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After ‘change,’ what?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Democrats privately are questioning whether Barack Obama has a second-phase act, a follow-up once “change” wears thin, the Associated Press reports.
John McCain,meanwhile, is finding his footing. A new radio ad for McCain returns to the image of Obama, the celebrity. “Celebrities like to spend their millions,” it says. “Barack Obama is no different. Only it’s your money he wants to spend.”
Obama television ad approach is to accuse McCain of being “more of the same” with tax-cut giveaways to big oil and big corporations. It’s the sort of stuff that appeals to his liberal base, but after a year of campaigning has lost its punch. Young guy, old stuff. Is there something else? Something else beyond “change”?
A problem for Obama, too, is that once he goes negative, as he’s doing this week, he risks turning off the young who hear one message and see another. In the Atlanta market, he’s launching a television ad that attempts to link McCain to Ralph Reed. “It is just sad,” Reed said, “that the Obama campaign, which once pledged to run on hope and change, is now resorting to the politics of personal destruction and fear and smear as Obama drops in the polls.” Too, he continued, it takes “a lot of chutzpah for someone who did real estate deals with Tony Rezko to attack others.” McCain is up 5 percentage points over Obama in the latest Rasmussen poll, a real turnaround.
Reed, who handles the media’s tough questions better than any other Republican in the country, did go to the heart of one of Obama’s vulnerabilities in his response. The young have a nose for hypocrisy. If Act Two of the Obama narrative is the scene where he reveals himself to be just another Chicago machine politician who plays with the truth, the young cut him loose in a heartbeat.
Obama goes into his convention reeling. But no worry. Bill and Hillary are there to lift him up.
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One Joe, yes. Please. But not two.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Please, make it Joe.
Make Joe the VP.
Joe Lieberman, the Independent U.S. Senator from Connecticut who caucuses with the Democrats, came to Atlanta Monday with the Republicans’ presidential candidate for a fund-raiser. The speculation — and concern — was that John McCain was shopping Lieberman as his running mate. If so, it didn’t go over well. McCain’s base is growing comfortable with him as the nominee, reassured by his aggressiveness in taking on the post-European global citizen, Barack Obama, and by his sterling performance in the Saddleback Church conversations with Pastor Rick Warren.
Don’t blow it now. Joe, no. Surveying the entire Republican Party and concluding that there’s nobody there who’d be a suitable vice president is a message McCain doesn’t want to send.
Ah, but there is a Joe, a fine Joe, who would be a spectacular choice for vice president. That’d be Joe Biden, U.S. Senator, Deleware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
There’d be great tension, of course. Both are talkers. Talk and talk and talk. Morning and night. Vapid, empty, meaningless, meandering rhetoric. With Obama and Biden, America could revive the presidency of Warren Harding.
About him it was said by Georgia native William G. McAdoo, Treasury Secretary under Woodrow Wilson, that his campaign speeches were “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”
And arrogance? If there’s a politician in America who matches Obama for arrogance, it’s Joe Biden. Instead of the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn, we could have an Arrogance Face-Off at 20 paces. This is a tough one. My money in that contest is on Biden. He’s far more experienced.
But with a little seasoning, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” could be the Michael Phelps of political arrogance.
Oh, the suspense of it all. Who will it be? Who is the other one we’ve been waiting for?
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Turn services over to private sector
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Despite a 12-year job-performance record that included “fights with co-workers, chronic tardiness, insubordination, repeated sleeping on the job and numerous mistakes routing emergency calls,” it wasn’t until a major 911-call blunder ended with a woman’s death that Gina Conteh got fired.
The quotes are from an account by AJC reporters D.L. Bennett and Marcus K. Garner of how the Fulton County civil service system works —- or doesn’t —- to serve the public interest. A mishandled call for medical assistance from Darlene Dukes of Johns Creek delayed help for almost an hour; she later died from a blood clot in her lung.
Getting rid of bad employees in Fulton is “impossible,” said Rob Simms, chief of staff to former Commission Chairman Mike Kenn. “Essentially, you can’t be fired.”
The state legislator who represents Johns Creek, House Speaker Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter, told the reporters that it’s “well-known that Fulton County is quick to hire, rarely disciplines and perpetuates an inefficient government.” He described Fulton as “a bloated jobs program.”
The inability to rid the public payroll of bad employees is a prime reason for moving virtually all nonjustice functions of state and local government into the private sector.
After a hundred years or more, we should have learned some lessons about the services government provides and the management systems they’ve created.
The primary one is that elected officials are notorious for thinking no further than the next election cycle. As such, they are incapable of acting in taxpayers’ best interests. The city of Atlanta, for example, sweetened pensions as a quick fix to placate disgruntled employees, putting the city in a financial bind for years to come.
The Atlanta school board has a pension system that covers 2,400 retirees and 1,000 current employees, mostly janitors, secretaries and other support staff, that is underfunded by $510 million. Teachers are, for the most part, in the state system. The board will spend $850 per student yearly to keep the system afloat —- meaning that the first $850 raised from property taxes for education goes to pay for yesterday’s short-sightedness.
Most of Georgia avoids troubles so dire not because they have smarter, more fiscally responsible, elected officials. It’s because Atlanta is older, has had more of a union presence and a greater cash flow, enabling its officials to be irresponsible more consequentially. It’s built up systems, like Fulton County’s, that make it virtually impossible to properly manage its personnel.
Before personnel problems get any worse, elected officials should be working overtime to come up with ways to turn functions over to the private sector. Then if a company doesn’t deliver, or is staffed with bad employees, elected officials can get rid of the company and give the contract to a new one. When workers are in the private sector, they’re not voting to elect their bosses, and they’re not lobbying for special favors. And, furthermore, politicians aren’t tempted to give in to them because they see the workers as a voting bloc. If they do, the costs will be pushed into the open, raising the possibility that another company will bid for the contract.
The other concern is unionization. Elected officials should never put themselves in the position of dealing with blocs of workers. More unionization is coming. A bill now before Congress called the Employee Fair Choice Act is a short cut to unionization. It would authorize a union in a private-sector company if a majority of workers merely sign an authorization card. No election would be necessary.
That’s on Big Labor’s wish list because the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector has dropped by more than half, to 7.5 percent, in 25 years.
Meanwhile, though, in the public sector, unionization is exploding and is now at 35.9 percent. That’s ominous. Georgia’s one of the five states with less than 5 percent of the work force unionized (4.4 percent). The time to deal with the problem is before it arises.
We see in Fulton and Atlanta, two mature governments, the consequence of short-term thinking and of adopting work rules that make it impossible to manage the work force properly.
Now’s the time to act. Privatize everything that’s not a function of justice. Everything.
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Liberation Russian style
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Russia promises, of a sort, to begin moving its forces, including 2,000 tanks, out of the territory of its neighbor, the republic of Georgia, today. To paraphrase a former governor of this Georgia, Marvin Griffin, everybody who believe that should pick up a tank and follow me.
In Griffin’s phrase, the object to be picked up was a bale of cotton. But the point is the same. Nobody expects Russian President Dmitry Mededev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to honor the promise to begin leaving Georgian territory today — except, perhaps, to begin a months-long trickle, while building up their defenses in the Georgian province of South Ossetia.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was asked by Wolf Blitzer Sunday on CNN Late Edition whether “those Russian peacekeepers who were in South Ossetia before the violence started about 10 days ago…will be allowed to remain?”
“Well, you know, there is no such thing as Russian peacekeeper,” Saakashvili replied. “I mean, these are obvious Russian interventionist forces, Russian occupiers.”
They are that — and the challenge for the rest of the world, Europe and the U.S. most prominently, is to get them out, not only of the undisputed territory, but out of all of Georgia, including South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russians in Georgia “are destroying our pipeline and port infrastrure…they are just rampaging and going — looting… this is liberation, Russian style,” said Saakashvili on CNN.
The U.S. is the sole superpower remaining in the world, but there’s never been any doubt that it cannot be the world’s policeman. Some problems are first and foremost our responsibility, regardless of whether a single ally joins in. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq is an example. Some, Sudan for instance, require regional intervention. Others require a global response — in this case to make it clear to the Russians that it cannot seize and actually or effectively annex the territory of a sovereign nation.
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McCain showed best how to react to Russian force
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The world really cannot allow the Russian attempt to annex the territory of its neighbor, the republic of Georgia, to succeed.
If it does, if the West acquiesces to Russia’s seizure of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it is not necessarily a return to the Cold War. But it is the beginning of a period of heightened tensions where great risk accompanies miscalculation by either Vladimir Putin or by America’s next president, Barack Obama or John McCain. It’s no time for indecisiveness, for lack of clarity and hints of timidity.
The invasion of Georgia is, like 9/11, a defining moment — less consequential, obviously. A military response to the invasion is not an option.
While Georgia is a beacon of aspirational democracy that suffered for generations in Communist bondage, the strategic interests of the United States in the republic of Georgia are circumscribed by its location and by more direct threats to our national security elsewhere.
Still, the entire world — and the Western world in particular — has to assert every noncombat effort possible to enforce a cease-fire and to replace Russian “peacekeepers” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia with an international force. The United States and other nations cannot look away while Russia effectively annexes the two regions — not now and not two years from now.
In the initial U.S. response to the invasion, the clearly decisive leader was McCain, not Obama or President Bush. Obama’s initial reaction was to urge both the rapist and the victim to show restraint, while McCain spoke forcefully to denounce the invasion and to call for specific actions, including withdrawal from “sovereign Georgian territory,” an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council, action by other official bodies and the creation of “a truly independent and neutral peacekeeping force.”
Ten days later, McCain’s first response appears to have been the right one. Obama reflected uncertainty in part because of inexperience and in part, too, because he was responding as events unfolded. He is far more comfortable, as indeed the administration’s critics are, in letting President Bush act and then declaring that he or they would have been smarter, wiser and righter had they been making the decision.
President Bush’s strongest response was to reach agreement with Poland last Thursday to base 10 interceptor missiles to protect Europe from those fired by Iran or North Korea.
In the days prior to the Russian invasion of Georgia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying that “we should restore our position in Cuba and other countries.” He made comments in response to a report on a delegation’s visit with Cuban leaders to discuss cooperation in “energy, mining, agriculture transportation, health care and communications.” Military ties were specifically not mentioned, publicly at least.
But an influential former top defense official, Leonid Ivashov, was quoted in a separate report as saying: “It is not a secret that the West is creating a ‘buffer zone’ around Russia involving countries in central Europe, the Caucasus, the Baltic states and Ukraine. In response, we may expand our military presence abroad, including Cuba.”
The invasion of Georgia was clearly intended as a message to the West and to the newly independent states on Russia’s borders. If, in the process, it is possible to replace Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with a puppet, so much the better. Russia has a compelling interest now in having the entire world see Georgia suffer. It has to be painful. It has to be humiliating and brutal.
The world either agrees now that Russia can declare a sphere of interest that includes surrounding itself with compliant states. Or it exerts every noncombat effort to protect the sovereignty of Georgia and to recognize its territorial integrity. That involves some risk. Medical and humanitarian resupply, for example, would be in proximity of Russian forces.
The invasion makes the world less safe. We enter a period where Putin and other Russian leaders should have no doubts about our intentions and our resolve. We have to take some risks in undoing the aggression, but there can be no false signals. In a time of testing, America needs a seasoned leader.
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