The Cain Scrutiny

Two factors may help Herman Cain weather the first major political storm of his candidacy.

The first is that many folks predisposed to support Cain also have serious doubts about the objectivity, credibility and honesty of the liberal media elite pushing the story. The "mainstream" media is widely perceived to have an agenda -- justifiably, in my opinion -- that's hostile to conservatives and libertarians. People on the right, if they haven't actively tuned-out the MSM, simply aren't going to allow a media cabal to drag their candidate down -- at least not without hard, damning evidence that the man is a genuine demon.

Second, Cain seems to be benefiting from what might be called The Clinton Effect.

The former president set the bar so low in terms of presidential behavior, personal mores and salacious sexual adventures that almost anyone can easily clear it, inoculating candidates like Cain against the damage that certain revelations might formerly have inflicted. Clinton's continuing popularity with certain Americans -- the fact that he still struts upon the national stage as a lecherous elder statesman -- tells politicians that a sexual scandal does not have to spell political ruin. On the contrary, you can sodomize an intern in the Oval Office coat closet and still live out your days as the political celebrity, with the media hanging on your every pronouncement.

But Republicans are different, some will say. "Values voters" don't tolerate such nonsense. They have higher standards. Such scandals still can damage candidates on the right, since Republicans still expect something more from their leaders than someone who can run the welfare state spoils system.

Yes, but maybe that's changing, as conservatives, libertarians and even RINO Republicans recognize that there's something far more dangerous to the Republic than a candidate with a loose tongue, wondering eye or history of divorce -- which is having a dangerous, left-wing ideologue like Barack Obama in the White House for 4 more years. When the survival of the Republic is at stake, winning becomes more important than nitpicking and moral preening. Certain character flaws can (and must) be overlooked in a candidate who can knock-off Obama and reverse this country's toboggan ride toward fiscal and economic ruin.

Maybe this time Republicans are so determined to win that they aren't going to allow rank hypocrites on the other side, and in elite media circles, torpedo viable candidates and turn their value voting tendencies against them. The stakes are much higher, and clearer, this time around. They fear Barack Obama and his radical policies more than they fret over minor alleged character flaws in their candidates.

True Tales from a Shutdown Survivor

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my closet hides a threadbare memento of one of the most harrowing experiences of my Washington years, second only to Sept. 11, 2001. It's a tee shirt bearing the boast, "I Survived the Government Shutdown of 1995."

It's true. I was there. And I lived to tell the tale.

As the nation stands once again on the brink, facing the first government shutdown since then, I feel I must speak out about the horrors I experienced first-hand there at ground zero. Those who survived have an obligation to share our stories, so that it never, ever, happens again.

I remember it as if it were yesterday, driving to work one bright winter morning, past a glitzy Northern Virginia megamall, wondering why the hell the parking lot was spilling over on a day when most of the city was normally at the office, shuffling papers and looking busy. Then it hit me. It must be that government shutdown thing I'd been reading about. Our worst fears have finally been realized. It was actually unfolding, right before my eyes.

The malls were jammed with federal workers, out doing some early holiday shopping and enjoying the day off. So overflowing were the parking lots that day -- this is true – that some had to go to another shopping mall five miles away. Other than that, all seemed eerily normal as I went about my routine that day.

Traffic signals worked. Jets flew in and out of Reagan International. Gas stations were open. I caught glimpses of the subway -- it appeared to be running. State troopers were in their usual frenzy, ticketing High Occupancy Lane violators along the beltway. Buses swooshed past. Buildings were brightly lit and appeared to be heated. No panic was evident. It was absolutely creepy.

And this went on not just for a day or two, but maybe three. Each day the malls were buzzing like hives, as off-work federal employees stripped the shopping racks bare, before the rest of us, who weren’t getting any days off, even had a chance to get our shopping done! The federal workers were enjoying an extended holiday, while the rest of us wage slaves were still schlepping away, working for The Man. It was horrible. It was unnerving. It was an experience that scarred me.

But we in Washington didn’t see the worst of it. According to media reports, passport offices were closed, which really screwed-up a few vacations, and some national park visitors were turned away at the gates. They too can testify, first-hand, to the shock, the madness, the momentary inconveniences of the great government shutdown of 1995.

This is all tongue-in-cheek, of course, because there was no real government shutdown of 1995, as far as I recall, as someone who was living in the belly of the beast at the time. So there is no commemorative tee-shirt in my closet. There are no post traumatic stress symptoms. Most of my memories of the “shutdown,” in fact, are happy ones. Having thousands of idled federal bureaucrats out shopping, or at home, rather than doing whatever they do, meant less congestion on my daily commute. There were fewer cars clogging the roadways; fewer frowning faces on mass transit. That fewer bureaucrats were manning their posts was actually a comfort.

I venture to guess the experience was the same for all but a tiny number of Americans, who either had delays in getting their passports or were turned away at park gates. The vast majority of us didn’t notice, weren’t even slightly impacted, and so probably have no real recollection of that completely unforgettable alleged crisis. It wasn’t a shutdown, or even a brownout. And life went on uneventfully. It was the greatest non-event since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vaults.

What really happened was this. The Clinton White House ordered some selective closures, and pushed on a few pressure points, in order to maximize the public outcry and make Newt Gingrich and his Republican revolutionaries flinch first. The media blew minor inconveniences into major disruptions, manufacturing a sense of hardship and crisis. This tactic even became known as "the Washington Monument strategy," because this iconic mall attraction was one of the few federal facilities actually padlocked.

And this all worked beautifully. Gingrich backed down and the Republican revolution of 1994 at that point died, by my calculation, based on the view from front row seats. When people ask me when I think the Republican Party went astray, and lost its soul, or when Republicans in Congress began taking on the worst attributes of the Democrats they ousted in the 1994 coup, I point to this as a turning point. Whether history will repeat itself depends on the next few moves in the game of budget chicken unfolding now.

That’s more than you can put on tee-shirt. But it’s all that really happened. If another impasse comes, President Obama will take a chapter from the Bill Clinton Handbook and do some selective shutdowns, designed to maximize screaming and garner media attention, while most of the rest of the government, and life in America, plods on as normal. He’ll bet that Republicans will retreat when enraged passport recipients or locked-out park visitors tell their sob stories to the media, and the media uses those stories to generate a sense of crisis. It’s all the fault of Republicans and the Tea Party: that will be the line from the White House, congressional Democrats and most in the media. Republicans will have to do some ferocious counter-spinning to win the blame game.

Will Republicans again blink first? Only time will tell. It depends on whether, and what, if anything, they learned from the last so-called shutdown. The stakes may be high for political parties, but the American people have little to fear from this piece of political gamesmanship and theater, since neither party has the nerve to truly shut down the federal government, or even shrink it significantly, as recent history shows. The fear of potential disruptions, not disruptions in fact, is what the White House will count on to carry the day.

But there’s another reason why no real shutdown of the government will happen. What Washingtonians of both parties fear most of all about a real shutdown is that the rest of America won’t care, or notice, and that we might even cheer – that we might just shrug it off, adapt, and find that we can get along perfectly well (and maybe even better) without omnipresent Washington.

Just imagine if that happened. The game would be up for both parties.

Revisionist History

I was working in Washington in 1995 when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton squared off in the last great government shutdown showdown, and I recall it much differently than Gingrich does in the slick piece of revisionist history appearing in today's Washington Post. But he's running for president, I'm not. I guess he feels a need to re-write events in a way that cast him in a heroic light. But I mark that as the moment the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 died.

Newt doesn't mention the fact that Republicans were so outmaneuvered by Clinton, and so defensive about being blamed for what was called a "shutdown" but was actually just a few days of extra Christmas shopping for federal workers, that they passed a resolution or approved a statement vowing to never again engage in shutdown politics. It was a stupid thing to do -- the statement, not the shutdown -- and I keep wondering if anyone is going to go back and dust that old statement off, now that another possible showdown looms, and waive it in the faces of Republicans.

When people ask me when the Republicans started becoming so much like Democrats, when they ask me when I started drifting away from a party I had supported and carried water for, I often say the turning point came in late 1995. Newt is correct in saying that this new crew of Republican revolutionaries should stick to their guns if another shutdown comes. But it's just not true that he held the line, or won the showdown, back in 1995.

Disorder in the Courts, Devastation in the Forest

I've been writing about Bill Clinton's roadless rule since it was approved nearly 8 years ago, as one of his last actions in office. But even I've lost track of how many related court cases are going, and how many often contradictory court rulings have been made, in this seemingly endless, seemingly unresolvable, controversy.

We just had court ruling 10 or 11, I think. And this one -- like the rulings before it -- resolves nothing and only deepens the confusion. I defy readers to make sense of the situation, as described by the AP:

"SAN FRANCISCO — A federal magistrate judge on Tuesday scaled back a 2006 decision that reinstated a Clinton-era ban against new road construction and development on millions of acres of national forest.

Two years ago, Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco invalidated a 2005 Bush administration rule that overturned the 2001 "Roadless Rule," which protected 58.5 million acres of federal land in about 40 states. But in August, a federal judge in Wyoming invalidated President Clinton's Roadless Rule, prompting the Bush administration to request that the two judges modify their conflicting rulings.

In response, Laporte on Tuesday reduced the geographic scope of her 2006 ruling, so that the road construction ban would apply only to national forests in 10 western states. The ban doesn't apply to national forests in states such as Colorado and Wyoming, because those states are in the district overseen by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Laporte's move is only a temporary fix. Federal appeals courts in San Francisco and Denver both are expected to rule on the case next year, and road construction rules also could change under President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration."

The reporter does his best, but doesn't (and can't) do justice to the complexity of the situation, which would require a book, rather than a wire story, to fully explain (any literary agents out there interested in such a book, please drop me a line). Here one gets a Reader's Digest Condensation of a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners public lands battle that demonstrates, I would hope, the impossibility of having any coherent public lands policy when every decision is hashed-out (and turned into hash) in court. It shows, as well, that such conflicts ultimately get us nowhere, whether we support the roadless concept or not.

I do not support it.

Clinton's actions constituted a typically slick attempt to overturn multiple-use management on 60 million acres of national forest, and turn those acres into de-facto wilderness areas, without going through Congress. That dishonesty -- that unwillingness to say what the real agenda was, while using euphemisms like "roadless areas" as obfuscations -- still angers me, as it angers many in the West.

But the Clintonistas and gang green, rather than admit that they were trying to pull a fast one, and retreat when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, have been trying ever since to legitimize the illegitimate, and to secure their ill-gotten trophy. They know they would lose in the court of public opinion, and probably in Congress, if these roadless areas were proposed as wilderness areas. The public understands that this means severe access restrictions and the throwing out of multiple use. So the exclusionists try to win from judges what they can't get from Congress. Chaos and confusion have been the result.

And roadless advocates are kidding themselves if they imagine that the Obama administration is going to settle the matter, once and for all, in their favor. Now that the matter is tangled up in the courts, it will stay in the courts. Even the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent Obama can't override the federal judiciary. And the other side has access to the courts as well.

The roadless push was also terribly ill-timed, since the wildfire threat and forest health crisis (which already was apparent when Clinton left office), if we're going to combat them, will require more access to the forests, not less. But this all circles back to a fundamental disagreement (already touched on in my earlier post about Terry Barton and Smokey Bear) between those who want the forests left to themselves, with man and his management techniques subtracted from the equation, and those, like me, who believe that we can responsibly manage the forests for multiple uses, balancing economic and ecological values, and be a force for good, as well as for ill.

We've been chasing our tails in circles now for 8 years, while the forest health crisis -- a crisis that demands decisive action, not paralysis -- deepens around us.

The full impact of that crisis, and the economic devastation it will bring to Colorado and the American West, will be clear to anyone who takes the shortcut between Breckenridge and Keystone ski resorts, as I did last weekend. Once green forests are a sickly mustard brown. It's now obvious to the untrained eye that all these trees are dead or dying. It's only a matter of time before the brown needles are shed and the skeletons start blowing over, littering the landscape and blocking (and perhaps closing) the road -- if they don't go up like a torch first. A moonscape will follow, destroying the views from the million dollar homes nearby and driving many winter visitors to more bucolic settings.

Riding the chairs at Keystone, on a very windy day, I worried that the brown giants nearest the lift line could snap and fall, bringing disaster. It was frightening and depressing. And it's happening everywhere in Colorado, and in many Western states.

Yet the vocational activists who profess to love the forests most -- the tree hugging industry -- stand mute and passive in the face of the devastation, creating chaos and paralysis by playing their usual games in court and blaming a man-made crisis on natural causes or climate change. And worse, they want to severely restrict access to a third of these forests, impeding any possible response, through their roadless agenda.

But perhaps roadless areas serve a secondary purpose for gang green now. This way, fewer Americans will be able to venture far enough onto the "public" lands to see the destruction all this pointless conflict, all this costly litigation, all this paralysis, all this stupidity has wrought. They'll be able to hide this scandal, and their culpability in it, from the public eye.

Out of sight, out of mind. Right?