Republican “debate” (?) in the Valley of the Shadow of Death

It has been widely reported that the Republican Presidential Primary frontrunners have slapped the African-American community in the face, on both cheeks, by failing to attend a debate in a Democratic city (renowned for its high violent crime rates), in a Democratic state, at a traditionally, and majority, black university. I, and I suspect many others, have struggled with the concept of this 'debate' for the last several weeks. As Akilah Smith said, "This isn't [the Republicans] environment. These aren't the people who voted for them. I guess they think this is a waste of their time," she said. "I would think it was a waste of my time." Smart woman. And, she was not alone.

Nine out of ten registered voters in Baltimore are Democrats. This was a Republican debate. The Democratic Party debates have been held in Democratic strongholds. Why hold this here, and why would anyone expect the candidates to show up here? Perhaps UMES would have drawn a larger audience and a larger pool of candidates while still maintaining a focus on issues of particular interest to the various population segments on which this gathering was to focus. Furthermore, the goal of highlighting a traditionally black university within a reasonable drive from Washington would have been met.

The lack of audience looks less like a disappointment than like a plan. Of the 2000 seats in the auditorium, only 800, slightly more than one-third, were available to the public and one-third went begging. I wonder which third was empty – the reserved or the available. This could have been caused as much by the venue itself as by the location in what is perceived as a very, very dangerous city where crime was the over-riding concern in the recent city election.

My wife and I both white, both over 50, she from Chicago and I from Baltimore, can name one-half dozen predominately-black colleges off the tops of our heads. Neither of us can name a predominately-white college. Each of us has attended two or more colleges, our children have attended three - all liberal arts - and I took a non-credit course at Morgan in 1980. The 2008 Democratic Presidential debates have been scheduled at traditionally black colleges where the candidates were roundly supported. The history of Republican debates at Morgan has been less than stellar. We hope last night helped to temper that history. Overall, was this really the best place, or even a reasonable place, to reach Republican Primary voters?

Lastly, Mr. Eugene Morris, a Democrat coming here from Chicago for the Republican Presidential debate (?), nailed down the real reason the Republicans should have rejected this debate completely, "Already, there is a big PR push to make sure the African-American community is very aware of what happened here," he said. If the community wants to complain about the bad thing that happened, they might want to focus on host Tavis Smiley repeatedly minimizing the venue by refusing to refer to it by its name, Morgan State University.

This was clearly a lose/lose proposition for the candidates. Those who did not show up because it was a bad idea to be there will be maligned, criticized and castigated by Republicans and Democrats, because each has an ox to gore by doing so. This started on the stage during the introductory remarks and continued into the spin-room afterwards where the host and questioners talked more about what did not happen that what did. Everyone has his or her agenda. Those who did show up will be criticized for the lack of content and depth of their positions and their presentations. The only winners here were the opponents of the Republican Party.

Traditionally low ratings for PBS primary debates; an unfriendly audience dominated by people who will not or cannot vote for them; and a format that gave unfriendly questioners more time to ask questions than the candidates had to answer them (and what was that bit with Juan Williams calling out people placed in the audience to illustrate his statements couched as questions - the NPR State of the Union Address?); this all added up to good reasons for candidates to make other plans for the evening. It does not take a political scientist to figure out that getting this event out of the PBS conference room last January set-up the Democratic Party to bludgeon the Republicans during the long campaign. There is more than one color of blood contemplated by the press adage, "if it bleeds, it leads". Occasionally, the messenger is wielding the weapon.

You Better Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

It was the Gubernatorial Election of 2006. The top two candidates locked in a neck and neck race. The polls were all too close for either side to explain away. The Governor was flush with cash and spending freely. The Mayor was strapped for cash and taking out loans, one for a cool $500,000, to ensure competitiveness. Losing because you ran out of money at the end is a terrible way to lose. It worked! The Mayor became the Governor, giving him a platform from which to raise the money to pay back his financiers.

However, there were some lingering problems. As reported in the September 25, 2007, Examiner, O'Malley, Brown return funds nearly a year later, some of the money being used at the end of the campaign last November was somewhat tainted. The Examiner seems to tell us without drawing conclusions for us.

"We regret that there confusion regarding the ability of corporations to make campaign contributions," reads the letter, dated August 13 [2007] from O'Malley/Brown campaign treasurer Martin Cadogan to James Robinson (no relation to this blogger), described as the chief of Morgan Creek Productions. One is driven to wonder, did Robinson independently come up with the idea to write multiple checks to the election committees of 1) Martin O'Malley, 2) Anthony Brown, and 3) O'Malley & Brown – leadership that works, confused after researching Maryland Campaign Law. On the other hand, is it possible that he received counsel, or guidance from someone else? It would be hard to believe that Mr. Cadogan, an experienced attorney could have contributed to the confusion he cites in his letter. Perhaps subsequent stories will tell us the origins of the confusion.

There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding these contributions. When Common Cause raised the questions last November to the campaigns, the State Board of Elections and the State Prosecutor, the O'Malley campaign responded that it was all a computer glitch erroneously linking the contributions from a variety of sources to Robinson, implying that there were no improper contributions. On a beautiful fall day in September, the spokesperson for the Governor does not retreat, but modifies his response in light of the facts. He now believes that the computer glitched, erroneously linking the contributions, AND that the violations took place. "[O'Malley spokesman Rick] Abbruzzese said, '… once we realized these contributions were made in violation of campaign finance law, we moved quickly to correct it.'" Ten months had passed since Common cause raised the issue. Multiple campaign finance reports had been prepared and filed during that period. Moreover, only the O'Malley campaign entities report, officially, returning any portion of the money. Campaign spokespeople make a living selecting the right word for every official declaration. Her, we are left to determine how Mr. Abbruzzese squares his definition of the word "quickly" with that understood by everyone else.

The State Board of Elections seems a little confused, too, about their responsibilities, in spite of access to excellent legal counsel. They are obligated to report perceived violations of election law to the State Prosecutor. Common Cause brought these alleged suspected violations to their attention in November 2006. They did not refer this to the Special Prosecutor because Common Cause said they would. In spite of some wags assertions, Common Cause does not represent, and is not the agent for any state agency.

Throughout this story, reporter Jaime Malarkey has presented quotes from administration officials that make the nose turn up. It is the statements and not the paper that reeks of weeks (or months) old fish.

“The War”: Anything left to learn?

Baltimore Sun columnist and blogger Dan Rodericks offers that the story being told by Ken Burns on Public Television is a story too often told and previously told better. Not everyone agrees on what the story is and what it might tell us.

Some saw the same production that Rodericks' saw. Tried and true - or is it old hat and mundane - video techniques, music reminiscent of the most effective lullabies', and a 150 minutes segment that needs a fifteen minute break to avoid putting people soundly to sleep. However, some people saw something else in the project. Some saw a story too often told, while others, reminded of the recent state of public education, recognize the need to share facts about our history so that we might heed Santayana, and accept the reminder of what we might not remember.

My first impression was that I was not really watching public television. The messages I was seeing and hearing were inconsistent with the left of center political position generally found here. Additionally, although I, too, have heard the story before, there were nuances and details that often seemed to slip by in the telling by Walter Cronkite and other chroniclers of the last half of the twentieth century. Let me explain myself by giving a few examples and the messages I was receiving. That these messages were coming at this time in our national struggles at home and abroad was more perplexing.

In fairness, I was running an errand to the grocery store when the show started, and missed the first one-half hour. When I joined the show there were images and commentaries on the events occurring in Spain and Asia in 1939. There were bits of film from the theaters and comments from contemporaries about their shock, concern and horror at what men were doing to men. We then started to go down the slopes that ended with virtually everyone at war, even those in countries that were neutral.

What was different was some of the slant, or spin, or perspective. We are familiar with the photos of bodies Burns used in The Civil War, and with the melancholy music. We are not as familiar with the photos of dead babies and beheaded corpses. We are familiar with the story of spoken atrocities, but not with supporting images on public television. The reverence usually reserved for conditions under President for Life Roosevelt (I wonder if the press referred to him as Roosevelt II?) was missing. The state of preparedness of the armed forces was atrocious. Why, during the early years of alphabet soup agencies, didn't our leadership prepare for the national defense in a period of extraordinary weakness, the great depression, and world instability, and build some arms and stock materiel to ensure our future use of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Lake New Germany, to name but two important projects that used American workers and resources during that period.

It was hard to watch the images and listen to the people who lived in America in the middle years of the century without drawing some comparisons to America today. From the attack on American innocents to the reactions of the general populace, to the responses to the preparedness for and progress of the military operations, we are enlightened by how the Greatest Generation responded to these stimuli. We listened to a sailor express his outrage at the Japanese attack on the innocent people at Pearl Harbor. It is hard to feel his outraged at the attack on a military installation that killed 2900 American members of the armed forces. The sailors at Pearl Harbor had the tools with which to defend themselves. The outrage about the attack should go more to the failure of the Executive Branch to inform military commanders of the specific threats delivered earlier by the Japanese Ambassador. The sailors could have used that information stand ready for their own defense. The numbers and outrage cannot help but invoke the image of 9/11 where the attack killed 2900 people, too. These were really innocents when we speak of acts of war. They had no tools for their defense. They had no expectation that an enemy might attack them in their office building. The outrages of the populations of the two attacks were similar. There was shock and pain followed by a broad consensus of determination to right this wrong as a nation.

(This might not go here, but if only the Republicans had not said they were going to use the terror attacks as a tool in the next Congressional or Presidential elections, we not have had such an increase in impolitic, impolite and vile public discourse. It has extended to the 2008 election where the democrats are still running against George Bush and he is not running. Back to the other War . . .)

Burns reminded us that some of the decisions coming out of Washington contradicted the advice of the military commanders on the ground. Without stretching, we can recall a Southeast Asian police action where the troops repeatedly achieved objectives and made advances only to be recalled by the salons in Washington. In the 1960s, the result was a quagmire. In this century, the political opposition uses that term to evoke a similar, visceral public reaction. In earlier wars, the result of diddling by politicians resulted in deaths no less than it does now. Nevertheless, The War provides another distinction between earlier wars and the present. That distinction is in the numbers of deaths. During WWII, 1500 deaths each day were common. In Viet Nam, the daily average was closer to 16. Now the average is closer to four. Perhaps the military leaders have learned more than the politicians have over the years. At least that is what the evidence suggests.

People were also struck by the descriptions of the early war efforts of the United States. We had been shipping arms and materiel to Great Britain and Russia, but had not been increasing the equipment and preparedness of our forces. There were images of WWI pie plate helmets and leggings. We saw the horse of the cavalry and heard about the numbers useless for mounting war on an ocean of islands or in Europe. How many administrations had dropped that ball? Who could not immediately think of the 21^st century American soldiers fighting without body armor or armored vehicles. Was this one of those things forgotten, things that could not inform us for that reason?

One more example that invokes a comparison is that of Bataan. The government abandoned 78,000 American and Filipino troops because the United States was not prepared for the action. The radio carried messages of hope for the soldiers and threat to the enemy. Both messages were hollow. The few who survived described the terrible actions of their opponents, beheadings and genital mutilation. We heard of the promises of captors to employ humane treatment, promises made by people who scorned surrender and visited their scorn on their prisoners. Where is the comparison with modern times? Why, in what we remember. Our military has learned not to overextend its lines even if the President says to do it. It has remembered what Sun Tzu told us centuries before about force deployments. After practices that made people seem expendable from the American Civil War, The Spanish American War, the Great War and The War, our military started to see soldiers as people, people worth protecting and worth retrieving.

My maternal grandfather left Baltimore and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force early in WWI. He flew in France. Repatriated when America joined the War, based on the three planes shot out from under him, he became an aircraft mechanic in the Army Air Corps. While in the Army, he helped train a pilot, H. Norris Mangan of Salem New Jersey. Norris and his brother Harry had been part of the New Jersey National Guard activated to fight in that war. My grandfather told me stories of the war and Norris and Harry wrote letters almost every day to their Mother. I listened to the stories and read the letters. I recently found some letters written in December of 1918 by a Baltimore Marine Drill Sergeant at Parris Island. I could not help but recall these things as I watched, snoozing to the lullabies of The War. As in the show, the complaints of these men were not of the poor political leadership, but were about the heat in Biloxi and the behaviors of those around them. The DI thought it unfair that the draftees were going to go home before the enlistees. The future pilot and his brother commiserated about the qualities of their commander, a good person back in Salem, but not the best of leaders in the field.

My parents both served in the Army during The War. Mom, a WAC from Baltimore and Dad, an Okie intelligence operative both served. They met when he made the occasional disciplinary visit to the Fort Monmouth office of the Adjutant General to see mom's boss and clear up his case. There sits on my desk a box of tiny photos from the tiny camera he used in the Pacific Theater. The emaciated young men were not complaining about the food, but of the changes to their characters from their participation in The War. My parents also told stories of the hardships of war but never once mentioned the incompetency of the leadership. They, like the WWI veterans understood that not everything would work. The War was hard on them. People around them were dying, even at Fort Monmouth. They trusted that the leaders would do their best bring success. The glass framed, sepia toned photograph of them smiling at the camera is in another box nearby.

Watching the reactions of the people to the attacks on America was amazing. After Pearl, people stood ten deep in the streets to send off soldiers, not protest their patriotism. In every town, a line around the block of young men enlisting to protect their country, and the attack was three thousand miles away from their homes! Fast forward to now. People still silently pass the site of the attack on our soil. The enlistment lines have diminished. But they were there. Young people might want to serve but there are so many voices in opposition it is hard to step up. I am afraid our political leaders have forgotten. Protestors get the media to promote their marches and inflate expectations that always fall short under a post event detail blackout. I wonder what they think they will really accomplish beyond rending the fabric of their community. I fear they do not remember the result of the last time this was done this way.

My mother described her duty in the towers on the New Jersey shore, watching for submarines intent on attacking our homeland. My sisters and I thought this activity to be preposterous. In The War, I learned that the Gulf Coast and waters off Florida experienced attacks on many ships attempting to get supplies to our troops and those of our allies. As often as I have heard the story that detail that hit my mind as fresh. Perhaps I can blame my public school education. Probably not. That was but one of the little details that I learned from Mr. Burns production there were others for another time.

I think that one of the greatest harms of war is the way it drains the gene pool. Darwinism does not always seem to triumph in war. The list of good people dead is too long. The list of people who stood up to right wrongs and were killed is too long. Those who made it back procreated the next generation. Moreover, after the next war we were left with those who survived. Many good people survived, but the evidence suggests that many spineless people have passed there traits on to others. When I was in school I wrote about the harms visited upon those who fought and returned to society lesser people than when they left. Now I am worrying more about the children of the previous age's cowards. What will their progeny contribute to society?

I admit that I was falling every so softly into the land of nod as I 'watched" the last thirty minutes of The War. My wife rested quietly beside me. The story was very familiar, as was the music, as were the production techniques. But I learned something new and remembered some things that had faded for me. I was interested that "political correctness" was not overpowering. The series will continue tonight. I have been assailed by advertisers to join that singer of standards Wayne What'shisname, you remember him, he has black hair, as he Dances with the Stars. Others insist that I join Chuck, the computer geek with no drive. I will leave those shows to Dan and his friends and return to the story of what made the Greatest Generation so great.