But will they thank the president? -- Nov. 16, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A great American tradition is again about to take place -- and I don’t mean overeating, arguing over politics, watching football and shopping.

Before those time-honored Thanksgiving rituals, the president of the United States will issue a couple of pardons everybody can agree on.

If all goes according to plan, two photogenic and well-behaved turkeys from Minnesota will be driven to the nation’s capital. They will spend the night in a luxury hotel before being delivered Tuesday to the White House, where President Donald Trump will exercise his power to pardon. 

The two lucky birds then will make the trip to Virginia Tech, where they will join Tater and Tot, the turkeys President Barack Obama pardoned last year, to live out their lives in a special enclosure called “Gobbler’s Rest.”

Unlike the other 238 million turkeys raised in the United States annually, these turkeys will never grace anyone’s dining room table.

So, naturally, the question on Americans’ minds is: Will the turkeys thank Trump?

This president loves to be thanked. You could say he demands it. He asked in a tweet Wednesday whether the three UCLA basketball players would say “thank you President Trump” for securing their freedom from a Chinese jail.

The young men stupidly shoplifted in three stores in China while on a team trip and got caught. “They were headed for 10 years in jail!” Trump tweeted.

As presidents often do, he intervened and the three were released. They did thank the president and the U.S. government. Trump then tweeted “You’re welcome” and urged them to “give a big Thank you to President Xi Jinping, who made your release possible and HAVE A GREAT LIFE!”

He also advised: “Be careful, there are many pitfalls on the long and winding road of life!”

Speaking of pitfalls, it’s not true that Trump revoked Obama’s turkey pardons and ordered the birds executed by firing squad. A satirical website ran a “news” story to that effect earlier this year and gullible readers have been spreading the fake news ever since.

But it’s not fake news that the feathered fortunates traditionally spend the night before their White House appearance at the historic Willard InterContinental Hotel, where the luxurious rooms cost upwards of $350.

Rolls of brown paper, pine shavings and plastic tape are involved in preparing for the guests, Time magazine reported. No word yet on whether the new hotel of choice will be Trump International on Pennsylvania Avenue.

When it comes to giving thanks, though, the pardoned turkeys should be especially grateful to Virginia Tech.

Yes, Trump will pardon, but it would be news if he didn’t. What happens next to the celebrity turkeys hasn’t been pretty.

The National Turkey Federation started giving presidents a turkey for their Thanksgiving feast with Harry S Truman. John F. Kennedy decided to send the turkey back to the farm in 1963, saying, “We’ll just let this one grow.”

George H.W. Bush was the first president to use the word pardon. He announced on Nov. 14 1989, the turkey had “been granted a presidential pardon as of right now.”

Over the years, the freed turkeys were dispatched to Disneyland, petting farms and Mount Vernon. Sad to say, wherever they went, they often died months, or even days, later.

“The bird is bred for the table, not for longevity,” Dean Norton, the director at Mount Vernon in charge of livestock, told CNN in 2013.

Fed a high-protein diet, the turkeys grow large but their organs can’t keep up. They can’t fly or roost in trees like wild turkeys and don’t live as long, he said.

That’s why the turkey federation sends two turkeys every year – in case one falls ill before the big White House event.

The federation contacted Tech last year and said it wanted to start a tradition of sending pardoned turkeys to universities with strong poultry science departments, the Roanoke Times reported.

Tech’s Poultry Science Club built the enclosure in a show barn in Blacksburg and welcomed Tater and Tot about a year ago. Faculty credit the students’ good care with keeping the turkeys alive and thriving.

Thank you, Virginia Tech. And Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Ka-ching! National parks get only Trump change -- for now -- April 6, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

You’d have thought the National Park Service won the lottery.

The photos of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke holding an oversized check with Tyrone Brandyburg, superintendent of Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, looked like shots of a lucky lottery winner with a gazillion-dollar bonanza.   

But this check to the National Park Service was chump change – or Trump change -- $78,333.32.

That’s how much salary taxpayers have paid Trump since noon Jan. 20. To compare: Taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $10 million on Trump’s visits to Mar-a-Lago.

Candidate Trump vowed he wouldn’t accept a salary as president, but the Constitution requires a president to be paid. The framers thought compensation would keep the president independent and free of corruption.

Until now, only Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy gave their presidential salaries to charity.

Trump initially planned to make a splash by giving away his entire $400,000 salary at year’s end. But the White House changed course and staged the photo op Monday in the press briefing room.

Trump gave the first installment of his salary to the park service, nearly everybody’s favorite federal agency. The money will go towards repairing infrastructure, Zinke said. 

But the sum will hardly make a dent in the $229 million backlog in deferred maintenance on the 25 national battlefields. Overall, the park service has a backlog of $12 billion in deferred maintenance on more than 400 parks and historic sites around the country.

Trump’s budget proposes a cut of $1.5 billion, or 12 percent, from the Interior Department’s budget. It doesn’t specify how much will be cut from the park service.

So, Trump came across not as a generous benefactor to the park service but as a latter-day John D. Rockefeller, handing it a few shiny dimes.

Visits to national parks have been growing over the past decade to a record high of 330 million visits last year during the service’s centennial celebration.

Most park facilities were built in the early and mid-20^th century and need updating or replacing. These include rest areas and visitor centers, wastewater treatment and electricity plants, staff quarters and campgrounds.

Congress has long preferred to create new parks rather than take care of existing ones, but addressing deferred maintenance may be a rare area of bipartisan cooperation in the fractured Congress.

Last year, Congress authorized an additional $90 million for non-transportation maintenance and an additional $28 million for roads and bridges in the parks, with funds rising every year for five years.  

That’s not nearly enough to tackle the enormous backlog, park service officials and fans say.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, introduced on March 28 the National Park Service Legacy Act, which would direct $50 million annually in 2018, 2019 and 2020 for deferred maintenance at the parks.

The Legacy Act would authorize increasingly larger sums until $500 million would be available annually from 2027 through 2047. Costs would be paid through revenues from government oil and natural gas royalties.

“Virginia ranks fifth in the list of states with the greatest need for maintenance, with a backlog of $800 million,” said Warner. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia is a cosponsor.

Republican co-sponsors include Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who wants to help the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has a $232 million maintenance backlog.

“The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of America’s greatest treasures and it has a tremendous economic impact on East Tennessee,” Alexander said.

The park service does have its critics.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on federal spending and oversight, has called out park service projects in Pennsylvania and Alaska as wasteful.

While congressional action is slow, there is something you can do: make a gift directly to the National Park Service, or, if you prefer, to your favorite national park. 

Shenandoah National Park has a $90 million maintenance backlog, for example, and Gulf Islands National Seashore has a $21 million maintenance backlog.

Your gift, like Trump’s, comes with a bonus. It’s tax deductible, if you’re among the 30 percent of taxpayers who itemize.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

No joke: Trump will be oldest first-term president -- Jan. 5, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Vice President Joe Biden quickened the pulse of some Democrats last month when he said he may run for president. In four years, he’ll be 78. Was he serious?

Die-hard Bernie Sanders fans want to believe he still has a shot at the White House. In 2020, Sanders will be 79.

In comparison, Elizabeth Warren, another Democratic presidential possibility, is a youngster. She’ll be a mere 71 in four years.

Donald J. Trump enters the Oval Office at threescore years and 10, the age Mark Twain at his own 70^th birthday party called the “Scriptural statute of limitations.”

Months older than Ronald Reagan at his first inauguration, Trump will be the oldest first-term president in history.

Most Americans don’t remember that even younger presidents have had serious health problems. Woodrow Wilson was 63 when he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919 and was gravely ill for the last year and a half of his term.

Dwight Eisenhower was 65 when he had a massive heart attack in Denver in 1955 and spent seven weeks in the hospital there. The White House kept the public in the dark about the severity of both cases. Eisenhower recovered and won a second term.

Age was hardly mentioned during the last campaign, which offered voters a choice between grandparents. Grandpa Trump is a year older than Grandma Hillary Clinton, but he gibed that she lacked the stamina to be president.

Clinton and Trump released letters from their doctors attesting to their health, with Clinton providing more details. Neither went as far as GOP presidential nominee John McCain in 2008. To reassure voters about his physical fitness, McCain, then 71, released more than a thousand pages of medical records.

While Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is 57, most of Trump’s Cabinet picks are white males over 60, reflecting the growing trend of working later in life. Nearly 20 percent of Americans over 65 hold full or part-time jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last year.

The Oval Office, though, has traditionally been a place for the middle-aged. The average age of presidents at their first inauguration is 55. John F. Kennedy was inaugurated at 43, Bill Clinton at 46 and Barack Obama, 47. Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president at 42, after the assassination of William McKinley.

When World War II hero Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, he had to put up with late-night jokes about his age – 72.

“Bob Dole is calling himself an optimist,” David Letterman said in a monologue. “I understand this because a lot of people would look at a glass as half empty. Bob Dole looks at the glass and says, `What a great place to put my teeth.’” Dole lost to the decades-younger Clinton.

Perhaps the all-time master at obliterating the age issue was Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Reagan, 73, was running for a second term against Democrat Walter Mondale, a lad of 56. Asked during a presidential debate if he was up for another four years, the Gipper was ready.

“I’m not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” Reagan quipped, putting away the age issue, at least through the election.

Reagan, who survived being shot and colon cancer as president, even dared to tell self-deprecating age jokes.

“One of my favorite quotations about age comes from Thomas Jefferson. He said that we should never judge a president by his age, only by his work. And ever since he told me that, I’ve stopped worrying,” Reagan told the National Alliance for Senior Citizens in 1984.

“When I go in for a physical now, they no longer ask me how old I am. They just carbon-date me,” he said at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 1987.

It was easy for Reagan to joke about getting older when he was often seen riding horses and clearing brush at his California ranch. He wasn’t diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until several years after he left office.

So far, Trump – who boasts about his vigor and has a glamorous, 46-year-old wife -- has managed to avoid age jokes. We’ll see whether his age becomes a punch line in four years when he’s 74.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A gracious loser? We can hope -- Nov 3, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A ritual of American politics will unfold Tuesday night.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will hold victory parties but, before the night is over, one will concede defeat. If we’re lucky.

We can take nothing for granted. To the end, Trump remains a question mark. In his last debate with Clinton, he refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election.

“I will keep you in suspense,” he said. It was outrageous, provocative and pure Trump. He still appears likely to come up short in the Electoral College, although polls have tightened in the last week.

One thing is certain, though. The American people have suffered enough disappointment during this dispiriting campaign. Barring an election disaster, the loser needs to accept the will of the voters with grace and urge his or her followers to do the same.

The winner also must move immediately to begin repairing the breach that has riven the country.

This presidential contest has always been more about the candidates’ deficiencies than their policies. When the votes are finally counted, it’s time for all of us to put the country first.

Our admirable American tradition holds that defeated presidential candidates rise to the occasion for the sake of the greater good. It’s reassuring to see failed candidates muster grace – and even humor -- at a time of personal misery.

In 1908, after his third failed campaign for the White House, Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan said: “I am reminded of the drunk who, when he had been thrown down the stairs of the club for the third time, gathered himself up, and said, `I am on to those people. They don’t want me in there,’” William Safire wrote in “Safire’s New Political Dictionary.”

Going into the 1948 election, Thomas Dewey was confident he’d beat Harry Truman – as were some newspaper editors. We’ve all seen the screaming banner headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”

All night the votes came in. When Dewey awoke the next morning to learn he’d lost, he sent a gracious telegram to Truman.

“My heartiest congratulations to you on your election and every good wish for a successful administration. I urge all Americans to unite behind you in support of every effort to keep our nation strong and free and establish peace in the world,” he wrote.

Asked by reporters what had happened, Dewey replied, “I was just as surprised as you are . . . It has been grand fun, boys and girls. I enjoyed it immensely.”

Four years later, when he lost to Dwight Eisenhower, Democrat Adlai Stevenson said he was reminded of the story about Abraham Lincoln after an election defeat. Lincoln said he felt like the boy who stubbed his foot in the dark -- “too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

After the bitter 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon offered a quasi-concession statement to John F. Kennedy.

“If the present trend continues, Mister Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, will be the next president of the United States,” Nixon told his supporters in California about midnight Pacific time. 

“I want Senator Kennedy to know . . . that certainly if this trend does continue, and he does become our next president, that he will have my wholehearted support and yours too,” Nixon said.

Nixon was convinced voter fraud cost him the election but he did not demand a recount despite JFK’s razor-thin margin of victory -- just over 100,000 votes out of 68 million votes cast. 

Kennedy won 303 electoral votes and Nixon 219. Fifteen unpledged electors in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma voted for segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia.

To preserve his viability for future elections, Nixon would not look like a sore loser.

Nobody ever warms to defeat. Mitt Romney was so sure he was going to win four years ago that he’d written only a victory speech.

“It’s about 1,118 words long,” he told reporters traveling with him on Election Day. His staff hadn’t written a concession speech either.

A few hours later, Romney called President Barack Obama to congratulate him. Then Romney went to what was supposed to be his victory party.

After wishing the president and his family well, Romney told supporters, “This is a time of great challenges for America and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation.”

We can dream that whoever loses on Tuesday is as classy.

(c) 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Summer 2015 -- brought to you by the 1960s -- July 16, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I have a word to describe the summer of 2015. It’s groovy. Make that neo-groovy.  

Yes, children, Groovy is now a programming language, but in the 1960s groovy -- lower case -- meant wonderful or cool. Simon and Garfunkel sang “Feelin’ Groovy” (“The 59^th Street Bridge Song”) on their 1966 album, “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.”

Over the last few weeks, nearly every major news event – whether it came from the heavens, the political mud or a cultural landmark between the two – has had ties to the 1960s. This may be the summer the Sixties built.

Everybody was feelin’ groovy when the New Horizons spacecraft finally flew by Pluto on Tuesday. After traveling nearly a decade and 3 billion miles, the spacecraft about the size of a baby grand piano made its one and only flyby of the former planet.

President Barack Obama tweeted his congratulations. 

Everybody loves Pluto. Images of the dwarf planet with its heart-shaped region charmed the world 50 years to the day after the first mission to Mars, Mariner 4, explored the red planet on July 14, 1965.

The space program didn’t just happen. President John F. Kennedy feared that the Soviets, having launched Sputnik and then the first human into space, would win the space race. On May 25, 1961, he addressed a joint session of Congress with a stunning proposal.   

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth,” JFK said.

Just eight years later, on July 20, 1969, the first two humans -- American astronauts -- walked on the moon. It took them 76 hours to travel the 240,000 miles.

To compare, when New Horizons launched Jan. 16, 2006, it passed the moon nine hours later.

In another sign of how the 1960s are informing our lives, Obama this week drew from Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address to argue in favor of a nuclear deal with Iran.

“It’s now more than 50 years since President Kennedy stood before the American people and said, `Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate,’” Obama said.

In politics, the big news this summer is a brash Republican candidate in the populist tradition. Some commentators liken real estate mogul Donald Trump to George Wallace “without the charm.” Wallace, a former Alabama governor and segregationist, ran for president four times from the 1960s to 1980s. 

Trump’s propensity for harsh rhetoric – he has called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers -- and loose use of facts worries the GOP establishment. In early polls of likely Republican voters, though, he leads the pack of GOP presidential hopefuls.

The book of the summer is a novel written more than half a century ago. Readers dreamed for decades that Harper Lee would publish another novel after her perennial bestseller “To Kill a Mockingbird” came out in 1960. The 1962 movie based on the book starring Gregory Peck was a classic.

Lee finally released another novel this month, but it confounded readers. Written before Mockingbird but set 20 years after it, “Go Set a Watchman” altered the character of saintly Atticus Finch into a cranky, racist coot.

Readers will long debate the merits of Watchman and whether Lee, 89, should have allowed it to be published. Her “new” novel brought back the dark side of the 1960s – but this summer also saw South Carolina give the decade the boot symbolically.

After 54 years, the Confederate battle flag came down from the statehouse grounds in Columbia on July 10. Raised over the capitol dome in 1961 during the civil rights era, the flag had been moved to the grounds in 2000. It was taken down permanently after the murders last month of nine black worshippers at a prayer meeting in a Charleston church.

This summer we also saw the 1960s as a selling point. Jaguar has come out with a new Lightweight E-Type racer that only looks like it was built in 1964. It can be yours for a cool one million British pounds, or about $1.5 million.

That must be one groovy car.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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A march to renew the dream of equality -- Aug. 15, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

At the rally on Aug. 28 commemorating the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, President Barack Obama will do something President John F. Kennedy declined to do 50 years ago. He will speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

For the first black president to speak from the spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech illustrates how much society has changed for the better in half a century. But it’s not the end of the journey. Obama’s remarks likely will point to how far we still need to go, especially to achieve economic equality.   

The march galvanized the nation behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, but despite the spectacular success of some individuals, overall economic progress for blacks has been slower.

The poverty rate for blacks is three times that of whites, the black unemployment rate is nearly twice that of whites, and, nearly 60 years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, most schools remain racially segregated, reports  the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that focuses on the economic condition of low- and middle-income  Americans.   

The anniversary of the march gives us a window on a sad and turbulent time that many Americans don’t recall. Obama was only 2 in 1963. Time has dimmed the memories of many who are old enough to remember the benighted South of segregated movie theaters and waiting rooms and “whites-only” lunch counters and motels.

Huge demonstrations on the National Mall are routine these days, but Washington had never seen a mass gathering of black protesters. Kennedy tried to persuade organizers to cancel it because he was afraid it would turn violent and that would provoke a backlash in Congress, dooming his civil rights bill.

Television news that spring and summer had shown Americans a horrifying picture of their country. Fire hoses, night sticks and attack dogs were turned against nonviolent citizens protesting discrimination. On June 11, National Guard troops were required to escort two black students to the University of Alabama where a defiant Gov. George Wallace reluctantly stepped aside. That same afternoon, King sent a telegram to Kennedy urging him to do something about police brutality against protesters in Danville, Va.

"The Negro’s endurance may be at a breaking point,” King wrote.

That night, Kennedy made a televised address from the Oval Office. He called civil rights a moral issue.

"The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated,” the president said.

A few hours later, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss.

Leading up to the march, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought to minimize potential problems by negotiating how it would be conducted. To reduce crowds, the march would be on a Wednesday. Bars and liquor stores were closed, the Washington Senators baseball game canceled and federal workers could stay home. The rally would end by 4 p.m. so protesters could leave town by dusk.

On the Sunday before the 1963 march, NBC’s “Meet the Press” featured Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, and King, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Many questions centered on whether the march would be peaceful. Yes, said Wilkins and King, yes.

During the Cold War, the threat of Communism loomed large, and the journalists  asked about Bayard Rustin, the march’s chief organizer, who had been a member of the Young Communist League. He has changed, the leaders insisted.

The radical Rustin, who was also a gay activist, is finally being recognized for his role in orchestrating the peaceful march. Obama will give Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously later this year. It’s the country’s highest honor given to civilians.

Kennedy reportedly declined to speak at the march because he thought it impossible to write a speech that would please both the marchers and the nationwide TV audience. The president met with march leaders at the White House immediately afterward. He praised their deep fervor and quiet dignity, and he promised to work toward civil rights, full employment and to eliminate discrimination in employment, education and housing.  

As Kennedy and then President Lyndon B. Johnson took the lead on civil rights, it’s now Obama’s turn to take the lead on moving the country closer to economic equality.     

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.