Posts published in “Johnson”

In the early 1970’s voters across the Pacific Northwest – Idaho, Oregon and Washington – could boast, and often did, that the region was home to three of the most accomplished, most interesting and most engaging governors in the country.

Cecil Andrus in Idaho, Tom McCall in Oregon and Dan Evans in Washington – the self-described three amigos – formed a political and personal partnership that hasn’t come close to being replicated in the intervening 50 years.

Ironically, the most conservative Northwest state, Idaho, elected Andrus, a Democrat, in 1970 – the first of his four terms – while the more liberal coastal states elected two progressive Republicans. Washington voters put Evans in the Statehouse in 1964 for the first of three terms, while Oregonians gave McCall the first of his two terms in 1966.

Andrus and Evans defeated incumbents to win the governorship, while McCall defeated a popular Oregon secretary of state. Each man became a vote gathering machine, often defying their own national parties and in the process developed legacies unmatched in the region.

All three were pioneering state-level conservationists. McCall’s landmark efforts to preserve public access to Oregon’s magnificent beaches continues to mean to this day that the public interest in the state’s shoreline is paramount. McCall, like Andrus and Evans, believed not every tree had to be cut or mountainside despoiled in the name of economic progress.

The gruff McCall famously told a television interviewer that Oregon was a special place, too special to be ruined by too much development and too many people. “Come visit us again and again,” McCall said. “This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”

Andrus’s four terms were the bookends for his history making tenure as Secretary of the Interior, a time that saw Jimmy Carter, with encouragement and strategy by Andrus, champion protections of millions of acres of wilderness, wildlife refuges and national parks in the nation’s last frontier, Alaska.

All three governors championed public and higher education and wise economic development. McCall and Andrus were early champions of land use planning. And each man understood the wisdom of joining forces on issues of regional importance, putting aside partisan considerations to give the region greater clout and more ability to attract national attention and money.

Their mutual regard extended so far that Republican McCall came to Boise in 1974 to headline a fundraiser for Idaho’s Democratic governor. When Evans was appointed and then elected to the U.S. Senate after the death of legendary Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Andrus endorsed Evans as the only man big enough to fill Jackson’s shoes. When Andrus made his gubernatorial comeback in 1986, Evans endorsed his Democratic friend with such conviction that the Andrus campaign turned the endorsement into an incredibly effective political ad.

McCall, a terrific writer whose early journalism career included a job at what is now the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, was the first of the amigos to go, dying of cancer in 1983. McCall was a one-of-a-kind character, brash, outspoken, clever with a quip and determined to make change.

As McCall’s biographer Brett Walth has written, “McCall dominated everything around him … because of all he represented in his state.”

Andrus was a similar personality. Quick with a quip and just as quick, as he often said, to “throw an instant fit” when he encountered unfairness or ineptitude. Andrus dominated the politics of his conservative state through three decades because he was the genuine article – tough, empathic, a strategic thinker determined to make a difference while keeping the trust of voters who just plain liked “Cece.”

Andrus’s death in 2017 left only the last amigo, Dan Evans. And now that towering figure has died at 98.

Evans, who demanded in the 1960’s that the hard right wing of his own party, including the John Birch Society, just leave the Republican Party is the last of a breed: the determined individualist, willing to buck party and ideology in the cause of genuine progress.

Long-time Washington journalist Joel Connelly wrote of Evans: “He was a lifelong Republican, part of a now critically endangered species of conservation-minded members of the Grand Old Party. Nowadays, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference has panels debunking Theodore Roosevelt.”

The legacy of the three amigos will not diminish. You’ll continue to see it in the Andrus White Clouds wilderness in central Idaho, the Alpine Lakes in Washington and a dozen other places championed for protection by Evans and the waterfront park in Portland that carries Tom McCall’s name.

It requires courage and vision and action to make our fractured politics work. The get-along, go-along types can win elections by catering to the worst instincts in their party and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the electorate, but in the end these types merely occupy a place on the ballot or hold down a desk. They do little or nothing for democracy and the next generation.

It’s tempting to say that we’ll not soon – or perhaps ever – see the like of Evans, McCall and Andrus again. And ask yourself why?

The answer won’t be found in partisan politics or fealty to a corrupt leader or even the obvious desire for popularity that too often requires trimming and hedging. Leadership of the type Andrus, Evans and McCall demonstrated was all about character – the moral and ethical qualities of any individual.

Scandal never touched any of these men. They kept their word to their voters. They stood for real and important things like clean air and water and the thrill of wide open spaces where humans are but temporary visitors. They built schools, spoke candidly about challenges, demanded excellence of themselves. They behaved honorably.

The Pacific Northwest once had three amigos and we are better, much better for having had them.

 

I’ve long been a fan of the late journalist Tom Wicker, a Washington, D.C., fixture for a quarter century who covered presidents, assassinations, Watergate, even a deadly prison riot. Wicker’s southern charm — he was born in North Carolina — didn’t prevent him from offering sharp, preceptive and critical comments about presidents of both parties.

Wicker was a truth teller, including his quote that I use to assess today’s politicians:

“The first and most fundamental task of the American politician ought to be that of public education — the enlightenment of the electorate he represents, a constituency that in the nature of the case and in the process of its own business will not have the time, opportunity or inclination that he had to inform itself about the realities of an ever more complex and shrinking world.”

That’s the job — enlightenment — and the recent remarkable presidential debate made it, at times painfully obvious, that the Republican Party’s candidate has no such ability and indeed displays precisely the opposite characteristics.

A good deal has been written since Tuesday night about Vice President Kamala Harris’s mastery of former President Donald Trump, almost all of it bad for Trump.

To cite just one example of post-debate analysis, Jeff Greenfield, writing in Politico, said: “Harris made it Trump’s night — in the worst possible way. The campaign armed Harris with a series of trip wires hoping that Trump would be unable to resist setting them off. Not only did Trump take the bait, he brought a couple of his own, which he tripped over again and again. It was as if Lucy showed up with half a dozen footballs for Charlie Brown to kick, and Charlie himself brought a few more for good measure.”

Media analyst Margaret Sullivan noted: “Even over on Fox News, there were some abnormal glimmers of reality, as when Brit Hume allowed that Trump had ‘had a bad night.’ ”

What Harris accomplished on the biggest possible stage was, as Wicker said, the business of enlightenment, reminding a country that seems to suffer short-term memory loss that Trump is all about himself and about as stable as his hairstyle becomes in a windstorm.

Peter Wehner, a former George W. Bush staffer, wrote in The Atlantic that “Trump savaged people he had appointed to his administration who have since broken with him. He repeated his claim that Harris wasn’t Black. And then there was the piece de resistance: Trump spreading the conspiracy theory, weird even by his standards, that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrants are abducting and devouring their neighbors’ pets. ‘They’re eating the dogs!’ he roared. ‘The people that came in — they’re eating the cats!’

And he still couldn’t stop himself. When one of the moderators, ABC’s David Muir, rebutted Trump’s claim, the former president said, ‘I’ve seen people on television! People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food!’ ”

What a ridiculous and easily debunked conspiracy theory that at heart is, not surprisingly for Trump, profoundly racist. The fantastical fable wasn’t a George Wallace-style dog whistle; it was literally the blare of a Klaxon. Trump might as well have been saying, “White people don’t eat dogs, only brown-skinned Haitians eat dogs.”

Racism is at Trump’s core and, sadly, is also the beating heart of much of his appeal to many Americans. Trump is running the most openly racist campaign in recent American history, doubling down on the Obama birther smear he literally peddled for years to now openly questioning Harris’ heritage. How galling it must be for him to be soundly shamed by, of all people, a woman of color.

Harris wisely has refused to take Trump’s racial bait other than to raise eyebrows and a “I can’t believe this stuff” smile as he flayed away with nonsense.

If we could wipe away at least some of America’s profound case of historical amnesia, we might have both candidates rather than just one making the case for turning the page on a too long period of division that too often boils over in rage. In a better world, we would remember the still unfinished business of the Civil Rights Act, passed 60 years ago this summer.

Wicker was an astute observer of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who signed that landmark legislation. Johnson was, as Wicker wrote, “By blood and geography, a Southerner.” Yet, once in power, Johnson bucked his own region and many of his historic allies to become a civil rights champion. He explained why it was so critically important to move the country on from its old, often deadly past. Johnson was not a naturally gifted speaker, but he could tell a story as he did in one of the greatest political speeches I’ve ever read.

Late in his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, an ultra-conservative who opposed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson knew the once solid Democratic South was no longer solid. To try to reach the region that broadly opposed his civil rights efforts, Johnson sent his wife, Lady Bird, on an eight-state, 47-stop train trip from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans where LBJ met her train.

In a speech to a packed crowd at a New Orleans on Oct. 9, 1964, Johnson invoked his own history, imploring the many skeptical Southerners listening to embrace a hopeful, pluralistic America, to cast off the old ways and build a stronger, better country.

“There is work to do, and we can either do it together, united, or we can do it divided, eating on each other.

“Now, the people that would use us and destroy us first divide us,” Johnson said. And “if they divide us, they can make some hay. And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us.”

In winning a historic landslide, Johnson lost Louisiana in 1964. There the old divisions won again.

And the same issues confront us today. The Great Debate this week served one critical mission. It was a rare moment of political of enlightenment. In stark contrast, we are offered a candidate promising more division and another recognizing the work to be done.

 

At this stage of a presidential campaign it can become difficult to keep up with, let alone keep straight the flood of noise and bombast dominating the television screen or interrupting your dinner with one final desperate plea for – pick one or more – money, a vote, a response to a survey, an attack on a candidate …

I’ve come to value the days when presidential candidates campaigned from their front porches, greeting delegations of visitors and largely ignoring the kind of bat crappery that has become the essence of American political campaigns.

Our campaigns don’t really tell us much about the candidates, but they sure tell us a lot about the country, which is why it’s important to find the few nuggets of enlightenment in our political sewage treatment plant of nonsense.

Two bits of current enlightenment seem important with both casting light on fellow Americans who seem willing to embrace, for the third time, the fake everyman from Queens who promises to be a dictator, but only on his first day back in office.

The first ray of enlightenment involves the former Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson, a trust fund man of the people whose present shtick involved serving as a propaganda vehicle for the Butcher of Kiev, Vladimir Putin. (You may recall that Carlson interviewed the great man a while back, an interview that largely consisted of Putin schooling the Swanson TV dinner heir on the fine points of Russian history – Putin style – since the days of the Czars.)

In every conceivable way the interview was embarrassing, particularly if you understand Carlson’s motive for traveling to Moscow to interview a dictator, which was, of course, to simply kiss up to a dictator. And not just any dictator, but one who has – remarkably – grown in favor with many far-right Americans while trying to wipe Ukraine off the map.

Not incidentally, the Justice Department moved this week to shutdown Russian disinformation schemes again designed to effect the November election.

Wow, it really is the Russia thing – again.

Carlson, a featured speaker at the recent Republican National Convention who helped convince Donald Trump to select J.D. Vance as his running mate, has now doubled down on normalizing historical revision.

On a recent podcast Carlson featured a two-hour interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper – “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson said – who declared Winston Churchill the true “villain” of World War II and preposterously claimed that Adolf Hitler really didn’t seek the most gruesome war in human history.

“He didn’t want to fight,” Cooper said of the man who invaded Poland 85 years ago this month, beginning World War II. For good measure Carlson’s “honest” historian threw in a big dose of Holocaust denial, while the Trump whisperer let him talk and talk and talk.

“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda,” said the conservative truth-teller Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming who was run out of the Republican Party for opposing Trump.

But it is actually worse than mere propaganda. It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism.

Moreover, Carlson is the leading media figure in Trump World, a confidante of the former president, who crackpottery seems to know no boundaries. Carlson speaks and the Trump base responds, no matter the level of offensive BS that tumbles out of his microphone.

Yet, when you consider that the party that once celebrated American exceptionalism is now led by a man who avoided military service, trashes military heroes like the late John McCain, sides with Putin and bases his current campaign on the ridiculous notion that America has failed, it somehow follows that the party’s most prominent media figure is Tucker Carlson, crackpot.

But there is more.

Donald Trump’s gross and grossly incorrect 2015 comments about McCain not deserving hero status because he had been captured should have, in any sane world, ended any thought of him in the White House. That did not happen because party leaders tolerated the McCain slander that only grew, as his Marine general chief of staff confirmed, into calling Americans killed in World War I “suckers and losers” and climaxed with Trump questioning the value of the Medal of Honor.

But since Trump World has no bottom, there is always room to go lower as Trump did with his blatant political stunt at Arlington National Cemetery, a photo op designed to give a draft dodger a platform to criticize his opponent for the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Like the authoritarian leader he intends to become, Trump’s campaign ignored laws about not using hollowed Arlington ground for political purposes, and when confronted manhandled a civilian employee of the cemetery attempting to enforce the law. In the process, as the Washington Post detailed, Trump systematically misrepresented his own role in the Afghan departure to the very people who lost loved ones there.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written extensively about Trump’s attitudes toward those who have served their country. “The record is plain,” Goldberg says. “This is the truth of Donald Trump: He has contempt for men and women who serve their country.”

The military men who served under Trump – Generals John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, among others – confirm his unfitness for office.

So here is a nugget of enlightenment at the dark heart of our politics: Conservatives, up and down the Republican Party, have tolerated and embraced a truly unfit and unAmerican individual as their candidate. And most of them will easily shrug off the Carlson holocaust denial, the Hitler revisionism and the Arlington stunt for reasons that I cannot adequately explain.

We are left with this, again from Jeffrey Goldberg.

“If you could count on anything in America, and especially in Republican politics – if you had a list titled ‘Things Republican Candidates Cannot Do’ – I think ‘insulting war heroes’ would be near the top of that list. Our society venerates combat heroes. Trump very often treats them with open contempt. Just think about how he has repeatedly demeaned wounded veterans, demanding that they be kept out of parades, out of his sight. And yet Republicans have nominated him for president three times. I still cannot adequately explain it.”

There is no explaining such nonsense.

 

Steve Symms was a politician ahead of his time. And that is no compliment.

Symms, an Idaho Republican who served in the House of Representatives and the Senate for 20 years, died August 8 at age 86. The former Canyon County fruit farmer was remembered by current Senator James Risch as a “staunch defender of conservative values in Washington, D.C., for the people of Idaho.” Idaho Governor Brad Little, who announced Symms’ death, called him “a true patriot … God bless this fighter for Idaho values.”

There is no question that Symms was a political figure of consequence, and not because of any list of legislative accomplishments — there are none — but because Symms was one of the earliest and most effective practitioners of the so-called “New Right’s” politics of grievance and resentment.

As effective a retail politician as almost anyone in the state’s history, a back-slapper who was quick with a quip, Symms knew how to work a room and charm voters, while often peddling genuine nonsense — or worse.

Beneath his sunny personality beat the heart of a cultural warrior ready at any moment to flay the liberal enemy. Symms’ defeat of four-term Democratic Senator Frank Church in 1980 marked a decisive turning point in Idaho’s political trajectory as well that of the national Republican Party. In many ways, we are living with the politics that Symms and others on the 1970s New Right ushered in.

Symms was a charter member of a group of young, far-right conservatives who came to Congress in the messy years when Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency. In the view of many of these sharp-elbowed conservatives, moderate Gerald Ford, who replaced Nixon, was little more than a RINO (Republican in name only).

When Ford nominated former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as vice president in 1974, Symms opposed the appointment. Rockefeller, Symms said, was evidence “of the rapid movement to the left by the Ford administration.” The choice of Rockefeller was “abrogation of liberty,” Symms said, “what we can expect from the mish-mash of unphilosophical ooze that the two-party system has degenerated into.”

You might think the incessant Republican attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, the IRS or the media are a 21st century phenomenon, but Symms was regularly attacking the same “enemies” 50 years ago.

In 1980, for example, Symms supporters sported bumper stickers reading: “I’m voting for Steve Symms, the Statesman made me do it,” a reference to Idaho’s largest newspaper that had reported extensively – and fairly – on the support Symms received from New Right groups.

It was little noted in Idaho before 1980, but Symms was deeply involved with the founding fathers of the ideological, grievance-obsessed movement that engineered the GOP transformation in the mid-1970s.

“The late Paul Weyrich was the foremost political strategist of the movement,” columnist Stuart Rothenberg has written. “He was joined by people such as Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, televangelist Jerry Falwell and direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, all of whom … wanted to steer the country dramatically to the right.”

Symms, along with North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, Indiana’s Dan Quayle and the only member of this group still in the Senate, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, were darlings of the New Right. Symms attended their trainings, utilized their talking points, sat on their advisory committees and, of course, vacuumed up their campaign money.

You hear echoes of these original New Right warriors in the current assaults on higher education, libraries, climate science and reproductive and voting rights. And that list doesn’t really get to the main feature of the modern GOP – total disdain for basic character and decency.

GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance was born during Symms’s first Senate term, but the generational difference doesn’t mean they aren’t members of the same ideological family.

The political brilliance of people like Weyrich and Viguerie — and the racist Helms — resided in their understanding of how to appeal to “low information voters,” who are, not incidentally, the largest group of Donald Trump followers. These folks display only passing interest in politics and governing, but are mad as hell about immigrants, the “deep state” and “communists.” The New Right’s originalist strategy was to rile up these infrequent voters with dystopian visions of a country going down the toilet because of guys like Frank Church, who, after 24 years of distinguished service, was accused of being “too liberal for Idaho.”

The National Conservative Political Action Committee — Roger Stone was a founder — saw in Symms a vehicle to remake the national party. NCPAC’s landmark — and grossly unfair — attacks on Democratic incumbents in 1980 seem almost quaint by today’s smashmouth political standards. Yet, the histrionic direct mail, distorted television and big lies worked. And they still work.

The issue mix in Symms’ 1980 race against Church included, of course, opposition to abortion, challenging whether “liberal” New York City deserved financial help from Washington, D.C., undermining the treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama and promoting the wholly invented Sagebrush Rebellion, an issue that worked particularly well in Idaho with Symms talking constantly about federal government overreach allegedly destroying the state’s economy.

There is, of course, some irony in Idaho’s governor praising Symms’ support of “conservative values,” not including apparently Symms peddling the entirely fabricated but widely disseminated story that Kitty Dukakis, the wife of the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, had once burned an American flag.

And missing from most Symms obituaries was any reference to why he left the Senate in 1993 after two terms at age 54.

“He duped her, then he dumped her,” editorialized the Twin Falls Times-News after it broke the story in 1991 about Symms campaigning with his wife, Fran, to get reelected in 1986 and then, after being romantically linked to a staff member, filing for divorce.

That interview with the Times-News in June 1991 was the only one Fran Symms gave regarding the divorce and the rumors of her husband’s affair.

“Steve Symms is under fire, not for the divorce, but for being two-faced,” wrote Bill Hall of the Lewiston Tribune. “He has cynically used, not only his wife, but the people of Idaho to whom he has also been legally linked for two decades. They should copy their remedy from him: Divorce him.”

The senator announced his retirement two months later.

This much of Governor Little’s tribute was correct: The Symms who trafficked in smears, was concerned about Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment because of her views on abortion and said that when all else fails, American justice should come from “the cartridge box,” exemplified what surely have become Idaho’s political values.

Steve Symms was a man before his time.

 

Two things have struck me about the recent selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket.

The first was the guy’s resume before politics – high school social studies teacher and football coach, National Guard sergeant major, duck hunter, state college graduate. Walz won a Minnesota congressional delegation cooking contest with his hot dish recipe. If Walz is what he seems to be – and if he’s faking it he’s doing a really great job – he is a remarkably normal American, something increasingly rare in our politics.

[The original version of this column was filed before the Trump campaign attacked Walz’s military record. It’s hard to believe the attacks, or better yet smears – managed by the same guy who “Swift boated” Senator John Kerry in 2004 – will stick to Walz who, after all, spent 24 years in the Guard.]

The second was the obvious joy he brings to politics. Enough to remind you of Hubert Humphrey, another Minnesota vice president. Walz smiles a lot. He laughs. He seems to enjoy the personal interactions of retail politics. He’s the kind of politician who can “work the room,” engaging with total strangers and enjoy it. This, too, has become extremely rare.

I worked for a politician with the same characteristics. His name was Cecil Andrus, and I have always thought he was the most comfortable person in his own skin that I have ever known. Tim Walz reminds me of Cece Andrus, a politician who spent a career overachieving as a Democrat in a very conservative state.

Andrus, the four-term Idaho governor and secretary of the interior, never met a stranger. He loved, absolutely loved, the small personal interactions that can make or break a retail politician. If Andrus walked into a room and spotted a political adversary, someone he had a political difference with, he made a beeline for that person. He’d extend a hand and crack a joke, totally disarming the other person. It was a skill most of us lack, engaging with someone we disagree with.

People still tell me stories about the first time they met Andrus. They remember the details, and while he had a legendary ability to recall names and faces he wasn’t perfect, but most everyone thinks he was.

He could make a joke at his own expense. When was the last time you heard that from our national real estate developer and serial sexual abuser? Or literally anyone in national politics, come to think of it?

Andrus freely appropriated an old joke attributed to the great Arizona Congressman Mo Udall who related walking into an Iowa barber shop in 1976 while campaigning for president. “Good morning, I’m Mo Udall and I’m running for president,” Mo would say. And he would then relate the barber’s reaction: “I know, we were just laughing about that this morning.”

Who doesn’t like a guy who can tell that kind of joke on himself?

After riding a horse in the Eastern Idaho Fair parade, a supporter said to Andrus: “Boy, you got a warm reception.” His replay, “Yup, and some were waving all five fingers.”

The Republican ticket is populated by two angry sourpusses. Donald Trump is a raging insult machine. A man selling darkness. He’s running for one reason: to stay out of jail. His running mate is a shape shifting 40-year-old who reinforces the negative. America is going to hell. Dark skinned people are taking your jobs. Meanness is a virtue. Angry cat ladies are ruining the country.

There are two kinds of political campaigns: campaigns built on anger, grievance and destroying the opponent and campaigns centered on hope and the future.

I suspect Kamala Harris chose the former high school teacher from Nebraska because he doesn’t display any grievance. Like Cece Andrus he isn’t a hater.

J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, went to Yale, made a bundle working as a venture capitalist in California and said he despised Trump before he didn’t. Tim Walz went to Chadron State College, taught school in Alliance, Nebraska – I know that place and it is conservative and rural – and later coached a high school football team to the Minnesota state championship.

What do those who have observed him up close say about Vance? “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told journalist McKay Coppins, who pegs Vance an opportunistic phony. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”

As Aaron Sanderford wrote in the Nebraska Examiner, “Walz coached linebackers and signaled the defense at Alliance High School under coach Jeff Tomlin.”

“Tomlin said he remembers Walz as an amazing coach and social studies teacher. He called Walz ‘an ordinary guy with the extraordinary ability to have a vision for who he is and who he wants to be.’

“He was an exceptional teacher, one of the best I’ve been around,” Tomlin said.

The Republican campaign has only two gears: negative and nasty. It’s not morning in America, it’s a vision of a shithole country, populated by vile people who, as Trump said this week, “want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

That’s preposterous Trumpian BS, a convicted felon and Putin apologist telling the rest of us about law and order. The Republican campaign will continue to disintegrate day-by-day with Trump, if it is possible, growing more and more unhinged.

One reason Walz will be so effective over the next three months is that, again like Andrus, he’s both decent and tough. He can make a joke, as he did while trolling fellow Governor Kristi Noem, she of South Dakota puppy killing fame, and never mention the subject of the jab. Walz posted a photo of his own dog taking a treat and saying “show me you didn’t shoot your dog and dump it in a gravel pit. I’ll go first.” Noem wasn’t mentioned. Everyone knew. Noem, of course, wanted to be Trump’s vice president and, as if to compensate for not making it, immediately labeled Walz “radical.”

Another inviolate rule: Politics is a matter of addition. Tim Walz is additive to the Democratic ticket. We’ll be talking about the high school course he developed on the Holocaust, while Vance is still answering questions about calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”

Hope is additive. Grievance is exhausting. We’ll see soon enough if America wants a future of hope or something much darker.

 

Nine times in American history a sitting vice president has risen to the presidency on the death or, in Richard Nixon’s case, the resignation of a president.

Those nine men represent a cross section of the worst and best of American political history.

Theodore Roosevelt, a rambunctious 42-year old when he became president, clearly fits in the best category. In many ways after succeeding the assassinated William McKinley, Roosevelt transformed the presidency, using the bully pulpit and his well-developed political skills to conserve vast amounts of public land in national forests, parks and wildlife refuges.

Teddy had a vision about America’s role in the world and arguably was a principal architect of the American Century. Roosevelt was a scholar/politician who read and wrote books. He remains a supremely engaging character.

John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur also became president following the death of a president and there is ample reason none of them are on Mt. Rushmore.

Tyler was a southerner who welcomed the Civil War, effectively committing treason after leaving the White House. Fillmore was a non-entity, best forgotten. Johnson was a horrible racist even by the standards of his time.

Arthur, surely you remember Chester Arthur, was a machine politician who may have been the best of this fairly sorry lot. Sympathetic historians have concluded that Arthur tried hard to be competent and failed to get credit for clearing that low bar. One biographer concluded of 21^st president that, “some people just do the best they can in a difficult situation, and sometimes that turns out just fine.”

Calvin Coolidge following Warren Harding, Harry Truman following Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson succeeding John Kennedy and Gerald Ford replacing Nixon have all enjoyed a generally positive historical reassessment.

Coolidge gets graded on the curve in part because Harding, to quote Alice Roosevelt Longworth, “was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” Truman suffered in FDR’s shadow but proved his mettle by staging arguably the greatest presidential comeback in history in 1948. He also recognized Israel, desegregated the armed forces and pushed back against southern segregationists in his own party. Johnson’s record of domestic accomplishment, including the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, compares in impact only to FDR’s. Vietnam was Johnson’s downfall and without it, as has been said, he would have been a great president. That remark caused the eminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith to quip “and except for the mountains Switzerland would be a flat country.”

A new biography of Ford, the accidental vice president, makes a strong case for the man’s decency and common sense. Biographer Richard Norton Smith notes Ford’s decency by remembering that in the last year of his presidency he had the good grace to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a remarkable collection of great Americans: Jesse Owens, Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, Lowell Thomas, General Omar Bradley, Irving Berlin, Martha Graham and historians Will and Ariel Durant.

Texan John Nance Garner, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s three vice presidents, reportedly said of the vice presidency that it “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” But, ol’ Cactus Jack was wrong. Sometimes it’s worth everything, the whole enchilada. (By the way, Garner used a word other than spit.)

Presidents do die in office (or in one case resigns) and the understudy is elevated to the pinnacle.

While we contemplate Donald Trump’s increasingly wrong footed selection of an untested 40-year old former venture capitalist as his running mate it is worth remembering that J.D. Vance could be a heartbeat away from the presidency, while serving with a guy who will be 82 should the country survive him serving out another term.

Vance is being pilloried, and properly so, for what appears to be his voluminous writing and speaking – before become a vice presidential candidate – about gender roles and birthing babies, including his particularly incendiary crack about “childless cat ladies.”

Here’s the full Vance quote: “We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance seems like nothing so much as an apostle of the far right fringe Claremont Institute of cultural studies, represented enthusiastically by Scott Yenor, the Boise State University professor who has effectively argued that professional attainment is lost on women whose real place, were it not for “feminism” and civil rights laws, is barefoot and in the kitchen.

Yenor – Vance, too – has argued for a return to a simpler, and in his view better time when old “stereotypes” – man the breadwinner, woman the mom – were in vogue. Make America 1950 Again.

“The problem is this,” Yenor has written. “We have replaced the old ‘stereotypes’ with new, confused ones. Men are thought to be scum. Independent women are taught to have interests that are difficult to reconcile with men and marriage. Education and careers come first. Overcoming old stereotypes becomes the new stereotype. Marriage is delayed. Childbearing is deferred.”

Vance is about as popular right now as Andrew Johnson was when he replaced Abraham Lincoln, with his post-convention polling numbers worse than any vice presidential candidate ever. The first rule of the vice presidency is, of course, “do no harm.” By that token Vance has failed, and with spectacular speed, and he will soon be compared to whatever man Kamala Harris selects as a running mate.

Harris could stumble with her VP pick. It does happen. George McGovern, for instance, bombed with his pick of Thomas Eagleton in 1972 over concerns that seems all these years later a lot less important than arguing that millions of American women – cat lovers or not – should know their place.

Meanwhile, Trump is busy insulting Black Americans and dismissing the guy he’s running with. “Virtually never has it mattered,” Trump said of his strange pick with a beard Chester Arthur might envy. “Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”

Right. Just ask that famous vice president Sarah Palin.

 

I filed this column on Thursday before President Biden’s Sunday decision to step out of the presidential race, but that incredibly significant event doesn’t change the essential need for the party of Donald Trump to confuse, lie and distort the reality of the last eight years.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

——

“Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity. Over time, a gaslighter’s manipulations can grow more complex and potent, making it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth.” — Psychology Today

———

In the 105 days until American voters elect their next president, we will experience the greatest deluge of political gaslighting in the long history of the republic.

We’ll be told that God spared Donald Trump at his Pennsylvania rally and, by logical extension, God apparently cared nothing for a retired firefighter who died at that same rally trying to protect his family.

We’ll be told the one-time views of JD Vance, Trump’s new running mate — like the views of so many others in his party — have “evolved,” that Vance no longer views the three-time Republican presidential candidate as possibly “America’s Hitler,” and that those who vote for him must be “idiots.”

We’ll be told that the inexcusable, horrendous violence that marked the Trump rally was prompted by Democrats and others who have the courage to highlight the manifest dangers of another Trump term. We can and should thank God that Trump was spared, both for the humanity of that thanksgiving but also because — at least temporarily — the violence that might have been set off has been tempered.

We’ll be asked to forget that it was the three-time Republican candidate for president who called fellow Americans vermin, who pledged to provide retribution to match the grievances of his white Christian nationalist followers, who joked about the vicious attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, with a promise that it would be “wild” and then did nothing when that mob chanted: “Hang Mike Pence.”

We’ll be told to disregard Trump’s 34 felony convictions and his civil liability for sexual assault and defamation of his victim.

We’ll be told that “justice prevailed” when a Trump-appointed judge did everything in her power to delay adjudication of charges that Trump illegally removed top secret documents from the White House and stashed them in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. And when delay was no longer enough, the judge totally dismissed the charges citing justification as flimsy as J. D. Vance’s resume.

We’ll be told the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity — a case almost certainly shielding Trump from any future accountability for January 6 and the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case — was not all that big a deal, just good conservative constitutional rewriting from the bench.

We’ll be told Trump presided over the greatest economy since the beginning of time, that he handled a deadly pandemic and its million victims “beautifully” and that the hundreds of former officials who worked for him and saw him up close and came to consider him unfit are just a bunch of losers.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s catalogue of grotesque policy proposals, the so-called Project 2025. We’ll be told time and again that the 140 ex-Trump staffers involved in the plan that would destroy the nonpartisan civil service, gut Social Security, implement mass deportations, cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and heap benefits on the wealthiest among us is nothing more than a random collection of policies, not an astonishingly crackpot blueprint for a second, authoritarian Trump term.

Vance’s positions — a national abortion ban, ending support for Ukraine and opposition to same-sex marriage — will be minimized and, where possible, ignored. He’s a Yale graduate masquerading as a bearded hillbilly from Appalachia. But since he looks the part and coat-checked his character before entering the Senate chamber, he’s the perfect Trumpian Mini-Me.

Inventing “alternative facts” has been the Trump — and now the Republican Party — playbook since they claimed the largest crowd in the history of presidential inaugurations showed up in Washington, D.C., in 2017. And make no mistake: These fabrications are ripped from the playbook of every demagogue, every charlatan, every would-be authoritarian who ever craved public attention and sought unbridled political power.

The gaslighting has only one purpose: to get as many Americans as possible to consume enough “false information that (it) leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves.”

The grifting MAGA podcast host Steve Bannon, now behind bars for refusing to tell Congress what he knows about January 6, distilled the essence of Trumpism when he said it was about “flooding the zone with shit.”

“What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age,” Sean Illing wrote in 2020. “And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.”

Sort the crap from the important while remembering even a fraction of the Trump actions that have brought our country to this extraordinarily dangerous moment is simply exhausting. Many give up and give in.

Yet, facts are facts. The Republican presidential candidate, celebrated this week by his cult following, is a twice-impeached convicted felon who stole national security secrets and owes millions to a woman he defamed after losing a civil trial for sexual assault. He lies repeatedly about a “stolen” election that he lost, and he desperately tried to cling to power by inciting a violent mob to attack the seat of our government. His own vice president stopped the formal part of the Trump insurrection. You can bet a Vice President Vance will carry out any orders no matter how extra-constitutional they might be.

All that is left this a question: Is this the kind of country you want to pass along to a next generation? Do you really want a felon in thrall to Russian President Vladimir Putin with his stubby finger on the nuclear button?

As the always-sensible journalist Margaret Sullivan wrote recently: “Let’s be steered not by political opportunism, delusion and blame-casting, but by a more constant North Star: the rule of law and the truth.”

Were it to be. Were it possible to be.

 

If you enjoy a little irony to compliment your summer this has been a week for you.

Irony one: on the day the United States Supreme Court dramatically realigned our historic understanding that “no man is above the law,” granting every former president “absolute immunity” for acts committed in their official capacity, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon reported to jail for refusing to provide information to Congress about the failed Trump coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

Bannon, whose reason to be centers on dismantling the “administrative state,” is a world-class grifter who stands to enlarge his toxic influence in a second Trump administration. Bannon has no more cause to be near the presidency than does the man he worked for, but while he is paying a (small) price – four months in a minimum security prison – the instigator of the coup, thanks to the Supreme Court, will likely never face any consequence for one of the most heinous acts in the long history of the Republic.

If Trump makes it back to the presidency – an increasingly likely outcome – he will never face a jury for trying to overturn an election or any of his other crimes, while the flabby mouthpiece of white nationalism and a proponent of the January 6 insurrection goes to jail, not for cheerleading the riot but for refusing to talk to Congress about cheerleading the riot.

Another irony: While Americans celebrate the nation’s independence this week, a movement initiated 248 years ago against a mentally unstable English king, the Supreme Court has effectively put the once and future crimes of an American president out of reach of the vaunted “rule of law.”

A certifiably crazy former president is now set to be a certifiably crazy king.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent against the Court’s gobsmackingly outrageous decision – “immune, immune, immune, immune.”

“We are the United State of Amnesia,” the novelist Gore Vidal once wrote, “we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Remembering nothing, for instance, like Richard Nixon. Fifty years after Nixon resigned the presidency under a cloud of crimes associated with the Watergate caper that the Supreme Court has now decided that was no big deal. Nixon acted as president when he authorized the CIA to concoct a cover story for the break in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in 1972. He was acting in his official capacity when he ordered the break in of the doctor’s office where the medical records of the leaker of the Pentagon Papers were housed. Nixon was acting officially when he order hush money payments to keep witnesses quiet.

“As I looked at it, I realized Richard Nixon would have had a pass,” said no less an authority than John Dean, the White House counsel who helped reveal the extent of Nixon’s crimes.

“Virtually all of his Watergate-related conduct,” Dean said and, “virtually all that evidence falls in what could easily be described as ‘official conduct.’”

And here’s law professor Jeffrey Toobin writing in the Washington Post: “The strongest evidence that Nixon obstructed justice in the Watergate investigation was the so-called smoking gun tape of June 23, 1972. In that conversation, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to instruct the CIA to tell the FBI to curtail its investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national security grounds. Nixon told Haldeman: ‘When you get … these people in, say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing. … That will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.

“Under Trump v. United States, Nixon’s statement would not amount to obstruction of justice because it related to his ‘official’ duties — that is, supervising the FBI and CIA. ‘Investigative and prosecutorial decision-making is ‘the special province of the Executive Branch,’ Roberts wrote, ‘and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President.’ Accordingly, ‘the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority.'”

Nixon, of course, accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford for the simple reason that he knew he faced prosecution for the crimes he committed and abetted. Now, the Supreme Court says forget it. Turns out Nixon was right when, after his resignation, he infamously told interviewer David Frost, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Toobin argues that the evidence of Nixon’s obstruction, the “smoking gun” audio recording, could not, under Roberts anti-constitutional reading be used as evidence. That’s right. Read it again.

“What the prosecutor may not do, however,” Roberts wrote based on nothing more than his own ideology and aiming for his desired outcome, “is admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”

The ultimate Trump card delivered by not a conservative Supreme Court, but a radical and reactionary court with a majority more activist than judicial, more driven by its desire for a political outcome than by fidelity to the Constitution.

But it that this American way? Do we really want to encourage an already overly powerful president to have the ability to commit crimes in his official capacity and be held immune for his actions? Is this the way our 248 year experiment in checked and balanced government ends?

To see where this is going read the dissents to Chief Justice John Roberts’ outrageous opinion for the court, an entirely ahistorical document that would almost certainly make even the old Watergate defendant squirm.

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.”

Sotomayor ended with this: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Roberts dismissed such concerns with the high handed authoritarian impulse he has now effectively amended the Constitution to permit. He argues that a president, shielded now with immunity granted by six unelected judges, has the power to be “bold.”

Was Nixon being “bold” when he initiated the coverup of his crimes, all done, by the way, to further his own political prospects and to punish his political enemies?

Unlike Roberts, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has read history. In her dissent Jackson quotes the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and in the process demolishes the claim that the Constitution encourages an all-powerful executive.

The Constitution’s “separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787,” Brandeis wrote in 1926, “not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but . . . to save the people from autocracy.”

Final irony: a former president with autocratic ambitions – Trump took to social media this week to assert, that is to lie, that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney had committed “treason” for investigating his coup activities – has had those ambitions supercharged by the authority of the nation’s highest court.

In short, the Supreme Court majority – three of them appointed by Trump – has vastly increased the likelihood that should he gain office again Trump will rule like the “dictator” he has pledged to become.

Joe Biden had an awful debate last week. He’s too old to be president. He should stand down. Trump’s court has emboldened his desire for absolute power and his lust for revenge against his opponents. What a choice.

We can have a dime store Nixon with a third the mental capacity of that corrupt former president and ten times the venality, or we can have a diminished man whose entire career supports the American ideals the Supreme Court has now kicked in the ditch.

With fear for our democracy, I despair.