DebateGate

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  PEGGY NOONAN
He's Got Guts
In praise of Chuck Hagel.

Friday, January 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.

We all complain, and with justice, about the falseness of much that is said in Washington, and the cowardice that leaves a great deal unsaid. But I found myself impressed and grateful for the words of Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, in a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. Because his message was not one Republicans or Democrats would find congenial, it may be accidentally dropped down the memory hole, so I'll quote at some length.

The committee was nearing a vote on what was, essentially, an announcement of no confidence in the administration's leadership in Iraq. Specifically it was a nonbinding resolution opposing the increase in troops the president has requested. This was not significant in a concrete way: The president has the power to send more troops, and they are already arriving. But as symbols go, it packed a punch. You couldn't watch it on television or on the Internet and not see that Mr. Hagel was letting it rip. He did not speak from notes or a text but while looking at his fellow senators. There seemed no time lag between thought and word. He was barreling, he was giving it to you straight, and he'd pick up the pieces later.

This is what he said: Congress has duties; in the case of the war, meeting those duties was not convenient; Congress did not meet them.

And so: "The Congress has stood in the shadow of this issue, Iraq, for four years. As [John] Warner noted . . . we have a constitutional responsibility as well as a moral responsibility to this country, to the young men and women we ask to go fight and die and their families. . . . This is not a defeatist resolution, this is not a cut-and-run resolution, we're not talking about cutting off funds, not supporting the troops. This is a very real, responsible addressing of the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam.

"Sure it's tough. Absolutely. And I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line on this. What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why are you elected? If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.

"This is a tough business. But is it any tougher, us having to take a tough vote, express ourselves . . . than what we're asking our young men and women to do? I don't think so."

Later: "I don't question the president's sincerity, his motivations in this. I never have. . . . Part of the problem that we have, I think, is because we didn't--we didn't involve the Congress in this when we should have. And I'm to blame. Every senator who's been here the last four years has to take some responsibility for that.

"But I will not sit here in this Congress of the United States at this important time for our country and in the world and not have something to say about this. . . . I don't ever want to look back and have the regret that I didn't have the courage and I didn't do what I could. . . .

"I would go back to where I began, and pick up on a point that Chairman [Richard] Lugar mentioned: coherence of strategy. I don't know how many United States senators believe we have a coherent strategy in Iraq. I don't think we've ever had a coherent strategy. In fact, I would even challenge the administration today to show us the plan that the president talked about the other night. There is no plan. I happen to know Pentagon planners were on their way to the Central Com over the weekend. They haven't even Team B'd this plan. . . . And I want every one of you, every one of us, 100 senators, to look in that camera, and you tell your people back home what you think. Don't hide anymore; none of us.

"That is the essence of our responsibility. And if we're not willing to do it, we're not worthy to be seated right here. We fail our country. If we don't debate this . . . we are not worthy of our country."

Whenever the camera shot broadened to show the other senators, I wondered what they were thinking. For a few it might have been, Well done, Chuck. For others, Hey, righteous indignation is my act. And some would have been thinking, That's good, ol' buddy, and no matter how long I have to wait, I'll get you for putting me on the spot, for making us look bad, for getting on your high horse and charging.

But Mr. Hagel said the most serious thing that has been said in Congress in a long time. This is what we're here for. This is why we're here, to decide, to think it through and take a stand, and if we can't do that, why don't we just leave and give someone else a chance?

Mr. Hagel has shown courage for a long time. He voted for the war resolution in 2002 but soon after began to question how it was being waged. This was before everyone did. He also stood against the war when that was a lonely place to be. Senate Democrats sat back and watched: If the war worked, they'd change the subject; and if it didn't, they'd hang it on President Bush. Republicans did their version of inaction; they supported the president until he was unpopular, and then peeled off. This is almost not to be criticized. It's what politicians do. But it's not what Mr. Hagel did. He had guts.

A note too on John Kerry, who, on the floor of the Senate, also talked about Iraq this week, and said he would not run for president. Clearly he saw the lipstick writing on the wall: This is the year of the woman. He also might have been acting on the sense that this is a time of ongoing and incipient political flux. The major parties seem as played out as they are ruthless, and the arc of political fame is truncated: nobodies become somebodies become has-beens before half the country knows their name. The Democrats have no idea what they stand for, the Republicans only remember what they stood for.

But there was Mr. Kerry, liberated by the death of a dream and for once quite human as he tried to tell it the way he actually saw it. Took the mock right out of me. Good for him, and for Mr. Hagel. I wonder if we are seeing the start of a new seriousness.

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110009577

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/16591107.htm



   Posted on Wed, Jan. 31, 2007   
BREAKING NEWS

Columnist Molly Ivins dies

By JOHN MORITZ
STAR-TELEGRAM AUSTIN BUREAU

AUSTIN — Molly Ivins, whose biting columns mixed liberal populism with an irreverent Texas wit, died at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at her home in Austin after an up-and-down battle with breast cancer she had waged for seven years. She was 62.

Ms. Ivins, the Star-Telegram’s political columnist for nine years ending in 2001, had written for the New York Times, the Dallas Times-Herald and Time magazine and had long been a sought-after pundit on the television talk-show circuit to provide a Texas slant on issues ranging from President Bush’s pedigree to the culture wars rooted in the 1960s.

"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ms. Ivins at the newspaper’s Austin bureau in 1992, a few months after the Times-Herald ceased publication. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn’t hurt so bad."

A California native who moved to Houston as a young child with her family, Ms. Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. Two years later after enduring a radical mastectomy and rounds of chemotherapy, Ms. Ivins was given a 70 percent chance of remaining cancer-free for five years. At the time, she said she liked the odds.

But the cancer recurred in 2003, and again last year. In recent weeks, she had suspended her twice-weekly syndicated column, allowing guest writers to use the space while she underwent further treatment. She made a brief return to writing in mid-January, urging readers to resist President Bush’s plan to increase the number of U.S. troops deployed to Iraq. She likened her call to an old-fashioned "newspaper crusade."

"We are the people who run this country," Ms Ivins said in the column published in the Jan. 14 edition of the Star-Telegram. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.

"Raise hell," she continued. "Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge."

She ended the piece by endorsing the peace march in Washington scheduled for Saturday. 01-27 "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!' " she wrote.

The spice of Texas

Born Mary Tyler Ivins on Aug. 30, 1944, in Monterey, Calif., Ms. Ivins was raised in the upscale River Oaks section of Houston. She earned her journalism degree at elite Smith College in Massachusetts in 1965. From there she ventured to Minnesota, taking a job as a police reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.

Growing weary of the winters in the Upper Great Lakes and missing the spice of Texas food and its politics, Ms. Ivins moved to Austin to become co-editor of the Texas Observer, long considered the state’s liberal conscience.

Nadine Eckhardt, the former wife of the late Texas novelist Billy Lee Bramer and who later married former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt of Houston, said Ivins soon made herself a fixture in the Austin political and cocktail party scene in the early 1970s.

"That’s where she became the Molly Ivins as we’ve come to know her," said Eckhardt, an Ivins friend for nearly four decades. "The Observer had such wonderful writers doing such wonderful stories at the time, and Molly was always right in the middle of everything."

Her writing flair caught the attention of the New York Times, which hired her to cover city hall, then later moved her to the statehouse bureau in Albany. Later, she was assigned to the Times’ Rocky Mountain bureau in Denver.

Even though she wrote the Times’ obituary for Elvis Presley in 1977, Ms. Ivins said later that she and the sometimes stodgy Times proved to be a mismatch. In a 2002 interview with the Star-Telegram, Ms. Ivins recalled that she would write about something that "squawked like a $2 fiddle" only to have a Times editor rewrite it to say "as an inexpensive instrument." Ms Ivins said she would mention a "beer belly" and The Times would substitute "a protuberant abdomen.”

So Ms. Ivins returned to Austin in 1982 to become a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald and reconnecting with such political figures as Ann Richards, who would later become governor, and Bob Bullock, then the hard-drinking state comptroller who later wielded great power as lieutenant governor.

Trademark language

The column provided Ms. Ivins the freedom to express her views with the colorful language that would become her trademark. She called such figures as Ross Perot, former U.S. Sen. John Tower and ex-Gov. Bill Clements "runts with attitudes." As a candidate for governor, George W. Bush became "Shrub," a nicknamed she never tired of using.

Surprised became "womperjawed." A visibly angry person would "throw a walleyed fit."

Ms. Ivins, who was single and had no children, told readers about her first bout with cancer in a matter-of-fact afterword in an otherwise ordinary column.

"I have contracted an outstanding case of breast cancer, from which I fully intend to recover," she wrote on Dec. 14, 1999. "I don’t need get-well cards, but I would like the beloved women readers to do something for me: Go. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done."

Ms. Ivins authored three books and co-authored a fourth. She was a three-time finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and had served on Amnesty International’s Journalism Network, but the iconoclastic writer often said that her two highest honors were being banned from the conservative campus of Texas A&M University and having the Minneapolis police name their mascot pig after her when she covered the department as a reporter during one of her first jobs in the newspaper business.

Funeral arrangements were pending.

John Moritz, 512-476-4294

jmoritz@star-telegram.com



© 2007 Star-Telegram.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com

Ethics theory often misunderstood
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/233232,CST-FIN-Milton29.article)

January 29, 2007

BY ALEXEI M. MARCOUX

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman died on Nov. 16, and this week at the University of Chicago, where he taught for 30 years, friends, colleagues and admirers will gather to honor his positive contributions to the world in which we live.

And there are many.

We owe our escape from the stagflation of the 1970s to the embrace of Friedman's monetary policy ideas. We owe the creation of our highly professional, all-volunteer military in part to his vigorous efforts to end the draft.

But there's one contribution that will likely go unnoticed: his contribution to the field of business ethics.

Perhaps the most reprinted article ever published on corporate social responsibility -- the belief that corporations have a responsibility to address social concerns -- is Friedman's 1970 New York Times Magazine piece, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits."

It is also the most maligned and misunderstood.

A staple of business ethics textbooks preaching corporate social responsibility, Friedman is generally presented as a foil, a what-not-to-believe.
Friedman's view is simple, straightforward and largely contained in his title.

Business firms are purpose-built entities, well-suited to creating wealth through market exchanges, and ill-suited to other purposes -- like solving the myriad social and environmental problems that corporate social responsibility advocates demand.

Friedman said there is a place to address those problems, and that place is the political arena.

The social responsibility of business is to increase profits -- not to boost the stock price by what-ever means are convenient, or to ensure that stock analysts are duped or co-opted into giving a healthy "buy" recommendation. Consistent profit-making is virtually impossible without disciplined, ethical conduct.

Many of the longstanding aphorisms of business support this: "Make the customer, not the sale" and "Don't sell a man one car -- sell him five cars over 15 years." They reflect the importance of making good on promises to customers. Profitability -- like that coming from repeat business -- is a rough but reliable barometer of ethical conduct because the cheated rarely come back for seconds.

However, because he does not pay obeisance to the enthusiasms of business ethicists, Friedman is often cast by them as inspiration for the worst excesses of corporate America -- his views characterized as leading invariably to the scandals the corporate world has so recently suffered.

And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Friedman's views provide a much clearer, more straightforward and more intuitive critique of wrongdoers like Enron than the corporate social responsibility crowd can muster.

Before its fall, Enron was Wall Street's darling. But it was also much celebrated by the social responsibility crowd. Named repeatedly to lists of the best places to work and the best-run companies, Enron was also the winner of several social responsibility awards.

It issued regular reports on its social and environmental performance, and even embraced the so-called "triple bottom line" (social, environmental, financial) much adored by advocates.

Why would Enron executives concern themselves with social and environmental performance? Because they recognized that corporate social responsibility initiatives bring freedom from accountability. Complex, multifaceted mandates to achieve social, environmental and financial goals are the self-serving executive's best friend.

Charged with a complex mandate, the manager will have to trade off some goals against others. Because some goal is almost invariably aligned with the self-serving manager's interests, that manager is essentially free to do as he or she pleases.

Belatedly, some business ethicists are starting to see service to shareholders' interests in profitability as a solution to problems of managerial accountability.

A recent article by University of Montreal business ethicist Wayne Norman captures the problem with multifaceted mandates: "How could the board of directors judge whether the CEO was doing a good job of managing the firm effectively?

"If the firm's profit margins were lower than its competitors', the CEO could claim that this is because he or she was trying to improve, say, benefits to employees or relations with local communities."

Much has been made of the harmful effects Enron's collapse had on its employees. But as employees they lost only their jobs. However, as Enron shareholders, the employees lost much of their net worth. Why?

Because Enron wasn't profitable. The shares they were urged to buy and hold were worthless.

Excessive allegiance to shareholders didn't bring Enron down. Instead, it was management's willful disregard of their bedrock responsibility to increase its profits.

In business ethics, as in so much else, we owe Milton Friedman a word of thanks.

Alexei Marcoux is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago's Graduate School of Business and a policy adviser to the Heartland Institute. He can be reached at amarcou@luc.edu.

Bush to Seek Cutback in Gas Consumption
Email this Story

Jan 23, 1:17 PM (ET)

By JENNIFER LOVEN


WASHINGTON (AP) - In his first State of the Union address to a Democratic-controlled Congress, President Bush is calling for Americans to slash gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent by 2017.

Bush envisions the goal being achieved primarily through a sharp escalation in the amount of ethanol and other alternative fuels that the federal government mandates must be produced. The rest of the fuel use reduction is to come from raising fuel economy standards for passenger cars, Joel Kaplan, White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters in a briefing before Bush's Tuesday night speech to a joint session of Congress.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070123/D8MR52TO0.html

Blue-ing the West

by SASHA ABRAMSKY

[from the January 22, 2007 issue]

A quarter-century ago, an up-and-coming senator from Colorado by the name of Gary Hart began outlining a Western strategy for the Democratic Party. His dream was to offset the national influence of an increasingly Republican South by building Democratic power in the Western states, which he saw as ripe terrain for such an effort. In 1984 Hart tried to bring this strategy to life by running for his party's presidential nomination. After a strong early showing, Hart lost the middle rounds of the caucus and primary season before winning almost all the Western states toward the end of the monthslong process. In the end, however, he couldn't gain quite enough delegates to beat frontrunner Walter Mondale. Mondale, whose core base was the old industrial Midwest, went on to be thoroughly humbled by Reagan in the presidential election that November. Three years later, Hart entered the 1988 campaign as a charismatic frontrunner, only to self-destruct with the now-infamous sex scandal aboard the aptly named boat Monkey Business. Had that campaign not imploded, it's possible that two decades of rightward Southern drift in US politics would have been avoided.

Five presidential election cycles on, and the Western Strategy is back at the fore of Democratic strategic thinking, with talk of several early Western primaries, and Denver making a serious bid to host the 2008 Democratic convention (the Democratic National Committee will decide early this year). This time around there's a better-than-even chance that the West will fundamentally alter the regional balance of power within the party. After all, with the exception of Bill Clinton's triumphs--helped, at least in part, by the third-party presence of Ross Perot--and Jimmy Carter's victorious 1976 campaign, in presidential elections since 1968 Democrats have failed to break away Southern states from the Republican fold, leaving them grasping for a new source of Electoral College votes.

"We want to hit different regions of the country as well as different populations," Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Stacie Paxton explained last summer, before the Democrats scored big in the West in the November elections. "There's already an effort under way, through the '50 state strategy,' to ask for votes in every state. In Western states more people are coming our way, but we need to put in the resources to take it over the top and win in these states. You'll see a lot more interest in Western states: resources, candidates stopping in those states. We're making investments now so we can be successful in '06, in '08 and beyond."

November's election results vindicated this strategy. Building on gains in 2004, Democrats picked up four Congressional and Senate seats in the interior West, bolstered by one the number of governorships they control in the region and increased their presence in statehouses. In fact, the results may ultimately presage a political realignment as far-reaching as that following passage of the Voting Rights Act, which saw the decampment of a critical mass of conservative white voters in the South into the GOP and, in turn, the GOP's remaking of itself increasingly as a party of Southern values. In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the margin between George Bush and Gore/Kerry was within five points in New Mexico (which went narrowly for Gore in 2000) and Nevada and within five points in Colorado in 2004. Many strategists, who tout more than thirty Electoral College permutations that would allow a Democratic victory based primarily on inroads in the West, believe every Western state but Idaho, Utah and Wyoming could fall to a strong progressive-leaning presidential candidate in 2008.

"National candidates really haven't invested in trying to pick up Electoral College votes in the Mountain West, with the possible exception of New Mexico," explains Arizona's Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano. "You need to be there, have a campaign structure, buy media time, have a real serious get-out-the-vote effort. The Democratic Party has to multitask. We have to deal with the South, but we have to win another area of the country; and this is an area where we're winning elections." In 2000 all eight of the interior Western states had Republican governors; today, with Bill Ritter's recent win in Colorado--springing from Senator Ken Salazar's victory in the state in 2004--five of the eight are run by Democrats.

Napolitano, long one of the leading boosters for opening up what might be termed a Western Front for nationally minded Democrats, argues that her party "has to broaden its base geographically and in terms of issues. For the party, it means a new, or a renewed, emphasis on issues predominating in the interior West. Part of that is people want a good quality of life, do not want government to dictate to them how they live their lives. They want good government but not big government. They're looking for pragmatic folks who produce results. How do you move goods and services and people, and preserve open space, and preserve economic opportunity for a growing number of people? You have to make your economies more diverse, be very entrepreneurial, rewarding those who will take a chance--and your public policies need to align with that." Napolitano cites Arizona's investment in high-tech university laboratories, the crafting of tax credits for research and development, the creation of state-backed research funds designed to leverage increased private-sector investment and an emphasis on conservation that protects the treasured open spaces of the West.

Western politicians also believe immigration politics could play to the Democratic Party's advantage, not least because, despite Bush's efforts to moderate his party's stance, during the last year of the outgoing Congress hard-line Republicans hijacked the debate about border security and undocumented workers. "Democrats can come in and say, 'Yes, we want to secure our borders, but we want an immigration policy that works,'" Napolitano avers, explaining why she believes that an increasing number of Hispanic voters in the Southwest will turn to the Democrats as their party in the post-Bush years.

For New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a much-talked-about potential 2008 presidential candidate, immigration is part of a panoply of issues that should, he says, make his region "fertile territory" for national Democrats. "I've long been an advocate that the Democratic Party should emphasize and gravitate to the West," the Governor argues. Capturing states within his region would, he says, "give us a beachhead. It would make us a national party. Now we're an East Coast and a West Coast party."

November's election suggests that the shift he envisions may already be happening: Such states as Montana are now electing Democratic populists. Moreover, even before November's election, most of the big cities throughout the region, including Denver, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Boise and Missoula, were already run by Democratic mayors, or by mayors elected in nonpartisan races who openly identify with their state Democratic parties. These politicians have supported a dramatically increased minimum wage, and most have made economic populism a key part of their platform. They have stepped back from coastal Democrats' rhetoric on gun control--Richardson, who was endorsed by the National Rifle Association in his re-election campaign, is adamant that a candidate's position on gun control "should never be a litmus test again." Many have pushed energy conservation and alternative energy proposals as part of a larger Western environmental vision that has created unlikely alliances among hunters, fishermen, ranchers and Sierra Club-type environmentalists. And they have advocated large-scale investments in high-tech public transit systems in an attempt to curb runaway suburban sprawl.

"If you had the right kind of Democrat and took guns off the table," argues Governor Richardson's re-election campaign chief, Dave Contarino, "you could even win Montana."

While Richardson is the most obvious potential beneficiary of a Western tilt in '08, someone like John Edwards could also reap the fruits of this shift. In much the same way that a Californian, Ronald Reagan, rode to power atop the early Southern GOP wave, a Southern populist untainted by religious fundamentalism could ride the growing Western wave for the Democrats, creating alliances hinted at in Bill Clinton's two presidential election victories but subsequently lost. "Although a Southerner, he [Edwards] could connect," argues Boise Mayor David Bieter. For Bieter, winning the West is at least in part an exercise in linguistics rather than a matter of simply fielding regional candidates. "You need to learn to speak to the values of Westerners--it's a different political language, less ideological and more to people in their homes. The national party can be sort of elitist. The Republicans have been real skilled in taking somebody like Bush, with an absolute silver spoon upbringing, and making him appeal to the common man. And the Democrats have lost that touch."

In early 2005 Gary Hart--now a professor at the University of Colorado in Denver and described by local political consultant Mike Stratton as the "John the Baptist" of the Western movement--was asked by the chair of the state Democrats to write a memo that could be forwarded to incoming DNC chair Howard Dean, outlining the importance of the interior West to Democratic presidential prospects. Sitting down in his home in Kittredge, Hart typed out two and a half pages, broken down into ten crucial bullet points.

The party, he wrote, needed to pay more attention to Western environmental issues, with locally based environmental policies that didn't appear to be imposed from afar; it had to look toward a managed growth approach that would allow booming Western economies, increasingly based around high-tech companies in place of traditional resource-extraction industries, to grow while not undermining the high quality of life drawing so many to the region--and that would involve a commitment to invest heavily in public transit, clean-energy initiatives and anti-sprawl housing policies, all initiatives embraced by local Democratic politicians in recent years; it needed to promote a strong national security agenda that would appeal to Westerners long involved, from the earliest days of the cold war, in the country's military and defense infrastructure; and, finally, its leaders had to do more than pay lip service to the values of Western individualism.

"The religious right," Hart opined, "preaches values. Democrats, regionally and nationally, should espouse principles, for ourselves and for our country. 'Values' have religious overtones. Principles are humanistic and secular."

Hart's analysis borrowed significantly from Christopher Caldwell's influential 1998 article in The Atlantic Monthly, titled "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," in which Caldwell argued that the Southern flavor of the Republican Party, while providing it with short-term electoral success, was in the long run an Achilles' heel, with the conservative values espoused by the party faithful ultimately alienating middle-of-the-road suburbanites and Westerners.

The onetime senator's memo concluded with a prophecy: "The national Democratic Party should look Westward. The South will return to the Democratic Party only when economic downturn requires it. Meanwhile, the West provides the Democratic Party's greatest opportunity and represents its greatest future. National Party leaders must develop a plan to win the West in the early twenty-first century or risk settling into minority status for many years to come."

Westerners generally oppose government legislation on sexual morality, are tolerant of medical marijuana (on November 7, in an underreported sideshow to the main election, 44 percent of Nevadans voted in favor of an initiative that proposed legalizing marijuana across the board), dislike the more intrusive aspects of legislation such as the Patriot Act and tend to be less influenced by fundamentalist Baptist churches than are voters in the South. When Gallup conducted a poll last June on what noneconomic issues were of most importance to voters, 7 percent of Southerners said ethical/moral/religious decline worried them most, whereas only 3 percent of those in the coastal and interior Western states responded that way. Westerners were more preoccupied with the emerging energy crisis. In general, they are responding more to issues Democrats have made their own in recent years and are less receptive to the religious issues Republicans have hyped so effectively elsewhere in the country.

"I'm very prochoice," says Napolitano, recalling her election campaign. "I said, 'I'm not going to support any laws limiting a woman's right to choose. End of story. Move on.' We should be fighting on new ground--like healthcare. There are initiatives like the minimum wage where the Republicans have to fight on our terms rather than the other way around."

Not too long ago, it would have been hard to imagine the Republicans being successfully painted as big-government advocates by progressive Democrats touting their small-government credentials. But, as a mark of how the Bush presidency has turned things upside down, that is precisely what Western Democratic strategists are now doing.

Whereas Washington, DC, used to intervene against reactionary state policies like the poll tax and educational segregation, these days it is Washington that is proving reactionary on issues ranging from its failure to rein in carbon dioxide emissions to Congress's repeated rejection of an increase in the minimum wage, from the legislation GOP lawmakers rushed through during the morbid Terri Schiavo spectacle to vast tax giveaways to Big Oil. As important, a Republican administration that touts its conservative credentials has, over the past six years, been busily spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than it brings in each year in tax revenues, running up the largest budget deficit in American history. And increasingly, it is aggrieved politicians and voters in the states who are forming a backlash against this irresponsibility.

In a way, on social issues, Western Democrats, represented by figures like organic-farmer-cum-Senator Jon Tester, are more the party of that iconic Westerner Barry Goldwater than is the big-business- and religious-right-dominated GOP. To an increasing number of desert and mountain Westerners--including socially liberal, economically conservative Californians who have been moving inland in pursuit of cheaper land and open space--it is GOP hard-liners who threaten their way of life most, by imposing policies crafted by rigidly conservative lobbyists and kingmakers inside the Beltway or by equally uncompromising local party apparatchiks.

"The attitude to livability, attention to riverfront trails and parks, and downtown revitalization is clearly something associated with Democratic leadership," asserts Daniel Kemmis, a senior fellow at the University of Montana's Center for the Rocky Mountain West, as well as a coordinator for the organization Democrats for the West, dedicated to boosting the party's fortunes in the region, and a onetime mayor of Missoula. "Over time, the people who are moving to the West and who stay here because they like the feel of these communities, it's starting to sink in that Democrats seem to deliver more effectively on these issues than Republicans."

Hoping to capitalize on the new Electoral College calculations, Western Democrats are flexing their muscle as never before. To boost Denver's chances at hosting the party's '08 convention, the city's convention bid team, as well as Mayor John Hickenlooper--himself a transplant, with a petroleum-exploration and small-business background, from the environs of Philadelphia and then Connecticut--has proposed something unprecedented: that while the convention itself would be held in the Mile High City, the entire Rocky Mountain West would sponsor it. The convention would be billed not as a Denver affair but as a Rocky Mountain West Convention.

"I've talked to Napolitano in Arizona, Governor Richardson, [Wyoming] Governor [Dave] Freudenthal and [Montana Governor Brian] Schweitzer. Each has been very enthusiastic," says Hickenlooper, who recently made a splash by working with the thirty-two mayors who govern the cities of the greater Denver metropolitan area to kickstart the nation's largest public-transit expansion, 119 miles of light-rail lines throughout the urban region. "A Western convention says something. Democrats in the West have a strong sense of self-responsibility. A Western Democrat is more cautious about ceding power to Washington over our environment. We believe in local control, in the inherent value of open space. We are in many ways pro-business, trying to create opportunity for people, cutting red tape, cutting bureaucracy, making government more efficient."

Democratic politicians throughout the region have similarly come together to urge the DNC to move Western caucuses and primaries forward. Nevada will now hold a caucus sandwiched between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, and momentum is growing in Western policy circles for the creation of a regional super-primary, to be held early in the candidate-selection process.

Daniel Kemmis believes that as many as six or seven Western states will sign up for early primaries. "There's an increased interest in the idea of a Western presidential primary, trying to coordinate many Western states and have them hold their caucuses and primaries on the same day," he says. Others are slightly more cautious. "You'd now have four Western states in play at the very start of the nominating schedule," estimates consultant Mike Stratton. "If the candidates have to come out West early and through '07 and into the nominating process of '08; if you have them traipsing out West, they're going to have to start talking Western issues: water, land, energy, conservation, quality of life. Then the balance of Western independent voters here have a reason to start looking to the Democratic Party and its nominee."

How would Gary Hart advise Howard Dean on this, as the Western strategy the Coloradan advocated as a young man finally comes of age? "Be very strong on environmental issues," he argues. "That doesn't mean give over the agenda to the Sierra Club, but to say on climate change, transportation, urban pollution issues, you've got to be very strong and lay out an agenda." Above all, he says, start speaking with Westerners and not at them. "We're still a nation of regions and mannerisms. You have to be able to put people at ease, speak in a way they understand and accept."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/abramsky

Bush says feds can open mail without warrant

By James Gordon Meek
New York Daily News

WASHINGTON — President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.

Still, the move, one year after The New York Times' disclosure of a secret program that allowed warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mail, caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

"Despite the president's statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people's mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

"You have to be concerned," a senior U.S. official agreed. "It takes executive-branch authority beyond anything we've ever known."

A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised a review of Bush's move.

"It's something we're going to look into," the aide said.

Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane changes. But the legislation also explicitly reinforces protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval.

Yet, in his statement, Bush said he will "construe" an exception, "which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent ... with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

Bush cited as examples the need to "protect human life and safety against hazardous materials and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection."

White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore denied Bush was claiming new authority.

"In certain circumstances — such as with the proverbial 'ticking bomb' — the Constitution does not require warrants for reasonable searches," she said.

Bush, however, cited "exigent circumstances" that could refer to an imminent danger or a long-standing state of emergency.

Critics noted the administration could obtain a warrant quickly from a court or a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge, and the Postal Service could block delivery.

But the Bush White House appears to be taking no chances, national-security experts agreed.

Martin said Bush is "using the same legal reasoning" as he did with warrantless eavesdropping.

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