Category Archives: Politics

Kasich: What should have been

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

“For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been!’” wrote the poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

I’m thinking that line is appropriate regarding the presidential campaign of Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Perhaps some Republican party types are thinking that as well. If not, they may be after November.

After winning his home state of Ohio, Kasich is now the last candidate standing between the nomination and Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz – candidates many Republicans, particularly those in the establishment, can’t accept (Trump) or don’t like personally (Cruz).

Despite that victory, Kasich is now mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination. At best, he can win enough delegates to deny Trump a majority, leading to a contested convention when Republicans gather in Cleveland in July. And then, the theory is, maybe he can emerge as a consensus candidate. It’s possible, but it’s a long shot.

Yeah, I voted for Kasich – I and 15,304 other Arkansans, or 3.72 percent of Republican primary voters.

I did that because I believed he’s the most experienced, qualified candidate with the best record. He was chairman of the House Budget Committee in the 1990s, the last time Congress came close to balancing the budget, and then he became governor of Ohio and led the state in turning that state’s deficit into a surplus. No other candidate, Republican or Democrat, can say anything like that.

I also voted for him because of his common decency, a quality that has been unfortunately uncommon in this ugly election year. More than any other candidate, he has avoided disparaging others and has offered a positive, unifying vision for the country.

If Republicans really want to win the election and deny Hillary Clinton the presidency, Kasich should be their first choice. An average of polls by the website Real Clear Politics shows, in hypothetical match-ups, Clinton beating Trump by more than six points, while Cruz is leading Clinton by .8 of a point, a statistical tie. Sen. Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race after losing his home state of Florida, was leading her by four points. Kasich, however, is beating her by more than seven points.

Those are national averages, but the United States does not actually have national elections. Instead, it has 51 state ones counting the District of Columbia, and of those, only a few are competitive, including Ohio, which has 18 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win. No Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio. Kasich is beating Clinton there by an average of almost 18 points.

Also really important is Pennsylvania, with 20 electoral votes. It’s voted Democratic in each of the last six elections, but some have been close. According to a recent Mercyhurst University poll, Kasich was trouncing Clinton 49-36 there. Meanwhile, she was beating Cruz 45-42 and Trump 43-35.

A Republican who wins both Ohio and Pennsylvania would be your next president.

Unfortunately, leading Arkansas Republicans did not bet on this horse. Thirty legislators endorsed Rubio. Gov. Asa Hutchinson did, too, during that brief period after Jeb Bush dropped out and Rubio became the darling of the establishment.

Hutchinson chose the candidate who seemed to have the best chance of beating Trump, despite Hutchinson’s having a lot in common with Kasich, including serving together in the U.S. House of Representatives and both accepting Medicaid expansion dollars under Obamacare as governors. Rather than refuse the money, Arkansas created the private option, which Hutchinson wants to continue as a program he is calling Arkansas Works.

Another 18 legislators and Secretary of State Mark Martin publicly endorsed Cruz Feb. 24.

If Hutchinson or anybody else instead had come out swinging for Kasich, it wouldn’t have made much difference. Voters don’t base their decisions on endorsements by elected officials – or newspaper columnists, thank goodness. Still, no Republican legislators or state officials endorsed the candidate who balances budgets, reaches across the aisle, and has the best chance of winning the general election. That’s notable, I guess.

Kasich and some of his supporters are still holding out hope that something crazy will happen at the convention. Maybe something will, but more than likely, they and some other Republicans will be left wondering what might have been. Actually, what should have been.

Related: For president, governors no longer need apply.

Less government, not no government

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

At the State Capitol this week, a high-profile Republican talked about reforming an important but imperfect government service, rather than complain about it being there.

Lt. Governor Tim Griffin recently completed an extensive review for Gov. Asa Hutchinson of the Department of Human Services, the sprawling state agency that handles human needs such as health care for Arkansans with low incomes or disabilities, paying for nursing home residents, and serving foster children.

Meeting with reporters in his office, Griffin said he found an agency that’s poorly organized into divisions that don’t communicate with each other, leading to waste, inefficiency and less effective services. An Arkansan served by more than one division must talk to each separately, with little help.

Griffin, who previously served four years as Arkansas’ 2nd District congressman, said this kind of organization exists in other agencies. Addressing it in DHS is most critical because it serves what he said are “vulnerable” Arkansans.

The presentation was completely constructive. He offered solutions. He was genuine in wanting better services for DHS clients. He didn’t dismiss the department as another example of hapless government. He didn’t blame anybody.

Griffin’s presentation was not the only example this week of Arkansas Republicans trying to make government work better and smarter, when it would be easier to just criticize it. On Monday, the Republican-dominated Health Reform Legislative Task Force voted to endorse Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s Arkansas Works program, which is a continuation of the private option, which was created largely by Republican legislators.

The private option uses federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private health insurance for Arkansans with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. It now provides insurance for 200,000 people.

It unquestionably is a government expansion, so many Republicans understandably don’t support it. Republicans who do are trying to make government work at the state level to address problems not being fixed at the federal level or through the private sector. It’s a tough call, and the Legislature may yet choose to end it. However, Louisiana at first said no to the Medicaid money, and now it’s changing its mind.

Republicans have long been more comfortable with government at the state and local levels than at the federal level. State and local governments are closer to the people. In Little Rock, constructive work does get done.

But the party’s rhetoric often doesn’t reflect that, at any level. While it’s the party of less government, it often sounds like it’s the party of no government.

Unfortunately, it’s painting itself in a box. The GOP says it wants to cut or end government programs it can’t cut or end. That means it breaks a lot of promises and disappoints a lot of people. Meanwhile, its base includes a lot of people age 60-plus who depend on government or soon will. So what does the GOP do with that?

So here’s where we are. One party says it wants to cut government unrealistically. The other party too often wants to grow government. What’s not being said enough is that government is sometimes the best bad answer we have, but that it should be smaller and that it should work better. Instead of ending government, or growing it, there should be more talk about reforming it. What Griffin did at DHS should be done everywhere.

In the presidential race, you know who’s sort of filling that niche now? Donald Trump. He doesn’t seem to have a well developed political philosophy, but he’s talking about bringing his supposed business competence to government. He certainly doesn’t talk much about cutting government, aside from repealing Obamacare. He doesn’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare. He wants to build up the military and enact tariffs on Chinese goods. He wants to build a wall along the border funded by Mexico, which can’t afford it, so American taxpayers would pick up the tab.

This election may have been an eye-opener for the GOP. It opposes government, but its voters are nominating a candidate who doesn’t.

Maybe, somewhere in our political discourse, there’s room for responsible candidates to talk knowledgeably about smaller, cheaper, smarter government – reforming it, in other words, because sometimes that’s the best an imperfect society can do.

That’s not pro-government. It’s pro-honesty, and it can happen, even in politics.

The craziest primary, hands down

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

I cannot believe I’m writing this, but last week saw two of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates commenting about the size of Donald Trump’s “hands.” I’m 46 years old, which means I’m at the age when I start looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but I’m pretty sure presidential elections have never sunk this low in my lifetime.

How did we get here? Donald Trump ran for president and appealed to a part of the electorate that wasn’t inspired by anyone else. The other candidates each thought he would eventually go away, so they ignored him and focused on each other. Then one day, they realized that, dang, Trump was winning this thing. So Florida Sen. Marco Rubio nicked him with a few zingers and, reveling in the attention, decided to go straight to the gutter by saying Trump has “small hands.” Trump joined him, or was already there waiting for him.

The other two remaining candidates, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, refrained from discussing body parts. Of the two, Kasich has the more proven record as both a congressman and governor, and he has run a positive, unifying, Reagan-esque campaign, to the point that he alone often refused to join the competition in insulting Democrats.

In Arkansas, he won less than 4 percent of the vote March 1.

Trump, meanwhile, won almost 33 percent of 409,828 votes cast in the Republican primary. He beat Cruz, who had 30.5 percent, by more than 9,000 votes.

How did he do that? An analysis by the consulting firm Turtle Target and by the media outlet Talk Business & Politics found a high percentage of this year’s early voters had participated in only one or none of the last three primaries. Most of the early voters were above the age of 50, and two-thirds voted in the Republican primary.

Something about this election was different enough that it motivated those people to vote. Trump is the most different candidate.

Until Tuesday, it looked like Trump’s act might be wearing thin. After basing his candidacy on being a straight-shooter, he’s been flip-flopping lately, including on immigration, his signature issue. The establishment finally is hitting him hard. But he won Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii, while Cruz won only Idaho.

Can Trump still lose? Sure. No one can say for certain what will happen next in this crazy primary season, including the pollsters. In a recent speech at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, pollster Andrew Smith said polling is much harder during the primaries, when voters are choosing between like-minded party candidates, then in the general election, when it’s the Republican versus the Democrat. In primaries, voters wait very late to decide. In New Hampshire this year, 47 percent of Republican primary voters made up their minds in the last three days before the election.

That’s one way you get such wild swings as what happened recently in Michigan, where Kasich went from having 15 percent support in a CBS News/YouGov poll taken March 2-4 to 33 percent support in another poll by American Research Group taken March 4-5. That second poll occurred entirely after that Fox News debate in Detroit when Trump said his “hands” were big enough while bickering the entire night with Rubio and Cruz. Kasich stayed above the fray and was generally considered the night’s winner.

Other polls had Kasich still behind Trump, and on Tuesday, he came in third place in that state, just behind Cruz.

Next are Wyoming and the District of Columbia March 12. Then comes the big day, March 15: Florida, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri. If Rubio and Kasich lose their home states of Florida and Ohio March 15, they’re out. They’ll have lost the only poll that matters, the one in the voting booth, among the people that know them best.

Trump is increasingly looking like the nominee, though I’m not predicting that or anything else this year. Not only is he winning among the Republicans, but on the Democratic side, the Clinton machine can’t put away a 74-year-old socialist who’s not even a Democrat.

Crazy, huh?

Hutchinson’s ham and egg election

Gov. Asa Hutchinson

Gov. Asa Hutchinson

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

You know that old saying about the difference between ham and eggs? The chicken is involved but the pig is committed. Gov. Asa Hutchinson was both during this year’s primary elections.

With the presidential race, he was merely involved. He endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio for president eight days before the vote. He made a couple of appearances and a TV commercial. Donald Trump won Arkansas. Rubio was third, which he was going to be anyway.

Hutchinson, however, was committed in the state legislative races, where his political action committee, ASA PAC, donated money to eight Republican candidates who had Republican opponents.

This happened because the eight he supported also support, or at least would consider supporting, Hutchinson’s Arkansas Works. That’s the continuation of the private option, the state program that uses federal Medicaid dollars through Obamacare to purchase private insurance for adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Created in 2013 by Republican legislators and Gov. Mike Beebe’s administration, it now covers 200,000 Arkansans. It brings a billion dollars in federal money to the state’s economy annually and has saved hospitals from providing millions of dollars in uncompensated care. But some Republicans are opposed because of its association with Obamacare, because it’s another government entitlement, and because they say neither the state nor the country can afford it.

Because it involves spending money, it requires a three-fourths vote for passage every year, which means nine senators can kill it. It barely reached three-fourths in 2013 and in 2014.

In 2015, Hutchinson persuaded legislators to accept a truce: Fund the private option through 2016, when it would end, and he and a task force would look into creating something else. That alternative is Arkansas Works, which is like the private option except that it requires a bit more personal responsibility on the part of beneficiaries. He says it’s a real change. Opponents say it’s cosmetic.

Hutchinson says Arkansas needs it. His budget depends on it. He doesn’t want to take insurance from 200,000 people. He needs $50 million in extra money for highways so the state will be eligible for $200 million in matching federal dollars. Take away the private option, or Arkansas Works, and that money’s hard to find without a tax increase, which isn’t happening.

On April 6, legislators will meet in special session to vote on Arkansas Works, or something. It can pass with a simple majority, which isn’t that high a bar. Then they’ll meet in the fiscal session, which occurs every even-numbered year, to vote on funding. And because a three-fourths majority will be needed, that session could be a doozy.

Arkansas Works was a central issue in those eight Republican primaries, which left Hutchinson a choice: Do nothing so as not to offend the potential winners; get involved like the chicken; or be committed like the pig. He was committed. He openly supported candidates. He held a press conference defending them. His political action committee gave each of them $5,400.

His job would have become much harder had those candidates lost. While the winning candidates would not take office before the special session, the current legislators would see Arkansas Works as a losing bet. Then Hutchinson next year would be dealing with as many as eight new legislators he’d worked to defeat.

Instead, six of the eight won, including all three in the Senate, where Hutchinson has no votes to spare. On the House side, three of his five candidates won, and one who lost was challenging an incumbent, Rep. Josh Miller, R-Heber Springs. Miller was already in the House, so Hutchinson’s situation didn’t change there.

The next day, Hutchinson addressed the Political Animals Club at the Governor’s Mansion. His mood was not quite jubilant, but it was definitely somewhat north of relieved.

“I think everybody in this room knows that if those three state senators had lost their race, it would not be a pleasant day for me in this room,” he said. “I would have to be explaining. It would have been considered a referendum on me and my leadership.”

Yes, it would have been, in a way that the presidential race was not. He was merely involved with Rubio for eight days, but he’s staking a big chunk of his first term as governor on Arkansas Works. That’s commitment.

Related: Coming health care debate a “cage fight,” says leading legislator.

Is China a threat or an opportunity? Both

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

Is China a threat? Yes, but not the kind you might think, and it also represents an opportunity for Arkansas, says a professor and entrepreneur who knows more about this subject than I do.

Jeremy Haft, author of “Unmade in China: The Hidden Truth About China’s Economic Miracle,” says his experiences building companies in China have left him without fear that the country will soon overtake the United States. For all the talk about China’s ascendancy, the gap between the two countries’ wealth is widening, and for good reason.

The system just works better here than it does there, he said at the Clinton School of Public Service Feb. 11. Holding up a bottle of water, he said only a few companies are involved in the production thanks to America’s efficient, transparent supply chain. The United States has been producing goods for the free market for centuries and has a well developed system of corporate law and a climate of individual freedom. Chinese products require 15-20 firms, many of which lack basic governance skills, and each step in the production process adds risk.

I know all American regulators such as the EPA are supposed to be terrible, but after listening to Haft, our system sounds pretty good. China’s regulatory system is “broken and fragmented,” leading to corruption and unsafe practices, he said. China has had many safety scandals in recent years, including 300,000 babies suffering from renal failure because baby powder was contaminated by an industrial chemical. Sales of American dairy products to China quadrupled that year. And when something bad happens in China, rather than challenge the system, the one-party Chinese government tends to find one person to scapegoat and “take him out back and shoot him,” he said.

Chinese consumers know about these safety and quality problems, and as a result will pay a premium for American products. In his export company, farmers export their goods to China at a high price and sell pork products like organs that Americans won’t eat but Chinese like.

China represents a huge opportunity for Arkansas food producers. Agriculture is Arkansas’ number one export to China, while China is the state’s second largest export market after Canada. The country of 1.4 billion people contains only enough land suitable for farming to fit inside the state of Texas, and 90 percent of the country’s aquifers are contaminated. For all of the country’s supposed technological advancement, most farming is done on 140 million small farms tilled by hand. That means China imports a lot of agricultural products – cotton, soybeans, pork and soon, rice. Many Chinese aqua farms also are contaminated – chicken coops are placed over ponds and the fish are fed by the waste – so catfish is another potential export product.

China represents other economic opportunities for Arkansas. China’s deforestation activities have left it short of forestland, which is why it recently announced it was investing $1.3 billion in a pulp mill in southern Arkansas. Aerospace – a major Arkansas export – also represents an opportunity because the Chinese are less adept at such advanced manufacturing processes.

The real threat from China isn’t from continued trade dominance, but from substandard, often unsafe products. Remember the baby powder scandal? The United States imports four billion pounds of food annually from China. Risky Chinese raw materials are used to make American medicines and other products. When California contracted with a Chinese company to repair the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the welds connecting the decks were cracked and the quality random. When U.S. inspectors sounded warnings, California fired the inspectors.

So instead of creating trade barriers to China’s huge and growing market of 1.4 billion people, American policymakers should be finding ways to capitalize on those people’s desire to buy our stuff, Haft said. Meanwhile, policymakers should concentrate on the real threat from China – unsafe and shoddy products.

Haft made a compelling case. As he was saying all this, I noticed I was taking notes on my Apple laptop while keeping an eye on my iPhone, both of which were invented by an American company but made in China. Apple took my money; China got most of the jobs. So is China a threat or an opportunity? Both, I guess, like a lot of things.

To watch Haft’s address at the Clinton School, click here.