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Funny and sad, leading up to Super Tuesday

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2012 Super Tuesday–

Former GOP front-runner Herman Cain

With the 2012 primary calendar moving inexorably toward ‘Super Tuesday,’ this is as good a time as any to indulge a quick review of past fatuities this election cycle.

Michele Bachmann

It’s anything for a joke with some people.

The following is a short list, nowhere near exhaustive, reflecting fleeting moments in time over the months leading to where we are today in the GOP primary season, 2012.

What these funny historical statements all have in common is that they issued from highly qualified or at least well-regarded media outlets and, however intrinsically ridiculous, were taken seriously at the time by equally established and respectable audiences.

Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin

From the Christian Science Monitor:

“When all is said and done, the race for the 2012 GOP nomination may boil down to just three serious contenders: former Governor Romney of Massachusetts, former Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota, and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.”

Presidentialelectionnews.com:

“Following the withdrawal of former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, the field narrows a bit while at the same time expanding to accommodate Texas Governor Rick Perry.

The new top tier roughly consists of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.”

 

The Daily Beast:

“The Republican nomination race has suddenly metamorphosed from a snooze fest into a three-way smack down with a fascinating cast of characters. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, two aggressive, charismatic religious conservatives, will spend the next few months vying for values voters and the role of chief alternative to Mitt Romney.”

The Alaska Dispatch newspaper:

“Imagine former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, comfortably campaigning in next-door New Hampshire, keeping the home fires warm as he heads toward an anticipated win in the first primary early in 2012. Then the pugnacious governor of Texas, Rick Perry, jumps in and threatens to take it all away.

Could Governor Perry actually succeed?”

The New York Times:

“With a strong finish in the caucuses, Mr. Perry could re-emerge as a top-tier candidate — perhaps the best-equipped to compete with Mitt Romney, the presumed frontrunner, on a state-by-state basis.”

The New York Post:

“Like a Hurri-Cain, Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has been gathering strength and rocking his opponents–while causing political pros to scrap some of their early forecasts for the GOP field.

Fueled by strong debate performances and his trademark quips, Cain has jumped to the top tier in several independent national polls, including pulling up to a dead heat with Mitt Romney in the latest CBS poll, tied at 17 percent, with Rick Perry trailing at 12 percent.”

 

The Washington Post:

“1. Cain is already top-tier: Cain has surged to 27 percent in a hypothetical national primary ballot test — up from just 5 percent in an August NBC-WSJ poll. His current standing puts him on par with Romney (23 percent) and makes clear that the two men comprise the top tier in the race as of today. That Cain’s rise has been fueled almost entirely by the struggles of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Cain went up 22 points between August and October, Perry dropped by 22 points over that same period) is a dynamic that suggests Cain is now the conservatives’ choice in the contest.”

It may be added that none of these opinions were formed in a vacuum. Not even the goofiest ones were idiosyncratic. The above are not one man’s opinion—each expresses the view or hypothesis held at some point by numerous persons, all experienced in their field.

 

There’s more than one way to go with this. An old saying has it that the worst insult you can level at someone is to accuse him of having no sense of humor. (Can’t say that about the experts quoted above.) I don’t think so. It looks to me as though many people are far more insulted by any criticism, even implied through disagreement, of their judgment of people. This insecurity is often most vehement, vented with most rage, among people who really are not good judges of character, who have shown zero ability to size up a man by his character.

The favorable treatment given by seniors at the Washington Post to GWBush and Dick Cheney as candidates, back in the 2000 election cycle, may be the premier example. Cheney was widely characterized as having ‘gravitas.’ Bush was linked to down-home folksiness rather than to his Wall Street policies. The characterizations masked a breathtaking obtuseness about what Bush and Cheney actually had in mind for the country—assaulting the Middle East abroad and the middle class at home. (Admittedly, the WP had a motive for obtuseness: Bush’s education policy—standardized testing–benefited the Post Co.’s Kaplan Learning sector by billions, a windfall the Post newspaper did not report.)

But the same blinders have been on during the past year, with regard to candidates or potential candidates from Michele Bachmann to Donald Trump. The same people who took George W. Bush seriously as a candidate for the White House were eager to treat Rick Perry the same way, and with the same breathtaking presumption that Texans or Southerners would go for Perry whole hog. They made the same error with regard to Sarah Palin and Women in 2008, and Michele Bachmann and Women in 2011. Regardless of how ridiculous the candidacy, or the potential candidacy, may be, some pundit is always ready to take it seriously—if the person is a Republican. Nor, of course, are the analysts ever held to account for their past mistakes. Who’s keeping score? On television, no one.

The biggest problem may be the way the horse race is so separated, often, from any reasoned discussion of the (disastrous) policies supported by the candidates.

But reporting on policy with the same focus and attention as personalities would destroy the media pretense that the two major parties are somehow equivalent.

There is a continuing dynamic in the GOP contest, 2012, and here it is: It is an ongoing tension between Republican voters who don’t know much about their candidates, and the possibility that they might actually learn about them. The bottom line is that many or most GOP voters in 2012 do not want to know their candidates well. It’s not just that they want to be surprised by a white knight; it’s that they don’t want any information that would shake their willingness to vote along previous party lines or to vote against the president.

So you start with that firm, solid, bedrock fundamental of Tea Partyers and other prospective GOP voters 1) not knowing, AND 2) not wanting to know. This dual fundamental alone goes a long way to explain the brief prominence in the Republican field of Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. In fact, it is virtually the only thing that does explain the aforementioned prominence.

The same fundamental goes a long way to explain the ongoing longing for some other prominent Republican to enter the race—Sarah Palin, Haley Barbour, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, etc. However unrealistic the demand, and however ineligible a prominent GOPer might be—Palin was a disaster on the ticket in 2008, Daniels was GWBush’s budget director, Christie conducted federal prosecutions timed with political advantage, Bush is still a Bush—there is always some cadre of analysts and unnamed insiders ready to take him/her seriously. As long as they don’t know much about the candidate, s/he is in like flint.

 

Gingrich

It will be mildly interesting to see how this tension plays out over ‘Super Tuesday’ on March 6. At this moment, prognosticators are largely engaged in a cynical guessing game with regard to Newt Gingrich. Will Gingrich’s race-baiting, aided by Romney’s Mormonism and Santorum’s Catholicism, be enough to put Gingrich over the top in the Georgia and Tennessee primaries? Will any of the known anecdotes be enough to shake loose voters from their chosen candidates? Or conversely will any surface gracelessly enough to undermine the attacker rather than the target? This new version of Southern strategy would of course be more viable if Gingrich had succeeded in getting on the ballot in Virginia—where polls showed him leading. (As a result of Virginia’s ballot requirements, only Romney and Ron Paul are on the ballot in the Commonwealth.) More chances for Gingrich on March 13, in Alabama and Mississippi, and another in Louisiana on March 24.

Maybe. They don’t put it as bluntly as I just did, but that’s the game plan.

Meanwhile, more respectably, Ron Paul’s forces are working the caucus states including Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas and Wyoming. As of now little attention looks to be directed any of those places. Iowa is usually the only caucus location that gets big media play. The other primaries and caucuses mainly come down to a question of who will win the most delegates, and an increasingly glum and shriveled media force is increasingly ceding most of them to Romney.

The scandal of parasitical management–disgraces continue

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Disgraces continue

The scandal of parasitical management

W. Edwards Deming, the wise man of American industry, said decades ago that industrial problems were overwhelmingly the failures of management rather than of labor. No flame thrower, Dr. Deming attributed U.S. manufacturing problems 90 percent to management, 10 percent to work force.

Deming

That kind of clarity now is 100 percent obstructed by most Republicans running for office. Call it the not-Gov. Walker, or –Gov. Kasich, or –Gov. Daniels principle. Instead, we have ongoing disgraces. The treatment of the work force by so-called managers at the beginning of the 21st century would often shame the 19th century, and the problem is politically exacerbated. Outright shameful conduct is at least passively condoned and is at worst actively supported by GOP leadership, who almost to a man always heed their corporate donors and future K Street employers. Call it the Gov. Walker, or Gov. Kasich, or Gov. Daniels principle. Three examples, out of many possible, follow below.

Cooper Tires lockout

  • Cooper Tires, of Findlay, Ohio: Unionized workers at Cooper Tires gave up millions in concessions in pay and benefits in 2008, to help save the company. Reviews of Cooper’s pay and benefits remain mixed among people who work there. Sales for the company have grown significantly, even in the sorely stressed economy that is the state of Ohio under Kasich, largely because the Obama administration bailed out the automobile industry (over GOP opposition). How did management at Cooper Tires return the favor? By locking out workers in November 2011—that would be right after Thanksgiving—and the workers remain locked out to this day. Lockouts always cost the company money, by the way; they entail hiring and training new help, with all the cost and risk entailed in higher turnover and lack of experience. That these are production workers doesn’t help. Meanwhile, compensation for five top executives at Cooper totaled $9,531,521 in 2010—up from the previous five years, and an all-time high, though listed as lower in percentage terms by Morningstar. The percentage ‘decline’ is owing to a decline in Cooper’s stock price, making options less valuable. Cooper CEO Roy V. Barnes took home $4.7M that year. The kicker is that the company, now pressuring employees to accept a worse contract, has ample funds on hand to purchase a plant in Serbia. Cooper Tire & Rubber still has problems with profitability in terms of its stock price, partly because the company is losing goodwill and suffering in public esteem over the way it is treating its employees. But cost-cutting measures have yet to extend to executive compensation for top management; the Human Resources officer responsible for pushing around employees in ways including the lockout also took home six figures in 2010. The excuse for raising executive salaries, of course, is the declining value of company stock options.
  • Apple, Inc.: Software giant Apple is less susceptible to accusations of lack of innovation or of failing to move with the times. Nor is its profitability suffering. However, its executive compensation is suffering even less, so to speak. Business Week and the Wall Street Journal are among business publications reporting that Apple CEO Tim Cook will receive 2011 compensation valued at $378 million. This, as they point out, stands in some contrast to the $1M annually drawn by late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. It stands in more dramatic contrast to conditions at Foxconn, a Chinese sweatshop used by Apple, where workers committed suicide in waves in 2010. The Apple-Chinese sweatshop connection was highlighted again by Rachel Maddow last night and was reported again by the New York Times recently. It was reported earlier by the Guardian. The story will continue to surface until the conditions are addressed—meaning corrected, once and for all. Whatever the problems of our struggling heavy industry, Apple, Inc., cannot convincingly claim that its pockets are too full of nothing but lint to pay its cheapest employees. N.b. There is also that niggling question of whether Apple couldn’t make more of its products here in the U.S., of course. Another question we’re not hearing raised on the campaign trail. Could it be that Apple is avoiding OSHA and EPA oversight?

Apple employee overseas

  • American Airlines, Inc./AMR: Any passenger who has had to endure AA’s baggage policy, fees for changing tickets, multi-stop routes, and teeny-weeny aging prop planes understands intuitively why American Airlines might need to apply for bankruptcy protection. Like almost every U.S. airline except Southwest, AA socks it to you at every possible juncture, including a baggage fee for checking just one suitcase. At least the company does not charge a baggage fee when it has to check your small carry-on bag, for passengers shunted onto a plane with overhead bins too tiny to accommodate even a carry-on–a frequent occurrence. Since AA is also using an aging fleet and, as mentioned, a large number of smaller and less-safe planes, operating expenses do not look to go down any time soon. Be it noted that decisions not to upgrade the fleet, not to purchase new planes rather than maintaining clunkers, and not to purchase larger rather than smaller planes are all managerial decisions. They violate Deming’s core principles for management; see the link above. They have not made AA profitable. But needless to say, AA top management is not seeking to lay itself off in the bankruptcy. The bankruptcy move is being used to break airline unions. Haven’t we seen this before?

How the company treats passengers is also a managerial decision, or series of decisions, determined by managerial policy—although the corporation does not hesitate to blame ‘government’ at every opportunity. While it is risky to use individual first-person experience as data, I have a first-hand anecdote to fill in the broader picture. For common-sense reasons, I do not usually fly at Thanksgiving. Last Thanksgiving, however, I had to fly to another state to tour Alzheimer’s-certified facilities for my mother, who needed to be relocated. That project is accomplished; all to the good. The trip home to DC on the Sunday after Thanksgiving entailed my getting on four planes. Naturally, there was a mechanical failure on the first of these, a small prop plane, and the two-hour delay meant that I missed the next three connections. Incidentally, the announcement we got about this did not explain the mechanical issue but blamed ‘paperwork’ for the delay, also stating that many mechanical staff were off for the holiday.

I did not know that I was booked on AA in the first place; I had bought tickets on Delta and on a local airline. But Delta was borrowing American planes, or AA was borrowing Delta’s brand. Either way, when I phoned the company about the problem, I was shuttled via phone from one company to the other, each disclaiming responsibility. Both companies had overbooked virtually all flights for the day; “They all overbook,” as one airport employee remarked matter-of-factly. Perhaps company management thought that few people would be traveling over Thanksgiving. That said, the story for me at least had a happy ending: eventually I asked the right question of the right person, who pointed me to the right in-house phone, which got me to someone with an Indian accent who was able to put me on a direct flight to DC at no extra cost. In fact, for the first time in my life I came home with more travel money than I left with—a combination of refunds and vouchers for being bumped. The next day, American’s bankruptcy was announced. Click.

Treatment of customers, including a deliberate policy of overbooking flights, is again a managerial decision.

More later.

To call for an end to the lockout in Findlay, Ohio, go here.