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.

Hat in hand

Gov. Ted Strickland is in Philadelphia today along with nearly all of the nation’s other governors. They are begging the president-elect for federal money.

It appears that it’s a given that the state is going to have to mandate a 10 percent across-the-board spending cut, which would reduce the state’s projected two-year deficit from about $7.3 billion to $4.7 billion. Strickland must be hoping that the seemingly bottomless federal coffers can make up the rest; help with Medicaid and unemployment benefits seems to be the state’s most pressing need.

Then again, the deficit is only projected, so it isn’t written in stone. I mean, the state thought it would generate $73 million from a keno gambling expansion to go toward plugging the deficit. That hasn’t worked out. Projections are funny things.

Ruh-roh

The state of Ohio faces an eye-popping $7.3 billion deficit in the next two-year budget, 2010-2011.

I hate to be a broken record on this, but tell me how the state is going to find more money for public education as it faces this nightmare?

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.

A small request

Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s Democratic secretary of state, released the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections from administrative oversight. The move comes more than a year and a half after Brunner sacked the entire four-person board because of the county’s incompetent handling of elections.

Elections went well, by most accounts, in Cuyahoga County and Ohio as a whole this year.

Brunner, although something of a Luddite when it comes to election technology, had herself a fine cycle.

Now she needs to fix her awful Web site, which has pathetically incomplete historic election data. Good luck trying to find Statehouse race results from any election prior to 1996.

Yes, I’m bitter. But surely I’m not the only one who’d like to use the Web for research, right?

Geeky rant concluded.

Oh my

If we didn’t already know that the Republican Party was in bad shape, this confirms it: Former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is a candidate to become RNC chairman?

Legislators hacking, wheezing

In 2006, a commanding majority of Ohioans voted to ban smoking in nearly all indoor, public places. The law had hardly any exceptions; for instance, businesses employing only family members still could allow smoking, but in my view such businesses don’t really constitute public places anyway because smoking would be banned if the public was allowed into the business. The law was very clear about this, although I remember that private clubs, such as VFW halls and Elk’s Clubs, seemed to think they were exempted from the original law and that voters had been hoodwinked.

Now Ohio’s Legislature appears poised to gut the smoking ban, bending over backwards to carve out exceptions for businesses that yell the loudest.

If private clubs, bowling alleys or anyone else thinks that the public would support them at the ballot, then they should take a weaker ban to them in November. The Legislature, meanwhile, was given a clear mandate — 58.5 percent — by the voters. Legislators needn’t go against their wishes to reward narrow constituencies.

Column: How to enrage Ohio conservatives

My Nov. 20 print edition column:

“The phone at our headquarters,” Lorain County Republican Party Chairwoman Helen Hurst said, “has been ringing off the hook.”

The callers weren’t looking for souvenir McCain/Palin yard signs or begging to donate money. Rather, they were expressing their outrage at Kevin DeWine, the Ohio Republican Party’s deputy chairman.

DeWine angered social conservatives, who make up much of the state and national GOP’s core base of support, by suggesting two days after the election that the Republican Party was having an “identity crisis.” In listing the party’s problems, he noted the GOP’s “distracting fixation on social issues.”

“We have to exchange a fiscal message and economic message in for a social message that has dominated the messaging of this party for the last decade,” DeWine said.

DeWine’s insertion of his foot into his mouth insulted church-going conservative Republicans. They are Republicans not because of their support for free markets and limited government. They are Republicans because they think abortion is murder and gay people shouldn’t have the right to marry.

These activists dominate the party’s base, and they won’t surrender or downplay their beliefs. On social issues, Hurst said, “We abandon nothing.”

DeWine, a term-limited state representative from the Dayton area, must mend fences with the right because he wants to succeed the outgoing Bob Bennett as state party chairman. So, in a letter written to Republican leaders across the state, he defended his anti-gay and anti-abortion bona fides:

“I spent eight years in the General Assembly advancing pro-family legislation such as the Defense of Marriage Act and at least six major pro-life reform bills. The executive director of Ohio Right to Life recently credited my ‘perfect voting record on abortion issues.’ Since I became deputy chairman of this party, I’ve met with dozens of pro-family leaders to discuss candidate recruitment, outreach and volunteer support.”

DeWine, so long as social conservatives don’t undermine him at the last moment, will in January take over a party in turmoil. He urges the party to craft a message that appeals to a broader range of people.

After the election, prominent Ohio Republicans, such as former U.S. Reps. Rob Portman of Cincinnati and John Kasich of greater Columbus, have suggested that what the party needs, among other things, is better communication.

Kasich, writing after the election at www.TheNextRight.com, said, “We must communicate clearly what we stand for, and make the case for why our ideas are better.”

Portman, writing for the Dallas Morning News, said the party must craft solutions to problems such as pollution and health care costs. The party also “must put more effort and resources into communicating our policies.”

Criticism of messaging is a common one on the right, mostly because Republicans swear that the media are the reason for their failures. DeWine, in his kiss-and-make-up letter to Republican leaders, cited “media bias” as a reason why his party got crushed two weeks ago.

Now there’s a “message” his whole party can get behind: Shoot the messenger.

Bennett, a few days ago, laughably suggested that DeWine’s comments “were presented in news reports without context.” The Columbus Dispatch dismantled Bennett’s claim by posting audio of the interview online. When politicians say something was taken out of context, what they’re really saying is that they wish the stupid thing they said hadn’t been reported.

But as Republicans figure out how they should talk, the question as to what they should talk about remains open.

It’s easy to argue that the Republicans need to tone down their social stances. Gay marriage, thanks to young voters, probably will be widespread nationally in the next few generations. Roe v. Wade, thanks to Democratic President-elect Barack Obama and the liberal justices he will appoint, won’t be overturned any time soon. Social issues aren’t going to save Republicans.

But don’t tell that to the religious conservatives who man phone banks and knock on doors in order to get Republicans elected.

DeWine did. And look what’s happening to him.

Bipartisan gay-bashing

Gay Americans rallied throughout the country on Saturday to protest the passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Ohioans, in 2004, approved a similar ban.

That year, Democrat Jennifer Garrison of Marietta challenged state Rep Nancy Hollister, R-Marietta. Hollister was the lone Republican in the Ohio House to vote against the “defense of marriage act.”

So Garrison attacked her. As the Gay People’s Chronicle (scroll down about halfway) noted at the time:

Hollister was the only House Republican who voted against the bill. She was also the only Republican to oppose it in 2001 when it passed the House on Halloween. That year, the bill died in the Senate.

Hollister’s Democratic opponent Jennifer Garrison, a Marietta attorney, sent campaign literature to homes in the 93rd district saying, “If you believe marriage is between one man and one woman, there’s something you should know about Nancy Hollister.”

The district includes Washington, Monroe, Noble, and Guernsey counties and part of Muskingum County in southeast Ohio.

The cards, which arrived October 7, have a flip side that reads, “DOMA was enacted precisely to protect Ohioans from having to accept ‘marriages’ or ‘unions’ entered into in other states. Despite the value of DOMA, Nancy Hollister voted against it.”

Democrat Garrison then implies that because of her vote against DOMA, Hollister doesn’t represent Southeast Ohio.

“Jennifer Garrison believes marriage is between one man and one woman and will fight to protect our values,” according to the card.

Garrison won. And when the Democrats take control of the House in January, she’ll join the caucus leadership as majority floor leader.

That many Republicans like to bash gays is a given. But, in Ohio, such behavior apparently is rewarded by both parties.

Are you experienced?

So Beachwood Democrat Armond Budish will be the new speaker of the Ohio House, and Medina Republican Bill Batchelder will lead the minority Republicans.

Budish was just elected to his second two-year term; Batchelder has been a state representative for more than 30 years, though not continuously; he served as an appeals judge earlier this decade. He’s a rarity in Ohio — an experienced legislator. That’s thanks to Ohio’s term limits.

This is merely to point out that Batchelder is in a good position to teach Budish and the Democrats in his slim majority caucus a thing or two come January.