Category Archives: Elections

Clinton, Trump: Some things are inevitable

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This past week in politics was all about the inevitable: a gaffe by Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s march to the Democratic nomination.

Trump spoke before a crowd of 1,000 at the Republican Party of Arkansas’ annual Reagan-Rockefeller Dinner, where he exceeded my expectations. His speech was funny and entertaining, and he handled the media well in a press conference. I left thinking he would be a factor until the crowded GOP field shrinks and the party’s support coalesces around a more acceptable candidate.

Then on Saturday, Trump said that Sen. John McCain, who spent 5.5 years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, is not a war hero. His explanation – “I like people who weren’t captured” – was an insult to all prisoners of war. Trump later said he didn’t serve in Vietnam because he had bone spurs in his heels.

You don’t insult veterans, especially if you did not serve. The reaction was swift. Many Republican candidates condemned the remarks. So did the Republican National Committee, which indicates it was waiting for the opportunity.

So that’s probably enough about Donald Trump.

Clinton did not say anything particularly memorable Saturday speaking before 2,500 Arkansas Democrats at their Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Little Rock. She also did not put her foot in her mouth, which is why, come next spring, she’ll still be in the race.

Because we all want campaigns to be interesting, there’s some talk about Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who is making Clinton work a little for the nomination.

That’s a temporary flirtation. Some Democrats want to send a message to Clinton, the former member of Walmart’s board of directors whom they believe also is too close to Wall Street. She’s the party’s nominee.

She is not, inevitably, the next president. Republicans have some advantages going into the 2016 election. The country tends to swap parties every eight years. Republicans are raising a lot of money. And of course, Clinton has a long public record they can attack.

But there are at least three reasons why it’s more likely she’ll win than lose.

One is that Democrats have an advantage in the Electoral College. It takes 270 votes to win the election, and in each of the last six of them, Democrats have won at least the same 18 states and the District of Columbia, a coalition worth 242 votes. If that trend holds – and it won’t necessarily – then Clinton needs only to find 28 votes elsewhere. Republicans, meanwhile, have won the same 13 states six straight times for a total of only 102 votes. That’s a big gap, though it narrows when only the last four elections are included.

Another Clinton advantage comes from the Democrats’ long-standing lead among minorities, and Republicans’ failure to change that – or lately, even to try. According to the University of Connecticut’s Roper Center, President Obama in 2012 won 93 percent of African-Americans’ votes and 71 percent among the fast-growing Hispanic population. Mitt Romney won among whites, 59-39.

Those percentages are not that different from 1984, when Ronald Reagan won 49 states. But in 1984, whites made up 86 percent of voters, compared to 72 percent in 2012, and that number will continue to shrink. No wonder Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican presidential candidate, once said his party is in a “demographic death spiral.”

Republicans must win more votes among minorities. If they don’t, they’ll still compete well in mid-term elections, when older white Americans compose a disproportionate share of the electorate. But they’ll lose a lot of presidential elections. And frankly, they’ll deserve to.

Clinton’s final advantage is that the United States is in the midst of a major cultural shift. Voters have elected and re-elected the first black president. The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage with the support of six in 10 Americans. Many Americans even expressed support for Caitlyn Jenner’s gender identity switch. If the election is seen as a choice between breaking the glass ceiling with a female nominee and voting for yet another guy named Bush, the trend would favor Clinton.

There’s a significant percentage of voters who don’t merely oppose Obama, but despise him, and they spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how much they despise him. Many of those people feel the same way about Clinton.

They should reconsider their perspective lest they spend 16 years of their life mad all the time. Clinton’s election is not inevitable, but it’s more than half likely.

Should secret political donors be disclosed?

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

About 70 people turned out for a political demonstration on the State Capitol steps Tuesday – a fraction of the number that would have appeared if the subject were a controversial social issue, but I’ve seen plenty of smaller crowds there.

The issue was campaign finance reform. A coalition of groups were calling attention to their coming effort to gather signatures for a ballot initiative serving two purposes. First, it would make Arkansas the 17th state to call on Congress to advance a constitutional amendment allowing it and the states to regulate campaign funding. That’s just a request. Second, it would require independent political groups in Arkansas to disclose their donors. That would be the law.

Among the speakers was Rhana Bazzini, an 81-year-old Floridian who previously had marched from Sarasota to Tallahassee to protest current campaign finance laws. Bazzini pointed out, correctly, that every issue – education, health care, the national debt – is connected to how we elect our public officials.

And how we elect our public officials is through legalized bribery. I mean, let’s call it what it is. Serious candidates ask donors for money; unless they are super-wealthy, they have no choice. Groups who want something from the government give candidates money, which buys access, sympathy and loyalty. The more they give, the more access, sympathy and loyalty they receive. You know that version of the Golden Rule that says, “He who has the gold makes the rules”? That’s a fundamental part of American democracy.

This has always been the case, of course, but the dots between money and politics are becoming ever more connected. In America, money is speech and corporations are people, and under the 2010 Citizens United ruling, corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts on campaigns.

The result of that ruling has been the creation of independent groups spending enormous amounts to spread half-truths and slander political candidates while hiding under the cloak of anonymity. A single donor, or a small group of them, essentially can buy their own candidates in legally approved secrecy. Because more money is going into judicial races, justice increasingly is for sale.

I am not sure if there are easy answers for this. Money tends to find its way to power like water finds its way to the bottom of a hill, no matter what laws are passed. Also, I can see the argument that spending money to advance a political idea is a form of political speech, as well as a property right.

The obvious problem with that last argument is that more money equals more speech, which, after all, is supposed to be “free.” We know this current system is having a corrosive, corrupting influence on our politics. It’s creating a class of ultra-wealthy political sugar daddies. It’s accelerating the transfer of wealth from middle class taxpayers to the one percent. (Remember the bank bailout?)

It’s also affecting our daily lives. According to the Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons the colonists broke away from Great Britain was to better enable the pursuit of happiness. The constant barrage of negative political ads isn’t making anyone happy except those who get paid to produce them.

What do you think? Should there be limits to the amounts that donors can give to candidates and/or independent political groups? Should campaigns be publicly financed, so that more candidates could run for office without having to rely on these legalized bribes? Or would that just open up new cans of worms?

At the very least, disclosure of donors to independent political groups ought to be required. If people are able to spend millions of dollars to elect a candidate, at least the rest of should know about it. That’s the law these groups want in Arkansas, and they probably are going to have to pass it through a ballot initiative. This past session, Rep. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, tried unsuccessfully to pass a disclosure law through the Legislature, and it didn’t even advance past a House committee.

“Speaking” is by definition a public activity, so there should be no expectation of anonymity when doing so. If people want to spend their millions to shout from the hilltop, they can’t expect to do so from inside a cave. So when the canvassers ask for my signature to place this measure on next year’s ballot, I’ll enthusiastically write my name – in person and in public.

Arkansas seeks to find its place in the nonstop campaign

CapitolBy Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday that legislators will be returning to Little Rock for a special session May 26. The main reason will be to pass a bond issue to help Lockheed Martin compete for a contract to produce the military’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the replacement for the Humvee, in Camden.

Lockheed Martin is a global megacorporation with $45.6 billion in sales in 2014, so it will be interesting to see what Arkansas taxpayers will be asked to fund. But this is the way the game is played these days, so Arkansas must play it. At stake is the production of 55,000 vehicles – basically, the auto plant the state long has coveted – and that’s not counting what foreign militaries might order. About 600 jobs would be created in south Arkansas, which needs them.

Legislators also will consider ways of streamlining state government – Hutchinson hasn’t offered concrete proposals regarding how – and might consider moving Arkansas’ political primaries, or maybe just the presidential ones, to March 1. That’s the subject of the rest of this column.

Tired of ceding the early presidential nominating process to Iowa and New Hampshire and then being forgotten later, a group of Southern states are considering holding their primaries March 1 in what many are calling the “SEC primary.”

Arkansas voters don’t usually play much of a role in presidential politics. The state’s primary election occurs so late in the process that many candidates have dropped out by the time Arkansans vote, and the state is so small that the remaining candidates don’t make it a priority. Legislators considered the SEC primary in the recently completed regular session. The bill didn’t pass, but support didn’t die. Maybe it would make Arkansas more relevant. It might give Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign a boost, which his supporters would see as a plus.

These campaigns start early – Jan. 3 in Iowa in 2012, in fact. This year, the Iowa caucus will be Feb. 1, nine months before the general election, and the New Hampshire primary will be Feb. 9. And of course, candidates already have been campaigning for months.

Didn’t we just have an election? These days, elected officials are so focused on the next campaign that they can’t do the jobs voters chose them to do in the previous one. And that’s a problem with real-life consequences.

Case in point: The federal Highway Trust Fund is nearly empty, and the bill that funds it expires at the end of this month. A real, multi-year replacement is badly needed, but time is running out. We were in this same situation last year, but of course an election was coming up, so Congress passed a gimmicky, short-term fix that funded 10 months of construction with revenues borrowed from the next decade. Now those 10 months are over, and we’re right back where we were. Uncertain about what Congress is going to do this time, the state Highway Department has cancelled $282 million in construction projects this year. Last month, the American Trucking Associations’ chief lobbyist told Arkansas trucking executives that a bill must be written this year or else we’ll have to wait until the end of 2017 because presidential politics will get in the way.
.
Contrast American democracy with Great Britain’s recently completed parliamentary election. Queen Elizabeth formally dissolved Parliament in late March at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron, the election was scheduled for May 7, the parties campaigned, and 66.1 percent of the electorate voted. The Conservatives won, and Cameron retained his post. It was over in six weeks.

Great Britain has its own problems, of course, and nobody here wants a monarch, but the United States clearly is not well served by a democratic government where few have time to govern anymore. According to the Declaration of Independence, the “pursuit of happiness” is one of the three inalienable rights that led to America’s founding. Are the nonstop campaigning and barrage of toxic negative advertising helping you pursue happiness?

We’ll know whether the primary election will be moved before the session begins because only issues where the outcome is reasonably certain will be included in the call. It will be predetermined behind closed doors, which is not very transparent but is efficient.

At least they’ll govern, and then voters can decide if they did the right thing. I hear there’s an election coming up.

Christie, doc fix: A little honesty in the national debt debate

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Uncle Sam hangs on for webA couple of things happened this past week that are worth noting because they concern senior citizens (today’s and tomorrow’s) and taxpayers (as usual, mostly tomorrow’s).

On Tuesday, the Senate sent to President Obama the long-awaited and much-discussed Medicare “doc fix.” Each of the past 17 years, Medicare payments to physicians have been scheduled to be cut automatically under something called the sustainable growth rate formula, and each of those years, Congress has suspended those cuts for one year. It’s been a charade, but one with real consequences because Medicare payments to doctors are low, and some doctors routinely threaten to stop treating those patients. Those who still do would like more certainty than these one-year fixes provide.

Now there will be no more last-minute reversals of the pretend spending cuts. The problem, as is usually the case, is that Congress did not offset the costs of the doc fix, either with spending cuts or higher taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation will add $141 billion to the national debt through 2025 – money that almost certainly would have been added anyway, just one year at a time.

Arkansas Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton voted for the doc fix, which passed 92-8. Earlier, they voted for an amendment that would have required Congress to offset the bill’s costs. That amendment failed, 58-42.

So we’re still burdening future generations with more debt, but at least we’re being more honest and transparent about it. Unfortunately, that qualifies as progress.

On the same day that the Senate passed the doc fix, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a probable presidential candidate, proposed in a speech a number of meaningful reforms to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Generally speaking, Medicare serves seniors, and Medicaid also serves seniors along with poor people and the disabled.

Christie’s proposals would affect Americans of all income classes. The retirement age would be raised to 69 very gradually (for Medicare, it would reach that age in 2064). Future senior citizens earning annual incomes above $200,000 from other sources no longer would receive Social Security benefits. Wealthier recipients would pay a higher percentage of Medicare premium costs than they do now. Christie would reform the qualification process for Social Security Disability Insurance, which has become a welfare program for younger recipients. Medicaid recipients above the poverty line would be required to pay co-pays rather than basically receive their health care for free.

Why is he talking about those popular programs? Because they are important contributors to the national debt, which has grown from less than $1 trillion in 1981 to more than $18 trillion today. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, $24.11 of every $100 the federal government spends goes to Social Security, while $14.42 goes to Medicare and $8.60 goes to Medicaid. That’s $47.13 of every $100, an amount that will grow as the baby boomers age.

What’s important about Christie’s speech is not whether he’s offered the right answers, but that he’s talking about the subject at all. Social Security has long been called the “third rail” of American politics: Like the electrified third rail on a subway system, if you touch it, you die. Politicians would rather talk about lowering taxes and increasing spending now because the young and unborn who will pay for those decisions don’t yet vote.

Hopefully, Christie’s plan will at least start a real discussion. A government that is $18 trillion in debt and adding more every year must cut spending, increase tax revenues, or do some combination of both. Other potential presidential candidates – including the two with Arkansas ties, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee – should offer their own concrete proposals, not poll-tested platitudes. Those who want to keep the status quo, or increase spending, or cut taxes should show how they will make the numbers work.

At least then we’d have an honest debate – not just about how big the government should be, but also about how today’s taxpayers pay for the government we already have.

If Christie can’t win that debate, then hopefully someone else can with their own plan that preserves an appropriate social safety net without adding to the debt. We can’t just keep passing government’s costs to our children and grandchildren – like the doc fix does, albeit transparently.

Voters should select, not elect, judges

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The recent admission of bribery by former circuit judge Michael Maggio is an example of why Arkansas should consider changing the way it fills judicial offices – still relying on average citizens, but not by using elections.

Maggio pleaded guilty Jan. 9 to a felony bribery charge and now probably is on his way to prison. He had reduced a jury verdict against a nursing home operator from $5.2 million to $1 million two days after receiving large campaign donations from the operator.

Clear-cut justice-for-sale cases like this are relatively rare, so let’s not overreact. The corrupt official was caught, so you might say the system worked.

The problem, however, isn’t so much the obvious cases of bribery that can be prosecuted. The problem is when judges are merely influenced. Who donates to judicial campaigns? Often, those who have an interest in the outcomes of judicial decisions in general, such as attorneys and nursing home operators.

Elections of judges and justices has always been the least democratic of all ballot races. Candidates aren’t supposed to discuss how they would rule on specific cases because a judge should remain impartial until hearing the evidence. Meanwhile, they aren’t allowed to run under party labels, which at least would give voters a sense of where they stand. Many voters are just guessing.

In the future, the problem may go from voters having no information to them having a lot of bad information. More and more, the waves of campaign dollars swamping the executive and legislative branches is engulfing judicial races. In some other states, ads by outside groups in judicial races are as nasty as the ads for other offices. It hasn’t really come to Arkansas yet, but when it does, it will change not only judicial campaigns but also the administration of justice.

Solutions? One would be for the governor to appoint justices and judges the way the president does at the federal level, subject to legislative confirmation. That kind of power bestowed on the governor might make some people uncomfortable, but remember that he or she would be held accountable by the voters. A personal example: In 2000, enthusiastic about no candidate, I decided while driving to the polls to vote for soon-to-be President Bush solely because I preferred the justices he would appoint over Vice President Gore’s likely selections.

There is another model. In American democracy, where do registered voters best collect adequate information in a deliberative fashion before making an important decision? Juries.

So let’s have “voter duty” where 100 (or some other number of) Arkansas voters are randomly selected, summoned to a location, and given two days to interview judicial candidates and study their records. The names of the voters would be withheld so the candidates couldn’t influence them beforehand. At the end of two days, the voters would select the officeholders and go home.

We trust jury members to make life-or-death decisions in capital murder cases. Why not trust registered voters to appoint judges, which they do now anyway through the ballot box? Wouldn’t 100 informed and focused average Arkansans do a better job than 1 million scrolling through a list of names on the ballot that they recognize only through campaign attack ads? Best of all, judicial candidates could avoid having to raise money from shady donors who want something in return.

So let’s have a selection process instead of an election process for judicial offices. Elections are a means to an end, not the end itself. The ultimate goal is a just, democratic society ruled by the people. To keep justice from being for sale, 100 people might accomplish that goal better than 1 million of them.