Last month, Rep. Michele Bachmann announced her decision not to seek a fifth term amid an array of ethics charges, one of which is an allegation that she secretly paid Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson for his support during her abortive presidential bid. According to NBC, Bachmann’s former chief of staff, Andy Parrish, swore in an affidavit to the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee that Bachmann “knew of and approved” a scheme to funnel $7,500 per month to Sorenson through an allied consulting firm in exchange for his backing, despite Iowa Senate ethics rules barring lawmakers from receiving presidential campaign payments. In his affidavit, Parrish called Bachmann an “outstanding public servant,” suggesting he had no axe to grind. Sorenson flatly denies any violation of ethics rules, and says he received money only to cover expenses. While gleeful liberals and dismayed Tea Partiers have mostly overlooked the charge in the wake of her announcement, it may be an important harbinger of future election cycles.
To understand why, you have to start with turn-of-the-century urban machine politics. Early get-out-the-vote (GOTV) systems relied on money changing hands through employment: Party bosses, generally divided by ethnicity, rounded up votes from ethnic neighborhoods in exchange for control over the abundant patronage positions available in rapidly-growing cities. At first the practice was confined to European immigrant populations, but African American voters were gradually included. In Chicago, for instance, blacks were gradually incorporated into the machine by powerbrokers like the late Rep. William Dawson, and were offered municipal positions like the one held by Fraser Robinson III, a pump worker at the city’s water plant (and Michelle Obama’s father).
Many American cities have a storied tradition of machine politics. But in recent decades, party electioneering has evolved into arrangements whereby candidates and parties pay people small amounts of cash in exchange for GOTV efforts like canvassing. When I represented an inner-city St. Louis state Senate district, I was often approached by operatives proposing such arrangements. That’s not strictly illegal, but it creates a lot of untraceable campaign cash, and it’s vulnerable to corruption. (Although I declined, I did run afoul of federal campaign-finance law during my 2004 U.S. House race: I approved coordination between two aides and an outside party who created a flier about my opponent’s legislative attendance record. I then lied when asked about it, earning me eight months in federal prison for obstruction of justice.) I know people who have disbursed several hundred thousand dollars on Election Day. In some cases, the process is blunter, not to mention illegal: Low-level operatives simply distribute cash in even smaller increments to individual voters.
In St. Louis, local powerbrokers often steered “street money” through a trusted ally or relative — and, according to scuttlebutt, siphoned off a chunk for themselves. Sometimes a powerbroker will even dole out money to low-level party functionaries himself. In 2004, John Kerry reportedly dropped hundreds of thousands on the street in Philadelphia alone, though ultimately the Republicans’ all-volunteer ground game was widely seen as superior — and Kerry lost.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: ‘Walking-Around Money’ — How Machine Politics Works in America Today
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 12, 2013 at 2:11 PM ET
Welcome to Episode Two of The Recovering Politician’s CRISIS TV, a weekly roundtable discussion of the highest profile national scandals, with expert analysis from those who’ve served in the arena and suffered through crises themselves.
SPOILER ALERT: Be prepared to laugh — these former pols tend not to take themselves too seriously.
CRISIS TV is hosted by The RP, former Kentucky State Treasurer Jonathan Miller.
This week’s guests include:
Rod Jetton, former Speaker of the House, state of Missouri
Jason Grill, former State Representative from Kansas City
Josh Bowen, Nationally renowned and published personal trainer
Click here to order
This week’s topic — Baseball and Performance Enhancing Drugs
The panelists discuss the nature of the scandal, what Major League Baseball and accused players such as Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriquez have done wrong, how they could have handled the crisis more effectively, and what advice they would share with the players and owners.
The panelists discuss the lessons they learned from their own crises, detailed in the book they co-authored, The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis. Click here to order.
5 Gifts That Keep You At The Top Of Clients’ Minds
The Fruit of the Month Club was way ahead of its time. Now, you can have everything — from razors to makeup to dog treats — sent to you on a monthly basis. I personally use a few of these subscription-based companies to make sure I don’t run out of the essentials, but I really see the value of subscriptions for client gifts.
If you’re in the service industry, staying top-of-mind with your clients (in a positive way) is important. Our company wants to show our clients and partners that we appreciate them in a genuinely thoughtful way, not in an “I’m bribing you with a $500 bottle of wine” kind of way, so we’ve enlisted the help of a few subscription-based companies.
I have to admit that part of the attraction of subscription gift-giving is the laziness it allows. Greg Alvo, CEO of OrderGroove, explained it perfectly: “Subscription gifting is the perfect way to show appreciation and stay on your client’s mind. The best part? As the on-the-go gifter, you have the ability to ‘set it and forget it!’” It still requires thoughtfulness to find the perfect fit for a client, because if he or she is going to be receiving something from you once a month, it had better be something well-liked!
Here are some ideas for interesting items that won’t break the bank, but will pleasantly surprise your clients.
The Stylish Stud:
You know how you’re always losing socks (behind the dryer, at the laundromat, under the hotel bed)? We’ve found a solution.Sock 101 has created the Sock of the Month Club. One pair of high-quality, stylish dress socks will be sent to your clients every month. Now, when people compliment their savvy style, your company may just come up in.
And even better — a personal note from the most famous old-school handwritten note writer in the US:
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jun 12, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Me and cars. What do you want to know?
Me (with friend asking sales clerk for directions) : Are you sure it’s on Hubbards and Shelbyville road ?
Sales Clerk: Yes, across from Mini Cooper Dealership
Me (to sales clerk). OK. Thanks
Friend to me: (smiling because he knows I know little about cars) Do you even know what a Mini Cooper is?
Me: Are you serious ? Of course I do.
Friend: What are they?
Me: They are cars. They are, obviously, a smaller version –a sort of miniature version –of the regular-sized Cooper…..
(Pause). Snickering .
Me: I know Austin Powers drives one. You probably didn’t know that, did you? You want to know any more about Mini Coopers or entire Cooper line—including Medium Coopers, Jumbo Coopers and the soon-to-be-released Teeny Tiny Micro Coopers (mostly in Europe, of course). Or are you gonna quit before I embarrass you with my deep knowledge of cars?
I follow up my observations about the challenges conservative reformers face with some thoughts about how those issues are playing out in the debate over Common Core educational standards. Stanley Kurtz’s observations on the subject in National Review Online are a pretty fair articulation of the right’s grassroots based activism against the Core. To be sure, he gets lost in his share of rabbit holes—raising the Fifth Amendment-taking IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner as a bogeyman is about as irrelevant as Arnie Duncan’s comparing opposition to the Core to worrying about black helicopters; and Kurtz’s specter of liberals imposing “fuzzy math” sounds loopy because it is—but he highlights the dilemma rank and file Republican politicians are running into. And his claims raise an important question right of center Republicans ought to be stressing over: is education reform about to become the next subject that Republicans are about to cede to the left?
To be sure, the Core is not the most inspiring kind of fight. Liberals who spent the last decade waging trench war against national accountability standards are playing a hypocritical game by suggesting that resistance to Washington driven reform is now the province of Luddites and primitives. There is no question that curriculum content is being artificially elevated to the point that it is drowning out elements that are far more decisive to student achievement, like the deteriorating quality of entry level teachers, the impediments against parents transferring their kids out of under-performing schools, and the institutional protections that make replacing inept teachers all but impossible in many districts. It is also far from clear that state by state variations in the Core’s focus of math and science teaching are as substantial as some advocates suggest.
But Kurtz and some of the Core’s sharpest critics go too far in their suggestion that education should not even be on the table as a national agenda item, and it’s worth remembering that they hardly represent the only conservative vision on educational policy. In fact, for most of the last decade, the right’s critique of No Child Left Behind was not that it overstepped some constitutional line but that the law wasn’t aggressive enough about incentivizing ideas like vouchers or charter schools. True, a number of conservatives questioned the heavy handedness of the Race to the Top fund; but for much of the first Obama term, the case was made with equal force that it imposed too weak rather than too strong a set of rewards for tenure reform or merit based pay for teachers.
As sanguine as Kurtz is about the decision-making processes of local school boards and state legislatures, the local and state level have been venues where teacher unions have typically been far more effective than reformers in driving their cause. It’s an illusion that a locally driven debate is necessarily one that favors the interests of parents or accountability, and conservatives who think so should be discomfited by the ease with which the teacher unions mimic arguments about local control in their efforts to thwart the most rigorous goals within Race to the Top.
Until recently, the political right also seemed to enjoy a rough consensus that the values that underlay the effort to prod states and districts toward more demanding standards on education were conservative in nature. As much as today’s conservative libertarians denigrate George W. Bush’s forays into rewriting education law at the national level, those efforts deserve to be appreciated as a campaign to inject market driven notions of performance and results into education rather than some weak kneed effort to pander or out-promise Democrats.
To be sure, there are very few conservatives who don’t have a palpable suspicion of the federal government using the leverage of funding to compel states to do much of anything. And it’s not a revolutionary insight that reforms are most politically palatable on the right if they are linked to language and values that ordinary Republicans will embrace. Given those realities, Republican governors who are shortchanging populist initiatives like overhauling tenure and parental choice will probably find that they haven’t stored up enough capital with their base to take on fights like the Core.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Conservatives and the Fight Over the Common Core
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There was nobody happier than I was when term limits ended my official position in 2008. I was tired of feeling responsible for all the problems that needed to be fixed in our state. I was also tired of getting beaten up in the press and having my enemies constantly trying to take me out. As a private citizen, I thought I would be able to be behind the scenes, work on my friends’ campaigns and not be in the crosshairs each and every day.
Unfortunately, my marriage was in bad shape by that time; and even though I was out of office, things continued to get worse. In early 2009, we separated; and by October, we were divorced. I tried to tell everyone it was a good thing for me; but inside, it really messed me up. After all, we had been married almost 20 years and had raised three wonderful kids.
I was a 42-year-old successful divorced man, whose personal life was not turning out like he planned it. My dad was a Baptist preacher, and the best parents in the world had given me a perfect childhood. I was a family values conservative Republican who was not supposed to have these types of problems. I won’t go into details, but my life was not reflecting the teaching my parents had taught me, nor was I being the example I wanted my kids to see.
I don’t know if you believe in God or not, but I do! In December of 2009, God finally had enough of my hypocritical ways and got my attention. After spending the night with a lady I had reconnected with on Facebook, I was charged with felony assault. The press, along with my enemies, had a heyday. I immediately shut down my consulting business. Soon after that, I was notified that I was a target of a federal grand jury investigation surrounding my handling of a bill in the 2005 legislative session.
Needless to say, I started 2010 with no job, very few friends and lots of time on my hands. As bad as my troubles were at the time, looking back now, I’m thankful for them. Life passes by so quickly, and very few of us get the chance to sit down and contemplate what is important. My troubles gave me a chance to analyze my weaknesses. With my pride stripped away, I was able to honestly evaluate my past actions. I saw how foolish I had been to put my family on the back burner. I learned how bitterness towards my enemies made me a bitter person toward everyone around me. The hardest thing for me to admit was that I wasn’t the same friendly and caring guy who had gone to Jefferson City in 2000.
Most of my friends say, “Rod you were not that bad, you handled it well. You were polite and treated everyone with respect. We liked you then, and we like you now.” I’m very thankful for those friends and their friendship, but I know the prideful thoughts I was thinking, and I know I should have handled things better.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m thankful for all the successes I was a part of. I’m also grateful for all the kind people I met along the way who helped and encouraged me. But I wish I would have worked less and stayed home more; been more forgiving and not gotten bitter at my opponents; been less prideful, less judgmental and more understanding. Plus, I wished I had lived the personal life I believed, instead of being such a hypocrite. Of course, I can’t change the past. I can only look to the future and focus on learning from my mistakes.
Life is wonderful for me now. Each morning, I wake up and thank God for the day. I spend more time with my family and stay connected with my friends. I have a lovely new wife, a great job and a contentment I never knew in my first 42 years of life. I was never convicted in the assault case, and the grand jury suspended their investigation into the ethics allegation and never charged me with a crime. I have slowly begun gaining back the respect I lost from my bad choices, and I am even back in politics.
Let’s face it. Sooner or later we are all going to make a mistake; we are all going to do something stupid that we regret.
Sometimes these mistakes go unnoticed and don’t cause us much trouble publicly. But for those in the limelight, their mistakes are written about, analyzed and discussed in the public square.
It happens to celebrities, business leaders and athletes; but it also happens to parents, kids and everyday people. Anyone who has made a mistake that becomes public has a problem; and how you deal with it will either make it a bigger problem or put it in the rear view mirror.
Just in case you’re thinking, “It can’t happen to me!” think about this: Powerful politicians, corporate leaders, pro athletes and Hollywood stars all have opponents, enemies and even subordinates who believe it is in their best interest to help promote problems for them. The more powerful or well known you are, the more likely it is that others are looking harder to find the mistakes you make. Additionally, the press desperately needs scandals to generate readers/viewers, and most reporters dream each day about breaking the story that takes someone down.
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Click here to read the rest of Michael Steele’s extraordinary chapter by purchasing The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis for only 99 cents this week only.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jun 10, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
What’s in a name? In the business world, more than we usually think….
Award for worst named new technology in the past decade?
“The Cloud” A remote point for storing massive amounts of sensitive data
Nothing says security like “I’m moving my data from the server in IT to a place where it will be more secure and accessible. Something called “a cloud”
It’s like calling a sturdy new product for storing dangerous liquids “The Sieve.”
I know that were naming the new technology based on its physical (or rather non-physical) characteristics.
But it’s important to remember when naming a new product or service–especially one that is supposed to change the world— to think not only of the “appearance” but also of the benefit it produces for future users.
And surely the name “The Cloud” has given pause to IT directors who might otherwise be eager to take the leap (worth billions for a truly superior product)but resist because they have to explain to their boss how “The Cloud” isn’t anything like a cloud but just the opposite.
Of course in naming some things, like boys and girls, neither appearance nor functionality are helpful. But even painful names like Helga and Norbert would have been better for remote data storage than “The Cloud.”
I would feel secure with all my sensitive data stored in “The Norbert” or “Helga”
Then again maybe the person who came up with the name “The Cloud” was named Norbert or Helga —and was just trying to get even. That might explain it.
By Carte Goodwin, on Mon Jun 10, 2013 at 8:15 AM ET
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Some times crisis can be borne of tremendous good news – a chance of a lifetime; or put another way, when the dog finally catches the car. As one of my political heroes, President John F. Kennedy, once noted, “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.”
I’m living testament to that principle. A childhood dream almost literally was dumped in my lap. It was an extraordinary opportunity. But it came with considerable responsibilities and posed some serious challenges.
And I learned a powerful lesson for all forms of crisis management: Keep your head and sense of humor when all around you are losing theirs.
* * *
In July 2010, I was a 36-year-old attorney, recently returned to private practice after an incredible four-year stint as General Counsel to West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin. Then, West Virginians were saddened to learn of the passing of Senator Robert C. Byrd – one of the true lions of the Senate and West Virginia’s most beloved public servant.
Governor Manchin had a strong interest in serving in the Senate (and ultimately, he would run for and win the seat); but as a man who believed in the sacred rites of our democracy, he did not want to appoint himself to the vacancy: He’d let the voters decide if they wanted to give him the honor of federal office.
But he also recognized that the people of West Virginia needed representation during the four months before a special election could be held. And much to my incredible honor, Governor Manchin appointed me to serve as West Virginia’s junior U.S. Senator.
Senator Byrd cast quite a long shadow, and it was daunting to contemplate being appointed to fill the seat previously occupied by the longest serving legislative member in the history of the United States. I could not begin to replace Senator Byrd or ever hope to fill his enormous shoes, but what I could do was emulate his work ethic and commitment to West Virginia – which is precisely what I strove to do during my four months in Washington, a town ruled by Congress, Blackberries and Members-only elevators; and a place where fame (and infamy) can come and go in a matter of hours.
(Side note: Years before, former Oklahoma standout and Chicago Bulls forward Stacey King saw limited action in an NBA game, hitting a single free throw. That same night, his teammate Michael Jordan poured in 69 points. Afterwards, King joked that he would always remember that game as the night that he and Jordan “combined for 70 points.” Similarly, rather that describing my term as “four months,” I usually characterize it by saying that Senator Byrd and I combined to serve over 52 years in the United States Senate.)
Within days of my arrival, men and women I had studied in law school were introducing themselves to me, welcoming me as one of their own, then asking for my vote in the same sentence. And I wasn’t alone; I was immediately put at the helm of a full Senate staff – many of whom had served for decades under Senator Byrd. I was given a personal secretary and press secretary – no longer would I be the one answering the phone in my own office. However, I declined the offer of a personal driver and walked myself to work.
In fact, as the august body’s youngest member – and one who had never stood before the voters – I found it especially important to strongly resist all temptation to allow any of the unusual attention get to my head. Maintaining humility was critical, but also approaching the extraordinary opportunity with a healthy sense of humor would be a necessary prerequisite.
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Click here to read the rest of Carte Goodwin’s extraordinary chapter by purchasing The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis for only 99 cents this week only.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 7, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
If I could give high school freshmen one piece of advice to motivate them to work hard the next 4 years, it would be this.
“The primary importance of working hard and achieving a lot in high school is that high school, fairly or unfairly, is where we develop our core opinion of ourselves. If we do well, we have high self-esteem. If we do poorly, we worry we will have to spend the rest of our lives fooling our bosses.”
It’s a self-image thing primarily.
But there is also a very measurable financial component that can be measured.
Over the course of a lifetime your success over the next four years in high school will be worth about $300,000. In avoided therapy bills.
But at the end of all that therapy you’ll learn that the people who did well in high school that you envy, think they are faking it too and fooling their bosses. They just believe they are better at fooling others than you are. That’s the chief advantage in life. None of us feel we’re up to the task. Except that one family member we all have who is a certifiable narcissist. (Or four or more family members in certain families.)
And, if you don’t have a have a successful run in high school and become a therapist yourself, you’ll eventually get to treat those students from high school who achieved the most. They will want to meet discreetly and late at night and you can charge them a lot more than your other clients. And they can pay. So charge them. It will make you feel better and finally realize they really had nothing on you all these years and are a bigger mess than you are.
It’s awesome when that happens.
Which leads to the second thing I would tell 9th graders if I could.
The universe has a way of balancing out in the end. So don’t sweat it if you aren’t able to take advantage of my first piece of advice. Just be patient and keep a sense of humor. And have an office space you can meet wealthy but screwed up salutatorians after hours.
Many American cities have a storied tradition of machine politics. But in recent decades, party electioneering has evolved into arrangements whereby candidates and parties pay people small amounts of cash in exchange for GOTV efforts like canvassing. When I represented an inner-city St. Louis state Senate district, I was often approached by operatives proposing such arrangements. That’s not strictly illegal, but it creates a lot of untraceable campaign cash, and it’s vulnerable to corruption. (Although I declined, I did run afoul of federal campaign-finance law during my 2004 U.S. House race: I approved coordination between two aides and an outside party who created a flier about my opponent’s legislative attendance record. I then lied when asked about it, earning me eight months in federal prison for obstruction of justice.) I know people who have disbursed several hundred thousand dollars on Election Day. In some cases, the process is blunter, not to mention illegal: Low-level operatives simply distribute cash in even smaller increments to individual voters.
