Democrats take House delegation

Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy of Columbus was declared the winner of a razor-thin Columbus-area congressional seat. More than a month after Election Day, provisional ballots pushed Kilroy over the finish line.

Democrats now hold 10 of the 18 congressional seats that represent Ohio. Pretty incredible, considering that Republicans drew the districts earlier this decade and, going into the 2006 cycle, they controlled 12 of 18 seats.

Kilroy’s fate now appears tied to Democratic President-elect Barack Obama. A bad two years for Obama will put Kilroy and other new Democratic congressional representatives in tough shape. A new president’s party typically takes losses in midterm congressional elections, although Republicans bucked that trend in 2002.

Saving Detroit from its past

My Dec. 4 print edition column:

In their first mission to Washington, the CEOs of the Big Three automakers flew in their dying companies’ private jets. Finding failure the first time, they chose to drive hybrids to the Beltway for their most recent round of begging this week.

Walk or crawl the plank, you’ll swim with the sharks either way.

For that, without federal aid, appears to be the fate of Detroit’s paper titans, leaders of a crumbling industry centered in a crumbling city.

As easy as it is to ridicule CEOs Rick Wagoner of General Motors, Alan Mulally of Ford and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler for their “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” act — and it is — the problems of the Big Three aren’t entirely their present leaders’ making.

They aren’t responsible for the sins of their forebears, who chose to assume lifetime employee health care and pension commitments instead of asking the government to provide them.

Roger Lowenstein, writing in The New York Times in July, recounted the story of how Walter Reuther, the powerful United Auto Workers leader, asked General Motors, Ford and Chrysler in the 1950s to join his union in asking Washington to provide universal health care and pensions. The Big Three balked, opting instead to simply provide those benefits themselves. At the time, the automakers were so dominant — they sold nearly every car driven in the United States — that they could afford the benefits. Besides, pension and health care benefits were easy for the Big Three’s leaders to award. The burden of actually paying those benefits would fall largely to future generations. Enter Wagoner, Mulally and Nardelli.

The automakers can no longer afford what Lowenstein termed the “corporate welfare state.”

The Big Three, in recent contracts with the UAW, created a private trust that would pay for retiree health benefits. That should provide relief in the long term, but the short term is grim.

Socialism wouldn’t work for the Big Three in the 1950s. But it’d be just fine now, thank you. Detroit wants as much as $34 billion from Washington.

Congress faces a dilemma — defined as two unpleasant alternatives — in which it either can be principled or pragmatic. Not both.

The principled thing to do would be to send the CEOs home empty-handed. Without the money, it’s not even clear that GM, Chrysler and Ford would go belly up: Ford, which operates Lorain County’s only automobile plant, appears to be the healthiest of the three. And, even in the event of a collapse, Americans will be able to buy their cars from other automakers. Capitalist principles preclude picking winners and losers.

OK, fine. But the pragmatic argument is a better one: A Big Three collapse could cost at least hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs as falling dominoes knocked out both big auto plants and suppliers. For Washington to rediscover its principles just in time to forbid Detroit less than 5 percent ($34 billion) of what it just gave Wall Street ($700 billion) would show that the body’s legendary dollar foolishness applies to pennies, too. A complete shutdown of the Big Three would cost the government $60 billion in lost taxes and additional costs in the first year, according to the Center for Automotive Research. Even if there isn’t a complete shutdown, it appears that Washington can pay something now or something more later.

U.S. Sens. George Voinovich, R-Cleveland, and Sherrod Brown, D-Avon, want to allow the automakers to tap into a previously approved $25 billion in loans to pay for operating costs. The money was originally earmarked to go toward greener vehicle production.

A pragmatic Congress would do its due diligence scrutinizing the future plans of the Big Three. And then it would try to save them.

Column: The Fairness Doctrine sham

Amongst the sounds of the clanking of dishes and the pouring of spirits, there’s likely to be conversation at your Thanksgiving dinner table later today.

I know — bummer. Especially if someone at that table gets his news from talk radio. In that case, expect to hear some silly statements.

One of those might be that congressional Democrats, unleashed by the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, are poised to silence talk radio by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine.

The doctrine would stipulate, among other things, that radio stations give equal time to controversial political views. Theoretically, three hours of blowhard radio from the right would have to be balanced by three hours of blowhard radio from the left. The repeal of the doctrine in 1987 led to the widespread proliferation of conservative talk radio. Re-imposing the doctrine, then, could kill talk radio.

Space cadet conservatives are convinced that Democrats will restore the doctrine. Former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, retired from public office by sensible Ohioans in 2006, warned his fellow conservatives in July of the threat posed by the doctrine and other liberal objectives. In a column headlined “The Gathering Threat to Freedom” — he sure has a knack for understatement, doesn’t he? — Blackwell wrote, “This year the left has launched a full assault on the First Amendment.”

If the doctrine came back, “Free speech would lose. Americans would lose.”

On that point, Blackwell and I agree: The Fairness Doctrine would be bad policy and an unjustifiable attack on free speech.

Granted, listening to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other talking slabs of meat spout their opinions goes beyond tedious. But I wouldn’t muzzle them. If Hannity and Limbaugh want to express themselves, great. If people want to listen, great. On this Thanksgiving, be grateful that you don’t have to listen to talk radio if you don’t want to.

So, yes, the Fairness Doctrine does pose a threat to free speech. But not a realistic one.

Blackwell and many others on the right incite rage — and hook readers and listeners — by drumming up phony controversies. Blackwell’s become so good at this that he’s been mentioned by credible news sources as a possible candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee. The RNC will pick its new chairman in January; if the Republicans select Blackwell, Democrats will get their biggest present after Christmas.

As for the doctrine, there’s scant evidence that Democrats have any interest in resuscitating it. Marin Cogan of The New Republic, a center-left magazine, recently wrote: “To figure out who was causing such agitation, I went searching for the proponents of the Fairness Doctrine. I looked at Obama’s position — and it turns out that he doesn’t want the policy reinstated. Then I called the array of Democratic congressmen who had been tagged by conservatives as doctrine proponents. But they all denied any intention to push for its reinstatement.”

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican strategist writing at www.TheNextRight.com, had a message for those worried about the doctrine: “Not happening.”

There’s no reason for the left to pick this fight. Not only is the Fairness Doctrine a naked attack on free speech, it also would rile up the right to such an extent that it would distract Democrats from far more important policy items, such as universal health insurance and ending the Iraq war. As Ruffini says of the upcoming Democrat-dominated federal government, “Be afraid, be very afraid, but not because the Fairness Doctrine is coming back.”

I’m so sure he’s right that, if the doctrine is re-instated, there’ll be another sound around next year’s Thanksgiving dinner table: me cutting out this column and eating it.