Democrats Have to Learn to Win Elections Again

Upon reading former Sen. Jeff Bingaman's recent endorsement of Damon Martinez for Congress as published in the Daily Post, I was disappointed that the best that our former Senator could think of for compelling issues that a candidate for U.S. Congress would face were those I would consider regional, second tier, or those driven by identity politics. Maybe that's why we Democrats lost control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and something like over a thousand elected offices in this millenium. Not to mention all those judicial appointments that other party is making. Maybe we need a  lesson in The Vision Thing.

The vision thing means ideas that can win elections and pull back the political center. Here are some issues.

1. Pull back the center. As Dwight Eisenhower said, "The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters".  The two major parties, which are alienating moderates into becoming independents in droves and encouraging  forms of tribalism, must  stop playing only to their base and start playing ball with the center and the opposition again. While Dems may not be condemned to permanent coastal status in a red Flyover America (and a minority in Congress), polarization ensures that little will be done in Washington and that what little gets done might soon be undone.

Forswear polarizing issues in favor of consensus is a good start. Last year,  Jon Hendry, the President of the NM Federation of Labor, told a meeting of Santa Fe Democrats to, when possible, stay away from topics that drive moderate and conservative Democrats away from the party.  Gun control was one he explicitly called out. It is more important to win elections, win back the center, and fix the economy so that it works for most of us again instead of for the 1%. Many other problems (gun violence, drug abuse) will start to take care of themselves if people have hope again. One can find bipartisan ways to address gun violence and other issues without senselessly making hot buttons out of them. Let's find a way to stop making red electorates redder, blue electorates bluer, and instead get people talking to each other again.

Part of this is also a primary election issue, where the two parties tend to race apart to satisfy that part of the base most likely to show up at the polls. We are thus stuck, in the general election, choosing between the two extremes chosen in the primary. Some major revamping of the primary system is needed, as is ending primary voter apathy, which leaves both party's primaries vulnerable to the torch and pitchfork crowds, who are more likely to show up.

2. Fix the economy so it works for most of us. As a former Democratic Party President's campaign strategist once said, "Its The Economy, Stupid".  As long as people are struggling with today's household crisis, other people's issues or the nation's future problems are irrelevant.  As some say, when one is up to one's ass in alligators, one forgets that the idea was to drain the swamp. Good, well paying middle class jobs have fled the US. Income inequality is staggering. The opioid epidemic is in part a result of over-prescription practices but I think in part an outgrowth of this economic malaise; being drugged, for increasing numbers of Americans, is better than dealing with reality.  MAGA gimme caps, drugs, or make work jobs are not substitutes for real job satisfaction, a middle class wage, and a belief that one's kid's future will be better than one's own past.

3. Manage our response to climate change: Climate change can bring on wars or massive dislocations as well as drought or flood.  This could cost billions---trillions---or who really knows, as detailed cost/benefit analyses of continued use of carbon energy vs. climate change are rarely discussed with the public. Nonetheless, the science is imperfect so we must be making decisions in the context of considerable uncertainties. While the extremes on right and left either deny human contributions to climate change are serious matters or act as though the sky is imminently falling, we have to hedge our bets against worst case outcomes as we continue to understand the complexities of the climate system. Some combination of regulation, engineering, and free enterprise will be needed. The way climate change will/may affect different parts of the nation is varied but in the Southwest, water availability and deforestation are major problems.

4. While the national debt looms, the GOP cuts taxes and both parties continue spend like proverbial drunken sailors. No one has figured out how to balance the budget or seriously reduce the debt as the glut of Baby Boomers like me reach retirement age and reach for the entitlement programs that, having paid into all our lives, we are definitely entitled to collect. Strong medicine and hard decisions lie ahead. The longer we kick the can down the road, the worse the outcome. Hence read #2.

5. Manage international relations more carefully as the nuclear button competes with cyberwarfare and fake news. The recent insult match between Pres. Trump and Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un reminds me of a game of chicken between two immature hot rodders. Only in this case, both have, or may soon have, the nuclear button. While deterrence has kept the peace among major powers since the end of WW II, my fear is that the cataclysms at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become mere abstractions. Meanwhile, the plot thickens. Cyber-warfare is a growing threat and our elections are vulnerable to hacking and social media attacks from abroad. Congress must be part of a set of solutions.

6. Set the bar high for high school education that rewards excellence. An electorate cannot be expected to make good decisions when it lacks the ability to understand complex problems. Neither can a poorly educated work force be expected to be qualified for good jobs in a rapidly evolving, technologically driven economy. In states like NM where the high school graduation rate leaves almost one out of three behind and even those who get their sheepskin are helped along by social promotion, its not surprising we have problems with economic growth. Social media is not the problem with "fake news" as propaganda is as old as the Republic. The problem is that so many people cannot see through the fakery.

7. Build sustainable, economically viable communities.  The last half century has reveled in low density development. Increasingly in the years ahead, demands will come due to replace aging infrastructure in countless communities, i.e., sewer, water, etc. There are fewer people per acre in low density communities to pay the cost of uprooting and replacing miles of infrastructure. But we keep at it, e.g., the Santolina proposal down in the Duke City. The reality, as the planning organization Strong Towns has discussed, is that we will need a lot of money to even put a dent in future infrastructure requirements that we have embedded into our communities and New Mexico is no exception. Someone is going to have to teach the American people that sustainability isn't just about hybrid cars or recycling, but basic issues of urban and regional planning that do not burden the future with unsustainable development costs. Since Federal matching funds are ubiquitously part of the funding mix in state projects and pass-throughs, this is a Federal as well as a state and local problem.

8. Fix the immigration mess. It seems to me that both parties are playing to their bases and driving the discussion to polarized opposites. Meanwhile, DREAMERs are held hostage to irrational politics, their parent's decisions, and our inability to decide on immigration policy. This is a political problem, period. Find a bipartisan solution to the immigration mess.

9. Some issues are not best handled by Washington and by pushing stuff to the Federal level, we have more to fight about. For example, Sen. Bingaman's "sexual assault on campus" issue. While campus sexual assaults are a real problem, they are law enforcement and college environment problems best dealt with by legal minds familiar with both law enforcement and campus environments, working with reasonable campus administrations. Aside from assault, which is a crime, the current muddle of how to teach what is consensual between two adults and what is not in today's "hookup" environment is a more complex issue than one which can be handled by law enforcement or blunt-instrument bureaucrats.  Here is a neat way that UNM is doing it. Use brains, not sheer brawn.

Under the Obama administration's "dear colleague" letter, the Education Dept. merely created a firestorm of disagreement on what constitutes a Title IX issue and also created a growth industry in trial lawyers suing universities and colleges that were, under pressure from the Feds,  throwing due process under the bus in a stampede to show results and to maintain Title IX compliance and Federal funding.  If there ever was a rationale for small government and big citizens as put forth by conservatives, its what big government does when it lacks nuance and a modicum of critical thinking.

I think we Democrats have to practice our vision thing on more than the guys and gals looking back from the mirror. If not, there will soon not be enough opioids, not to mention blue seats, left to go around as our polarizing national malaise deepens.

To the Vanquished, Manifest Destiny, Regardless of What You Call It, Smells About the Same

I'm glad Lisa Sarenduc put in some good words for NM Public Education Director Christopher Ruszkowski. To many, he looked like the stereotypical hapless politician who had tripped over a verbal land mine of his own making with his "Manifest Destiny" quote.

But Manifest Destiny, regardless of what you call it, is pretty much the human condition, whether you call it "Manifest Destiny", "Gold, Glory, and Gospel", "Lebensraum", "Zionism", "Proletariat of the World, Unite!" or whatever manifestly self-important reason humans gin up to expand their tribal base while stepping over the fallen bodies of others. The major difference between the American and German experiences in large scale expansion at the expense of others is that Germany lost its war.

So while Secretary Ruzkowski may have tripped over his tongue, the rest of us merely hold our own, knowing that many, if not most of us are living on land of questionable title; many of those title deeds were paid for in someone else's blood or Trail of Tears.

We can't turn back the clock on past sins so we must move forward with a greater consideration for all of humanity rather than looking out for the good of our own tribe, whether our tribe is racial, ethnic, religious, or political. Using concepts like Manifest Destiny as a basis for the good things that Mr. Ruzkowski's educational platform might accomplish only poisons the rhetorical well.

http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destiny-and-Indian-Removal.pdf

http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-3

If You Are Going to Eat Meat, Something Has Gotta Die

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others".-- George Orwell

Editor, Santa Fe Reporter

The letter exchange resulting from Elizabeth Miller's article "Huntress" somewhat misses the point as far as killing animals. I see a lot of meat sold in Santa Fe stores including Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and my own co-op, La Montanita. Indeed, while hunting is on a long term decline in the US, Americans have available about 180 lbs of meat of all types per year each (USDA) and are ravenously killing chickens and eating more meat, even as red meat consumption decreases (Rabobank data).

While a lot of the meat sold at upscale stores may be advertised as grass fed, free range, antibiotic free, etc. in order to attract the healthy living market in the City Different, I don't know of any "no kill meat". So unless one is a vegan (milk, cheese and eggs support animal agriculture), one is killing animals with one's wallet rather than a gun or bow, and sometimes under deplorable conditions found in "animal factories". At least hunters are honest about how their meat gets to their table.

If you deplore hunting, you should be at minimum, a vegetarian and ideally, a vegan. My own conversion from an avid hunter is detailed here.

Tragedy in Aztec, Revisited

Stephanie Nakhleh asks some good questions in her letter regarding the Aztec school shooting and reflects a lot of our mutual frustration with not being able to stop these things from happening. But she may have missed the article in the Albuquerque Journal that stated that the FBI had investigated the shooter and reported him to the local police. The FBI did not have adequate justification to equate William Atchison's obnoxious rants with a credible threat so they could not act on their information to arrest, interdict, or put the future shooter on a no-buy list. Neither could the local police.

That in a nutshell is the problem with having both First and Second Amendment rights. The Founders assumed a sort of circuit breaker between thought and action. That was clearly missing in this and a lot of cases.  How we re-instill that mental circuit breaker is a good question. I think laws are not a guarantee of success but perhaps education and social outreach combined with some carefully targeted legislation might be effective.

One option is to institute a "may issue" permitting process for purchasing a handgun in New Mexico that would allow local law enforcement to put the brakes on a future Mr. Achison until he matured a little and demonstrated some distance between radical ideology and radical lawlessness. The trouble with that idea is that while it may, if we are lucky, interdict the William Atchisons of the nation, it also empowers law enforcement to arbitrarily and capriciously deny other people their rights. Having grown up in a "may issue" state, New York, I saw that arbitrariness and capriciousness used against my uncle, a WW II combat veteran with a spotless military record and no criminal history who was denied the right to defend himself by the actions of a law enforcement official who didn't even have to offer a reason to deny my uncle a handgun permit. That was in spite of my uncle having defended his nation while dodging German '88' shellfire as he fought his way across Europe. In a neighboring jurisdiction, I was granted, straight out of college, an unrestricted concealed carry permit virtually no questions asked. The bottom line is that permitting had virtually nothing to do with one's reliability or qualifications and everything to do with local politics. If you like that idea applied to guns, feel free to apply it to abortion rights or anything else.

Back to my uncle, who with an increasing disability due to nerve damage in his neck as he grew older, worked late nights as the maitre d'Hotel at a well known restaurant in Buffalo, the Anchor Bar, which local readers might know from the "Buffalo Wings" that were invented at his restaurant. He wished to carry a gun for protection as he left work at long past midnight and due to his nerve damage and age could neither outrun nor outfight anyone on his way home in inner city Buffalo. So in spite of his history of being a combat veteran and honorable citizen, he was denied a permit. Yours truly, with neither age nor maturity nor a history of knowing how to defend myself in combat as my strong points, could carry a hand cannon virtually anywhere I wished. Go figure.

 Perhaps if the gun violence prevention community could ensure that these travesties that tormented my uncle would not occur, we in the gun community could offer to meet our political adversaries halfway. After seeing what my uncle went through, I have little confidence in such a situation of trust ever developing. In fact, given recent political polarization, the political climate, like the natural one, seems to be changing for the worse.

14 December, 2012-14 December, 2017

Pile the bodies high at Newtown and Columbine.

Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Orlando
And pile them high at Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs.
Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

With apologies to Carl Sandburg

There is a danger to relying on bombs and bullets to keep the peace, whether domestically or internationally: sometimes they go off. The world has lived with nuclear deterrence since the start of the Cold War and as an astute reader knows (“The Limits of Safety” by Scott Sagan, “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser), we had several pretty close shaves with disaster, either because a bear crawled over the fence at a US installation, someone mistook a prerecorded air raid drill for the real thing, or otherwise sane leaders like Khruschev and Kennedy stood, joined at the hip at the nuclear precipice, just to make a geopolitical point. Fortunately neither jumped. What worries me now is that I have far less faith in the likes of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Kim Jong-Un to know when to hold them and when to throw them. Like, as in never throw them.

Likewise, on the domestic front, the recent Sturm und Drang on concealed carry reciprocity suggests we citizens rely on being perpetually armed and dangerous in order to ward off evil doers and neer do-wells. Like Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump playing with nuclear bombs, the average citizen lacks the training and experience and in some cases, probably the common sense to always do the right thing with a personal weapon. The fact that the House bill would appeal to the lowest common denominator in concealed carry reciprocity rather than impose bona fides is not a comforting thought. Its one thing to pull out the hand cannon or shotgun inside one’s own home as the door is being kicked down and that’s what Antonin Scalia and his merry men agreed to in Heller v District of Columbia. It’s in a little more of society’s interest to attach qualifiers when we are trusted to carry a deadly weapon in the public square. Its called a social contract. And we haven’t even discussed mass shootings or S. Chicago yet, although if you catch the significance of the title...

On the fifth anniversary of the Newtown Massacre, we need to think carefully about the role of armed deterrence. The grass may cover all and the 24/7 media coverage might dull our senses, but sooner or later that loud retort, either from small arms or from the re-entry vehicle of an ICBM, might get our attention. If we don’t deal with the underlying problems before that day, it will be too late. Or, to cut to the chase, if my house was a firetrap, I would clean up my house rather than buy a bunch more fire extinguishers.

Concealed carry reciprocity bill coverage on KUNM

Elaine Baumgartel, KUNM News

Gah, Elaine. I sat by the radio with my coffee to hear the story but it left me less than informed.

http://kunm.org/post/congress-passes-concealed-carry-reciprocity-act

That was a pretty superficial story. Anyone following this debate could guess that New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence would oppose the concealed carry reciprocity bill but no real reasons were provided. Were those edited out? KUNM could run a longer piece for those who want details. Several problems with the bill were glossed over.

It is likely to be difficult to defend against Constitutional challenge.** No higher court has claimed that citizens have a right to concealed carry; Heller was actually a pretty limited ruling. So far the appellate courts have upheld state laws regulating concealed carry. SCOTUS recently declined to grant certiorari in Peruta v California on CA’s strict and highly restrictive “may issue” system. Congress is skating on thin ice. Its rationale on using an interstate commerce justification to let a Federal law trump state law is bizarre.
** http://www.nationalreview.c...

The bill would bypass many state requirements, including our own in NM, which mandates 16 hours of training including demonstrated proficiency on the range. According to two law scholars, people could shop for out of state permits from “easy” states and bypass their own state requirements. That is going to alarm both conservatives interested in Federalism and liberals and public safety professionals wanting to keep guns out of the wrong hands. I see Death by Lack of Cloture in the Senate assuming supporters even muster 51 votes.

Although both the NRA and its historical, gun hating opponents make grandiose claims about this bill (either its effects on empowering citizens against bad guys is overhyped or claims are made by opponents that blood will be running in the streets), the results would probably be more subtle. Most crime is home grown, not resulting from mythical hordes of concealed carry killers running between states. That said, there is no scientific evidence that citizen concealed carriers (statistically) make the nation safer and some work, such as by David Hemenway of Harvard, suggests (to paraphrase) that guns are no better than hollering or cell phones in deterring crime. Except, perhaps, to those reasonably well trained and situationally-aware private citizens who actually take self defense training, something that this bill doesn’t think is an important consideration. But if more people are carrying on trips, there are likely to be more guns left in cars or hotel rooms to steal and gun issue researchers know theft is a major conduit for guns to crimes.

Of course, some blue states brought this on themselves by imposing law that treats an honest mistake like a felony, i.e, New Jersey. The real purpose of a consensus concealed carry law would have been to bring states together rather than drive them apart.

I think this is a lousy bill and once again, a contest between the left and right to whip up support from their bases. Meanwhile, public safety and reasonable discussion is secondary in importance.

Deer Hunt

Or, how I became a vegetarian.

Sitting quietly in the woods
Warmly dressed in blaze orange goods
Listening, observing, watching for that fleeting shape to appear

Out of nowhere I hear the familiar, cautious sound of crunching leaves
A face comes into view through the trees
It’s a four-pointer

As I raise the Ithaca to my eyes
The Williams receiver sight showing the deer through the trees
Not a good shot yet

The deer stops, uncertain
I hold my aim, waiting for it to show itself from the brushes’ curtain
But the deer freezes

It takes a step back, wary
I think I see a clear shot through a small clearing
A single shot rings out, the deer stumbles

Deflected. A single small branch flies apart
The deer instead of dying has a shattered limb
It crashes into a ravine in a loud, long din

It takes me a while to reach his side
He is terrified, wounded, unable to rise
Writhing with terrified, wide eyes
Two final shots at a thrashing neck and his demise

I was stunned, shaken
At my bad shot taken
No animal should have to die in such a state
That was the last time I raised my rifle a life to take

-KJS, 2017