Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

When I was a young reporter first breaking in at The Times, I had a terrific editor who from time to time would assign a story and say “Let’s blow this one out of all proportion.” I wonder if that same individual, who now works at the Statehouse, might have been talking to General Treasurer Frank Caprio last week.

Caprio took a simple idea: letting individuals, rather than just big institutional investors, buy the state’s tax anticipation notes, and he blew it out of all proportion by turning it into an appeal to get people to rally to the flag of the state and save the treasury from running out of money (or at least not being able to pay some bills) before Christmas. Such was Caprio’s entreaty that it led one headline writer to dub the notes as “war” bonds. (Maybe he or she talked to my old editor, too.)
Caprio took exactly the wrong tack in announcing the program the way he did.
If he had (accurately) described the idea as providing a place for people nervous about the stumbling stock market to dump the money they have in mutual funds and other investments into an instrument that will give them a small but relatively dependable interest rate for 8 months until the frenzy has, hopefully, run its course, he might have had a winner on his hands.
But instead the treasurer made it an appeal to patriotism for people to bail out the state, like they do in hurricanes and blizzards and times of war. That strikes me as a real loser argument.
People are unemployed, they are having a hard time making ends meet and a lot of us don’t know how we are going to keep the house warm throughout the winter, let alone send a kid to college. They are exceedingly unlikely to be moved by an appeal to invest what is left of their money to fix the fiscal mismanagement of the state by a bunch of politicians. The General Assembly and the governor and other state officials — the General Treasurer, maybe? — helped get us into this mess and we are supposed to go to the bank today and use our own money to pull their chestnuts out of the fire? I don’t see that happening, do you?
And that is not even considering the notion that taxpayers are being asked to buy tax anticipation notes to keep the state’s coffers filled until their taxes are paid. If Caprio can talk people into that, maybe he could become governor after all.
Something else to consider: Rhode Islanders wealthy enough to put money into these tax-free notes are going to earn interest that is for the most part going to be paid from the taxes of the people who are not wealthy enough to make such an investment.
Caprio says he expects state residents and businesses to buy up a good percentage of the $350 million in bonds the state is selling, but Governor Carcieri says, “In no way, no way, do we expect a significant amount of money” to come from mom and pop investors.
We’ll see by Tuesday which one of them was right.

Style over substance?
I have a question for Joe Sixpack: When was the last time your hockey mom wife dropped $75 grand on a shopping spree at Neiman Marcus and another $50 large at Saks Fifth Avenue?
I have a question for the McCain campaign: Couldn’t shopping at these snooty stores be considered “elitist”? After all, from everything I’ve heard about Sarah Palin, I figured she would do all her clothes shopping at L.L. Bean. 
Here’s another irresistible tidbit: According to the Associated Press, a celebrity makeup artist who works on some reality TV show I never heard of was hired to be Palin’s “traveling stylist” and got paid $22,800 for two weeks work this month. McCain’s foreign policy advisor, on the other hand, was paid $12,500 for the same two weeks. Can you say “style over substance,” boys and girls?

Had enough?
Back in 1994, the year of the Contract With America that saw Republicans take the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in nearly a half-century, Newt Gingrich put to bed, at least temporarily, Tip O’Neal’s old maxim that “All politics is local.”
He made the Congressional elections a national race, rather than a series of district contests.
The message was: It doesn’t matter what district you live in, or who the incumbent representative is. You should vote Republicans into Congress because the Democrats have been there too long, have become arrogant and corrupt, and take their power for granted even though they have been screwing things up for years.
It worked.
It now looks like Rhode Island’s Lilliputian GOP, or at least Governor Carcieri, is, after all these years, taking a page out of Newt’s playbook. Carcieri has made radio ads appealing for more Republicans to be elected to the General Assembly to help him move his initiatives forward — or at least stop obstructing them. (A separate but parallel group also connected with Carcieri, Transform RI, resurrected Gingrich’s 1994 slogan, “Had Enough?” for a highway billboard.)
Republicans are making a similar argument to the one Sheldon Whitehouse used to oust incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee two years ago. Their reasoning is: even if the incumbent got you a stop sign at the end of your street, or got a legislative grant for your Little League or Senior Center, at the end of the day, he or she is going to perpetuate the Democratic majority and everything it has been doing for decades. That should be and must be stopped. The only way to achieve reform is to at least narrow the lopsided Democratic majority. The only way to do that is to vote Republican. In other words, vote incumbents out because they are Democrats and elect challengers because they won’t be Democrats, (I am not making this argument, merely explaining it; I report, you decide.)
Rather than fight 113 district-to-district races, the GOP wants people to vote for the Republican brand — or, perhaps more accurately, against the Democratic brand — on a statewide basis. They want the General Assembly election to be a statewide contest.
It will be interesting to see if that works on Election Day.
A lot of people think that because of the presidential election, this is going to be a Democratic romp. But Democrats voting in the presidential election are supposed to be all about “change” and “new politics.” Well, Rhode Island Democrats are nothing if they are not Old Politics, and “change” in the Ocean State would mean electing Republicans.
It could be argued that the defeats of Sen. Daniel Issa of Central Falls and Sen. Stephen Alves of West Warwick, both powerful committee chairmen, augurs a desire for change, but they were beaten in a Democratic primary, so does that really count as change?
But the state is in such a horrific mess — with no one currently in power even offering any ideas for how to get out of it — that if at least some incumbents aren’t booted out by voters next week, what is the point of even holding elections? It would be the final proof that the state’s electorate is so pitiful — lazy, uninformed and stupid — that they can’t or won’t act in their own interests.
And in this political and economic climate, any moron who casts a single, unthinking, “straight ticket” ballot should be stripped of their right to vote for at least two election cycles.