Speed Gibson

Tim Pawlenty

I had tweeted that Pawlenty would bow out around Labor Day.  He ended it today, apparently out of money.  But the money is just a symptom.  Even his campaign is a symptom, of a basically flawed candidate.  Two points before I continue.

One, I admire anyone who runs for office.  It truly is a sacrifice, at least the first time.  I respect anyone who wins, grudgingly at times when the candidate is more lucky than good.  So I of course admire and respect Tim Pawlenty's service to us as a two term Governor.

Two, those two terms were generally good for Minnesota.  His opponents would have done considerable damage, adding billions to the "budget deficit" as popularly defined.  For that I am grateful.

That said, Tim Pawlenty was a flawed Presidential candidate.  In a year that demands no half-measures and few inconsistencies, his record did not survive even a cursory fact check.  Pawlenty's misrepresentations of that record were also exposed.  Those watching the recent debate also saw desperation in trying to misrepresent Michele Bachmann's record, that her work against Obamacare somehow ensured its passage, for example.

Mostly, I think Pawlenty is an anachronism.  His approach to politics is at least a generation out of date.  The days are gone where you can change the message from place to place, time to time, to build a coalition to get elected.  The Internet never forgets, something the traditional media takes advantage of to heighten their usual contempt for Republicans.  And this isn't your father's GOP any more.  It's the era of Limbaugh et al.  Non-conservative positions, even traditional bringing home the bacon politics are at least challenged now.  In short, you just can't get away with this kind of stuff anymore.

And despite his record of Governor, I wonder if the voters sense what I do, that Pawlenty ultimately isn't really executive material, that his first, best destiny is as a legislator.  An executive always thinks two or three moves ahead.  Pawlenty decides issues in the moment.  It is Bachmann who comes off as a doer despite no time in an executive office.  Her campaigns, her fund-raising, her entire life are indeed very well managed and it shows.  And the voters seem to agree.

Word is that Pawlenty and the GOP party leadership have already started talking about a Pawlenty challenge to Senator Klobuchar in 2012.  This is a mistake.  Tim Pawlenty needs to take a oouple of years off, then perhaps take on Senator Franken in 2014.  During that sabatical, he needs to rethink who he is and what he believes.  He's a good talker but not a good liar, particularly when he wanders off script.

Richard Nixon came back from the political wilderness as the "New Nixon" to win election.  A "New Pawlenty" must arise from his ashes, one who understands Conservative principles and why his base values them so highly, especially now.  Making deals like his hero John McCain is yesterday's politics.  Given so much, I'd start worrying now if I was Al Franken.

Tell Me Again

Tell me again why not raising the debt ceiling would have been catastrophic.

Head In The Clouds

One of the best illustrations of the progressive mind set I've seen appears in today's (8/7) Minneapolis Star Tribune, headlining the Opinion Exchange section: Wait - Did I Vote For the Wrong Man? by St. Paul writer Bonnie Blodgett.  Your first clue is in the subtitle, that "if we'd elected a President McCain, at least there'd be no Tea Party." 

No indeed, why would a pompous reach across the aisle mushy maverick spawn such a movement, drawn from all ranks by the way, not just Republicans?  But regardless, so what?  Is there not room for all points of view in the arena of ideas, particularly those more closely drawn from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and our two hundred plus years of history?  Not in Blogett's fantasy world, where they only cloud the situation.

But now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all.

 On health care, she states:

"So-called moderates who admire Obama's cool and willingness to compromise argue that at least we got some health care reform. The reform Obama campaigned for contained a public option.

"When that far-sighted feature was bargained away, along with it went any hope of controlling spiraling health care costs through the creation of a larger pool of payers and providers from which consumers could choose."

The "so-called" adjective still puzzles me.  Moderates love to compromise, often drawing ire from both sides.  Her assumption that a government option, whose existence assumes and requires the destruction of almost all private options, would save money is fatuous.  Worldwide, it has only saved money by imposing rationing and lowering quality standards.  She needs to show us what the British are doing wrong with their Public Health Service before claiming the same structure would work here.  But it gets worse:

"There is no profit motive in this system, so there is no incentive to "grow" the government. Companies these days espouse the grow-or-die philosophy. Government does not."

So what is it that has been growing government, lately at stupendous rates?  Medicare and Medicaid have exploded to consume many times their original projected costs, as many opponents said they would.  And where or when has this "grow-or-die" desperation ever been published in a serious business book?  Companies exist to make a profit.  Always have, always will.  The notion that companies now seek short term gains is partially true, but a total consequence of fiscal, monetary, tax and regulatory policies that clearly punish longer term thinking.

Next up is the banking and housing collapses, and again she finds President Obama's lack of action or reaction disappointing.  I thought Dodd-Frank was going to fix all that, but here's another insight that tells me her radio dial is forever stuck at 91.1 FM.

"The only people who saw it all unfolding with perfect clarity, of course, were the architects of the collapse, those same fat cats who profited from the scam and whose minions are now in charge of our economy thanks to Obama's astounding and relentless naïveté."

There were outsiders who did indeed see this coming, though nobody she was likely to hear on NPR.  But on this we agree:

"Why Larry Summers et al. were ever asked to create reform out of the rubble is beyond my understanding."

One might think she truly is having the second thoughts the headline suggested, to the point where she might admit that yes, she voted for the wrong man.  After all, she goes after Obama, even if it was for not doing enough.  And she does have a couple of kind words for Senator and candidate John McCain.  Not really:

"People who tell me I should have supported Hillary Clinton aren't listening to what I'm saying. She would have been worse. I have no regrets that Obama was my candidate. I'm proud that I waited for hours in the sweltering heat to hear him accept the nomination, after writing him check after check and walking door to door campaigning for him.

"He had it all. That he squandered it I don't chalk off to inexperience so much as to a morbid fear of America's first black president being a one-term president."

Right on cue!  The race card!  That explains everything, why Obama was not the uncompromising hard left socialist she expected, not even the tabula rasa she could mold in her image like millions of voters and most of the press assumed.  Or as she puts it:

"If Obama wins, my hope is that with the race monkey off his back he'll turn into the president he wanted to be."

Forgive me, and even if you don't, people are always marrying the spouse they want them to be, not what they are.  They further assume the spouse will welcome their advice in raising their game.  So it is here politically, that her flawed choice will somehow become what he never was, what she has no reason to think will ever be.

I hate to be harsh, but this article has far more to say about its author than its subjects, something that should have been obvious even to the Star Tribune editors.  I would like to see the list of submissions they passed over to print this nonsense.

But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say I've changed.
Something's lost but something's gained in living every day.

I've looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions i recall.
I really don't know life at all.

Radio Silence

We as dirty rotten capitalists cannot complain, only sigh.  David Brauer at MinnPost is reporting that KTLK-FM (100.3) will soon be switching signals with KFAN-AM (1130).  Besides the loss of fidelity, this again consigns many of us to spotty reception, virtually none in office buildings or stores.

In my youth, when I was waiting for Bill Diehl, the Rajah of the Records, the Deacon of the Discs and Purveyor of the Platters to play Surfin' Bird, it was frustrating how poorly "Wonderful Wee-Gee W-D-G-Y" came in at night in St. Louis Park.  Their 25,000 watt night signal pattern is highly directional.  So I'm anticipating further trouble living another 10 miles further from their Bloomington transmitter.  I'll be running some experiments now.

I usually listen to Rush via podcast or dittocam, so that isn't much of a problem.  What will be problematic is picking up Davis & Emmer in the winter months, the best morning radio in the Twin Cities in my book.  The new KTLK-AM won't be able to power up to their 50,000 watt, more even pattern until sunrise, about 7:30 am at the solstice, halfway into the program.

Yes, KTLK has podcasts, including Davis & Emmer.  Yes, they have streaming.  Yes, I have a top notch semi-portable AM radio that should at least handle my night stand duty.  But it's annoying that comparitively worthless news programming on public radio stays on FM at our expense.  Hopefully, they will at least leave the Viking broadcasts behind.

UPDATE: It's official, the switch starting next Monday, August 15.  They have announced that FM 102.5 will also carry the talk programming, but not carry to my neighborhood.  The only good news is that 1130 reception is working surprisingly well - as long as you're outdoors.  No doubt ClearChannel thinks they'll pick up office workers with FM sports that ESPN 1500 can't reach.

Too Many Experts

I saw a statistic that said that about 9 percent of American adults hold a post-graduate degree, way up from maybe 3 or 4 percent 50 years ago.  And then I thought of Minnesota Senator Linda Berglin who is retiring this month.  Plaudits are flowing regarding her decades of legislative service in general and her expertise in health care issues in particular.  Mitch at Shot In the Dark sees this differently as do I, that she has been part of the problem all these years, not the solution.

She has no formal training in health care, and judging by the size and growth of State's Health and Human Services bureaucracy, hasn't really learned anything on the job either.  All she apparently knows how to do is spend money, at a pace that even some in her party find disconcerting for it threatens other areas like education.  And yet she is considered an expert, one the Senate will now clearly miss.  I say all this not to personally impugn her legacy, but to provide an example of a more general problem, that we have too many experts.

If all the experts agreed, this would be at most inefficient, like where there are over two dozen Chief Information Officers across the various state departments.  Their technical disagreements are likely quite minor, such that even one might provide sufficient overall guidance.  But in areas like health care, you can find any number of divergent opinions, each with its own cadre of experts.  Is salt really bad for you?  How about high fructose corn syrup?  Is "fast food" making us fat?  Which is the key to losing weight - diet or exercise?  What kind of exercise?  Low carb or low fat?  Supplements?  Organic?

With government, question one is not which expert is right, but whether or not you even need an expert.  Question two is what do you do when you realize that you know more than your assigned expert?  Consider another area: education.

From what I've seen both in general and specifically at the local level, the experts at the Department of Education (federal or state) provide nothing substantive to my local school district beyond funding.  They in fact can be annoying in demanding overly complex, unhelpful and duplicative testing, and - guess what? - issuing various permits.  They have alternatives like the Association of Metropolitan School Districts and any number of private consultants.

Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was reportedly expert-averse.  He resisted repeated attempts to expand the company headquaters lest it get overrun with experts.  He wanted his people in the field, doing something useful, staying closer to his customers.  It worked for Mr. Sam.  It could work for us, too, pruning back the number of experts wherever and whenever they over-extend themselves.