Category Archives: Politics

Kansas independent could shake up Senate

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Note to subscribers: This is an updated version of this column that had been released earlier today.

The race between Sen. Mark Pryor and Rep. Tom Cotton is one of the two or three most important in the country because both political parties believe it will help determine control of the Senate. But another race could be even more important – the one in Kansas, where businessman Greg Orman, a member of no party, has a real chance to win.

Orman, an independent, had polled third in a four-man race in a recent Public Policy Polling survey, but with 23 percent support, he was not far behind Sen. Pat Roberts, the unpopular incumbent Republican. Roberts was leading with only 32 percent and had an approval rating lower than President Obama’s. That same poll revealed that, were this only a two-man race between Orman and Sen. Roberts, Orman would be leading, 43-33.

The four-man race is now a three-man race. The Democrat, Chad Taylor, who was second with 25 percent, dropped out Wednesday. The other candidate is Libertarian Randy Batson.

Taylor had little chance of winning in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since the Great Depression. In fact, the best he could have done was split the anti-incumbent vote and elect the Republican, which would have been a huge irony. Typically the argument against voting for independents is that it’s a “wasted vote” – you know, you must vote for the major party candidate you dislike the least, or you’ll otherwise help the other major party’s candidate win. In this case, the Democrat would have been the spoiler. His party’s leadership obviously encouraged him to drop out.

Orman says he simply does not fit into either party. He was a College Republican in 1988, became a fan of independent Ross Perot in 1992, leaned Republican for a while, and then flirted with running against Roberts as a Democrat in the 2008 race. He says he voted for President Obama in 2008 and then Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2010, he founded the Common Sense Coalition, whose purpose has been to elect centrist candidates. “Historically, I’ve tried the Republican Party, I’ve tried the Democratic Party, and I’ve just finally decided that if we’re going to change things in Washington, we’ve got to attack the two-party system and stop supporting it,” he told MSNBC.

He describes himself as “fiscally conservative and socially tolerant,” which might not play well in Arkansas right now but apparently has some appeal in Kansas. The nationwide tension between the GOP’s various factions is boiling over in that state. On Wednesday, more than 70 moderate former Republican legislators announced they were supporting Orman, not their own party’s candidate.

Why am I writing about a Kansas race? Because of what might happen if Orman wins. There are already two independents in the Senate who align themselves with the Democrats. Orman says he will caucus with whichever party will adopt more of a solutions-oriented approach. If control of the Senate in this close election comes down to which party he chooses to align with, he then becomes a powerful swing vote. He could make demands. And that could get interesting.

Then what? There would be three independents out of 100 in the Senate. Maybe Orman’s model could create a template that other independent candidates could follow. Maybe a rich businessman in a state like Arkansas might decide to run as an independent, too. Maybe if there were six or seven independents in the Senate, they could form a “coalition of the uncorrupted” who side with either party or neither depending on the issue, forcing both to behave.

Of course I’m heading toward wishful thinking territory here. Eventually, that coalition would be corrupted, too. Also, two-party domination is almost inevitable the way our system is designed. The most likely good scenario is a shakeup that makes the system work a little better for a while. That’s what happened after 1992, when Perot won 19 percent of the vote basing his campaign on balancing the budget, and then congressional Republicans and President Clinton sort of balanced the budget.

Maybe it starts this time in Kansas.

Here is one of Orman’s ads.

A tale of two Pryor ads

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

One ad explains why Sen. Mark Pryor made the toughest vote of his career. In another ad, the Pryor campaign misrepresents his opponent’s position. The first ad features the candidate speaking directly into the camera and is effective. The second uses faceless narrators and is terrible. That’s not a coincidence.

Let’s start with the first ad. Pryor and his father, former Sen. David Pryor, describe Mark Pryor’s struggles with his insurance company when he was battling cancer. “No one should be fighting an insurance company while you’re fighting for your life,” Mark Pryor says in the ad. “That’s why I helped pass a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick or deny coverage for pre-existing conditions.”

That law was the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. The ad has gotten some national attention because a Democratic senator in a tough re-election bid in a Republican-leaning state embraced his vote for Obamacare, even if he doesn’t actually use the name. Good for him for explaining his reasoning. That’s what campaigns are for – to give voters information so they can make decisions.

Then there’s the “Ebola” ad, which also has received national attention, but for a different reason.

You don’t hear much from Pryor in that ad, except for the legally required “I’m Mark Pryor, and I approved this message.” In that ad, not only one but two faceless narrators say Pryor’s opponent, Rep. Tom Cotton, “voted against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola. … Instead Cotton voted for tax cuts for billionaires funding his campaign rather than protecting our families.”

The vote to which the Pryor campaign is referring was to pass the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013, which funded preparations for responding to a public health emergency such as a rapidly spreading disease. The bill passed 395-29 in the House on Jan. 22, 2013. As the ad correctly states, Cotton was the only Arkansas congressman to vote no.

How could Cotton vote against “protecting our families”? His spokesman, David Ray, said Cotton objected to a part of the bill enabling the federal Department of Health and Human Services to enact a mandatory deployment of public health workers, including those employed by states, during a major health crisis. Cotton believed the mandatory call-up was contrary to existing law and Supreme Court precedent. The bill did not pass as written. In March, Cotton voted for a similar bill that made the call-up of health workers a voluntary one. Pryor voted for the same bill, and that’s what funded the program.

So Cotton didn’t really vote “against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola.” He voted against an early version of a particular bill. Campaigns use votes like this to mislead voters about their opponents all the time, but this one is so over-the-top that Cotton’s campaign is now featuring it on its own website, while it’s not on Pryor’s.

On Wednesday, Pryor held a press conference defending the ad. He brought up Cotton’s votes against the farm bill and disaster aid and said this is part of a pattern where Cotton votes against appropriate government spending.

He made a better case talking in person than those two faceless narrators did reading a script on television.

In fact, the most effective campaign ads right now feature the candidates talking directly to voters. Those would be the Pryor cancer ad already mentioned, and Asa Hutchinson’s ad where he talks about his granddaughter inspiring him to support a law requiring high schools to offer a computer coding class.

Those ads work because they allow voters to see the candidates offering a positive vision, but what if candidates also spoke for themselves when they wanted to criticize their opponents? I’m betting their messages would be much more responsible and measured. In one earlier ad, Pryor himself had this to say, calmly, about Cotton regarding Medicare: “My opponent voted to withhold benefits until age 70, and I’m trying to stop that.” When candidates want to distinguish themselves from their opponents in a 30-second ad, that’s how they should do it.

Campaigns have decided it’s bad for their candidates to be seen criticizing their opponents in an ad. Actually, I would respect them more if they did it that way. My outlook is very Southern. If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. But if you think something not nice needs to be said, say it yourself.

Here are the two ads.

The lieutenant governor: Change it, or get rid of it

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

For more than three years from 2003-06, your tax dollars were not spent very efficiently, and I was a beneficiary.

I was the communications director in the lieutenant governor’s office. My boss, Lt. Governor Win Rockefeller, was a very good man, but the lieutenant governorship, at least the way it is designed in Arkansas, is not a useful office.

Nothing occurs there that could not be done somewhere else. Under the Arkansas Constitution, the lieutenant governor presides over the Senate when it is in session (a ceremonial job) and serves as governor when the governor is out of state (an unnecessary responsibility in the 21st century). The other major duty, the one that really matters, is to serve as governor if the governor does not finish his or her term. Two of the past four lieutenant governors have been called upon to do that.

The office, when filled, consumes about $400,000 a year in order to employ state government’s backup quarterback and his or her staff. Currently, no one even occupies the office. With the resignation of former Lt. Governor Mark Darr, the doors have been locked and the lights off for months. As Sen. Keith Ingram, D-West Memphis, explained in an interview, “We’ve got an office that in all intents and purposes doesn’t exist right now, and there’s no clamor about some services that are not being met.”

Ingram and Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, are proposing abolishing the office and making the attorney general next in line to be governor. This would require a constitutional amendment approved by the voters. Were it to pass, Arkansas would join five other states that don’t have a lieutenant governor.

The proposal has been far from universally embraced. There’s a natural resistance to changing the Constitution, which is a good thing. Plus, some legislators might want to be lieutenant governor someday and are reluctant to vote to get rid of the office. It’s hard to cut the backup quarterback when you hope to be one someday.

There’s some concern about making the attorney general next in line, which no state currently does, because doing so limits that opportunity to lawyers only.

But it not the attorney general, then who? The next highest statewide position after attorney general is the secretary of state, a job that deals primarily with running elections and maintaining the Capitol – not really governor-type duties. Still, that position ascends to governor in three states that have no lieutenant governor – Arizona, Oregon and Wyoming. In New Jersey, the lieutenant governor and the secretary of state are the same officeholder. Legislators deal with many of the same issues as the governor, so the speaker of the House or the Senate president pro tempore would make sense. The objection is that neither are elected by voters statewide, but that hasn’t stopped Maine, New Hampshire, Tennessee and West Virginia from making the leader of the Senate their next in line. In fact, Tennessee and West Virginia give their Senate leaders the title of “lieutenant governor.”

We could just make the lieutenant governor a real job. At one time, Arkansas’ lieutenant governor exercised real power in the Senate by appointing committees and committee chairs. There’s no way legislators are giving up those powers now, but perhaps the lieutenant governor could be made the head of a state agency or a member of some important commissions.

Or, the governor and the lieutenant governor could be yoked together on one ticket, like the president and the vice president are, instead of running separately as occurs now. That way the governor and lieutenant governor could be a team, maybe even share staff. That would be the opposite of what the state had before Darr resigned: a Democratic governor and a Republican lieutenant governor who couldn’t work together and didn’t even like each other.

Changing anything in government is hard, particularly when there’s no deadline forcing it to happen. We don’t have a crisis. We have an office that doesn’t do much when it has an occupant and currently doesn’t even have that. Ideally, Arkansas could either make it useful or just get rid of it.

Or we could just leave things as they are. It’s only $400,000 a year. Of your money.

Here’s a KARK-TV report about this subject.

Impeach us all

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Impeaching the president would be bad for the country in many ways. It should not happen, and it will not happen.

But we columnists like to use this kind of thing to make a point, so here goes.

If the U.S. House of Representatives somehow were to vote for impeachment, there would be no point in asking whether or not the Senate would remove the president from office. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote in that chamber, and no Democrat there would vote for that.

Instead, a better question would be, if we’re going to start stripping constitutional duties, why stop with the president? Maybe we all should be replaced.

The president has failed to provide leadership on the most important long-term issue facing the federal government, one that will really matter long after the Benghazi and IRS scandals are long forgotten. The national debt was $17.68 trillion on Aug. 11 – more than $5 billion more than it was the day before and more than $11 trillion more than it was in 2000. The $500 billion that will be added to the national debt this year will be the best fiscal year the nation has had since President Obama took office. The debt is now equal to about $56,000 for every American man, woman and child. It’s still rising, and it will continue to rise unless something in Washington changes.

The country must have a serious conversation about its wants, needs and expectations, because it’s clearly living beyond its means. The president started that conversation by appointing the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in 2010 to make recommendations for addressing the problem. At the time, he seemed interested in the subject. But no one in the White House is talking about fiscal responsibility and reform now.

The president sets the tone, but Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the responsibility for taxing, spending, and paying off debts. Clearly, Congress has been failing to fulfill those responsibilities for a long time. For the past few years, it has lurched from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, jeopardizing the full faith and credit of the United States and blunting the country’s economic recovery. Like a college freshman who parties all semester and then crams during finals week, it rarely acts anymore without an absolute deadline.

And yet despite the fact that, according to Gallup, only 13 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, being a member is a secure job. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 90 percent of House incumbents and 91 percent of Senate incumbents running for re-election were sent back to Washington in 2012. Voters did not care that, during the fiscal year leading up to that election, the federal government had spent almost $1.3 trillion more than it had collected. In fact, they rewarded that behavior.

Ultimately, the White House and Congress reflect the will of the people, and the will of the people is to borrow and spend. Polls have made it clear that Americans are at least aware that the national debt is a problem, but they also oppose meaningfully cutting spending or raising taxes. In a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, respondents were presented 19 areas where spending could be cut. None were favored by a majority. Members of Congress and the president know this.

The Constitution reserves impeachment for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Americans today – the president, the Congress, and the voters – together have made the decision to steal trillions of dollars from our children and grandchildren. Stealing is a crime – in this case, a high crime. We’re committing treason against the future country they will inherit.

So maybe it’s time to stop talking about impeaching just a particular president and start talking about impeaching us all. We voters have proven unable or unwilling to perform our duties, and so perhaps those duties should be stripped from us and entrusted to the next in line – every American currently under 18. Put kids in the White House and in Congress. If we won’t make their future a priority, maybe they will.

I’m kidding, I guess. But at least my 12-year-old and nine-year-old know that stealing is wrong.

Real Americans tackle ‘Big Bad Budget’ in film

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

If you and seven other Americans with different backgrounds and beliefs were given a weekend to balance the federal budget together, could you do it?

That’s the premise behind “Big Bad Budget,” a film that producer and host Tom Carroll calls a “high-brow reality show.”

Carroll, who owns an Albuquerque, N.M.-based marketing and PR firm, rounded up four local Republicans, three Democrats, and a Democrat-leaning independent. They were given information about the federal budget to digest for a week and then were brought together over two days in June 2013. Their mission was to balance the budget by finding $750 billion in spending cuts and/or tax revenue increases. The negotiations were filmed and then edited down to an hour.

Like other reality shows, there’s some conflict, though there’s no yelling or tearful confessionals. The two tribes – I mean, parties – were separated at times to strategize, and Carroll pulled individuals aside for brief interviews.

The show gave differing viewpoints a chance to be aired. Republican Seth Heath said this about food stamps: “Poverty isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to be painful. Otherwise you have no desire to achieve and to become a successful person.” Wanda Small, a human resources consultant and a Democrat, said most people are trying to succeed. While arguing against cutting unemployment benefits, she said one temporary position she tried to fill paying $10 an hour drew more than 150 applicants. “Nobody wants to be in a situation where they have to get a handout,” she said.

I’ll spoil the ending: They balanced the budget by raising tax revenues by $250 billion and cutting spending by $500 billion, including $200 billion from defense, or about a third of the defense budget. The vote was 7-0, with one abstention. Heath accepted higher taxes along with smaller spending cuts than he preferred. Small agreed to reduce unemployment benefits from 99 weeks to 18 months and to cut Social Security by $75 billion.

It’s hard to miss the point.

“Congress needs to see that it needs to put its own personal interest behind the national interest, and if regular Americans can get together and over a short period of time with the information make the hard decisions, then why can’t Congress?” Carroll told me.

Granted, the comparison with Congress is imperfect. The participants had only one task – make the numbers add up. Members of Congress must balance many competing interests, and not just personal ones. Quickly cutting $200 billion from the defense budget would send shock waves through the economy, for example.

Still, the show demonstrates that, when Americans are given the facts and a reason to work with people with whom they disagree, a consensus can emerge. The first thing that happened was the Democrats proposed cutting $10 billion from the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans, annoyed at government intrusion in general, quickly agreed. Both sides proposed spending cuts and tax increases early in the process because they knew compromise would be required. There was some venting, and then it was just a matter of giving and taking and finding common ground.

“Big Bad Budget” has aired in Albuquerque and is being shopped around public television stations. AETN has recorded the show but hasn’t decided if it will run it. Carroll hopes it will be available on Netflix. It’s available on DVD at bigbadbudget.com.

Something like this needs to happen in cities across America and include more than eight Americans. Congress reflects the will of the people, and we the people don’t understand the national debt very well. According to the polls, we don’t want to cut spending or raise taxes. You can’t balance the budget without doing one, the other or both.

On the other hand, the show demonstrates the inadequacy of polling. Questions are usually asked over the phone and in isolation, such as, “Do you favor raising the such-and-such tax?” By itself? Of course not. In this case, Americans made difficult choices because they had an opportunity to make thoughtful decisions in the context of the big picture. They raised taxes, but they cut spending twice as much and balanced the budget.

Failure to compromise meant failure, period. They didn’t want to fail. So even though this wasn’t exactly like Congress, much applies. In Albuquerque and in Washington, people are more likely to succeed when given the right incentives. If it really had to, Congress could balance the budget. As Carroll said, “Right now they’re stuck in their positions, but if you told them that they had to do it or they’d all be thrown out of office, they’d do it in a weekend.”

Here’s the trailer.