Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
In today's tumultuous media environment, there comes a time when free-agent scribes such as myself are wise to diversify. That time is now.
WHYY, the public media service in Philadelphia (more traditionally known as Public Broadcasting), has lured me - so, beginning Monday, this blog will move there, under a new name. You can even check it out today - at whyy.org/nationalinterest - and list it in Favorites. There's scant furniture in the room yet, but I left a note pinned to the door.
Philly.com has been a great host these past four and a half years. Cranking out a political blog, which requires provocative text five days a week, is a taxing exercise that can't be done without significant in-house support, so I especially want to thank Wendy, Jonathan, Bob, and Tony for watching my back. And while I'm certainly inviting my clamorous community of readers to link the new site every weekday, I'm obviously hoping that you'll also continue to avail yourselves of the extensive philly.com menu.
And even though I'm moving and reinventing the blog, my Sunday Inquirer print column will continue to be posted online at philly.com, and I'll surface in live chats sponsored by the Inquirer editorial board. In fact, a chat is scheduled for Monday. Such are the perks of diversification, and the expanding options for staying in touch. Let's do that.
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Before time keeps slipping, slipping, slipping into the future (apologies to the Steve Miller Band), let us collectively bow our heads and mourn the sudden passing of one of Washington's most successful socialists.
That would be former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, whose legendary deeds will forever demonstrate the flaw at the core of the GOP's "small government" credo, the chasm separating the party's rhetoric and actions.
After Stevens perished this week in a plane crash at age 86, national party chairman Michael Steele praised the 40-year senator "for his unparalleled effectiveness at fighting for his home state interests." In other words, Stevens vaccumed every last possible federal cent and sent it off to Alaska, thereby practicing socialism on a scale unmatched by any of his senatorial brethren.
Naturally, no Republican has been eager to point out the fact that Stevens, over a recent span of 13 years, bestowed $3.4 billion in federal taxpayer money on his home state, for a plethora of projects ranging from the scandalous ($29 million to a fisheries marketing board chaired by his son) to the hilarious ($300 million for the infamous "bridge to nowhere" that would've served 50 people, the bridge that Gov. Palin ultimately opposed after she was for it).
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
The Tuesday night primary results are rich with story lines - a tea-party darling wins the Colorado Republican senatorial nomination, the Georgia GOP gubernatorial race (featuring a candidate championed by Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, versus a candidate championed by Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee) is a cliffhanger heading for a recount - but I'm partial to the plot in Connecticut. That state's autumn Senate contest promises to be a veritable wellspring of entertainment.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I'll happily stipulate that I have a soft spot for my birth state, where I also spent my first 11 years in the dead-tree news biz. The political climate was quite genteel, the governor was a penny-pincher who owned a bar, moderate Republicans were plentiful, and the biggest fuss in the state capital was the yearly warning from the bottling industry that if the lawmakers ever passed the radical bill mandating the recycling of bottles, Connecticut would surely shed zillions of jobs and sink into a recessionary dark age.
And back then, it would have been inconceivable in Connecticut that a major political party would tap, as its candidate for the U.S. Senate, a female impresario who had made a billion bucks by staging events in which people stuffed with steroids pounded each other with furniture and the occasional woodshed tool.
Yet that's what happened last night, with World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon's self-financed ascent to the GOP nomination. Reportedly, she's already the fourth most prolific self-funder of all time. She spent $22 million of her own money to finish first in the Republican primary with 58,000 votes; that works out to roughly $400 a vote, and she vowed on TV this morning to extract another $28 million from the personal till. ("It's money I've earned. It's money I'm willing to invest.")
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Democrats, road-testing their midterm election message, have been warning lately that the Republicans want to bring back the policies of George W. Bush. But that claim is not accurate, given the fact that the current Republican crowd apparently views George W. Bush as a flaming liberal who was soft on immigration.
In all his years as president, and to his credit, Bush never trashed the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which since 1868 has declared that all babies born on U.S. soil are automatically citizens. He never proposed that the birthright citizenship language be ripped out. He never smeared immigrant women as opportunists who simply wanted to "drop a baby" in America for the supposedly sole purpose of creating an American citizen. He never sought to indulge the denizens of nutcase nation by whipping up fears about so-called hordes of "anchor babies."
On the contrary, Bush accepted the birthright language as a settled American tradition; indeed, the amendment itself stands as a singular achievement of the early Republican party, and the current GOP still lists it, on its website, as a major party "accomplishment." Bush's aim was not to disenfranchise babies. Rather, his broad aim was to welcome immigrants to the fold; as he remarked in a January '04 speech, "every generation of immigrants has reaffirmed our ability to assimilate newcomers, which is one of the defining strengths of America."
Unfortunately, one of our defining flaws - now on display, courtesy of the post-Bush GOP - is that we sometimes demonize immigrants. It's tempting to dismiss the current hysteria as merely the latest manifestation of the August syndrome, by which we seem to get progressively stupider with each blast of humidity. (This month, it's "anchor babies." Last August, it was "Nazi" health reform.) But the truth is, the right-wing impulse to tamper with the Constitution and remove the birthright language has been marinating for a long time. It once was the province of the party fringe. Now it has migrated to the party mainstream.
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
August 9, August 9...I knew that something big happened on this date, but what? Was I referencing the A bomb we dropped on Nagasaki on this date in '45? Or the Charles Manson gang's murder of Sharon Tate on August 9 in '69? Or the fact that Jerry Garcia departed this world for that Dark Star in the sky on August 9 in '95?
And then I remembered. I conjured the image of somebody wiggling his fingers in the semblance of a victory salute at the door of a chopper on the White House lawn, seconds before he flew off into exile and disgrace. That indeed was 36 years ago today, on the first and only occasion when a president quit his job.
So rather than marinate in the latest transient brouhaha of the moment, I'm in the mood to mark this day by pondering the Richard Nixon enigma - the shrewd pragmatic centrist who nonetheless pioneered the negative partisan tactics, and stoked the deep-seated cultural resentments, that badly stain our politics today.
It's no easy job to gauge the guy. As historian James MacGregor Burns once remarked, "How can one evaluate such an idiosyncratic president, so brilliant and so morally lacking?" We're talking here about a character out of Shakespeare; surely no other president has been dissected for tragic and comic purposes by so many actors and comics - at least three dozen, by my count - including Frank Langella, Anthony Hopkins, Beau Bridges, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall, Dan Hedaya, Lane Smith, Rich Little, Dan Aykroyd, and David Frye.
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
It was inevitable that the historic federal court ruling in favor of gay marriage - detailed here yesterday - would infuriate cultural conservatives. The attacks began scant minutes after Judge Vaughn Walker released his decision, and, while some were merely hilarious (thrice-married Newt Gingrich championing the sanctity of opposite-sex marriage), one particularly fatuous argument has taken hold among the dimmest denizens of the right:
The ruling is a travesty of justice because Walker himself is reportedly gay - and because he's gay, he should've removed himself from the case!
I wrote here in February that this talking point would surface down the road, only because it was so obvious. At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle had just reported that Walker's sexual orientation, which he had never advertised, was nonetheless "an open secret." A few conservative outlets, such as the Christian Broadcasting Network, promptly circulated the story, and a few demanded that Walker should therefore quit the case, citing his "textbook conflict of interest."
There the matter rested. But two afternoons ago, after Walker concluded in his fact-packed ruling that the California ban on gay marriage violated the U.S. Constitution's equal-protection and due-process guarantees, I began the countdown. Three, two, one...
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
The power and essence of yesterday's historic federal court ruling on gay marriage can be found on page 74 of the decision. Judge Vaughn Walker, in the midst of his meticulous declaration that California's gay marriage ban violated the U.S Constitution's equal-protection and due-process guarantees for all Americans, specifically said this:
"Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation. No credible evidence supports a finding that an individual may, through conscious decision, therapeutic intervention, or any other method, change his or her sexual orientation." The judge then backed up his conclusion by citing 12 factual examples drawn from the trial evidence - most notably, scientific and survey findings from a psychology expert, Gregory Herek; and, as the judge dryly noted in his ruling, the foes of gay marriage "did not present testimony to contradict Herek."
Given the fact that Walker's exhaustive ruling will probably wind its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the passage on page 74 is critically important. The judge basically concluded, based on the scientific evidence presented at his trial, that gays deserve full equal-rights protection under the Constitution - just like any other underdog now recognized by the courts as an "identifiable class," such as minorities (who can't choose their skin color), and women (who can't choose their gender).
Courts have often denied gays the equal protection of laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment because the gay "lifestyle" was deemed merely to be voluntary "conduct," an argument that was again floated in Walker's court earlier this year. He has now rejected that argument, on factual grounds. Federal appeals judges - and, ultimately, high-court swing voter Anthony Kennedy - may well be at pains to toss out the trial evidence and contend anew that gays deserve less status, and hence less constitutional protection, than others. (Indeed, Walker appeared to aim his ruling for Kennedy's ears, with frequent quotes from recent Kennedy-authored gay-friendly rulings.)
Moreover, what Walker concluded yesterday ("Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians") was no different than what Ted Olson - one of the pro-gay marriage lawyers in the case, and a veteran conservative Republican activist - stated in a magazine column back on Jan. 9: "Science has taught us, even if history has not, that gays and lesbians do not choose to be homosexual any more than the rest of us choose to be heterosexual. To a very large extent, these characteristics are immutable, like being left-handed."
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Missouri has spoken. Or, to be more precise, Missouri's most ticked off voters have spoken. Last night, in the first-in-the-nation referendum on President Obama's health care law, they signaled a resounding thumbs down. Seventy one percent of voting Missourians supported Proposition C - which decreed that the feds have no business requiring citizens to buy health insurance, and that the state of Missouri should defy the new mandate.
The referendum win will bring forth much triumphant Republican spin - which is ironic, given the much-overlooked fact that the federal mandate concept was originally birthed by the GOP.
The Missouri verdict was fully expected. It was primary night in Missouri, and state Republicans were staging the more competitive contests - which meant that the primary electorate would skew heavily Republican. (Which indeed happened. The Senate Democratic primary drew 314,000 voters; the Senate GOP primary, 574,000 voters.) Overall turnout was light, but motivated August voters are typically angry voters, and Proposition C was intentionally crafted by its authors as a way for these folks to lash out at Obama, the Democratic Congress, and Washington in general.
Even though the referendum was basically symbolic - the real action on the insurance mandate issue will play out in the federal courts - last night's results will surely be framed by Republicans as a stunning blow for liberty, as proof that "the people" want the freedom to remain uninsured and thus drive up insurance costs for everybody else.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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