No matter how much we resist, politics' impact unavoidable

Adapted from a guest column by Farrell Quinlan provided to the Arizonan quarterly published by the Arizona Capitol Times for the Arizona Contractors Association.

One fact of life that the Panic of 2008 or the Great Financial Meltdown (or whatever historians end up calling it) has reminded us is that no matter how hard we might try to ignore it, sooner or later, the consequences of government policy impacts everyone.

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you,” commented Athenian statesman Pericles 2,500 years ago in the cradle of democracy.

Today, with trillions of dollars flowing from Washington in various bailout schemes and billions of dollars in red ink here in Arizona – for good of for ill – politics has decided to take an obsessive and maybe even oppressive interest in you.

Here’s were a lobbyist might come in handy.

Sure, we all have a general sense of what a lobbyist does. Lobbyists serve special interests and get things from government that the rest of “us” can’t – if it were only as easy as that.

First off, everyone is a member of a “special interest.” Often, we are special interests many times over. Small business owners, teachers, construction workers, taxpayers, Social Security recipients, youth sports coaches, gun owners, nurses, doctors, lawyers, firemen, dog catchers, morticians, circus performers and a thousand other designations are all special interests who have lobbyists dedicated to looking out for their concerns.

We tend to see our own lobbyists as virtuous knights fighting the good fight against the despicable forces of the special interests when, in all candor, we’re all equally virtuous and despicable when it comes to influencing public policy.

We call them “special interests” for a reason. Human nature dictates when it comes to our own circumstance, there really is a special case to be made for our interests.

Some of the most important but difficult to quantify benefits a trade association membership provides its members are public policy representation and advocacy – otherwise called special interest lobbying.

During the first four to six months of every year, the Arizona Legislature meets in regular session to consider hundreds of pieces of legislation as well as produce a state budget that conforms to the constitutional mandate of being balanced. A typical session sees more than 300 bills pass out of about 1,200 introduced.

Part of the job for a trade association’s public policy team is to know the issues confronting their industry and making sure that the Legislature takes appropriate action on them. That can take the form of drafting legislation to address an issue, recruiting a legislative sponsor and supporting the legislation through committee hearings, amendments, passage by both chambers and signing into law by the governor. It can also mean opposing bad measures and/or offering amendments to improve legislation sponsored by other interests, special or not.

Trade associations also promote their industries by providing opportunities for direct contact between their members and the policymakers that have considerable power over their member companies and jobs. Either through face-to-face interaction with politicians by the association’s membership or through political action committee efforts to support pro-industry lawmakers, the trade association’s public policy team’s advocacy continues long after the conclusion of any legislative session.

“Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all,” to again quote the ancient Pericles. In this spirit, a trade association works to give its members the power to express the interests of their industry, especially the special ones.

September 11th, 2,000 years ago: "Quintilie Vare, legiones redde!"

Two-thousand-nine is the 2,000th anniversary of one of the most important battles in European history. September 11, A.D. 9 saw the conclusion the three-day Battle of the Teutoburg Forest between the Roman legions of Augustus Caesar under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus and the Germanic tribes under the leadership of the Roman-trained Arminius or Hermann the German. Caught over extended and, more importantly, over confident, Varus was ambushed in a heavily wooded area and cut down along with three legions and auxiliary troops, about 20,000 troops in all.

According to the Roman historian Suetonius in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Augustus was so traumatized by the defeat that until his death in A.D. 14 at the age of 77, he would often cry out Quintili Vare, legiones redde! ('Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!'). Moreover, to place an unmistakable exclamation point on the taboo associated with the shameful defeat, the three legionary numbers (XVII, XVIII and XIX) were never used again by the Romans for any of their armies, unlike other legions that were restructured — a case unique in Roman history.

The great loss caused Augustus to abandon his goal of establishing the Elbe River as the empire’s permanent frontier and withdrew to the Rhine River to mark the boundary between the Latin and German speaking worlds. Ever since, the French and Germans have been disputing Augustus’ settlement to the detriment of Europeans and the whole world for almost two millennia.

For the Romans, the Rhine border was defensible and held for 400 years until New Year’s Eve A.D. 406. On that momentous night, the Rhine froze over solid allowing a motley group of Vandals, Alans and Suebians to simply walk across at Mainz, initiation the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire in the West. Within three years, the Visigoths sack Rome itself accelerating a decline that ends in A.D. 476 with the cessation of the use of the title “Emperor of the Romans” in the West until the Frank Charlemagne revives the office in the year 800.

2009: Anniversary of Some Dubious as well as Distinguished Events

Today is the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Arizona icon Sen. Barry Goldwater who was born on New Year’s Day 1909 in Territorial Arizona. The Year A.D. 2009 will also see the 200th anniversaries of the births of Abraham Lincoln and British naturalist Charles Darwin who were born on the same day, February 14, 1809.

Aside from Barrack Obama’s relentless efforts to associate himself with the 16th U.S. President, Lincoln is set to get a well-deserved though probably over-the-top attention from our media this year. This includes a generally uninspiring commemorative redesign of the reverse side of the penny with four depictions of scenes from Honest Abe’s life.

The log cabin and rail-splitter designs are nice and appropriate. But the last two, outside the Illinois Capitol building and the inexplicable construction view of the U.S. Capitol Dome, are mistakes. The final two designs should have depicted something to do with freeing of the slaves and the Emancipation Proclamation or perhaps the Lincoln-Douglas Debates on the topic of slavery. The final design should have focused on the universal values embodied in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. Maybe a depiction of attention-starved Lincoln Administration domestic policy achievements like the railroads and creation of land grant colleges could have been featured instead of the Capitol scaffolding.

This year also sees the sad anniversaries of the Castro Bros. Communist Dictatorship on Cuba (50th, 1959) and Hugo Chávez’s socialist paradise in Venezuela (10th, 1999).

It’s the twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling on adherents to the “Religion of Peace” to murder “The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie (which has yet to be successfully carried out.) It’s also the 20th anniversary of .the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Pete Rose’s lifetime ban from baseball for gambling on the sport also began in 1989.

But 1989 should not be remembered for those dreary events. Instead, the iconic scene of Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 signaled the end of the Cold War with the West’s victory over Soviet Communism. What was so remarkable about the collapse was how peacefully it was accomplished. The notable exception to the bloodless revolutions toppling communism was in Romania where Christmas 1989 saw the lynching of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

As a native Vermonter, I cannot let pass the 400th anniversary of explorer Samuel de Champlain’s “discovery” and claiming the Lake Champlain area of Vermont for France in 1609.

June 11th will see the 500th anniversary of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII of England to Catherine of Aragon. Seven-hundred years ago saw the beginning of the “Babylonian captivity” (1309–77) of the papacy in Avignon by the French crown.

I’ll stop here. My next post will take a closer look at a pair of historic events, one 1,000 years ago and the other 2,000 years ago, that have define today’s world.

Obama/Gore 2008!!! Too Weird? Not Really

There's a movement to make former Vice President Al Gore the running mate of Barack Obama.

Seems a little crazy… a little weird too?

On the contrary, it wouldn't be the first time of double duty as vice president or as veep nominee.

There are actually three instances of something like this in our history.

New Yorker George Clinton (no relation to the 42^nd president) served as the fourth vice president of the United States, first under Thomas Jefferson from 1805 to 1809, and then (without interruption) under James Madison from 1809 until his death of a heart attack in 1812, becoming the first vice president to die in office. Jefferson and Madison were close political allies and Clinton did not seek to succeed Jefferson as president. He was happy to continue to serve in the subservient role to the Virginians.

But there is another more interesting example of a vice president for two different presidents.

Calhoun Strandles Adams/Jackson Fued

John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was both the cranky John Quincy Adams' and the volcanic Andrew Jackson's vice president (1825 to 1832) through a quirk in the way we elect our top two executives.

The 1824 election of Adams is the only presidential election to be decided by the House of Representatives when no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College.

At that time, there were no clearly defined parties that nominated a ticket for president and vice president. The "Democratic-Republicans" had four presidential contestants who received various forms of "nomination" ranging from congressional caucus to state legislatures. In the presidential race, Tennessean Andrew Jackson received 99 of 261 electoral votes or 38% – 32 votes short of the number needed to win the presidency. Massachusetts’ John Quincy Adams came in second with 84 electoral votes, former Georgia senator and then-Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford got 41 votes and House Speaker Henry Clay from Kentucky scored 37 votes.

The Constitution requires the top three vote-getters to be considered by the House of Representatives in the event of the Electoral College fails to elect a president. The House elects the president by one vote per state delegation rather than each member getting a vote. As the fourth-place finisher in the Electoral College, Henry Clay was dropped off the ballot. However, he was the Speaker of the House and at the least, had great influence over the House vote. When the state delegations’ votes were counted, Adams had 13 state delegations, Jackson won seven and Crawford four.

Adams became president through what Jackson supporters called a "corrupt bargin" that was revealed, so goes the conspiracy theory, when Adams asked Clay to be his to Secretary of State.

[Note: The 1824 election represented the third presidency in a row where the winner was the serving Secretary of State (James Madison, James Monroe and then John Quincy Adams.) Back then, the Secretary of State post was viewed as the clearest path to the presidency.]

Back to Calhoun… so, the 1824 Electoral College struckout on settling on someone for the top job but was able to decide on a vice president. Calhoun wanted to be in the mix for president in 1824 but failed to secure his home state's nomination. Instead he ran for the second job and won in a landslide to become the seventh Vice President of the United States.

Vice President Calhoun was not party to any "corrupt bargain" and was politically allied to Andrew Jackson throughout the Adams Administration. He was rewarded for his loyalty by being retained as the Jacksonian vice presidential nominee for the election of 1828. The Jackson/Calhoun trounced Adams and a new political party was born, the Democrats.

The first Democratic administration's honeymoon didn’t last long. Calhoun identified himself more as a South Carolinian than as an American. His sectional biases created explosive friction between himself and the unionist Jackson. Calhoun decided after the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that he could best protect the interests of South Carolina as its senator and resigned as vice president.

The Last Bearded Vice President

The other double vice presidential precedent is Charles Fairbanks. He’s the only person to secure the bottom of the ticket nomination from his party for two different presidential nominees in non-consecutive elections.

The Indiana senator was added to Theodore Roosevelt’s ticket in 1904 to fill the vacant vice presidency (VP TR had succeeded the assassinated William McKinley in 1901.) But when the Rough Rider promised not to run for a “third” term in 1908, his loyal veep was passed over for the presidential nomination in favor Teddy’s handpicked-successor, Secretary of War William Howard Taft of Ohio. But Fairbanks wasn’t through with vice presidential politics. He was the Republican Party’s 1916 nominee under Charles Evans Hughes.

And he was that close to achieving the office again. A flip of 1,887 votes in California from Woodrow Wilson to Hughes would have made Fairbanks the VP again after an eight year hiatus.

I’m not sure what to make of this trivia but an Obama-Gore ticket would clearly not be unique.

CRITIQUE & REVIEW: “Constantine the Great: The Man and his Times” by Michael Grant

“Constantine the Great: The Man and his Times” by Michael Grant is another entry in my “Year of Rome” theme. I have not been able to find a good biography of Constantine so this one had to do.

The author is truly a subject expert but not a very elegant writer. His work suffers in comparison to Anthony Everitt's who wrote two prior “Year of Rome” books I recently read, one on Cicero and the other on Augustus.

Grant does his best to breakdown the various biased accounts of Constantine’s life and times to portray the truth as he discerns it. He succeeds in only the barest sense. I finished the book without really knowing Constantine’s motivations. Where the coherent narrative of a flesh and blood person? Grant is so focused on revealing an unbiased account of the facts culled from Christian hagiography and pagan polemics, we lose the man.

A great case can be made that Constantine the Great was one of the ten most influential humans ever to walk the planet. Grant’s work is valuable but I still await a deeper study of the man.

CRITIQUE & REVIEW: “Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor” by Anthony Everitt

Book Finished and Review Coming Soon.

CRITIQUE & REVIEW: “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” by Norman Podhoretz

Book Finished and Review Coming Soon.