Max Cleland's in 2002?
And notice this big difference. In 2004, the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" didn't stop at Kerry's readiness to be president. They called him a phony. They questioned the very authenticity of Kerry's service in
But this is not the only double standard we've seen regarding the Swift Boat veterans. To his credit, John McCain condemned their tactics in 2004. To his total discredit, he has embraced them in 2008. McCain has named Bud Day, one of the most vitriolic Swift Boaters against John Kerry, to his campaign "Truth Squad." And, according to USA Today, so far McCain has accepted almost $70,000 in campaign contributions from Swift Boat associates. Whatever moral outrage he felt toward them four years ago disappeared once he needed them as his own attack dogs.
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6/26/08
YOU CAN’T LEGISLATE BY THE BIBLE
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
A couple of years ago, in a book called “How The Republicans Stole Religion,” I urged Democrats to steal religion back. Today, Barack Obama is doing just that, by daring to stand up to the religious right and prove them wrong.
Hallelujah!
James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, recently blasted Obama for his now famous “Call to Renewal” speech of 2006, in which he pointed out that there’s an inherent difficulty in attempts by evangelicals to establish the Bible as the road map for public policy. “Would we go with James Dobson’s interpretation (of the Bible),” Obama asked his audience, “or Al Sharpton’s?”
For Dobson, even raising that question is pure heresy. “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Dobson told his national radio audience. He even accused Obama of having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”
But unlike previous Democratic candidates, Obama didn’t back down. He questioned what Dobson meant by the “traditional understanding” of the Bible. “Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asked. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?”
Again, Obama tackled head-on what Dobson, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell have been saying for years: that we are a Christian nation; that public policy must be based on the Bible; and that every word of the Bible must be taken literally. In our pluralistic society, it’s not that simple. Because not all Americans are Christians, or even believers, you can’t find common ground for legislation based on the Bible. And even in the Bible, you can’t give equal weight to Old Testament prohibitions against homosexuality and New Testament admonition to “go sell your possessions, and give to the poor.”
What’s most surprising is that Barack Obama’s not alone. In his criticism of Dobson and the old-fashioned religious right, he’s joined by some prominent evangelists. No spiritual advisor, for example, is closer to President Bush than Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, pastor of Houston’s Windsor Village United Methodist Church. Caldwell introduced Bush to the 2000 Republican convention, offered the official benediction at both his 2001 and 2005 inaugurations, and recently presided over first daughter Jenna’s wedding to Henry Hager.
But today, Caldwell has not only endorsed Barack Obama for president, he has launched a Web site — jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com — which says that, when it comes to the role of faith and politics, Obama is right and Dobson is wrong.
James Dobson doesn’t speak for me “when he uses religion as a wedge to divide,” writes Rev. Caldwell on his site. “He doesn’t speak for me when he speaks as the final arbiter on the meaning of the Bible. He doesn’t speak for me when he denigrates his neighbor’s views when they don’t line up with his.”
Ouch! Dobson’s pious balloon has just been popped by Bush’s own spiritual adviser. It shows how off-base Dobson is with his attacks on Obama’s faith. But it also shows how ineffective Christian conservatives will be in this presidential campaign. In years past, they lined up lock-step behind the Republican. This year, not only can they not agree on a Republican candidate, they can’t even agree on attacking the Democratic candidate.
And that will have a significant impact in this election. It means John McCain will not be able to count on a unified block of religious right voters, 88 percent of whom voted for George Bush in 2004, giving him 26 percent of his total vote. Barack Obama, a Christian himself, very comfortable with his faith, will capture a healthy chunk of that vote. The love affair between Christian conservatives and Republicans may not be over, but it’s definitely on the rocks.
Beyond the election, it also means that Americans are beginning, once again, to put faith and politics in the proper perspective. Even though most Americans are Christians, we are not a Christian nation: never have been, never will be. Therefore, in making the laws that govern our nation, we don’t turn to the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Koran. We turn to the only sacred text that all Americans worship: the U.S. Constitution.
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6/19/08
MCCAIN SELLS OUT TO BIG OIL
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Elections are about the future, whether for the city council or the White House. In this election for president, one candidate represents the future while the other candidate remains stuck in the past — and there’s no doubt which is which.
Just look at the difference between Barack Obama and John McCain on energy. Obama proposes a windfall profits tax on big oil companies in order to help develop wind and solar energy, research new alternative energy technologies, and wean ourselves from fossil fuels. McCain proposes drilling for oil off the coast, one of the oldest and worst ideas in the Big Oil pipeline.
Environmentalists fought the battle over offshore drilling decades ago, and won. New oil rigs in state coastal waters have been banned in California since the days of former Gov., now Attorney General, Jerry Brown. There’s a congressional ban on drilling off both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts, in place since 1981, plus an executive ban on both coasts, originally signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990. And there’s a good reason why.
Offshore drilling will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs: destroy our most beautiful stretches of coastline, wreck our valuable tourism and fishing industries. And it will continue our dependency on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, it won’t do anything to ease today’s energy crisis. Even if the moratorium were lifted tomorrow, it would take at least 10 years to develop the offshore rigs and onshore tanks, pipelines and roadways necessary to begin production. By that time, with a new energy policy, we could be well on our way to a new, alternative-energy future.
Offshore drilling won’t bring any relief for consumers, either. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates there are 18 billion barrels of oil in the moratorium areas. At present rates of consumption, those fields would be exhausted in less than two and a half years. Our coastline and beaches, of course, would have been lost forever. And don’t expect lower prices at the pump. According to the Campaign for America’s Future Online, lowering the price of crude by $1 per barrel saves roughly 2.5 cents per gallon. Which means that getting rid of the ban on coastal drilling would lower the price at the pump by less than 6 cents — by 2025.
After oil executives, nobody was happier with John McCain’s proposal than oilman George W. Bush, who’s wanted to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling ever since he got to the White House, but didn’t dare. But whether McCain or Bush takes the lead, proposing offshore drilling as a solution to our energy problems is nothing but a cynical attempt to exploit public anger over $4-per-gallon gasoline in order to overturn economic and environmental protections in place for the last 27 years.
Even John McCain knows that, or used to. His U-turn on offshore drilling is one of the most spectacular flip-flops in presidential campaign history. When he first ran for president, in 2000, McCain opposed drilling off the coast and attacked the “special interests in Washington” that were pushing it. As recently as three weeks ago, he told a questioner at a Greendale, Wis., town hall meeting: “With those resources, which would take years to develop, you would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels.”
Amazing! In less than a month, McCain has had the political equivalent of a religious conversion. And he’s not the only one. Charlie Crist ran for governor of Florida on a pledge to protect the Sunshine State’s beaches from offshore drilling. Yet no sooner did McCain flip than Crist flopped. Isn’t it amazing what an inordinate ambition to become vice president can do to a shallow politician?
Florida’s Sen. Mel Martinez did a parallel back flip on offshore drilling. In fact, among Republican politicians, only California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has resisted the urge to throw principle out the window and jump on the Bush-McCain offshore drilling bandwagon.
Echoing Barack Obama, Schwarzenegger told reporters: “We are in this situation because of our dependence on traditional petroleum-based oil. The direction our nation needs to go in, and where California is already headed, is toward greater innovation in new technologies and new fuel choices for consumers. That is the way we will ultimately reduce fuel costs and also protect our environment.”
How refreshing: a Republican with both backbone and brains.
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6/12/08
ARE REPUBLICANS HAVING BUYERS REMORSE?
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
You almost have to feel sorry for Republicans. As presidential nominee of their party, they could have chosen Rudy Giuliani, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee.
Instead, they got stuck with John McCain. And McCain’s already starting to show signs of losing it. Especially on Iraq.
His first slipup, made while visiting Iraq, was accusing Shiite Iranian forces of training Sunni al-Qaida terrorists. Only after Joe Lieberman, standing by his side, whispered in his ear did McCain correct himself. Still, after eight visits to Iraq, you’d think he’d know Shiite from Sunni.
Then McCain volunteered that it would be OK with him if American troops remained in Iraq for 100 years. He wasn’t talking about combat troops, he hastened to add, but simply forces stationed long-term in Iraq, much like American troops now serving in Germany or South Korea. But surely the former chairman, and now ranking member, of the Senate Armed Services Committee should recognize the folly of attempting the permanent occupation of a foreign land. Didn’t we learn anything from the mistakes of the Russians in Afghanistan or the French in Indo-China?
Sowing further confusion, McCain next suggested we might be able to start bringing some troops home, but not until 2013 — as if we could afford, or endure, five more years in Iraq. He also goofed in claiming that George Bush’s surge had allowed us to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to pre-surge levels when, in fact, the exact opposite is true.
And now McCain has stepped in it again, asserting that it really doesn’t matter whether we disengage from Iraq or not. Appearing on NBC’s “Today,” he was asked about consequences of the surge by Matt Lauer: “If it’s now working, Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?”
Get this. “No,” replied McCain, “but that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine.”
Oh, yeah? Does he really believe that the question of when American forces start coming home from Iraq is “not too important”? Try telling that to the families of 140,000 Americans still serving in Iraq, many of them on their second or third tour of duty. At worst, McCain’s response suggests a callous disregard for the dangers still facing American troops every day. At best, it reflects a man who, in the words of Sen. John Kerry, is “unbelievably out of touch” with reality in the Middle East — if not with life in general.
McCain’s conflicting statements on America’s continuing presence in Iraq are especially troublesome because the U.N. mandate allowing the presence of American troops in Iraq expires at the end of the year. Because of that deadline, the United States and Iraq are now in the middle of negotiating a new Status of Forces Agreement, under which the Iraqi government has authority to decide when American forces must leave the country. How can the Iraqis trust any deal offered by the Bush administration when the would-be next president says we’ll stay in Iraq as long as we damn well please?
For John McCain, it’s been one misstep after another on Iraq. And, remember, after George W. Bush, he’s the war’s biggest defender. McCain has made Iraq his number one issue. It’s too late for him to change his focus now to the economy. After all, in December 2007, McCain admitted to reporters: “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”
Given McCain’s increasingly embarrassing public statements on the war, it’s small wonder that so many Republican members of Congress have distanced themselves from him. In a survey conducted by The Hill newspaper, 14 GOP senators and congressmen refused to endorse John McCain. Another 17 simply declined to comment.
Yes, you almost have to feel sorry for Republicans. It’s still two months before the convention, but already they’re starting to experience buyers’ remorse. They’ve got to wonder whether John McCain is really up for the job. Ron Paul, anyone?
6/5/08
A PROUD DAY FOR AMERICA
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
“Tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another. Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the president of the United States.”
Listening to Barack Obama say those words on the night of the last primary contests, I’ve never been so proud to be a Democrat. And I’ve never been so proud to be an American.
We made history, friends: by nominating the first African-American to carry a major party’s presidential banner, and by awarding a close second place to the first serious female candidate for president. In one exciting primary campaign, we shattered both the glass ceiling and the “black ceiling.”
What a great tribute to this county. And what a great tribute to the Democratic Party, which has proved itself — in deeds, not just in words — the party of minority rights and women’s rights, and the party of equal opportunity.
The nomination of Barack Obama, especially, is an event that should make every American — not just every Democrat, but every American — proud. Consider: Just 150 years ago, Obama and his family would have been in chains. Until 40 years ago, Obama would not have been able to attend the same school, drink from the same water fountain, worship in the same church, or shop in the same store as whites. Yet today he’s the standard bearer of the Democratic Party and could very well be the next president of the United States.
Obama’s success, of course, is due primarily to his exceptional skills as a candidate. He motivated millions of Americans who had given up on politics and inspired millions of young people to discover politics. He electrified an entire nation with his promise of change.
Yes, there were charges of racism and sexism during the primary. And, to a certain extent, they were well-founded. Sadly, some Democrats refused to vote for Obama, simply because he’s black. And some Democrats, and the media, ganged up on Hillary because she’s a woman. But that’s not why he won or she lost. Obama won because he ran a much tighter campaign.
Starting from nowhere, the Obama team crafted a winning message, developed a campaign strategy aimed at both large states and small, at both caucuses and primaries. They also set new records for raising small, repeat contributions over the Internet. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, made one blunder after another.
For starters, there was Hillary’s stubborn refusal to join John Edwards in apologizing for voting to authorize the war in Iraq. She also got off on the wrong foot by basing her campaign on “experience,” thereby letting Obama identify himself as the candidate of “change.” And her campaign failed by making no plans to win important caucus states or how to proceed if the primaries dragged on beyond Super Tuesday. As a result, they allowed Obama to win 11 contests in a row.
In the end, Clinton got stronger and Obama seemed to run out of gas. But by that time, thanks to his superior campaign organization, Obama had already built up the lead in delegates and the perception of inevitability that Clinton could never overcome.
Even though she did not prevail, Hillary Clinton proved to be one hell of a fighter. And by refusing to quit when everybody told her to get out of the race, she made Obama a stronger candidate.
But Obama’s success is more than a story about who won the Democratic primary and how. It also speaks volumes about how much progress we have made in America. An African-American woman called my radio show to talk about her 7-year old son, who stayed up late to watch Barack Obama declare himself the Democratic nominee. And there are millions more young Americans like her son, inspired to believe in America by Barack Obama, the same way we were inspired by John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.
By choosing Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s nominee, we have demonstrated that we do, indeed, value the content of one’s character over the color of one’s skin. We’ve shown the world that we are, indeed, the land of unparalleled opportunity, where every little boy or girl can grow up to be president — even, as he describes himself, a skinny little black kid with a funny name. God bless America!
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5/29/08
SHOWING SUPPORT FOR THE TROOPS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It’s one thing to brag about supporting the troops. It’s another to do so. And George Bush and John McCain are braggers.
The GI Bill is one of the most important government programs ever created, right up there with Social Security and Medicare. It was first passed by Congress in 1944 and signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt, as the final program of his New Deal. FDR wanted to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression that followed World War I and did not want WWII veterans to suffer the same fate as veterans of the Great War, who were given little more than $60 and a train ticket home.
Under terms of the first GI Bill, World War II vets who had served a minimum of two years were eligible for government assistance in getting a college education, with grants covering the cost of books, fees and tuition up to $500 a year. The program was enormously successful. College enrollment exploded. In 10 years, 7.8 million of 16 million World War II vets had taken advantage of the program. And economists estimated that, for every one government dollar spent on educating GIs, seven new dollars were pumped into the American economy.
What worked so well for World War II veterans should not have been limited to them, and it wasn’t. Congress made the same educational opportunities available to veterans of the Korean War and, later, the war in Vietnam. Eventually, an even higher percentage of Vietnam vets than World War II vets took advantage of the benefits of the GI bill. And now two Vietnam vets have moved to extend the program even further.
In a rare display of bipartisanship, Sens. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) and Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), both decorated veterans of Vietnam, are sponsoring legislation to upgrade the GI bill and make it available to veterans of today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To qualify, veterans must have served since Sept. 11 in any branch of the military, including the National Guard and Reserves. Depending on their length of service, veterans could receive payments covering up to four years’ tuition at the most expensive in-state public college, plus a monthly housing stipend.
Surely most Americans agree that helping vets get a college education and start a new career is the least we can do to honor those who stepped up to defend our country in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The Webb-Hagel legislation, in fact, passed the Senate 75-22. Only the most hard-hearted could oppose it, and for only the flimsiest of reasons.
But Bush and McCain say they oppose offering benefits of the GI Bill to today’s veterans because it’s too expensive and because it will discourage troops from re-enlisting. Poppycock. True, the expanded program would cost about $2 billion a year. That’s a lot of money, but it’s less than the cost of (BEGIN ITALICS) one week (END ITALICS) of the war in Iraq.
It’s also true, as McCain regularly points out, that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new GI Bill would cause a 16 percent drop in re-enlistment rates across all four branches of the military. But McCain fails to mention that the very same study predicts a 16 percent uptick in new recruits, who would be attracted to join the military by the same educational opportunities. Hypocrisy, thy name is McCain.
There is simply no excuse for denying veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan the same benefits enjoyed by veterans of earlier wars. But this is not the first time that McCain, who prides himself on his family’s three generations of military service, has double-crossed his fellow veterans. In Congress, he’s voted for veterans’ benefits only 30 percent of the time, according to the scorecard of the Disabled Americans for America.
And for George Bush, this is just one more example of saying one thing and doing another. He even had the audacity to honor the troops on Memorial Day while threatening to veto the educational benefits millions of them are counting on. At least, observed the New York Times, he’s consistent: “Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform.”
One thing is for sure: If Bush and McCain have any questions about the merits of the GI Bill, they don’t have to go far for answers. McCain could ask fellow Sens. Frank Lautenberg, Ted Stevens, John Warner and Jim Webb, all of whom got their college education thanks to the GI Bill. And George Bush could ask his own father.
Had he listened to his father five years ago, Bush might not have sent young Americans to risk their lives in an unnecessary war. Had he listened to him today, he might not deny them the opportunity to improve their lives, if they’re lucky enough to come back home alive.
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BRING ON THE WINNING TICKET
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
With another victory in Oregon, Barack Obama has now won the support of a majority of the Democratic Party’s 3,253 pledged delegates and stands within 100 votes of the 2,026 total delegates needed to secure the nomination.
Could Hillary Clinton still win? Technically, yes. But it would take one of two events: either a complete meltdown by the Obama campaign (unlikely); or a total repudiation of Obama by superdelegates (even more unlikely, given his success in the primaries and caucuses).
The time has come. As difficult as it may be, even loyal Clinton supporters must recognize that, although officially it’s not over, unofficially, it is. Barack Obama will be the 2008 presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
The end of one road, and the beginning of another, comes with mixed emotions for many Democrats, including this one. I voted for Clinton in the California primary, and would do so again today. She has the judgment and experience to be president, and she’s an exceptional candidate. But she was not served well by her campaign advisors. And she was crucified by the media, who decided early on that Obama was their favorite and painted her every legitimate criticism of him as racist, while refusing to acknowledge many criticisms of her as pure sexist.
In fact, I still think Clinton would be a stronger candidate against John McCain in the general election. She’s right on all the issues. She has demonstrated her appeal to the working-class voters Democrats need in order to win swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. She would easily put into play formerly red states like Florida, Indiana and New Mexico. And there’s no doubt she’s tough: tough enough to take anything Republicans might throw at her, toss it right back at them, and enjoy doing it.
At the same time, I have no hesitation in getting 1,000 percent behind Barack Obama. He’s a phenomenal candidate, with a trans-generational, trans-racial, indeed trans-political appeal unlike any political figure we’ve seen in our lifetime. Obama makes you believe again: believe in the goodness and greatness of this country, believe in our potential to come together and work together for the common good, and believe in our ability to restore our image in the world.
Obama’s got the nomination. The next question is: Whom does he choose as his running mate? And the answer is obvious. After all, what are the criteria for choosing a vice-presidential candidate? That person must be a plausible president, for starters. But also someone who can help win the White House by uniting the party and broadening its appeal in key swing states.
Be honest. There’s only one person who fits that bill: Sen. Hillary Clinton.
True, Obama carried more states in the primaries than she did. But Clinton won more big states, more swing states, and more Democratic voters. Both ran remarkable primary campaigns. It would be a mistake to let either one walk away in the general. The key to victory lies in combining their strengths — her female, senior, middle-class and white blue collar voters with Obama’s male, higher-educated, and African-American voters — into one unbeatable ticket.
And besides, none of the other potential candidates for the number two slot would bring to the ticket what Clinton could, and each has his own shortcomings. Sam Nunn? Boring. John Edwards? Been there, done that. Chuck Hagel? Good man, but put him in the Cabinet, not on the ticket. Bill Richardson? No demonstrated electoral strength. Joe Biden? Perfect Secretary of State. Jim Webb? Another freshman senator; make him secretary of defense. Janet Napolitano? Janet who?
Ironically, most vocal opposition to an Obama-Clinton ticket comes from passionate supporters of both. But those people are the same reason the so-called dream ticket makes so much sense. If the Democratic Party could harness the passion of the Obama camp with the energy and excitement of the Clinton camp, the team of the first African-American and the first woman to lead the country would electrify the nation.
Barack Obama has a lot going for him: his own strengths as a candidate; an endless fundraising ability; the burning desire of the American people for change; and the combined impact of an unpopular war and a failed economy. He has a great chance of becoming our next president. All he has to do to seal the deal is to name Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential nominee.
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5/15/08
DESPONDENT REPUBLICANS TURN TO DRUGS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Hillary Clinton scored a huge victory over Barack Obama in West Virginia: enough to keep the Democratic primary contest alive and enough for her to continue to make the case, however unpopular, that maybe, just maybe, she’d be a stronger candidate against John McCain than Barack Obama.
Overshadowed by Hillary Clinton’s big win in West Virginia, however, was a big victory for Democrats in Mississippi — which is even more significant, in terms of its impact on November 2008, than the results of one more primary.
In Mississippi’s First Congressional District, Democrat Travis Childers defeated Republican Greg Davis in a district that George W. Bush carried in 2004 with over 60 percent of the vote. Even though Republicans spent $1.3 million desperately trying to hold onto the seat. And even though — or maybe because — Dick Cheney flew to Mississippi and spent election eve campaigning for the Republican candidate. Poor Greg Davis. Campaigning with Cheney proved almost as dangerous as going hunting with him!
Not only that, forgetting that “all politics is local,” Republicans tried to win the special election by linking it to national politics. They said Childers would be a puppet of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They accused him of embracing “the same values” as Barack Obama. But the Pelosi/Obama attacks backfired, proving that Obama, especially, may have more appeal in the Deep South than Republicans bargained for.
The Democratic victory in Mississippi doesn’t stand alone. This is the third special election held this year — all in Republican strongholds — and under the leadership of DCCC Chair Chris van Hollen, Democrats have won all three: in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi. On March 8, Democrat Bill Foster replaced former House Speaker Dennis Hastert as Representative from Illinois’s 14th Congressional District, held by Republicans for over 30 years. On May 3, Democrat Don Cazayoux captured a solid Republican seat in Baton Rouge, La. Just 10 days later, he was joined by new Democrat Travis Childers from Mississippi.
The capture of all three conservative districts is a great omen for Democratic chances in November and raises hopes of breaking an institutional jinx. Historically, neither party cleans up two election cycles in a row. The party that picks up over 20 seats in a so-called “wave” election typically loses ground in the next cycle. The last exception to that rule was in 1976. After adding 43 seats in 1974, thanks to public outrage over Watergate, Democrats actually bounced back in 1976 to score an additional gain of — one!
This year promises to be different. Having already won three Republican seats in special elections, Democrats are already two ahead of 1976. According to Politico.com, GOP House experts are predicting Democrats could pick up an additional 20 seats this fall. That could give them an advantage of 70 seats in the next session of Congress.
Which, of course, leaves Republicans tongue-tied. After his party’s latest embarrassing defeat, Republican House Leader John Boehner explained: “The results in Mississippi should serve as a wakeup call to Republican candidates nationwide. As I’ve said before, this is a change election. . . . Our presidential nominee, Senator McCain, is an agent of change.” This is, almost word for word, how Boehner defended his loss in Louisiana, 10 days earlier: “The result this weekend in Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District should serve as a wakeup call to Republican candidates across the country. . . . Our presidential nominee, Senator McCain, is an agent of change.”
Even Republicans are asking: How many “wakeup calls” does Boehner need before he get gets the message? And is the Republican leadership really that bankrupt of ideas?
If there were any doubt Republicans are in complete disarray following three consecutive losses, they quickly proved it. After holding an emergency summit meeting, Boehner and other House GOP leaders emerged to announce they had adopted a new slogan for the 2008 campaign season: “The Change You Deserve.” There’s only one problem. It turns out that very same phrase is already the trademarked advertising slogan for the antidepressant drug Effexor.
Manufactured by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Effexor is prescribed for “depression, anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults.” It is, in other words, just what congressional Republicans need. Except they should be taking it, not selling it.
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5/8/08
THE CANDIDATE AND THE PASTOR
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
Imagine this: A preacher endorses a candidate for president. Then we learn the preacher has, for years and from the pulpit, made disgusting, inflammatory and un-American statements. Yet the mainstream media totally ignores the preacher’s remarks and never pressures the candidate to explain all the ugly things the preacher has said and done over the last 20 years.
Impossible scenario? That depends on whether your name is Barack Obama or John McCain — and whether the preacher’s name is Jeremiah Wright or John Hagee. Obama, of course, was held personally responsible by the media for everything Jeremiah Wright ever said, and forced to repudiate him. McCain, on the other hand, has been given a free ride by the media and never challenged to answer for Hagee’s comments — even though, in many ways, they are more outrageous than anything heard from Pastor Wright.
Hagee is founder and senior pastor of San Antonio’s 19,000-member Cornerstone Church. He’s also a leading televangelist, whose radio and television broadcasts are seen and heard in 99 million homes. On many occasions since he began his ministry in the 70s, Hagee has come under criticism for his controversial remarks on women, gays, Israel and Catholics.
Hagee shows no mercy for the Catholic Church. He has called it “the Great Whore” and “an apostate church,” and accused Catholicism of being nothing more than “a false cult system.” Hagee also blames the Catholic Church for the Holocaust, telling viewers in one telecast that Hitler learned his hatred for Jews from growing up as a Catholic. When launching his wholesale slaughter of Jews, according to Hagee, Hitler told his followers: “I’m not going to do anything in my lifetime that hasn’t been done by the Roman Church for the past 800 years. I’m only going to do it on a greater scale and more efficiently.”
On women, Hagee makes St. Paul, notorious for treating women like second-class citizens, look like a feminist. “Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher?” asks Hagee. “The answer is lipstick.” As if that’s not insulting enough, he continues: “Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? . . . You can negotiate with a terrorist.” Real cut-up, that John Hagee.
We all remember that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were condemned for asserting, the day after Sept. 11, that God had punished America for, among other “sins,” our tolerance of gays. Yet John Hagee made a similar claim five years later about Hurricane Katrina and nobody cared. Appearing on NPR’s “Fresh Air” on Sept. 18, 2006, Hagee said: “The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades.”
An incredulous host Terri Gross asked if he was really saying that God had flattened the entire city of New Orleans, because a gay pride parade was scheduled in the French Quarter. Yes, said Hagee, that’s exactly what I meant. “All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.”
Hagee is also founder of Christians United for Israel, which sounds innocuous enough until you realize that, like most evangelical Christians, he only supports Israel in order to trigger another war that would bring about the end of the world. As he himself told a July 19, 2006 CUFI event in Washington, D.C.: “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West . . . a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation and the Second Coming of Christ.”
Now here’s what’s different about Obama/Wright and McCain/Hagee. John McCain actually sought out Hagee’s endorsement, said he was proud to receive it, and continues to brag about it.
My question is not: How could a Christian preacher say such ugly things? But rather: Why did the media pay so much attention to one preacher, and zero attention to the other?
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4/24/08
THE DIRTIEST CAMPAIGN EVER?
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
After Hillary Clinton’s surprisingly comfortable win in Pennsylvania, the Democratic primary moves on North Carolina and Indiana. And so continues the dirtiest and most vitriolic political campaign in history — or so the mainstream media would have you believe.
The night of the Pennsylvania primary, ABC’s Charlie Gibson lamented that the campaign had become “so nasty and negative and dirty.” The next day, The New York Times bemoaned a primary contest that was “even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pandering contests that preceded it.” And David Broder of The Washington Post lamented a campaign that has become “markedly more negative.” Same with the rest of the media. When they’re not complaining about how long the primary’s lasting, they’re carping about how nasty it is.
What I want to know is: What rock have they been living under? Have they ever covered a political campaign before? By any standard, the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been one of the most civilized in our lifetime.
Of course, both candidates have emphasized differences between them. That’s what campaigns are all about. Obama says Clinton’s vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq means she can’t be trusted to make other foreign policy decisions. Clinton says Obama doesn’t have enough experience to govern from day one, especially when the phone rings at 3 a.m. Tough? Maybe. But nasty? No way. Those are legitimate issues.
Clinton tells superdelegates that Obama’s such a weak candidate he can’t beat John McCain. Obama counters that Clinton has so much baggage, she can’t beat John McCain — and, besides, she’s too beholden to insurance, pharmaceutical and oil company lobbyists. Tough? Sure. But dirty? Absolutely not. Those, too, are legitimate issues.
Seriously, if you can’t challenge the credentials of your opponent, or his or her ability to win and govern, you might as well not even have a campaign. Flip a coin or draw names out of a hat instead.
Of course, as they say, “politics ain’t beanbag.” And we learned that from the very beginning. In the 1800 presidential campaign, as David McCullough recounts in his masterful biography of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson paid James Callender to vilify his opponent. In a campaign booklet, Callender called Adams a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite,” and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” Not only that, Callender portrayed Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
Shown proofs of the campaign pamphlet, Jefferson assured Callender: “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.” But Adams gave as well as he took, allowing Yale president Rev. Timothy Wright to warn what would happen were “atheist” Thomas Jefferson elected president: “The Bible will be burned, the French ‘Marseillaise’ will be sung in Christian churches and we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonored; speciously polluted.”
And these were our Founding Fathers!
Politics weren’t much gentler in President Lincoln’s day. In her excellent book, “Dirty Politics,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson recounts the terms used to describe candidate Abe Lincoln: “filthy story teller, despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, Ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, perjurer, robber, swindler, tyrant, fiend, butcher, and land-pirate.” Notice that “Honest Abe” wasn’t on the list.
Of course, you don’t have to go that far back to wallow in dirty campaigns. Think 1988 and Lee Atwater’s promising to make Willie Horton “a household name.” Think South Carolina 2000, when George W. Bush’s henchmen accused John McCain of fathering an illegitimate black child (actually, his adopted daughter from Bangladesh). Think Georgia 2002 and ads equating Max Cleland with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Think 2004 and the “Swift Boat” smears against John Kerry.
The truth is, we’ve seen a lot of dirty campaigns, but this isn’t one of them. You can call the 2008 Democratic primary many things. Call it historic. Call it hard-fought. Call it colorful, lively, and long. Just don’t call it dirty.
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4/10/08
MAKE IRAQIS SPEND THEIR OIL MONEY, NOT OURS
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
The Iraq War dog-and-pony show’s back in town, with the same old tired arguments for staying the course.
Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker anesthetized Congress with a “progress report” almost identical to the one they gave last September. According to the duo, dubbed “the surge twins” by Maureen Dowd, we’ve made some progress, but not enough; we can bring home some troops, but not all; the surge is working, except when it’s not. Yawn.
Even after five years of war and one year of the surge, Petraeus had to admit he saw “no light at the end of the tunnel” and no possibility of bringing more troops home until at least September — when conditions might allow further withdrawals, or might not. The whole presentation had a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” quality to it. As Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh summed it up: “We’ll know when we get there, and we don’t know when we’re going to get there.”
Petraeus and Crocker did succeed in one respect, however. They managed to run out the clock for another eight months, thereby helping President Bush achieve his number one goal in Iraq: keeping the war alive until he can dump it in the lap of his successor. That’s all Bush asked of Petraeus, and he delivered. “General, you did a heck of a job!”
Despite their lackluster performance, at least one good idea did emerge from Petraeus’ and Crocker’s appearance before Congress. It didn’t come from them. It came from Democrats. And here it is: If we’re going to stay in Iraq any longer, let the Iraqis pay for it — with their own oil money. Allah knows they can afford it. In fact, they’ve got a surplus, while we’re running a deficit. So why should we continue to pick up the tab?
This is not exactly a new idea. During the buildup to the Iraq war, remember, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress that the entire cost of the operation would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues — without costing American taxpayers one dollar. Today, at least $600 billion later, that’s just another one of George Bush’s broken promises.
But now the Iraqi oil fields are up and running, the pipelines are repaired, the price of oil’s at an all-time high, and money’s pouring into the Iraqi government’s coffers. In fact, according to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Iraq has over $30 billion squirreled away in U.S. banks, collecting interest, and it could reap an additional $100 billion in oil profits from 2007 and 2008. Meanwhile, American taxpayers are not only paying for the cost of the war, we’ve spent $47 billion so far on Iraq reconstruction.
Adding insult to injury, American troops in Iraq are forced to buy gas on the open market, paying $3.23 a gallon for gas in Baghdad that they’ve sacrificed their lives to help deliver. Which means the Pentagon’s spending $153 million a month in Iraq on fuel alone. Thus does the Iraqi government show Americans its gratitude: by sticking it to us at the pump.
Ironically, even though over 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, it may be the cost in dollars, and not in lives, that in the end unites both supporters and opponents of the war in demanding a change in direction. Arch-conservative Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a cheerleader for the war from the beginning, told Petraeus and Crocker it was way past time the Iraqis started to pay for their own security. If they don’t, warned Rohrabacher, “There’s going to be trouble on the Republican side, as well as the Democratic side, of getting support for an ongoing conflict.”
Enough’s enough. Time to put all those Iraqi oil profits to good use. If we’re going to be stuck in Iraq any longer, at least let the Iraqi government pay for it. They can afford it. We can’t.
4/3/08
GEORGE W. BUSH: THE OUTLAW PRESIDENT
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
It’s hard for this liberal to admit, but conservatives actually get some things right.
They are correct, I believe, in advocating smaller, more efficient government; fiscal responsibility; balanced budgets; a non-interventionist foreign policy; and a constitutionally limited chief executive.
The problem is — as I document in my new book, “Trainwreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (And Not A Moment Too Soon)” — once conservatives came to power, they delivered just the opposite: a bloated federal government; out-of-control federal spending; record budget deficits; a trigger-happy foreign policy; and a president who thumbs his nose at the law and Constitution.
Indeed, while failing in many things, George Bush and Dick Cheney have succeeded in restoring the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon. From the beginning, they have operated as if they are above the law. By refusing to reveal the names of oil executives on Cheney’s Energy Task Force, tapping phones without a warrant, or authorizing the use of torture, Bush and Cheney have put into practice Nixon’s rule: “When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”
This week we saw two more blatant examples of their disdain for the law. First was an 81-page memo provided to the Defense Department by Deputy Attorney General John Yoo in March 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Yoo advised officers of the Pentagon that, in interrogating suspects in the war on terror, they didn’t have to worry about international treaties prohibiting torture. They didn’t even have to worry about U.S. laws against assault, maiming or other forms of physical abuse. After Sept. 11, advised Yoo, any abusive treatment of prisoners was justified as self-defense.
In other words, on behalf of the Bush White House and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, Yoo made the argument that, in wartime, anything goes: an argument long ago rejected by the civilized world, especially after Nazi atrocities in World War II. And an argument that led directly to the abuses of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Perhaps more chillingly, Yoo’s 2003 memo — released to the ACLU under a Freedom of Information request — cites an earlier, 2001 Justice Department memo, still classified, advising the Bush White House that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure do not apply to actions taken against American citizens as part of the so-called “war on terror.” That memo was most likely used by Bush as the basis for his illegal NSA wiretapping program, which continues to this day.
But it’s not only on national security matters that the Bush White House flouts the law. This week’s second example: Construction of Bush’s 670-mile fence along the border with Mexico has been held up because of legal challenges from ranchers, property owners, and environmental organizations. Rather than resolve those differences under the law, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the administration will simply ignore 30 different applicable federal laws, declare itself exempt from the law, and build the fence by the end of the year. Property rights, states rights and the environment be damned.
How convenient. Wouldn’t you and I love the privilege of deciding which laws we like, or which laws we would obey — and chucking all the rest?
What’s so shocking about these two Bush administration actions is not simply their utter lawlessness. It’s how far they are from what conservatives profess to believe. Starting with the Founders, conservatives have always stood for strict limits on presidential power as a safeguard against tyranny. In keeping with James Madison, conservatives Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr. taught that the Congress, not the president, was the most powerful of the three branches of government.
Even Barry Goldwater opposed the idea that presidents could ever operate outside the law. As if anticipating the power-grabbing days of Bush and Cheney, Goldwater warned in 1964: “This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means. . . . If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.”
But here again, as in so many areas, today’s conservatives have thrown true conservatism out the window. George W. Bush doesn’t believe he has to obey the law. He believes his is the law.
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier,” he once confessed, “. . . as long as I’m the dictator.” Fortunately, he won’t be much longer.
3/27/08
HANG IN THERE, BARACK AND HILLARY
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
You might call it Press’ First Rule of Politics: The longer you’re inside the Beltway, the more disconnected you are from the real world. And nothing proves it more than the current whining about how harmful this year’s continuing primary is to the Democratic Party.
You’ll notice that most complaints about the primary come, not from real Americans, but from talking heads on television: — 90 percent of whom live inside the Beltway, and 95 percent of whom are incapable of thinking for themselves and merely echo what other gasbags have to say.
It’s ironic that those complaining about the Democratic primary’s taking too long are the same bloviators who were complaining, only a few months ago, that the party’s nominee would be decided too early. At least they’re consistent. They were wrong then and they’re wrong now.
But it’s hardly the first time the media intelligentsia have been hopelessly out of touch with reality. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Washington’s sanctimonious talking heads demanded that Bill Clinton resign the presidency. Meanwhile, out in the heartland, a majority of Americans said he should hang in there and fight.
We’re seeing the same disconnect today. Inside the Beltway, most pundits are demanding that Hillary Clinton quit the primary because Barack Obama’s ahead in delegates. Besides, they argue, Democrats are worried that the long primary is irreparably damaging the Democratic party.
Nonsense. Once again, the chattering class is living in its own world. It’s not true that Democrats are sick and tired of the primary. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, only 22 percent of Democrats believe that Hillary Clinton should abandon the race. Curiously enough, the same number, 22 percent, believe Barack Obama should drop out. Meanwhile, 62 percent of all Democrats want the primary to continue until there’s a clear winner. Most Americans, in other words, get what the Washington elite doesn’t: You don’t call the game at halftime just because one team’s ahead.
Nor is there any evidence that the unusually lengthy primary is damaging the Democratic party. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Starting in Iowa, Democrats have come back to life with a vengeance. The Iowa Democratic caucus attracted a record 227,000 voters — many of them first-time and young voters. That was almost twice the Republican turnout. And that outburst of enthusiasm has continued in every state.
In Ohio, as reported by Dan Balz in The Washington Post, 2.2 million voters turned out for the Democratic primary, compared to only 1.1 million Republicans. Voter participation in Texas was equally lopsided: 2.9 million Democrats vs. 1.4 million Republicans.
And the excitement has kept growing with each additional primary. When registration for the April 22 Pennsylvania primary closed on March 24, state officials announced that Democrats had set a new record for either party: over 4 million registered voters. Leading up to the primary, Democrats added 161,000 new voters, while Republicans lost almost 60,000. The same pattern is being observed in North Carolina, Indiana and other states with upcoming primaries.
There are only two reasons for that newfound energy: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They’re providing us with the most exciting primary contest in our lifetime, and the end result will be extremely advantageous to Democrats. Whenever it’s over, and whoever wins, Democrats will have built a ground operation in every state, including states and congressional districts they never bothered to campaign in before. And Democrats will have created a huge new historic pool of dedicated voters to help propel them to victory.
When will either Obama or Clinton lock down the nomination? Who knows? But whether it’s Puerto Rico in June or Denver in August, there will still be plenty of time to unite the party against John McCain. All those newly energized Democrats are not going to go away quietly. They will quickly rally to prevent a man from reaching the White House who would simply deliver the third Bush presidency.
So far, so good. Unless it gets really, really ugly — which neither Clinton nor Obama will allow — the Democratic primary of 2008 is not hurting the Democratic Party. It’s the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party. Let every state vote!
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