Category Archives: The Nation

When Wall St. woes hit Main St.

Ever since the TARP rescue for credit markets was first proposed, we've heard and read many times how if credit dries up on Wall Street, it affects us on Main Street. And I've sort of, kind of understood that in the abstract.

But I understood a little better how in could play out when I read this piece this morning in The Wall Street Journal, about what's happening out there to small businesses. I was particularly struck by this anecdote about a business that is strong (for its size) in every other way, but is now in trouble because of the lack of credit. That sort of isolates cause-and-effect in a way that I found illuminating:

Even some small businesses that have seen a rise in demand are
struggling, due to the credit squeeze. In October, the most recent data
available, the Federal Reserve Board reported that 90% of U.S. banks
had tightened lending standards on small businesses in the previous
three months. That hurts young businesses that need to finance growth.

Susan Knapp once sold yellow-pages ads to small businesses, meeting
people who had turned their dreams into companies. It inspired her in
the late 1990s to turn her love of making pear jelly into a side
business. For years, she had collected pears from a Northern California
farm, whipped up batches of jelly and passed it out at holiday time. In
2003, she quit her job and became a full-time entrepreneur, using
credit cards, personal savings and an equity line against her home to
get going.

By 2007, her company, A Perfect Pear, was reporting $700,000 in
sales. She says she is sitting on $100,000 in orders from specialty
stores and grocers who want to buy her jellies and salad dressings. On
the company's Web site, many items are on back order.

And yet Ms. Knapp can't fill those orders: She doesn't have the
money to buy the 300 cases of vinegar and 200 cases of olive oil she
needs to make the products, and she hasn't been able to find funding.

Ms. Knapp, 56, says she has gone from making six figures to not
taking an income. For the first time, she and her husband, a
self-employed chiropractor, are without health insurance. In the past
year-and-a-half she has nearly drained her $190,000 retirement account
to pay for operations and two-part time employees.

Today’s Will column, with links

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The George Will column I put on today's page is one of his oblique ones — the closest thing to a point in it is what I said in the headline, which is that in a National Endowment for Humanities project, of all places, Mr. Will seems to have found what he regards as "A government program worth the money."

But the column caused me to look up some of the artworks he describes, and I enjoyed doing that. Of course, I couldn't reproduce them on the page itself, but I can run the column here with links, to make it easier for you to look at them yourself. Enjoy:

By GEORGE F. WILL
The Washington Post
In Winslow Homer’s 1865 painting “The Veteran in a New Field,” a farmer, bathed in sunshine, his back to the viewer, his Union uniform jacket cast on the ground, harvests wheat with a single-bladed scythe. That tool was out of date, and Homer first depicted the farmer wielding a more modern implement. Homer then painted over it, replacing it with what evokes a timeless symbol of death — the grim reaper’s scythe. The painting reminds viewers how much Civil War blood was shed, as at Gettysburg, in wheat fields.
    Homer’s painting is one of 40 works of art that the National Endowment for Humanities is distributing, in 24-by-36-inch reproductions, with teaching guides, to all primary and secondary schools and libraries that ask for them. About one-third of them already have done so, according to Bruce Cole, the NEH’s chairman.
    So as Washington’s dreariest year in decades sags to an end — a year in which trillion-dollar improvisations that will debase the dollar have been bracketed by a stimulus that did not stimulate and a rescue that will prolong automakers’ drownings — at the end of this feast of folly, consider something rarer than rubies. It is a 2008 government program that costs next to nothing — $2.6 million this year; a rounding error in the smallest of the bailouts. And “Picturing America” adds to the public stock of something scarce — understanding of the nation’s past and present.
    The 40 works of art include some almost universally familiar ones — John Singleton Copley’s 1768 portrait of a silversmith named Paul Revere; Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 “Washington Crossing the Delaware”; Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ bronze relief sculpture “Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Regiment Memorial” on Boston Common. But “Picturing America” is not, Cole takes pains to insist, “the government’s ‘top 40.’ ” Forty times 40 other selections of art and architecture could just as effectively illustrate how visual works are revealing records of the nation’s history and culture, and how visual stimulation can spark the synthesizing of information by students.
    The colorful impressionism of Childe Hassam’s flag-filled painting “Allies Day, May 1917” captures America’s waxing nationalism a month after entry into World War I. And it makes all the more moving the waning of hope captured in Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother.” This haunting image of a destitute 32-year old pea picker, a mother of seven, is a springboard into John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.
    One of the 40 images in “Picturing America” is more timely than Cole could have suspected when the project was launched in February. It is a photograph of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building.
    Built between 1926 and 1930 — between the giddy ascent of the ’20s stock market and the Crash — this art deco monument to the might of America’s automobile industry is decorated with motifs of machines and streamlining. There are winged forms of a Chrysler radiator cap; an ornamental frieze replicates a band of hubcaps. The stainless steel of the famous spire suggests the signature of the automobile industry in its salad days — chrome.
    To understand the animal spirits that drove New York’s skyscraper competition — the Chrysler Building was the world’s tallest for less than a year, until the Empire State Building was completed 202 feet higher — is to understand an era. Two eras, actually — the one that built the building, and ours, which has reasons to be reminded of the evanescence of seemingly solid supremacies.
    After seven years of service, Cole, the longest-serving chairman in the 43-year history of the NEH, is leaving to head the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge. America has thousands of museums, including the Studebaker National Museum (South Bend, Ind.), the Packard Museum (Dayton, Ohio) — yes, Virginia, there was a time when automobile companies were allowed to perish — the Hammer Museum (Haines, Alaska), the Mustard Museum (Mount Horeb, Wis.), and the Spam Museum (Austin, Minn.) featuring the sort-of-meat, not the Internet annoyance. There is, however, no museum devoted to the most important political event that ever happened, here or anywhere else — the American Revolution.
    Cole says there will be one, at Valley Forge. It will be built mostly by private money, for an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the sum of public money currently being lavished on corporations. Perhaps a subsequent iteration of “Picturing America” will feature a thought-provoking photograph of the gleaming towers that currently house, among other things, General Motors’ headquarters. Looming over Detroit’s moonscape desolation, the building is called the Renaissance Center. Really.

Write to Mr. Will at georgewill@washpost.com.

NYT sees Columbia as microcosm of economic decline

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Don't know how I missed the story in yesterday's New York Times about the job fair in Columbia — headlined "Reeling South Carolina City Is a Snapshot of Economic Woes" — but in case you did, too, here it is. And here's an excerpt:

    As the American economy sinks deeper into one of the more punishing recessions since the Depression, frustration and fear color the national conversation.
    This city in the center of South Carolina is an ideal listening post. According to a range of indicators assembled by Moody’s Economy.com — from job growth to change in household worth — this metropolitan area came closer than any other to being a microcosm of the nation over the last decade.
    This is now an unfortunate distinction. Some 533,000 jobs disappeared from the economy in November, the worst month since 1974. In South Carolina, a government panel is predicting that the state’s unemployment rate could reach 14 percent by the middle of next year….

Graham’s got it right, too

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No sooner had I hit "save" on that last post than I saw this release from Lindsey Graham, which actually came in before the DeMint one:

“I’m disappointed with President Bush’s decision in many respects.

“I do not believe it’s appropriate to use the TARP (Troubled Asset Recovery
Program) funds to bail out the automotive companies. These funds were supposed
to be used to stabilize financial institutions. The TARP legislation would
certainly not have passed it we had known it was going to be used for this
purpose.

“The plan announced by the President today will not lead to the necessary
reforms which will make these companies profitable. The only viable solution is
for them to enter Chapter 11 reorganization.

“There the companies would be able to renegotiate their labor and health
costs to make them competitive in the global marketplace. It would also allow
the reorganization to be accomplished without political considerations.
Presidential or congressional restructuring will end up being a political
exercise more so than a business exercise to make these companies profitable.

“If we continue down this road, I expect this will be the first of many
government payments to the Big 3 automotive companies.”

Needless to say, I also agree with Graham. I'd like to see a little more indignation from him on this, though.

This is a bad situation we're in, folks. A lame-duck president takes it upon himself to throw $17.4 billion of money that was NOT appropriated for this purpose down a hole (and yes, I think the sudden failure of the Detroit Three is a bad thing to be avoided, but the whole managed bankruptcy thing sounded like a less bad option to me), and the only people who disagree with what he did is members of his party, and they're too loyal to get outraged about it. The Democrats love this, so they won't have a critical word to say.

And I'm too sick and eager to go home and hit the sack to get into it. Again, I recommend the Will column coming up on Sunday — he gives him both barrels.

DeMint’s right about Bush bailout

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Just saw this release from Jim DeMint about Bush's unilateral $17.4 billion bailout of Detroit:

“This decision is
disappointing. While the bailout may provide a short-term boost to three
companies, it will not force them to fundamentally improve their operations and
become competitive in the long-term. This decision, I am sad to say, runs
counter the interests of American taxpayers, American consumers and the American
auto industry,” said Senator DeMint.

“I also believe this action is
unconstitutional. The Executive Branch must have the consent of Congress to
appropriate taxpayer funds. Yet the bailout legislation passed earlier this year
does not permit the Administration to use taxpayer money in this way, and
Congress rejected the auto bailout when it was brought up for a vote last
week.”…

The senator and I are not on the same page when it comes to other "bailouts" — we definitely disagree about the Obama infrastructure thing — but we're on the same side on this one. All of his libertarian populist rhetoric aside, this IS a constitutionally objectionable action. As I wrote in this editorial earlier this week, the president "takes too much upon himself."

And the thing is, nobody's going to stop the president from doing this — certainly not the Congress. George Will will have an interesting piece about that on our Sunday pages.

Some actual GOOD news about the U.S. auto industry

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I'm not up to posting a lot of commentary on it, but I didn't want to let the day pass without noting this positive development, from an Energy Party point of view:

Fourteen U.S. technology companies are joining forces and seeking $1
billion in federal aid to build a plant to make advanced batteries for
electric cars, in a bid to catch up to Asian rivals that are far ahead
of the U.S.

The effort, the latest pitch from corporate America to inject
federal dollars into a project, is similar to an alliance that two
decades ago helped the U.S. computer-chip industry restore its
competitiveness. Participants include 3M Corp. and Johnson Controls Inc.

Many experts believe battery technology and manufacturing capacity
could become as strategically important as oil is today. Auto makers,
including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor
Co., say they plan to roll out plug-in electric cars by 2010. But the
U.S. has limited capacity to make the lithium-ion batteries those cars
will need. Asian producers such as Panasonic Corp. dominate the car-battery field.

About time we got off our duffs on this. That could be a decent thing to spend federal dollars on, rather than more of the same…

Obama’s clean; let’s move on now

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ALL RIGHT, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it is my firm belief that Barack Obama had nothing to do with the (alleged) sordid doings of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
At this point (if you’re sane), you’re saying, of course he didn’t. But you just say that because you’re not a part of the narrow partisan universe of 24/7 TV news and blogs. Unfortunately, the president-elect himself ignores that world at his peril. Hence the statement released Monday from his transition office:

At the direction of the President-elect, a review of Transition staff contacts with Governor Blagojevich and his office has been conducted and completed and is ready for release. That review affirmed the public statements of the President-elect that he had no contact with the governor or his staff, and that the President-elect’s staff was not involved in inappropriate discussions with the governor or his staff over the selection of his successor as US Senator.

    Actually, that’s just the first of three paragraphs in the non-denial denial — a Watergate-era term that actually works better in this very different context: Obama has nothing to deny; there’s no reason for him to have to deny anything; and yet he knows that he must.
    Barack Obama is trying to organize an administration to govern in a time of war and serious economic crisis, and at least a portion of his staff is having to stop everything and investigate, in detail, whether anyone on the team ever had anything to do with that other Illinios Democrat that might in any way reflect badly on the president-elect, and then very carefully deny wrongdoing, being careful not to over-deny.
For instance, if the initial reaction of the transition had been to say “no one associated with Sen. Obama had any conversations with anyone in the governor’s office about the open seat,” they would already have to retrench — it was reported over the weekend that Rahm Emanuel talked with people on the governor’s staff about candidates for the Senate seat who would be pleasing to Mr. Obama. Which is a perfectly natural, innocent thing to do — but if your initial denial had gone too far, you’d be in trouble. You’d be having to retract, and then there would be blood in the water.
    That’s why, according to The New York Times’ Week In Review section Sunday, the Clinton administration veterans on Obama’s team (Mr. Emanuel et al.) “imposed a cone of silence on colleagues so they would not make a remark that could come back to haunt them…. Republicans were ready to pounce, rushing out statements linking Mr. Obama to Mr. Blagojevich within an hour or so after the governor’s arrest was reported. They too knew the script and that any opening must be exploited. Politics in this hyperpartisan age, after all, is the ultimate contact sport.”
    The Times piece was interesting, but it was flawed: It traced the atmosphere of reflexive defensiveness to the Clinton impeachment. The implication is that these Democratic veterans know to what lengths those dastardly Republicans will go to tar their guy. Let me explain the Clinton impeachment: It was related to what the president himself did, and what he said about what he did, in office. It was sordid; it was shameful; it was demeaning, and the president lied to us about it. Got the picture?
    Mr. Obama, by contrast, has done nothing. Nothing that is, except get elected president by running against the very culture of perpetual partisan character assassination, thereby creating a vacancy in the U.S. Senate that some sleazebag proposed (allegedly) to sell.
    The only thing the two incidents have in common is that in both cases, Republicans are poised to gleefully take advantage of the situation, to the Democrats’ detriment. Just as Democrats have used every sharp implement they could get their hands on (and more than a few dull ones) for the past eight years to rip and tear at George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on.
    And I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with it. We’ve got a president-elect who is an honest, decent man who wants to lead us beyond all that. And although I didn’t support him in the election — I liked the other honest, decent guy more — I want to say here and now that I stand ready and willing to follow him to that better place.
    The other day, my colleague Robert Ariail did a cartoon that showed Barack Obama walking across the surface of smelly sewage flowing from a pipe labeled “Chicago Politics.” A bystander remarks, “Walking on it’s one thing… not getting any of it on him — that’s the miracle.” Which is a good cartoon.
    The only problem is, it only makes sense within a context in which we assume that Obama has a problem when he hasn’t even done anything wrong. Ah, but you will say that man is born to sin, and wallows in it if he’s involved in Democratic Chicago politics.
    But here, too, is a difference. I point you to one of the editorials that prompted Mr. Blagojevich to try to get the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune fired. It invited the governor to come in and answer some questions about, among other things, his relationship with developer Tony Rezko. The editorial noted that when Sen. Obama was invited to do the same several months ago at a critical point in his candidacy, “He accepted the invitation and, during 92 minutes of questioning, answered literally every question put to him about his relationship with Tony Rezko…. With that interview session and a meeting at the Sun-Times, Obama largely put the Rezko issue behind him.”
    And, they could have added, it helped earn him The Tribune’s endorsement, its first for a Democrat for president in its 161-year history. The editors were able to tell the difference between an honest man and a crook.
    So can I. And since I see no reason whatsoever to doubt that Barack Obama is completely clean on this, I’d like to see him and his team spend their time on something more productive than this nonsense, from here on out.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Blagojevich: Who’d have voted for this guy?

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From the moment he intruded upon the national awareness last week, Rod Blagojevich has prompted a sort of Monty Python response. Whenever I see him — and I see him too often — I think, "How’d you get to be governor, then? I didn’t vote for ya…"

Those of you who are literal-minded are thinking, "Of course you didn’t vote for him; you don’t live in Illinois," but don’t spoil my fun. What I’m saying is that when I look upon this guy, I am as mystified by the radical peasants in the mud contemplating the king: I can’t imagine anyone voting for him, so I imagine he must have come into office in some bizarre manner involved strange women distributing scimitars or some such. A "farcical aquatic ceremony" seems more likely than his winning an election.

This is a first-impression thing for me. I look at the guy, and I think, "Yeah, I believe he did all that stuff they’re saying he did." And that’s saying something, because what they say he did is probably a national record-setter for being simultaneously crooked, brazen and stupid all at the same time.

But I look at this guy, and I think, yeah, I can see him doing all that. I don’t even have to see video, or hear his voice. A still photograph is enough.

And what gets me is that he has apparently always looked just like this. So I find myself wondering, who would have voted for a guy who looks like this guy? I mean, look at him — he just drips sleaze.

The only explanation I can imagine is that whoever he was running against looked worse. But if that’s the case, I don’t want to see the person he beat.

Blinded by ideology

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Just to show you the difference from an UnParty approach and an ideological one, take a look at The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the Detroit bailout, and compare it to ours.

Both of us are against the bailout. So we agree, right? Not quite. It seems that the one thing that bugs the WSJ the most about the deal is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it might force Detroit to make sensible cars for a change. And that, to the libertarian extremists at the Journal, would be like taking the country to Room 101 — in other words, it would be the worst thing in the world:

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that the real goal of Democrats isn’t to save jobs per se, but to tell Detroit what cars to make and how to make them. The goal is to turn GM and the rest into Big Green Machines that will stop making SUVs and trucks and start making small cars that run on something other than carbon fuel. If consumers don’t want to drive them, well, the next step will be to impose subsidies or penalties and taxes to coerce them to do so. Giving the federal government an equity stake could also lead to protectionism, as the politicians attempt to shield Detroit’s mismanaged assets from competition by citing the interests of the UAW, the environment, or some other "social" good that has nothing to do with making cars Americans will want to drive.

Here’s what’s wrong with that — or one of the things wrong with it: As I’ve made clear, I’m against the bailout. But if there IS a bailout, provisions requiring Detroit to build cars that move us toward energy independence and maybe, just maybe, reduce greenhouse gases would be a GOOD thing about deal, not a bad one.

Moreover, if we the taxpayers are putting up the money — which, we shouldn’t, but if we are — we have EVERY RIGHT in the universe to demand that Detroit make whatever kinds cars we demand. If we want them all to be purple and green two-tone three-wheelers that run on moonbeams, that by God is the kind of cars the recipients of OUR money ought to get. If the market demands some other kind of car, then the car companies that aren’t taking our frickin’ money can make them.

Of course, I also believe — as the founder of the Energy Party — that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with making it illegal to sell those idiotic land yachts that Americans have been driving for the past decade or so. SUVs are contrary to the national interest — strategically and environmentally — and I am utterly unmoved by anyone’s argument that they should be allowed to help fund the next bin Laden to come out of Saudi Arabia’s madrassas just because — and this infantile "reason" is offensive to me in the extreme — they WANT to.

Of course, the God-given right to fund petrodictators — helping Mahmoud buy the Bomb, for instance — while at the same time destroying the planet, for no better reason than some moronic desire to loom over the rest of traffic in a vehicle that can carry 8 times as many people as it ever actually carries, is of SUPREME IMPORTANCE to the editors of the WSJ. Nothing is more sacred. One gets the impression that if someone came up with a foolproof plan to capture bin Laden, neutralize the Taliban, stabilize Pakistan, turn our economy around 180 degrees, end man-made global climate change and make everyone in America a millionaire (without the currency losing value, mind you), the WSJ would be against it if it also included a requirement that CAFE standards rise.

Detroit bailout editorial

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Here’s the editorial I wrote for today’s paper about the Detroit bailout deal Congress and the White House have been working away on so busily this week:

The more we hear,
the worse Detroit
bailout sounds

CONGRESS IN RECENT days has made two things plain with regard to the Detroit Three automakers (still known as the “Big Three,” although they no longer dominate the marketplace):

• It is determined to do something, and to do it right away.
• It doesn’t really know what to do.

A couple of days ago, the plan seemed simple enough: Give automakers $15 billion or so — instead of the $34 billion they’d asked for — just to delay the inevitable until March. That approach was at least plainly and obviously unappealing. Essentially, we’d be throwing $15 billion into a hole, and accomplishing nothing other than kicking the can down the road.

In the last couple of days, as Democrats negotiate with the White House to try to shape a deal that enough Senate Republicans will vote for — realizing that some Republicans will never go for it — the “plan” has gotten more complicated. Note that we put “plan” in quotation marks, because this seems a dubious application of the word. “Plan” suggests coherence; it implies that we know where we are going. What was shaping up as this editorial was written seemed undeserving of the term.

Oh, but it would all be guided by a “car czar” to be named later — by George W. Bush, who will be out of office next month. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has hinted that the czar would not need to be replaced once Barack Obama is president, thereby leading to speculation that the czar would be someone the president-elect had agreed to, we sorta kinda hope.

Presumably all this would be spelled out more specifically by the time Congress actually votes on it, possibly today (or possibly as hastily as last night; that was unclear as of this writing), but a sober period of reflection before the government takes a huge stake in a collapsing industry seemed not to be part of the “plan.”

Here’s an interesting sidenote: Even as the management at General Motors — management that we are assured by the board would not change, because the board doesn’t think it needs to change — eagerly awaited (temporary) salvation, Ford Motor Co. announced that it would not seek short-term federal aid, because it doesn’t face the same “near-term liquidity issue” as G.M. and Chrysler. That actually makes Ford sound like a better investment than any company that wants a bailout.

We understand that a collapse of the erstwhile Big Three would have a terrible effect on real people and real businesses throughout this country. But we also know — this has been more than amply demonstrated — that the Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers have been locked in a mutual death embrace for some time, operating under contracts that make it impossible to thrive. Meanwhile, we’ve seen foreign carmakers operate here in South Carolina and elsewhere across the South, producing good jobs and weathering the current economic downturn better than the U.S.-based companies.

We wish we were confident that Washington had a coherent vision of how to turn the U.S. auto industry around, making it profitable and putting American automakers back out in the vanguard of innovation, making the cars that we will want (and the planet will need) tomorrow. That would be worth investing in.

But we view with suspicion any deal that spends our money to keep the U.S. auto industry going on its present course, especially when said deal is worked out in a rush between a lame-duck Congress and president.

So when, precisely, do you suppose Inez got cozy with these “teachers’ unions?”

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It’s been a busy day, so I’m just now getting back to that bizarre AP story I read this morning about Inez and the Education secretary job. It said, in part,

Teachers’ unions, an influential segment of the party base, want an
advocate for their members, someone like Obama adviser Linda
Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor, or Inez Tenenbaum,
the former state schools chief in South Carolina.

Reform advocates want someone like New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wants teachers and schools held accountable for the performance of students.

Say WHAT? Inez is the one who led the nation in implementing accountability. And where on Earth did that stuff about "teachers’ unions" come from?

Something I meant to mention in my Sunday column, but it was just too complicated to get into, was the fact that it’s hard, if not impossible, to place Inez in the simplistic terms that David Brooks used to describe the conversation within the Obama transition over the Education Secretary nomination:

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms…

He went on to suggest that potential education secretaries are being assessed according to where they fall on that spectrum.

Mind you, I’m not accusing Brooks of being simplistic. Rather, the problem is that NATIONALLY, that’s the way the whole issue of public education plays. And it just has nothing to do with Inez’ experience — or anyone else in South Carolina’s experience — of dealing with public education.

That’s because we don’t have a teachers’ union in South Carolina. In case you hadn’t noticed, teachers don’t engage in collective bargaining here, and that’s a GOOD thing. We don’t hold with
it here. Yes, we have an organization affiliated with the organization
that in other places constitutes a union, and that organization does
wield some influence at the State House. But not being a union takes
some intensity out of the conflict we see elsewhere.

This might doom her chances, for a number of reasons. First, she simply lacks experience dealing with unions, which are such a big factor elsewhere. Also, if Brooks is right, the two camps are each determined to have someone who is ONE or the OTHER (fer or agin the unions). But the fact that she doesn’t fit neatly on that scale speaks to another reason why I’d like to see Inez in that job: Maybe she could change the subject from this titanic ideological battle to one of dealing pragmatically with the challenges facing kids in our public schools.

That’s what Inez would bring: The pragmatism that Obama has sought in his nominees up to this point.

Sure, Inez has some experience dealing with entrenchment in the education establishment — she had to overcome a lot of that in implementing the EAA. But it was less fierce than you might find elsewhere. And in any case, she got the job done.

Also — and my colleague Cindi Scoppe has written about this — when folks in other parts of the country talk about "school choice," they mean charter schools as often as not. Well, we have charter schools in South Carolina. This newspaper has supported them from the start. That is NOT the case with the wacky stuff that "choice" advocates push, with out-of-state money, here. Charter schools are about innovation; vouchers and tax credits are about undermining the entire idea of public schools — accelerating the process of middle class abandonment that began with post-integration white flight. (And before you have a stroke and say you’re for vouchers, and you don’t want that, I’m not talking here about YOUR motivation — I’m talking about what the effect would be.)

So the vocabulary doesn’t really translate. What I’d like to see is a South Carolinian in the main national education pulpit changing the conversation, and therefore the vocabulary, to something that matches the reality that we see in our schools here.

Has Inez been a reformer? You betcha, on the grand scale — she’s the one who implemented the Education Accountability Act, which put us out ahead of most of the country on that point (and then came NCLB, which has been really discouraging because it compares how well South Carolina meets its HIGH standards to how well other states meet their LOW standards, and acts as though they’re the same thing).

Was Inez in the vanguard demanding the EAA? No. It was passed before she entered office. But she was the one who implemented it, and got high marks for how well she did it.

Note that of the three main sorts of reform Brooks mentions above — "merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards" — South Carolina is ahead of the pack on numbers two and three, and Inez has had a lot to do with the accountability one.

Merit pay is one of those things that we haven’t done much on, and we should. In fact, that’s one of the reforms we keep trying to push here on the editorial board of The State, along with school district consolidation and giving principals greater flexibility and authority to hire and fire.

But we don’t get much traction. Why? Because of this completely unnecessary, incessant battle over vouchers and tax credits, which consumes all the oxygen available for talking about education policy. The "choice" advocates yell so much, and defenders of public education yell back so much, that you can’t hear anything else. And it’s a shame.

Elected officials such as our governor will give lip service to favoring school district consolidation — and then put no appreciable effort into making it happen. And of course, his out-of-state allies who fund voucher campaigns have NO interest in pushing consolidation, because they have no interest in anything that would actually help public education in South Carolina. They don’t want to make our public schools better; they just want to pay people to abandon them, and the whole strategy depends on portraying the schools as being as bad as possible.

So, bottom line: Inez a reformer? Yes. Inez the candidate of "teachers’ unions?" Where did AP get that? Unfortunately, AP isn’t saying. But somebody at AP sure does seem to like Arne Duncan.

The imperial presidency-elect?

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This letter on today’s page got me to thinking:

New administration may be full of itself

For the past few weeks, I have witnessed our newly elected commander-in-chief and his subordinates on national and local news.

On the podium is a seal that denotes “the office of the president-elect.” Believing I had forgotten much of my ninth-grade civics class, I reread our U.S. Constitution. Described therein were the offices of, requirements for and duties of the president, senators, representatives, et al. Nowhere could I find a definition of the “office of the president-elect.”

How pompous and presumptuous of those so headily and gleefully poised to assume the reins of power. Could be a sign; I don’t know.

JOHN R. CLARK
Hartsville

Obamaseal1
What it got me to thinking was this: This keeps cropping up, and I keep wondering why, because Barack Obama doesn’t strike me as this kind of guy. He is, after all, The Tieless One. These overdone trappings of gonnabe power just don’t seem like him.

Remember how everyone talked about the "Imperial Presidency" during the Nixon administration? Well, who is it on Obama’s team who is so tone-deaf as to want to project an image of an "imperial presidency-elect," or earlier, an imperial candidacy (at right)?

I had noticed the seal, too, and I thought it was pretty weird. But what I don’t know is, whose idea is this? Why does this keep happening? And why doesn’t Obama put a stop to it?

At least we don’t have to worry about Sanford doing things the CHICAGO way…

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After more than three decades in this business, you can get sort of jaded. You hear that the governor of Illinois is arrested and charged with trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, and you think, here we go again. What’s new in the world? Hey, I’ve seen gubernatorial corruption. I was there in Nashville in January 2009 when they swore in Lamar Alexander several days early because Gov. Ray Blanton was expected to turn a bunch of prisoners loose in his last days in office.

And hey, this is Illinois we’re talking about, so what do you expect? They’re doing politics the Chicago way.

But then I saw that, among the nefarious things this Blagojevich was about to do is blackmail the troubled Chicago Tribune into firing the entire editorial board as the price of getting state aid. At that point I thought, now he’s gone to meddling! I mean, there oughta be a law, right? Fortunately, there is…

I’m still not sure exactly what happened. The NYT said:

The authorities also say Mr. Blagojevich threatened to withhold state assistance from the Tribune Company,
the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, which filed
for bankruptcy on Monday. According to the authorities, Mr. Blagojevich
wanted members of the Tribune’s editorial board, who had criticized
him, to be fired before he extended any state assistance.

What state aid, I wondered? Here I was thinking that my industry was the only one taking its lumps without asking for any government handouts. The WSJ described the plot differently:

Another incident that came from intercepted conversations involved
the Chicago Tribune. The governor wasn’t pleased with the Tribune’s
coverage of him and its editorial content. According to the government,
the governor threatened to stall the sale of Wrigley Field if the
newspaper failed to fire certain members of the editorial board. Both
the newspaper and Wrigley Field are owned by Tribune Co.

According to Mr. Fitzgerald, the person who was targeted to be fired
is still at the newspaper. He wouldn’t offer specific names.

In a statement, Tribune said the actions of its executives and
advisers working on the Wrigley Field sale "have been appropriate at
all times." The company also said, "No one working for the company or
on its behalf has ever attempted to influence staffing decisions at the
Chicago Tribune or any aspect of the newspaper’s editorial coverage as
a result of conversations with officials in the governor’s
administration."

Apparently, the gov was upset about editorials such as these:

Hey, isn’t that the way a newspaper is supposed to write about its governor?

Anyway, we’ve got nothing to worry about. Aside from the fact that our governor is NOT a crook — and remember, you read it here — our governor doesn’t believe in the gummint getting involved with bailouts anyway, so what kind of leverage could he have if he DID go bad…

By the way, the photo above is of the Illinois gov arriving at da scene of da crime — Tribune Tower — on Monday. In the perp-drive photo below, that’s his (allegedly) naughty face peeping out from behind the cop’s headrest at extreme left.

Blagojevich_corruptio_wart_4

Inez Tenenbaum for Obama’s Cabinet?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
NOW THAT HE’S got his economic and national security teams lined up, President-Elect Obama can turn to the “second-tier” Cabinet positions, such as Secretary of Education.
Normally, I wouldn’t take all that much interest in the Education job. I don’t see education as a proper function of the federal government; it’s a state responsibility. And when the feds have gotten involved in K-12, they’ve generally mucked it up. I’m not a fan of Ronald Reagan, but he did get some things right, and one of them was proposing to do away with the U.S. Department of Education. You’ll notice, however, that after all that talk, he didn’t actually get rid of it. So the department is there, and somebody is going to run it.
That being the case, I hope the somebody Barack Obama chooses is our own Inez Tenenbaum. At this point you’re thinking two things: First, “Does she really have a shot at that?” I don’t know. There are a lot of lists, short and long, floating around, and she’s on some and not on others. The Associated Press had her on a short list of five names (which also included Colin Powell) at the end of November, but when they moved the same list on Thursday, she wasn’t on it (nor was Gen. Powell). On the same day, MSNBC posted a long list on its Web site that included her (and Gen. Powell). Other names regularly mentioned include Arne Duncan, who runs Chicago public schools, and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
Inez (disclosure here — I call her Inez because her husband, Samuel, is a friend) doesn’t make it on David Brooks’ short list in his column on the facing page. But we’ll see.
Now for the second thing you’re thinking, especially if you’re one of those who buy into the notion that public schools in South Carolina are irredeemable, and anyone who has ever had anything to do with them is tainted. When I mentioned Inez as a contender for the job the other day, someone who should know better said it would be ironic for two Democratic secretaries in a row to be from South Carolina, since our schools struggle so.
No, it wouldn’t. It would be perfectly fitting, especially given Inez Tenenbaum’s record as state superintendent from 1999-2007.
There are achievements that can be quantified, such as South Carolina’s students scoring at or above the national average on nationally recognized standardized tests for the first time. Our fourth- and eighth-graders even scored at the very top in math and science on the National Assessment of Education Progress.
But what of the SAT, the favored test of naysayers? During her tenure, our average rose 32 points, the greatest gain of any state where most graduating seniors take the test. No, we didn’t catch up — we just improved faster than anyone.
But what impressed me most about her performance was that she took the situation she had and did the most she could with it. The most dramatic example: her implementation of the Education Accountability Act. The EAA was enacted the year she was elected, pushed by business leaders and a conservative Republican governor, and largely opposed by Democrats and professional educators. She might have dragged her feet, but instead she fully embraced the task of implementing accountability, in spite of institutional resistance.
How did she do on that? The year she left office, Education Week ranked South Carolina No. 1 in the nation for accountability. The research organization Education Trust ranked our state as tied (with Maine) at No. 1 in the rigor of our proficiency standards; The Princeton Review rated our testing system 11th best.
Our state’s leadership on this front ironically became a liability when No Child Left Behind came along. That’s because each state was judged by how well it met its own standards and expectations, and ours were higher than other states’.
So as long as there is a U.S. Department of Education, and especially while NCLB remains law, I want the person in charge of administering it to know the reality here in South Carolina.
But what makes Inez Tenenbaum, and Dick Riley before her, better suited than folks from other parts of the country at addressing the nation’s real K-12 problems? Consider the sheer magnitude of our challenges, based in generations of slavery, Jim Crow and abject poverty. Before the Civil War, our state had more slaves than free people. We integrated our schools 16 years AFTER Brown vs. Board of Education, even though the case started here. The achievement gap for poor and minority students is a national problem, but no one has more experience combating it than Gov. Riley and Inez Tenenbaum.
Inez isn’t talking about her candidacy, or non-candidacy. But she did say some things about Barack Obama and education that I liked hearing.
She’s had time to think about this because she’s one of the experts who helped him draft his education platform (which you can read online, linked from my blog). Rather than talk about the federal government trying to run our schools, she speaks of the historic opportunity Mr. Obama has to lead by example.
She remembers how John Kennedy got kids engaged in physical fitness when she was in school, mainly by talking it up. A president Obama can do the same with parental involvement, parlaying the excitement his election has generated into an ongoing movement. She has been deeply impressed by his own commitment to education, from seizing every opportunity offered in his own life to his involvement in his daughters’ schooling — she heard him, on the campaign bus here in South Carolina, talking to his girls on the phone about every detail of their day at school. He was engaged in the way all parents should be.
Barack Obama, as she describes it, has the potential to lead on education without pushing coercive new laws or creating new bureaucracies.
Now that’s a federal role in education I can get behind.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Paul Krugman vs. Mark Sanford

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Someone brought this to our attention via e-mail. It seems that one of my least favorite syndicated columnists, Paul Krugman, had a few words to say about my least favorite current governor.

Mr. Krugman, you’ll recall, won the Nobel Prize for economics this year. My beef with him is that he doesn’t stick to economics, and his political commentary reads like something written by a member of the College Democrats, it’s so sophomorically partisan. But note that in THIS case, he is talking about what he knows — economics. (Now watch — Lee will ‘splain to us that he’s the economics expert, and the guy who just won the Nobel for it doesn’t know squat.)

This is from the MSNBC program "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" on Tuesday:

GREGORY: To this point, Paul, this is Governor Mark Sanford in the course of the meeting today from South Carolina, taking on this idea of the efficacy of a stimulus package. Listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. MARK SANFORD (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: We’ve been told for a long number of months that this stimulus, that stimulus, this stimulus, that stimulus would opportunity the economy around, and it hasn’t. The ultimate stimulus package for the United States of America is the entrepreneur with a dream working on the project of tomorrow. The ultimate stimulus package is, again, that market-based economy, rather than a political economy wherein people come as simple plaintiffs to Washington, D.C., for yet more money.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: Paul, reaction to that?

KRUGMAN: You know, that’s catastrophic. If that become the way the decisions are made, that’s real know-nothing economics. That’s just saying, oh, you know, we’re going to-the reason that this market-based-total faith in the free market didn’t work is that we didn’t do it enough. We have a lot of experience here. We have the 1930s. We have Japan in the ’90s. And we do know that government spending helps when you’re in a big problem-when you’re in a deep slump of this kind. It’s, in fact, about the only thing we have to keep us from being in something that would look more like the Great Depression than we want to contemplate. This is a time that the private sector is pulling back. The private sector is pulling back because consumers are nervous, because the financial system is a mess. There’s a huge hole in the economy. Government has to fill it, or we’re going to look at double-digit unemployment.

Governor working his (national) constituency

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From time to time I mention the constituencies that our governor cultivates with a success that stands in sharp contrast to his inability (and/or unwillingness) to get anything done working with elected officials of his own party here in South Carolina. So you regular readers know what starry-eyed fans he has among the Club for Growth and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.

Between them, those two did all they could to construct an alternative universe in which Mark Sanford was seen as a viable second banana on the national ticket this year. Cato

But I have been remiss in failing to note that there’s another group out there that is a natural part of the constituency that our governor continues to cultivate: The Cato Institute, of course.

Guess where that libertarian think tank held its annual retreat? And guess who spoke to them, and got his picture featured as the dominant art on the organization’s most recent slick newsletter? You guessed it! Y’all are so smart!

Oh, as long as I’m keeping y’all up with the governor’s doings on the national front — and you’ll notice that he seems to be devoting a lot of energy to heading the Republican Governor’s Association, and writing for the WSJ, and speaking to Cato, and generally keeping his name out there (and quick, name three things he’s done for SC in the past month, or even ONE thing other than complaining about Mack Whittle, while he’s been doing all this national stuff) — I should give you a link to his latest op-ed piece in the WSJ, saying he does NOT want the federal gummint sending any bailout-style aid to SC.

You say I already TOLD you about that? No, this is ANOTHER piece in the same paper, saying the same thing. The only difference is that this time, he got another governor to sign it.

So that makes two brave boys standing on the burning deck…

Actually, though, I think maybe Gov. Perry deserves the top billing he got on this one. It’s a little better written, the cliches not nearly as shopworn as those in the piece the gov penned all by his lonesome. It’s also different in that it doesn’t engage in naked self-aggrandizement to the extent that the first one did. See if you agree.

Obama and national security: Pragmatism, continuity

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Sorry I haven’t posted today — actually, I DID post something, but it blew up when I hit SAVE, and I’m not about to type it again, so there.

Anyway, I thought I’d put up something that would provide a chance for y’all to discuss Obama’s National Security team. I’ve already expressed my concern about Hillary Clinton, and I don’t have a lot to say about the rest. I like that Robert Gates is staying. I’ve always liked Gates. (See my Nov. 10, 2006, column, "The return of the professional")I thought he was a great pick to rescue our military from the screw-ups of Rumsfeld, and he’s generally lived up to that.

But the Gates choice speaks to a larger issue, which is continuity of policy. Obama spoke of his "pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world." Which speaks to something I like about him, and appreciate. I hoped it would have been like this, and he’s not disappointing me.

Some of y’all who know about my support for our national endeavor in Iraq may have wondered how I could have been so wholehearted about endorsing Obama in the primary last year, given that he stressed so much how he was the one guy who would NOT have gone in there. Well, there’s the issue of whether we should have gone in, and the issue of what to do next. And the next president is about what to do next. And I believe Obama will be sensible and pragmatic about what to do next.

Some of his most ardent supporters are likely to be disappointed by the very things that reassure me about Obama and foreign policy. But personally, I don’t think Obama’s going to blow Iraq just to please them. He’s fortunate that the Surge (which he was wrong to oppose) has produced a situation in which an ordered withdrawal of American troops is actually advisable, and no longer reckless. I think he’ll be careful to do it in a rational manner, according to conditions on the ground. I think he’ll see the things that Tom Friedman sees, and wrote about in his Sunday column:

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from
moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against
pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq.
There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that
a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt
in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is
the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin
drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long
and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also
an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world
in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said
during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi
leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to
sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving
tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull
this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats
could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it.
Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national
security credentials than that.

The really miraculous thing that Friedman notes is a sign that an independent judiciary is emerging in Iraq: The high court came down on a member of parliament for trying to persecute a government official for visiting Israel. This is a startling development, almost miraculous, really. I remember several years back listening to Lindsey Graham talk about how very far Iraq was from developing the institutions that support the rule of law. Graham believed we needed to stay there; I believed we needed to stay there, but contemplating how long it would take for such institutional changes to take hold was extremely discouraging.

Now we’re seeing such encouraging signs as this, which is actually as important as the reduction of violence. As Friedman says, "It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try
to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of
law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for
its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries." That’s why Friedman was for the Iraq War, and it’s why I was, too. But I didn’t think something like this would happen so fast. As you’ll recall from what I wrote the week we invaded, I really didn’t expect us to be talking realistically about withdrawal this early in the process. But now we can — as long as we don’t screw it up. And keeping Gates at Defense is an important way of maintaining the continuity needed to avoid screwing it up.

I realize that doesn’t fit the hopes of those who thought an Obama administration’s policies would be as different from the Bush administration’s as night and day, and Obama’s going to have to do and say some things to keep those people happy, but I suspect he can do that and still chart a wise course. To them, "continuity" is probably a cuss word. But it’s the wise course, and it will be respected abroad. More than that, it’s what will work.

As David Brooks wrote today, in a column headlined "Continuity We Can Believe In:"

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a
series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In
recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and
development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat
organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.

Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short
run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals
improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots
around the world.

He has developed a way of talking about
security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government
and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of
counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to
describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns….

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

Some of you might not be seeing the change you believe in. But I’m already seeing continuity I can believe in.

And here’s the change that we WILL see, and that will matter: I think Obama can sell this policies, and make them work, better than Bush did. He was a lousy salesman. As I wrote about the Surge when I first heard about it, it was the right strategy, but Bush was the wrong guy to have selling it.

Obama’s the right guy. This is going to be interesting, and I hope gratifying, to watch.

The failed hyperbole of the past eight years (column version)

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
QUICK, WHO said this?

“Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power.”

I’ll give you some hints:

A. Oliver Stone
B. MoveOn.org
C. An overexcited intern at the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee
D. The New York Times

The answer is “D.” Yes, I’m sorry to say that overwrought purple prose was the lead sentence last week in the lead Sunday editorial of the paper I was so recently congratulating for having the good sense to back the Columbia Free Trade Agreement. (And they made so much sense that day.)
Editorial writers — particularly at one of the best papers in the country — are supposed to use words with care and discrimination. Some say I occasionally fail to do that. For instance, some say I was mean, nasty and ugly to Gov. Mark Sanford in my column last week. Go read the letter to the editor from the governor’s press aide that ran in Wednesday’s paper (as always, you will find links to that, and the NYT piece, and any other linkable item mentioned in this column, in the Web version on my blog — and the address for that is below). An excerpt:

This editorial page was once respected as a voice for good government. Now, thanks to Brad’s childish screeds, fewer and fewer people are reading.

And yet… I challenge you go find anything that I said in that column that comes anywhere near the unsupported, gross hyperbole of “watched in horror” or “trampled on the Bill of Rights.”
So does President W. get all excited and whip off a letter to protest to the NYT? I doubt it. Nah, he just spends the week working with Barack Obama as though he were already in office, as though they were co-presidents — which, by the way, is exactly what he should be doing, in this extraordinary economic crisis. (I wonder: If this period of cooperation between the president and president-to-be does not lead to economic miracles, will someone look back on the interregnum in January and denounce “the failed policies of the past eight weeks?”)
Democrats are thrilled that at long last, Bush will no longer be in office. Me, too. He can’t leave soon enough. But I’m even more thrilled that after January, I won’t have to listen to any more semi-deranged yammering about the guy. You know that I never liked him — he’s the guy who did in my guy (remember John McCain?) in the 2000 S.C. primary. But I have never, ever understood why some hate him so much. The Bush haters can’t simply say, “I disagree with Mr. Bush and here’s why.” They have to go way beyond reason in condemning him absolutely in terms that render him utterly illegitimate.
Get a grip, people. It’ll be over soon.
Oh, and for those of you who will say, “But the Times went on to support its statement” — no, it didn’t. Sorry, folks, but his playing fast and loose with federal law regarding wiretapping, to cite one example given, just doesn’t amount to “trampling on the Bill of Rights.” He should have worked from the start to change the law rather than skirting it (as our own Lindsey Graham and others urged), but he did nothing to instill “horror” in a rational person. You “watch in horror” as a gang of thugs rape and murder an old lady — you merely disagree with something so bloodless as monitoring telecommunications without proper authorization.
Not following me? OK, here are some more things one might “watch with horror:” The My Lai massacre. The butchery in Rwanda in the 1990s. Gang-rape and mutilation of women in Darfur. The Hindenburg disaster. The Twin Towers falling on 9/11. The Japanese reducing Pearl Harbor to a smoking ruin. Men, women and children being herded into the Nazi death camps. The Bataan Death March.
Get the idea? To apply those words, “watched with horror” to, for example, “the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act” (you know, a law passed by Congress, which Congress can change at any time) as the Times did is to suck all of the meaning out of those words. Once you use those words to describe imprisoning terrorists (real or imagined) at Guantanamo (the main sin listed in the editorial), they no longer have force. If you watch that “with horror,” what words do you use to describe the fire-bombing of Dresden?
People should not fling words about so carelessly. As a professional flinger of words, I know.
Now I’ll fling a few more for you Democrats who are watching with horror as I “defend” the outgoing president (when what I’m really doing is defending the language): Folks, settle down. I get it; you don’t like the guy. You like Barack Obama. Well, so do I (he was, after all, my second choice for president). I expect that I, too, will prefer an Obama administration to the past eight years. He’s off to a good start.
But before we say goodbye to this era, let’s resolve in the future to do what Sen. Obama does so well — speak with sanity and moderation, and mean what we say.

Read the Times piece and more at thestate.com/bradsblog/ .

GOP’s in worse trouble than you thought

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There is a tiresome sameness to the reaction of Republicans to this year’s elections. And this piece by Katon Dawson on Politico is an excellent example of what I’m talking about, replete with the same cliches about "courage of convictions" and "walking the walk" that brought the GOP to this pass.

The irony is that after admitting what should be obvious, that the GOP is "in need of new ideas, new
messengers and a new focus in order to move forward as a party," Katon falls back on this stuff:

What really cost Republicans at the ballot box during the past two
election cycles was forgetting a lesson many of us learned from our
parents — say what you mean and mean what you say.
… Our elected
officials, candidates and party leaders dutifully repeated the
principles of our party, but once in office, too many abandoned those
principles. Whether it was abandoning our commitment to fiscal
responsibility, turning a blind eye to serious character flaws in some
of our candidates, or providing a handout to big business at the
expense of the American taxpayers, we seemed to lose the courage of our
convictions.

Of course, the context of this piece is Katon’s campaign to be national party chairman, as he states openly. He argues against claims that "Republicans were too conservative, that we’ve become a regional party and that
we’re clinging to an old playbook." He says that speaking from the conservative wing of the party, from its regional heart of South Carolina, and gripping the old playbook tightly to his chest. For instance, he says Republicans must:

Renew our commitment to our Party’s timeless principles…by reconfirming
our commitment to be the party of smaller government, lower taxes, individual
freedom, strong national security, respect for the sanctity of life, traditional
marriage, the importance of family and the exceptionalism of America.

THOSE are the GOP’s "timeless principles?" I bet that would surprise ol’ Abe Lincoln. He’d agree with the exceptionalism thing, and he’d be on board with a strong defense, but that’s about it. He sure wasn’t a small-gummint guy.

The failed hyperbole of the past 8 years

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Quick, who said this?

"Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power."

I’ll give you hints:

A. Oliver Stone
B. MoveOn.org
C. John Kerry, writing for the DSCC
D. The New York Times

Yes, I’m sorry to say that overwrought purple prose is the LEAD SENTENCE in the lead Sunday editorial of the paper I was so recently congratulating for having the good sense to back the Columbia Free Trade Agreement.

You know, I’ve got people over at the governor’s office all ticked off (see tomorrow’s letters to the editor) because of the mean, nasty, ugly things I supposedly said in my Sunday column about the gov, and I challenge to you go find ANYthing that I said that comes anywhere near the unsupported, gross hyperbole of "watched in horror" or "trampled on the Bill of Rights."

So does W. get all excited and whip off a letter to protest to the NYT? I doubt it. Nah, he just swallows his pride and works with Barack Obama as though he were already in office, as though they were co-presidents (which is exactly what he should be doing, under the circumstances). Which makes me wonder: Come January, will someone look back on the Bush/Obama hybrid interregnum and speak of "The failed policies of the past eight weeks?"

Democrats are thrilled that at long last, in January, Bush will no longer be in office. Me, too. But I’m even more thrilled that after January, I won’t have to listen to any more semi-deranged yammering about the guy. You know that I never liked him — he’s the guy who did in MY guy in the 2000 S.C. primary. But I have never, ever understood why some hate him SO much. The Bush haters can’t simply say, "I disagree with Mr. Bush and here’s why." Instead, they have to go way beyond reason in condemning him ABSOLUTELY in terms that render him utterly illegitimate and beyond the pale.

Get a grip, people. It’ll be over soon.

(Oh, and for those of you who will say, "But the NYT went on to explain its outrageous statement," let me say now — I read it. They failed to back up that sentence. Sorry, folks, but his playing fast and loose with FISA, to cite but one example given, just doesn’t amount to "trampling on the Bill of Rights." He should have worked to change the law rather than skirting it, but he did nothing to instill "horror" in a rational person. You "watch in horror" as a gang of thugs rape and murder an old lady — you merely DISAGREE WITH something so bloodless as scanning through telecommunications without proper authorization.)

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