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May 2008
Judged fairly, pay packages cost us dearly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The president of the State Bar of Georgia, Gerald M. Edenfield of Statesboro, writes to express the extreme disappointment of lawyers that Gov. Sonny Perdue vetoed “the first substantial salary increase” for judges in nine years.
Lawyers studied the issues and concluded that judges’ pay should be raised by 20 percent, which was reduced to 5 percent, plus cost-of-living adjustments, by the Legislature.
But Perdue rejected the popular option and did something responsible and revolutionary, setting a precedent that every future governor should follow — and not just for judges. He looked at the whole compensation package. He explained in his veto message.
“I have consistently expressed concern with raising judicial officers’ salaries without tackling the well-above-market retirement benefits.” What’s more, he said, a review that he’d commissioned by employee-benefits consultants at New York-based Mercer LLC finds judicial pay to be “in line with competitor states and various counsel.”
In Georgia, Supreme Court justices earn $167,210. Their counterparts in Florida, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia average $153,356, according to the study. Superior Court judges are paid $120,252 by the state, but, with one exception — the Alapaha circuit, which covers five counties extending north from the Okefonokee Swamp — counties supplement their pay. The average is $35,160.
My specific interest here is not what judges make. Whether they’re underpaid or overpaid is entirely dependent on the quality of an individual’s service. The fact is, and has always been, that salaries are public record and the applicant pool is always full. When bad judges rise to the bench, far more often than not, it’s because a governor put them there at the expense of better-qualified applicants.
“We are looking for the best and the brightest of the public minded,” said Perdue this week, “not the best and the brightest that money can buy.” This particular veto and the affected group are the backdrop, really, for a far more important story.
Those who’ve followed the latest accounts of Atlanta’s budget woes know that city officials blame this year’s problems on high health care and pension costs, exacerbated by a short-sighted decision to buy off unruly employees with future money. In 2001, it adopted a formula change for computing police and fire benefits that was foolish, dramatically increasing long-term costs.
Business and government — especially government, because it can levy taxes to cover its recklessness — should therefore look not just to pay but to the cost of benefits, current and future. That’s what Perdue did on the proposed judicial pay increase. The Mercer review “confirmed that the judiciary’s retirement benefits are far above market average.”
When Mercer compared the total compensation of judges to peers in the private sector, it found that they ranked fifth of 94 in the peer group on total benefits — in large part because benefits are backloaded, as was the custom for public employees. At age 60, judges with 16 years’ service can retire with two-thirds of their highest salaries; at 24 years, the maximum, it would be three-fourths. For appellate court judges, that’s about $9,200 per month after 16 years on the bench.
Perdue’s begun a process to modernize the public-employee compensation system. Recognizing that few now spend an entire career with one employer, he’s begun to look at the whole compensation package. The aim is to raise salaries early by moving some of that backloaded compensation forward. The best solution would be to move from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans that would allow workers to take their full retirement benefits with them to new jobs.
For taxpayers the marvelous side effect of changing the way we compensate public employees could be to remove the temptation by employees to game the retirement system and by politicians to corrupt it. That’s been the pattern for decades.
On this issue, Perdue is cutting-edge. He could save Georgia from Atlanta’s financial fate.
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CRCT, menthol, a ‘bloody fortune’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama spoke to graduates of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., the day before Memorial Day. Topic was the usual commencement fare: the obligation to perform “service to one’s country.” He mentioned them all. An entire laundry list. Except one. Military service. This is as close as he came: “At a time of war, we need you to work for peace.” It doesn’t occur to our would-be commander-in-chief to invite the college-educated to consider a career in uniform.
Be thankful, though, that good people do choose military service. Case in point today is Fort Stewart’s 3rd Infantry Division, which has brought a measure of peace and stability to the “Triangle of Death” region south of Baghad and across central Iraq. The division is on its way home. All Georgia, indeed all of America, should cheer their service and success.
I read the comments, a number of them, of local school superintendents on the high failure rate on the statewide Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests on the new social studies and more rigorous math curricula. Observation: They had a chance to lead, to explain, and instead they whined and passed the buck, determined to make certain the locals knew it was not their fault.
A critical bit of information was missing from the story headlined “Teen accused of grabbing, biting women’s buttocks.” Now, how tall was he?
The left is determined to destroy the tobacco industry in America. First the high taxes and lawsuits to “recover” the medical costs associated with smoking. Now they’re playing the race card, insisting that menthol be banned as a tobacco flavoring, along with chocolate, strawberry and other candy flavorings that are said to appeal to the young. Menthol is not included in the flavoring ban now working its way through Congress. But wait. About 75 percent of blacks who smoke prefer menthol. Not banning it “gives the appearance that the lives of black youngsters are valued less than white youngsters,” said Dr. Louis Sullivan, former secretary of Health & Human Services. Goodness gracious. Just plain goodness gracious. Is there no race card we won’t play to win an election, legislation or policy debate?
The folly of the state’s monopoly-creating and antiquated certificate of need regulation of hospital construction, expansion and equipment could not be more evident than in the effort to revive Southwest Atlanta Hospital. It’s failed twice or more in the marketplace and relied most recently on nostalgia and guilt trips on young medical professionals and the black middle class to succeed. Now it’s trying again. Its primary asset: a state license to operate a hospital. Georgia really should get rid of that CON law.
Headline: “New Lebanese president urges unity.” Is the appeal from the winner ever otherwise? And here, “unity” may not be good. The election ended a stalemate, but Hezbollah gets veto power over all government decisions. Poor Lebanon.
Want to get rich —- and therefore become somebody liberal Democrats hate? Follow the advice of John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group Inc., the nation’s second-largest mutual fund company. Save a part of what you earn. Invest. Hold. He has “a bloody fortune” and “I didn’t really do anything except save all the time,” starting with 15 percent of his first monthly check of $250 in 1951.
Big Brother, my foot. A proposal to require employers to submit Social Security numbers of proposed hires to the federal government to make certain they’re legals would be costly —- about $10 billion over nine years —- but it’s not Big Brother, as critics assert. This would eliminate the argument that employers who hire illegals are the problem.
Be thankful for our blessings and for every day we have on this earth. A Tennessee woman, who died this week, spent almost 60 years of her life in an iron lung. “Everyone she encountered came to her because they cared about her,” said the president of a foundation that helped support her medical needs, “so she grew up in her 61 years thinking every person is good.”
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McClellan’s shocking revelation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A shocking revelation! An American President made the decision to sell his distant goals for peace in the Middle East by focusing on the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to accounts of the tell-all book by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan.
If true — and we’ll have to wait for a more balanced historical accounting that includes first-hand accounts of the actual participants in decision-makingto know whether Bush serving future generations, as I believe, or settling an old score for his dad, as the loopy-left believes — the news is hardly indictable.
If marketing to the American people a policy that the President believes is in the country’s best interest is a crime, we’d have to dig up and indict an awful lot former presidents — FDR on lend-lease, for example. McClellan doesn’t believe, however, that Bush was intentionally deceptive. “I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.”
The White House, obviously stung by the betrayal, called McClellan’s tell-all sour grapes. “Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” said Dana Perino, the current press secretary. “We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.”
He was eased out earlier than he’d planned to leave and was apparently embittered that he was kept out of the loop on key policy decisions — not a good policy, incidentally, for any president, governor or other chief executive who has to sell his policies and ideas to a mass audience.
McClellan also indicts the media for “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war.” He said Bush made the decision by early 2002 or earlier — the terrorist attack on America was Sept. 11, 2001 — though the actual war in Iraq was not launched until March 19, 2003. The President’s primary reason was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom, ” according to press accounts of the book. Bush and key advisers made “a marketing choice,” he said, to downplay that view in favor of the weapons of mass destruction threat. Bush and others made “the WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were,” said he.
The anti-war left will feel vindicated. I’ll wait for a more balanced view — and the memoirs of the President and those who were actually in the meetings and heard the intelligence. I’m not a fan of kiss-and-tell people or their books — especially when their disloyalty comes in a time of war. And for credible second-guessers on national security, public policy, executive management and leadership, I’ll turn to somebody above the pay grade of press secretary.
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War on the Boy Scouts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The war on the Boy Scouts continues. It’ll either accept gays or be driven from existence. The long struggle, now going on 20 years, strikes up again, this time in Philadelphia where the city is imposing a $200,000 per year fine on the Boy Scouts for declining to open its ranks to declared homosexuals.
It’s not a fine, literally. It’s rent on city-owned space that has been the Scouts’ headquarters for 80 years. The Scouts built the headquarters in 1928 and renovated it at a cost of $1.5 million in 1994. In addition, it pays about $60,000 per year to maintain it. The city owns the building and land and rents it to the Scouts for $1 per year.
The city has given the Scouts until Saturday to open their ranks to gays or to pay market rents.
The Boy Scouts filed suit in federal court, noting that Philadelphia has free and nominal-rate rents on other facilities with groups that limit membership, including The Colonial Dames of America and some church groups.
The Boy Scouts has a national policy that declares:
“Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed. The conduct of youth members must be in compliance with the Scout Oath and Law, and membership in Boy Scouts of America is contingent upon the willingness to accept Scouting’s values and beliefs.”
The Supreme Court ruled eight years ago that as a private group the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays. It essentially maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy similar to the military. Under pressure, the Philadelphia Cradle of Liberty Council of the Boy Scouts adopted language it considers a compromise barring “unlawful discrimination.”
“They’re free to exercise their First Amendment rights,” said City Solicitor Shelley Smith. “What they’re not free to do is get a benefit from the city while violating our policy.” He said he didn’t know of other discrimination by groups with cut-rate city rents.
The $200,000 the city wants would fund summer camp for about 800 boys.
Cheap rent is a form of public money given to a preferred group. You take their money, you invite their rules — and their meddling. The solution for the Scouts is to sever all ties with government, to either buy the headquarters or negotiate for the city to buy out its interest in the building and to relocate.
If Philadelphia is successful in punishing the Boy Scouts, it will be a sad day for community and for groups like the Scouts that have a reasonable basis for enacting and maintaining the membership qualifications they do.
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Barack, Billary or Barr?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr did get the Libertarian Party nomination over the Memorial Day weekend.
I’ve declared my intentions never to vote for a third party candidate. They’re spoilers. If they get hot and become well-financed, they pull in the teens. If not, it’s single digits, usually low single digits, often under 1 percent. That spells spoiler at best.
Barr expects the party to be on the ballot in 49 of the 57 states, though work remains to get on the ballot in about 20. Barr thinks his candidacy puts Georgia in play — and it could. Depending on the race and the candidate, Georgia can go either way, Democratic or Republican.
But through the summer doldrums leading up to Democratic and Republican national conventions, I will listen to Barr define the Libertarian Party. He took some flak over the weekend because some party purists insist he’s not really a Libertarian because he doesn’t buy into the entire party agenda, including legalization of all drugs and ending federal taxation.
Barr, who announced his candidacy just three weeks ago, says that “I am a competitor and I am in this to win. I do not view the role of the Libertarian Party as spoiler and I have no intention of being a spoiler.”
While waiting to see whether the Democratic convention’s rules committee will do “justice ” by Hillary( I love it when I can use the word “justice” just as the lefties would) and seat the Florida and maybe the Michigan delegates, Barr’s on the radar.
The question is whether Barr can define the party in such a way that it appeals to a broader audience or whether the purists in his party will hold him to a platform — drug legalization, for example — that will keep Libertarians on the fringe nationally. I don’t like Big Government, but I do want one that inspects the poultry plants and performs other necessary health-related functions.
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Straight arrows find it hard to survive Gold Dome
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s not much demand for PB&J Politicians.
We say we like them. We’re always looking for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the straight arrow of the 1939 Frank Capra classic.
But, truth is, they don’t fare all that well in the real world of politics.
Take Angela Speir, for example. After one six-year term as a member of the Georgia Public Service Commission, Speir, a Republican, opted not to run again this year. Could she have been re-elected? Probably, though she’d have a tough race against the veteran politico known during his legislative career, and later on the PSC, as Lauren “Bubba” McDonald.
Times change, though, and as evidence thereof, Bubba the Democrat is now Lauren the Republican. It’s a new Georgia. He’s the best-known of the four candidates —- two Republicans and two Democrats —- qualifying to succeed her.
Six years ago, Speir was an unknown, under-the-radar 34-year-old who spent little beyond the qualifying fee in a race against the better-known McDonald. When the votes were counted, she had 924,015 to McDonald’s 911,772. The upset was such that, for awhile at least, she was referred to as the “Accidental Regulator.”
Republicans just coming into power under the Gold Dome would have done well to emulate Speir. “I’ve never let a lobbyist even buy me a cup of coffee,” she says. Some in newfound positions of power under the Gold Dome do more than take a cup of coffee; they use lobbyists as credit cards, just as the good ol’ boys had before them.
For Speir, the perks of power held no sway. She declined the Crown Victoria that taxpayers provide members of the Public Service Commission. She declines, too, to accept tickets, gifts, junkets —- favors in all forms. She does not accept meals from lobbyists —- or journalists. For this interview, her suggestions include the snack bar at Agnes Scott College. “I usually eat a PB&J [peanut butter and jelly sandwich] at my desk, so I don’t know of many quiet places to meet,” she had said when I first proposed that we talk over lunch.
“You don’t have to ply me with food or beverages to give me the facts,” she recalls telling those who wished to influence her when she first joined the PSC. “Whatever you have to say, say it on the record in a committee room.” She continues:
“I wasn’t going to tell them how I was going to vote [on rate cases], and I wouldn’t tolerate off-the-record conversations with things they wouldn’t say before every interested party.”
One of her crowning achievements as a commissioner was to get the PSC to agree to a rule that would ban private talks between commissioners and those with business before the agency during the final weeks of deliberations when proposed settlements are being discussed. That rule, she said when it was finally approved last August, would move the PSC toward decisions “based solely on the evidence on the record and not on backroom deals.”
When she talks about her six years on the PSC, it’s with the refreshing innocence of a schoolgirl idealist, a Miss Smith Goes to Atlanta. “I didn’t run for office so I could make a living,” she says. “I looked on it as a way to make a difference. It’s a very humbling calling to be a public servant. I feel like I’m there to represent 9 million people and that they are there with me, counting on me to make a fair, honest and ethical decision.”
As she leaves the PSC, perhaps to work with children in a nonprofit, perhaps to start a family, she’s not certain what will come next. “I’m 40 years old; I’ve got a lot of life left and I’m really excited about that,” she said. “There’s more to life than utility regulation.”
Whatever’s ahead, Speir is certain of the legacy of her regulatory career. “I want to look back and know that I have done everything possible to honor the Lord and the people of Georgia with courage, strength and integrity.”
PB&J Politicians. God bless ‘em —- and the mamas and daddies that raise ‘em.
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Point-scoring all that matters in election year
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congress is a despicable body in an election year.
Something absolutely has to happen to move this country away from a grotesque governing body that turns every piece of legislation, no matter how critical, into a game of partisan one-upmanship or a vehicle for bleeding taxpayers to gain or preserve political power.
This week’s examples were legislation to fund the war in Iraq and Afghanistan through next spring and a $300 billion farm bill that — in the words of the president of the food relief agency Oxfam America, Raymond Offenheiser — “continues billions of dollars in subsidies to large industrial-sized farms, doing little for family farms and rural America while hurting poor farmers abroad.”
The president rightly vetoed it. Georgia’s congressional delegation, with the exception of Tom Price, Lynn Westmoreland, John Linder, Nathan Deal and Paul Broun, voted to override. And Congress did. Why?
It’s an election year. Two-thirds of the bill’s funding goes to food programs, with generous increases added to attract urban Democrats, while the remainder goes to continue and expand subsidies to farmers, despite the fact that crop prices are at all-time highs.
Just after overriding the president’s veto of the farm-and-food-stamp bill, which U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) helped write, the Senate passed war funding legislation that should embarrass responsible governing officials. Everything’s a game with this Congress.
With 25 Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved a war funding bill loaded with domestic election-year pork and with programs intended to score political points to win elections in November.
One example of presidential politics setting the agenda to stage a “gotcha” opportunity is a veterans’ education add-on that would cost an estimated $51.6 billion over the next decade, substantial even by congressional standards.
There’s legitimate policy disagreement about whether the proposed entitlement, as drafted, produces unintended consequences. Barack Obama, seizing the moment for political advantage, took to the Senate floor to lambaste McCain, who supports an alternative measure. “I respect Sen. John McCain’s service to our country. … But I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in opposition to this G.I. Bill,” Obama said, “or why he believes it is too generous to our veterans.”
On Memorial Day weekend, no senator can be seen as opposing education aid for returning veterans. And, of course, McCain doesn’t. It’s a cheap shot by Obama that’s typical of how policy gets made in Washington. McCain unloaded:
“It is typical, but no less offensive, that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take a cheap shot at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of,” said McCain.
While it would be easier politically to support the particular approach that Obama favors, said McCain, he, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and North Carolina’s Richard Burr have offered an alternative “that would provide veterans with a substantial increase in educational benefits.” He continued:
“The most important difference between our two approaches is that” the bill by U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) that Obama supports “offers veterans who served one enlistment the same benefits as those offered veterans who have re-enlisted several times.” The McCain-Graham-Burr approach is to increase benefits with longer service, “otherwise we will encourage more people to leave the military after they have completed one enlistment.” By one study, the Webb approach would reduce retention by 16 percent, he said.
Without re-enlistments, the non-commissioned-officer core, the backbone of the military, loses its pipeline, weakening all the services.
It could be an honest disagreement that leads to the best solution for national security and for veterans.
It’s not. It’s cheap partisan politics that, sad to say, frightened 25 Republicans to turn war funding legislation into a domestic Christmas tree.
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Inspectors, defunct Bird, farm bill
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Georgia’s rushing to execute its murderers, you say. Would the “rush” apply to Jack Alderman, who murdered his wife in Savannah in 1974 —- 34 years ago —- or to Curtis Osborne, who murdered two people in Spalding County in 1990, 18 years ago? Stays were lifted on both.
Public Service Commissioner Bobby Baker finally wins all challenges to residency. His wife has a house in DeKalb; he has a condo in Athens, in the PSC district he represents. He spends most of his time in Atlanta. Duh. That’s where his job is. Requiring PSC members to live in districts is one of the dumber laws the Legislature has imposed. It should be repealed promptly.
The state has no business licensing home inspectors. Gov. Sonny Perdue was right to veto that bill. In his view, and mine, the marketplace and voluntary associations are perfectly capable of “regulating” those who inspect the homes for prospective buyers. In fact, the state should be looking for every opportunity to get out of the licensing business. Mostly, licensing is a way to keep out potential competitors. License physicians. Republicans should be deregulating, not piling on.
Whatever happened to the Great Speckled Bird newspaper? It died. All the young hippies went into academia or politics and/or into being old hippies.
I’d probably have to read the book to find out why 78-year-old Barbara Walters wants us to know that she once had an affair with a politician. It never occurred to me to inquire. Or care. People, especially those in sports and entertainment, are all the time telling us more than we want to know about their personal lives. Stop. Quit. Or else I go before the Tribunal of Right Wingers to get a cease-and-desist order.
Barack Obama is determined to control not only his campaign but the campaign he will authorize to be waged against him. He tells Tennessee Republicans his wife’s comment that “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country” is off-limits. “If they [Republicans] think that they are going to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful, because I find unacceptable the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family.” Bill’s fair game. So’s Michelle. If they make campaign speeches, they’re fair game. Spouses. Children. Parents. Pets. Sacred cows. All.
Amnesty it is. A proposal by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would allow farm laborers who have worked in the U.S. over the past four years to work legally for the next five. Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, is opposed.
No crisis here, at least with the state’s system for testing middle school students. Failure rates ran as high as 80 percent. The levelheaded observation of Herb Garrett, director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, charts the course: “Anytime you have that level of failure statewide, you’ve got to go back and re-examine the test and re-examine everything associated with the test.” Take a sip of water, a deep breath and go on living. Matching curriculum, instruction, testing and higher standards is a work in progress.
Good news. Somewhat, anyway. Syria and Israel resume direct talks. Syria wants the Golan Heights. Surrendering it invites disaster.
Thank you, Lynn Westmoreland of Grantville, Nathan Deal of Gainesville, Paul Broun of Athens, John Linder of Duluth and Tom Price of Roswell, who cast a fiscal conservative vote to sustain the president’s veto of the $307 billion farm bill. “At a time when net farm income is projected to increase by more than $28 billion in one year, the American taxpayer should not be forced to subsidize a group of farmers who have adjusted gross incomes of up to $1.5 million” per year, said the president. He lost. We did too.
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Are you really voting for Barr?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If Barack Obama is the 2008 version of George McGovern, it looks like former Georgia Congressman could be this year’s version of Ross Perot. A nationwide Zogby poll of 1,076 likely voters conducted Thursday through Sunday puts Obama up 10 points over John McCain. It suggests that Barr’s Libertarian campaign — assuming he gets that party’s nomination this weekend in Denver — could inflict serious damage by siphoning off voters McCain needs.
Barr comes in with about 3 percent in Zogby’s poll of general election match-ups, to 47 for Obama, 37 for McCain, 4 for Ralph Nader and 10 percent undecided or for others. Zogby finds that Barr gets the support of 10 percent of those who describe themselves as very conservative and 22 percent among those whose philosophy would be considered libertarian, though they may or may not be members of that party.
For McCain the danger is that the more he tracks to the left, the greater Barr’s appeal to libertarian and very conservative Republicans who have never been enamored with him. It should be noted, of course, that unless Obama finds a way to appeal to whites who are not part of the liberal base that got him through the primaries, he has electability problems too. And there’s always Nader camped out nearby ready to pull off disgruntled Democrats if he tries to move to the center. Democratic flight is a lesser concern, though, because die-hards still blame Nader for putting George W. Bush in the White House.
I’ve previously stated my absolute unwillingness to vote again for any third party candidate. If I decide I want Obama in the White House, I’ll vote for him directly and not use Bob Barr as the conduit. The only way that vote could happen, though, would be for McCain to signal that he loves David Souter and that he, too, will set a firm timetable for surrender in Iraq. Otherwise, I’m with him.
Anybody here actually intend to vote for Barr? If so, explain your thinking.
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Barack McGovern
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama’s now within a hundred delegates of securing the Democratic Party nomination to fulfill the legacy of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and Al Gore.
John McCain’s spokesman Tucker Bounds set it up:
“This election is fundamentally about who Americans can trust to secure peace and prosperity for the next generation of Americans. Without a doubt, Barack Obama is a talented political orator, but his naive plans for unconditional summits with rogue leaders and support for big tax hikes on hardworking families expose his bad judgment that Americans can ill-afford in our next president.”
What he neglected to say is that four members of the U.S. Supreme Court are likely to retire over the next eight years. And since Democrats control both the House and the Senate, a left-lock on the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court should be enough to complete the march to the welfare state.
The stakes this November, then, could not be higher.
Throughout the primary season, the end-of-day story in every state has been how blacks and whites voted. It happened again in reporting exit polls in Kentucky and phone surveys in Oregon, the two states voting Tuesday.
Here are the first two paragraphs of an Associated Press report on those results:
“White voters played a decisive role in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s lopsided victory Tuesday in Kentucky’s Democratic presidential primary. Barack Obama got the victory in more liberal Oregon, where race and the hard-edged rivalry between the two embattled candidates was muted.
“Nearly nine in 10 of each state’s voters were white, surveys of voters showed, but there the similarities ceased. Kentucky’s less educated, less liberal, poorer and more rural population fit the profile of states where Clinton has done well, while Oregon’s better schooled, more affluent and urban residents more resembled those that have delivered for him all year.”
Spare me the Southern stereotypes here, but the story went on to note that Hillary Clinton won the support of 63 percent of the white college graduates who voted Tuesday in Kentucky. Obviously the “better-schooled” and presumably more affluent Southerner did not prefer Obama.
Is Obama’s race the explanation? You can believe that if you also believe that the better-schooled or the worse-schooled Kentucky voter would have chosen McGovern, Dukakis or Kerry.
The left is determined to make this election a referendum on white racism. But the fact is that a majority of this country has not and will not now elect a president who runs as far to the left as Barack Obama.
It is essentially over. Obama will be the Democratic nominee. The party has what it has, a candidate who in Kentucky failed to win the votes in a Democratic primary of all age groups and incomes, the college-educated and those who aren’t, and those who described themselves as liberal,moderate and conservative.
By the convention this is a party that will have buyer’s remorse. They’re getting themselves another McGovern.
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TADs: If you don’t know, vote ‘no’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The proposal on the November ballot that will invite Georgians to divert the property taxes they pay to support schools to benefit developers is, in the words of Georgia State University President Carl V. Patton a vote for “local decisions about local funding of local projects to remain local.”
That’s his analysis of Senate Resolution 996, one of the three proposed constitutional amendments on the November ballot. It grates a bit that the three measures that would enshrine permanent tax relief in the Constitution all had paid advocates, while the measure that didn’t get to the ballot —- ad valorem or income tax relief for ordinary Georgians —- had none.
Interesting that Patton, writing in the AJC in support of Atlanta’s BeltLine rail project, frames the question on the November ballot as local, local, local, local. That’s almost as misleading as the actual wording on the ballot. The question:
“Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to authorize community redevelopment and authorize counties, municipalities, and local boards of education to use tax funds for redevelopment purposes and programs?”
The more honest question would be: Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to give tax revenues to developers for up to 30 years that is now allocated to support public education?”
The answer to the latter question is most likely no.
As presented to voters in November, and as explained by Patton, the answer will most certainly be yes. The reason is that voters can’t possibly know what they’re being asked to enshrine in the Constitution.
The local, local, local amendment comes about because the Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously in February that the state constitution prohibits school tax money from being spent on anything other than education.
A 1985 law intended to help local governments redevelop blighted areas is at the heart of the controversy. It allowed authorities to float bonds for redevelopment of blighted areas, with the appreciation in property values for up to 25 years being diverted to pay off the debt. Cities, counties and school boards would waive the appreciation.
There’s some justification for the concept and for the financing mechanism. Write a definition for “blight” that truly limits property tax giveaways to redevelopment of genuinely blighted areas, and there’s merit in the proposed constitutional amendment.
The downsides are that cities such as Atlanta that are financial basket cases shouldn’t be giving away future revenues to incentivize development that would likely come anyway. If it’s giving away future revenue, the redevelopment incentives should be reserved for areas such as some neighborhoods in the northwest part of the city, or south of I-20 where developers are not likely to venture without a strong inducement.
Even there, a second downside still exists. It’s this: Every child brought into the school system by the new development has to be educated at somebody else’s expense. Why? Because the property taxes the child’s parents pay are diverted from the school system to pay development-related debt.
Patton can argue that this is local, local, local because the school board can say no. But the pressure on local boards is enormous and few can resist.
The taxpayers who bear the burden are those who come after the politicians who approve the arrangements are out of office.
The problem with TADs now is that they’re being used to fund development that would occur any way. Areas are not blighted. They are immediately in the path of development or are attractive for redevelopment because of location and existing infrastructure. They’re not blighted —- and when they’re not, the gift of tax revenues for decades to come is corporate welfare, plain and simple.
Rule of thumb on proposed constitutional amendments such as this Tax Allocation District question: If you don’t know, vote no. And be warned: You can’t rely on ballot phrasing for an clear summary of what it does.
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Obama scares the old folks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama is such a hypocrite.
He will not wear well over the coming general election campaign.
Campaigning Sunday in Oregon, a state he should win handily on Tuesday, Obama did what Democrats have done for decades: Spooked the old folks on Social Security. He told a crowd of about 130 at an assisted living center in Gresham, Ore., that John McCain will threaten their Social Security checks. Sleazy. What a hypocrite. Takes the high-horse to complain about the politics of division and diversion and resorts to the only game Democrats running nationwide know: Scaring the daylights out of grandma and grandpa, the vulnerable, weak and confused.
He throws his own grandmother under the bus because that’s what he needed to do win, and then frightens ours into jumping under it for the same reason. No shame.
McCain threatens their Social Security checks because he supports what Democrats call privatization of the the system, Obama told the old folks. “Let me be clear, privatizing Social Security was a bad idea when George W. Bush proposed it, it’s a bad idea today,” he said. “That’s why I stood up against this plan in the Senate and that’s why I won’t stand for it as president.”
Nobody alive or dead has ever threatened the sacred cow that is Social Security. Admittedly the system’s in desperate financial trouble over the long haul. For those young enthusiasts attracted to the Obama campaign, it’s a lousy investment. Now 12 percent of the population is over 65; by 2030, it’ll be 10 percent. Fewer workers support more retirees. Throw in the medical costs of caring for the elderly and more and more of the earnings of the young will be transferred to the old in the coming decades, setting up generational conflict.
Obama’s response is to raise payroll taxes on “the rich.” That brilliant idea at least gets him past November where he presumably can reach across the aisle to invent a new solution that he’s not now discussing.
President Bush’s proposal in 2005 was to allow young workers to divert a portion of the taxes they pay into accounts they would own, control and could pass on to their heirs. Demcrats reacted as Obama does now. Congress never took it up.
Obama said in Oregon Sunday that McCain will raise the retirement age for benefits or reduce annual cost-of-living increases to retirees.”We have to protect Social Security for future generations without pushing the burden onto seniors who have earned the right to retire in dignity,” he said.
McCain spokesman Tucker Bonds said McCain knows Social Security needs fixing, “but raising taxes should not be the answer to every problem.”
Obama promises a new tomorrow, but he is so yesterday. Scare the elderly to win campaigns. Use Social Security to buy their votes to stay there. That’s not change. It’s what Democrats always do, which is why Social Security’s in the mess it’s in.
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Education and health care bills worthy of GOP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saving the best for last, Gov. Sonny Perdue “sealed his legacy as one of America’s foremost ‘education governors’ ” last week.
That’s the view of Lori Drummer, director of state projects for the Washington-based Alliance for School Choice, the nation’s largest nonprofit promoting school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs. “Georgia is now a national leader in a school choice movement that is gaining momentum,” she said.
The reason for her exuberance? On the final day allotted to deal with legislation passed by this year’s General Assembly, Perdue signed a bill authored by State Rep. David Casas (R-Lilburn) that will assist families, like those poor souls in Clayton County whose children are held hostage by a system in turmoil.
The bill Perdue signed will allow corporations and individuals to get tax credits for donations to organizations that give scholarships to parents who want to put their children in better schools.
With two other pieces of education legislation signed earlier, this session — the squabbling notwithstanding — will go down as one of the most productive in two important areas since the GOP took control: education and health care. The bills signed earlier — one part of the governor’s agenda and the other authored by State Rep. Jan Jones (R-Alpharetta) — completed an education-reform trifecta.
The bill that grew out of an education commission the governor appointed gives local systems freedom from state regulations in return for promises to produce results in areas such as dropout reductions. It eliminates excuses and the tendency of local boards and superintendents to blame somebody else, usually the state, for their failure to educate.
The Jones bill promotes public school choice and establishes the important principle that the money follows the child.
The education trifecta this year had a number of heroes. There were Perdue, Jones and Casas, of course. Another is Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), whose persistence and skill produced the first breakthrough last year with a voucher program for children with special needs. This year he maneuvered another education bill through the Senate that the Alliance for School Choice praises. In the House, Rules Committee Chairman Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs), an early advocate of the scholarship tax credit idea, was masterful behind the scenes in easing passage of Casas’ bill, a legacy achievement.
Less noted, but remarkable still, are the successes in the health care arena. Perdue earlier this month signed legislation that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described as “an extraordinary new law that will make Georgia the national leader in new and innovative solutions to expand health coverage.”
It’s a combination of the governor’s bill and one offered by State Sen. Judson Hill (R-Marietta). One part exempts insurers from a state premium tax for high-deductible plans with a health savings account (HSA), and allows individuals to deduct premiums from their state income tax. Insurers can reward individuals for healthy lifestyles. Another provision provides a $250 tax credit for the self-employed and for small businesses that enroll employees in an HSA plan.
The importance of this is that it puts Georgia on an alternative course to government-sponsored universal health care. In urging Republicans not to surrender on the issue, former U.S. House majority leader Dick Armey of Texas, writing in The Wall Street Journal, had this to say:
“I believe the American people will reward innovative, principled leadership on health care. A rational, conservative solution to rising health care costs gets the government and other third parties out of our health care business.
“Both our families and the GOP can win by expanding health savings accounts, by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, by doing away with tax policies that encourage third-party payment systems, and by embracing health care price disclosure.”
Congress has the larger role here. But Georgia is clearly on the right course in giving consumers choice — and incentive to be responsible. There is a conservative difference.
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Tainting McCain, raising the Barr
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases a study revealing that almost three in 10 households either have only a cellphone or seldom take calls on their land line. This need-to-know insight is brought to you from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Whatever.
The dying gasps of welfare-state financing are revealed by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a post-Reagan Republican, who proposes to borrow $15 billion, pledging future lottery collections. The alternative would be to make unpopular spending cuts. The post-Reagan Republicans can look a lot like the Barack Obama Change-Democrats. That’s where they find common ground.
Get ready. Just as soon as Hillary is driven from the race for the Democratic nomination, partisans and their commentators on the left will make certain that the uttered, printed or e-mailed stupidity or racism of anybody who ever voted Republican is surgically attached to the hip of John McCain. It’ll be nasty. Voter ID times 10. All to drive turnout.
Anybody who steals the wedding and engagement ring of a deceased accident victim in the emergency room, as a Grady Hospital employee is accused of doing, is too immoral to live uncaged. A $20,000 reward has been posted for their return. Surely nobody would take money for doing the right thing in getting the rings back to her family.
The bulk of the $300 billion farm bill —- at least two-thirds —- goes to nutrition programs, including food stamps and emergency food aid. Congress is expanding eligibility, and therefore costs, though the program’s not serving all who are eligible now. It’s being done to attract urban reps in hopes of building a veto-proof majority for this pork-laden giveaway.
Whatever the look of the proposed MLK monument, it’s a far-too-tall 28 feet. That’s the problem with the Richard B. Russell monument on the grounds of the State Capitol. It’s far out of proportion to those added later, including Ellis Arnall and Jimmy Carter.
Bob Barr’s running for president as a Libertarian. First chore is to get the nomination. Then to be something other than a spoiler. No third parties for me, but he’d be my second choice for president among the current field.
“Some people talk about change,” says Rep. John Lewis. “I am change.” Proof yet again that political slogans are devoid of meaning. Lewis has his hands full. Opponent “Able” Mable Thomas, a state rep, is no slouch.
Great week for Gov. Sonny Perdue. He was Thinking Right on the bills he signed and those he vetoed. Guns, yes. Education, yes. Insurance, yes. Pork, no.
Complain all you want about the failure of the General Assembly to create a trauma-network entitlement, but the fact is that unless the Legislature finds a way to avoid that, the funding requirement won’t be $74 million —- the sum to be raised by a $10 tax on cars —- but $250 million or more. No specific tax should be levied for trauma centers. A designated tax becomes the funding base and an entitlement.
Oh, good. Jane Fonda’s finally back in the news again. It’s been forever, a couple of days anyway, since there was a Fonda sighting.
Conservation reduces Fulton County water use by 30 percent. So rates will be increased by 15 percent. Classic monopoly, which is why most liberals would nationalize the oil companies. Take the profits for “social good” and tax up the price to force people out of the hated SUVs.
Please wake the voters in former state Rep. Ron Sailor Jr.’s district in the DeKalb-Rockdale area. They had grown so accustomed to him missing votes that they came to believe they weren’t entitled to representation. In a five-candidate contest to replace him this week, only 523 people voted. A House district population is about 45,500. The top two got a total of 263. I’d tell you when the runoff is, but nobody cares.
The California Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision on marriage is precisely the reason voters in Georgia and elsewhere amended state constitutions. Activist judges willing to substitute their social views for those of legislators exist everywhere. A measure expected to be on the ballot in California in November will declare that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Some 1.1 million signatures have been gathered to put it on the ballot; 763,790 are required.
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Guns and liberal angst
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The suspense ended Wednesday, the final day for Gov. Sonny Perdue to veto legislation from this year’s General Assembly. He signed the bill that had most stoked liberal angst, agreeing that law-abiding citizens with licenses to carry guns can take them in purses or under jackets on public transportation, in restaurants that serve alcohol and in state parks.
MARTA’s union drivers had said they would demand bulletproof shields, reports the AJC’s James Salzer. The Georgia Restaurant Association, likewise, magnified its distress, arguing that servers shouldn’t be put in the position of asking to see patron’s permit before serving alcohol.
We are talking here about law-abiding citizens, those who have submitted to fingerprinting and to a criminal background check. MARTA drivers, we can reasonably assume, transport riders carrying weapons without permits without thinking they need bulletproof shields. So all of this to-do is a reaction to lawful citizens without criminal records who pose no danger to Atlanta’s banks, liquor and convenience stores or to its public safety.
We over-react to the lawful, as the MARTA union and restaurant association do, not because it’s the population that poses the threat, but because it’s the one that can be controlled. Go figure.
I own guns. Three of them. Rifle, shotgun and pistol. Even with a permit I wouldn’t take a weapon on public transportation or in parks or restaurants. But I’m not the least disturbed by the prospect that others with carrying permits would. Perdue made the right call in signing this bill into law.
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Think Right, Move Right.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Results from two races — Hillary Clinton in West Virginia and Democrat Travis Childers in Mississippi — offer a window into November’s general election.
“The White House is won in the swing states, and I am winning the swing states,” Clinton said after her West Virginia blow-out, 67-26. Sure, the demographics were favorable to her. The state’s 95 percent white, poorer and more rural than most. But it was an impressive win, nevertheless.
Barack Obama’s inability to sell himself to voters across the country who fit the demographics of the West Virginia Democratic voter will sink him in November. Once past race, he is the standard-issue liberal Democrat that the nation rejects repeatedly. Hillary’s point is valid. The states she’s taking are the ones that will determine whether she, Obama or John McCain occupy the White House next January.
Obama, looking past Hillary, appears determined to run against George W. Bush — something the campaign’s obviously polled, but hardly makes any sense to those of us who see a world of difference between Bush and the maverick McCain. “This is our chance,” said Obama in swing-state Missouri Tuesday, “to build a new majority of Democrats and independents and Republicans who know that four more years of George Bush just won’t do.”
And then, said the broken record: “This is our moment to turn the page on the divisions and distractions that pass for politics in Washington.” Take a look at this Congress, where Obama’s party dominates, and identify one program area that represents an effort or even a willingness to “turn the page.” Pages may turn, yes. But back to the earlier how-to chapters on building the welfare state.
Interestingly in West Virginia, half of the voters polled believe Obama shares, to some degree, the views of the Rev. Jermiah Wright. Six of seven of those voted for Hillary.
The other race that offered insights into November was in the 1st Congressional District of Mississippi, where Democrat Childers defeated Republican Greg Davis in a special election to replace Roger Wicker, who was appointed to fill Trent Lott’s Senate seat.
Childers won 51-49 in a district Republicans have held since 1994. He won the way Democrats win statewide in the South: As a pro-life conservative who appeals on gun rights and social issues. Republican may be a tarnished brand this election cycle but in the South at least, Conservative is not.
The message for the general election: Think Right, Move Right.
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Congress deserves to reap veto of farm bill
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Everything most Americans —- and all fiscal conservatives —- hate about Congress is contained in a five-year, $300 billion farm bill headed to a certain presidential veto.
It’s dishonest. Congress claims that it’s only $10 billion more than the administration wants. In reality, though, said Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Chuck Conner in a conversation Monday, it’s about twice that.
“It’s about $20 billion over budget because they have managed to hide the true cost of the bill quite a bit.” They are doing it, he explained, by moving payouts beyond the time frame used to calculate costs while moving up revenues from things like crop insurance.
Congress did the same thing last year in projecting the cost for the State Children’s Health Insurance program. Spending on that bill, which the president vetoed, was projected to go from $5.6 billion per year to $13.9 billion in 2012, and then —- as Congress employed the game it now plays on the farm bill —- would “drop” 69 percent in 2013 to $7.8 billion and further to $4.8 billion in 2014. Dishonest.
To hide the true cost of the farm bill, “they take a program that they know has to be funded, like disaster money and a couple of others that they know they will have to come back to extend,” said Conner.
In addition to dishonesties, it contains outrages, one after another. An example is the sugar program, which costs taxpayers in excess of $2 billion annually. “The sugar program is essentially a producer cartel run out of Washington,” said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at the Cato Institute.
“Many people thought you could not get more heavily involved than the government already is under the current program,” said Conner. That program exists solely to benefit sugar beet producers, mostly in Minnesota, Michigan, California, Idaho and North Dakota, and sugar cane producers, mostly in Florida and Louisiana.
It’s designed to keep sugar prices high by requiring that 85 percent of the sugar sold in America be produced here. Taxpayers buy sugar at roughly twice the world price and, heretofore, stored it for sale back when supplies were tight. “This bill says, ‘no, you can’t store sugar, you have to sell it immediately for ethanol,’ ” said Conner.
The value of sugar for ethanol production is about 2 cents per pound. The world price of sugar is about 12.5 cents per pound. “We are buying it at 23 cents a pound and are required to sell it for 2 cents a pound,” explained Conner. “What kind of deal is that for U.S. taxpayers?”
Lousy, of course. Outrageous, certainly. Insane public policy. “I am not talking about a few million bucks here,” said Conner. “This is hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Outrages are evident, too, in a much-publicized provision that would give the owners of thoroughbred racehorses a $93 million depreciation write-off. It is a first, said Conner, the first time that a farm bill has been used to write a tax bill. “These are provisions that would never have passed on their own.”
Outrageous, too, is the provision that suddenly appeared requiring taxpayers to spend $200 million to buy land in Montana that has no farm-related value.
Most outrageous of all is the refusal of a Congress that denied $600 stimulus checks to some in the middle class but now refuses to expunge even the wealthiest of farmers from the dole. The administration proposed to start weaning farmers whose nonfarm income exceeded $200,000. Congress raised that to $500,000 or $1 million for married couples. For those whose income is solely from farming, it’s $750,000 and $1.5 million. “We only targeted the top 2 percent” of farmers, said Conner. As rewritten, “this is going to deny benefits to virtually no one in America,” he said.
“Scarce tax dollars are hard to come by. The notion that people whose annual income is in the million-dollar range, the idea that we have got to use tax dollars to help them, is beyond explanation. We should say to them that ‘there is an American Dream out there and you are living it, but don’t expect any more tax dollars from people who are struggling to find dollars to put gas in the tank.’ “
Within days, Congress will pass this bill. It’s atrocious legislation deserving of the quick veto it’s certain to get.
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Obama, McCain in the mushy middle?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is this presidential election evidence that the nation is determined to move to the middle?
Wall Street Journal reporters Gerald F. Seib and John Harwood speculate that the campaign of ‘08 may yield a new political center, something akin to the alignment that existed two generations past when conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northeastern Republicans formed a center that constituted “a kind of human bridge between the partisan extremes.”
The premise is that John McCain and Barack Obama are running as candidates who can bridge the partisan divide — something we know to be true of McCain, as evidenced by his participation in the Gang of 14, campaign finance reform and other efforts to chart his own course.
But while Obama talks the talk, there’s no real evidence I’ve seen that the speeches translate into anything more than campaign bromides. He’ll set a firm departure schedule on Iraq, raise taxes on capital gains, create universal health care and, most assuredly, appoint judges in the mold of John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite the talk, the policies that emanate from them are pretty much from the “partisan extreme” that’s supposedly to vanish if he’s elected.
The mushy-middle is certainly useful in public office — if, in fact, there’s a strong leader in the White House or in the governor’s office who has a strategic vision. Otherwise, if Obama proposes a fixed pull-out from Iraq in 10 months and the mushy-middle causes him to make it 12 or 15, what’s gained by compromise? Bad policy executed more slowly.
Likewise, If he proposes to raise the capital gains tax from 15 percent to 28 and the mushy-middle settles at 23, we’re still enroute to big government and high taxes, just on a slower train. And if the compromise on judges gets us David Souter, an unknown from the left, rather than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose leanings were known, the train’s track reaches the same destination.
Rebuilding the middle is a lot like campaign finance reform. It’s usually more appealing in the abstract than in practice. It’s wishy-washiness as a virtue.
If Obama and McCain have distinctly different visions for America and distinctly different ideas about what’s best for the country — and they do — the solution is not to split the difference. One solution often precludes the other.
GOP … on road to 2010 Georgia governor’s race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John Oxendine, the insurance commissioner who would be governor of Georgia, orders latte at the downtown Atlanta Starbucks.
No syrup, he says. But chocolate chips.
And skim milk.
He pauses briefly and then asks for cream and whipping cream.
Conflicted?
On latte, maybe. But not on a desire to be governor or the willingness to leave a safe job he’s held for 14 years to join the stampede to succeed Gov. Sonny Perdue in 2010. While others ponder the opening created by U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson’s announcement that he’ll seek re-election to the Senate — not the governor’s office — in 2010, Oxendine’s in, declared, and ready to go.
Isakson would have been a shoo-in. Had he declared, the crowd would have assembled to replace him in the U.S. Senate. Now, in the gubernatorial race, U.S. Reps. Lynn Westmoreland of Grantville and Jack Kingston of Savannah are possibilities, as is Secretary of State Karen Handel of Atlanta and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle. So, too, is state House Majority Leader Jerry Keen of St. Simons Island.
On the Democratic side, House Minority Leader DuBose Porter of Dublin, a 25-year-veteran, has a career decision to make. His life in the House gets no better; his party’s chances are nil of taking control of the House and elevating him to speaker. Over the next decade, the prospects don’t much improve, either. The combination of the Voting Rights Act and GOP control of redistricting will keep Democrats in the minority in the House and Senate.
Democrats’ best access to power is statewide. And while some of its best and brightest are too liberal to be elected statewide, others could position themselves in the mainstream. State Sen. Michael S. Meyer von Bremen of Albany, a thoughtful and decent moderate Democrat, is abandoning his Senate seat to run for the Georgia Court of Appeals. His Senate colleagues, Tim Golden of Valdosta and Doug Stoner of Smyrna, could have statewide potential, along with U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall of Macon. Atty. Gen. Thurbert Baker and Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond have already won statewide.
After that the bench thins.
Among Republicans, the best news is not at the top of the Gold Dome power players. It is likely to be 2010 before Georgians can gain real relief for the frustrations wrought by the three-way personality conflicts and the incessant games that Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson play. Nothing and nobody on the ballot this November represents a solution.
The solution, incidentally, is not to recreate the last years of the Roy Barnes administration when a dominant governor could assemble compliant House and Senate leaders behind closed doors and decide what both chambers would rubber stamp. Tension is needed. Competition, if it can’t be cultivated in one party, requires Georgians to look to the other.
But the competition should be purposeful, grounded in principle and built on policy disagreements. Is it better, for example, to offer tax relief across the board or to wage-earners via an income tax?
Republicans are still trying to decide as a governing party whether tax relief and spending discipline are good things; whether choice in education and health care are worth pursuing and whether leaders or lobbyists set agendas. Competition, as practiced here, is not purposeful and productive. It’s personal. Ego- and ambition-driven. Pointless.
Isakson’s appeal is that he’s knowledgeable and serious about public policy, has first-rate political skills and is, furthermore, a calming presence.
He would be seen as coming from outside the problem — something Oxendine offers as an argument for his candidacy. (Oxendine says, incidentally, that he’s often asked why he didn’t run for lieutenant governor two years ago if he wanted to be governor. His explanation is that he thought it would be immoral to run for one office determined to pursue another. Fortunately for the ambitious, that immorality — if that’s what it is — is not a jailable offense.)
The next governor needs a Newt Gingrich vision and the political skills to turn competition productive for the Georgians who aren’t represented by lobbyists. We need a place to go and a plan for getting there.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Friday, Sunday and Tuesday.
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Proud Georgians, justice, Hillary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
No Johnny for governor in 2010? Whoa. The field just got very crowded.
From the Do Georgia Proud department: U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Grantville is the Georgia congressional delegation’s “strongest supporter of responsible tax and spending policies,” according to the National Taxpayers Union. Close behind are Reps. Nathan Deal of Gainesville, Tom Price of Roswell and John Linder of Duluth, all Republicans. No Georgia Democrats made the list. Westmoreland, Linder and Phil Gingrey of Marietta were among eight House members ranked as “most conservative” by National Journal magazine.
From the High-Class Company department: Atlanta-based James magazine names U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson and State Sen. President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) as Georgians of the Year and State Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs), chairman of the House Rules Committee, as Legislator of the Year, selections on which I concur.
From the Little Guys Win Too Department: Up-and-comer Tom Graves, a state representative from Ranger, who was unceremoniously bumped from leadership, packed up and marched out of his Capitol office to digs across the street for bucking House Speaker Glenn Richardson on a transportation board election, is one of six conservatives honored in Washington. The Legislative Entrepreneur award was presented by FreedomWorks, a nationwide organization led by former House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. Others honored included Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona and U.S. Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, fiscal-conservative blue-chippers all.
Natives of Lesbos, an island in the Aegean Sea, who are Lesbians, take a gay rights group to court for usurping their identity. If successful, Gay, Ga., will follow suit.
Was that a Republican running in Clayton County? Whatever for? Not one, but two, did. Both qualified for the school board.
From the corrections column: “A story published on May 3 incorrectly identified the political party affiliation of four incumbent congressmen the GOP hopes to defeat in the 2008 elections. The incumbents are Democrats.” Seems obvious, but you had to correct it. It’s not a given that they were Democrats. Republicans carry the county convention and caucus squabbles that were the staple of their out-of-power years into public office. It may be the only behavior they know.
Lisa Clark Gonzalez, 39, and her 17-year-old husband, Adrian, should get their child back —- and be allowed to move on with their lives.
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle says now that voters should decide whether the beer stores that are driving the agenda are allowed to sell booze on Sunday. Voters should decide, too, whether they want to cap state spending and cut taxes —- but they don’t have paid lobbyists working for them on that case.
Twenty years ago William Lynd killed two women. This week the victims got justice. Twenty years. It’s cruel of the state and of the courts to delay justice that long. Jack Alderman, another death row inmate, murdered his wife 34 years ago.
Earlier this week, in noting the influence Mitchell County legislators wielded under the Gold Dome for more than six decades, I should have mentioned Frank Twitty, a Talmadge stalwart who served as House floor leader for Gov. Ernest Vandiver, 1959-1963, the father of current state Democratic Party chairman Jane Kidd.
When faced with the choice of integrating the University of Georgia or closing it, Vandiver sought advice from about 60 of the state’s political leaders. All but two —- Twitty and Senate floor leader, and later governor, Carl Sanders —- advised him to close UGA. Ten days later Vandiver went on television and urged the General Assembly to keep the university open.
- Hang in there, Hillary. You’re the trouble we know. And can live with. The moment Obama appears inevitable, the stock market tanks 200 points. Watch the sell-off when investors think he may actually win.
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Rush and the GOP crossovers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the day after the two Democratic presidential candidates split victories, Barack Obama supporters — and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh — were quick to attribute her Indiana victory to crossover Republicans.
“If it hadn’t been for Republicans taking Democratic ballots,” said former Demo nominee John Kerry, an Obama supporter, “they likely would have won in Indiana too. There really is no masquerade now — Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary and the GOP has clearly declared that they want Senator Clinton as a candidate.”
Obama strategist David Axelrod attributed the margin to Limbaugh and to cross-over Republicans. And, indeed, there was some indications that Republicans were making sport of the Democratic division in an effort to prolong the fight. Obama does seem inevitable, largely because the Democratic Party can’t risk denying him the nomination and thus offending one of the party’s most loyal constituencies. About 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic, slightly higher for women than men, and in the primaries about 90 percent of black Democrats voted for Obama. If Obama’s denied the nomination and they sit home in November, Hillary’s toast. Oh, the mess of it all.
Pollsters and pundits have lined up to draw attention to the racial divide in voting — it’s quite obvious and certainly relevant to November — asking repeatedly how voters who consider race an important factor intend to vote in the general election.
In Indiana, according to media reports of exit polls, 13 percent of white voters said race was important in their vote — a group that presumably includes those who consider it either a positive or a negative factor in their decision. Of those, 49 percent said they would support Obama against McCain.
The more shocking number, however, is that of the large marjority of whites who said race was not an important factor, a third in Indiana and about 36 percent in North Carolina will vote for McCain or sit it out if Obama is the nominee. In Indiana, Republicans and independents could vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary so some of the one-third of whites who intend to vote McCain in November could be Republican cross-overs. In North Carolina, though, registered Republicans couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary Tuesday.
Without doubt I’d prefer Hillary to Obama as President, assuming that John McCain blows it. She’s more seasoned. She won’t venture too far, in policy terms, from the polls. As the last few months have established, she’s tough and she can take a punch. She bounces back when she’s down. She won’t foolishly surrender our gains in Iraq because she’s wrapped up in slogans and buzzwords — change moving forward — unmindful of the consequences.
Obama, on the other hand, took three weeks to get to the right place on Jeremiah Wright. And I keep repeating this: He sat an listened to 20 years of anti-American hate preach before his perspective broadened enough for him to hear. He will surrender Iraq and I have no confidence that his judgment is sound on national security matters.
The point, really, though is that Republicans and those intend to vote for McCain in November should resist the temptation to play games in the Hillary-Obama race. Recent primaries and Hillary’s resiliance — her ability to take a punch — convince me she’d be the stronger nominee against McCain. Republican should’t help Democrats out of the mess they’re in.
But more importantly, either McCain or the Democratic nominee will be President next January. And if I can’t have the candiate that I think would be best for America, I’d at least like to have the second-best.
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Obama’s Reagan moment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, they muddle on. Hillary Clinton takes Indiana, 51-49, while Barack Obama wins North Carolina, 56-42. Neither is likely now to win at the ballot box the delegates needed. The game shifts to the superdelegates — which means that the party elite anoints the winner. Democrats have a mess on their hands.
Obama showed in his post-victory speech in North Carolina that, while he now appears to be the weaker of the two Democrats in a general election campaign against John McCain, he’ll be tough to beat.
As he stood before the cameras last night, the screen behind him was filled with the faces of people who represent Hillary voters. All were white, most all were women and many of them were older.
And while he didn’t mention Jeremiah Wright, he took the second step in distancing himself from Wright’s jaundiced view of America. I quote a portion of his remarks at length here because they could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan. The view is optimistic and distinctly different from the America where institutions are evil and embittered small-town people live clinging in their grimness to God, guns and bigotry.
From Obama’s speech:
“The people I’ve met in small towns and big cities across this country understand that government can’t solve all our problems - and we don’t expect it to. We believe in hard work. We believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance.
“But we also believe that we have a larger responsibility to one another as Americans - that America is a place - that America is the place - where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are few guarantees in life, you should be able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you need it; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s the America we believe in. That’s the America I know.
“This is the country that gave my grandfather a chance to go to college on the GI Bill when he came home from World War II; a country that gave him and my grandmother the chance to buy their first home with a loan from the government.
“This is the country that made it possible for my mother - a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point - to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country on scholarships.
“This is the country that allowed my father-in-law - a city worker at a South Side water filtration plant - to provide for his wife and two children on a single salary. This is a man who was diagnosed at age thirty with multiple sclerosis - who relied on a walker to get himself to work. And yet, every day he went, and he labored, and he sent my wife and her brother to one of the best colleges in the nation. It was a job that didn’t just give him a paycheck, but a sense of dignity and self-worth. It was an America that didn’t just reward wealth, but the work and the workers who created it.
“Somewhere along the way, between all the bickering and the influence-peddling and the game-playing of the last few decades, Washington and Wall Street have lost touch with these values.”
That’s a great transition — assuming he repeats it often enough — from Wright’s toxic anti-Americanism and perhaps even from the question of why he sat there for 20 years without walking away, as Oprah had done.
Questions are likely to remain about his judgment. But nobody can question his ability to deliver precisely the right speech at the appropriate time. It’ll be no walk-over for McCain.
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A retirement signals end of Mitchell County clout
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Within a year of the death of former House Speaker Tom Murphy, the transformation of the Two Georgias continues mostly unnoticed.
In southwest Georgia’s Mitchell County, population 23,852, an icon of a region that has produced movers-and-shakers under the Gold Dome for more than six decades announced that he would not seek re-election.
“In my 25 years of service, I have witnessed far too many competent individuals who sadly did not know when to step down,” said Richard Royal of Camilla, who as a Democrat had served under Murphy as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. “I prefer not to follow in their steps.”
Last Wednesday, Royal had driven to Atlanta with a certified check for $400 to cover the qualifying fee. But as he drove, he debated whether to run again. On Friday, as the noon deadline approached with Royal yet to qualify, former Camilla Mayor Jay Powell stepped forward to run for the seat as a Republican.
In Mitchell County and the rest of the South, politicians rose to power and influence in Congress and state legislatures by being smart and attuned to the will of voters. Once elected, they were rarely challenged. Royal, who represented Colquitt (Moultrie) and Mitchell counties, epitomized that tradition, facing only two challengers in a quarter century. After Sonny Perdue was elected governor as a Republican, Royal followed Perdue in switching parties and continued to win as a Republican, even though the district is predominantly Democratic.
Royal served on Ways and Means for 22 years, including 11 years as an officer or chairman. He followed in the footsteps of another Mitchell County titan, former state Rep. Marcus Collins of Cotton, who served as Ways and Means chairman for nine years before he was appointed Revenue Commissioner in 1983 by Gov. Joe Frank Harris.
Collins had come to the House in 1961, part of a freshman class that included Murphy. Twelve years later, in 1973, Murphy was elected speaker, and by 1975 he had picked Collins to chair Ways and Means. That post requires someone who is smart and able to resist pressure to riddle the tax code with unsanctioned giveaways. So it helps if they are also from safe legislative districts. Most are expected to be stout fiscal conservatives, though a few haven’t been.
It is a post of enormous power.
Before Collins, there had been Fred Hand of Pelham, a Talmadge loyalist who served as speaker from 1947 to 1954. Hand left the House in an effort to succeed Herman Talmadge as governor in 1955, but was defeated by Marvin Griffin, who lived in neighboring Decatur County (Bainbridge).
For more than 60 years, from Hand to Collins to Royal, Mitchell County has wielded disproportionate influence. But that era is coming to an end, in part because Royal has grown disenchanted with politics, especially since his switch to the Republican Party. His district is 35.5 percent black, and while he could most likely have held the seat for as long as he chose, he was dismayed that black voters in his district had deserted him in droves when he changed parties. He had also become frustrated that despite his institutional knowledge, he was never integral to tax-policy decisions as a Republican.
“I don’t guess I ever recovered fully from the change in leadership from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party,” Royal told The Moultrie Observer.
Royal’s retirement was one of the few surprises in last week’s qualifying. Otherwise, the status quo won’t change much. Almost 80 percent of House seats and two-thirds of Senate seats will be uncontested in November because redistricting and the Voting Rights Act have largely eliminated interparty competition. In the Senate, Republicans will keep power, possibly with the same 34-22 majority they have now.
But for Mitchell County, and for a corner of the state with real clout in decades past, the status quo is changed. An era of outsize influence ends under the Gold Dome.
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Ethanol, gas tax and designer fuels
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the dumbest policy decision Congress and the Bush Administration have made is to put food in the gas tank.
Barack Obama on Sunday joined John McCain and a group of two dozen Republican senators who want the Environmental Protection Agency to ease requirements passed by Congress last year to blend nine million gallons of biofuels into gasoline. By 2022, the requirement would be 36 billion gallons. In 2000, it was three billion gallons. Most of that is corn-based ethanol.
Obama said rising food prices may force the decision to relax the requirement. “What I’ve said is my top priority is making sure people are able to get enough to eat,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” “If it turns out we need to make changes in our ethanol policy to help people get something to eat, that has got to be the step we take.”
Hillary Clinton, on ABC’s “This Week,” spoke to the issue, too. “What we need to do is accelerate the research into farm waste and into other cellulosic plant materials. Because, I think, instead of using the corn, let’s figure out if we can use the corn cob,” she said. “Let’s figure out if we can use the corn stalk. Let’s figure out what other kind of food, you know, waste we can use.”
When the biofuel mandate was first imposed, corn sold for about $2 per bushel. Now it’s above $5. About a quarter of the corn crop goes to ethanol. Eliminating it could reduce corn prices by 20 percent, by some estimates. About $15 billion of the $22 billion increase in food costs in 2007, or $130 per household, is related to the increase in demand for corn as fuel, according to Perdue University researchers Corrine Alexander and Chris Hurt.
Food costs increased by 4 percent in 2007, highest since 1990, the chief economist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Joseph Glauber, told Congress last week. Projected increase for 2008 is another 4 percent to 4.5 percent.
In addition to the food cost increase, taxpayers provide a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon for ethanol. A bill now under debate in the Senate would reduce that to 45 cents, but would create a new subsidy, at $1.01 per gallon, for cellulosic ethanol, made from wood chips, switchgrass, citrus waste and other non-food waste.
No question Congress should throw in the towel on corn-based ethanol subsidies, It was a dumb policy from the start and it always will be.
On a related subject, suspending the federal gas tax of 18.4 percent, as McCain and Clinton suggest, is another pointless exercise. If anything, the requirement for designer fuels, which increase the cost of gasoline in the Atlanta area by about 5 cents per gallon, should be suspended while gas hovers at $3.50 to $4 per gallon.
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Health care’s shot-in-arm: People’s choice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The debate that keeps raging — the one that divides legislators, policy-makers and others who weigh the role of government in our lives — comes down to this:
Can individuals be trusted to make responsible choices in their lives?
The conservative belief — and generally where most Republicans come down — is yes. That certainty is at the core of virtually all major domestic-policy disagreements that tend to divide along party lines. Education. Health care financing. Retirement planning. All divide on the basis of one’s belief in the ability of informed individuals to act in their own best interest and that of their families and children.
The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt, a three-term governor of Utah, is squarely in the corner of those who believe that an informed citizenry, aided by government leaders with a shared vision and purpose, can bring about revolutionary change. Two related issues offer specific examples.
“Medicare,” he says, “is drifting toward disaster.” No surprise here. “The core problem is that costs are rising significantly faster than costs in the economy as a whole. … When I was born, [health care] was 4 percent of the economy. When my son was born it had doubled to 8 percent. When my first grandson was born two years ago, it had doubled again to 16 percent.”
Now 12 percent of the population is 65 or older, he notes. By 2030, it’ll be 20 percent. Fewer workers support more old folks. Medicare’s insolvent in 11 years.
For young families now starting out, “the typical household is going to see its health care spending basically double in the next 20 years,” he says, “from 23 percent to 41 percent of total compensation” while the federal share of spending for Medicare will nearly double from 13 percent to more than 23 percent. Bleak. At some point, and soon, the generations clash.
“What I have discovered after nearly four years is the symbiotic relationship between Medicare and the larger health care reform,” Leavitt said in a conversation last week. “Medicare is not just the single largest payer, but it is the foundation upon which all other billing systems and practice-management systems are based.” On Medicare, he says, “we will have to do three things: separate the commitment from the pain, pick the right moment, and modernize the budget-scoring conventions.” Those are political processes and they warrant separate discussions.
On health care, it means both changing behaviors and systems to deliver better quality at lower cost. First up is developing national measures quality. Second is to gather and report costs for procedures, by physician and hospital. “Our system of billing is insane,” says Leavitt. He compares it to an automobile, except everybody bills separately without regard to total charges.
“The way we price health care cannot be understood by a human being of average intelligence and limited patience.” Last year Medicare paid for 255,000 knee operations. “Believe me, when you pay for 255,000 of anything, you know what medical supplies, services, procedures, and facilities somebody getting a knee operation is going to use.” Developing a single-price system for common procedures “would promote coordination and accountability that does not exist now,” he says.
His department is developing demonstration projects on “bundled payments for hospital-based episodes of care.” Hospitals would bid for procedures. Savings would be shared with patients who chose cost-competitive hospitals.
Providing incentives for higher quality and lower cost, and making information available, should motivate consumers to search out better care at lower cost.
Part of that was announced last week. An HHS Web site, www.medicare.gov, offers comparisons of hospitals, nursing homes, dialysis centers and home health agencies. When consumers have sufficient information both on hospitals and physicians and when they have incentive to care what things cost, they’ll change the way they make health care decisions.
Are we smart enough? Yes. The momentum and the necessity exist, along with the tools, to save Medicare and to change the health care delivery and financing system. In the process, we can avoid sucking young families dry by forcing workers to divert more and more of their quality of life to the baby boomer generation.
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Gasoline prices; Clayton school board
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Barack Obama blames high gasoline prices on a political establishment that hasn’t faced down the oil companies. “The candidates with the Washington experience —- my opponents —- are good people. They mean well, but they’ve been in Washington for a long time, and even with all that experience they talk about, nothing has happened.” Change. For the record, according to the Department of Energy: Crude’s about half the pump price of a gallon a gas, refining accounts for 28 percent; taxes, 14 percent; and distribution and marking, 8 percent. Wonder where Obama is on drilling in ANWAR? Nevermind. It’s the oil companies’ fault.
A Florida lottery winner —- $13 million in 1990 —- dies nearly broke at age 60. Gambling, gifts and luxuries. Hand out a million dollars on the to passers-by on the street corner and at least some of the recipients would be panhandling a month later.
When a story starts like this, “The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners,” as the one from the New York Times did, you know disapproval follows. “Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations” are said to be “mystified and appalled.” Much that dismays liberals here —- whether in our legal system, environmental practices or national security policies —- mystify and appall select portions of “industrialized nations.”
Democratic strategists say they have identified 30 to 35 Georgia House districts that “are either competitive or may become competitive.” Yes. The latter. But probably not in their lifetimes. Barring a last-minute surge in top-quality candidates qualifying in the right districts, Democrats will gain no more than five seats in the House (giving Republicans a 102-78 majority) while the Senate remains static (34 Republicans, 22 Democrats).
People who run for public office for the pay are not the ones you want there. A salary of $17,000, plus $173 per day for food and lodging, and two-year terms is about right for the General Assembly. Higher salaries don’t necessarily attract higher-quality people. After all, dumbos and dullards are drawn to higher salaries, too.
Clayton County is a reminder. “Local control” means parents empowered to do what they think is best for their child, not the administration or the school board, which is in this case dysfunctional. Imagine agreeing to give a new superintendent in an imploding system 107 days off. Gimme my child back.
Have a chicken for lunch Sunday. It’s International Respect for Chickens Day, a day that “celebrates the dignity, beauty and life of chickens and protests the bleakness of their lives in farming operations.”
Congressional Democrats accuse the Bush administration of changing Environmental Protection Agency reviews of chemicals in a way that opens the process to “politicization.” Specifically, they object to a proposal to allow other agencies to submit comments and requests for further research. We’ve been trained to believe that bureaucrats are pure and political appointees are corrupting. The reality is, however, that it ain’t that simple. Advocacy groups know the best way to get the decision you want is find like-minded zealots in the bureaucracy.
Case in point: Hans von Spakovsky, as a top official in the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division, was accused of overruling career bureaucrats in clearing voter ID legislation passed by the Georgia General Assembly in 2005. If so, he was right. They were wrong, and as I discovered during the brouhaha over redistricting (when Cynthia Mckinney carved herself a congressional district, with the aid of civil rights division lawyers), Justice Department bureaucrats can have agendas, too. (The Senate should now affirm von Spakovsky’s wrongly blocked nomination to the Federal Elections Commission.)
*Gasoline prices; Clayton school board Two bowls are added to college football’s post-season, bringing the number to 34: The Congressional Bowl and the St. Petersburg Bowl. Pretty soon it’ll be like the NBA. Everybody goes bowling. Give us playoffs.
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Wright, Obama and the black church
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A black female columnist in Barack Obama’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, essentially accuses him of “acting white” in his response to the incendiary anti-American rhetoric of Jerimiah Wright.
Wright’s speeches, which prompted Obama’s criticism, were “given in defense against an orchestrated assault on his character and on his ministry,” wrote columnist Mary Mitchell. She took Obama to task for denouncing them. “There is no institution in the black community more respected than the black church,” wrote Mitchell.”And the notion that white pundits can dictate what constitutes unacceptable speech in the black church is repulsive to most black people.”
A predominately black crowd of Wright supporters who gave him a standing ovation at the National Press Club “cheered, clapped and punctuated his speech with shouts of ‘amen,’” she noted. “So, when Obama says America was ‘offended’ by Wright’s harsh language, he isn’t speaking for or to Black America. He is speaking to White America.”
She continued:
“As much as I want to see Obama make history by becoming the first black man to be elected president, I don’t want to see a warrior like Wright denigrated to prove to white voters that Obama is not a radical.”
The Wright-Obama episode does, as Mitchell suggests, offers a rare window into America’s racial divide. Mitchell, like Wright, attempts to portray his particular anti-American radicalism as a microcosm of the black church, and therefore protected from criticism by “white pundits.” She, like most liberals, sees conspiracies and orchestrated campaigns — this directed at Wright — where none exists.
Far be it from this “white pundit” to offer commentary on how anybody, black , white or otherwise, should interpret scripture or what the rituals and practices of any church should be. But at some point the doors open — as they have on Wright’s ministry — and what’s said there is judged against fact, values and beliefs of the larger community, and the intellectual soundness of the interpretation of events or scripture. In Wright’s case, it’s not a question of interpreting scripture, but of political radicalism and virulent anti-Americanism.
While I’m not in a position to have an opinion on what transpires in black churches on Sunday morning, if his conspiracy-laced anti-Americanism is indeed the black church in America, as Wright declared at the National Press Club, we — blacks and whites — are in trouble. And so is the ministry.
It would certainly be a call to massive integration of churches, both ways, to make certain that rhetoric such as Wright’s is challenged on Sunday and Monday and Friday — and not just when it surfaces in a campaign where a candidate is trying to appeal to all.
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