ECONOMY TRUMPS POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

By H. N. Burdett

The Republican spin on the 2010 U.S. Congressional elections -- from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to columnist George Will -- attributes the Democratic Party drubbing to a repudiation of liberalism. But framing the GOP victories as American voters' reaction to the Obama administration's health care and economic stimulus initiatives is right out of Republican strategist Frank Luntz's playbook: Repeat an hypothesis often enough and loud enough and it eventually becomes conventional wisdom. Or, in Dr. Luntz's own words: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth."

The "dry recitation of the truth" of the election day turnaround that gives the GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives and a virtual even split in the Senate is that the economic recession trumped ideology. People voted their pocketbooks, as surely as they did in 1932 during the Great Depression; then, Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party were voted out, Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism swept in and the Democratic Party reigned over Washington for a generation.

This year was somewhat different, mainly because when Barack Obama was elected two years ago, the theme of his campaign was his promise of Change. The economy was only dragging at the time he launched his drive for the presidency, but had not yet imploded. The average American voter probably doesn't place all that much stock in campaign rhetoric, but in 2008 George W. Bush's popularity had sunk as low as it ever had for any U.S. president. The idea of Change to a majority of Americans spelled Relief. As the economy worsened, our troops were (and are) fighting in two West Asian countries, with still no sign of weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't hard to read the doomsday handwriting on the wall for the Republican Party.

Two years later, the mess left by the Bush-Cheney misadventure has yet to be cleaned up and the multitude of Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes, and those still hanging on by a thread, simply ran out of patience. The Republican Party had nothing to lose by turning to a Frank Luntz "compelling story." Actually it was an old story. The same one the GOP used once upon a time in its unsuccessful attempts to defeat Medicare and Medicaid: the Democrats were leading the country down the dreaded path to socialized medicine. When you've lost your job and you can no longer make the mortgage or your kids' school tuition payments, does the slippery slope to 'socialized medicine' really top your list of concerns?

Obama's campaign promise of Change had been at first perceived as just another presidential candidate's fancy sounding stump speech. Still the notion of switching horses in the nation's capital sounded better and better to an electorate no longer comfortable with being led by an administration neck-deep in its commitment to foreign oil, fighting unwinnable wars for reasons that seemed to change weekly if not daily and financed by a program of borrow, spend and stick the grandchildren with the bill.

But after Obama was elected and the economy kept plunging deeper and deeper toward catastrophe, Americans soon realized that he didn't have an immediate solution to restoring economic stability. Frustration and anger mounted and had to be unleashed. The national consensus was that someone had to pay and in hard times the party in power traditionally must shoulder the blame, regardless of the degree of actual culpability. Consequently, the comfortable Democratic majority in the House was transformed into an equally comfortable, though not veto-proof, GOP majority.

Republican congressional leaders now sound the clarion that they are training their sights on undoing what they couldn't stop from happening during the previous two years when the Democrats had majorities in both houses, as well as their man in the White House. The apparent first order of business is to overturn so-called Obamacare.

Neither conservatives nor liberals are completely satisfied with either the health insurance or economic stimulus initiatives -- the two most stunning successes of Obama's first two years at the helm. But if the President succeeds in rigidly defending these achievements and the economy vastly improves over the next two years, both plausible possibilities, offensive rather than cooperative politics could backfire on the Republicans.

Flawed as the health insurance law may be, it still opens the door for providing coverage for up to 32 million Americans who were uninsured; that combined with the elimination of pre-existing health conditions as a rationale for denying insurance provides a strong rationale for not trashing the Obama initiative.

The Democratic Party argument for retaining Obamacare is further bolstered by the President's stated willingness to tweak it so that small businesses will not be saddled with an unfair burden of providing health care for employees. Senate Minority Leader McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner might be better advised to cobble a compromise, then loudly and frequently claim credit for improving the health care act, rather than torching it.

As for the economic stimulus plan, General Motors recently announced a $20 billion profit -- an indicator that the American automobile industry may be making a comeback that seemed only a few months ago to be highly improbable if not impossible. There were few Americans who did not deeply resent the bailout of the auto industry as well as selected financial institutions, but should the U.S. economy get its head above water before November of 2012 and the troops are back home, as Obama has pledged, the political landscape will look far different than it does today. In politics, a year can be a lifetime, two years an era. For better or worse, the electorate has an incredibly short memory.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL PRAGMATIST

by H. N. Burdett

I'll Never Forget It: Memoirs of a Political Accident from East Baltimore. Marvin Mandel with Jeremy Lott. The Maryland Public Policy Institute, 2010.

Baschert is Yiddish for a concept that literally translates as "destined" or "inevitable" and it can be positive or negative. There is no one to whom baschert is more applicable than Maryland's first and only Jewish governor, Marvin Mandel, the subject of this collection of anecdotes -- some amusing, some disarmingly wise, a few even poignant -- that will have to serve as his biography while a work of greater depth, detail and gravitas begs to be written. But when some Hopkins or University of Maryland scholar undertakes that formidable and worthwhile challenge, this slim volume in Mandel's own unequivocal words will be an invaluable source.

Mandel clearly has no qualms about describing himself as a "political accident" and actually relishes recounting how he stumbled into, rather than gloriously ascended to, progressively higher offices in a political career spanning nearly three decades.

It all began when, following his discharge from the army in the wake of World War II, Mandel began practicing law in Baltimore. He was approached by a city councilman about running for one of the then three seats on the Fifth Legislative District Democratic State Central Committee. Assured that the job was like being on a corporate board of directors "where you don't have to do anything," with classic Mandelian deadpan and a touch of Groucho Marxian syntax, he replied: "Okay, if I don't have to do anything, I'll do it."

He was subsequently elected to the committee, which basically functions to recommend to the governor individuals to fill vacancies left by elected Democratic officeholders should they occur in the district. Two years later such a vacancy occurred. But there was a problem. Mandel's two fellow committee members were beholden to rival political bosses, each of whom had his own candidate for the coveted open seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.

The decision was now Mandel's to make. But not wanting to antagonize either of the political leaders, he abstained. And he continued to abstain until an editorial in the Baltimore Sun took him to task for ill serving the Fifth District by denying it full representation in the General Assembly.

The committee called a meeting to settle the matter once and for all. Consequently, Mandel made his first ever visit to Annapolis: to take the oath of office as the newest member of the Fifth District's delegation to the lower chamber of the state legislature.
Soon afterward, Mandel's baschert kicked in again. The Speaker of the House named him to the powerful House of Delegates Ways and Means Committee, which holds hearings and evaluates each bill requiring an expenditure of state funds, then reports them favorably or unfavorably to the full House of Delegates.

In due time, Mandel joined a coup to depose the chairman of this major committee. The coup failed and Mandel's punishment was his removal from the panel. He told me later that the committee to which he was then assigned had not met in something like three years. It was then that the accidental delegate from East Baltimore set into motion his lifelong political credo of not getting angry but getting even.

Each bill introduced by the Ways and Means chairman promptly had an amendment attached, courtesy of Mandel. Amendments require a bill to be held over for 24 hours. On the next day, the chairman's bill would have another amendment to be considered. The chairman got the message and invited Mandel to rejoin his committee. Mandel humbly accepted.

When the committee chairman was elected Speaker of the House, Mandel succeeded him as chairman of Ways and Means, which, of course, could not have happened had he not resorted to his endless amendments ploy during his exile.

A succeeding house speaker was indicted by a grand jury in connection with information he had allegedly withheld regarding savings and loan companies he represented that had become the targets of an investigation. Governor J. Millard Tawes had someone in mind to serve as the new speaker. But House Judiciary Chairman Thomas Hunter Lowe called the governor's attention to a parliamentary rule mandating that a speakership vacancy be filled by the Ways and Means chairman. Mandel's baschert had shifted into overdrive.

On January 7, 1969, Mandel was the beneficiary of the crowning baschert of his political career. On that day, Ted Agnew, Maryland's hands-down most notorious political accident, resigned the governorship to assume his duties as Vice President of the United States under Richard Nixon. At that time, the Maryland Constitution had no provision for a lieutenant governor to succeed a governor who had resigned or was incapacitated. The document instead decreed that the new governor was to be elected by a joint session of the Maryland General Assembly. The legislature proceeded to do what would have been highly improbable had there been a statewide election: the lawmakers overwhelmingly elected Marvin Mandel Governor of Maryland.

To be sure, Mandel's extraordinary political journey had its share of negative baschert. There was his bizarre decision to announce by press release that he was seeking a divorce from Barbara Oberfeld Mandel, whom he had married when he was 21 years old and was the mother of their two children. The release was issued on an Independence Day weekend, perhaps suggesting Mandel's penchant for irony. Barbara proved that she, too, knew a thing or two about getting even rather than angry by refusing to move out of the governor's mansion. It was the governor who sought lodgings elsewhere. Though the new living arrangements of the state's first couple might have violated the state constitution, Maryland's attorney general had no stomach for pressing the issue.

And there was the matter of Mandel's indictment, followed by Maryland's trial of the century, his conviction and sentencing to a federal lockup in Florida -- all stemming from the "crime" of "mail fraud and racketeering," which the Supreme Court of the United States later ruled did not exist. Mandel is quietly adamant that most of the public outside of the legal community may not comprehend that there is a clear distinction between a pardon and a commutation of a sentence. President Reagan commuted Mandel's sentence; he did not pardon the former governor. "By accepting (a pardon), you are admitting you have broken the law, which I did not do," Mandel writes. "That's why Gerald Ford always insisted that by pardoning Nixon, he was passing judgment."

In sum, when Mandel adds up his lifetime score of positive baschert and subtracts the negatives, despite the torment and anguish associated with the latter, over breakfast in an Annapolis bagel emporium, the 90-year-old former governor tells me, "I've had a good life."

When the definitive biography is finally written, it will show that the kid from East Baltimore -- so shy that he delivered his bar mitzvah speech from halfway up the stairs inside of his family's Oakmont Avenue home, then immediately ran to his room rather than face the celebrants downstairs -- spearheaded the transition of a state long dominated by its rural outreaches into perhaps the most progressive political entity below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Future state historians may find themselves bewildered by how much was achieved by this quiet, confident politician's politician who emphatically was not cast from the mold of such legendary progressives as Teddy Roosevelt and Fighting Bob LaFollette. Mandel had more in common with the title character in Woody Allen's film, Zelig, who always just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Moreover, Mandel eschewed ideology and seemed to believe first and foremost in two precepts: that politics is the art of the possible, and in his own ability to see that the possible happened.

By taking salient parts from the failed draft Maryland Constitution, crafted in 1967 by some of the best minds in the state, Mandel led the effort to overhaul a creaky state government into a streamlined modern paradigm. Though he is East Baltimore to the core, he did it with his strongest support coming from the state's rural bastion of conservatism, Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Marvin Mandel will be remembered by those who served with and under him in the legislature and as governor, as well as the press that covered him, for getting things done; he was the quintessential pragmatist. In today's climate, when straying from the party line is viewed as heresy, when camaraderie, cooperation and compromise have been replaced by the politics of polarization, there are many worse things to be called.

# # #