2013-05-25T00:55:54-04:00 Steve Daley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=steve-daley Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Steve Daley Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.884125 2011-06-26T12:41:06-04:00 2011-08-26T05:12:01-04:00

Steve Daley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-daley/
No one quits here. Absent personal disgrace (see Anthony Weiner) or historic ignominy (see Richard M. Nixon), no one in Washington walks away from the job title or the money or the dinner parties or the town car.

The angry and the disgruntled, those bothered by budget cuts or endless wars or the incompetence of others above their station, leak stories to reporters. They let feuds percolate. They whinge in private, or call the "Reliable Source" at the Washington Post. Nobody actually quits.

But on Thursday, Riggleman, a 58-year-old baseball lifer, resigned as manager of the Washington Nationals. He just quit. And he did so in mid-season, with his team in third place.

That's rarefied air for a franchise that has been at the bottom of its division in five of the six years of its existence. At this writing, your Washington Nationals have a record of 449-596 since the National League club stumbled into town from Montreal in 2005.

Timing is everything, of course, and Riggleman's team had won 11 of its last 12 games and owned a modest winning record (38-37).

"I'm too old to be disrespected," he told a gaggle of gobsmacked reporters after the Nats had defeated the Seattle Mariners,1-0.

The issue, as far as we know, was contractual and the fact that Riggleman was reportedly the lowest paid manger in the game is likely not irrelevant.

He says he "repeatedly" asked Nationals' General Manager Mike Rizzo about extending his one-year contract. When Rizzo told him once again the "time wasn't right," the manager said he would not be on the team bus for the flight to Chicago. And he wasn't.

Inside the Beltway and the 202 area code, Jim Riggleman is as rare as a polar bear.

Counting the roll of those public figures who walked away from a pretty good job on a matter of what they considered principle doesn't take but a minute or two.

Veteran diplomat George Ball, a fierce opponent of Vietnam policy in the Kennedy and Johnson years, became celebrated for almost resigning, but not quite.

Back in the 1990s, Peter Edelman, a senior advisor to Health and Services Secretary Donna Shalala, quit in protest of President Clinton's approach to welfare reform.

Others who had a Howard Beale, "mad as hell" moment, who turned in the top security clearance in anger or outrage or even shame?

I'm waiting...

Washingtonians resign to spend more time with the family. They resign to move to K Street, or Santa Fe, or the Kennedy School at Harvard.

They so rarely resign on principle you have to conclude they really don't understand the concept.

Think about Iraq and Afghanistan. Think about Katrina and FEMA, about the boys and girls at the Securities and Exchange Commission or the other regulatory agencies during the recent and ongoing economic meltdown or the oil explosion in the Gulf or a dozen other scandals and affronts.

Jim Riggleman gave them back the watch and likely ended his baseball career. At some level, it had to feel pretty good.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.680256 2010-08-13T12:53:27-04:00 2011-05-25T17:20:22-04:00

Steve Daley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-daley/ Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago, there is for some of us a kind of guilty pleasure.

The obits have struggled to give the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee his due as a legislator, as a master of reaching bipartisan consensus on the thorniest of tax and entitlement issues.

But the overlay, as he understood and predicted, was indictment, loss of power, felony conviction and time served. "Powerful, Corrupt" is the headline writer's shorthand, and that is fair enough in its way.

Perhaps society benefited from Rostenkowski's conviction on two counts of mail fraud and the 17 months he spent in a federal lockup, winding up in a Salvation Army halfway house before his release. But this society will have to get a good deal more saintly before some of us think so.

As a reporter and columnist, I didn't know Rostenkowski very well. Many of my colleagues, particularly in Chicago, knew him far better.

But I had time to observe him in his role as a committee chairman and there is this: Rostenkowski came to Washington with a purpose. He did not come here to tell us how much he loved Jesus or to sit on cable television and impugn the motives of others.

The only worthwhile members of Congress are those who come to the place with that sense of purpose, whether you agree with that purpose or not. And you can get a good argument their estimable numbers are shrinking.

Rosty wanted power and influence and he wanted to get things done. It took him a while to get to his chairmanship but by any standard, by any measure, he succeeded at getting things done.

He was imperious and greedy, arrogant and tribal and, if you spent time on Capitol Hill, you understood that he was also widely respected and much beloved.

"Everybody has a district," he said to me once. "Everybody had to go home and explain what they did here. Understanding that is fundamental."

Ways and Means was not run as a democracy, but Rostenkowski understood the fears and ambitions of his colleagues, especially those on his committee.

In a sense he was all clichés. He combined a love of the back-room deal with that hoariest of congressional bromides -- be a workhorse, not a show horse. Denizens of the Capitol, including many reporters, delighted in his bumptious, brash behavior and in his effectiveness.

I recall watching him deliver a floor speech -- a relative rarity -- on a bill to raise the pay of House members. Most of his colleagues wanted the money, of course, but they cowered in fear of constituent phone calls and the wrath of the opinion makers.

Rosty marched to the lectern and roared at the gathering, insisting on his worth, insisting that he would defend his salary back in Chicago.

Watching from behind him in the press gallery, I saw the beaming faces of his peers -- Republicans and Democrats -- basking in the moment. Here was a man living their dream - unapologetic and proud of his work.

Even his legislative failures were compelling. In 1989 a crowd of irate seniors famously chased him through the streets of his district over a health-care measure known as "catastrophic care."

I wrote a Sunday column suggesting that if the voters of his district wanted face time with the Chairman on the matter they should pony up a $2000 honorarium and get him to give a speech.

The next week, the phone rang and an aide asked me to hold for the Chairman.

Rostenkowski had seen the column and, as his voice rose, said that I needed to know - not that he cared -- that he didn't give speeches for a mere $2000.

Another morning in the House I watched an esteemed reporter for the New York Times follow Rosty toward a door to one of the many meeting rooms he commanded.

The Timesman had more questions. Rosty had no more answers. He opened the door, stepped inside and shut the door in the reporter's face.

Another Times reporter, the late Robin Toner, turned to me with a smile on her face. "Well," she said, "you don't see that happen to my paper very often."

Finally, there is the art of the performance. Understanding this concept is not possible if you possess a reflexive distaste for politicians. But there it is.

There is pleasure to be drawn and something to be learned from watching someone do their job with surpassing skill, and a little style. Think Michael Jordan going to the hoop, Meryl Streep at the movies, Derek Jeter playing baseball, Mike Royko at the height of his column writing powers, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan working a crowd.

For all his imperfections, which will be well chronicled this week and next, Rostenkowski was exceedingly good at being Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of House Ways and Means Committee. There are worse legacies.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.574255 2010-05-13T18:06:09-04:00 2011-05-25T16:25:21-04:00

Steve Daley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-daley/
One night as I was conducting a 4 a.m. seminar on the state of American politics, a Democratic Party lawyer and friend of Oklahoma populist Sen. Fred Roy Harris shamed me into writing a $100 check to Harris' long forgotten presidential campaign. The next morning - well, the next afternoon - the lawyer called me at home and offered to give me back the check.

$100 was a fair amount of money in those days (and is again, as it turns out). But I had blathered on until sunrise so I told him to cash the check and good luck to Fred Harris and his lovely wife LaDonna.

It was the first time I had ever given money to a politician.

Fred and LaDonna didn't have much luck electorally. Jimmy Carter wound up in the White House and I went on a 24-year hiatus from giving money to the political class. It was called journalism.

Journalists don't offer up campaign contributions, as a general rule, and by my lights it's a pretty good general rule. In the 20-plus years I spent in the newspaper business, I thought my colleagues were a trifle holier-than-thou about the whole thing, but to paraphrase songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, I kept my campaign business in my pocket.

In 1996 the Chicago Tribune and I had an ugly divorce. The market for Washington-based white male political writers and columnists of a certain age was a crowded demographic and after a while it was clear my days in daily journalism were effectively at an end.

By 2000, I felt comfortable giving some dough to Al Gore for President, and no regrets except for the fact that Joe Lieberman may have benefited in some way.

We all know what happened in Florida that year and as for me it meant an avalanche of mailings from every tree-loving, affirmative-acting, union-organizing liberal interest group rained down on our house. And the rain continues to this day.

I went in again in 2004 for Sen. John Kerry. My wife Jane and I also coughed up a modest amount for the Democratic National Committee. I was miffed at the presidential outcome but felt better about my largesse as the second Bush-Cheney term began to reveal itself.

2008 was no different. Made a modest contribution to the Barack Obama campaign. Gave $50 to something called "Act Blue" in support of the Democratic House member from my old Republican hometown in western New York State. He turned out to be Eric Massa. Stop laughing.

So here we are.

President Obama is doing pretty well on the job by my lights. But it's clear that a chap like me cannot pony up enough money to make it interesting. And I didn't write the checks to support the antics of recalcitrant Senate Democrats led by the preposterous Max Baucus of Montana who made a hash of health care or the timid likes of Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh of Indiana.

Not looking for perfection here but I'm still waiting on the closing of Gitmo and I'm not in support of open carry of guns in our national parks, which is now the law of the land. I'm pretty sure that the Afghanistan adventure is going to wind up badly.

Mostly I'm waiting for those 68 million people who voted for Obama to make themselves heard, and for the President and his party to act as if they're proud of what they're trying to do. I believe those two phenomenon are connected.

This approach may not involve pleasing Lindsey Graham or Olympia Snowe or various editorial writers and Washington Post columnists or the tin-eared folks braying for "bipartisanship" as the culture war heats up.

Until then, however, the little check is not on the mail.


]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.491811 2010-03-10T11:30:11-05:00 2011-05-25T15:45:22-04:00

Steve Daley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-daley/
Before my father, my maternal grandfather pretty much held the title in the small, scenic company town (Corning Inc.) in the Republican stronghold of southwestern New York State.

Joe Daley and Paul V. Lovette Sr. were Democratic aldermen in a place where Democrats won elected office about as often the local temperature hit 100 degrees on Thanksgiving morning. For decades, Congressional representation in that part of the state was the private reserve of dull Chamber of Commerce Republican businessmen. When the Sisters of Mercy had control of me in grade school, the local congressman was W. Sterling Cole, a stolid GOP lawyer from Painted Post, N.Y. who held the seat for more than 20 years.

When popular Jamestown mayor Stan Lundine somehow won the seat after the retirement of the GOP member in 1976, he became the first Democrat in the 20th century to represent the district in the House of Representatives. A few years later, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, showing his legendary political savvy, sent Lundine into permanent public obscurity by picking him as his lieutenant governor. Republican Amory Houghton Jr., former Chairman and CEO of Corning Inc., won the seat, which, it must be said, he ably held for nearly two decades.

My father was resigned to Houghton's tenure in Washington, believing it only fair that a man who owned the district might as well represent it in Congress. The truth is, Houghton was an independent sort who voted against the Iraq war and was possessed of a political spine as alien to Massa and Democrats such as Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Blanche Lincoln as webbed feet. Houghton's retirement and the election of garden-variety GOP Rep. Randy Kuhl in 2006 seemed to signal more of the same for the district.

So the 2008 election of Democratic Rep. Eric Massa to the House from the 29th district looked like a pretty big deal, at least to a Steuben County native son and political junkie who had been away a long time. There was some evidence that the local politics was shifting. In 2008 President Barack Obama won nearly 49 percent of the vote in the district (John McCain drew 50.5%). In 2006, then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran strong for re-election in the "Southern Tier," in part because she wasn't afraid to show up in places such as Corning, Hornell and Jamestown.

So having set aside my official journalist's cap some time ago, I sent Massa a modest $50 campaign contribution, which earned me a handwritten thank you note (not sure who the hand belonged to).

It did not take Massa long to bring me to my senses.

Having once voiced support for a single-payer health care system, he quickly signed on with 38 other House Democrats to vote against his own party's health care reform bill. Which is something Randy Kuhl could have done, and would have done.Through modern electronic channels, never having met the man, I told Massa to take me off his money list. I was a trifle let down, but what's the worst that can happen? Well, it turns out there's resignation and disgrace and whining and conflicting rationales and the overwhelming likelihood the district will again have a Republican serving in the House.

If it was a Democratic renaissance, it was a short one.

Last week, Eric Massa of Corning followed New York Gov. David Paterson and Rep. Charles Rangel into political ignominy in the Empire State. On a Wednesday Massa announced he would not be seeking a second term in the House, citing a recurrence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. On Friday, after published reports that he had been accused of sexual harassment by a male employee and was the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, Massa resigned effective this week and booked a date on the Glenn Beck program.

Joe Daley and Paul Lovette are gone, and so it appears are the Democrats in my old hometown and its environs. Local savants say the mayor of Hornell would make the best Democratic candidate to replace Massa.

My guess is they'll elect a Democrat to Congress sometime before the next Ice Age.

Steve Daley, a native of Corning, N.Y., is a former reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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Steve Daley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-daley/
Perhaps that is part of the reason President Obama and his Chicago-based inner circle have had so much difficulty dealing with intractable Republican opposition and ideological warfare on the national stage.

Political battles in Chicago are about money, jobs, turf, access, contracts and bragging rights.

Ideological fights are left to the reform types - "goo-goos," in the local parlance. And what the Republicans are up to has never been of much interest to the Democratic power elite in Chicago.

That elite is the political world that shaped Barack Obama and his closest advisors, including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisors David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett.

Axelrod and Emanuel have logged plenty of time in the national political arena, but, like Jarrett, their roots are in the last campaign of the late Mayor Harold Washington and in service to current Mayor Richard M. Daley, who has held that job since 1989.

Daley's Chicago is an insular world, a tribal network of loyalties, on- and off-the-book enterprises and mutual self-interests where Republicans are viewed as potential business partners.

Still, the "city of the big shoulders" bravado has its rhetorical uses.

In April 2008, Emanuel burnished the tough-guy legend, telling U.S. News & World Report, "Politics in Chicago is an all-season sport, and it's not for the faint-hearted."

"Ours is a blunt, brawling way," Axelrod said in the same story.

Coming to Washington, the Obama team made it known their approach would be an artful mix of the President's charm and intelligence and a healthy dose of the "blood sport" Chicago style.

Republicans and editorial writers voiced dismay at the tough-talking presence of Emanuel in the Oval Office, presumably playing the enforcer with Democrats and Republicans alike.

But one year later, after the misadventures of health care reform and the Massachusetts Senate debacle, it's clear that no one in Washington in either party is afraid of these people.

To many, the Obama team has seemed paralyzed by the braying chorus of GOP opposition. When, some have wondered, will Obama throw a political punch?

Obama supporters have lived with assurances of effective behind-the-scenes negotiations even as conservative "teabaggers" ruled the summer of '09, Republican senators openly discussed "breaking the presidency," and a GOP House member felt comfortable yelling "you lie" at Obama on national television.

GOP resistance to the Administration's economic stimulus plan and health care reform has been all but unanimous, in a tone bordering on mockery.

And from the Administration's side? Certainly nothing that could be described as blunt and brawling.

For generations Chicago has dined out on a hard-edged, partisan Democratic image. But all the fights were internecine.

When it comes to confronting the national GOP, the mythic nature of rough-and-tumble Chicago politics is just that - a myth.

The late Mayor Richard J. Daley was the embodiment the hard-nosed big-city mayor, taking care of his friends, brooking no back talk from Republicans nor, more importantly, from those in his own party.

But the "real" Mayor Daley's fights were with pesky reform Democrats - they'd be called "progressives" today - and with African-Americans Democrats, who correctly felt taken for granted by the Democratic establishment in every year that didn't have an election.

The other relevant narrative involves the remarkable election of an African-American mayor in Chicago in 1983.

Democrat Harold Washington served only four years before his death but all his epic political battles were with fellow Democrats, though a few did masquerade as Republicans when the spirit moved them.

Democrats on the City Council lined up against Washington and precipitated "Council Wars," an all-Democratic border war built along a racially charged split in the Council.

A Newsweek cover at the time branded Chicago "Beirut on the Lake." But, as ever, it was Democrat on Democrat. Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, then the Cook County Democratic Party chairman, led the "Council Wars" against Washington. No Republicans in sight.

Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett played important, career-building roles in that historic election, and in the ongoing electoral success of Richie Daley. Emanuel was chief fundraiser in the 1989 win, a three-way race in which Daley's GOP rival - Vrdolyak - got four percent of the vote.

Even in Obama's 2004 U.S. Senate victory, signaling his rise to national prominence, Republicans played a marginal role.

The GOP incumbent did not seek re-election. The winner of the Republican primary disappeared in a sex scandal and a candidate imported from Maryland collected just 27% of the vote.

In his State of the Union address and in a testy meeting with House Republicans, President Obama adopted a more combative attitude, now appearing prepared to slug out his agenda with GOP rivals.

History suggests that posture may not prove a comfortable fit. For all his talents, if the President can't throw a punch at the GOP, it's perhaps because he's never had to, and doesn't know how.

Steve Daley is a former reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune.]]>