When is a lobbyist not a lobbyist? Sunday, Nov 20 2011 

History and Politics , victorgold 4:40 pm

“I wasn’t a lobbyist, I was a strategic adviser.”

— Newt Gingrich, explaining why he took $1.8 million in fees from Freddie Mac, a federal agency that operates on taxpayer/bailout money

Move past, if you will, the part of this story that involves a Republican presidential candidate’s having what reporters call “baggage” (though in this particular candidate’s case it’s sure to be either Gucci’s or Louis Vuitton’s).

That Newt Gingrich has always viewed political cachet as a route toward becoming Newt Getrich dates back to his first touch of power, assuming the House speakership in 1995 and immediately hooking onto a $4.5 million book deal he gave up only after being pressured by his embarrassed Republican colleagues.

No, Gingrich-being-Getrich shouldn’t be the focus of media attention here. That’s old news. The question to be raised – the thing to be condemned by good government moralists in the media – is why federal departments and agencies like Freddie Mac are allowed to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to lobby Congress for additional millions of taxpayer dollars.

Gingrich’s audacity (somebody has to pay those Tiffany bills, so why not Freddie Mac?) simply expresses the routine acceptance by members of Congress — Democrat and Republican alike — that influence-peddling not merely for but with taxpayer money is now the accepted norm in Washington.

There ought to be a law against it — and as a matter of fact, there is: Taxpayer-subsidized federal departments and agencies are strictly prohibited from using their funds for lobbying purposes. But then, this isn’t lobbying, is it? No, it’s “strategic advice,” given when the price is right by ex-Republican and ex-Democratic congressmen alike.

Who says there isn’t bipartisan agreement on some federal expenditures?

Sound Bite to Remember (circa 1955)

“Why is it that when I take it, it’s stealin’, but when a governor who’s a lawyer takes it, it’s called a fee?”

 Alabama Governor Big Jim Folsom, complaining about the inequity of it all

 

Biden in 2016? It’s All in the Game Wednesday, Oct 26 2011 

Media and Politics victorgold 5:51 pm

I can’t pinpoint precisely when Presidential politics turned into a game, but I can tell you who owns the casino.

Flashback: Halfway through the Nixon v. McGovern campaign of 1972 — ancient history, but bear with me — Vice President Spiro Agnew arrived in Los Angeles prepared to answer reporters’ questions about the Vietnam war, Nixon’s new economic policy, and a host of other major issues (including the Watergate break-in five months earlier). Instead, the first question asked by a local TV reporter was whether the Vice President was planning to run for president in 1976.

As Agnew’s press secretary at the time I’d long since learned to expect the unexpected when the man was provoked by what he regarded as nattering nabobs. What followed was true to form: A glare, a clearing of the throat, then: “In ten years of holding press conferences on a local, state and national level,” said the Vice President, “that is absolutely the stupidest question I’ve ever been asked.”

All of which came to mind last week when I tuned in to hear CNN’s Candy Crowley ask Vice President Joe Biden the same stupid question: Was Biden, in his campaign travel this year, laying the groundwork for a presidential bid in 2016?

For Crowley, of course, the question was anything but stupid. It was smart television, what she’s paid to do. That whatever answer Biden gave – it was predictably vapid – would shed no light on the issues and substance of the current campaign made no difference. As a political correspondent for a cable news network, her job is to give the dull grind of a presidential campaign the casino touch.

It’s all about the game – the ratings game – and second only to controversy, there’s nothing like speculation to entertain an audience, raise the numbers that keep sponsors happy. What value would those vacuous candidate “debates” be without a covey of instant analysts and partisan touts coming on to tell us who won, who lost, who held the hot hand, who crapped out.

In their book The Permanent Campaign and Its Future, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein deplore the impact that pollsters and spin doctors have had on our political system, blurring the line between running for and holding office. All to the good, as far as the boys (and girls) on the Permanent Campaign Bus are concerned.

Joe Biden running in 2016? Why should this question come up now? The answer is that having exhausted the list of prospects for the 2012 race, there was nowhere else to go. Remember Trump, Daniels, Barbour, Palin, Christie?

The last named, you’ll recall, became so tired of telling reporters he wasn’t going to run that he famously asked, “What do I have to do to convince you? Commit suicide?”

And if a non-candidate did in fact kill himself to end speculation about his running, what then? No problem. I can hear Chris Matthews now: “Good campaign move.”

Sound Bite to Remember (1972)

“He’s a Democrat. What would you expect him to say, ‘Kiss my elephant’?”

— Campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz explaining why his candidate George McGovern told an obnoxious heckler to ‘kiss my ass’

 

September Headlines Monday, Oct 3 2011 

Politics , , , victorgold 12:36 pm

Under the headline “Why We Need a Third Party,” Washington Post columnist Matt Miller condemns both the Democratic  and Republican parties for being “prisoner  to interest groups” whose chief aim is “to win elections, not solve problems.”

Some deep thinking there. Miller goes on to list unemployment, the budget, health care and education as problems “we need to truly fix,” then  quotes the late Senator Pat Moynihan saying “If issues can’t be discussed, they can never be advanced.”

What’s needed to bring about “a new politics of problem-solving,” writes Miller, is a third party that would offer “candidates with the vision and nerve to fill today’s void.”

Now why didn’t I think of that? Possibly because my thought waves were hung up on a New York Times headline earlier in the month:

PLAN WOULD KEEP MILITARY

IN IRAQ BEYOND DEADLINE

My, what a surprise that was — along with a Post headline the same day that expressed the Pentagon’s view that we’re involved in an “endless war.”

In his 2010 book “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich predicted it all, down to the matter of American lawmakers, Democrat and Republican alike, approving billions-per-month to build roads, hospitals and schools overseas, while ignoring the need to build roads, hospitals and schools  here at home.

And more: “With current Pentagon outlays running at something like $700 billion annually,” wrote Bacevich, “the United States spends as much or more money on its military than the entire rest of the world combined,” with “approximately 300,000 troops stationed abroad occupying 761 ‘sites’ in 39 foreign countries.”

There lies a “problem,” one would think, that third-party advocates like Miller would add to their list of things “we need to truly fix.”

But no – the Post columnist, while purporting to speak with “vision and nerve,” is no better than the issue-dodgers he criticizes when it comes to confronting what our last soldier-president, Dwight Eisenhower, called “the military-industrial complex.”

Why is it that the only politicians willing to do that, e.g., Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, are widely derided as kooks? A ventured guess: Because, Mr. Miller, when the “problem” involved is the Bush-Obama Doctrine of “endless war,” what America needs isn’t a third party — it’s a second party.

 

The Bachmann Corollary to Santayana’s Rule Monday, Oct 3 2011 

Politics , victorgold 12:35 pm

The upside to not knowing history is that you don’t run the risk of forgetting it.

 

You’re the President of the United States . . . Monday, Sep 5 2011 

Politics victorgold 11:56 am

. . . and you’re sending a long-overdue jobs program to a contentious Congress. To work up public support you plan to deliver a prime-time speech from the Oval Office, asking the American people to call, write, contact their representatives on Capitol Hill, to let them know their constituents support the President’s program.

Question: What’s wrong with that scenario? Answer: Nothing if you’re a politically savvy president named Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, more interested in getting your message across than in the spotlight of delivering it.  What better way to put pressure on members of Congress than a direct appeal to their constituents?

But if you’re Barack Obama, that’s not the way to go: Center stage, captive audience, on-camera — daytime, prime-time, anytime — is the be-all and end-all of his presidential leadership. So it is that having earned the distinction of being the most over-exposed president in American history, the Lecturer-in-Chief now moves to make the calling of a congressional joint session commonplace.

What’s that, the President again, speaking to Congress? Must be a summer re-run. Flip the channel.

 

Welcome to Cheneyland Monday, Sep 5 2011 

Politics victorgold 11:55 am

One glance at the cover jacket to Dick Cheney’s memoir, In My Time, tells all we need to know about the substance and spirit of the book within: It’s a full-color photograph of the author astride the royal red carpet that presidents since Ronald Reagan have used on entering the White House East Room for a televised news conference.

Same old Cheney, delusional as ever. This, remember, was the Vice President who thought nothing of using a motorcade of eighteen vehicles, sirens blaring, to go to his White House office – a distance of only two miles – every morning; who attended a Chesapeake Bay reception surrounded by a contingent of seventy armed Secret Service agents, with a hovering helicopter and three motorized boats circling the water in the event Osama bin Laden managed to slip a suicide submarine past the Coast Guard to launch a dirty bomb.

More reminders? How about the full-moon paranoia of the Vice President hunkered down each night at an “undisclosed location” while the President himself had no problem putting in eight hours’ sleep at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Or the Vice President’s refusing to show up for the 2002 State of the Union address because, he explained, there was high-risk, post-9/11, in the President and Vice President’s being in the same building at the same time.

But of course. Given the possibility of al Qaeda’s slipping past the Army, Navy, Air Force, Secret Service and FBI to bomb the Capitol, we’d need a back-up plan if the President, Congress, Cabinet and Supreme Court were wiped out. Comforting to know, President Cheney would be on the phone (at some undisclosed location), telling Air Force One where to pick him up.

 

Suppose They Gave An Iowa Straw Poll… Friday, Aug 19 2011 

Politics victorgold 5:26 pm

  . . . and no media showed up to cover it? Would anyone notice – or care?

As it happens, I was touring the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, the day before 17,000 Iowa Republicans paid $30 apiece to cast a straw vote for their preferred candidate in next year’s presidential election.

In the museum — along with the sights and sounds of Birmingham’s past racial conflicts — was a vignette of the audacious speech that Warren Harding delivered when he visited the city — the first president to do so – in October, 1921.

Harding had traveled south to receive an honorary degree from the University of Alabama. His acceptance speech was expected to be the usual soporific pap that public figures deliver on such occasions. Instead he delivered the first civil rights address — denouncing racial discrimination in any form — given by any American president since the Civil War. Blacks in the segregated audience applauded; whites sat on their hands.

This took place, keep in mind, when the Ku Klux Klan was a political force not only in the South but across the nation. As president, Harding — chosen by Republican party bosses in the infamous “smoke-filled room” — also pushed for anti-lynching legislation and a shorter work week, controversial stands at the time.

Oh for the good old days-and-ways of choosing presidential nominees. Harding is widely considered one of our worst presidents, but as his Birmingham speech illustrates, even the most egregious products of smoke-filled rooms had something to be said for them. Whatever the closed-door flaws of the boss system, no smoke-filled room ever came up with a list of candidates that included (1) a former U. S. Senator who had lost his race for re-election by 17 points; (2) a former House Speaker with a penchant for Greek island cruises and Tiffany diamonds;  and (3) a two-term Minnesota congressman who thinks the Battle of Lexington was fought in New Hampshire.

Sound Bite to Remember

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

                                         — Charles DeGaulle

 

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