Monthly Archives: September 2016

Leading from Behind…or Farther Back

Culture, Politics, Uncategorized

 

There I go again.  A hopefully provocative headline which will entice you into reading this post.  And you likely thought the subject matter involved United States foreign policy.  If you’re still reading this, it worked.

Actually, this post is about philanthropy, a topic which has received considerable attention during the last couple of weeks, largely due to the Washington Post’s David Farenthold and his investigation into the Trump Foundation.  Farenthold has pointed out a number of instances in which the Trump Foundation is guilty of either illegal or questionable transactions including:

  • A $25,000 donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s re-election campaign at the time Ms. Bondi was considering whether to join her New York counterpart’s case against Trump University.
  • Failure to make a $1.0 million donation to veterans’ organizations in lieu of participating in a Republican debate until he was shamed into doing so after being exposed by Farenthold.
  • Use of charitable funds by Trump to purchase two portraits of himself.  NOTE: The charitable tax benefit goes to the individual who donates the item to an auction, not the person who buys it.
  • The use of charitable funds for donations to civic organizations  to settle lawsuits related to violations at his Mar-a-Lago home and one of his golf courses in New York.  The settlements were supposed to be paid with corporate or personal funds.

As reported by Farenthold, what makes this more unconscionable is the fact the Trump Foundation, since 2008, has been funded by third parties, not by Trump himself.

Sometimes I have to research an issue to better understand it.  This is not one of those cases as I have personal experience, having proudly been an associate for five years at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri.  What struck me as I read Farenthold’s reporting was not these individual instances of charitable malpractice, but the difference in philosophy between Trump as an philanthropist and Mr. K (as he was affectionately called by friends, colleagues and the Kansas City community).  Mr. K practiced what he preached and held himself to the same standards he expected of others.  For someone like Trump, who is quick to suggest he would be out front rather than “leading from behind,” you should look for him to demonstrate that leadership style in other aspects of his life.

Which brings me back to Mr. K.  When he felt people did not appreciate the heritage of Negro Leagues baseball or acknowledge the talent of the players who never had an opportunity to play for major league teams, he put up the money to build the National Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.  When he believed the rich history of Kansas City jazz might be forgotten, he funded the American Jazz Museum.  He did not wait for someone else to ask him to join these projects.  It was his lead funding, desire and initiative which brought others to the table.

Although not a charitable endeavor, Mr. K also demonstrated a commitment to his home town when he personally committed the dollars which secured a major league franchise which became the Kansas City Royals.  While many owners view sports franchises as a wise business investment, the extent to which Mr. K viewed the Royals as a community asset became clear when he directed the proceeds from the sale of the team after his death to go the Kansas City Community Foundation, not to his own foundation or to the family.

There is one other major difference between Trump and Mr. K.  Neither the Negro Leagues or jazz museums bares his name.  And when he put up the money for a new stadium for his beloved baseball team, he insisted it be called Royals Stadium.  Only after he was diagnosed with cancer and his imminent death became apparent, his friends and the community demanded the name be changed to Kauffman Stadium so they could honor him while he was still alive.

Mr. K’s philosophy of philanthropy did not extend to his business dealings.  Just the opposite.  The principles which guided the foundation were honed during his years as president and CEO of Marion Merrill Dow.  He was among the first to institute profit sharing with his workers.  He changed the relationship between management and labor by referring to everyone as associates.  He attributed his success to hiring people smarter than himself.

This is what taking the lead looks like.  More importantly, it is not demonstrated through individual transactions, it is manifest in the overarching philosophy on which those transactions are based.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

Emily Litella Revisited

Media, Politics

 

Imagined transcript for “Weekend Update”: September 17, 2016.  All of the material in italics in this post are documented quotes about President Barack Obama’s country of birth.

ANCHOR:  Like all of you, we miss Gilda Radner.  In hopes of recapturing just a smidgen of her comic magic, Saturday Night Live has invited Republican President candidate Donald J. Trump to sit in as a guest commentator.

TRUMP:  Thanks.  We have a problem. Our current president came out of nowhere.  Came out of nowhere.In fact, I’ll go a step further, the people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is.” (Source: Politicifact, February 2011)

TRUMP: If Obama was born in the United State, why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? And you know what? I wish he would… Nobody from those early years remembers him… There’s something on that birth certificate he doesn’t like. (Source, The View, March 2011) Right now, I have some real doubts…His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth. He doesn’t have a birth certificate or he hasn’t shown it. (Source: NBC Today, April 7, 2011)

TRUMP:  I know he has showed us a copy of his birth certificate, but  a lot of people don’t agree with that birth certificate. A lot of people do not think it’s authentic. (Source: CNN Situation Room, May 29, 2012)

TRUMP: Instead of questioning whether the President is legitimate, the media keeps questioning me.  Just last week the media again asked me whether I was convinced Obama was not born in Kenya. I have no idea. I don’t know. Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. … Nobody knows. (Source: ABC This Week, August 2013)

TRUMP:  And I’m not alone.  Just the other day, a supporter at my rally in New Hampshire said, ”We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”  We needed this question. (Source: C-SPAN, Rochester, New Hampshire Town Hall, September 17, 2015.)

TRUMP: You tell me.  How did we end up with a President for eight years who was born in Kenya.

ANCHOR: (leans over)  Mr. Trump, his grandmother said he was born in Kona, not Kenya.

TRUMP.  Kona?  (long pause)  NEVER MIND.

Magic? Maybe.  Comic magic?  Definitely not.  Maybe this is what Donald Trump would call “black magic” (pun intended). Instead of making objects disappear like most magicians, Trump makes non-objects materialize at will.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

When One Head Is Better…

Media

 

I am trying to figure out the moment in time news programs became game shows.  I’m not sure exactly when this transformation took place.  Maybe it was May 11, 2001.  That was the date of Lynn Russell’s last broadcast as the anchor of CNN Headline News.  Russell’s program consisted of a recap of current events which was updated every fifteen minutes, reminiscent of the CBS nightly news before it became a half-hour newscast on September 2, 1963.

You might think the expansion of broadcast nightly news to 30 minutes and the addition of three 24/7 cable news networks would make it easier to “get the news.”  Unfortunately, you would be wrong.  This was never more evident than September 4, 2016.  An AP wire story reported a 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma.  Interested in learning more, I turned on cable news. On CNN, instead of news, I encountered six talking heads discussing the impact on the presidential election of the latest “sound bite du jour.”  In another era, the image would have been mistaken for an episode of Gene Rayburn hosting The Match Game.  MSNBC was no better.  It may be the “place for politics” but it is no longer “a place for news.”


The Sunday morning network talk shows further represent the decline of broadcast journalism.  Oh, for the days of Lawrence Spivak, the original host of Meet the Press.  When watching archived videos such as the one pictured here with then Senator John F. Kennedy, you immediately notice three things.  First, the panel is made up of credentialed correspondents from the major news services such as the Associated Press and United Press International. Second, only the principals (candidates, public officials or world leaders) are invited to appear.  No surrogates allowed. Finally, the panel members never express their own opinion.  They ask questions and trust the viewers to evaluate the guest’s response.  If they thought the guest was avoiding the question or if the answer was suspect, they would challenge the interviewee with follow-up inquiries.  Today, Meet the Pundits would be a more apt title for what is passed off as current affairs programming.

What have we sacrificed in return for the endless babble of opinion?  In a word, journalism. And there is a simple test to prove it.  Name one occasion on which a panel discussion resulted in a “breakthrough” moment in American history or politics.  Imagine it is April 13, 1954.  Instead of Edward R. Morrow hosting the CBS news program See It Now,  you have four pundits analyzing the McCarthy hearings. Committee legal counsel Roy Cohn defends Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communists in the government. One of the anti-McCarthy pundits might echo Morrow’s now famous accusation. “The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one.  The junior senator from Wisconsin has crossed that line.”   The host concludes, “There you have it.  Both sides of the issue.”  I think it is a safe bet the program would not have won a Peabody Award nor would organizations like the Ratio Television Digital News Association or NRP name awards for outstanding journalism for the show’s host, as they have for Morrow.

Or imagine it is February 27, 1968.  Walter Cronkite’s broadcast Report from Vietnam changed Americans’ perception of the conflict.  He ended the program with the following.

We’ve been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

Now imagine our coverage of the Vietnam war had been relegated to Hard Ball, The Situation Room or Fox and Friends. Instead of an eyewitness account, we would have been inundated with accusations likely based on false or exaggerated numbers.  Remember, support for the war turned in part when Cronkite reported that the official “kill numbers” released by General Westmoreland’s office included livestock.

There was one additional element at play as Cronkite’s broadcast approached.  He had to convince CBS News president Richard Salant to air the report.  Journalism is not just about investigating or writing a story.  The truly great reporters also have the courage to confront their bosses, urging them to take risks they otherwise would prefer to avoid.

When the history of broadcast journalism in the early 21st Century is chronicled, there will be many questions and hopefully some second guessing.  However, there is one thing of which I am sure.  Next to the word journalist, you are just as likely to find Gene Rayburn’s picture as you are to find Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer and Sean Hannity.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

Why Clinton’s Emails Remind Me of Watergate

Media, Politics

Image result for john deanLast February, Donald Trump and his surrogates began making a comparison between Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the break-in at Democratic Headquarters and the subsequent cover-up by the committee to re-elect Richard Nixon president.  Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano suggested the unavailability of  every email “was far worse than an 18-and-a-half-minute gap on President Nixon’s internal office recording  equipment.”  Napolitano, who once served as a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, did not recognize the fact Nixon’s efforts to withhold information were related to an actual crime. And I still find it hypocritical those most disgusted with Clinton’s actions do not hold Dick Cheney, who failed to archive ANY of the his emails leading up to the Iraq war, to the same standard.

I thought the comparison was a stretch until this past weekend when Democrats on the house committee investigating the email issue released one of Colin Powell’s emails to Secretary Clinton.  This new information made me realize the resemblance between these two events is less about who did what but the veracity of the principals.  On June 3, 1983, White House counsel John Dean testified before the Senate select committee investigating Watergate.  He told the panel he had warned Nixon further efforts at cover-up would have disastrous results.

I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.  

Following his testimony, other participants in the scandal vowed no such conversation took place and Dean was attempting to cover his posterior to avoid a potential jail sentence.  In other words, at this point it was just a case of he said/they said.  That is, until Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a self-activated recording system in the oval office.  And a March 21, 1973 conversation between Dean and Nixon included the following:

…there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer–within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself.

From that point on Dean’s account of the entire scandal was viewed as the most reliable.  His accurate recollection of this conversation resulted in his being given the benefit of the doubt on other points on which he testified.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and her FBI testimony.  On August 31, 2016 the New York Times reported Clinton “told investigators that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had advised her to use a personal email account.”  Four days later, the Miami Herald quoted Powell as saying Clinton was “using the private email server for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.”  One more case of she said/he said.

There is only one problem.  Last week a January 23, 2009 email exchange between Powell and Clinton, part of the record the FBI turned over to the House committee on Benghazi, was made public.  NOTE:  This is only one day after Clinton is sworn in as secretary of state, not a year as Powell had claimed.  (Source:  CNN.com January 22, 2009)

Clinton had asked Powell whether he used a BlackBerry.  Here are excerpts from his reply.

I didn’t have a BlackBerry.  What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient).  So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers.  I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts.  I did the same thing on the road in hotels.

However, there is a real danger.  If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it it (sic) government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law.  Reading about the President’s BB rules this morning, it sounds like it won’t be as useful as it used to be.  Be very careful.  I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.

As with John Dean, this is no longer an instance of she said/he said.  Clinton’s recollection of the timing and content of their exchange is much more accurate than Powell’s as proven by this source document.  This in no way absolves Clinton of other instances when she and her campaign have been less than transparent.  But, when FBI Director James Comey testified Clinton had not lied to the FBI during her three hours of testimony, this element of the investigation affirms Comey’s assessment.  Like Dean, she deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Equally egregious, we learned yesterday Powell warned Clinton’s personal attorney Cheryl Mills, in a March 19, 2016 email, not to drag him into the email fiasco.  Quote: “Hillary’s Mafia keeps trying to suck me into it.”  Again, this is contrary to the facts.  When questioned about the use of private emails on 60 Minutes, Clinton said she had received advice about using non-official systems, but did not name Powell.  And based on historical precedence, Clinton assumed her testimony before the FBI and supporting documents would not be made public.  If Secretary Powell has anyone to blame, he should be pointing fingers at the House Benghazi committee which demanded the FBI turn over their notes and documents associated with Clinton’s testimony.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

Sophie’s Choice Revisited

Politics, Uncategorized

 

While driving to D.C. on Friday, I was listening to Morning Joe  on satellite radio, when the panel was interviewing a Democratic representative about Congress’ failure to provide funds to fight Zika.  It’s not what he said that raised my ire.  It’s what he didn’t say and made me realize Democrats need to stop blaming Republicans for legislative gridlock.  They need to blame themselves for not articulating issues in a way that clearly defines what is at stake.

Zika funding is the perfect example.  While both Democrats and Republicans agree something needs to be done, Republicans have added a non-germane rider to the Zika bill to attack Planned Parenthood. When asked what he was going to do today to break the deadlock, he said, “I’m going to be talking to a lot of people about this.”  He did not specify who this included.

Public policy guru Kevin Gottlieb has always said, “When politicians feel the heat, they see the light.”  Gottlieb also reminds us a politician’s primary instinct is survival.  But to make an issue a matter of political life or death, it must be presented in a way voters will respond emotionally as well as intellectually.  This is where the Democrats fail far too often.

If I were running the Democratic National Committee, I would create and run the following political advertisement in the districts of every congressman and senator who believes Zika funding should be tied to Planned Parenthood.

[Picture of Meryl Streep and her two children in a scene from the movie Sophie’s Choice]

Voice over: Remember the movie Sophie’s Choice, when a mother in a concentration camp was forced to decide which of her children should live and which should die.  No woman should ever have to make that kind of decision.

[Picture of the congressman or senator from that jurisdiction]

Voice over:  This is a picture of (add your representative/senator’s name) who refuses to vote for emergency funds unless Planned Parenthood is barred from access to these dollars.  For many women, Planned Parenthood is their primary health resource. In other words, Zika prevention and treatment will only be available from providers Congress approves.

[Picture of a woman being inoculated against the Zika virus]

Voiceover: Call (add representative/senator’s name) and tell him/her this is a false choice.  Tell him/her you are not willing to open the door to defunding Planned Parenthood in exchange for Zika funding.  Either vote for a clean bill to address this potential health crisis or come November, you will find someone who will.

If Gottlieb is right, a clean Zika bill will be on the President’s desk post haste.

Sadly, this election cycle is being viewed as a choice between one candidate who tries to keep her cool and presents reasoned policy options and the other candidate who appeals to his supporters’ emotions without much content.  This too is a false dichotomy.  There is a third choice I like to call “cool heat,” bringing emotional intelligence, not just emotion to the debate.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP