Category Archives: Politics

One of us for president?

Elections aheadBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

What would happen if the president were an average person, not a member of the country’s political and wealthy elite? Matthew O’Connor would like to give Americans a chance to find out.

The Ohioan is trying to mount an independent presidential campaign and wrote me recently looking for someone in Arkansas to collect signatures. Prospective presidential candidates in this state must collect only 1,000, which is pretty doable, but the deadline is August 1.

What led a father of three with no real political experience, no support and no name recognition to run for president? His big issues are corruption, the national debt, and the failure of the country to produce the right kind of candidate. His website is www.darkhorse2016.com.

“I just felt like no one was doing it for the right reason,” he told me. “I felt that a lot of people felt like … either they deserved it, or it was their turn, or they could buy it, and I thought it was about time that somebody did it because they wanted to serve the country and serve the people.”

A lot of Americans are looking for the same thing right now, considering the two major party nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have historically high unfavorable ratings. It seems the current system is not producing humble, service-oriented candidates like the famed Cincinnatus, who in 458 B.C. left his small farm to lead Rome through a crisis and then returned to the farm.

O’Connor won’t get very far in 2016. While the bar for making the ballot in Arkansas and some other states is low, in many states it is impossibly high for all but the best-connected candidates.

Maybe it should be. Every walk of life includes a system for winnowing out the wannabes. In business, you move up the corporate ladder. In sports, you prove yourself in college and in the minor leagues. And in politics, candidates are elected to something less than president, make a name for themselves, and then run for the nation’s highest office. On rare occasions, someone with success in another walk of life – Trump, President Dwight Eisenhower, President Ulysses S. Grant – has gotten a shot at the title. There’s no “American Idol” for presidents, and thank goodness.

O’Connor is not a billionaire business mogul or a famous general. He says he’s been able to balance life’s important areas – as an information technology professional, a father of three and a happily married husband who the day after our interview was planning to celebrate his 20th wedding anniversary.

“I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but there’s a lot of success in that,” he said. “A lot of people don’t manage those things.”

Could someone like that be president? Could America benefit from leadership by competent, moral persons plucked temporarily from Main Street? Would those people be better at balancing budgets and serving the people than the political and cultural elite? Or would Main Street Americans be like decent high school baseball players suddenly facing Major League pitching? A lot of us probably could read a speech off a teleprompter. Could we sit across the table from Vladimir Putin?

If you’re thinking you’d like to write in O’Connor as a protest vote on Election Day, you can’t. There is no provision in Arkansas law for write-in presidential candidates. He must collect 1,000 signatures, which is a steep hill to climb for someone without Arkansas roots or campaign donations.

If he doesn’t, there’s still enough time for Arkansans to qualify a favorite son or daughter for the ballot. They wouldn’t win, of course, but at least they would offer another choice.

Some suggestions?

– Sam Sicard, president of the First National Bank of Fort Smith. In an age of self-promoters, he cares about ideas and doing the right thing.
– Kevin Kelley, head coach of the Pulaski Academy Bruins, the high school football team that doesn’t punt. He’s a creative, data-driven thinker.
– Mark DeYmaz, pastor of Little Rock’s Mosaic Church, where people of all races and income classes worship under one roof. He brings people together.
– Mary Carol Pederson, founder of The CALL in Arkansas, which recruits families to foster and adopt children. She focuses on kids and the future.

Want to vote for one of those people, or Matthew O’Connor, rather than Clinton, Trump, or one of the third party candidates? The deadline for collecting signatures is August 1.

Related: It’s OK to vote for someone else.

It’s OK to vote for someone else

Hand with ballot and boxBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Voters complain each presidential election about their choices, but that’s especially true this year. According to Real Clear Politics’ compilation of polls, Hillary Clinton is viewed unfavorably by 55.5 percent of voters and favorably by only 39.7 percent, while Donald Trump’s numbers are worse: 61.1 percent to 33.4 percent unfavorable to favorable.

These are historic numbers, and they could get worse. When candidates’ negatives are so hopelessly high, they respond by trying to drive up their opponents’ unfavorables and, if necessary, win by becoming the lesser of two evils. Both campaigns will unleash a torrent of negative ads. Both have plenty to work with.

If you’re like many Arkansas voters, you may have said you’ll just write in somebody else’s name. Unfortunately, there is no provision in the law for you to do that in the presidential race.

However, there will be other candidates on the ballot: the Libertarians’ Gary Johnson, the Greens’ Jill Stein, the Constitution Party’s Darrell Castle, and possibly others. The bar for running for president in Arkansas as an independent is remarkably low: Just collect the signatures of 1,000 voters, which is much less than the 10,000 required to run for statewide offices. Candidates have until August 1 to submit those signatures.

This is the part where somebody always says, “Don’t waste your vote. If you don’t vote for one of the two major party candidates, you’re helping the other one” – the one they don’t want to win.

I respectfully disagree with that kind of thinking. An election is not just a process for picking winners and losers. It’s an opportunity for voters to express their beliefs about the country’s direction. Many voters strongly oppose both Clinton and Trump and do not want to affirm either candidacy on Election Day.

If your beliefs more closely align with one of those third parties, then vote your conscience and encourage others to do the same. That’s how the Republican Party came into existence. On March 20, 1854, a small group of idealists met in a Wisconsin schoolhouse to form a new party that would be based on their anti-slavery convictions, not raw political calculations about who might win the next election. Instead of holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evils, they took the long view and stayed true to their beliefs. Six years later, Abraham Lincoln was elected president.

No matter how you vote, you won’t change the results in Arkansas. The United States does not have national elections where everybody’s vote goes into a big pot. It has individual, winner-take-all state elections that feed into the Electoral College. Arkansas has six votes, and we already know who will win them. In a recent Talk Business & Politics poll, Trump leads Clinton, 47-36 percent, and nothing will turn those numbers around. Clinton’s 36 percent is consistent with recent election results: President Obama won 37 percent in 2012; while in 2014, Sen. Mark Pryor won 39 percent in the U.S. Senate race while Mike Ross won 41 percent in the governor’s race. Somewhere in those numbers is the Democrats’ ceiling.

Regardless of what you as a voter do, Arkansas will be part of a large red splotch in the middle of the country on your television screen on Election Night. The state will be called for Trump immediately after the polls close, and then the attention will turn to the states that are actually up for grabs: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.

In other words, because Arkansas is blood red, your vote essentially has become meaningless as an election-deciding tool. However, as with those idealistic Republican reformers in 1854, it has great meaning as a form of political expression. This is when your voice really counts.

The best vote I ever cast was in 1992 for independent candidate Ross Perot. I believed he was not temperamentally suited to be president, but he campaigned on political reform and on balancing the budget and ran 30-minute infomercials explaining the national debt. On Election Day, he won 19 percent of the vote. Not coincidentally, President Clinton and the Republican Congress began working on balancing the budget. They couldn’t ignore Perot’s voters.

So do you really want to avoid wasting your vote? Vote your conscience.

Related: Independents, Greens better choice than death

If Trump or Clinton succeed? More debt

Uncle Sam hangs on for webBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Presidential candidates can’t possibly fulfill all their campaign proposals, and few would even want to try. But what would happen if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump actually did what they said they want to do? Clinton would grow government and do nothing to reduce the growth of the national debt. Trump would explode the debt.

Those are the findings of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates for deficit reduction. It scored the two candidates’ campaign proposals to find out how much they would increase the debt, determined maximum and minimum amounts based on various factors, and then came up with midrange amounts.

The CRFB found that Clinton’s proposals would increase spending by $1.4 trillion over 10 years, but she has proposed $1.2 trillion in tax increases over that time period. That’s $200 billion in new debt, plus another $50 billion in additional interest costs her policies would cause.

So Clinton’s not doing too badly, right? Not exactly. She has no plans for the $19 trillion in debt that already exists, nor does she propose anything that would reduce the additional annual deficits that already are baked into the system and are projected to add $10 trillion over 10 years if nothing is done.

Clinton gets a few points for this: While proposing to grow government, she also at least proposes to pay for most of that growth. Because of that, the CRFB says the national debt would not increase much as a share of gross domestic product if Clinton does what she says she wants to do. Without Clinton’s policies, the debt held by the public – the national debt minus what the government has borrowed from itself – will increase from its current 75 percent to 86 percent of GDP in 2026. With her policies, it would increase to 87 percent.

But I’m not reassured. Elected officials in Washington tend to keep their happy promises but not their take-your-medicine ones. If history is a guide, she along with Congress will more likely increase spending while letting her less popular tax increases slide.

Trump, meanwhile, proposes spending cuts of $650 billion, which is not much when you consider it covers an entire decade. Meanwhile, he’s proposing an estimated $10.5 trillion in tax cuts. Counting higher interest payments, Trump’s policies would increase the national debt by a midrange estimate of $11.5 trillion, the CRFB says. While tax cuts do have a stimulative effect, the economy would have to grow more than 10 percent a year for a decade for the budget to balance – more than twice the best it’s previously done over that time period. Moreover, like Clinton, he does little to address the current $19 trillion debt or the $10 trillion in new debt that’s already projected to occur. If Trump keeps his promises, then in a decade the debt held by the public could equal 127 percent of the gross domestic product – numbers not seen since World War II.

At this point, a lot of people might ask, so what? Since presidential candidates often don’t even try to enact their campaign proposals, then maybe we should just ignore them and vote with our guts.

The problem with that thinking is that it removes accountability. If voters don’t care what candidates tell us during the campaign, then they are free to say anything to get elected and do anything afterwards.

Moreover, a presidential campaign isn’t just a time to pick winners and losers. It’s also a time for voters to educate themselves about the issues. In 1992, third party presidential candidate Ross Perot broadcast 30-minute infomercials in which he explained the national debt. Because of him, it became a front-and-center issue, and after he won 19 percent of the vote, President Clinton and Congress moved to balance the budget. If the national debt is mostly ignored in this campaign, it probably will be mostly ignored after the election.

The CRFB says it will continue to track the candidates’ proposals as the campaign moves forward. Unfortunately, it has not scored any of the third party candidates, but hopefully that will change. Every candidate should be held to high standards – particularly Trump and Clinton. One of those two will succeed at becoming president. Let’s hope the winner doesn’t succeed at increasing the debt.

Related: Fiddling around, ignoring problems

Fiddling around, ignoring problems

Uncle Sam hangs on for webBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You know the story about Nero fiddling while Rome burned? It didn’t actually happen, but it illustrates a point about leaders crazily ignoring a problem.

These days, no illustration is needed. The government’s largest programs, Social Security and Medicare, are not burning up, but their problems are being ignored.

On Wednesday, the Social Security trustees and Medicare trustees each released their annual reports.

Social Security’s trustees wrote that the trust fund that supposedly finances the program – but actually has been raided to pay for other programs and then filled with IOUs – will be empty by 2034. That’s when today’s 49-year-olds (I’m 47) reach the normal retirement age. When that happens, benefits for all recipients, including 85-year-olds, theoretically would be cut 21 percent.

But of course that probably wouldn’t happen. The American people wouldn’t stand for it, and too many seniors vote. If tomorrow’s elected officials play the fiddle as well as today’s do (and they will probably be some of the same people), they’ll transfer money from the rest of the budget to Social Security and add to the national debt. As of June 21, that debt is $19,265,744,770,778.65, or more than $59,000 for every American.

Medicare’s due date is approaching faster. The trustees say the trust fund that pays for hospitals will be depleted by 2028, which is two years sooner than was projected last year. When the assets are depleted, revenues would cover 87 percent of the costs. Today, the program covers 55.3 million people.

All of this is occurring in the context of huge budget challenges. The government will already spend $534 billion more this year than it will collect, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt already comprise 45 percent of the federal budget. Social Security and Medicare are growing, and the CBO says interest costs will rise from 6 percent of the budget this year to 13 percent by 2026.

In other words, if you neither touch Social Security and Medicare nor raise taxes, everything else, including defense, has to be cut quite a bit.

The American democratic experiment has faced bigger challenges than this one: creating a Constitution, ending slavery, reconstructing the union, winning World War II. Social Security and Medicare previously have faced insolvency, but at various times policymakers have figured out ways to push the due dates into the future. Social Security doesn’t require some Einsteinian policy fix – just spend less and/or collect more tax revenues. Medicare is harder because it’s based on paying into a health care system that keeps getting more costly, but it can be done.

Still, solving these problems is difficult because of changing demographics – we’re getting older and living longer – and because Americans now expect expensive government services for which they’re unwilling to pay the full cost. They believe the money can be found elsewhere, and some can be found, but not enough.

So elected officials not only must put down their fiddles, but they must also come down into the city and convince a majority of people to help put out a fire that, for now, is hard to see. All the while, they must overcome the many special interests who want to feed the fire.

Somebody must lead. Unfortunately, that probably won’t happen this election year. Sen. Bernie Sanders has led the Democratic Party, including President Obama and Hillary Clinton, to calling for increasing Social Security benefits. Clinton says she’ll pay for her increases by raising taxes on the wealthy – but remember, she gets a lot of money from wealthy people. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, says there will be no need for changing the programs because America will be so rich because of his better trade deals and Mexico-built wall.

If it were up to me, we’d raise Social Security’s retirement age, reduce or end benefits for the wealthy, increase payments to older and infirm recipients, and increase the payroll tax. I’m not sure what to do about Medicare. I’d also cut other things and slowly pay back the money we’ve already spent.

But for now, I’ve lost that debate in every direction. Americans don’t want to cut spending, and they don’t want to raise any taxes.

So at this point, I really don’t care which direction we go. Just stop increasing the debt we’re passing on to my kids. They’re going to have enough on their hands taking care of me someday.

Related: Red ink rising.

Governor a Trump supporter, not surrogate

Gov. Asa Hutchinson

Gov. Asa Hutchinson

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Wednesday was in “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” mode, and seemed comfortable with it.

The day before, he and five other Republican governors had a private meeting with their party’s presumptive nominee in Trump Tower.

Donald Trump is not Hutchinson’s ideal choice. He endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Earlier this year, he told National Public Radio, “I do not see (Trump’s) discussion of issues as serious. The words are frightening – how you’re going to build a wall, how you’re going to have Mexico pay for it. What does this mean?” When Trump said a judge should step down from a lawsuit against Trump University partly because his parents are from Mexico, Hutchinson issued a statement saying, “Criticizing and trying to disqualify a judge because of the judge’s ethnic heritage is antithetical to everything that is true and good about America.”

But now he’s supporting him. Why? Because they’re both Republicans, and because he’s better than the alternative, Hutchinson said.

“The framework that will take place under Mr. Trump is totally different than the framework that will take place under a President Clinton,” he said. “Elections are team efforts, and just because you don’t agree with the last play called by a quarterback doesn’t mean you’re going to stop blocking. …

“I have no doubt but that the team that I’ve aligned myself with for multiple decades is the one that I feel most comfortable with and will provide the best direction and security for the United States of America.”

Hutchinson did not seem torn about supporting Trump. When he started in politics, Republicans in this state were rare breeds and, occasionally, odd ducks, so this is not the first time he’s had to cast a less than enthusiastic vote. Believing your party is best for the country is not putting party over country.

Still, there are limits. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said after the Trump Tower meeting that the governors would be “surrogates” for Trump.

“He was speaking for himself there,” Hutchinson said. Asked if he would campaign for Trump, he said, “In a serious vein, there’s a lot to be done here in Arkansas in the fall, but this election’s important, so we’re just going to take that a step at a time.”

Other Arkansas Republican officials? During the campaign, some legislators held a press conference endorsing Rubio, while others did the same for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. There was no group photo op for Trump. But, like Hutchinson, they’re part of a team, and they don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president, so, whether they like Trump or not, most will get in line.

But most is not all, and we still have a secret ballot. Most Republican officials picked that party because they want to shrink government and defend certain traditional values. Trump doesn’t talk much about shrinking government. He also once wrote in “The Art of the Comeback”: “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.”

So some members of the party of family values may leave that race blank in the voting booth. Or they might cast their secret ballot for the Libertarians, who have nominated two credible former Republican governors, New Mexico’s Gary Johnson for president and Massachusetts’ William Weld for vice president.

It’s not only Republicans who are divided. Clinton only recently clinched the Democratic nomination campaigning against Bernie Sanders. She must try to unite her party, too.

But Republicans have more to lose. Of the 34 U.S. Senate seats in play this year, 24 are occupied by Republicans. While both Trump and Clinton have historically high unfavorable numbers, Trump’s are in the stratosphere. In a recent ABC News poll, 71 percent don’t like him and 55 percent don’t like her. So one of two things seems most likely to happen. First, Trump inspires millions of new voters, and the math works out in his favor, just as it did in the primaries. Or, it’s possible that Republicans as a party suffer a historic defeat up and down the ballot.

Unless something weird happens – and, boy, this would be the year – Trump will win Arkansas. Hutchinson and most Republican elected officials will support him with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Whether they like him or not, they’ll decide they’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do.

Related: Trump played checkers and they played chess – in a checkers year