Plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Library have recently been released.
The Library will include:
The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction and looks like a disaster.
The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won’t be able to remember anything you see or hear.
The Creation Science Room, where you can see how God created the world in 7 days plus a bonus tour of how the Bush administration created the evidence that linked Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in just 7 days as well.
The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't have to show up.
The American Homeowners Room, where you can see millions of home foreclosure notices.
The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they won't let you in.
The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they won't let you out.
The Fiscal Responsibility Room, where you will hear lots of noise but see absolutely nothing.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which you won’t be able to find.
The Iraq War Room, where once you complete your first tour of the room, they make you go back for a second, third, fourth, & sometimes fifth tour.
The Abstinence Sex Education room, where you can see millions of positive teenge pregnancy test results.
The Dick Cheney Room, which you will find in an undisclosed location and which also includes a shooting gallery.
Future plans also include:
The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.
The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
In addition to the aforementioned plans:
An entire floor will be devoted to a 1/64 scale model of the President's ego.
In order to highlight the President's accomplishments the museum will also have an electron microscope available to help you locate them.
There is no word yet on where the library will put the President's only book.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
Its Trench Warfare Now
Republican Politics, American Style
Published on April 3rd in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week I discussed the CEO management style Mrs. Clinton has displayed over the course of the last year while running her Presidential campaign into the ditch. While not all of the problems Clinton has experienced on the campaign trail were of her own making, when you are telling voters you are the most experienced and capable Democratic candidate running for President then the buck stops with you regardless.
As President you can’t blame those you have appointed to positions of power in your administration for failing to get the job done. You have to casually admit you made a mistake appointing them by unceremoniously cutting them loose as quickly as possible, and simultaneously naming a successor who has a reputation for possessing whatever qualities that their predecessor lacked. There is no room for sentiment or personal loyalty when it comes to running a business enterprise or the US government. You have a much greater responsibility to US citizens and that responsibility is more important than one’s sense of personal loyalty to any one person, no matter how long they have been with you.
President Bush has repeatedly put his personal feelings of loyalty ahead of the interests of the US and its citizens by stubbornly resisting calls to replace long time aides who were failing in their jobs such as Alberto Gonzalez and Donald Rumsfeld. My concern is that Hillary Clinton has, from the outset of her presidential campaign, shown the same propensity as Bush for putting a higher premium on loyalty than competence or experience as a pre-requisite for working for her in her presidential campaign.
Thus far Clinton’s poor campaign management skills and inability to make hard choices have only had consequences that have affected her Democratic presidential nomination prospects. But install that same management philosophy and indecisiveness in the White House and it will be the American people who will suffer the consequences not just Clinton and her staffers. Is this the type of President I want answering the phone at 3am? A President who isn’t decisive and can’t bring herself to make tough choices?
When I saw Clinton’s 3am phone call advertisement questioning Obama’s ability to respond to some kind of middle of the night emergency, I got scared at the sight of her answering the call. While I understand her campaign’s use of this TV attack ad tactic in an attempt to cast doubt on Obama’s fitness to serve as Commander in Chief, the reality of such crises is that decisions on how to respond to them are made in much more unexciting ways. Even former Clinton National Security advisor and Hillary Clinton supporter David Rothkopf says that “It's a bit of a specious issue, somehow implying you need better judgment in the middle of the night.”
In fact US government historians and former national security advisers from both parties say that all serious presidential decisions have been made over the course of days or weeks and never in the middle of the night. Regardless, Senator Clinton’s decision to not even bother reading the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) prior to voting to authorize the Iraq war calls into question her ability to make better judgments as the US Commander in Chief in the middle of the day, much less in the middle of the night.
Aside from the fact that Senator Obama has shown better judgment than Senator Clinton on the Iraq war, Obama has also shown himself to be a much stronger and more decisive CEO than Clinton in terms of how he has managed his presidential campaign. The Obama presidential campaign staff is not composed of a bunch of people who all get along and agree on everything particularly as regards campaign strategy and tactics.
There were a number of Obama’s campaign advisers who were suggesting he change his campaign strategy and or tactics during the course of the last year while Obama continued to languish 20 plus percentage points behind Hillary Clinton in both national and early voting states’ polls. They wanted Obama to attack Clinton and among other things try to shed some light on the Clintons’ many questionable financial dealings since they left the White House in 2001.
Questions such as: How much money was Bill Clinton earning from speeches, (compared to what other former presidents made from speeches) on the basis of the presumption that he and Hillary would be returning to their White House perch after the 2008 elections? What were the names of the donors who had “donated” over $500 million to the Clinton Presidential Library and could they have been doing so to curry favor with the “next” Clinton administration? Why won’t the Clintons release their post-2000 tax returns until after they have been nominated as the Democratic candidate? What is in these tax returns that they don’t want Democratic voters to see until “after” they have voted?
Obama heard the voices calling for a change in strategy and considered the reasoning offered by those who proposed it. But Barack Obama decided that he was going to be consistent and continue to try and maintain a positive campaign message of bringing an end to the divisive politics that have dominated in the United States for the past forty years. He said that if he had to attack and tear his opponent down in order to win the nomination that he would be no better than that which he was fighting to change.
The Clintons have no such lofty illusions about political campaigns.. They are after all a product of the divisive anything goes politics that Obama is trying to bring an end to. Having squandered their advantages in name recognition, money and political establishment support, the Clintons have decided that they will attack Obama with a “kitchen sink” strategy in a final desperate effort to win the nomination no matter what it costs. I don’t think it will succeed but this is trench warfare now ….and the Clintons are very good at it.
Published on April 3rd in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week I discussed the CEO management style Mrs. Clinton has displayed over the course of the last year while running her Presidential campaign into the ditch. While not all of the problems Clinton has experienced on the campaign trail were of her own making, when you are telling voters you are the most experienced and capable Democratic candidate running for President then the buck stops with you regardless.
As President you can’t blame those you have appointed to positions of power in your administration for failing to get the job done. You have to casually admit you made a mistake appointing them by unceremoniously cutting them loose as quickly as possible, and simultaneously naming a successor who has a reputation for possessing whatever qualities that their predecessor lacked. There is no room for sentiment or personal loyalty when it comes to running a business enterprise or the US government. You have a much greater responsibility to US citizens and that responsibility is more important than one’s sense of personal loyalty to any one person, no matter how long they have been with you.
President Bush has repeatedly put his personal feelings of loyalty ahead of the interests of the US and its citizens by stubbornly resisting calls to replace long time aides who were failing in their jobs such as Alberto Gonzalez and Donald Rumsfeld. My concern is that Hillary Clinton has, from the outset of her presidential campaign, shown the same propensity as Bush for putting a higher premium on loyalty than competence or experience as a pre-requisite for working for her in her presidential campaign.
Thus far Clinton’s poor campaign management skills and inability to make hard choices have only had consequences that have affected her Democratic presidential nomination prospects. But install that same management philosophy and indecisiveness in the White House and it will be the American people who will suffer the consequences not just Clinton and her staffers. Is this the type of President I want answering the phone at 3am? A President who isn’t decisive and can’t bring herself to make tough choices?
When I saw Clinton’s 3am phone call advertisement questioning Obama’s ability to respond to some kind of middle of the night emergency, I got scared at the sight of her answering the call. While I understand her campaign’s use of this TV attack ad tactic in an attempt to cast doubt on Obama’s fitness to serve as Commander in Chief, the reality of such crises is that decisions on how to respond to them are made in much more unexciting ways. Even former Clinton National Security advisor and Hillary Clinton supporter David Rothkopf says that “It's a bit of a specious issue, somehow implying you need better judgment in the middle of the night.”
In fact US government historians and former national security advisers from both parties say that all serious presidential decisions have been made over the course of days or weeks and never in the middle of the night. Regardless, Senator Clinton’s decision to not even bother reading the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) prior to voting to authorize the Iraq war calls into question her ability to make better judgments as the US Commander in Chief in the middle of the day, much less in the middle of the night.
Aside from the fact that Senator Obama has shown better judgment than Senator Clinton on the Iraq war, Obama has also shown himself to be a much stronger and more decisive CEO than Clinton in terms of how he has managed his presidential campaign. The Obama presidential campaign staff is not composed of a bunch of people who all get along and agree on everything particularly as regards campaign strategy and tactics.
There were a number of Obama’s campaign advisers who were suggesting he change his campaign strategy and or tactics during the course of the last year while Obama continued to languish 20 plus percentage points behind Hillary Clinton in both national and early voting states’ polls. They wanted Obama to attack Clinton and among other things try to shed some light on the Clintons’ many questionable financial dealings since they left the White House in 2001.
Questions such as: How much money was Bill Clinton earning from speeches, (compared to what other former presidents made from speeches) on the basis of the presumption that he and Hillary would be returning to their White House perch after the 2008 elections? What were the names of the donors who had “donated” over $500 million to the Clinton Presidential Library and could they have been doing so to curry favor with the “next” Clinton administration? Why won’t the Clintons release their post-2000 tax returns until after they have been nominated as the Democratic candidate? What is in these tax returns that they don’t want Democratic voters to see until “after” they have voted?
Obama heard the voices calling for a change in strategy and considered the reasoning offered by those who proposed it. But Barack Obama decided that he was going to be consistent and continue to try and maintain a positive campaign message of bringing an end to the divisive politics that have dominated in the United States for the past forty years. He said that if he had to attack and tear his opponent down in order to win the nomination that he would be no better than that which he was fighting to change.
The Clintons have no such lofty illusions about political campaigns.. They are after all a product of the divisive anything goes politics that Obama is trying to bring an end to. Having squandered their advantages in name recognition, money and political establishment support, the Clintons have decided that they will attack Obama with a “kitchen sink” strategy in a final desperate effort to win the nomination no matter what it costs. I don’t think it will succeed but this is trench warfare now ….and the Clintons are very good at it.
Clinton shares many Bush traits
Republican Politics, American Style
Published on March 27th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
So how is it the Clinton Presidential campaign went from leading all the national and early voting state polls by margins of 20 plus percentage points for almost a full year, (not to mention having over 200 super-delegates pledging their support before the first state primary votes are cast) to being behind in the number of primaries and delegates won, total number of all delegates and total popular vote in less than 3 months time? How do you begin your Presidential campaign with a massive war chest of Senate re-election and lobbyist campaign funds and find yourself loaning the campaign $5 million of your own $50 million personal fortune a year later because your political campaign is broke?
Now I could be wrong but I believe the answer lies in Clinton’s lack of effective Chief Executive Officer (CEO) management skills. Allow me to elaborate on why I believe this to be the case. At some point during their tenure all Presidents and CEOs have to resolve conflicts and disagreements between various different subordinates or groups of supporters. Such conflict is inevitable within any large organization because no matter how hard you might try to only hire people who share similar perspectives there are bound to be legitimate differences of opinion on how to accomplish certain objectives. It is the CEO’s job to resolve such conflicts so the organization can move on to deal with other issues and not get bogged down by sometimes petty disagreements.
In the case of the Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton has cultivated an image as a strong and steady chief executive surrounded by legions of loyal and efficient staffers when in fact the reality of the inner workings of her Presidential campaign has been the exact opposite. The truth is that many of Clinton’s campaign advisers despised each other and there were also deep divisions within her campaign over campaign strategy, TV and radio advertising, where to allocate resources as well as how best to use former President Bill Clinton as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. These problems were allowed to fester for months throughout 2007 until her campaign ship almost ran aground on the shoals of financial insolvency at the end of January of this year.
Now don’t get me wrong here, but there is a legitimate CEO organizational management style whereby some CEOs actually seek to surround themselves with feuding subordinates because they believe the conflicting ideas that result from these clashes gives them the best possible set of options to choose from. There is also some evidence that would suggest that this style of management can be quite successful, but it requires a CEO who is both very decisive and also very involved in terms of the divergence of opinions between his or her subordinates. They only let the debate of ideas continue for a brief period of time before they step in and make a decision on which course the organization will take so that all involved can then move on to the next issue.
But while Hillary Clinton assembled a group of campaign advisors who were well known for their dislike of each other, she paid almost no attention to the details of the issues her campaign staffers were debating. Nor was Clinton decisive, preferring to delegate virtually all campaign decisions (no matter how large or how small they were) to various different lieutenants and to defer to her advisors on all critical campaign issues.
For months Clinton appeared to be totally unaware of the many conflicts that were simmering within her organization and that were also preventing her staffers from making decisions on how and where to confront the upstart candidacy of Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign’s seething cauldron of campaign staff resentments and unresolved conflicts over political strategies finally boiled over in the wake of consecutive February primary losses to Obama and led to the departures of her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and Doyle’s top assistant, deputy campaign manager Mike Henry.
James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management says this about Clinton as a CEO: “She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators. She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”
I found it interesting that Clinton chose another long-time member of her old White House inner circle of loyal aides as Patti Solis Doyle’s replacement. Maggie Williams, like Patti Solis Doyle, has had no previous experience running a presidential campaign or managing a paid political staff of almost a thousand people. In this respect Hillary Clinton has shown the same disturbing tendency that our current President Bush has shown during his two terms as President. Like Bush, Clinton appears to place a higher value on those who have demonstrated personal loyalty to her through the years than she does on their relative experience or competence.
Virtually all of Clinton’s key campaign aides are people who have worked for her for many years and are familiar with her peculiar management style. Clinton has also demonstrated the same propensity the current President Bush has shown for sticking by lieutenants who are not getting the job done even when other friends have urged Clinton to let them go. I find these tendencies troubling because it says a lot about the type of people Clinton is likely to nominate as Cabinet heads and for positions overseeing government agencies should she ever be elected President.
What the US doesn’t need is another four years of Presidential appointees who lack the experience or the competence to do the jobs they are tasked with. That is why I find these parallels between Bush’s and Clinton’s CEO management styles so disturbing.
Published on March 27th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
So how is it the Clinton Presidential campaign went from leading all the national and early voting state polls by margins of 20 plus percentage points for almost a full year, (not to mention having over 200 super-delegates pledging their support before the first state primary votes are cast) to being behind in the number of primaries and delegates won, total number of all delegates and total popular vote in less than 3 months time? How do you begin your Presidential campaign with a massive war chest of Senate re-election and lobbyist campaign funds and find yourself loaning the campaign $5 million of your own $50 million personal fortune a year later because your political campaign is broke?
Now I could be wrong but I believe the answer lies in Clinton’s lack of effective Chief Executive Officer (CEO) management skills. Allow me to elaborate on why I believe this to be the case. At some point during their tenure all Presidents and CEOs have to resolve conflicts and disagreements between various different subordinates or groups of supporters. Such conflict is inevitable within any large organization because no matter how hard you might try to only hire people who share similar perspectives there are bound to be legitimate differences of opinion on how to accomplish certain objectives. It is the CEO’s job to resolve such conflicts so the organization can move on to deal with other issues and not get bogged down by sometimes petty disagreements.
In the case of the Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton has cultivated an image as a strong and steady chief executive surrounded by legions of loyal and efficient staffers when in fact the reality of the inner workings of her Presidential campaign has been the exact opposite. The truth is that many of Clinton’s campaign advisers despised each other and there were also deep divisions within her campaign over campaign strategy, TV and radio advertising, where to allocate resources as well as how best to use former President Bill Clinton as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. These problems were allowed to fester for months throughout 2007 until her campaign ship almost ran aground on the shoals of financial insolvency at the end of January of this year.
Now don’t get me wrong here, but there is a legitimate CEO organizational management style whereby some CEOs actually seek to surround themselves with feuding subordinates because they believe the conflicting ideas that result from these clashes gives them the best possible set of options to choose from. There is also some evidence that would suggest that this style of management can be quite successful, but it requires a CEO who is both very decisive and also very involved in terms of the divergence of opinions between his or her subordinates. They only let the debate of ideas continue for a brief period of time before they step in and make a decision on which course the organization will take so that all involved can then move on to the next issue.
But while Hillary Clinton assembled a group of campaign advisors who were well known for their dislike of each other, she paid almost no attention to the details of the issues her campaign staffers were debating. Nor was Clinton decisive, preferring to delegate virtually all campaign decisions (no matter how large or how small they were) to various different lieutenants and to defer to her advisors on all critical campaign issues.
For months Clinton appeared to be totally unaware of the many conflicts that were simmering within her organization and that were also preventing her staffers from making decisions on how and where to confront the upstart candidacy of Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign’s seething cauldron of campaign staff resentments and unresolved conflicts over political strategies finally boiled over in the wake of consecutive February primary losses to Obama and led to the departures of her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and Doyle’s top assistant, deputy campaign manager Mike Henry.
James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management says this about Clinton as a CEO: “She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators. She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”
I found it interesting that Clinton chose another long-time member of her old White House inner circle of loyal aides as Patti Solis Doyle’s replacement. Maggie Williams, like Patti Solis Doyle, has had no previous experience running a presidential campaign or managing a paid political staff of almost a thousand people. In this respect Hillary Clinton has shown the same disturbing tendency that our current President Bush has shown during his two terms as President. Like Bush, Clinton appears to place a higher value on those who have demonstrated personal loyalty to her through the years than she does on their relative experience or competence.
Virtually all of Clinton’s key campaign aides are people who have worked for her for many years and are familiar with her peculiar management style. Clinton has also demonstrated the same propensity the current President Bush has shown for sticking by lieutenants who are not getting the job done even when other friends have urged Clinton to let them go. I find these tendencies troubling because it says a lot about the type of people Clinton is likely to nominate as Cabinet heads and for positions overseeing government agencies should she ever be elected President.
What the US doesn’t need is another four years of Presidential appointees who lack the experience or the competence to do the jobs they are tasked with. That is why I find these parallels between Bush’s and Clinton’s CEO management styles so disturbing.
The presidential candidates CEO skills
Republican Politics, American Style
Published on March 20th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week my closing comment was to express my hope for a landslide victory by Barack Obama in the General Election, one that would also usher in a bigger Democratic majority in Congress as well as many state legislatures.
One of my Republican friends, who is also sympathetic to my reasons for supporting Barack Obama, was nonetheless surprised to hear me advocating for larger Democratic legislative majorities as well. He wondered how I could do this given my longstanding opposition to many of the policies supported by previous Democratic legislative majorities in Congress as well as state government. So I will now attempt to explain my reasons for taking such a radically different position on this subject.
History has shown that US Presidents elected in landslide elections also bring substantial changes to the United State’s domestic political landscape. After his landslide election in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt brought Americans guaranteed old age pension benefits in the form of Social Security legislation. On the heels of his 1964 landslide Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1965 Voting Rights Act that would later guarantee the success of 1964’s Civil Rights legislation. Ronald Reagan was able to cement the tax and economic reforms he had pushed through Congress (which significantly altered US economic and taxation policy) following his landslide win over Walter Mondale in 1984.
Just as the US was grappling with seemingly intractable domestic problems in those years, we now face a host of equally daunting issues that will require landmark legislation to effectively deal with them. I hope I will be able to see Barack Obama follow in the footsteps of these other Presidents because I believe he is the only one of the three remaining candidates with a chance of winning the Presidency in a landslide.
With a voter mandate provided by an overwhelming electoral win and a strengthened Democratic majority in Congress, Obama would be able to cut through a lot of the partisan political posturing we have seen in Congress for the last 20 years. With his emphasis on finding common ground and not trying to settle old political scores, I believe he would be able to get enough support from both Democrats and moderate Republicans to pass the difficult measures that will be required to address America’s ills while the country is simultaneously experiencing tough economic times.
If one closely examines the political campaigns of the three remaining Presidential hopefuls, you can get a pretty good idea of who is more likely to perform best in the role of US President. Being President of the United States of America is more akin to being the CEO of a huge corporation and thus is a role that is quite different than the advise and consent role played by a US Senator. Being an effective US Senator with a paid staff of 20 people doesn’t require the same kind of CEO skills needed to manage a Presidential campaign with a paid staff of over 500 people.
Let’s take a minute to examine the records of all 3 Senators and how well they have managed their respective Presidential campaigns over the past year. John McCain began his campaign in November of 2006 as the Republican frontrunner with the advantage of his past experience running for President in 2000 and narrowly losing in some key primaries against the current President Bush. He had the experience and the national name recognition from the previous campaign as well as a strong fundraising operation. McCain actually had more well connected lobbyists as fundraisers than any other candidate for President and raised over $13 million in the first quarter of last year.
So what happened? By July of last year the McCain presidential campaign was almost broke and they had to let almost 100 staffers go while the other remaining staff took pay cuts or switched to being unpaid advisors. McCain had also slipped from first to fourth place in national polls behind Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and the as yet undeclared candidacy of Fred Thompson. As a result McCain also showed both his campaign manager and chief campaign strategist the door.
But John McCain’s subsequent comeback to win the Republican nomination was less about savvy political campaign management and more due to the mistakes of his competitors and fortunate turns of events that McCain had no control or influence over.
In January of 2007 Hillary Clinton began her Presidential campaign in an even stronger position than John McCain thanks to the transfer of $10 million from her NY Senate campaign. She had been discussing running for President since the fall of 2002 and so it was widely assumed that much of the money raised for her 2006 Senate re-election was actually destined for the 2008 Presidential race.
She was the immediate Democratic frontrunner in all of the national polls due to her name recognition as the wife of a popular former President at a time when the current President was very unpopular. She also led the polls in the first 6 Democratic primary/caucus states and used this data coupled with influential lobbyists to raise an additional $25 million in the first quarter of 2007 to add to the $10 million from her 2006 Senate re-election campaign she started the presidential race with. By October of 2007 Hillary Clinton had a commanding lead in all of the national and early voting state polls over her 2 main rivals, John Edwards and Barack Obama.
By the beginning of December Senator Clinton was presumed by most political observers and establishment Democrats to be unstoppable in her quest to be the Democratic Presidential nominee. As a result many of these Democratic politicians decided to jump on the fast moving Clinton Presidential campaign train and announced they would cast their un-pledged delegate vote for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton had over 200 Super-delegates pledged to support her before the first voters ever went to the polls.
So what happened? I will discuss this in some detail next week.
Published on March 20th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week my closing comment was to express my hope for a landslide victory by Barack Obama in the General Election, one that would also usher in a bigger Democratic majority in Congress as well as many state legislatures.
One of my Republican friends, who is also sympathetic to my reasons for supporting Barack Obama, was nonetheless surprised to hear me advocating for larger Democratic legislative majorities as well. He wondered how I could do this given my longstanding opposition to many of the policies supported by previous Democratic legislative majorities in Congress as well as state government. So I will now attempt to explain my reasons for taking such a radically different position on this subject.
History has shown that US Presidents elected in landslide elections also bring substantial changes to the United State’s domestic political landscape. After his landslide election in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt brought Americans guaranteed old age pension benefits in the form of Social Security legislation. On the heels of his 1964 landslide Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1965 Voting Rights Act that would later guarantee the success of 1964’s Civil Rights legislation. Ronald Reagan was able to cement the tax and economic reforms he had pushed through Congress (which significantly altered US economic and taxation policy) following his landslide win over Walter Mondale in 1984.
Just as the US was grappling with seemingly intractable domestic problems in those years, we now face a host of equally daunting issues that will require landmark legislation to effectively deal with them. I hope I will be able to see Barack Obama follow in the footsteps of these other Presidents because I believe he is the only one of the three remaining candidates with a chance of winning the Presidency in a landslide.
With a voter mandate provided by an overwhelming electoral win and a strengthened Democratic majority in Congress, Obama would be able to cut through a lot of the partisan political posturing we have seen in Congress for the last 20 years. With his emphasis on finding common ground and not trying to settle old political scores, I believe he would be able to get enough support from both Democrats and moderate Republicans to pass the difficult measures that will be required to address America’s ills while the country is simultaneously experiencing tough economic times.
If one closely examines the political campaigns of the three remaining Presidential hopefuls, you can get a pretty good idea of who is more likely to perform best in the role of US President. Being President of the United States of America is more akin to being the CEO of a huge corporation and thus is a role that is quite different than the advise and consent role played by a US Senator. Being an effective US Senator with a paid staff of 20 people doesn’t require the same kind of CEO skills needed to manage a Presidential campaign with a paid staff of over 500 people.
Let’s take a minute to examine the records of all 3 Senators and how well they have managed their respective Presidential campaigns over the past year. John McCain began his campaign in November of 2006 as the Republican frontrunner with the advantage of his past experience running for President in 2000 and narrowly losing in some key primaries against the current President Bush. He had the experience and the national name recognition from the previous campaign as well as a strong fundraising operation. McCain actually had more well connected lobbyists as fundraisers than any other candidate for President and raised over $13 million in the first quarter of last year.
So what happened? By July of last year the McCain presidential campaign was almost broke and they had to let almost 100 staffers go while the other remaining staff took pay cuts or switched to being unpaid advisors. McCain had also slipped from first to fourth place in national polls behind Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and the as yet undeclared candidacy of Fred Thompson. As a result McCain also showed both his campaign manager and chief campaign strategist the door.
But John McCain’s subsequent comeback to win the Republican nomination was less about savvy political campaign management and more due to the mistakes of his competitors and fortunate turns of events that McCain had no control or influence over.
In January of 2007 Hillary Clinton began her Presidential campaign in an even stronger position than John McCain thanks to the transfer of $10 million from her NY Senate campaign. She had been discussing running for President since the fall of 2002 and so it was widely assumed that much of the money raised for her 2006 Senate re-election was actually destined for the 2008 Presidential race.
She was the immediate Democratic frontrunner in all of the national polls due to her name recognition as the wife of a popular former President at a time when the current President was very unpopular. She also led the polls in the first 6 Democratic primary/caucus states and used this data coupled with influential lobbyists to raise an additional $25 million in the first quarter of 2007 to add to the $10 million from her 2006 Senate re-election campaign she started the presidential race with. By October of 2007 Hillary Clinton had a commanding lead in all of the national and early voting state polls over her 2 main rivals, John Edwards and Barack Obama.
By the beginning of December Senator Clinton was presumed by most political observers and establishment Democrats to be unstoppable in her quest to be the Democratic Presidential nominee. As a result many of these Democratic politicians decided to jump on the fast moving Clinton Presidential campaign train and announced they would cast their un-pledged delegate vote for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton had over 200 Super-delegates pledged to support her before the first voters ever went to the polls.
So what happened? I will discuss this in some detail next week.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
President Bush is out of touch with reality
Republican Politics, American Style
Published on March 13th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Today I want to turn my attention to the results of the March 4th primaries. My forecast was wrong in that Clinton barely held off Obama’s advance in Texas. But Clinton continues to weaken as Obama rolls into Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi on Tuesday with no real chance of strengthening before the August convention season. Thus I remain more optimistic about the long range forecast for positive impacts from political climate change in the US than for progress on ecological climate change.
In my columns a few weeks ago I said that the number one US Presidential election issue was not going to be the war in Iraq, universal healthcare or global warming, rather it would be the sad state of the US economy. This does not bode well for Senator John McCain, the likely Republican Presidential nominee, and Republicans running for Congress since he and other Republicans in Congress are closely tied to our lame-duck President and his short-sighted economic and irresponsible fiscal policies.
Our current President seems to be increasingly irrelevant and hopelessly out of touch with the economic malaise that is enveloping the United States. Americans are now getting their first good hard look at the bills which are coming due for our President’s ill fated war in Iraq and failure to reign in government spending over the last seven years. He and his Republican cohorts in Congress still try to tout their 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as having been a boon for the US economy but more and more Americans are starting to realize that the economic prosperity of the last 6 years was actually a false prosperity financed by easy bank credit and irresponsible mortgage lending practices.
President Bush recently returned from a week long tour of Africa where he attempted to draw attention to one of the few good things that his administration has done during his two terms in office, which was to increase humanitarian assistance to many of the impoverished countries in this region. Unfortunately even these positive contributions have become lost in the chatter surrounding the President Bush’s numerous failed economic and foreign policies. Worse still is the impact those policies are now having on future aid to African countries.
As I write this the U.S. Agency for International Development is drafting plans to reduce the number of countries and or the amount of humanitarian aid it provides them because of a 41% increase in the price of wheat, corn and other grains over the past year. This food price inflation can also bee seen in the cost of bread and cereals by consumers in the US, Ireland and the rest of the world. While rising demand for theses grains in the booming economies of China and India is a factor in food price inflation, it is by no means the only or the biggest cause.
Another factor has been the drive to produce more alternative bio-fuels which reduce CO² pollution, an admirable but short sighted attempt to address the one of the causes of global climate change. Bio-fuel production is rising quickly in part as a reaction to the soaring price of oil which at $103 last Monday surpassed its1980 peak price of $38 a barrel before inflation adjustments. Surprised? Don’t be. The wisdom of using bio-fuels as an alternative to oil and gasoline for transportation needs was a subject under serious discussion at the Berlin environmental conference I attended two weeks ago. I will devote a separate column to a more in-depth discussion of this issue at a later date however.
That is because I want to discuss the biggest factor driving food inflation, which is the declining value of the dollar that has caused the prices of all commodities to soar in recent years. Most commodities and contracts for them around the world are priced in dollars because for decades the US dollar was the most stable and reliable currency in the world. But the huge US budget deficits (caused by the Iraq war and other irresponsible fiscal policies) coupled with trade imbalances due to US consumer demand for imported goods (which was fuelled by easy credit and inflated housing prices) has led to a drastic reduction in the value of the dollar compared to all other major currencies in the world.
Oil producers have raised the price of oil because the dollars oil prices are quoted in have lost value while demand for their oil production has held steady or increased. Thus much of the price increase for oil has not been driven by increased demand or a shortage of supply, but rather by a need to reflect the weakening value of the US dollar.
Producers of food grains use oil to transport their production to market and as their transportation costs have increased with the price of oil, so has their need to raise the price of their food stuffs. It usually takes a couple of years for a weaker dollar to translate this weakness into higher prices for oil and other goods that consumers buy and that is what US consumers are now beginning to grapple with. Only now are the true costs for President Bush’s use of the federal government’s credit card becoming apparent.
The good news in all of this is that by the time Election Day rolls around eight months from now, the US economy should be well into an Iraq war and budget deficit induced recession, one that Bush and his Republican cohorts will not be able to evade responsibility for. This may lead American voters to not only elect a Democrat named Barack Obama as their next President, but to do so in a landslide election that also ushers in a bigger Democratic majority in Congress as well as many state legislatures.
Published on March 13th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Today I want to turn my attention to the results of the March 4th primaries. My forecast was wrong in that Clinton barely held off Obama’s advance in Texas. But Clinton continues to weaken as Obama rolls into Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi on Tuesday with no real chance of strengthening before the August convention season. Thus I remain more optimistic about the long range forecast for positive impacts from political climate change in the US than for progress on ecological climate change.
In my columns a few weeks ago I said that the number one US Presidential election issue was not going to be the war in Iraq, universal healthcare or global warming, rather it would be the sad state of the US economy. This does not bode well for Senator John McCain, the likely Republican Presidential nominee, and Republicans running for Congress since he and other Republicans in Congress are closely tied to our lame-duck President and his short-sighted economic and irresponsible fiscal policies.
Our current President seems to be increasingly irrelevant and hopelessly out of touch with the economic malaise that is enveloping the United States. Americans are now getting their first good hard look at the bills which are coming due for our President’s ill fated war in Iraq and failure to reign in government spending over the last seven years. He and his Republican cohorts in Congress still try to tout their 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as having been a boon for the US economy but more and more Americans are starting to realize that the economic prosperity of the last 6 years was actually a false prosperity financed by easy bank credit and irresponsible mortgage lending practices.
President Bush recently returned from a week long tour of Africa where he attempted to draw attention to one of the few good things that his administration has done during his two terms in office, which was to increase humanitarian assistance to many of the impoverished countries in this region. Unfortunately even these positive contributions have become lost in the chatter surrounding the President Bush’s numerous failed economic and foreign policies. Worse still is the impact those policies are now having on future aid to African countries.
As I write this the U.S. Agency for International Development is drafting plans to reduce the number of countries and or the amount of humanitarian aid it provides them because of a 41% increase in the price of wheat, corn and other grains over the past year. This food price inflation can also bee seen in the cost of bread and cereals by consumers in the US, Ireland and the rest of the world. While rising demand for theses grains in the booming economies of China and India is a factor in food price inflation, it is by no means the only or the biggest cause.
Another factor has been the drive to produce more alternative bio-fuels which reduce CO² pollution, an admirable but short sighted attempt to address the one of the causes of global climate change. Bio-fuel production is rising quickly in part as a reaction to the soaring price of oil which at $103 last Monday surpassed its1980 peak price of $38 a barrel before inflation adjustments. Surprised? Don’t be. The wisdom of using bio-fuels as an alternative to oil and gasoline for transportation needs was a subject under serious discussion at the Berlin environmental conference I attended two weeks ago. I will devote a separate column to a more in-depth discussion of this issue at a later date however.
That is because I want to discuss the biggest factor driving food inflation, which is the declining value of the dollar that has caused the prices of all commodities to soar in recent years. Most commodities and contracts for them around the world are priced in dollars because for decades the US dollar was the most stable and reliable currency in the world. But the huge US budget deficits (caused by the Iraq war and other irresponsible fiscal policies) coupled with trade imbalances due to US consumer demand for imported goods (which was fuelled by easy credit and inflated housing prices) has led to a drastic reduction in the value of the dollar compared to all other major currencies in the world.
Oil producers have raised the price of oil because the dollars oil prices are quoted in have lost value while demand for their oil production has held steady or increased. Thus much of the price increase for oil has not been driven by increased demand or a shortage of supply, but rather by a need to reflect the weakening value of the US dollar.
Producers of food grains use oil to transport their production to market and as their transportation costs have increased with the price of oil, so has their need to raise the price of their food stuffs. It usually takes a couple of years for a weaker dollar to translate this weakness into higher prices for oil and other goods that consumers buy and that is what US consumers are now beginning to grapple with. Only now are the true costs for President Bush’s use of the federal government’s credit card becoming apparent.
The good news in all of this is that by the time Election Day rolls around eight months from now, the US economy should be well into an Iraq war and budget deficit induced recession, one that Bush and his Republican cohorts will not be able to evade responsibility for. This may lead American voters to not only elect a Democrat named Barack Obama as their next President, but to do so in a landslide election that also ushers in a bigger Democratic majority in Congress as well as many state legislatures.
A negative effect of Global warming we can relate to
Republican Politics, American Style
Published on March 6th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week I discussed political climate change in the US and by now Metro Eireann readers will also know how accurate I may or may not be at providing political climate change forecasts. As such this provides me with a lead-in to this week’s column which deals with the ecological version of climate change.
Last week, I had the privilege of being invited to present a paper based on my Masters dissertation at the 2008 International Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Climate Change which was being held in Berlin this year. This conference brings together many of the top environmental researchers and scientists from around the globe for a series of plenary sessions as well as specific discussion panels dealing with all facets of global climate change, not just the increasing levels of CO² emissions which are the main cause of global warming.
Some of these other global climate change issues that research scientists are also grappling with include problems like deforestation, desertification, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea levels and costal erosion as well as coral reef destruction and plant and animal species extinctions. But the many negative impacts of global climate change that those of us involved in this research can validate as facts are very difficult for the average man, woman or child in the industrialised world to grasp because they don’t really experience any negative consequences from them. At least, not yet they haven’t.
Here in Ireland we have all had some recent exposure to one of the more benign consequences of global warming and by that I mean our increasingly mild winter seasons. While China has received a great deal of media attention this winter because of the unprecedented winter snows that disrupted its annual Lunar New Year holiday celebrations, the trend worldwide over the past decade has been towards warmer, milder winters, particularly in the countries in the Northern Hemisphere. In fact 9 of the 10 warmest years on record in both the US and the UK (the countries with the oldest meteorological records) have occurred in the past decade.
Mind you as a resident of Ireland for the past year and a half, I am not complaining about the warmer winter weather. In fact I must confess that I rather enjoy it as I suspect many of you do as well. But having said that I also think you should be aware of some of the less benign consequences that attend the issue of global climate change. I will begin by pointing out a couple of the downside risks to the milder winters we have been experiencing in Europe and in North America due to the warmer temperatures.
The warming of the more temperate land areas in the Northern Hemisphere has expanded the growing range and season for some of the plant species we depend on for food like wheat, corn, barley, rice and oats to name a few. But it has also extended the range, life cycle and habitable areas for certain insect species such as the pesky mosquito. With friendlier and larger habitats for mosquitoes there also comes an increase in mosquito borne infectious diseases like the West Nile virus from Africa.
Unknown in North America before 1999, in just four years the US death toll from the West Nile virus went from 7 people in 1999 to 284 in 2002 and it can now be found in every state except for Hawaii and Alaska and in all of the southern Canadian provinces except for British Colombia. This century’s more frequent summer heat waves in North America appear to increase the number and rate of infections because they contribute to mosquito activity and breeding. So why should people in Ireland be concerned about infectious African tropical diseases given the fact that the West Nile virus appears to be confined to North America and Africa?
Because closer to home here in Europe there are African immigrants spreading a different tropical disease called chikungunya, which is normally found in the Indian Ocean region of Africa. But the immigrants spreading this disease, which is a less debilitating relative of the much more dangerous dengue fever, are not humans. These African immigrants are mosquitoes, more specifically tiger mosquitoes, which thanks to global warming have been expanding their range north across Europe. Since its arrival in Italy three years ago, the tiger mosquito has now spread out across Southern Europe into countries like France and Switzerland and it is now thriving in a warming Europe.
Last summer in a town in Northern Italy called Castiglione di Cervia, over 100 villagers suffered for weeks with high fever, excruciating bone pain and physical exhaustion. These are the symptoms of chikungunya, a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics near the Indian Ocean, and by the end of September chikungunya had been diagnosed in nearly 300 Italians in the areas around this village of 2000 people. My concern for Ireland and those of us who live and travel in Europe is that if chikungunya and the tiger mosquito that transmits it can now survive and spread in Europe, there is no reason why much more devastating tropical diseases like malaria and dengue, cannot as well. Global warming doesn’t sound quite so benign now, does it?
In the US we also have seen the range of the fire ant expand from the south western US to the north and east so they can now be found throughout the southern US and into the lower portions of the mid west. Warmer temperatures are also aiding the spread of aggressive and dangerous Africanized bees northward across the US, which is having devastating effects on the domestic bee population which pollinates many of my homeland’s orchards and gardens. In future columns I will discuss other aspects of global climate change that I believe readers might be able to relate to because they are more likely to experience the effects of them within the next decade.
Charles Laffiteau is a lifelong US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is now completing his University of Texas MA dissertation in Dublin following his graduation from DCU( on March 29th) with a MA in Globalisation. He will begin a PhD research programme in Environmental Studies in October.
Published on March 6th in Metro Eireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week I discussed political climate change in the US and by now Metro Eireann readers will also know how accurate I may or may not be at providing political climate change forecasts. As such this provides me with a lead-in to this week’s column which deals with the ecological version of climate change.
Last week, I had the privilege of being invited to present a paper based on my Masters dissertation at the 2008 International Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Climate Change which was being held in Berlin this year. This conference brings together many of the top environmental researchers and scientists from around the globe for a series of plenary sessions as well as specific discussion panels dealing with all facets of global climate change, not just the increasing levels of CO² emissions which are the main cause of global warming.
Some of these other global climate change issues that research scientists are also grappling with include problems like deforestation, desertification, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea levels and costal erosion as well as coral reef destruction and plant and animal species extinctions. But the many negative impacts of global climate change that those of us involved in this research can validate as facts are very difficult for the average man, woman or child in the industrialised world to grasp because they don’t really experience any negative consequences from them. At least, not yet they haven’t.
Here in Ireland we have all had some recent exposure to one of the more benign consequences of global warming and by that I mean our increasingly mild winter seasons. While China has received a great deal of media attention this winter because of the unprecedented winter snows that disrupted its annual Lunar New Year holiday celebrations, the trend worldwide over the past decade has been towards warmer, milder winters, particularly in the countries in the Northern Hemisphere. In fact 9 of the 10 warmest years on record in both the US and the UK (the countries with the oldest meteorological records) have occurred in the past decade.
Mind you as a resident of Ireland for the past year and a half, I am not complaining about the warmer winter weather. In fact I must confess that I rather enjoy it as I suspect many of you do as well. But having said that I also think you should be aware of some of the less benign consequences that attend the issue of global climate change. I will begin by pointing out a couple of the downside risks to the milder winters we have been experiencing in Europe and in North America due to the warmer temperatures.
The warming of the more temperate land areas in the Northern Hemisphere has expanded the growing range and season for some of the plant species we depend on for food like wheat, corn, barley, rice and oats to name a few. But it has also extended the range, life cycle and habitable areas for certain insect species such as the pesky mosquito. With friendlier and larger habitats for mosquitoes there also comes an increase in mosquito borne infectious diseases like the West Nile virus from Africa.
Unknown in North America before 1999, in just four years the US death toll from the West Nile virus went from 7 people in 1999 to 284 in 2002 and it can now be found in every state except for Hawaii and Alaska and in all of the southern Canadian provinces except for British Colombia. This century’s more frequent summer heat waves in North America appear to increase the number and rate of infections because they contribute to mosquito activity and breeding. So why should people in Ireland be concerned about infectious African tropical diseases given the fact that the West Nile virus appears to be confined to North America and Africa?
Because closer to home here in Europe there are African immigrants spreading a different tropical disease called chikungunya, which is normally found in the Indian Ocean region of Africa. But the immigrants spreading this disease, which is a less debilitating relative of the much more dangerous dengue fever, are not humans. These African immigrants are mosquitoes, more specifically tiger mosquitoes, which thanks to global warming have been expanding their range north across Europe. Since its arrival in Italy three years ago, the tiger mosquito has now spread out across Southern Europe into countries like France and Switzerland and it is now thriving in a warming Europe.
Last summer in a town in Northern Italy called Castiglione di Cervia, over 100 villagers suffered for weeks with high fever, excruciating bone pain and physical exhaustion. These are the symptoms of chikungunya, a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics near the Indian Ocean, and by the end of September chikungunya had been diagnosed in nearly 300 Italians in the areas around this village of 2000 people. My concern for Ireland and those of us who live and travel in Europe is that if chikungunya and the tiger mosquito that transmits it can now survive and spread in Europe, there is no reason why much more devastating tropical diseases like malaria and dengue, cannot as well. Global warming doesn’t sound quite so benign now, does it?
In the US we also have seen the range of the fire ant expand from the south western US to the north and east so they can now be found throughout the southern US and into the lower portions of the mid west. Warmer temperatures are also aiding the spread of aggressive and dangerous Africanized bees northward across the US, which is having devastating effects on the domestic bee population which pollinates many of my homeland’s orchards and gardens. In future columns I will discuss other aspects of global climate change that I believe readers might be able to relate to because they are more likely to experience the effects of them within the next decade.
Charles Laffiteau is a lifelong US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is now completing his University of Texas MA dissertation in Dublin following his graduation from DCU( on March 29th) with a MA in Globalisation. He will begin a PhD research programme in Environmental Studies in October.
Monday, March 3, 2008
The March 4th primaries
Here is a sample of the spin the Irish and American ex-pats get over here in Ireland. Following is a quote from an half page political analysis piece speculating about Hillary's chances for a "Third Lazarus-like rebound" that ran in the Weekend Irish Times and was written by their Washington correspondent, Denis Staunton:
" She was counted out before New Hampshire and again ahead of Super Tuesday, when polls predicted huge losses in key states including California, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Clinton won all those states slowing Barack Obama's march towards the nomination."
EXCUSE ME PLEASE! Did anyone else in the US see the polls Denis is refering to. The ones that predicted HUGE LOSSES FOR CLINTON IN CALIFORNIA, MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW JERSEY. Hillary likes to complain about media bias but believe you me, she doesn't have a clue what true media bias is really like.
Anywho I plan to mention Denis's LACK of credible polling analysis when I am on the air from 10-12noon on Ireland's national radio broadcaster RTE Radio 1's Today with Pat Kenny tommorow in a preview of Tuesday's primary for the folks here in Ireland.
Here is the link if you want to listen http://www.rte.ie/radio1/todaywithpatkenny/
The show is on at 10am GMT which is 5 hours ahead of New York and 6 hours ahead of Dallas time so try the podcast if thats too early for ya. I have also done my part by voting absentee for Barack in the Texas Democratic primary. First time ever to vote in a Democratic primary so this joins the list of things I swore I would never do, but have.
BTW In my newspaper column last Thursday and on the radio tommorow, I am predicting a win for Barack in Texas and Vermont and a close finish if he doesn't win in Ohio and Rhode Island. I am also predicting that he widens his delegate lead over Clinton when all the votes are in even if Hillary does win Ohio and Rhode Island.
Now lets get out the vote and make my predictions stand up. Go Barack Obama!
charles
" She was counted out before New Hampshire and again ahead of Super Tuesday, when polls predicted huge losses in key states including California, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Clinton won all those states slowing Barack Obama's march towards the nomination."
EXCUSE ME PLEASE! Did anyone else in the US see the polls Denis is refering to. The ones that predicted HUGE LOSSES FOR CLINTON IN CALIFORNIA, MASSACHUSETTS AND NEW JERSEY. Hillary likes to complain about media bias but believe you me, she doesn't have a clue what true media bias is really like.
Anywho I plan to mention Denis's LACK of credible polling analysis when I am on the air from 10-12noon on Ireland's national radio broadcaster RTE Radio 1's Today with Pat Kenny tommorow in a preview of Tuesday's primary for the folks here in Ireland.
Here is the link if you want to listen http://www.rte.ie/radio1/todaywithpatkenny/
The show is on at 10am GMT which is 5 hours ahead of New York and 6 hours ahead of Dallas time so try the podcast if thats too early for ya. I have also done my part by voting absentee for Barack in the Texas Democratic primary. First time ever to vote in a Democratic primary so this joins the list of things I swore I would never do, but have.
BTW In my newspaper column last Thursday and on the radio tommorow, I am predicting a win for Barack in Texas and Vermont and a close finish if he doesn't win in Ohio and Rhode Island. I am also predicting that he widens his delegate lead over Clinton when all the votes are in even if Hillary does win Ohio and Rhode Island.
Now lets get out the vote and make my predictions stand up. Go Barack Obama!
charles
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