Tag: Bill Clinton

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Four Nights in Cyberspace — the 2020 DNC

My chief fear, as the virtual DNC began on Monday night, was that they didn’t make the mistake of over-producing it. Not for the last time, I found myself wishing it were possible to have a real rough-and-tumble convention.

And, after a needlessly slow start, killing prime time with the kind of desultory welcoming and filler material ordinary conventions start with in the morning or early afternoon, the DNC got going and massed several strong speeches and moments. The point to keep in mind is that in normal convention years the strong stuff starts right away— at 8 p.m. CDT or 9 p.m. EDT.

Having Bernie Sanders on fairly early was a good move toward answering several questions at once. A runner-up in 2020 as he was in 2016, could the Vermont Senator, an

Bernie Sanders

icon of the progressive left, close ranks with the Democrats’ centrist standard-bearer? Though he had made a speech on behalf of Hillary on opening night of the 2016 convention, it seemed not to have cleared away doubters — either in the Clinton ranks or in his own — and the remaining sense of suspicion left a tuft of malaise stuck to the coordinated campaign.

What he said this time around, speaking on a studio stage to the camera, not only sounded fully sincere, it was less a concession than a bona fide endorsement of the candidate who had bested him, Joe Biden. Indeed, it was the first example, of many to come in the convention, of what might be called testimonials from The Friends of Joe Biden — a group of illustrious and/or affecting exemplars who could implicitly be compared to the cronies and satraps of the incumbent President.

Bernie professed himself open to liberals, moderates, and even conservatives — a statement that put him on the same unity-minded platform as Biden — and provoked this thought: Those folks who worried that Sanders could not appeal to a national electorate, what were they thinking? Nobody could have been more obscure than an Independent Senator from Vermont, and look at the national following he had inspired with his attacks on economic inequality! And, the reality of Trump now a given, who could doubt this time that Bernie’s following would come with him in full support of the Democratic ticket?

In juxtaposition to Bernie Sanders on that first night was John Kasich, the moderate former Governor of Ohio who had been in the Republican field of candidates in 2016 and now served to bracket the ticket’s potential from the other side of the political spectrum. (In a sightly jarring and probably unnecessary acknowledgment of his role, Kasich would say he doubted that a President Biden would take any “hard left” turns.)

Michelle Obama was not a matter of right nor left. Nor was the former First Lady an old-fashioned adornment to the patriarchy. She came across as a truth-teller and a judge, sounding this more-in-sadness-than-in-anger note: “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He 

Bennie Thompson

simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

One more notable fact of that and subsequent nights: Mississippi’s venerable African-American congressman Bennie Thompson, sounding agreeably Old-Southern in his role as permanent Convention chair.

How about our girl Raumesh, one of several virtual testifiers on Joe Biden’s behalf to kick off Night Two of the DNC as sequential keynoters. Remember her floor speech from Phiadelphia in 2016? (Hillary, the state Senator from Memphis memorably said, was “a bad sister.” Unfortunately, she was also, arguably, a bad candidate.)

Raumesh Akbari

Raumesh Akbari, in any case, has been sprinkled with stardust twice — deservedly.

And, one thought, lookee at Caroline Kennedy and son Jack Schlossberg in a brief camera turn. Dang, he’s got those looks, almost a double for his late uncle JFK Jr.

A future-tense candidate?

Youth was similarly served by a pro forma nominating speech for Bernie Sanders by New York Congresswoman Aexandria Ocasio Cortez — AOC, as she’s increasingly called in tribute to her out-of-nowhere celebrity as an instant eminence of the left. Her speech was less about Bernie than it was about her wish list for the political future: “… 21st-century social, economic and human rights, including guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages and labor rights for all people in the United States; a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny and homophobia …”

It may have been obligatory to give time at some point to John Kerry, the party’s unsuccessful 2004 nominee — or was that old footage of Edmund Muskie? Not much, in any case, was advanced from the moment. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more effective links to the party’s past. It is impossible not to respect Carter nor to appreciate Clinton, for all the fresh tarnish on the latter’s image.

Caroline Kennedy and Jack Schlossberg

It was nice to see the friendship between Joe Biden and the late GOP maverick John McCain being remembered — not so much in the somewhat exaggerated hope of attracting fall-away Republicans as to remind the audience of Biden’s ability to work across third rails and party lines.

The absolute hero of the evening — both emotionally and ideologically — was the long-term ALS survivor Ady Barkan, who by his courage, perseverance, and very presence embodied the case for a revamping and extension of national heath care — a wider one, alas, than is envisioned (or at least publicly sanctioned) by Biden.

Jill Biden was a delight, and it was revealing to see her widen the domestic profile of her husband a bit further while giving us a preview of her likely presence-to-be on the national scene.

But, by all odds, the high point of Tuesday night was the roller-coaster ride across America in the form of the live roll call for President — the casting of the votes made sequentially from the scene of each of the nation’s 57 states and territories. What a trip, in every sense of the term! A virtue made of necessity — surely to be repeated in less pandemic future times.

Immigration had been touched on as an issue here and there on the Democratic Convention’s first two nights, but it became something more than that on Night Three when the nation was exposed to videos of 11-year-of Estela Juarez, daughter of an ex-Marine and an undocumented Mexican, crying over her mother’s forced deportation, alternating with excerpts of the President snarling about “animals” and his intention to “move ’em out.”

Estela Juarez

Yes, of course, Trump’s defenders would decry this as a trick of editing and would maintain that he was speaking of criminal elements in the illegals among us. Still, the images of Estela and her mother speak for themselves.

The evening would also see the wounded heroine, former California Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of a shooting at point-blank range in the back of the head by a zealot with a gun.

Another survivor of sorts was Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 standard-bearer, whose very presence, as much as her words, was a warning against complacency at the polls. It is pedantry of a sort, even nit-picking, to complain about certain kinds of style points, but here we go: “As the saying goes” is not the right way to introduce a certain famous comment by Ernest Hemingway, which, in its verbatim version, in “A Farewell to Arms,” goes, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Unmentioned by Clinton, as by most alluders to the sentiment, is the next sentence: “But those that will not break it kills.”

One very live and unbroken specimen is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took her turn Wednesday night, as did Elizabeth Warren — both of them properly aggressive and examples of the unprecedented prominence of women in today’s Democratic Party.
At one point viewers were treated to a recitation of legislative accomplishments of Joe Biden, one of which was his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act. This was appropriate, but also a little brazen, in that Biden, as chairman of the Senate committee looking into sexual-harassment complaints of Anita Hill against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, had been regarded as less than properly vigilant.

The night would end with the two biggest moments — a take-no-prisoners address from former president Barack Obama who, from within his customary restrained persona, threw protocol aside and gave it back to his presidential successor, Donald Trump, followed by a This-Is-Your-Life bio of Kamala Harris, and then Harris in the flesh, to accept the vice-presidential nomination.

Obama stood before the cameras as an elder statesman, but you could still sense within him the wunderkind who came from out of nowhere at the 2004 Democratic Convention — the moderate, sensible presence that his political enemies insisted on trying to characterize as a radical Zulu. But Obama’s inner flame never materalized as firebombs; he could provide heat and light but never explosions. So it was this night:

“I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
“But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”

There was no tit-for-tat to this, no understandable human response to the torrent of verbal abuse he has suffered from Trump. It was, more than anything else, a report card and a severe one.

Kamala Harris

And Harris, when she came on stage, was thereby largely enabled to eschew the tradition vice-presidential role of attacker, so as to complete the job of revealing herself to an America where she is still something of an unknown quantity. Smiling, and not without a fair amount of glamor, she described her scrambled ethnic heritage (part Black, part Indian of the East Asian variety), her stroller-view of the Civil Rights revolution, her rise in the legal world as a professional woman, and her simultaneous persona as a stepmother called Mamala. A homey presence altogether, but still a seasoned prosecutor and very much woke Senator. Someone who could plausibly say, “We can do better and deserve so much more.”

At the end of her remarks she was joined on stage by her husband Doug Emhoff, while the head of the ticket, Biden, stood awkwardly with his wife Jill a good 12 feet away. The two groups waved at each other and at the large overhead Jumbo screen showing a Zoom crowd applauding. No hands joined overhead of the two ticket heads, not in this socially distanced time. With the climactic night to come it all left an air of incompleteness. Or of expectation.

By and large, on the eve of the finale, the Democrats had managed to bring off a passable, even an impressive virtual show. Now, on Night 4, it was up to Joe to deliver. His surrogates, as well as his advance history, had created the profile of a likable, sincere and well-meaning presence. His adversary President Trump, had countered with a gaffe-prone bumbling caricature he called Sleepy Joe.

Thursday night would determine which of those personas would finish up on the stage.

Things didn’t begin all that auspiciously with some cheesy jokes in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus tried to riff on Mike Pence’s “foreign-sounding” name and declared, “I’m proud to be a nasty woman.” Functioning as the evening’s M.C., she would continue to be something of an edgy presence, only fitting into the mood of the Convention at the point later on when she spoke of her bout with cancer, thereby becoming one of the victims for whom Joe Biden is being posited as the hope.

Following a child’s reading of the Pledge of Allegiance, the erstwhile Dixie Chicks — now, post-George Floyd, just The Chicks — did the Star-Spanged Banner, and Sister Simone had to be in there somewhere because Senator Chris Combs thanked her by name when Wolf Blitzer of CNN cued him back in after a station break.

Civil rights icon John Lewis, memorialized upon his death two weeks ago, got one more lengthy reprise, and it seemed appropriate. Still, the evening was mounting toward Joe’s climactic moment, and everything else was patently build-up. Deb Haaland, a Native American member of the House from New Mexico, Cory Booker bloviating, Jon Meacham pontificating, Mayor Pete introducing all the old gang from the Democratic primaries who looked like Hollywood Squares as they traded Joe memories from their places on a Zoom screen.

Michael Bloomberg came on to boost the ticket and excoriate Trump. Smooth and fluent, he went far toward erasing the memory of that flat and defensive debate performance back in the winter that doomed his campaign and prepared the way for the revival of Joe’s.

There was a moment that mesmerized many onlookers when young Brayden Harrington, who met Biden in New Hampshire and was embraced there as a fellow stutterer, worked his way bravely through a reminiscence of the event before what he had to know was a national television audience.

Brayden Harrington

Then we got what looked like a sleepover image featuring the nominee’s four granddaughters, all smiles and fond recollections of their eminent senior kinsman. Steph Curry and his wife and two daughters would add their impressions, and the moment of truth got ever nearer as Biden’s two living children, son Hunter and daughter Ashley, prepared to bring him on with their own recollections.

Ashley is the daughter of second wife Jill, and, Hunter — he of Ukraine fame — is the survivor of two family catastrophes: a car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and a daughter and left both sons hospitalized; and the agonizing death from cancer of brother Beau, an ex-Marine war veteran and state Attorney General in Delaware on his way to higher things when the Reaper intervened.

Joe Biden’s all-too-obvious grief over Beau, coupled with the pummeling Hunter had taken from the Trump crowd, had created inevitably a sense of Hunter as a possible black sheep. He did not appear so Thursday night; in his coming-out before a national audience he looked and sounded like Joe’s son in every particular, more so than Beau in many ways. He was sympathetic and sincere about his dad, and Ashley, a bright presence, was another revelation.

And finally, after we got a filmed bio of the nominee’s life and times, the triumphs and tragedies, along with the curriculum vitae details of his long government service, there he was, all by himself, Joe Biden.

At this point, I am going to presume to borrow from a Facebook post by by former colleague and frequent partner on the campaign trail, Chris Davis:

“Joe did good. Between his lifelong stutter and a real affinity for putting his foot in his mouth, oratory never has been his thing. But tonight’s performance reminded me of the turning point in narrative cinema when filmmakers realized movies were fundamentally different than stage plays. This wasn’t the typical convention where viewers at home watched a public speaking event built to ignite a massive live audience. It has been intimate, if sometimes imperfect. One commentator positively described it as an infomercial, and that’s not a terrible comparison. I’ll continue to hold breath every time I see him on a live mic. But tonight Joe did good, and as several folks have pointed out before me, the medium really worked for him.”

Joe Biden

That’s one way of putting it. And the content of Biden’s speech complemented everything else that had been said and done earlier in the convention — in its concern for the powerless and the victims of injustice, its determination to transcend the Charleston debacle and fat-cat white supremacy and achieve at long last something resembling racial equity; in its defense of beleaguered pubic institutions like the Affordable Care
Act and the Postal Service; in its determination to revive our foreign alliances and confront the adversaries that the Trump administration has ignored or coddled; in its simple avowal that government is meant to serve and protect the American people.

“This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment,” Biden said. “This
is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”

And with that the ticket’s two couples were on stage together again, waving at the applause on the Jumbo Zoom screen and, with obvious delight, turning to face the sky auspiciously exploding in fireworks.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Arithmetic Don’t Lie

Former President Bill Clinton is considered to have given former President Barack Obama a serious boost toward re-election at the Democratic National Convention of 2012. That was by means of an elongated  address, both eloquent and something of a vamp, in which Clinton, among other things, credited his fellow Democrat with possessing a sagacity, one lacked by the competing Republicans, in dealing with the ravages of the then-recent economic crash.

Clinton said he could sum up the difference in one word: “Arithmetic!” The line brought down the house, but it was more than good theater. There was a sense in that statement that made it more than a punchline, that in fact summed up one of the fundamental differences between the two major parties in their recurrent debates over fiscal policy, wherein the Republicans talk (but don’t necessarily practice) solvency, while the Democrats prefer to emphasize (not always wisely) financial remedy.  

There came a similar point of epiphany Monday night in the official Democratic response to Republican Governor Bill Lee’s 2020 State of the State address, delivered by state Senate minority leader Jeff Yarbro of Nashville. It is worth quoting at length. In one of his several concessions to the principle of governmental activism, Lee boasted about the $117 million he proposed adding to the salaries of the state’s teachers. “$117 million,” Yarbro mused. “That’s just a little bit more than the $110 million that vouchers are supposed to cost the state once they’re fully implemented. So in a lot of ways, we’re not even sure if we caught up with last year’s losses before we we start filling in the holes.

“So it’s good news. But it’s not clear that we’ve really made the steps that we need to. Tennesseans don’t expect their state government to spend foolishly; they expect us to live within our means. But just imagine how much more we could afford if we weren’t wasting money on private school vouchers. If we weren’t sending almost $1 billion of childcare TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] funds back to the federal government, if we weren’t sending $1 billion a year worth of Medicaid funding  back to the federal government.

“And this is a big deal. The governor announced a lot of initiatives tonight focused on mental health care and substance abuse, and make no mistake about it, some of those ideas are great, ideas that we all support. But here’s the reality: Tennessee  could spend less money to reach more communities and help more people if we just simply join the other 36 states that have expanded Medicaid. That $300 million in initiative could go toward shoring up TennCare, providing new access and safety nets and pilot projects. That’s $300 million that could have gone straight into public education, if we had just expanded.”

Back in 2012, we found Clinton’s point to make good sense, and we find what Yarbro had to say on Monday night just as agreeable. In the jam-packed week of public events we’ve just gone through, we were mightily impressed by Shakira’s rendition of “Hips Don’t Lie” at halftime of the Super Bowl. And Yarbro’s numbers: They don’t lie either. Less sexy, maybe, but profoundly more serious.

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Politics Politics Feature

Rainy Night in Arkansas: Bill Clinton Helps Celebrate the Arkansas Gazette

It was a cold, rainy late-November night — not the kind of evening to tempt you out of doors and certainly not as far away as Little Rock, Arkansas. Not without good reason.

But I had several good reasons to brave the elements and the mileage. The occasion was a banquet celebrating the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Arkansas Gazette, my former newspaper, where I learned all kinds of things about journalism and in whose service I twice served jail time for declining to reveal confidential sources to a grand jury.

It was the newspaper that challenged local tradition and upheld the rule of law when a federal court, in 1957, ordered the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus attempted to defy the court by ordering the state’s National Guard out to deny admission to the brave young men and women who came to be known as the “Little Rock Nine.” President Dwight Eisenhower responded to that by ordering in the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court order.

This was well before my time with the paper, but the effects of that moment would endure. There had been passion, emotion, and conflict in abundance, as the old, segregated order was rent asunder and a new way of life came tentatively into being. And, from day one, the Gazette did its duty as the state’s daily newspaper, the same duty it had been doing since its founding in 1819 as the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi. It took a principled, unwavering stand for obedience to the law in the face of threats, boycotts, and organized hostility.

The Gazette would receive two Pulitzer Prizes for its efforts — one for public service, another for editorials. That was the high side of the thing. The other, more difficult side was that the newspaper earned the everlasting and unforgiving enmity of part of the population, the part that resented the break with the segregationist past.

In years to come, that fact would wear against the Gazette, especially when, in the late 1980s, the paper got into a fight-to-the-finish newspaper war with the Arkansas Democrat, Little Rock’s afternoon daily, which switched roles and became a morning paper in direct competition with the Gazette.

The Democrat won that war. Among other things, it had superior financial resources by virtue of its owners’ extensive holdings and was able to offer its classified ads (at the time the chief source of revenue for newspapers) free of charge. The end came in 1991, with the Democrat purchasing the name “Gazette,” along with other assets, and publishing from that point on as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Fade to 2019, when the D-G‘s publisher, Walter Hussman, conceived the idea — both self-serving and gallant — of the commemorative banquet in honor of the Gazette‘s history. I wanted to contribute to and be a part of that alma mater moment. But there was more to it than that. Hussman’s project was a two-fer: He was staging this overdue moment of reconciliation, this consolidation of newspaper histories, as a prelude of sorts to his ambitious next project.

Faced with the same flattening of circulation and squeeze on advertising revenues that have afflicted print media everywhere — and shrunk their bottom line — Hussman had resolved on an innovative remedy all his own. Henceforth, only the Sunday edition of the Democrat-Gazette will appear as usual on stands throughout the state and in the homes of subscribers. On the other six days, the paper’s contents will be available online — and via the medium of iPads, one of which each subscriber will receive free of charge.

In other words, if you can’t beat the social-media model that is triumphant everywhere, absorb it. If you can’t beat it, then be it. Hussman’s model is designed to let the Democrat-Gazette do that and remain a newspaper, one for the new age. Explaining that wrinkle and imagining out loud the impact of it on the future of newspapering at large was a major aspect of  the evening, and — to get to another important motive for my being there —it was something I wanted my daughter Julia, who accompanied me, to be able to envision as well.

Julia is a journalist, too, having joined me two years back on the staff of Contemporary Media Inc. — which publishes the Flyer, Memphis magazine, and numerous other ventures. We share an office at CMI’s digs at the Cotton Exchange Building, and, as I said (without irony) when she assumed the role of staff writer a year or so back, I fully expect her at some point to become my boss.

Beyond that, I wanted Julia to have the opportunity to encounter for herself  the unique personality who would be keynote speaker at Thursday night’s banquet. That would be native Arkansan William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, and a man, I had assured her, whose phenomenal impact on people had to be experienced first-hand to be understood. Clinton’s presence for the occasion had been arranged by another pivotal figure for the evening, my old friend Ernie Dumas, the great former Gazette political writer and editorialist who would play a major role at the dais, and had been Hussman’s partner in arranging the event and the evening’s general synchrony.

Julia, as I had hoped, got to meet and speak with Clinton before we left, and, before that, we had all heard him deal publicly with the moment.

“Old-fashioned newspapers are important,” he said. “We are at risk today. Not just of losing our newspapers but of losing what we like to take for granted — or I have most of my life — which is that I might agree or disagree with the newspaper’s editorial policy.” Clinton spoke of his erstwhile habit, at the beginning of his political career, of sampling six newspapers each morning, each with a different slant on the news.

“It’s really important to understand that a movement toward authoritarianism all over the world today is driving us to the point where ordinary people may find it impossible to tell fact from fiction or truth from a bald-faced lie. If that happens,  then it will be impossible to sustain meaningful democratic governments.”

Of Hussman’s proposed solution, he said, “You can’t know if this is going to work, but it’s better than doing nothing. We need to be able to have discussions, even arguments with our neighbors based on a received set of facts. And we do know that knowing is better than not knowing.”

Well said and well received. Outside the elements were still raging, and each of us headed back to the security of home or mayhap a motel under the spread of new umbrellas given to us by the host, and of new ideas born of the evening and of the same old, same old everlasting hopes.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

SNAP Program Needs Scalpel, Not Ax

Back in 2008, the administration of Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, asked for and got a waiver on enforcement of the strict work requirements imposed on recipients of federal food assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It was a sensible decision; the state, like much of the nation, was hard hit by the recession, and jobs were hard to come by. Temporarily, at least, the restrictions imposed on the genuinely needy in Tennessee could be lifted, though a certain rhetorical bias against them, building ever since the Reagan era, continued to posit the existence of”welfare queens” and the unholy triad of “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The predominant feeling of the nation’s ruling establishment could be summed up this way: “The current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility, and family, trapping generation after generation in dependency.” It wasn’t Republican Reagan who said that, by the way, or even his GOP successor George H.W. Bush. It was “New Democrat” Bill Clinton, apropos his shepherding into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which is still the governing framework for federal aid programs. There had gotten to be a bipartisan consensus of sorts, characterized by Clinton’s famous remark that “the era of Big Government is over.”

It really wasn’t, of course. The size and resources and perks of government simply were progressively redirected to the benefit of folks higher up in the national class system, to the point that spokespersons for the political left — including even the most genuinely revolutionary presidential candidate in modern American history, Bernie Sanders — habitually devote most of their verbal energy to solicitude for the “middle class.”

So, with the economy apparently still on a healing course, it was no great surprise when on Monday the administration of Tennessee’s moderate Republican governor Bill Haslam announced that the time had come to end the waiver and to restore stringent work requirements for SNAP — except for 16 counties still regarded as being in some measure of financial distress.

While professing to be “awaiting more details about how the governor’s workforce requirement policy for food stamps will be implemented,” 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen expressed concern about the effects of the policy shift on Memphis, which, as he noted, has “the highest poverty rate of metro areas with at least one million people.”  

Cohen made bold to suggest, “We need to be making nutrition assistance more available, not less.” Also skeptical was state House Democratic leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley, who said, “I want to make sure that we are not using an axe where a scalpel is needed in weeding out abusers of the system,” and insisted on “a targeted approach that ensures every Tennessean that needs help receives it.”

A cautious approach is certainly called for. The New Republic, in its current issue, surveyed some of the national consequences of overkill in the shift from welfare to workfare: “In 1996, nearly 70 percent of poor families received benefits. Today it’s less than 25 percent,” the periodical found. Further: “Since 1995 the number of Americans living on $2 or less a day has nearly tripled, including some three million children.”  

Something tells us the figures in Tennessee are at least that dreary.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Enter the Prosecutor

In 40 years of covering Washington politics, I have never seen anything like President Trump’s amazing rise to power. I have seen presidents laid low by botched Congressional investigations that lead to special prosecutors. That’s why I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

Spoiler Alert: This political thriller ends with the president’s top aides striking plea bargains with federal prosecutors to reduce prison sentences.

Juan Williams

The U.S. has a rich recent history of special prosecutors. The odds are rising that one more is coming to look into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The dwindling trust in the GOP majority in Congress to conduct such a probe is due to the fading credibility of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican chairman of that panel, Senator Richard Burr, is widely perceived as a Trump acolyte. 

When FBI director James Comey announced shortly before last year’s election that his agents had reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Burr bragged there is “not a separation between me and Donald Trump.”

Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, was slow to bury Burr with a call for a special prosecutor, perhaps seeking to avoid charges that he was politicizing the probe. But on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer made that call. A special prosecutor was necessary, he asserted, to probe “whether the Trump campaign was complicit in working with the Russians to influence the election.”

Now Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Susan Collins, are starting to peel away. Graham has said that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian diplomats, “then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor.”

On cue, last week Sessions had to recuse himself from the FBI’s probes into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia after The Washington Post revealed he met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice last year. Those details seemed to contradict sworn testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

If trust in the Senate probe is weak, then the credibility of any House investigation is even weaker. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) served with Sessions on Trump’s presidential transition team. Nunes was also one of the lawmakers actively recruited by Reince Priebus to counter stories about Trump’s ties to Russia. In a rambling press conference last week, he said he did not want the committee’s investigation to turn into a “witch hunt” and warned of “McCarthyism,” where innocent Americans were “haul[ed] before Congress.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the committee, further diminished trust in any House probe when he said last week that the FBI director refused to share with the committee more than “a fraction of what the FBI knows.”

Last week, we learned that the Trump White House Counsel’s office issued a memo to all White House staff instructing them to preserve all documents related to Russia. If history is a guide, all that is left now is for public pressure to build on the GOP and the special prosecutor to be named.

Here’s a quick look at that history: During the Iran-Contra affair, President Reagan tried to put the scandal behind him by agreeing to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. Walsh indicted several of Reagan’s top aides, including Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger.

During President Clinton’s first term, shady controversies from his time as governor of Arkansas led to the appointment of the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and set the stage for the Monica Lewinsky sex story that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.

President George W. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself from a White House probe. His deputy then appointed an independent special counsel to find out who leaked the name of a CIA agent. That special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, won the conviction of the Vice President’s chief of staff,  Lewis “Scooter” Libby. 

Senator John McCain said that he has “more hope than belief” that the GOP Congress will properly investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. “Have no doubt, what the Russians tried to do to our election could have destroyed democracy,” McCain said.

Julius Caesar feared the Ides of March with good reason. As the middle of the month approaches, President Trump and his GOP supporters will be under fearsome pressure to go along with the naming of a special prosecutor.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Joey Hack’s post, “Questions Raised by Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man'” …

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is that in 1974, Prozac had only just been invented. It wasn’t until years later that it went into wide circulation.

OakTree

He should be wearing a piano key necktie in that photo. And why is Billy Joel brandishing a Telecaster, anyway?

Packrat

I love that moment when he hits that soaring final chorus in “Piano Man,” and dozens of catheters come flying onto the stage.

Mark

Who cares about all the damn metaphors in “Piano Man”? I understood what he was saying. I also remember when Billy and his small group played to a packed house at the old Lafayette’s Music Room at Overton Square in the early 1970s. I listened to it live on FM-100. Billy loved Memphis, and Memphis loved Billy. He became a superstar almost overnight after that show.

Paul Scates

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Another City/Suburban Battle” …

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but did the city not determine that South Cordova was going to lose money for the city immediately after annexing it? I’ve been saying for a while that the annexation strategy is and has been failing.

If you were to do a postmortem on the annexations, I believe you’d find that even the ones that at first were profitable for the city likely are no longer profitable.

The big problem the city has is that the minute it annexes an area, property values in the area drop. So any business case the city did based on the potential tax revenue of the annexed area was wrong if they didn’t assume that the pool of funds would be reduced after annexation. Knowing how most governments operate, I doubt that kind of analysis was ever done on any of the annexations.

GroveReb84

Mark Luttrell: 26%; George Flinn: 11%; Brian Kelsey: 9%; David Kustoff: 8%; Tom Leatherwood: 7%; Steve Basar: 1%; Undecided: 38%.

Given the choice of the above, it’s easy to see why Undecided is winning.

B

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “Medium Cool” …

Maybe the Flyer is too “cool” to educate themselves on Trump’s policies, but you can read them here if you can find time between comparing IPA’s: donaldjtrump.com/positions.

Clyde

Dubya was cool to a certain segment of the country — largely the same segment that loves Trump, and for many of the same reasons. The difference is that many of the people who voted for Dubya but weren’t fond of his cool trusted that his handlers would actually run the country for him. They don’t have the same trust with Trump. They know he’ll surround himself with yes-men and do whatever he damn well pleases, and that’s what scares them.

Hillary Clinton’s cool is 10th-grade math teacher cool — the teacher everybody hates after the first day of class, but toward the end of the year decide she’s all right, and by the time they graduate, remember her quite fondly as one of the best teachers they ever had.

Jeff

Bruce, you’ve gone too far. How dare you insult the noble brotherhood of “Siding Salesmen.”

I prefer to think of Trump as more like the guy who owns a bunch of sleazy and failed businesses and has the audacity to show up uninvited to the party, referring to himself as a “Business Genius, and VERY, very rich to boot.”

Oh … Wait a minute. Never mind.

So maybe we can just call him what he is: the turd in the punch bowl of the 2016 election year. And that’s not cool.

John Shouse

I dunno, I have sat in a bar with John Kerry and voted for him anyway.

CL Mullins

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Trump vs. Sanders? It Could Happen.

Is Donald Trump trying to win my vote? I ask because the Orange One has been making some statements lately that are almost, well, progressive. Most notable was his recent attack on the most holy of Republican shibboleths, that “George W. Bush kept us safe” from terrorism during his presidency.

Trump contended, as have many Democrats and liberals since 2001, that Bush shouldn’t get a pass on the 9/11 attacks, because he was warned repeatedly about Osama bin Laden’s plans to strike the U.S. and ignored them. As Trump put it: “That’s [like saying] the other team scored 19 runs in the first inning, but after that, we played well. I don’t think so.” Zing.

In last Saturday night’s debate, Trump also defended Planned Parenthood, saying that the organization does some “good things for women’s health.” You could almost see the other GOP candidates’ heads explode. Trump is the honey badger candidate. He really doesn’t give a sh*t. And therein lies his power, as the GOP party establishment is discovering, much to its horror. A lot of folks aren’t buying the usual party lines this year.

Things aren’t much different on the Democratic side, as maverick “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders continues to disrupt Hillary Clinton’s second preordained waltz to that party’s nomination. The feisty septuagenarian is winning votes from a coalition of old hippies, social leftists, and perhaps most surprisingly, young people.

But it really isn’t that surprising when you remember that a major plank in Bernie’s platform is free tuition at public universities. This message resonates powerfully for the millions of twenty-somethings who’ve left college with a massive tuition-loan debt hanging over their lives.

It remains to be seen whether Trump and Sanders can sustain momentum through the eight-month slog of primaries ahead, but it’s not unprecedented for a candidate from the far wings of either party to grab the nomination. Barry Goldwater carried the flag for GOP ultra-conservatives in 1964 and got trounced by Lyndon Johnson. The pendulum swung the other way in 1972, as left-wing Democrats threw the nomination to George McGovern, who got destroyed by Richard Nixon. The American electorate usually breaks to the center.

But there could be another dynamic in play. Trump flirted again this week with running as a third-party candidate if the GOP didn’t “treat him fairly.” You don’t have to go too far back in history to see how that development can alter a presidential election: See Ross Perot, circa 1992, or Ralph Nader, circa 2000. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the beneficiaries of those quixotic ego trips.

It’s still possible, of course, that both parties will eventually pick a “safe” candidate, which could lead to another Bush vs. Clinton race. (Please, no.) But it’s also possible that we could get a contest between Sanders and Trump, which would be equal parts mind-boggling, entertaining, and terrifying.

Super Tuesday is only two weeks away. If you want to have a say in the electoral process, please vote. The stakes have seldom been higher. Or weirder.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1408

Hair Today…

It’s like the old saying goes. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. With guns. To steal weaves, wigs, and hair extensions. Last Wednesday, two thieves wearing dark ski masks shot and killed the manager at Bundles of Hair on Millbranch. Bundles of Hair is a “virgin human hair” dealership, and instead of stealing money, the culprits drove off with a box of small, unmarked hairpieces.

The encounter is the latest in a series of deadly hair-related crimes. It comes only a month after 18-year-old Shelby Isaac shot and killed EJ Tate and his pregnant girlfriend Edwina Thomas. Tate ran the company VirginHair4US.com, and bags of human hair valued at up to $200 each have been listed as a possible motive for the homicide. In a follow-up to TV reports about the Bundles of Hair shooting, Commercial Appeal reporter Yolanda Jones noted that thieves have stolen between $12,000 and $15,000 worth of fancy Brazilian weaves from Frayser wig store Beauty and Beyond in the past year. That just seems a lot of trouble and tragedy for something that’s just going to end up tumbling down the sidewalk anyway.

Verbatim

Fly on the Wall is calling for a moratorium on all descriptions of Bill Clinton as America’s first black president since: a) it’s always been a silly thing to say, and b) according to Clinton himself, that honor probably belongs to some other white guy, maybe even George Washington. From Clinton’s recent visit to Memphis: “The other thing I want to make a funny comment about is Steve Cohen’s remark that I was just a stand-in for the first black president. … We learned that unless your ancestors, every one of you, are 100 percent from sub-Saharan Africa, we are all mixed-race people.” The comment earned applause, so take that historical relevance!

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Few Surprises in Memphis Election Filings

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The probable lineups for various races in the forthcoming Memphis city election have been set for so long — most of them long before last week’s filing deadline — that it was interesting indeed to see some surprises develop before the stroke of noon on Thursday.

• There were no real surprises in the mayor’s race. It remains the case that of the 12 candidates who qualified, only four can be considered viable: incumbent Mayor  A C Wharton, Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams. Wharton and Strickland are, at this point, in the first tier all by themselves.

In any case, the four mentioned candidates, by a general consensus, seem to have been settled on as the four contestants in a series of forthcoming forum/debate events, though all mayoral  candidates and candidates in other races, for that matter, have been invited to Thursday night’s Sierra Club environmental forum at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. 

There was a genuine surprise in the council District 2 race, however: Frank Colvett‘s last-minute entry after the unexpected withdrawal of incumbent Bill Boyd presents voters with a likely showdown between party-affiliated entries. Colvett, president of GreenScape in Memphis, a custom design firm, is a longtime Republican activist who has served as state party treasurer and has been an active member of the Northeast Shelby Republican Club. He has already lined up backing from several GOP heavyweights.

His major opposition will probably come from newcomer Rachel Knox, who made a name for herself as an audience participant in Memphis City Council debates, especially on behalf of employees facing reductions in their benefits. Knox seems to have solid backing from Democrats, both grassroot and establishment, and is riding a wave of recent fund-raisers, but District 2 traditionally favors Republicans.

There are three other candidates in the race: Detric Golden, who switched from the mayor’s race; Jim Tomasik, who has run partisan races as both a Republican and a Libertarian, and this time is running on a de-annexationist ticket; and Marti Miller.

• Despite the up-to-the-brink aspect of it, there was no great surprise in the filing-day withdrawal of Justin Ford from the mayor’s race. Virtually from the moment of his first announcement, the youthful Shelby County Commission chairman had deported himself less like a real candidate and more like someone exploring the best way to maximize his name identification without committing himself to the serious effort of a campaign. In the vernacular of sport, Ford never made a football move.

The question is, does Ford’s switch to the race for city court clerk mean that a real race can be expected of him for that office? That race already features quite a few name players. Besides one Thomas Long, son of the incumbent, there are Shep Wilbun, a former City Council member and Juvenile Court clerk who has kept his name active; Wanda Halbert, who is just coming off a relatively long incumbency on the council; and, in what may be the real surprise in this race, Kay Spalding Robilio, who was a Circuit Court judge for a quarter century before resigning from the bench last year.

The clerk’s race is a winner-take-all, so even someone like the relatively unknown William Chism Jr., whose last name — a familiar one in local politics (Democrat Sidney, Republican George) — got him the Democratic nomination last year for Probate Court clerk, can hope for a lottery-like score.

• Did the district attorney general’s office stonewall a request by veteran political figure and twice-convicted felon Joe Cooper to have his citizenship rights restored in time to file for the Super District 9, Position 2 seat? Cooper alleges that is the case, and both the D.A.’s office and the state of Tennessee seem to have corroborated their opposition officially in responses to recent court hearings.

In any case, the D.A.’s office professed not to be able to have an attorney present for a hearing on Cooper’s case before Judge Robert Childers in Circuit Court early last week, and Cooper was forced into the expedient of seeking an injunction in Chancery Court for a stay on the filing deadline that would apparently have applied to all candidates in all races.

At that Thursday hearing, not two hours before the filing deadline, Chancellor Jim Kyle told Cooper that he could not rule on the case unless Cooper had actually filed a petition that had been denied. Subsequently, Cooper paid his filing fee at the Election Commission and submitted a petition that had two signatures, 23 less than the 25 required. It will be up to the Election Commission to rule on its admissibility.

Cooper has been campaigning, one way or another, for months. He had engaged professional consultants and had begun putting up campaign signs. To the question of why, in all this time, he hadn’t bothered to acquire at least 25 signatures on a qualifying petition, he answers to the effect that the state had advised him he could not legally do so before having his rights restored. And, for whatever reason, his court challenge on that point waited until very late in the game, indeed.

Though Cooper was talking of strategies ranging from a crash campaign to present signatures to the Election Commission to the launching of appeals to the state attorney general’s office or to the U.S. Justice Department, he acknowledges that his chances of getting anywhere, at least for this election season, seem remote. 

Meanwhile, state Representative G.A. Hardaway is working on a long-range solution to problems of this sort. Hardaway, who made it clear he was not endorsing Cooper but had made himself available as a potential witness for Cooper in Circuit Court, said he would file legislation in the 2016 General Assembly that would automatically restore a convicted defendant’s citizenship rights upon completion of his sentence, putting the burden of subsequent challenge on the state. Even without Cooper, the Super District 9, Position 2 race will not lack from drama. IBEW union leader Paul Shaffer will have significant support from Democrats, while the well-funded Philip Spinosa can count on solid backing from Republicans. Two former School Board members, Stephanie Gatewood and Kenneth Whalum both have appealed to existing, somewhat diverse constituencies. And the two remaining candidates, Tim Cook, who has some name recognition from previous races, and Lynn Moss, who is running on the same de-annexationist platform as Tomasik in District 2, can hope that lightning will strike in this winner-take-all race, which as an at-large position, has no runoff.

Other city races will be briefly previewed next week.

Two memorial events highlighted the weekend. On Saturday, former President Bill Clinton delivered a eulogy for Circuit Court Judge D’Army Bailey before a large crowd at Mississippi Boulevard Baptist Church. In his remarks, Clinton paid tribute to Bailey’s chief creation, the National Civil Rights Museum, as an institution whose power would never die.

Clinton concluded with these words: “This man was moving all his life. … He moved. To the very end he moved. And God rest his soul.”

A smaller ceremony was held Saturday at the chapel of Elmwood Cemetery for Pierre Kimsey, producer of several well-watched public affairs programs at WKNO-TV, including Behind the Headlines. One of the features of that event was the showing of several Emmy-winning feature shorts produced and directed by Kimsey.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Presidency for Sale

Gerald Ford was very briefly vice president of the United States and, following the resignation of Richard Nixon, somewhat less briefly president of the United States. He was an affable fellow, strangely guileless and yet a groundbreaker at what now gets little recognition: He was the first ex-president to sell the presidency.

Within a year of leaving office (1977), Ford had earned something like $1 million. He sat on corporate boards (20th Century Fox, for instance) and made paid speeches. He was available for conventions, meetings, and, I was told, the opening of a shopping center. A modest man of once-modest means, he soon had a home near Palm Springs and another one near Vail, where he liked to ski.

The shocking thing is how not shocking any of this now is — although Bill Clinton might be shocked at how little Ford made. Once upon a time, presidents left office and led monkish lives. They were not expected to accept outside income — except for book royalties, of course — and virtually none of them did. (Calvin Coolidge wrote a newspaper column, no way to get rich.)

Until 1958, former presidents did not even get a pension. (It’s now a bit more than $200,000 annually.) That changed when Congress took pity on Harry Truman and awarded him and Herbert Hoover pensions and funds for staff. Dwight Eisenhower left the White House with a nice nest egg. He had made a small fortune with his World War II memoir, Crusade in Europe, for which the government gave him a sweetheart tax deal.

John Kennedy followed Ike into the White House, and he, in turn, was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson. LBJ might have been a man of elastic morality, but he pretty much kept to his ranch, wrote the required memoir, and abjured buckraking.

Richard Nixon wrote books and sold a TV interview to David Frost, but paid speeches were not his thing.

Then came Ford, and everything changed. Skipping Jimmy Carter, who adhered to the Old Way, Ronald Reagan picked up where Ford left off. He made two speeches in Japan for $2 million. George H.W. Bush also gave paid speeches, but no one has raked it in quite like Bill Clinton and, of course, Hillary Clinton. The figures are astounding, virtual GDPs of small nations, some of which have given one Clinton or another a dictator’s ransom to say a few words.

A Nigerian newspaper group paid Bill Clinton $700,000 for a single speech. I’m sure it did wonders for circulation. The amounts for the Clintons are impressive indeed. Bill Clinton reported being paid more than $104 million from 2001 through 2012, just for speeches. He has become a very wealthy man, and I suppose I should say more power to him.

But while the numbers are astonishing, they are also troubling. Unless money ain’t money no more, someone is buying and someone is selling. The question is: What? Mostly, I would think, bragging rights. The nice people at Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase did not pay to hear Hillary Clinton because they were getting privileged information. (It’s rare that anyone gets any information at all out of her.) What they were buying was proximity, the chance to take a selfie with her. These are groupies in Guccis, and they go off confiding to others what Clinton has confided to them — which is what was in the morning newspapers anyway. It would be cheaper to buy the paper.

There is nothing illegal in any of this. But it is troubling. The figures are so huge that one can speculate that a future president might curry favor with the awesome rich as a way of ensuring a voluptuous retirement. I mean, why make enemies out of people who will gladly pay you to say nothing much — and fly you on a private jet just to say it? It’s a nice life.

Jerry Ford also got on the boards of Shearson/American Express, Beneficial Corporation of New Jersey, and other companies and soon became rich. I suspect no one hired him for his expertise or his business acumen, asking him about interest-rate swaps, buybacks, or, in 20th Century Fox’s case, whether to open a movie in the summer or wait for the Christmas crowd. He sold what they were buying, which was the prestige of the presidency. As a result, it has less and less.