Category Archives: Politics

We, the Incompetent

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(All of us are incompetent.  When a faucet leaks or a light switch quits working at my house, it is Nancy who fixes it, not me. I can help her with words when she’s trying to convey a particular thought to someone on Facebook or in a note, however.  Dr. Frank Crane says it is easy to pronounce others incompetent while ignoring our own lack of skill. But, he says, there is one overpowering competence that he believes will survive all of the abuses that we, the individual incompetents, might do to it.)

ONLY HUMANITY IS COMPETENT

One day as I passed down the street, I came to a spot where a teamster had unhitched his horses from his wagon and was giving them their mid-day oats, beneath the shade of a benevolent and comfortable oak. From one of the animals, I noticed the collar had been taken and that his neck was sore.

“Pretty hard, isn’t it?” I inquired of the man, “to make a horse pull with a sore shoulder against the collar?”

“Yep,” he answered, “plum tough.” And then he handed me a bit of philosophy which I have put among most prized possessions. “There wouldn’t be much work done in this word, mister, if only horses and folks that are plum fit had to do it.”

There you are!  That is a large and brilliant truth.  The business of this earth is carried on by the incompetent and the unfit. It is the mothers that don’t know how to bring up children that are bringing up most of them; it’s the people not at all qualified to marry marrying; it’s the teachers that can’t teach that are teaching; and the preachers who can’t preach that are preaching. Most mayors, governors, and presidents do not know how to manage states, cities, and nations; doctors who don’t know are giving us pills and cooks who are incompetent are preparing our food; and altogether the world is in the hands of the unfit.

Yet, somehow, nature manages to get things done. She gains her ends. Perfectly balancing all of imperfections, she arrives at perfection. Let us take heart. Incompetence is no excuse for despair. No individual is competent; only humanity is competent.

 

Who is an American?

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It’s time we reoriented the history of our country. Not rewrite it.  Reorient it—because most of it starts with the assumption that this country began with Protestant English religious-freedom pioneers establishing colonies on the east coast, thus history is told from East to West.

That is a questionable assumption at best, and some would say an excuse for a nation that talks about inclusion while its national culture has created barriers against it.

The great American writer Walt Whitman refused in 1883 to take part in Santa Fe’s observance of its founding because, “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents and sort them, to unify them.  Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.”

American-born journalist and historian Carrie Gibson, who now lives in London, quotes Whitman in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America. Unlike conventional histories, her book sees our national history from West to East.

Explorers and entrepreneurs from Catholic Spain were establishing settlements in this hemisphere a century before English Protestants started settling Jamestown and Plymouth as commercial ventures.

Gibson asserts that accepting the English-settlement version of our history is the root of some of our major social issues because it has led to categorizing people as lesser Americans. And she suggests part of the problem lies in our definition of “American.”

I am an English-German-French-Irish-Scottish-Canadian American. But none of that shows up on the census form I filled out last year.  A lot of other Americans were hyphen people in the census. African-Americans. Hispanic-Americans.  Asian-Americans. And others.

I have never self-identified with any hyphens. I don’t know a word of German. I had to take four semesters of French at the University of Missouri to pass three of them. I know no Gaelic languages. I don’t say “aboot” for “about,” or refer to my car’s trunk as the “boot.”

But we identify a lot of Americans with a hyphen and Gibson suggests none too gently that in hyphenating some Americans we are subtly saying, “not white,” and in doing so we are misunderstanding our history and, in effect, not recognizing one another as equals in citizenship.

Gibson was born in Ohio but moved to Dalton, Georgia as a child, just about the time many families from Mexico began moving in to work in the factories.  She soon realized “that if my surname were Garcia rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me” although she, too, was an immigrant—from the North rather than the South; she too was Catholic as were many immigrants coming to Dalton. Her grandmother, from Italy, never spoke English well and still had many relatives in another country. The difference, she perceived, was that she and her family were “European” immigrants and our culture, as Whitman wrote, lived with the image of being a second England—-instead of being American.

 

And what is “American?”  She suggests that many of us assume too much for ourselves and exclude others because we do not recognize the word.

It is convenient to we who call ourselves Americans to forget that the word derives from an explorer who never came to OUR shores.  Amerigo Vespucci explored what we now call South America. Our continents first show up as America, with any designation of separateness, on a map of the New World drawn by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, a century before Jamestown and a century-plus before Plymouth.

She finds it presumptuous to forget that the word “American” applies to everybody from Canada to Cape Horn. But those of us from the United States like to thing WE are Americans. Everybody else from this hemisphere is somebody or something else. The most common phrase used for those coming from the south is “Hispanic” as though everybody speaks Spanish, which is another erroneous assumption.

She points to another big difference.  Gibson is two generations removed from her Italian grandmother. She is not identified as Italian-American, can’t speak Italian.  But she asks, “Are you Hispanic if you don’t speak Spanish?”  Many who don’t speak that language, however, are considered “Hispanic” no matter how many generations removed they are from their border-crossing ancestors.

That’s a nagging question.  How many generations have to pass before someone is no longer African-American.  If you’ve never spoken a word in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese languages, are you still Asian-American?

Gibson writes, “Like whiteness, being ‘American’ was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans.”

There probably are places where cultural identifications are useful—in determining, for example, what parts of our culture are not doing as well as others and what the reasons for that might be.

But hyphens create deep and unnecessary divisions in how we see each other.

Perhaps society will solve these problems with the passage of time.  But why should we wait for time to heal the wounds we continue to insist on inflicting on each other because we do not recognize that all of us are Americans, that our roots are not in northern Europe, but all of Europe? Or that many years ago, some who came here were Africans and others were Asians?

(For decades and decades, archaeologists have discovered evidence that the first people in our land came from Asia, thousands of years before anybody from England or other parts of northern Europe set foot in America. If we insist on identifying each other with hyphens, perhaps we should let descendants of the first peoples decide how the rest of us should be identified. Would the rest of us be satisfied with a designation that implies, “Not Asian?”)

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the worldwide bestseller Sapiens says that mankind is nearing a tipping point driven by the third revolution that has shaped the history of Homo Sapiens. First was the Cognitive Revolution, about 70,000 years ago when our ancestors gained the capability of abstract thought. Second was the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors learned cultivation and food raising that led to longer lives and increased and diversified population.  He thinks we are living in the third, the Scientific Revolution that began about 500 years ago. Harari theorizes we are headed toward a time when Homo Sapiens will be transformed into something different by science. Biological engineering, computing, and cyber development, he thinks, will lead to creation of “a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

It will be the death of the hyphen. And none too soon.

Do we need to wait for centuries to pass before all of the things we let divide us become irrelevant?  Do we need to listen to those who preach hatred of our fellow Americans or is it time to banish them to caves of their own ignorance where their bones might someday be discovered and puzzled over because of their narrowness?

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ABG and the BP/M8B Poll

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It’s time for the first, as of this writing, poll of the 2022 United States Senate race in Missouri . We have gone back to a polling organization we used many years ago.

Bear in mind that this is quite early in the campaign and many things can happen that can change the election equation. Polls are only snapshots of a particular moment and it might be foolish to place too much value in today’s answers as tomorrow’s final outcome.

We have consulted with M8B, a firm created in 1950 by Abe Bookman and Albert C. Carter, two men you are unlikely to have heard about. They use a technique known as the “Icosahedron” that evaluates twenty possible responses to polling questions. The technique might be faulted because it tends to tilt toward positive responses, while rating negative or neutral proposals lower.  In the end the weight given negative and neutral responses combined equals the weight given positive responses.

Therefore, it appears, a neutral or negative response seems likely to be more significant because either is less than the weighted positive tilt, meaning responses rated “positive” are twice as easy to obtain as those in the other two categories.  Positive results, as we understand the system, are therefore softer than negative or neutral responses, and should be considered so.

That’s a complicated explanation but it results from decades of experience in evaluating polling questions and results.

If you have doubts about the results that we present here in the first public poll of the 2020 Missouri campaign for U. S. Senate, you also can consult with M8B for a reasonable fee and ask more sophisticated questions than we have asked.

The first question in the first BP/M8B poll during this campaign was test question for which we already know the answer. “Will Roy Blunt seek re-election in 2022?” The answer reflects the public knowledge of Missouri politics (some people follow them closely and others don’t have a clue).  M8B’s response boiled down to, “Don’t count on it,” meaning the overall result conforms to what the public knows, limited by uncertainty from people who have not been following Missouri politics much.

The first actual poll question was asked in two forms and the answer was positive both times.  We twice asked, “Will Eric Greitens be Missouri’s next Senator?” An analysis of both responses is positive.  The first response was “As I see it, yes.”  The second time the response was “Most likely, ” less than certain but it is early in the campaign.  HOWEVER, when we modified the question to ask, “Will Eric Greitens be Missouri’s next U. S. Senator?” the answer was “cannot predict now,” indicating his success is less guaranteed when the issue is more clearly defined.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt is the second announced major candidate on the Republican ticket.  So we asked, “Can Eric Schmitt beat Eric Greitens in 2022. “My sources say No,” reported M8B.  When we asked the same question a second time, M8B responded, “Ask Again Later,” indicating a certain level of uneasiness about the first answer.  We waited until the end of our series of questions to come back to this issue and rephrased the question to have more specificity: “Can Eric Schmitt defeat Eric Greitens in the Missouri primary election for U.S. Senate in 2022?”  Our pollster returned to the first answer, “My sources say no.”  Not a definite “no,” but the answers clearly indicate Schmitt has an uphill road to travel if he is to win.

Knowing that a crowded field of candidates could lower the threshold for victory (the more candidates, the lower percentage of the vote necessary to win), we asked, “Will there be more than five Republican candidates for U.S. Senator from Missouri?” and the response was, “Most likely.”  We interpret that to mean that Schmitt might pull votes from Greitens, but Greitens could be strong enough to win when Schmitt and three or more candidates in the primary divide the “anybody but Greitens” vote.  We asked about that later.

But could a Democrat win the general election?  When the first round of questioning on the issue produced a “concentrate and ask again” response, we concentrated and asked again and M8B clearly engaged in lengthy analysis before finally responding, “Outlook good.” This is an issue we might have to explore in later M8B surveys as the Democrat candidate list becomes more defined.

Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz has announced he’s thinking about getting into the race. M8B said it “cannot predict now” when asked if he could win the nomination, perhaps a reflection of Schatz just thinking about running but not placing himself in the race this early in the campaign.

How about Ann Wagner, who is starting her fifth term in Congress from St. Louis County, a former ambassador to Luxembourg, and former chair or co-chair of the state and national Republican parties. Will she run?  The result was “hazy” and we were asked to try again. On the second try the answer was definitive: “It is decidedly so.”

How about southeast Missouri Congressman Jason Smith, also in his fifth term in Congress, after more than four terms in the Missouri House? “My sources say no,” said M8B.

Billy Long, the auctioneer from southwest Missouri?  He’s in his sixth term in Congress. We asked about him twice and the results seem certain. “Outlook good,” was the first response. “It is decidedly so,” was the second.

Whether Donald Trump will be the factor that he says he will be in 2022 is far from certain. M8B results might reflect the uncertainty of Trump’s personal as well as his political future. We asked the question five times because he is so insistent that he will be a factor.  “It is decidedly so” was the first answer but then M8B follow-up responses were definitely less decisive: “My reply is no,” “very doubtful,” “Reply hazy, try again,” and then when we did, M8B twice  said, “ask again later,” which we will do as we get closer to 2022. But on balance the findings indicate Trump’s influence is likely to wane.

Our final question was whether a strategy of “Anybody but Eric Greitens” would be a winning strategy among the Republican establishment that has never found any substance to him.  Perhaps because the campaign is still so young that “anybody” has not yet been defined fully, the responses were understandably mixed: “Most likely” then “Don’t count on it,” Signs point to yes,” “My sources say no,” and finally, “Ask again later.”

In light of the uncertainty we read into the results of the final question, we certainly will ask again later.

You can ask the same questions we have asked in the BP/M8B Poll in your own living room.  M8B’s services are available for a small investment at your local toy store in the purchase of a Magic 8 Ball. In case you have ever wondered how they operate:  An Icosahedron is a polyhedron with twenty faces, each with an affirmative, negative, or neutral statement. Ten of the faces are affirmative. Five are negative, and five are neutral. The thing floats in alcohol died blue.

Is this poll accurate?

Ask again later.

 

If It Ain’t Broke—the other view

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As we noted in last Wednesday’s entry, there is a “comments” box at the end of each one that for those who agree or differ with what is said. This is the first time we have published comments as a stand-alone entry.  But the issue of elections and voting is so central to our system of government that when the sponsor of the bill we questioned called last week with concerns about some of the things we had written, we decided that the comment, or response, should get more than space in the “comment” box that, having been entered after the original piece was published, would not get the attention the issue deserves to have.

Representative Peggy McGaugh’s background on election issues is considerable. She worked for 32 years in the Carroll County Clerk’s office, almost 24 of those years (six four-year terms) as the County Clerk.  She is a past-president of the Missouri Association of Counties and a former member of the Secretary of State’s Voter Integrity Task Force.

In response to your “If it ain’t broke” blog, find below a few answers from my view as one of the sponsors of the consolidated election bill going through the General Assembly this year.

This bill is a culmination of bills passed out of the House Elections committee with the involvement of the Mo Secretary of State’s office and the Missouri Association of County Clerk’s/ Election Authorities (MACCEA)  who do Resolutions each year for proposed changes to improve the law and better the process for Missourians.

*limiting changes to six months before an election would prevent nefarious or bad actors from pushing a specific narrative to change the outcome of an election.

 

*the ability to select election judges and poll watchers from outside of the boundaries of a jurisdiction was a request from MACCEA who have difficulty filling the positions in areas where one party dominates another when following Chapter 115 of equal representation of parties at the precinct.

 

*the direct recording electronic devices (DREs) are the electronic equipment being phased out in the bill.  The three counties that currently use them will move to a system that will include some type of paper ballot hand marked by the voter and counted by an electronic tabulator as you described.

 

*absentee voting by mail or in person will still occur six weeks out from any election using the same excuses as in the past.  This bill allows a registered voter to appear in the election authority’s office three weeks out from any election, apply for and receive their ballot without using an excuse and then thread the ballot through tabulator. This assures them that their ballot was received and counted without having to fib to get the convenience. 

 

*ballots will be considered cast when received in the election authority office if postmarked on or before election day and the drop boxes will be swept and gathered for counting up until the close of the polls on election day.

Thank you for bringing the merits of this election bill to your readers.

Keeping Missouri as a model of free, fair and transparent elections is our goal in the General Assembly.

I look forward to answering any other questions you might have.

Representative Peggy McGaugh

Proudly representing Ray, Carroll and Chariton Counties   

    

We appreciate Rep. McGaugh’s thoughts. Her page on the House of Representatives website contains contact information should anyone want to send her an email.  If you do, please follow the same guidelines you follow them when writing to us—be kind, be courteous, be respectful.

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I respectfully beg to differ

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(We live in a time when disagreements seem unresolvable, when disputing forces seem more interested in fighting than serving, when disagreeing is, to use a term we wish had never come up, weaponized. Dr. Crane reminds us that disagreement can be a positive part of our existence, if respect is part of it, as he asks—-)

ARE YOU ON OPPOSITE SIDES?

Doubtless each of us knows someone in his circle of acquaintances who is intellectually contrary. Such as one delights on every occasion to take the opposite side.

If he is within a religious community he will take his stand firmly for atheism.  If he is one of the scoffers, he will argue just as valiantly for the church. He is a standing minority report. He is a crooked stick that will not lie in the woodpile. Like Goethe’s Devil he is the spirit who constantly denies.

This type of person is the steady, normal crop in the field of humanity. We would not get along without them. They keep the kettle of thing stirred, which otherwise would settle and spoil. These are they that keep the course of social life pure as a running stream and prevent it from becoming like a green stagnant pool.

They supply ginger for political campaigns. They are the party out of power. They are the watchdogs of progress. Without them religion would harden into a cruel tyranny of superstition, falsehoods would be crystallized into power, and ancient fraud live forever.

They harass mankind into being honest.

A Trojan Horse and a Forked Tongue

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We have grown tired of the arguing, year after year, campaign after campaign, administration after administration about rebuilding or improving our infrastructure.

While all of this talking and proposing and blaming and balking has been going on, I have replaced the front struts on my car—not a cheap thing to do—perhaps because I hit a few too many serious potholes in the seven years I’ve owned the car (it’s a great car, so great that I see no reason to replace it—and I’ve driven its 2021 replacement).

They talk. I pay to replace my struts.

President Biden this week announced a $2.25 Trillion infrastructure plan.  He wants to offset its further expansion of the federal debt by increasing the tax on corporations and people who are a lot richer than almost everybody who reads these entries.

Immediate opposition has come from the usual sources—the people on the other side of the aisle.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has branded Biden’s plan a “Trojan Horse,” saying, “It’s called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan Horse is going to be more borrowed money and massive tax increases.”

By “massive tax increases” he appears to mean a rollback of part of the “massive tax cuts” the Republican Congress approved under the Trump administration in 2017, cuts that were supposed to help the simple folk who work for the people and companies that got the tax increases.  Many of the folks who find the tax increase odious are the same people who have complained about the increasing the national debt for infrastructure building/rebuilding.

From time to time we hear political leaders from both sides bemoaning, on one hand, the cynicism of the public toward the political process while on the other hand they take advantage of that cynicism by appealing to it to get votes and campaign money.

While they play their games, my car’s struts keep taking beatings.

The Biden plan spreads the fiscal pain through several years.  It has several elements, some of which are more urgent to address than others.  There’s plenty of room for compromise—we’ll pass this but you’ll have to ditch that for now—if anybody wants to compromise.  But why compromise when you can just fight?

We’re tired of hearing our politicians say they’ll “fight” for us.   To Hell with fighting.  DO something for us!

For starters, here is an alternative plan that Republicans might consider supporting because it comes from one of theirs:

This infrastructure plan would be smaller and narrower.  It would involve spending up to one-trillion dollars financed by government bonds that average citizens as well as big-money investors could buy.

It’s kind of like the War Bonds that were issued during WWII to finance the fight against the Axis. Yes, the national debt would be increased but the payout would be gradual and spread through a number of years and, as some politicians and economic theoreticians like to say from time to time, the economic benefits would produce the increased revenues to pay off the debt.

This idea was proposed in 2016 by candidate Donald J. Trump—and his party has demonstrated he could do no wrong. It never gained any traction during his administration, perhaps because he suggested it to counter a smaller proposal by opponent Hillary Clinton and then, once in office, abandoned it because it was no longer needed for political points when there were more self-beneficial things to talk about.

The Clinton campaign rejected the Trump proposal, by the way, saying “Donald Trump’s only actual infrastructure proposal is the build a giant wall on the Mexican border and have Mexico pay for it.”  In retrospect there seems to be an element of truth in that observation. We’re still waiting to hear the Treasury Department announce the arrival of the first payment from Mexico, by the way.

Conservative critics of the Trump plan might have used the word “Trojan Horse” to describe it because, as New York Times reporter Alan Rappaport related, they believed, it was similar to a stimulus plan set forth in 2009 by President Obama and would worsen the national debt.

Any plan put forth by Obama had to be blocked because it was from Obama.  Any plan from Trump had to be blocked because it came from Trump. Today, if it comes from Biden, it must be automatically opposed by those who offer nothing but attacks.

So while our politicians in Washington continue to speak with forked tongues, the potholes keep getting deeper, the bridges keep getting weaker, old lead sewer and water pipes become more dangerous, and a public that absorbs all of this (aided and abetted by powerful undermining  voices on the air and in print) continues to incrementally lose faith in the democratic form of government.

Those in public office who prefer to stoke the fires of public dissatisfaction with the processes of government are the ones who are building a Trojan Horse. We saw on January 6 what is inside it—anarchy and totalitarianism, which do not seek nor want what is best for the nation.

And in Washington, it appears, the only thing that matters is an argument not over how the gate can be made more secure, but over whose hand most weakly holds it closed.

 

 

If it ain’t broke—

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Break it.

We have a place at the end of each of these musings for you, dear reader, to straighten out the author on points in which his thoughts obviously and erroneously vary from the truth.  In your opinion.

Feel free to utilize that space, especially with this entry because your worthy author seems to be missing badly the whole point of the legislative effort to rewrite some of our election laws.  Those doing the rewriting say our election system is flawed and need to be made better. Others  think the re-writers are limiting rather than enhancing voting rights and opportunities.

We must be missing something.  Big.

—because Missouri’s Secretary of State has offered zero complaints, as far as we know, about last year’s elections. We have heard zero complaints of voter fraud here.  No federal lawsuits were filed in Missouri contesting the outcome(s).  In fact, our Attorney General, who was so vigilant at spotting fraud and shortcomings in several other states’ elections, has offered not one legal peep about things here.  The two-third majorities were maintained in both chambers of the General Assembly, so it appears there was no nefarious plot to undermine the lawmaking structure of our state.

More than three-million people voted, the first time that many people took part in a November election. It beat the 2.9-million who voted in the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The raw number might have been a record but the percentage of eligible voters fell short of projections and short of the 78% vote when Bill Clinton was elected over George H. W. Bush, who had the worst performance for a Republican since Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Bush was hurt because Ross Perot had the best performance for a third party candidate here since John Bell Williams, also in 1860.

So what was broken last year?

Why is there a provision saying no change in voting laws can be made within six months of a presidential election?  Just last year the legislature made a change in response to a pandemic that was making many people nervous about going to polling places.  Mail-in ballots were allowed but they are outlawed in this bill. We have not heard any loud yelling, seen any frantic arm-waving, and heard of any lawsuit filed complaining this system generated anything but greater opportunity for citizens to exercise one of our most cherished rights, especially during one of our greatest health crises in history.

The good thing is that this is just a statute.  And this ban on changing laws within six months of an election can be repealed, just as the bill repeals mail-in ballots.  And we wouldn’t be surprised to see a repeal of the repeal if the party makeup of the legislature ever happens.

Present law allows the election authority—the county clerk or the metropolitan election authority—to appoint two judges from each major party to serve at each polling place. The proposed law says the political parties will recommend potential judges but says they don’t have to live within the jurisdiction of the election authority.  So the election authority, which is given the power to throw out people it deems unqualified to be judges, instead of going back to the parties can instead appoint somebody from outside the voting area—namely the county or the city?  Could the election authority, for example, dismiss local election judge candidates (we see nothing in the bill allowing an appeal of that action) and install, let’s say, a perceived looney advocate for a national candidate instead?

Please tell us we have just hatched a conspiracy theory.  We hate conspiracy theories and have no desire to be associated with one.

Another section allows the chairman of each county political party committee to designate a watcher for each place where votes are counted (that’s present law).  But the new language says the poll watcher does not have to live within that jurisdiction.  See the above question.

Are we reading another section of the proposed election law changes to say that we are doing away with electronic voting machines?  And going back to paper ballots?  We must have missed all of the complaints about how voting machines corrupted the elections in Missouri in 2020.

As we understand it, (from section 115.237—please pardon the technical language) the bill refers to “direct-recording” machines but not to electronic COUNTING machines. When I voted last November, I used a pencil to filling a little oval on a voting card and then fed the card into an electronic tabulating machine.  That’s okay but anything of a higher technology is not to be allowed.  Correct?

Absentee ballots can’t be cast until three weeks before the election and can only be cast at a designated location—seemingly a further limitation on mail-in voting—and require a photo identification (Did I miss anything about absentee voting by the military far overseas?).  BUT the bill does eliminate lying about the reason for voting absentee.  Last year Nancy and I voted absentee, citing our age which made us especially susceptible to the virus. Had we been required to say we were going to be out of town that day, we would have sworn that we would be and would have driven outside the city limits, turned around, and come back, thus being honest.

Should we be bothered by a provision that absentee ballots that do not arrive by the time polls close on election day will not be counted?  They “shall be deemed cast when received prior to the time fixed by law for closing the polls on election day.”  This applies to absentees mailed from halfway around the world as well as absentees left in a drop box.  This is kind of an awkward issue, isn’t it? We have heard for years discussions about the timing of sending out absentee ballots to our military in time for them to be voted and returned within proper time limits to be counted and we don’t know that there has ever been a system that guarantees every vote case before election day is counted whenever it arrives home. Given the mess our postal system is in today (we are never sure when we’ll get our mail anymore), maybe it makes sense to be a little more flexible than the bill allows.  As for drop boxes—-what is to keep an election authority from waiting for two hours past poll-closing to empty drop boxes in areas inclined to vote against the election authority’s wishes?   Doesn’t sound as if those votes will be counted even if they went into the box the day before election day.

In the days when we were in the chambers listening to debates or in the hearing rooms when bills were considered and justified or attacked by sponsors and critics, we might understand better the motivations behind this bill.  But we’re just another old guy on a quiet street—who is a voter—and we don’t have that kind of access.

So we wonder what all the fuss is about in making these changes after three million of our 4,338,133 registered voters found a way—-with the bipartisan help of the 2019 legislature—to cast ballots in a 2020 election that produced absolutely none of the bombast, accusations, and conspiracies that were generated in other states, usually by people who don’t live in those states.

Let us know.  This obviously isn’t Twitter. You can use as many helpful words as you wish.

 

 

How to identify political corruption

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I lost a good friend a year ago (March 12) when Tracy Wood stopped living with cancer. She was 76.  The Los Angeles Times called her “a hard-charging reporter who broke through the male-dominated press corps to cover the Vietnam War and later helped The Times win a Pulitzer [Prize] for its coverage of the L.A. Riots.”

Tracy, a United Press International correspondent in Vietnam, became the only woman to serve as president of the Association of Foreign Correspondents in Vietnam.  She worked in the UPI bureau at the California Capitol and let Nancy and me go with her to a Ronald Reagan news conference on the day we dropped in on her. She was a founding member of the editorial staff of the Voice of OC, a non-profit digital news operation founded when Orange County’s newspaper went away in the Los Angeles area. She thrived on investigating corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

The photo is from a book about Tracy and the few other women correspondents who covered the Vietnam War,  War Torn. Among other things, she covered the release by the North Vietnamese of American POWs, including the release of John McCain.

I remember her because she was a New Jersey girl who came to the University of Missouri intending to go to the School of Journalism.  She left school before she got her degree but she taught me how to play bridge (badly) and a friend of ours, Richard Montgomery, and I taught her how to sop gravy with pieces of bread, a Midwestern practice totally unknown, apparently, in New Jersey.  I consider the experience a valuable cultural exchange.

She wrote an article once headlined “The Ingredients of Corrupt Governments.” It’s good to keep what she wrote in mind.

Corruption doesn’t happen by accident. Here’s a rundown of tools used worldwide by corrupt leaders.

  • Patronage and its siblings, nepotism and cronyism. Government leaders appoint loyalists and relatives to posts without requiring them to have the experience and qualifications needed to perform the job competently. Patronage employees also often work on government time or resources to ensure their patron or patroness gets re-elected. The result is bureaucracies that exist solely to stay in power, not serve the public good.
  • Secrecy, one of the most valuable tools of a corrupt government. In the U.S., in spite of decades-old state and federal laws that mandate government openness, corrupt officials still try to hide their meetings and communications with lobbyists and others who influence their decisions. Lack of transparency is the canary in the coal mine signaling government corruption.
  • Attacking and even shutting down a free press. The No. 1 enemy of a corrupt ruler is a free and unfettered press. That is why you’ll see authoritarian rulers in places like China, North Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Russia — go to great lengths to stop journalists from doing their work. For example, China this month sentenced a 71-year-old reporter to seven years in prison, according to the Los Angeles Times,because she obtained an internal Communist Party document and leaked it to a U.S. based news organization. The document she got, the Times said, “urged tighter ideological control over Chinese society and warned against promoting judicial independence, media freedom and civil society.”
  • Cash, gifts or assets handed or promised to a government official in exchange for an official favor, like a vote, or for using his or her influence to benefit the briber.
  • Contracting/procurement. It’s a universal practice of corrupt government officials. Make sure government contracts or other payments go to supporters, even if others are more qualified to do the work.
  • Financial accountability. Corrupt governments fear exposure and one way to prevent it is to falsify, minimize or simply not allow strong financial audits.
  • Election fraud. Rigged elections, which unfortunately are commonplace throughout the world, undermine the foundation of democracy. Orange County has acted to combat its own election abuses. For example, then-GOP Assemblyman Curt Pringle and the Republican Party paid a $400,000 federal court settlement after they stationed guards at 20 Santa Ana polling places in 1988 in what those who filed suit alleged was an attempt to intimidate Hispanic voters.Eight years later, former Pringle aide and current county executive Mark Denny was one of three GOP workers convicted of election fraud as part of a scheme to manipulate an Assembly election by illegally circulating nominating petitions for a decoy candidate.
  • One-sided justice. Corrupt officials everywhere use law enforcement to go after political foes but protect—or simply don’t prosecute—their supporters or those who are friends of their allies. In some cases, they avoid enforcing the law against their backers by simply not equipping their offices with professionals who are good enough at their jobs to prosecute political crimes. In that case, even if they are forced to bring charges against a supporter, there is little likelihood of a conviction.
  • Keeping voters at a distance. The rise of professional political consultants over the past half-century has made it easier for corrupt politicians to get elected and re-elected because direct mail and other campaign tools allow them to avoid personal contact with voters. Officials truly interested in representing their constituents, meet face-to-face and listen to small groups representing a range of views. Sarah Chayes, in “Thieves of State, Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,”emphasizes the importance of all government leaders holding such small group meetings. Among other things, it reduces the ability of unethical aides to filter information that reaches the top leaders. And it gives leaders accurate information about public concerns.
  • Deliberately running yes-men—and now women—for office. Behind-the-scenes power brokers keep control by seeking out and running women and men who will take orders. Even better, finding candidates who will do what they believe their benefactors want without being told. That includes elected women and men who bully those around them or only think of government as a way to make themselves important, as well as financially better off.

Resources for government corruption information:

In another article in 2015 in which she recalled the corruption of the South Vietnamese government, Tracy warned, “…All governments, not just those at war, suffer when corruption takes hold.  The corrosive effects of government corruption can be seen wherever the symptoms appear, like political patronage, attempts to stifle the free press, government secrecy—and where complacency takes hold of the electorate.”

Tracy was not one for conspiracy theories, not one to think all people in politics are corrupt (because almost all of them aren’t). She recognized corruption and went after it, though, as all good reporters do.

She also knew corruption will take root when the complacent public ignores its responsibility to pay attention, to think for itself, to ignore those who try to make them think they are victims rather than partners in government, and to support and elect the best people.

Every couple of years we have a chance to recognize that responsibility.

 

Talktalktalktalktalk

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You might think that somebody who has endured the number of filibusters your faithful observer has endured would join those who think they should be banned or in some way limited.

You’d be wrong.

Those who favor limits of some kind appear to miss a point.  A limited filibuster is not a filibuster.

Filibusters are not intended to be entertaining although there were some of those that your observer endured that had their moments—the night then-state senator Sam Graves started reading the names of the high school graduates from his district and started over every time he was interrupted.

Or when Senator Marie Chappelle-Nadal decided to make a filibuster an audience-participation event and invited people listening to the Senate’s internet feed to send her text messages suggesting topics, or asking questions she could answer.

Then there was Senator Matt Bartle’s one-man version of Jimmy Stewart’s imitation of one in “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.”  He lasted something like 17 hours, taking advantage of quorum calls to dash off to the bathroom while the Senate was idle and waiting for enough Senators to get off their office couches and sleepily go into the chamber just long enough to be counted “present.”

I can recall several of them that lasted so long I had to leave the Senate press table to go to the Missourinet newsroom to do the morning newscasts.  At least a couple of times I listened to the internet feed while I was putting the newscasts together.  I think there might even have been a couple of times when I returned to the Capitol and the senators were still burning legislative time off the clock.

They’re most effective in the final weeks when time is running short and the debate calendars are running long with bills that are ready for final votes. The House limits the amount of time someone can hold the floor so the Missouri House doesn’t have much chance of having all that fun.  But the Senate has no such limits.

And it never should.  Nor should Congress.

The filibuster can be a futile time of railing against the inevitable—as can happen when one party has a two-thirds majority and therefore doesn’t need to compromise on anything and can just wait until the minority, or part of the minority, chews up precious hours of debate time and finally runs out of energy.

They’re most effective when the numbers are closer.  Many filibusters are resolved when opposing sides finally decide to find some compromises that previously had been rejected and start talking about lessening the most objectionable parts of the legislation.  But when one party is so dominant that it doesn’t need to compromise on anything, compromise is hard to see

When that happens, the participants in a filibuster hope some members of the other party will start seeing the time their bills needed to gain passage is disappearing, and they start pressuring their majority colleagues to stop this thing so there will be a chance for passage of other bills before the final adjournment.

As unpleasant as most of them are, as many times as this veteran observer of them realized hours of his life were disappearing in the ocean of blather and boredom (the same hours would disappear more pleasantly at home and in bed), they are an important part of government, a protection against steamrolling the minority or a faction of the majority.  When you have no other weapons; when you are heavily outnumbered even by members of your own party; when you want to kill an abhorrent idea or even one that could be better if the overbearing sponsor doesn’t want anybody tampering with his precious idea—-talk becomes the only weapon.

Filibusters are awful things.  But today’s pest is tomorrow’s ally. The tables might turn and those who are forced to listen today might be the talkers tomorrow and it’s important to recognize that possible reciprocity.  Respecting in others the tool you might need to use someday yourself is important.

They work better when the competing parties respect each other enough to be willing to work out their differences.  But when the two sides are so antagonistic that talk is impossible, extensive talk becomes even more essential.

Filibusters are part of our democratic-republic form of government.  They might not be nice but they’re essential.

Sometimes they result in talking a bill to death.  Other times they talk a bill into a better life.

Tools, after all, often have dual purposes.  And the filibuster is an important tool in our political system.

INTERNECINE WARFARE

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There is no joy in watching the divisions with the Republican Party.  Some are forecasting the end of the party as we have known it—conservative leadership at times, loyal opposition at others as the parties have swapped national leadership for more than two centuries.

But it is easy to project the death of either of our political parties.  And times have shown that such projections have been wrong.  Let us hope that Jon Meacham’s recent book that we often wrote about during last year’s campaign remains true: that Americans, when on the brink of destruction of our democracy, have coalesced and not gone over the cliff.

The other day, your noble researcher was going through some old newspapers looking for something else when, as often happens, something else caught his eye.

There was this cartoon at the bottom of page one of the June 23, 1912 edition of the Galveston Daily News:

The Republican Party was so badly divided that there was talk of a third party materializing out of the severe division.

And in 1912 that is exactly what happened.

The Chicago GOP convention nominated William Howard Taft for a second term.  The third tier of the headline speaks of resentment, “wild enthusiasm” for a losing candidate to threatened to form his own party, and did.  Teddy Roosevelt was the Bull Moose among Republicans.  In fact that became the nickname of the Progressive Party under whose label he ran in 1912, complaining that Taft’s policies were too conservative.

Times obviously were much different in 1912.

And this leads to another sidetrack.  When the Progressive Party met in August, it referred to its platform as “A Contract With the People” (so Newt was not particularly original all those years ago). Roosevelt told his followers, “Our cause is based on the eternal principle of righteousness; and even though we, who now lead may for the time fail, in the end the cause itself shall triumph.”

That’s an important thing to recall in these days when those in the progressive win of the Democratic Party are being ridiculed for promoting causes that are criticized as radical.  Her are some of the “radical” issues promoted by TR’s Progressive Party:

The Progressive Party had its own version of “Drain the Swamp” in its platform when it said, “To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

They called for such outlandish things as registration of lobbyists and disclosure of and limits to campaign contributions. They wanted a national health service that included all of government’s medical agencies. They wanted a social insurance program that provided for disabled, unemployed, and elderly citizens. They wanted to limit abilities of judges to limit strikes. They wanted to establish minimum wages for women, an eight-hour workday for everybody, and a workers compensation system for people injured on the job. They also promoted an inheritance tax—the “death tax” contemporary Republicans have targeted for years. And they wanted a Commissioner of Federal Securities. They said citizens, not legislatures, should elect United States Senators, letting women vote, and holding primary elections for state and federal office nominations. They favored giving citizens of the states the rights of initiative, referendum, and recall.

We haven’t read enough old newspapers to see if these terrible ideas were branded as “socialist” by non-progressive members of the two established parties. But they do show that today’s “progressive” ideas have a tendency to prevail through time.

Getting back on-topic:

The second page of the Daily News reported the 1912 Republican convulsions were hardly new:

Different people look at the 2021 convulsions within the Republican Party through different lenses.  Some worry that the party is self-destructing or that the Party is headed down the road that Germany headed down in the 1930s, or that the party will so badly divide and that so many members will defect that Democrats will become even more dominant.

An excellent question.

Predictions of the deaths of either of our two major parties have proven to be remarkably inaccurate.  Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 election with 41.8% of the vote, carrying forty of the forty-eight states. Roosevelt carried six and had 27.4% of the votes. Taft carried two states and got 23.2% of the votes.  There was a fourth candidate.  A Socialist.  Eugene V. Debs got six percent of the votes.

Wilson was re-elected in 1916 as this country hurtled toward a war he knew we could not stay out of, knowing that the popular campaign phrase, “He kept us out of war” was false.

In 1920, Republican Warren G. Harding got 60.4% of the popular vote.

In 1924, Republican Calvin Coolidge got 54% of the vote.

In 1928, Herbert Hoover got 58.2% of the vote.

It is reasonable to express grave concern about the future of the Republican Party and the sizeable and noisy segment of it that reminds many of a cult. While it is dangerous to dismiss the cult-culture segment of the party, it also is dangerous to declare the Republican Party cannot survive its latest division, and it is dangerous to laugh at the internecine warfare within it.

Remember 1912.  Then remember 1920. And 1924.  And 1928.

And also:

Don’t forget the “radical” ideas of Roosevelt’s progressives.

Time doesn’t heal wounds. It becomes the history that just records them. People overcome them. Or, at least, they have up to now.  And, we hope, they will again.