Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

You don’t hear this very often, but here goes: Three cheers for the leadership of the General Assembly!
The huzzahs come a couple of weeks late, because Patrick Kennedy’s announcement that he is leaving Congress, and its hectic aftermath, have kept political observers busy of late, but they are deserved and should not be overlooked.

The poobahs of the legislature frequently get heaped with (often deserved) criticism and downright scorn, but when they do good, it should be recognized. And Gov. Donald Carcieri recognized it when he backed down on withholding the third quarter car tax reimbursement from the cities and towns.
Carcieri said in a press release: “House and Senate leadership have made it very clear to me that the General Assembly does not intend to support my proposal to withhold the third quarter payment to cities and towns.”
The governor was not handing out huzzahs, however.  As a matter of fact, he was criticizing and scorning.
“I am very concerned that the General Assembly has chosen not to act on this matter,” his press release said. “Clearly, they do not understand, or they simply refuse to address, the magnitude of the financial crisis the State is facing. By not approving my FY 2010 supplemental budget as proposed, the General Assembly has put Rhode Island in an even worse financial position, and is failing to deal with the underlying causes of our perennial deficits — spending levels that cannot be sustained.”
No, they understood just fine. What they were doing by not approving the 2010 supplemental budget as proposed was preventing what Carcieri ostensibly doesn’t want: a tax increase — a fat, whopping property tax increase.
Even if the legislature did pass all of those so-called “tools” the governor is always talking about, none of that stuff would kick in for a year or more, in many cases not until after current contracts expire. Losing all that money in February of a budget year that ends in June means municipalities are faced with two choices: increase property taxes with a supplemental auto tax bill, or give up and not make payroll.
What Carcieri really wants is for teachers and guidance counselors who make about $75,000 a year to take a pay cut so that people making $300,000 a year or more can continue to see their taxes go down — not stay the same, not increase by just a little bit, no, continue to go down. Unfortunately, cops and firefighters and other municipal workers have already had to eat those kinds of cuts based on the silly notion that if we pump more money into the pockets of the rich, they will allow some crumbs to fall down to the rest of us. How much evidence will it take to convince our political leaders that such a scheme doesn’t work?

Lincoln Chafee picked the wrong year to seek re-election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 2006, but he may have chosen the exactly right time to run for governor as an independent this year.
The mood of the voters may be with him this time around. Governor Carcieri’s increasing unpopularity, and the electorate’s overwhelming sense that the state is moving in the wrong direction could poison the well for any Republican hoping to succeed him and with two long-time insider politicians — the sitting attorney general and general treasurer — vying for the Democratic nomination, an Independent Chafee steering his own non-partisan course could ride the wave of voter dissatisfaction to victory.
In an op-ed in the New York Times a week or so ago, Chafee summed up the national (and in many ways, local) political situation in a neat little one-quote nutshell: “Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all.”
That line absolutely sings, it is poetry — it sounds like a lyric from an early Bob Dylan song, back when he was young and angry.
Chafee should have that sentence printed at the bottom of every sheet of his campaign letterhead and paste it on every piece of advertising his team puts out.
If any campaign slogan could win an election, that might be the one.

Who has kept President Barack Obama locked up in an attic for the last 13 months and how did he finally escape?
That’s the thought that went through my mind when I watched some of that health care reform summit last week. There you saw the Barack Obama the American people voted for in 2008, sitting down with the leaders of both parties and trying to hash out a solution to one of the nation’s most vexing problems: the inability of so many people to afford any health insurance at all, and the inadequate and incomplete coverage so many others have to get by with.
Unfortunately, it was too little and far too late.
If Obama had convened that summit in February, 2009, he would have been dealing from a position of strength, taking advantage of a more than 2-1 Electoral College mandate to achieve an important policy goal.
Instead, by February, 2010, it had become a desperate, last-ditch move to try to salvage some small piece of what was supposed to be the crown jewel of his domestic agenda, one that he squandered the first year of his presidency booting away.
Obama was supposed to be the leader, grasping his post-partisan election mandate and running with it. Instead, he chose to let Congress carry the ball, and they wound up punting at every opportunity to the point where Obama may now be an irredeemably failed president.
Nobody elected Nancy Pelosi to be the leader of the free world, Harry Reid, neither. Why did Obama job out the vital issue of health care reform to those two? Obama has looked absolutely hapless standing on the sideline and watching Reid and Pelosi fumble the ball he should have been carrying to paydirt and spiking in the end zone. And his passive inaction while Congress dithered and dickered helped lead to the rise of the Tea Party movement that could very well bring about his downfall in 2012.
This problem was foreshadowed by authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in their terrific book about the 2008 presidential campaign “Game Change.” They recount a time in the spring of 2008 when a staffer tells Obama: “You need to take more ownership of this campaign. You’ve got a great team here, you’ve got confidence in them, they’ve got your best interest at heart. But what it feels like to me is they say, ‘Here’s your schedule for the week, here’s our theme — and off you go. I think you are the best political mind we’ve got, You ought to be more engaged.” Obama should have that guy, Pete Rouse, say that to him at least once a day for the rest of his term in office.
It’s too bad. Obama might have been a great president. Instead, he could come to be seen, as I have predicted before, as the Jimmy Carter of the 21st Century.

Sure, go ahead, fire all of the teachers and staff at Central Falls High School. Good idea!
Then what are you going to do next year when half the kids drop out, most are still not reading or doing math anywhere within shouting distance of grade level, and they are still going home to single-parent families in poverty, where little or no English is spoken?
Fire the new batch, too! Keep firing teachers every year if you have to and those kids will learn sooner or later. Won’t they?
Oh yeah, and vilify the union, too, while you are at it. That will help improve the situation enormously.
I remember covering Central Falls at the time the state took over the school system. It was supposed to become this great laboratory where the newest and most effective teaching methods and cutting-edge programs would be brought in to make Central Falls an educational model for the entire nation.
But since that hasn’t worked out as planned, a wholesale firing of the teaching staff seems like the most intelligent response, doesn’t it?