best friend: Broken Promise

MAD About Obama

The eternally irreverent MAD Magazine continues to refuse to treat the new President like a sacred cow, as illustrated in its latest issue:

Meanwhile it looks like President Obama has already broken one of his major campaign promises - to stop the insane practice of not giving bills enough time for public scrutiny before signing. According to Politifact:

One of President Obama's major campaign planks was making government more open and accountable. It's a reaction to a habit in Congress of rushing bills through the House and Senate without giving people much opportunity to know what the bills would do. Indeed, sometimes members of Congress don't even know what's in the bills.

So Obama pledged during the campaign to institute "sunlight before signing."

"Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them," Obama's campaign Web site states . "As president, Obama will not sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days."

But the first bill Obama signed into law as president — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — got no such vetting.

In fact, the Congressional Record shows that the law was passed in the Senate on Jan. 22, 2009, passed in the House on Jan. 27, and signed by the president on Jan. 29. So only two days passed between the bill's final passage and the signing.

Sweet Tax

I like this funny Boston Herald cover about Governor Patrick's proposed new tax on soda and candy.

Let's hope the legislature puts coal in his stocking instead!

Lost Chronicle

About ten years ago the Ogulewicz Chronicles, the 27 part political memoirs of former Springfield City Councilor Mitch Ogulewicz, was published in The Baystate Objectivist. All but about ten of them are now out of print, but here's one I came across recently that struck me as worthy of reprinting.

Between Two Worlds

In the elections for City Council officers which were held in January of 1985, Mitch Ogulewicz was elected by his colleagues to the post of City Council Vice President. Councilor Mary Hurley was elected to replace Brian Santaniello as the Council President. Yet the election of officers which elevated Ogulewicz to the Vice Presidency came despite a year of intense political activities that in some ways had alienated Mitch even further from the major players in the city’s power structure.

For one thing, the previous year had been a presidential election year. In 1984 most of the Valley’s Democrats were lining up behind Walter Mondale, who had been Vice President under former President Jimmy Carter. Mitch, however, was supporting Gary Hart, a Colorado Senator who was challenging Mondale for the presidential nomination. Mitch felt that Hart had a better chance of winning than Mondale, who besides being tied to the unpopular Carter Administration had also promised to raise taxes if elected. Ogulewicz felt that Hart represented a fresh face from a younger generation of politicians, and when Ogulewicz, who became Hart’s Western Mass co-chairman, introduced Sen. Hart at a pre-primary rally at Court Square, Mitch praised the Senator in Kennedyesque terms about “passing the torch to a new generation.”

At the time Mondale was attacking Hart as being all style and no substance, playing on a popular television commercial of the time in which Wendy’s Hamburgers was critical of their competitors for their skinny burgers. The ads showed a grumpy old lady looking at her hamburger and asking, “Where’s the beef?” Mondale appropriated that same catch phrase on the campaign trail to use against Hart.

In spite of those attacks Hart went on to win the Massachusetts primary. At the local victory celebration, Ogulewicz, his co-chair Lenny Wagner and a campaign worker posed for a photograph with Hart’s campaign platform between two slices of bread, as if to say, “Here’s the beef!” However, despite winning in Massachusetts, Hart soon lost both his momentum and the nomination to Mondale, who just as Mitch had predicted, went down to a landslide defeat in November.

Although Ogulewicz’s support of Hart had annoyed those among the local power structure who were mostly Mondale backers, it was nothing compared to the negative reaction to Mitch’s role in the U. S. Senate race that year. Incumbent Senator Paul Tsongas shocked the state of Massachusetts when he announced that he would be unable to seek re-election because he had fallen ill with cancer. One night soon afterwards Mitch received a phone call from Lt. Governor John Kerry, whose campaign for Lt. Governor Mitch had served as Western Massachusetts Chairman. Kerry asked Mitch for his advice on whether Kerry should seek the Senate seat made available by Tsongas stepping down.

Ogulewicz advised Kerry not to run, pointing out that Kerry had been Lt. Governor for little more than a year and suggested that it was too soon to seek another office, warning that it might make Kerry appear opportunistic. Kerry thanked Mitch for his advice, but did not follow it, running for and eventually winning the Senate seat later that year. Once again Mitch had agreed to head Kerry’s Western Mass operations. Yet now that Kerry was running from the position of already holding a statewide office, the senatorial campaign was much bigger and more sophisticated than the hard scrabble, grassroots campaign that Mitch had headed the first time Kerry ran. By comparison, Mitch felt that his role was now more ceremonial, with the nuts and bolts of the race being run by paid professionals.

Many in Western Massachusetts were passionately opposed to Kerry’s Senate race. That was because Holyoke native David Bartley (above) a former speaker of the Massachusetts House, was challenging Kerry for the nomination. Bartley was the hometown favorite, and the Valley’s power elites aligned themselves staunchly behind him.

Ogulewicz felt that he couldn’t get behind the Bartley campaign for a number of reasons. The primary reason was his longtime friendship with John Kerry. David Bartley, on the other hand, was someone he hardly knew. Mitch also disliked what he perceived as Bartley’s lack of commitment to a single political role. Upon leaving the legislature, Bartley had assumed the presidency of Holyoke Community College, despite not having the academic credentials for the job at the time. Bartley had taken a leave of absence at one point to serve in the administration of Governor Ed King and now he was taking yet another leave in order to run for the Senate. Critics wondered whether Bartley had actually retired into academia or if he was using the college merely as a paycheck and a powerbase from which to launch his own political agendas.

Yet what really disturbed Mitch was the behavior of some of Bartley’s supporters. He was shocked to hear Bartley backers saying things like calling Kerry a “flag burner" (although he participated in many rallies against the Vietnam War, Kerry denies he ever burned a flag) and in general implied that Kerry was not enough of a patriot to sit in the United States Senate. Mitch was annoyed that Bartley supporters who had never served a minute in the armed services were being critical of Kerry, a decorated combat veteran.

Ted Kennedy and John Kerry

As the Kerry/Bartley battle intensified, tempers started to fray and hard feelings began to form. Locally, much of the anger was directed at Mitch, who was thought of as disloyal to the hometown boy for leading the local fight on behalf of Kerry. Mitch tried to explain why he felt that Kerry was the better candidate, but no one would listen or even cut him any slack for being Kerry’s personal friend. As the Kerry campaign surged and the Bartley campaign sagged, Bartley’s supporters became increasingly embittered. Ultimately the race led to tensions with one of Mitch’s colleagues.

During the 1983 campaign, Mitch had run an aggressive door to door campaign, which is considered one of the most unpleasant ways to campaign because many citizens hate to be bothered at home by politicians, and many doors end up being slammed in your face. The only person matching Mitch’s pace was former Dimauro mayoral aide Francis Keough. They often ran into each other on the campaign trail and enjoyed talking and joking together about their campaign experiences. When both he and Keough got elected, Mitch had looked forward to working with his former campaign buddy.

It didn’t turn out that way. Keough was a team player anxious to get ahead in politics fast. That meant he was usually concerned with positioning himself on whatever side was winning. Meanwhile Mitch was becoming known as a boatrocker who would not sacrifice principle to ambition, which made Mitch's role on the Council the exact opposite of Keough's. One day Keough, a passionate Bartley supporter, walked up to Mitch and said something odd. “When all this over Mitch,” Keough said, referring to the campaign, “I want you to know that our friendship will be unchanged.” While there was nothing unusual in the exact words that Keough was speaking, there was something very disconcerting about the way he was saying them. While the words themselves suggested something nice, the odd tone in which they were spoken struck Mitch as having a facetious manner. In other words, he felt that what Keough really meant was the exact opposite.

So once again Mitch had a hard time comprehending people’s bad attitudes. It was almost as if he lived in two political worlds, one where big issues were at stake on matters of principle, such as in the John Kerry campaign, and another world of petty political mediocrities who fought viciously over local issues. Why did it seem impossible for him to make political choices without his opponents taking personal offense? Was it possible to disagree without being disagreeable? This herd mentality in Springfield that had everyone blindly going in one direction, with rejection toward those who would not follow, was foreign to Mitch’s style of independent thinking. How far were they willing to go in order to enforce their orthodoxy?

Mitch was about to discover just how far in the crudest possible way.

In the by and by I'll try to reprint more of this entertaining and enlightening series.

Eye of the Beholder

At Northampton's Smith College the ladies have a new symbol for their athletics program. Some use terms like strength and determination to describe what the new symbol inspires, while others see an angry bitch or a castrating feminist.

According to the Smith newspaper The Sophian:

After a yearlong effort led by the Spirit Mark Committee, the new Pioneer visual identity was revealed last December, a female figure head that has incited some controversy on campus.

The Sophian surveyed a group of students about their reactions to the spirit mark and found that, although there were positive reviews, a majority of students interviewed had unfavorable opinions about Smith's new visual identity.

Words used to describe the image ranged from "angry" and "frightening" to "ugly" and "masculine."

"I am really unimpressed by the new spirit mark," said Caroline Winschel '09. "I understand that whoever designed the image was trying to portray Smith as a school of strong women, but as I said in last year's ballot, the particular image simply looks pugnacious and angry."

Some students questioned whether the image fit the name of the Pioneers. "I think the spirit mark does not make sense with the Pioneers mascot. I like the mark, but it doesn't go with the name at all to me. If we were the Furies or something else, the mark would make sense, but not the way it is now," said Alissa Ortman '10.

In any case the new symbol came at a bargain price, it cost only $30,000 to design as opposed to the standard price of around one hundred grand.

Signs of the Times

I came upon these interesting signs in downtown Northampton today. I've never noticed this lady in red at Uncle Margarets before.