Excuse Me??

That whole “alternate universe” thing just keeps getting more bizarre.

Sandy Rios, formerly of Concerned Women for America, is now the host of a radio talk show for the American Family Association. Both organizations have a decidedly different slant on reality, but as Ed Brayton notes in a recent post from “Dispatches from the Culture Wars,”  Ms. Rios seems to have forgotten about two entire wars that George W. Bush launched:

“The problem with Islam, and we know this Bill, I would like to say, in fact I was going to write this article and I’ll just spill the beans on the air and that is they keep talking about what George Bush left this president and they’re talking about the horrible economy and what a mess he left and they haven’t been able to even turn it around in four years because it’s horrendous. But I’ll tell you what else he left them; he left them peace, he left them peace for ten years. And now that’s going ragged because we have been operating under Obama’s policies for the last four years and we are reaping the bitter fruits of chaos not only in the Middle East but in the world at large because we have not been dealing with them with strength.”

Until I read this, my favorite “excuse me” moment–not that it was easy to choose just one–was the line from a Mourdock ad that says something to the effect that “Joe Donnelly has been in Washington for eight years, and during that time the deficit rose by trillions of dollars.” I’ve lived in Indianapolis for over fifty years, and during that time the murder rate has increased–that hardly means I’m responsible. There are, of course, plenty of other inane and stupid political spots running–this bit of idiocy had lots of competition.

I can’t decide whether the politicians and pundits saying these things are unbelievably ignorant–or whether they just think we are.

And if it’s the latter…..dear lord, what if they’re right?

I am really, really ready for this election to be over.

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The Ethics Challenge

The Indianapolis Star actually engaged in journalism yesterday, and the result wasn’t comforting: a lengthy story about DCS director and former Juvenile Court Judge James Payne. Payne abused his position and fought the professionals in his own agency in a case involving his grandchildren.

You can read the details in the Star, which devoted significant space to the story.

My question isn’t so much about the sordid accusations and depressing details of the Payne son’s divorce and custody battle. It is bemusement over the elder Payne’s indignant refusal to recognize his own ethical transgression. When I was in law school–and the Judge and I are roughly the same age–there was a mandatory course in legal ethics. Conflicts of interest and abuses of power were central to that course. But even if the content of law school classes has faded, the Judge has always presented himself as a deeply religious man; he has worn his Christianity on his sleeve. Isn’t there something about “do unto others” that might have alerted him to the impropriety of his behavior?

Governor Daniels’ office was quick to distance itself from the Judge, protesting a complete unawareness of his inappropriate involvement in the case involving his own grandchildren. I believe the Governor–after all, he has been unaware of half-billion dollar “errors” in his administration, too. But the Governor has a history of turning a blind eye toward behaviors that raise ethical questions–notably, hiring a well-connected law firm to represent the state in the IBM lawsuit. That firm represents ACS–yes, the same ACS that made out like a bandit in the deal to manage Indianapolis’ parking meters.

ACS was IBM’s partner in the huge contract to manage Indiana’s welfare eligibility operations, and (unlike IBM) wasn’t terminated when the problems with that privatization effort became too embarrassing to ignore. When reporters raised questions about the propriety of hiring ACS’ lawyers to sue its former partner, the firm defended itself by pointing out that it had disclosed its conflicts–in a letter that took seven pages to detail them. (Maybe I’m dense, but I’ve never understood why disclosing an impropriety makes it go away.)

It was all very cozy. All in the family, you might say.

The real lesson here, I suppose, is that we can’t depend upon any administration to police itself in order to avoid self-serving behaviors. We need watchdogs–real newspapers to report on our elected and appointed officials. It was nice to see the Star acting like a real newspaper for a change.

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Out of the Mouths of Pundits

Peggy Noonan had a column a day or so ago in the Wall Street Journal in which she methodically detailed the ineptitude of the Romney campaign, and mused about what it might take to get that effort back on track. Much of what she had to say was familiar, conventional campaign wisdom to those of us who’ve spent lots of time in and around political contests, but it was her next-to-last paragraph that really struck me. Noonan wrote:

A campaign is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: victory.

That is demonstrably true–and not just true about political campaigns, but about the country’s political and social life. That said, it is a truth that has become, more or less explicitly, the hotly contested framework of this Presidential race.

Although the GOP took the President’s “you didn’t build that” remark out of context, Romney and the Republicans have made disagreement with what he actually did say the central theme of their message.

The President (and Elizabeth Warren, and others running for office this cycle) insist that “we are all in this together,” that citizens depend upon each other and our common institutions in myriad ways, large and small. The businessperson who succeeds deserves respect and admiration for his diligence and enterprise, but we also need to recognize the enabling role played by government: Mr. Successful ships his goods on roads provided by the taxpayer; he depends for security on police and firefighters supported by our taxes; he hires workers trained in our public schools. Ms. Businessperson sells those goods in markets that would not exist but for a legal and economic infrastructure that creates the rules and stability without  which people do not have the confidence–or often the wherewithal–to consume. (People in third world countries are not inherently less entrepreneurial, but even if they create a better mousetrap, there are few people able to buy it.)

Recognizing the importance of social infrastructure does not diminish the value of success or hard work, as the Romney campaign has charged. To the contrary, it is the refusal to recognize our essential interconnectedness and interdependence that is not only arrogant, but dangerous and short-sighted.

The GOP’s chosen message has been “it’s all about us, the job creators. There are makers and takers, and we are the makers. And we did it all by ourselves.”

The Democratic message this cycle (with apologies to Ms. Noonan) has been “A country is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: a fair shake for everyone.”

As the President said at the Democratic Convention, it’s about citizenship.

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Chutzpah

The time-honored personification of “chutzpah”–a yiddish word usually translated as “nerve” or “gall”– is “a guy who kills his mother and father and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.”

I have a better example: Brent Waltz.

Waltz, for those who’ve never heard of him, is the radical Right ideologue who defeated Senate legend Larry Borst in a Republican primary a couple of cycles ago. More recently, he has been in the news for non-ideological reasons: when a business venture he founded went belly-up, it turned out he had failed to make the legally-required payments into the State’s unemployment compensation fund. Whoops! Well, as he explained, these things happen–as a lawmaker, he’d been busy with other, more pressing matters, and well…those pesky legal requirements sort of escaped his notice. (Think he’d be equally nonchalant about Indiana citizens who fail to abide by the rules he is helping to pass at the General Assembly?)

According to a court filing in February, Waltz and his investment company received more than 145,000 from the failed enterprise, while as a result of his “inadvertence,” the workers who lost their jobs when the business closed were unable to collect either the pay they were owed or unemployment benefits.

Now, Waltz and (inexplicably) ISTA have teamed up to promote …wait for it…a new school program in fiscal literacy. I kid you not.

That’s chutzpah.

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Selling Cars and Candidates

When I was in college, I worked one summer for a friend of my father; he owned a Cadillac-Rambler agency (no kidding!), and I was billed as the first female used-car salesman (not “salesperson” back then) in Anderson, Indiana. I soon learned that if I wanted to sell a car, I needed to find out what the buyer wanted and emphasize those features–if someone came in wanting a red car, I talked about what a great shade of red this one had; if they wanted a V-8 engine, I talked about that.

A pretty elementary lesson in marketing.

Unfortunately, that’s the one lesson political candidates at all levels have really learned well.

We like to think of the democratic system as one where candidates and parties offer us competing visions and philosophies, and we choose between them. But all too often, that isn’t what happens. Instead, candidates hide or minimize agendas that they think (usually correctly) voters won’t “buy.” They become stealth candidates of a sort. So we have a Richard Mourdock, a man who won his primary promising to be intransigent, suddenly talking about co-operation and bipartisanship. You have Mike Pence, who has spent his entire time in Congress fighting for far-right culture issues, suddenly voicing concern about  jobs and economic development, and another culture-warrior, Scott Schneider, running ads touting his bona fides as a “family man, and small businessman” who serves the public in the Indiana legislature.

It’s enough to make me sympathize with the folks on the far right who are always complaining that their Republican candidates won’t run a full-throated conservative campaign. That complaint assumes that a campaign run forthrightly on Right issues–defunding Planned Parenthood, passing a “personhood” amendment to outlaw not just abortion but also most birth control, anti-GLBT measures and of course starving government until it’s small enough to drown in Grover Norquist’s bathtub–would be a winner.

Candidates who aren’t entirely delusional recognize that these positions do not reflect the will of the larger electorate, no matter how fervently they are embraced by the True Believers. So they lie. They try to re-invent themselves. They tell us what they think we want to hear. And if they have enough money and good advertising consultants, they often win.

Because selling that car is more important than admitting that it’s maroon, not red. Being elected–achieving some measure of power–trumps running a campaign based upon telling voters the truth.

It’s interesting that so many of these profoundly dishonest campaigns are run by candidates who talk incessantly about the importance of religion, and who want us to know how godly and pious they are. I guess they missed that part about “bearing false witness.”

They’d make great car salesmen.

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