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Tuesday, January 23, 2007
What a thrill to make national headlines
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s the headline on the AP report the Drudge Report highlighted this evening: “White Atlanta suburbs push for secession.”
There’s gotta be a Chamber of Commerce brochure in that.
Tonight’s State of the Union address: A 21st Century cardigan sweater
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Remember Jimmy Carter in his cardigan sweater, preaching to us about keeping the thermostat down?
Don’t expect the tone to be quite the same tonight when President Bush gives his State of the Union message. But if David G. Hawkins is right, there will be a sense of deja vu in some of the things Bush proposes.
Hawkins, a former EPA official who is now director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Climate Center, predicted at the conference on the Carter presidency over the weekend that Bush will show a renewed interest in alternate fuel sources and reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
Bush has made some nod toward energy independence in all his annual messages to Congress, but with a stripped-down list of domestic priorities, the subject will move a long way up the list tonight.
The political reason for this is pretty obvious. Energy independence topped the chart in the issue polling Democrats conducted last year, blowing away anything else Congress might take up this year, according to Democratic strategist James Carville. Presumably Republicans have read similar polls.
It was noted several times at the University of Georgia conference that Ronald Reagan took down the solar panels Carter had put on the White House. Carter was the last president to reduce foreign oil consumption, which has spiraled in this decade.
It may be that some of the things he talked about more than a quarter-century ago have become more politically palatable, with the increasing unpopularity of the war in Iraq. But Carter’s example also serves as a warning about the pitfalls involved in getting this energy-guzzling country to change its ways.
Already, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the distant echo of a competition for research dollars between Midwestern corn and Southern pine trees - both potential replacements for oil. And remember the photograph of Jimmy and Rosslyn Carter in the control room at Three Mile Island in those strange-looking plastic shoes?
Nuclear power is a political can of worms that has been left shut ever since that incident, but it’s likely to be opened again.
Climate change, which was just beginning to be talked about when Carter was president, will be a complicating factor in the formation of any future energy policy. And none of these issues will be made any easier by having been put off for more than a quarter century.
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Social notes: Bishop’s wife scores a first
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Congressional Club, founded by the members of Congress nearly a century ago as a social outlet for their spouses, is an inside-the-beltway insitution. Last week Vivian Creighton Bishop, wife of U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, became the club’s first African-American president.
As a Columbus Ledger-Enquirer story details, the club, which also includes former first ladies, spouses of cabinet members and Supreme Court justices as well as female lawmakers, is founded on the now quaint idea of setting aside partisan differences. So no matter who’s in the majority in Congress, the presidency of the club alternates between the parties every two years.
Bishop was also the first African-American woman to be elected citywide in Columbus, to clerk of the Muscogee County Municipal Court, a post she still holds. Sounds like a lot of frequent-flyer miles.
On the ‘08 race for president: Gingrich’s game of chance, and a bit of history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today’s editions of the Washington Post say that Newt Gingrich pump-primed his ideas-for-president organization with a $1 million check from a casino executive.
The “donation marks a new frontier in political fund-raising — a seven-figure check to a group associated with a single politician whose aspirations may include the White House. Gingrich has said that he will decide by the fall whether to enter the crowded race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination,” writes the Post.
On top of his three marriages, news that the house has put its money behind Gingrich is unlikely to thrill the GOP’s Christian conservative base.
On another front, if you think the ‘08 presidential contest is already more wild and woolly than anything you’ve seen before, there’s a good reason.
Duke University political scientist John Aldrich has checked the stats for us all. The last time the U.S. had both an open presidency and a sitting vice president not interested in running was 1920.
Warren Harding was the GOP victor that year, with Calvin Coolidge as his vice president. Democrats offered up James Cox, an Ohio newspaper man whose descendants own this fine publication.
Cox’s running mate was 38-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, who at 38 was just a year away from contracting the polio that would put him in a wheelchair the rest of his life.
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