San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom took another step toward a full nanny city on Wednesday when he issued an executive directive mandating healthy eating in San Francisco. This, after he banned bottled water for city employees (which I agree with on fiscal grounds — bottled water costs money and honestly Hetch Hetchy water is excellent anyway), and ordered composting citywide.
Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive directive he hopes will dramatically change how San Franciscans eat.
All city departments have six months to conduct an audit of unused land – including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips – that could be turned into community gardens or farms that could benefit residents, either by working at them or purchasing the fresh produce. Food vendors that contract with the city must offer healthy and sustainable food. All vending machines on city property must also offer healthy options, and farmers’ markets must begin accepting food stamps, although some already do.
The mayor will send an ordinance to the Board of Supervisors within two months mandating that all food served in city jails, hospitals, homeless shelters and community centers be healthy.
And effective immediately, no more runs to the doughnut shop before meetings and conferences held by city workers. Instead, city employees must use guidelines created by the Health Department when ordering food for meetings.
Examples include cutting bagels into halves or quarters so people can take smaller portions and serving vegetables instead of potato chips.
“We have an eating and drinking problem in the United States of America,” Newsom said Wednesday. “It’s impacting our health, and it’s impacting our economy.”
Now honestly, this is an honorable initiative. People do need to eat healthier. Turning unused land into gardens is an excellent idea. But just how far does government need to intrude on citizens’ lives by now mandating how and what people eat? Obesity certainly is an issue in America (I struggle with my weight, too). But mostly these are personal, lifestyle choices that people make, unless there is a health issue like a thyroid problem.
California is already a nanny state of the worst kind (and this is coming from someone with genuinely progressive leanings). The state mandates all kinds of things from limiting cell phone use in cars to proscribing smoking in a car with a child in it. Again, some of these are excellent ideas. But for a state that can’t even pass a budget, doesn’t it have better things to do than intrude on people’s choices?
Now, San Francisco wants to worry about how people eat. President Obama has mentioned it as well, but you haven’t seen him issuing executive orders on this. The United States is a republic founded on the basis of personal liberty. We don’t need the government infringing upon that one little step at a time. Pretty soon Big Brother will indeed be watching.
The attorney general of Massachusetts filed a federal complaint against DOMA yesterday. They are suing on constitutional grounds, saying that married same-sex couples in Massachusetts are unfairly being denied the same federal benefits that married opposite-sex couples enjoy.
BOSTON — Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage, sued the U.S. government Wednesday over a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
The federal Defense of Marriage Act interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define and regulate marriage as it sees fit, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. The 1996 law denies federal recognition of gay marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
Massachusetts is the first state to challenge the federal law. Its lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, argues the act “constitutes an overreaching and discriminatory federal law.” It says the approximately 16,000 same-sex couples who have married in Massachusetts since the state began performing gay marriages in 2004 are being unfairly denied federal benefits given to heterosexual couples.
“They are entitled to equal treatment under the laws regardless of whether they are gay or straight,” Coakley said at a news conference.
[snip]
The lawsuit focuses on the section of the law that creates a federal definition of marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.”
Before the law was passed, Coakley said, the federal government recognized that defining marital status was the “exclusive prerogative of the states.” Now, because of the U.S. law’s definition of marriage, same-sex couples are denied access to benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including federal income tax credits, employment benefits, retirement benefits, health insurance coverage and Social Security payments, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit also argues that the federal law requires the state to violate the constitutional rights of its citizens by treating married heterosexual couples and married same-sex couples differently when determining eligibility for Medicaid benefits and when determining whether the spouse of a veteran can be buried in a Massachusetts veterans’ cemetery.
This is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the line of attack that a successful lawsuit has to take. It seems to me that DOMA is unconstitutional and it always has been. It is also, as Emma Ruby-Sachs notes today in the Huffington Post, the conservative argument against DOMA.
But yesterday, the Attorney General of Massachusetts filed a complaint that chiefly argues DOMA’s violation of state’s sovereignty over the definition and regulation of marriage.
The genius of this complaint is that it takes a conservative argument — that liberal states should not be permitted to impose their tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality on the rest of the country — and turns it around to benefit a state that really pioneered gay rights in the U.S.
Even a conservative justice would support the notion that federal encroachment over those few areas where states have sovereign jurisdiction is unconstitutional. In this case, that principle supports, at the very least, limiting the application of DOMA when it affects state programs with federal funding.
If a conservative justice chooses to oppose the argument put forward by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, then their logic could be used in the future to justify federal enforcement of equal rights on those states that oppose same-sex marriage. If state’s no longer have absolute jurisdiction over marriage, a liberal government can interfere with a conservative state’s policies.
Coakley’s lawsuit will likely be joined with Gill et al. and the two will proceed as the most viable challenge to DOMA (many think that Smelt threw too many punches and doesn’t have the same institutional support as the Massachusetts suits since the lawyers involved were not working closely with Lambda Legal and other LGBT litigation groups with long histories in the gay rights movement).
It also has the support of Senator John Kerry. Kerry, a lawyer by training, argued way back in 1996 in the Senate, that DOMA was unconstitutional.
His reasoning then, that the full faith and credit clause would be threatened by a law that refused to recognize marriage rights potentially given by some states and not all, has not been popular in modern law suits. Perhaps this is because the trend on hot button social issues has been towards state sovereignty and full faith and credit undermines that sovereignty.
Hence the genius of Coakley’s argument.
We can all look forward to the slow, grueling process that is the march to the Supreme Court. And hopefully, by that time, a number of new states will join the same-sex marriage party.
But Coakley’s suit is significant. It is a smart, novel attack on a law that is clearly unconstitutional, but also has the support of a waning, yet still significant portion of the American population.
Hopefully this lawsuit will prevail. Congress did overstep its bounds when it passed DOMA in 1996. The law was then, as it is now, discriminatory and wrong. It has been 13 years. If Congress can’t find the backbone to repeal DOMA (and DADT), hopefully the courts will. Perhaps the conservative argument that Massachusetts is making will prevail.
Sarah Palin gave notice to Alaska over the weekend, saying that she would resign her governorship effective July 25. She also will not seek re-election in 2010. So just what is she thinking? No one knows for sure, although many people are trying to figure it out. I don’t get it myself.
Palin, 45, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate who has an ardent following among conservatives, had been expected to announce Friday that she would not seek re-election after her term ends in 2010. But, surrounded by her family, she blindsided even Alaska political veterans when she announced in a meandering statement that she will step down July 25 and turn over the reins to Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell.
[snip]
Palin, who has been the target of a series of ethical complaints in Alaska, delivered a rambling and defensive announcement surrounded by her family, and didn’t pinpoint a reason for the decision. She said she would be “taking my fight for Alaska in a new direction.”
“My choice is to take a stand and effect change and not just hit our heads against the wall,” she said. “We know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time.”
Palin noted that she had intended to announce she wouldn’t run for a second term, but “I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks … then I thought, that’s what’s wrong.”
“They hit the road, they draw a paycheck, they kind of milk it, and I’m not going to put Alaska through that … the same old politics as usual.
“All I can ask is you trust me with that decision,” Palin said. “I cannot stand here as your governor and allow the millions of dollars and all that time to go to waste, just so I can hold the title of governor.”
Even many of her supporters called quitting her job in midterm an act of political insanity – hardly an argument for a presidential candidate trying to demonstrate the capacity to tackle the nation’s toughest problems. And the timing of the announcement of such a major decision was puzzling – on the start of a three-day holiday when important news tends to get lost.
Though Palin said she had been considering her decision for weeks, state officials told Alaska media they were completely surprised by the announcement.
The move is the latest in a series of headline-making events for Palin and ignited a debate about whether it would extinguish – or fire up – her presidential aspirations.
“That’s the $64,000 question: Is she fed up with politics, or does it put her in a stronger position to run for president?” Whalen said. Voters “may forget if you leave your job, but they don’t forget every time you leave the state and an ethics complaint is filed. Alaska, as much as she loves her job, becomes an enormous burden if she wants to run for other office.”
Palin referred in her announcement to the ethics complaints, which she has dismissed as politically motivated.
It’s an unorthodox move to be sure, if she wants to run for president in 2012. You would think that retaining the office of governor would give her a “bully pulpit” of sorts. But she’s giving that up. But why? I can’t see that this move helps her politically, even though she remains quite popular with the Republican base. It looks to me like another indication that she is not ready to be president and that she never will be. (Incidentally, this also makes McCain look even more irresponsible in picking her to be his running mate.)
There has been some speculation that because her personal legal bills are about $500,000, she needs to get a talk show or write a book or go on the speaking circuit, or some combination of all of those. Does it give her an opportunity to rebrand herself as someone who is ready to be president? Maybe. But I doubt it.
I’m mystified by this move. Why would she do this? I really don’t get it. What do you think? Is she crazy, or crazy like a fox?
Another July 1 has come and California does not have a budget. That’s been the case since I moved here in the mid 1990s; in fact that has been the norm for longer than that.
This time, though, the impasse is particularly bad.
California’s historic fiscal crisis became even more difficult to resolve today, after the state Senate failed to pass three bills that would have averted an immediate cash crunch.
The bills – which would have made immediate cuts in schools, saved the state additional cash by deferring certain payments to schools and made technical changes in how the state shifts funds from redevelopment agencies to schools – were unable to gain the required two-thirds majority support in the Senate by the midnight deadline. The failure of the bills could push the deficit to more than $27 billion.
Legislators are trying to solve a $24.3 billion deficit, which just got worse by another $3 billion because they missed the deadline. Now the state will begin to issue IOUs to pay its bills probably as early as tomorrow.
Democratic legislators are trying to deal with that piecemeal, but Governor Schwarzenegger insists that the legislature deal with the entire deficit at once, something that seems to be an impossible task. Schwarzenegger is also insisting that there be no new taxes on anything and promises to veto anything that passes that contains new taxes. He is insisting that the legislature not kick the can down the road. Personally, I think Schwarzenegger is being needlessly hardheaded on this. There is no pragmatism in California at the moment, just people in entrenched positions, launching occasional forays against the other side’s emplaced machine gun nests.
The legislature is hindered by a requirement that budgets pass with a two-thirds majority, a provision that was enshrined in the state constitution when Proposition 13 passed in 1978. That measure is still popular in California, largely because people vote (understandably) with their own pocketbooks in mind. That, and all the mandated spending passed by California’s overly robust referendum system, has hog-tied the legislature. It is a genuine struggle each year to get the required majority and to keep the budget within constitutional limits. Because you know that if they don’t, someone will sue.
There is no help from anywhere. The federal government doesn’t really want to help, although if California makes all the budget cuts it needs to make, it will deepen an already bad recession in California and in the rest of the country.
States across the nation are suffering the effects of lost tax revenue in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. California’s woes are similar and different in kind, played out on a grand scale in a state that boasts the world’s eighth largest economy and a Hollywood star in the lead role. After voters rejected a slew of convoluted budget-balancing measures, the governor has proposed cuts to programs that would make California more like a struggling Third World state than 21st century America: welfare subsistence benefits would end, 1 million poor children would lose health care, college aid for the state’s best and brightest would be phased out, nonviolent prisoners would be released, hundreds of state parks would be shuttered, and thousands of teachers would lose their jobs.
[snip]
This week, however, the Obama Administration said it was not going to do anything to help California right now, believing that the state should try to get its budget mess in order first. There are good reasons for the Treasury not to rush to California’s aid. If it backstops Sacramento, rewarding the state’s bad behavior, it would set an example for other states to follow. A nightmare scenario: the Federal Government backs California’s loans, which leads to a downgrading of the Treasury’s credit rating and the unnerving of the global credit markets. Spooked, the Chinese government, which currently bankrolls a large portion of the U.S. deficit, decides to take its money elsewhere.
Stark news indeed. California is in shambles, a far cry from Pat Brown era, when the state spent loads of money on freeways, aqueducts, schools, universities that were the best in the world.
So, how did the state get here? I’ve alluded to that a little above. Proposition 13 bears much of the blame. It requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature to pass a budget or to raise taxes. Then we have other propositions — like Proposition 98 that sets education spending levels — that mandate state spending but doesn’t say how the legislature has to pay for that mandated spending. It’s a real mess (and I know I’ve over-simplified it). California’s dream, as Harold Meyerson writes today, is decimated.
In Sacramento, they can hear the chimes at midnight. State legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been told by State Controller John Chiang that he will be compelled to pay the state’s bills with IOUs starting tomorrow unless they come up with a way to close California’s mammoth $24 billion deficit.
[snip]
But California is a special case simply because it’s so big. Closing California’s budget gap entirely through cutbacks in programs, as Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the legislature propose, will deepen not only the state’s recession but also the nation’s. Fully 1 in 4 of the nation’s underwater mortgages, for instance, are on California homes, and the effects of the governor’s proposed cuts — which UCLA’s Anderson School of Business estimates will cause 60,000 state employees to lose their jobs — will be to create a new wave of foreclosures and toxic assets on the banks’ books. California accounts for 12 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and a disproportionate share of the federal government’s revenues (and for every dollar that Californians pay to the feds, they get just 80 cents back in services).
Right-wing ideologues see the crisis as an opportunity to shrink government regardless of the consequences. Schwarzenegger is proposing to end welfare, not just as we know it but altogether, and to throw 1 million children off the rolls of the state’s healthy families program. But the consequences of closing the deficit simply through cutbacks will be felt by more than the poor. Already reeling from $15 billion in cutbacks that the state put through in February, many school districts, including that of Los Angeles, have canceled summer school this year. Scholarships that enable students of modest means to attend California’s fabled university system have been slashed. Most of the state’s parks may have to be closed as well.
The terrible irony in decimating the public sector to save the state is that the California that was the epicenter of the postwar American dream was fundamentally a creation of government. Fighting a Pacific war during World War II compelled the federal government to spend billions on California industry and infrastructure, and the state was the leading beneficiary of Pentagon dollars during the Cold War. As Kevin Starr, California’s leading historian, points out in “Golden Dreams,” his brilliant new history of the state in the 1950s and early ’60s, fully 40 percent of all defense dollars for manufacturing and research in 1959 went to California, anchoring the state’s booming economy in a well-paid workforce that was either unionized or professionalized, and seeding an electronics and high-tech sector that was to blossom in the following decades. Building on that prosperity to create more prosperity, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — two Republicans, one Democrat — invested state dollars in schools, universities, freeways and aqueducts that were the best in the world. The Golden State was never more golden.
Today, its governor seems determined to turn that gold to dross. On Monday, the Democrats in the legislature passed a budget that included cuts of $11 billion, levied a tax on oil companies and tobacco, and raised auto registration fees by $15 per car to keep the state parks from closing. Schwarzenegger reiterated his refusal to raise any taxes or fees and said he would veto the budget.
From a model for far-sighted investments in the future, California has become a state that uninvests in the present and has no vision at all for the future. Proposition 13, enacted by state voters in 1978, effectively blocked its cities and counties from funding their own endeavors, and the Republican minority in the legislature, abetted by Schwarzenegger, has made it all but impossible to invest in the kind of projects that Warren, Knight and Brown undertook. Today’s California visionaries are calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the plainly dysfunctional rules by which the state governs itself. It is not only Californians but also America that has a stake in their success. A California that decimates itself during recessions drags the rest of the nation down with it.
I agree with the suggestion in the last paragraph of Meyerson’s piece. It’s time for a constitutional convention in California. The system of government we have now is not working. When something doesn’t work for as long as California’s constitution hasn’t worked, it’s time to try something else. Prop 13 needs to be repealed (as does Prop 8, for that matter). The people need to stop mandating spending that sounds good but isn’t actually provided for, putting the legislature behind the 8-ball. The referendum system needs to be completely overhauled.
California needs to dig out of this mess, and will probably require federal help to do it. But it has to help itself in the long run and enact some sensible political system reforms so that this doesn’t happen again.
UPDATE: Governor Declares State of Emergency
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency today citing the Legislature’s inability to pass a comprehensive solution to solve the state’s $24.3 billion deficit.
The Republican governor called a legislative special session under Proposition 58, which requires lawmakers to adopt a plan to close the deficit within 45 days.
In addition, the governor signed an executive order forcing 220,000 state workers to take a third furlough day without pay beginning this month.
What good will that do? The legislature can’t fulfill its constitutional requirements to pass a budget already.
The Republican Party is in the wilderness, in its “Lord of the Flies” period. As it tries to find its way back into the light (and into political power), it is casting about — somewhat wildly — looking for a new national leader. It doesn’t have much to choose from at the moment.
A large part of the reason for that is how the GOP sold itself out to the “Religious Right” and to social conservatives. That strategy worked quite well and kept the Republicans in the White House for twelve years under Reagan then Bush the Elder, and another eight years under Bush the Lesser. But the wedge issues — abortion, gay rights — are not working like they did. Everyone agrees that the number abortions must be reduced, even if they don’t agree on how. Gays are gaining acceptance as more and more people get to know us and see that we’re actually people living staid lives.
So the GOP looks for its leader. And because they’ve sold out to the moralists and have been proven to be human, they don’t have a leg to stand on. From Maureen Dowd’s column over the weekend:
The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.
That won’t be easy for them. And honestly, I can’t see any of the Republicans that Dowd named being able to do that. They’re too tainted by their own scandals, their own peccadilloes, their own humanity.
I don’t doubt that Mark Sanford loves Maria. He’s a man adrift, cut loose from the things that kept him in line — his faith, his marriage, his office. He did that most human of things — he fell in love. (And no, that does not excuse his infidelity.) In a way, that makes the argument for same-sex marriage as well as anything the gay rights movement could say.
It’s time for the Republicans to move away from the Christianists, as Andrew Sullivan calls them, and move back into the American mainstream. Enough sanctimony and piety. It’s nearly always false anyway, and the American people see it for what it is. The GOP is not going to win anything if they don’t. They’re not going to be a vigorous, honest loyal opposition if they don’t. That, as I’ve said before, is bad for the country.
Today was Dan Froomkin’s last column (go read it; it’s an excellent valedictory) on his White House Watch blog on Washington Post.com. When the news broke, I said that this was not a bright decision of the Post’s; they’re losing a strong voice for accountability in government. I still think that. The Post will miss him (even if it doesn’t know it yet), but his readers will follow where he lands and his voice won’t be lost. It’s sorely needed these days.
When I last checked, the journalists’ jobs were supposed to be about holding government accountable, holding government’s actions up to the light so that the people could see what the government was doing in their name, and decide whether they liked those actions. All too often, though, we see members of the media acting basically as stenographers for those in power, writing busily about facts without having taken a second to think that those facts might not actually be facts after all. Then they give us an opposing viewpoint in the name of balance without stopping to think if those talking points are facts. It’s a world of spin and reporters allow themselves to be spun too often.
And that’s only one part of what’s wrong with the media these days. The celebrity news culture detracts from coverage of stories that actually matter. Michael Jackson’s death — not that his death isn’t news — pushed any coverage of the unrest in Iran (for example) off the cable channels. The media seem to be more interested in covering stories about people who are famous for nothing other than being famous and those missing white woman (or child) stories wall-to-wall. There’s room for that kind of stuff; but it’s more important that the accountability news not be the filler as it too often is right now.
The problem, apparently, is that holding government accountable isn’t sexy, doesn’t sell newspapers and doesn’t drive television ratings. So how do we get past that and get back to covering the stories that really matter? Would a Watergate-type story break today? That was a couple of reporters digging, filing story after story. I don’t think it would, and that’s a shame.
That’s the kind of work that Froomkin did, and will do when he lands at his next gig. But he shouldn’t be one of the few doing it.
Leaving aside the sordid details (and what is it with all this crying in Argentina? I suppose we have to thank Andrew Lloyd Weber for this) of Mark Sanford’s affair (you can read the emails between Sanford and Maria at The State), this latest revelation from a prominent Republican further extends the GOP’s time in the wilderness (quoted article below from this New York Times link).
Coming a week after John Ensign’s confession that he had had an affair with the wife of a staffer (she was also a staffer of his), this is another bombshell the Republicans just didn’t need. The Republicans’ search for a national leader just got extended. Sanford was, by all accounts, seriously thinking of running for president in 2012. That dream now appears to be over.
Republicans were just starting to breathe a little easier.
The news that Senator John Ensign had had an affair with a former aide who was married to another former aide was fading. Polls showed some voter impatience with President Obama’s policies, if not with the president himself. And the Politico, the insidery Web site that is widely read in the capital’s political precincts, even featured an article exploring the possibility of a Republican Party comeback.
Then Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a fiscal conservative seen by many Republicans as an attractive standard-bearer for the next presidential campaign, went missing. Worse, he returned.
His confession on Wednesday that he had been in Argentina with a woman not his wife — and not hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had said Monday — was another jolt of bad news for a party that has struggled to get off the ropes all year.
That it was the second such confession in little more than a week from a potential Republican presidential contender — Mr. Ensign had been exploring a run in 2012 as well — left party leaders dazed. They spent Wednesday alternating between gallows humor and yet another round of conversations about what the party stands for and who will give it its best shot to retake the White House.
“Personal circumstances over the course of the last week have managed to shrink the front line of the 2012 possible-contender list by 30 percent,” said Phil Musser, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association.
Who does that really leave as viable candidates for the Republican nomination in 2012? Tim Pawlenty? Bobby Jindal, who showed that he wasn’t ready with his disastrous response to Obama’s speech to Congress? Newt Gingrich, who has all kinds of baggage? Sarah Palin, who really isn’t ready and can’t seem to form a coherent thought? Mitt Romney? Mike Huckabee? Haley Barbour? I honestly have a hard time seeing any of these Republicans as viable candidates in the general election against Obama.
One by one, those who have been publicly discussed as possible Republican candidates in 2012 have stumbled.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana suffered a political setback after even his fellow conservatives harshly critiqued his televised response to Mr. Obama’s prime-time address to Congress in February. The speech, which was supposed to provide a moment to shine in front of a national audience, instead became fodder for late-night comedy.
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee who was eviscerated by some of her own political aides at the end of last year’s presidential race, continued to get national attention, but hardly the kind likely to help convince voters that she would be a substantive candidate. The father of her unwed teenage daughter’s baby feuded openly with the Palin family, and the governor exasperated some Republicans in Washington with her off-again, on-again plans for headlining a fund-raiser there.
After basking in glowing reviews among political pundits this year, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, had to apologize for a post on Twitter in which he called Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, “racist” for saying that she hoped Latinas would be generally better equipped to make judicial decisions than their white male counterparts.
Another possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, fell out of contention when he accepted Mr. Obama’s offer to become ambassador to China, robbing the party of a rising star.
All of their troubles have served to improve the prospects of other contenders who have generally stayed out of the spotlight this year, or have ventured into it only gingerly, like former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.
So, as I asked above, who does that leave? For me, there really are no leaders of a national caliber in the Republican Party at the moment. I know that 2012 is a long ways off, and that the mid-term elections next year will be telling. But who’s the Republicans’ leader?
I’ve lamented this fact before. A strong loyal opposition is essential in our democracy. The country is not served well if one party — Democrat or Republican — has total power in Washington. We need good ideas from both sides of the aisle on issues from defense to foreign policy to health care to economics.
“I think there is somewhat of an identity crisis in the Republican Party,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an evangelical group in Washington. “Are they going to be a party that attracts values voters, and are they going to be the party that lives by those values?”
I think the answer to Perkins’s last question is “no.” The Republicans need to move past trying to attract “values voters” and using issues like gay rights as wedge issues. They need to stand for conservative values — smaller government, for one. They need to stop people like Tony Perkins from taking over the party again.
It’s time for the Republicans to take a hard look at themselves and figure out what, exactly, they believe in and who they want to have carry the banner. Then they need to tell the American people. If it resonates, they’ll win. It’s painful for them right now, but they should take this opportunity to figure it all out and then emerge stronger from this political winter.
The question isn’t whether South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford has the right to take time off. He unquestionably does. The issue is that he essentially disappeared into the ether, without telling his staff (or his wife and children) where he was going. I can tell you that — in my house — that would be a large problem between my partner and me, if I were to run off for almost a week without saying anything or getting in touch. She’d let me have it, and she’d be right to do so.
The issue is a bit deeper for him, though. He disappeared without telling his family or his staff. He’s also the highest-ranking elected official in South Carolina. He’s back now, of course, and not from the Appalachian Trail (as his staff said), but from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has a duty to the people of South Carolina. No disasters appear to have happened during his absence, but something could have happened. Hurricanes, for example (and yes, I know it’s early in the season), have been sighted in South Carolina from time to time. He has a duty to tell his staff where he is and where he can be reached. Buenos Aires is, after all, a long plane ride away from South Carolina.
Did he lie to his staff about where he was going? Did he not tell them anything? He clearly couldn’t be bothered to tell his wife. And what was he doing in Argentina, and whon was he doing it with?
The issue, really, is his apparent lack of responsibility. This, from a guy supposedly interested in running for president in 2012. If I lived in South Carolina, I’d be wondering what made him think he could just disappear — poof! — without saying anything. And I’d sure think twice before I voted for him for anything (including dog catcher) again. And I were his wife, I’d sure be waiting to have a conversation with him when he got home.
UPDATE: Mark Sanford, Mr. Family Values, was in Argentina to visit a woman with whom he had been having a secret affair.
After going AWOL for seven days, Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday that he’d secretly flown to Argentina to visit a woman with whom he’d been having an affair. He apologized to his wife and four sons and said he will resign as head of the Republican Governors Association.
“I’ve let down a lot of people, that’s the bottom line,” the 49-year-old governor said at a news conference where he choked up as he ruminated with remarkable frankness on God’s law, moral absolutes and following one’s heart. His family did not attend.
The woman, who lives in Argentina, has been a “dear, dear friend” for about eight years but, Sanford said, the relationship didn’t become romantic until a little over a year ago. He’s seen her three times since then, and his wife found out about it five months ago.
He told reporters he spent “the last five days of my life crying in Argentina” and the affair is now over. Sanford, a rumored 2012 presidential candidate, refused to say whether he’ll leave office.
“What I did was wrong. Period,” he said.
You just have to love the honesty by which some politicians live. These, of course, are the same people who will excoriate another person for who he or she loves. I don’t care a bit about the affair. That’s between Sanford, his family, and the woman. This country (and, indeed, history) are rife with examples of politicians who can’t seem to keep their zippers zipped. But it’s one more example that points out the hypocrisy these politicians — especially Republicans — have. You just have to love it.
