The president's new clothes -- Oct. 26, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In the Hans Christian Andersen fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” when the little child sees the emperor without clothes, he blurts out the truth.  

Everybody in the village instantly realizes the child is right -- except for the emperor who, shivering, carries on.

“So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all,” the story ends.

If only real life were that simple.

There was no universally shared “ah-ha” moment when two former presidents, a the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and two sitting senators – one his party’s former presidential nominee -- separately denounced President Donald Trump.

Instead, opinion in the American village split along predictable lines. The critiques won praise from the Democratic left and fell on deaf ears of the president’s Republican supporters.

In the latest poll by Fox News, Trump’s favorite news outlet, a whopping 83 percent of Republicans still approve of the job Trump is doing. Only 7 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of independents approve, Fox reported Wednesday.

Overall, because Trump can’t expand support beyond his base, only 38 percent of registered voters surveyed approve of his job performance. That was a new low for the Fox poll.

Americans in 2017 live in parallel universes with their separate news sources, heroes and very different takes on events at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Trump’s foes see nothing good in him and his fans are blind to his faults. Trump himself ricochets between calling congressional Republicans names and insisting they’re having a love fest.

Critics say Trump has accomplished nothing, while he and his press secretary cling to the dubious claim he’s already done more 10 months than President Barack Obama in eight years.

Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has struck fear in the hearts of Republicans with his well-funded plans to sweep Washington clean of incumbent GOP senators, except for hardliners like Texan Ted Cruz.

Many political observers believe Trump must deliver a substantial policy change to keep Republican voters’ support, hence the rush to enact a tax cut before year’s end.

But Trump’s constant blaming others for his failure to deliver on any of his major campaign promises – build the wall, bring back coal jobs, replace Obamacare with a better, cheaper plan – has worked for him so far.

What is different now is the growing bipartisan resistance to Trump. His two predecessors have taken the extraordinary step of warning Americans about the direction Trump is taking the country. Neither named Trump directly, but their message was clear.

Former President George W. Bush said almost nothing for the eight years Obama was in the White House.

But things have gone so off the rails that the Republican felt obliged to say Oct. 19: “People of every race, religion and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.”

Lamenting “our discourse degraded by casual cruelty,” Bush pointedly said, “And we know that when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy.”

Speaking the same day at a campaign rally in Richmond for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, Obama said, “Why are we deliberately trying to misunderstand each other and be cruel to each other and put each other down?”

Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona have rebuked Trump by name, saying he is unfit for office, divisive and debasing the country.

McCain is battling brain cancer, and Corker and Flake, conceding heavy weather for mainstream Republicans in GOP primaries, have announced they will not run for re-election next year.    

Unlike other Republicans, they are free to speak their minds, but such scathing criticism from within a president’s own party is rare. A tough defense and strong fiscal conservatism have been bedrocks of Republicanism for decades.

So when we see staunch fiscal conservatives like Corker and Flake and a defense hawk like McCain call out a Republican president for his policies and his behavior, it should give everyone pause. This is no fairy tale.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

`Hidden Figures' inspires with herstory -- Feb. 2, 2017

By MARSHA MERCER

In the splendid movie “Hidden Figures,” astronaut John Glenn is about to blast into space and become the first American to orbit the Earth when he makes a request.

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” he tells NASA.

Katherine Johnson is the “girl” whose mathematical prowess Glenn trusts more than IBM computers to calculate the flight trajectory. She verifies the numbers and Glenn rockets into history on Feb. 20, 1962.

The story seems too good to be true, a Hollywood fabrication, but Glenn did ask for Johnson to do the math, NASA confirmed.   

“Hidden Figures” tells the story of three black women mathematicians who worked in the NASA Langley Research Center in Jim Crow Virginia of the early 1960s.

Even though President Barrack Obama in 2015 gave Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, most Americans were unaware of the hundreds of women whose calculations helped put America into space.

Now, special screenings around the country during Black History Month are introducing girls and boys to women who love math and persevere against formidable odds, undaunted by discrimination and unfairness.     

Based on real people and facts, the movie was inspired by Margot Lee Setterly’s proposal for the book “Hidden Figures.” Producer Donna Gigliotti was so impressed she bought the movie rights before the book was completed.

Growing up in Hampton, Va., Setterly knew Johnson and heard stories about working at NASA from her dad, a research scientist. What seemed like no big deal in her hometown was largely unknown elsewhere.  

At times funny and others sad, the movie lets the brilliance, determination and patriotism of the women unfold in sharp contrast to the era’s benighted attitudes about race and women’s roles.

As TV news brings the civil rights movement into their living rooms, the women struggle to thrive in an environment where the work areas, lunch rooms, restrooms and water fountains are all segregated and promotions rare.  

Setterly, a 1991 University of Virginia graduate who worked on Wall Street and published an English language magazine in Mexico, began her research in 2010.

“It probably took three years of just research for me to just figure out how to tell the story -- really digging into these different strands of Virginia history, the history of these women,” she told collectSPACE.com, a space history and memorabilia website.

Her hard work paid off. “Hidden Figures” tops the Feb. 5 New York Times bestseller lists for combined print and e-book nonfiction and paperback nonfiction.

The film, a box office blockbuster, won the Screen Actors Guild award for feature cast ensemble and has been nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture and best writing for an adapted screenplay.

Oscar winner Octavia Spencer who plays Johnson’s supervisor, Dorothy Vaughan, was nominated for best supporting actress.

R&B star Janelle Monae plays Mary Jackson, who goes to court for the right to attend segregated night classes so she can pursue her dream of becoming an engineer. Kevin Costner is understated as Al Harrison, the decent boss who respects Johnson.

While some events and characters are fictionalized, the crux of the story is true, said director Theodore Melfi, who consulted during production with Setterly and NASA chief historian Bill Barry. Melfi took Taraji P. Henson, who plays Johnson, to meet the real Johnson, 98, to get a feel for her bearing and character.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA, hired five white women as human “computers” in 1935 and brought in black women in the 1940s. Male engineers had done the calculations, but they hated spending their time that way.

“They realized the women were much more accurate, much faster and did a better job – and didn’t complain. And you could pay them less,” Barry said in a broadcast to schools. “That actually got put in a memo: `Isn’t this great? They do this great work and they’re cheap.’”

Great the work was, and so is “Hidden Figures.” There’s nothing cheap about the film. 

You could say seeing Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson as role models is pure gold – Oscar gold.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Finger wag or wagging tongue? Olympics win -- Aug. 11, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Before the Obamas decamped to Martha’s Vineyard last weekend on vacation, President Barack Obama said in his weekly radio address:

“Every four years, our nation’s attention turns to a competition that’s as heated as it is historic. People pack arenas and wave flags. Journalists judge every move and overanalyze every misstep. Sometimes we’re let down, but more often we’re lifted up. And just when we think we’ve seen it all, we see something happen in a race that we’ve never seen before.

“I’m talking, of course,” Obama said, “about the Summer Olympics.”

Good one. And he was right. The Olympics, unlike that other quadrennial contest, haven’t let us down.

The Rio games are historic, dramatic and fun. We see some of the best American athletes who have ever competed. Their drive, joy and patriotism are infectious.

And don’t forget attitude. Who knew wagging an index finger could say so much?

Swimmer Lilly King, 19, a first-time Olympian, wagged her finger twice to mock Russian competitor Yulia Efimova for doping, after Efimova, 24, who was allowed to compete in Rio at the 11^th hour, wagged her finger No. 1 after winning a preliminary heat.

“You wave your finger No. 1 and you’re caught drug cheating? I’m just not a fan,” King said in an interview with NBC.

After she beat the Russian by two-hundredths of a second to win the gold for the 100-meter breaststroke, King said, “It’s incredible, just winning a gold medal and knowing I did it clean.” Take that, Russia.

Then, superstar swimmer Michael Phelps, competing in his fifth Olympics, wagged his finger No. 1 after he won his 20^th gold medal and beat his arch rival.

Earlier, Phelps blew up the Internet with his caught-on-camera “death stare” at Chad le Clos of South Africa. Le Clos was dancing and shadow boxing right in front of Phelps in the warm-up room before the 200-meter butterfly competition.

Phelps reclaimed the gold le Clos had won in the 2012 Olympics in London, and le Clos came in fourth in Rio.

Those displays of one-upmanship pale compared to the trash-talking on the campaign trail. This may be the first time a major party presidential nominee has been so willing to set tongues wagging. 

We don’t need Gallup to tell us we’d rather see athletes wagging their index fingers than hear the ugly rants of Donald J. Trump or, for that matter, more damaging revelations from Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Trump’s latest flap involving an off-the-cuff remark may have been “a joke gone bad,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan, who’s always sweeping up after the elephant, said. Or it could have been a call to arms to “Second Amendment people” if Hillary Clinton is elected, as Democrats and some Republicans charged.

At the rally in Wilmington, N.C., Trump was talking about what would happen if Clinton were elected: “She wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. And, by the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

When his remarks caused a firestorm, Trump blamed the biased media and insisted he meant Second Amendment supporters should galvanize to defeat Clinton at the polls. Clinton, who does not want to abolish the Second Amendment, accused him of “casual inciting of violence.”

The Chinese water torture of released Clinton emails continues to raise questions about how her work at the State Department intersected with the Clinton Foundation and what roles Bill Clinton would play in the White House and the foundation.

No wonder people have Trump -- and Clinton – fatigue.

So we turn gratefully to the Olympics, continuing through Aug. 21, to cheer Team USA and lift our own spirits. The Olympics are everything the 2016 presidential campaign is not: Team USA’s inspiring performances contrast sharply with Trump’s intemperate remarks and Clinton’s excruciatingly calibrated responses.

Trump is as undisciplined in his speech as the Olympic heroes are disciplined in sport, and Clinton as stiff as the athletes are limber.

The presidential campaign gives us headaches. The Olympics warm our hearts.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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What's luck got to do with it? -- June 2, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama’s pet peeve: “People who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them. It wasn’t nothing you did, so don’t have an attitude.”

When he urged Howard University graduates last month to be grateful, Obama reopened an old argument. Four years ago, he ran into a buzz saw of criticism when he strongly suggested that successful people don’t get ahead by hard work alone.

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” the president said in a campaign speech in Roanoke, Va., in July 2012.

Republican rival Mitt Romney jumped on the two sentences, using the scathing sound bite in ads against Obama, who claimed his words were taken out of context. They were. Obama was trying to make a point about community, government and even luck playing roles in an individual’s success, but he phrased it horribly.

Eleven days later, Obama spoke directly to voters in his own TV ad: “Of course Americans build their own businesses. Every day hard-working people sacrifice to meet a payroll, create jobs and make our economy run. And what I said was that we need to stand behind them, as America always has, by investing in education and training, roads and bridges, research and technology.”

How people see luck is a dividing line between conservatives and liberals, Robert H. Frank writes in his new book, “Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.”

Surveys show wealthier people overwhelmingly think their success is a result of their own hard work rather than other factors, such as luck or being in the right place at the right time, says Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell University.

People who believe luck plays a role in their success are more empathetic toward the less fortunate and that has tax and social policy implications, studies show.

When successful people believe there are others who also are smart and work hard but don’t strike it rich, they’re more generous and public-minded and inclined to approve of more spending on things like education and infrastructure, polls show.

Americans have always had a rocky relationship with luck. In the second half of the 19^th century, Horatio Alger Jr. built his writing career with a series of novels about poor but plucky young fellows who were honest, worked hard -- and got rich through strokes of luck.

But in the 1940s, E.B. White observed, “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

Donald J. Trump, who got his start in business with a million-dollar loan from his father, concedes a little of his success to luck.

“There’s a certain amount of luck,” Trump told students in Wisconsin earlier this year. “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

That’s a paraphrase of the line golfer Gary Player made famous: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

In his campaign book, “Crippled America,” published last year, Trump writes: “I know how lucky I am. The day I was born I had already won the greatest lottery on Earth. I was born in the United States of America.”

Trump, though, may be more optimistic than most. Less than half of Americans agree that “anyone who works hard still has a fair chance to succeed and live a comfortable life in today’s America,” according to the latest Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, released in January.

It’s odd that Obama’s talk about luck angers people when his overall message is uplifting. He told the Howard graduates:

“We must expand our moral imaginations to understand and empathize with all people who are struggling, not just black folks who are struggling – the refugee, the immigrant, the rural poor, the transgender person, and, yes, the middle-aged white guy who you may think has all the advantages, but over the last several decades has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change, and feels powerless to stop it.

“You got to get in his head too,” he said. And that could bring us all better luck.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Stopping Zika one bucket at a time -- April 14, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Congressional Republicans are balking at President Barack Obama’s request for $1.9 billion in emergency funds to prevent and treat the Zika virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes. Why the reluctance?

“They haven’t been bitten yet,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

Zing!

It’s politics as usual in Washington. Republicans said the administration should use already allocated funds, so Obama shifted $510 million from the fight against Ebola in West Africa and $79 million from diseases like malaria and tuberculosis to Zika.

But that’s not enough, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, who’s holding out for the full $1.9 billion.

“I’m not an alarmist,” Fauci told reporters Monday, “but the more we learn about the neurological aspects (of Zika), the more we look around and say, `This is very serious.’”

The nation’s top docs say the Zika threat is “scarier” than initially thought. Zika causes severe birth defects in newborns and is linked in adults to Guillain-Barre syndrome, an immune system disorder, said the Centers for Disease Control.

So far, no mosquitoes have transmitted the virus in the United States, although officials say that could change this summer.  

The 346 Zika cases reported in 40 states are all travel-related. Florida has the most with 85 cases. In Virginia, nine cases have been reported. Tennessee has had two cases, and Alabama, one.

In Puerto Rico, where mosquitoes are spreading the virus, hundreds of thousands of cases are expected this year. The government is distributing Zika prevention kits there and in other hard-hit areas.

There’s hope for a vaccine, with trials possibly starting in September. Obama is expected to sign into law a measure providing incentives to pharmaceutical companies to develop Zika treatments.

Once again, though, neither the White House nor Congress has thought to enlist ordinary Americans in fighting the threat. After 9/11 when the government mobilized for the war on terror, leaders asked nothing of most people. About 1 percent of Americans volunteered for war; the rest were told to go shopping. 

With Zika, the government is asking women who are pregnant or plan to be not to travel to affected areas.

But if we ever we needed a common enemy to draw us together, it’s now. Americans may be poles apart politically, but it’s safe to say nobody likes mosquitoes. Even before Zika, mosquitoes brought us West Nile Virus, and still do. To them, we’re just a meal.

Officials say Aedes aegypti, a.k.a. yellow fever mosquito, is most likely to transmit Zika. It has been found in 30 states, including throughout the Southeast. Until its tie with Zika, this mosquito was known for causing more casualties in the Spanish-American War than combat.

So, what’s a patriot to do in the undeclared war on mosquitoes? I stopped by the Arlington County (Va.) Cooperative Extension Service office and learned more about mosquitoes than I knew to ask.

For example, only the female mosquito bites. She needs a blood meal to lay eggs. The Aedes aegypti deposits hundreds of them on wet container walls or near standing water. Even if the surface is dry, the eggs can hang on for months. When water reappears, they hatch and grow to full-grown in a week.

Chemical insecticides often kill the beneficial insects along with the pests and can be bad for pets and pond fish. So, before you hire an exterminator, have a “dump the bucket” party in your neighborhood. Empty cans, flower pots and birdbaths weekly.

Get rid of old tires. Put goldfish in your pond to eat mosquito larvae or use larvicide donuts. Check gutters and downspouts to be sure they are free flowing and don’t hold water. Repair window screens.

When possible, wear long sleeves and long pants. Use products containing DEET, picaridin or oil of lemon eucalyptus on exposed skin – but not under clothes. Follow the label instructions.

And listen to Mikulski: “The mosquitoes are coming. You can’t build a wall to keep them out, and the mosquitoes can’t pay for it.”

But we can join our neighbors and dump the bucket. Early and often.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Help wanted: leadership to save disability safety net -- Feb. 12, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The nation’s safety net for the disabled will be forced to cut benefits by nearly 20 percent next year, unless Congress acts.

So what’s the new Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee doing about the problem? Blaming President Barack Obama.  

And what’s the top Democrat on the committee doing? Blaming Republicans.

Here we go again.

Obama’s “effort to paper over the problem is a classic example of Washington ducking a real American need,” charged Budget chairman Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, as he opened a committee hearing Wednesday on the “coming crisis” in the disability insurance program.

But liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont countered: “Republicans are manufacturing a phony crisis in Social Security in order to cut the earned benefits of millions of the most vulnerable people in this country.”

Sanders, technically an independent, is weighing a presidential bid. He issued a report Tuesday with the provocative title: “Republican Efforts to Cut Social Security Benefits Pit Disabled Americans Against Senior Citizens.”

The disability program’s looming insolvency has been predicted since 1994. In December of next year, the disability trust fund will be depleted, triggering automatic benefit cuts of 19 percent for the nearly 11 million disabled workers and their families who receive disability payments.

“I don’t want to be dramatic,” acting Social Security Administrator Carolyn Colvin told the budget committee, but such a cut for disabled people whose average monthly benefit is $1,200 would be “a death sentence.”

Fireworks aside, helping the disabled is an issue on which Democrats and Republicans have agreed recently and can again, if someone – anyone – will take the risk of forging a bipartisan consensus.  

Last December, the Senate and House passed by wide margins and Obama signed into law the Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act, which allows families with a disabled child to save for long-term care through tax-sheltered savings accounts similar to 529 accounts families use to save for college.

Action was far from quick; the ABLE bill was first introduced in 2006. But 85 percent of Congress signed on as cosponsors, even after the conservative Heritage Foundation complained that the bill was “a decisive step in expanding the welfare state.”

To shore up disability’s finances, Obama proposes reallocating a portion of payroll taxes from the retirement trust fund to the disability fund. Lawmakers have approved reallocations from one fund to the other 11 times, most recently in 1994.

But one of the first actions by House Republicans in the new Congress was to pass a rule making reallocation contingent on measures to improve Social Security’s overall solvency. Republicans say reallocation is merely robbing Peter to pay Paul and fails to solve the crisis; Democrats say the new rule is a stealth attack on Social Security.

Sanders says there’s no crisis because the Social Security trust fund has enough to pay all benefits to all recipients for 18 years. He also says it’s time to raise the income cap on the Social Security payroll tax to $250,000, from the current $118,500.  

Obama did not mention Social Security in his State of the Union address, but he has included proposals in his budget to encourage workers with disabilities to stay in the workforce, a goal many Democrats and Republicans support.  

The president proposed testing new strategies, including services to support those with mental impairments and incentives for employers, to help people with disabilities remain at work.

He called for reducing disability benefits to offset state or federal unemployment insurance payments and adding money for continuing disability reviews. These reviews, required every three to seven years, determine whether workers remain disabled. The Social Security Administration says the reviews save $9 for every $1 spent.

Republican Enzi said he was encouraged that “buried deep in the president’s budget are a few programs that might be a grudging acknowledgment” that more can be done to create a disability system that supports work.

But what was missing as Enzi opened the fight over disability was what steps he would take to stabilize the program.Obama’s proposals may be baby steps, but surely Enzi, who has a reputation as a level-headed legislator, could build on them to ensure that those who can return to work do so and those who are unable to work get the help they deserve.

(c) 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Don't do stupid stuff, Uncle Sam -- Aug. 14, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Maybe, as Hillary Clinton said, “Don’t do stupid stuff” isn’t a proper organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. But it surely would be a welcome change here at home.

If only President Obama could order the federal government to stop doing stupid stuff on the home front, he might begin to rebuild people’s rock-bottom trust in government. Here’s a modest start: make sure federal workers pay their taxes.

It seems obvious to the point of absurdity that federal employees should pay what they owe or have their wages garnished, but it doesn’t always work that way.

For example, about 83,000 Pentagon employees and contractors who held or were eligible for security clearances owed $730 million in taxes in 2012, the Government Accountability Office reported last month. The median amount owed was $2,700, but people owed from $100 to millions of dollars. Most of the tax delinquents had no plan to repay their tax debt.

The report found that about 26,000 employees and contractors had access to classified information at the same time they owed federal taxes totaling $229 million, and about 6,200 of those had top-secret clearance. 

In other words, we are risking sensitive secrets to people who are vulnerable to financial pressure. As the report said, someone who is “financially overextended is at risk of having to engage in illegal acts to generate funds.”

The personal finances and tax situations of applicants for security clearances are supposedly considered, but federal law does not expressly prohibit someone with unpaid tax debt from receiving clearance. Records don’t indicate how often clearance is denied because of unpaid taxes.

Naturally, the GAO’s report prompted outrage on Capitol Hill.

“Federal tax cheats with security clearances jeopardize both our national and economic security, and could unnecessarily put our nation’s classified information at risk,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in a statement. Coburn has been talking about cracking down on federal workers who don’t pay their taxes for years.  In the House, a bill to fire federal workers with unpaid tax bills failed last year.

   

But the problem doesn’t exist just at the Pentagon.

Congress could start by cleaning up Capitol Hill. About 3.24 percent of Senate workers and 4.87 percent of House workers owed $8.6 million in taxes as of last Sept. 30, according to IRS data released in May under a Freedom of Information Act request by USA Today. That’s 714 tax delinquents on Capitol Hill. The IRS didn’t say whether any members of Congress were delinquent.

  

At the White House, 36 of nearly 1,800 workers owe on their taxes for a tax delinquency rate of 2 percent. 

In all, more than 318,000 federal workers and retirees owed $3.3 billion in back taxes, USA Today reported. That’s slightly more than 3 percent.

To be fair, the proportion of tax delinquents is far higher among people not working in government than among those who do. The IRS estimates that 8.7 percent of taxpayers overall owe tax bills.

Still, it’s maddening that federal workers are skipping out on their taxes.  Not even all IRS workers pay their fair share. About 1.2 percent of IRS employees are tax scofflaws.

Even worse, some of the tax delinquents at IRS got bonuses. IRS awarded more than 1,100 employees more than $1 million in cash, 10,000 hours off and 69 step increases or promotions within a year that their tax compliance problems were substantiated, according to a report last March by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

For its part, IRS responded that it had examined the policies of 15 federal agencies and 13 states and found that only one agency had a rule against granting a bonus in cases of misconduct.  

It’s no wonder Americans’ trust in government has sunk to a record low. Only 13 percent of people say government in Washington can be trusted to do what’s right all or most of the time, a new CNN-IRC International Poll found. About three in four say they trust government only some of the time, and one in 10 say they never trust Washington.

  

Lack of trust maybe epidemic but it needn’t be inevitable. A first step to restoring people’s confidence is to ensuring that federal employees pay their taxes.  Government doesn’t have to do stupid stuff.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Dueling values at State of the Union -- Feb. 7, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For his 1965 State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson tried something new.

Wanting to reach the largest audience possible, LBJ moved the speech from day to primetime.

At 9:04 p.m. on Jan. 4, 1965, before a joint session of Congress, the president laid out his vision for a Great Society -- including hospital insurance for the elderly, a voting rights law for African Americans, federal aid for education and an extension of the minimum wage.

Not to be outdone, Republicans demanded time for a response, also a first. GOP House leader Gerald Ford and Senate leader Everett Dirksen did the honors.

Within two years, most of Johnson’s proposals were law.

Those were the days. LBJ had just won by a landslide. He knew he had to act fast to get big things accomplished. His laundry list became marching orders for the fattest Democratic majority in Congress since the New Deal.

Shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. He knows he has to act fast to accomplish his goals. He’ll outline a laundry list of legislative priorities. A Republican response will follow. And that’s where similarities with 1965 end.

Obama will face a divided, deeply partisan Congress. He’ll expound on how the Democratic values he talked about in his Inaugural Address translate into policies to strengthen the middle class. If the last four years are a guide, though, many of his proposals will go nowhere.    

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American in his first term, will give the Republican response. Rubio is a fresh face and he’s trying something new: He will speak in Spanish and English. He’s expected to offer a view of how smaller government, as championed by the GOP, will help the middle class.

Rubio has a tough assignment – to hit the reset button on a party that fumbled the last election. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana recently called the GOP “the stupid party” for dumbing down its brand and failing to appeal to minorities. Plus, Rubio has a lot of hype to live up to. He’s glorified on the cover of this week’s Time magazine as “The Republican Savior.”

As theater, the night of dueling values could get interesting.

Obama will use the bully pulpit to promote job creation, targeting education to job skills, reducing dependence on foreign oil while promoting green energy, reforming immigration and reducing gun violence. He wants to increase spending on those priorities.  

At the same time, the president insists he’s eager for a “big deal” on deficit reduction that will end the cycle of government by crisis that replays every few weeks or months.

Obama’s brand is strong among Democrats after his Inaugural Address in which he set out liberal themes for his second term, but he has alienated Republicans. The White House envisioned the two speeches as a package with the State of the Union offering what former senior Obama adviser David Plouffe called “details and blueprints.”

Obama gave a glimpse of Tuesday’s speech in remarks this week to House Democrats.

“The question I will ask myself on every item, every issue is, is this helping to make sure that everybody's got a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share and everybody's playing by the same rules?” he said.

Next month, Obama is expected to send Congress his budget for the fiscal year that starts in October.

Despite Lyndon Johnson’s legendary success, most presidents fail to get what they ask in the State of the Union speech.  

Between 1965 and 2002, on average 43 percent of the policy proposals contained in State of the Union addresses were enacted by Congress in the legislative session in which the president gave his speech, Donna R. Hoffman and Alison D. Howard wrote in the 2006 book “Addressing the State of the Union.”

For second presidential terms, the success rate drops to 39 percent.

In 2013, the Democratic president’s State of the Union address will be a wish list. The Republican response will be one too.

 © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Pushing term limits for Congress off the cliff -- Jan. 3, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Did you hear the one about sleep-deprived octogenarians in the Senate?

There’s no punch line. A Republican House member told his colleagues it would be ridiculous to follow the old fogies in voting for the fiscal cliff agreement. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the joke was on him.

One lesson we can learn from the fiscal cliff drama: Experience matters.

We’ve debated for years whether Washington insiders are a boon or a bane in public life. Too often it seems that the less a congressional candidate knows, or wants to know, about how Washington works, the more voters like him or her. 

The motto of the U.S. Term Limits group, “citizen legislators, not career politicians,” is appealing -- until there’s a crisis that requires political skill.

Were it not for two savvy old political pros, the country would have plunged over the fiscal cliff permanently and landed in the ravine of recession. The New Year’s Day deal to avoid tax hikes and deep automatic cuts in spending was far from perfect, but it was good news for the country.  It was bad news for advocates of congressional term limits and ageists who prefer stereotypes to real life examples.

Two 70-year-olds who had served together in the Senate for about a quarter of a century rose to the occasion. Vice President Joe Biden, formerly the Democratic senator from Delaware, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky, reached the compromise that had eluded the president and house speaker.

President Barack Obama isn’t a natural negotiator. Goading when he should have guided, Obama infuriated Republicans every time he opened his mouth. Critics complained that Obama should have been more like Lyndon Johnson, but Obama lacks LBJ’s long years in the House and Senate. Nor does he have Bill Clinton’s or George W. Bush’s gubernatorial experience, coping with legislators from the other party.

As for Speaker John Boehner, he gave up trying to herd the tea-chugging cats in his own party. Boehner, a lad of 63 who came to the House in 1991, grew so frustrated after needling from Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, who’s a decade older with four more Senate years, that Boehner used locker room language to Reid -- in the White House.

The approval rating for Congress hovers below 20 percent, so it’s no big surprise that three out of four Americans tell pollsters they favor limiting how long someone can stay in Congress. But after Arkansas tried to do just that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that states may not restrict the number of congressional terms. To limit terms requires a constitutional amendment. The Florida legislature last year passed a resolution urging Congress to adopt a term-limits amendment.

The twin public appetites for term limits and the sweet bird of youth can result in odd moments.

While campaigning for his eighth term in Congress, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was asked if he supported congressional term limits of two terms for the Senate and three for the House. Yes, indeed, he said; he’s a big fan. Really?

  

In November, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 72, was asked by NBC News’ Luke Russert, 27, whether she and her team were keeping a younger generation of Democrats from taking the House reins. Her deputies, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, are 73 and 72.

“Some of your colleagues privately say that your decision to stay on prohibits the party from having a younger leadership and hurts the party in the long run,” Russert said, and asked for her response. She allowed that his question was “quite offensive” but he probably didn’t realize it.

Pelosi, a formidable fundraiser for Democratic candidates, proved her leadership skills during the fiscal cliff-hanger. She held her Democratic caucus together in support of the agreement, allowing many Republicans to make a show of voting no, pretending they opposed the agreement.

Such theatrics belie the serious challenges that face our country. Thank heavens we still have experienced hands in Congress. Let’s hope they use their political expertise to do right for the country. This is no time for amateurs or snide comments. 

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Gloomy about USA? Visit a national park -- May 31, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Roughly three in four Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That means President Barack Obama faces re-election trouble. Or maybe not. A coin toss is as good as any poll at this point for predicting who’ll win in November, says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.

So let’s stop trying to handicap whether Mitt Romney or Obama is ahead in the horse race and consider how the rest of us are doing. Americans have been grumpy a long time, and it’s not healthy to live perpetually under a cloud.

Here’s an idea: The next time the state of the Union makes you feel blue, turn off the TV, unplug from the web and head for a national park. Oh, and it won’t kill you to leave your smart phone in the trunk.

I’ve tried this antidote myself recently, walking Civil War battlefields, historic sites and a national seashore. Each trip taught me something about our rich and quirky history. America has faced challenges before and triumphed over them. We’re stronger than we think we are.

I know, I know. Congress is dysfunctional, the economy fragile, the presidential campaign toxic, and the public discourse relentlessly depressing.

And yet, violent crime is down, marriage is up and at least one federal agency actually works. The rate of visitor satisfaction at national parks over the last several years is an astounding 97 percent.

There’s one thing even Obama and Romney, his Republican rival, can agree on. The national parks are beloved.

In 2008, candidate Obama promised to boost funding for national parks and national forests, and he signed a law in 2009 that did so, modestly. PolitiFact rated it “a promise kept.”

Romney talks fondly about boyhood vacations in which his family piled into the Rambler (his father ran American Motors which made the car) and toured national parks.

“We went from national park to national park,” Romney has said. “And they were teaching me to fall in love with America.”

Over Memorial Day weekend, I climbed the 248 iron spiral stairs at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It’s the equivalent of climbing a 12-story building, and I asked some people on their way down the narrow staircase if it was worth it.

“Oh, yeah!” they agreed, all broad smiles. And they were right. At the top, a wild, happy wind blew away cares and the coastal views were endless.

Built in 1870, the nation’s tallest lighthouse would have been lost to the sea had Congress not spent $10 million to move it half a mile inland in 1999. Engineers lifted the entire structure with hydraulic jacks, placed it on steel mats and slid it on rails, inch by inch.

The plan was fraught with controversy. Local people feared the engineers would fail, leaving a pile of bricks where a major tourist attraction once stood. But the amazing plan succeeded, and the beacon draws 3 million visitors a year.

The Hatteras lighthouse is safe from the encroaching ocean for another hundred years, if we’re lucky.

In Fredericksburg, Va., earlier in May, National Park Service historian John Hennessy led a walking tour that traced President Lincoln’s route around town in 1862. Lincoln met with his generals to plan what was to be a major assault on Richmond. As it happened, the attack was called off.

Lincoln’s visit was not unlike Obama’s recent trip to Afghanistan, Hennessy said, in that few in the Army and press knew about the visit. In Lincoln’s case, the occupied city refused to be impressed.

Fredericksburg’s Unionist newspaper, The Christian Banner, reported that, “There were no demonstrations of joy” among the citizenry – but neither had residents shown joy when Confederate President Jefferson Davis had visited the previous winter.

“The citizens of Fredericksburg seem to have little partialities for presidents,” the paper observed.

Some would say Americans haven’t changed much in 150 years.

So, before the campaign grows even more hateful and off-putting, take a clue from the men running for president. Visit a national park this summer and remind yourself why this country is special.

America’s national parks are waiting.

(c) 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

Family values, fundraising, fairness -- and Obama's stance on same-sex marriage -- May 10, 2012 column

By MARSHA MERCER

To those who were shocked, shocked to hear that campaign politics might have figured into President Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, I have bad news. It was ever thus.

Obama fired off a fundraising email the day after he said he personally supports same-sex marriage. Unseemly, yes, but hardly surprising. Political strategizing has been at the heart of the war over marriage equality since the Defense of Marriage Act was a glimmer in Bob Dole’s eye 16 years ago.

As President Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, Dole, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, co-sponsored the Senate bill that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Dole wanted to stir the “family values” pot, but Clinton grabbed the spoon.

As Dole shepherded the bill banning same-sex marriage through Congress, with the help of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the White House announced that yes, indeed, Clinton would sign it. And in September he did so, ignoring the outrage of gay supporters. The re-election campaign soon ran ads on Christian radio stations, lauding the president for fighting for “our values.”

Clinton sanded the edges off what Dole had hoped would be a wedge issue in that campaign. But the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, lives as the law of the land. Obama disavowed DOMA and has refused to defend it in court – but the law still blocks thousands of lawfully wedded same-sex couples from receiving benefits available to heterosexual couples. We’ve yet to hear how Obama proposes to change that.

In 1996, no state had legalized same-sex marriage. Today, six states and the District of Columbia permit it, but under DOMA no state must recognize same-sex marriages that are performed in another state.

Section 3 of the law specifies that for federal purposes ``the word `marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife.”

The law effectively cuts out same-sex married couples from more than 1,100 federal benefits, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.

Married same-sex couples cannot file joint tax returns, take unpaid family leave, receive surviving spouse benefits under Social Security or receive family health and pension benefits as federal civilian employees.

Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News Wednesday that, “For me, personally, it is important…to go ahead and affirm that I think that same-sex couples should be able to get married.” But he dodged questions about what he will actually do, saying the issue should be left to the states.

A day earlier, North Carolina became the 30th state to ban same-sex marriage, reinforcing current law with a constitutional amendment.

It’s difficult to imagine how Obama can stick to the stance that his views are merely personal when he says fairness and justice are at stake. He stood for fairness when he backed repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy that prevented gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

The main rationale for not defending DOMA in the courts was Obama’s determination that the law was unconstitutional, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. wrote House Speaker John A. Boehner in February 2011. Nevertheless, law is law, and the president ordered his attorney general to continue enforcing it.

House Republicans hired a lawyer to defend the law in the courts.

The Supreme Court likely will decide the issues at some point. For now, Obama has a campaign to run and pay for. One in six of his top bundlers, who have brought in $500,000 or more, have publicly identified themselves as gay, The Washington Post reported.

Obama is trying to walk a line between voters with strong feelings. He stressed in the ABC interview that he deeply respects pastors and others who believe in traditional marriage, and he indicated that same-sex marriage isn’t a current priority.

“I’m not gonna be spending most of my time talking about this, because, frankly, my job as president right now, my biggest priority, is to make sure that we’re growing the economy, that we’re putting people back to work, that we’re managing the draw-down in Afghanistan effectively,” he said.

But he’s not shy about using the issue to bring in campaign cash. For now, Obama’s strategy is to describe himself as a practicing Christian who believes in the Golden Rule.

“Treat others the way you’d want to be treated,” he said before boarding Air Force One for a trip to the West Coast for fundraisers, where his support of same-sex marriage could boost his haul.

©2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.