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Thursday, March 13, 2008
Taxes, insurance, honorable officials
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Taxpayer champions? They don’t get any better than U.S. Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Despite alienating colleagues in both parties, the two have persisted in their campaign to end pork-barrel politics — the so-called earmarks that got us the Bridge to Nowhere. All three presidential candidates have come around. Maybe. Clinton and Obama have signed on to a one-year moratorium, though they were defenders until recently.
• France’s last World War I veteran, Lazare Ponticelli, died this week at 110. It should be noted that only one World War II veteran remains in the Georgia General Assembly, the able and hardworking John P. Yates of Griffin. A first-class guy, he chairs the Defense and Veterans Affairs Committee.
• Another class act who served our nation in World War II, former Atlanta resident and Delta pilot Joseph H. Moss, made the largest individual donation ever to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, $25 million. His interest started with a story he read in the AJC about a little Mexican boy who needed a kidney transplant — a transplant he helped finance.
• Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine is outraged that the General Assembly has approved legislation allowing auto insurance companies to raise rates on everything except required minimum coverage without his approval. While he understandably objects to the loss of power to be the rate czar, he should cheer the state’s willingness to let the free market work. It’s the right policy. When consumers have access to information — and they do — competition works.
• The General Assembly should not vote out a proposed regional transportation sales tax that allows voters in one county to impose a tax on a neighboring county whose voters reject it. Too, voters should know the specific projects their money will be spent on when they go to the polls.
• Things just happen. Bishop Thomas W. Weeks explains how his wife, the Rev. Juanita Bynum, came to be on the ground with a man’s foot making rapid contact with her body: “I did push her and subsequently other things took place.” Lesson learned? “No matter how much you feel you are right in a push, it’s unjust according to the law.” Interpreter, please. Is that the same as saying that a technicality in the darn law won’t let you smack ‘em when they deserve it?
• Hillary Clinton is of two views about Barack Obama. One is that he’s inexperienced, naive, all talk and unworthy of being president. The other is that he’s an inspired choice to be VP.
• Words of regret for all in public office who fritter away their opportunities to make a difference: “I look at my time as governor with a sense of what might have been,” said Eliot Spitzer in resigning as governor of New York.
• The military commander for the Middle East, Adm. William J. Fallon, announced his resignation — and properly so — after a magazine article portrayed him as opposed to the commander in chief’s policy on Iran. Esquire described him as the lone voice against military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Retired admirals and generals can disagree publicly on possible military action. Fallon chose the honorable course. He’s retiring March 31. As with the U.S. attorneys, the president’s critics in and out of Congress find scandal where none exists in personnel changes.
• House Democrats rebound — joining in bipartisan agreement to reduce the yearly tax on cars, trucks and motorcycles used as personal vehicles to $10, a sum to be spent on a statewide trauma network. The vote was 166-5. The proposed constitutional amendment goes now to the Senate and, with its approval, to voters. More good news: A bill imposing a $1 tax on telephone and wireless service died this week. I hate these hidden taxes disguised as “fees.” Quit.
• The Georgia Senate passed a resolution to name the I-95/I-16 interchange near Savannah in honor of Justice Clarence Thomas. Insufficient. Name the state’s judicial building for him. Or Thomas County.
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Lessons of Spitzer’s fall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
No question that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s fall from power — he announced Wednesday that he’ll step down as governor on Monday — feeds the nation’s cynicism about politicians.
On so many fronts, he was a lie. Though his father, Bernard Spitzer, is believed to have real estate holdings that give him a worth of $500 million, Eliot cultivated the image of the frugal guy who drove a minivan. His 2006 income was $1.9 million, the majority of it from rents on property his family owns. He lives in a luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue owned by his father.
“He was certainly not free with the dollars,” said a consultant who worked on his first two campaigns. “He was very, very careful. This is not the kind of guy who would take $50,000 out of his own bank account one weekend and blow it in Atlantic City.”
Maybe not in a weekend, but the Associate Press quotes an anonymous law enforcement official as saying he may have spent $80,000 on prostitutes over several years. He paid 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupre, identified as Kristen, $4,300 on the evening before Valentine’s Day.
Spitzer could certainly afford the prostitutes. But part of the lie of his life was that he bought his way into the governor’s office by hounding honest and never-indicted businessmen with accusations of wrongdoing. That style got him named Time magazine’s Crusader of the Year.
Spitzer’s toast — and properly so. Hillary loses one superdelegate but the larger question is how the Spitzer saga affects Democratic presidential politics.
Public officials like Spitzer who cultivate a particular political image — whether that is as a change agent or a holier-than-thou crusader — fall quickly when their personal conduct fails to measure up. For Barack Obama, the stakes just went up in the Chicago trial of Tony Rezko, who is accused of bribing public officials and taking kickbacks. Obama has donated some $150,000 to charity, the allegedly illegal campaign contributions Rezko directed to his 2004 Senate campaign.
Obama’s major appeal is that he represents a new kind of politics — a message that has attracted hordes of young supporters. Spitzer just lowered the cynicism bar for politicians on high horses.
You decide. What do you see as the repercussions on public attitutudes or particular politicans, if any, of Spitzer’s fall?
