“It Doesn’t Make Any Sense”: Two Suicides Rock Missouri Politics
Last Thursday, on the one-month anniversary of the suicide of his boss, Missouri’s Republican auditor and a candidate for governor, Spence Jackson took the day off.
Tom Schweich’s suicide came amidst what had become a brutal campaign for governor and shocked the state’s Republican Party.
The circumstances surrounding his death, including nasty, anti-Semitic rumors, pitted donors and party elites like former U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth against Missouri Republicans like former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond who were calling for party unity.
Jackson, Schweich’s spokesman, was in the middle of that fight.
And last week, Jackson took his own life.
Police say it was the fear of losing a job, not political whispers, that may have haunted him the most in his final days.
Until about three weeks ago, Jackson, like a loyal soldier without a commander, continued to carry the torch in Schweich’s memory.
Only moments after Schweich’s funeral, Jackson was one of the first to call for the resignation of John Hancock, the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party who Schweich believed had orchestrated an anti-Semitic “whisper campaign” against him (Schweich was Episcopalian, but had Jewish heritage).
Jackson pushed the late auditor’s side to reporters and influencers in the state party as he and others tried to shame Hancock out of the office.
But, Hancock—who has vehemently denied the allegation that he was pushing an anti-Semitic message against Schweich—has not stepped down, and on Friday, Catherine Hanaway, who Schweich was challenging in what had already become a brutal Republican primary for governor, reemerged on the campaign trail.
On Friday, Jackson was back in the auditor’s suite in an office building across the street from the state Capitol for part of the day.
But after lunch, Jackson did not return to work, police here said.
Those who knew him said when Jackson left the office, he turned out the light and closed his door.
But on Friday afternoon, he left his lights on, the door open and his things as they were.
At some point later in the day, Jackson returned to his apartment only a couple miles away from his workplace.
There, he penned a note and left it in his living room before disappearing into his bedroom where police say he fatally shoot himself with a .357 Magnum revolver, which was found with him in his bed.
It was not until Sunday night, when Jackson’s mother was in Jefferson City to meet with him in advance of a scheduled doctor’s appointment on Monday, that Jackson was found dead in his apartment by police responding to a “check well-being call.”
Jackson, who had worked as a Republican communicator for nearly two decades, had served in former Gov. Matt Blunt’s administration as a personal spokesman for the governor and then for the Missouri Department of Economic Development. When Blunt decided to not seek reelection and Democrat Jay Nixon was elected to take his place, Jackson was let go and left without a job.
“I am so sorry. I just can’t take being unemployed again,” Jackson apparently wrote, according to Captain Doug Shoemaker of the Jefferson City Police Department.
David Luther, a spokesman for John Watson, Nixon’s temporary appointee as auditor as he seeks a full time replacement to fill out Schweich’s term though 2018, told reporters on Tuesday that senior staff had been told last week that, “if there was a change in the interim auditor, that might impact them.”
But, Luther said, nothing was specific, and nobody had been told they would soon be out of a job.
“Everybody was going to continue to be under employment, but in the political landscape, those things can change,” Luther said. “No one had been told their job was in jeopardy, but knowing that there would probably be a change down the road, I’m sure they were all understanding of that.”
Jeff Layman, a fraternity brother of Jackson who attended Missouri State University with him 25 years ago, said he was “heartbroken over the loss.”
“Spence was kind, caring and loyal; but most importantly, he was like a brother to me. Spence was a savvy political communicator who was passionate and intense about his politics. I will miss his huge smile, infectious laugh and larger than life personality,” Layman said on Monday.
Jackson’s coworkers and other Schweich staff members would not speak on the record for this article. But, speaking privately, one Republican who knew both Schweich and Jackson said the two had “emotional highs and lows” and “wore their emotions on their sleeves.”
Still, the fear of losing a job, at least immediately, should have been unfounded, the Republican said: “Nothing was going to happen immediately. He had a job and people were looking out for him to find something next. It doesn’t make any sense.”
By: Eli Yokley, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“Give Up, Evangelicals”: The Republican Party Isn’t Going To Help You
Evangelicals are not thrilled about a third coming of Bush. Concerned that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush will receive the GOP nomination thanks to his credit with the party establishment, Evangelical leaders around the country are in talks “to coalesce their support behind a single social-conservative contender,” The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel reports. Evangelicals do not believe that Bush “would fight for the issues they care most about: opposing same-sex marriage, holding the line on an immigration overhaul and rolling back abortion rights,” and fear that another bruising round of Republican primaries could lose the GOP the presidential race by failing to unite the party’s base.
Evangelicals have good reason to be worried. Despite Evangelicals’ willingness to throw their support behind establishment candidates—they enthusiastically voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain—the United States seems to resemble the Evangelical vision less and less. Since the mobilization of the Christian right as a useful voting bloc back in the 1980s, Evangelicals have enjoyed careful courtship from the Republican establishment, as evident in Senator Ted Cruz’s mating dance with right-wing Christians at his Liberty University announcement speech on Monday. But despite being Republicans’ “biggest, most reliable voting bloc,” in the words of Republican National Committee faith engagement director Chad Connelly, Evangelicals appear to have received relatively little from their arrangement with the GOP.
Next month, the Supreme Court will tackle same sex marriage, and all signs indicate that the justices will legalize same sex marriage nationally. The last bastion of hope for Evangelicals in such a circumstance would be religious freedom legislation like the bill recently signed into law by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, which would allow, inter alia, Christian businesses to refuse service to gay customers. These laws represent a kind of retreat from calls for gay-marriage bans, a shield of isolation around small enclaves of Evangelical sentiment that were ultimately incapable of winning the larger political fight. Likewise, despite the willingness of GOP candidates to speak to Evangelical concerns about abortion—29 percent of Evangelicals consider it a “critical issue” for our country—Roe v. Wade has not been overturned, and abortion is not illegal in a single American state. Instead, states have taken to fiddling with regulations relating to waiting periods, counseling, invasive ultrasounds, and parental notification in order to construct makeshift de-facto bans. Pornography, despite the best efforts of Evangelicals over several decades, is not banned. Evolution, too, persists in public schools, along with sex-ed; indeed, the only broadly Evangelical-backed political project that seems to have a prayer at the moment is comprehensive immigration reform, the success of which will largely depend upon keeping people like Ted Cruz out of office.
Some Republicans, like former Fox News host Mike Huckabee, are upfront about the fact that Evangelicals have been taken for a ride by the GOP. “They’re treated like a cheap date,” Huckabee told Politico during a 2013 interview, “always good for the last-minute prom date, never good enough to marry.” Evangelicals are always game to hit the polls, in other words, when the GOP needs to pull out a win: but that doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will be invested in pushing Evangelical issues once they get into office, or that they’d have any success if they tried.
Faced with the inability of their alliance with the Republican Party to produce much more than militarism and deregulation, neither of specific moral interest to Evangelicals, the Evangelical polity itself has begun to split, with some clinging to the triumphalist rhetoric of the past, in which America was a Christian nation and Christianity was an American religion, while others have moved on to lobbying for cells of legal protection from the country’s rapidly shifting moral landscape. For this reason, Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner notes, most Evangelicals would “rather hear the candidates talk about religious freedom, not offer overwrought displays of piety blended with patriotism.”
If Jeb Bush is interested in capturing the Evangelical vote, he could promise to push for laws that protect religiously motivated employers from legal censure should they choose to refuse business to LGBT clients. The fact that these laws have been a struggle even at the state level (Arizona governor Jan Brewer, no fan of same sex marriage, still vetoed such a measure last February, while Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature settled on a compromise earlier this month) suggests that they would be even more of a headache at the national level. But if history has revealed anything about the relationship between Evangelicals and their Republican allies, it’s that the promises made and positions telegraphed during campaigns don’t have to be kept.
Still, it seems that the rift between establishment Republicans and Evangelicals will be injurious to the GOP in the long term. As time passes, leveraging the necessary political force to reverse many of the decisions that most rankle the Christian right, including Roe and same-sex marriage, will become even more challenging, making it less likely that an Evangelical favorite could do much to roll these policies back even if elected. And, as failures on that front continue, Evangelicals will likely keep seeking out alternative candidates to rally around, further fracturing a GOP base already tugged in strange directions by the Tea Party. Any Evangelical darling (Huckabee, for example) would likely turn out unelectable in a national election, meaning that Evangelical success will add up to an easy win for Democrats, and another round of disappointments for the Evangelicals themselves. In short, the romantic alliance that was sold to Evangelicals when the Moral Majority helped deliver Ronald Reagan to the White House appears finally to have unraveled altogether.
Which ultimately might be an improvement for Christian politics. As Kevin Kruse notes in his forthcoming book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the alliance between Christian voters and politicians on the right was largely a calculated product born of plush industrialist funding and the handy rhetoric of the McCarthy era. But with the threat of Soviet aggression dissolved and the political promise of the Republican-Evangelical coalition played out, perhaps Evangelicals will be able to look beyond a frustrating alliance in which their interests were always low priority. The faith and family left, as the Pew Foundation has termed it, awaits their support.
By: Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, The New Republic, March 31, 2015
“The Ballad Of Lester Maddox”: Supporters Of Discrimination Have Always Cloaked Their Views In Appeals To Personal Liberty
Once upon a time, a restaurant owner refused to serve people who were different. He said he did so in the name of freedom, not discrimination.
The time was 1964, the place was Georgia, and the man was Lester Maddox. He was the owner of The Pickrick restaurant and one July day he chased out three black patrons, waving a pistol. This made him something of a local celebrity and a national symbol of resistance to the big government imposition of civil rights. But he always insisted that he was not motivated by racism but simply defending the rights of private property and his personal beliefs.
“This property belongs to me—and I’ll throw out a white one, a black one, a red-headed one or a bald headed one. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
Maddox became a hero to conservative populists—most of whom were Democrats at that time in the South, because of a hangover from the Civil War a century before—and he rode the wave of resistance to desegregation all the way to the Governor’s mansion two years later.
“History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes,” Mark Twain allegedly said. And there are no perfect parallels between Lester Maddox and the florists, bakers and other small business owners who have been invoked as a reason to protect the religious liberties of those who could legally refuse to serve gay and lesbian weddings. But amid a national debate about gay civil rights a half-century later, as we fitfully evolve toward the promise of a more perfect union, it is useful to listen for echoes of old arguments because they can clarify our current conversations.
We’ve had an age-old argument in our nation between the powers of the federal government and states’ rights. It goes back to the ratification of the Constitution (ironic, because many of the states’ rights advocates since have presented themselves as the purest defenders of the constitution) and found expression in the heated debates between John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, and Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln that ultimately exploded into civil war. The arguments resurfaced again in the 1960s over civil rights and desegregation. And so it goes.
But the de facto defenders of slavery and segregation rarely framed their arguments as endorsements of inequality. Instead, their argument was often uplifted, framed as a defense of lofty ideals. Sometimes these were rooted in theological objections—defense of slavery and defense of segregation was at one point imbued with the hue of religious belief. But more often it was framed as a fight between individual liberty and government tyranny, with no irony intended.
George Wallace, the conservative populist Democratic Governor of Alabama who heatedly defended segregation was a case in point. He famously thundered in his inaugural address that “It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history… In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
But he also made more subtle arguments against civil rights, rooted in private property: “This civil rights bill will wind up putting a homeowner in jail because he doesn’t sell his home to someone that some bureaucrat thinks he ought to sell it to.”
And yet he insisted, “I never made a statement in my political life that reflects on a man’s race… my only interest is in the restoration of local government.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook grew up in George Wallace’s Alabama and as he wrote this week in The Washington Post, “I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.”
It’s this “shroud” line that’s most relevant here. Even old Lester Maddox, looking back on his life in a 1975 memoir, reflected that “I knew then, as I know now, that I was trying to protect not only the rights of Lester Maddox, but every citizen, including the three men I chased off the property.”
This seductive self-justification doubles as self-deception. It’s a trope that tied libertarians up in knots for decades, trying to mediate their own twin imperatives of property rights and individual liberty. But time has made those choices clearer, as conservatives celebrate the now self-evident moral clarity of Martin Luther King, who declared that he was “embarrassed” when Maddox was elected Governor. This was understandable, given that Maddox called desegregation “ungodly, un-Christian and un-American.”
Maddox, if he is remembered today, is perhaps best known as a refrain in the ‘70s-era satirical Randy Newman song “Rednecks,” which proclaims, “well, he may be a fool, but he’s our fool, and if you think that you’re better than him you’re wrong.” The song goes on to jab at the hypocrisy of self-righteous northern critics who denounce the South while ignoring the segregation that hides under their own noses in cities like New York, Chicago and Boston. But as with all satire, the song contains a serious point that echoes on today: when conservative populism rears its head, liberals often make divisions worse by denying the respective humanity and individuality of the people with whom they disagree, compounding resentments that can turn into political backlash that endures for decades.
What’s sinister is the Orwellian mislabeling of the impulses behind resistance to civil rights progress that aims to ensure equal protection as a defense of liberty. And while it’s become fashionable for conservatives to honor Martin Luther King and venerate past civil rights fights, it’s nothing more than an attempt to benefit from historical amnesia unless they are willing to apply those lessons to present day debates. That means respecting the core conservative value of individual freedom in reality rather than just rhetoric.
In the Ballad of Lester Maddox, the lyrics change but the melody remains the same. It echoes across the decades, age-old arguments where freedom to discriminate becomes the emotional litmus-test of liberty. Direct parallels may miss the point, but ignoring these echoes blinds us from the ability to see current events in light of history and to anticipate what arguments will look like generations from now.
By: John Avlon, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“Mike Pence Still Isn’t Telling The Truth”: Pence’s RFRA Is Not Clinton’s RFRA
Why Indiana?
With the backlash in full effect—with cancellations of gamer conventions, Wilco concerts, office expansions—even Indiana Governor Mike Pence backtracked today, saying that he will accept the kind of legislative “fix” that Republicans had earlier rejected, as Jackie Kucinich reports.
To hear Gov. Pence tell it, his state is being unfairly singled out. In fact, he protested today, his Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is no different from the ones President Clinton and then-State-Senator Obama supported in the past. He reiterated that today in his press conference, saying it was no different than the federal bill the ACLU applauded “when President Clinton signed it in 1993.”
That is incorrect—and Gov. Pence knows it. Pence either doesn’t know the law—which is unlikely—or he is purposefully not telling the truth about it. And he kept up that lie today.
In fact, Indiana is different, for four specific reasons: Hobby Lobby, the interests supporting this bill, the bill’s focus on antidiscrimination, and the role of business.
1. Hobby Lobby
First and most importantly, Gov. Pence is being knowingly disingenuous when he compares Indiana’s RFRA to others. When Bill Clinton signed the federal RFRA in 1993, it passed Congress nearly unanimously. That’s because it was meant as a shield protecting minority religions from government interference. The typical cases were Native Americans using peyote, or churches seeking zoning variances—religious acts that didn’t really affect anyone else.
Hobby Lobby changed that. Last year, for the first time, the Supreme Court said RFRA was a sword, as well as a shield, enabling a corporation to deny insurance coverage to its employees. Social conservatives cheered.
Since Hobby Lobby, the only states that have passed RFRAs are Mississippi—not exactly a bastion of tolerance, commerce, and industry—and Indiana. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, you may recall, vetoed her state’s RFRA after the NFL, among others, rebelled. Georgia and Oklahoma have shelved theirs, and Texas is likely to follow.
Pence’s RFRA is not Clinton’s RFRA. Hobby Lobby changed the game.
Now, does Gov. Pence know this? Of course he does. The law’s own supporters have used the same examples for years: the baker who shouldn’t have to bake a cake for a gay wedding, the photographer, the florist. To most of us, that looks like discrimination—putting a “No Gays Allowed” sign up on your storefront window.
And those are the best cases. RFRAs allow hospitals not to honor same-sex visitation rights, and doctors not to treat the children of lesbians. These are actual cases.
Is Pence just lying, then? Well, not quite, because of ….
2. The Right-Wing Echo Chamber
No matter how many times Gov. Pence says this isn’t about gays and isn’t about discrimination, the people standing behind him when he signed it are a who’s-who of anti-gay social conservatives. (This meme makes it pretty clear.)
Within that far-right echo chamber, RFRA really is about religious freedom. When I started working on this issue two years ago, I thought the “religious freedom” line was just rhetoric to disguise the culture war.
Since then, though, I’ve met and debated these people, and I’ve watched their propaganda. They appear to sincerely believe that Christians are being persecuted, and that LGBT people owe them an “olive branch” in the form of religious exemptions.
That echo chamber has been so well-funded, and is so insular, that it’s lost sight of the American mainstream, which sees discrimination as discrimination, even if there’s a religious reason for it. That’s left Republicans across the country exposed. Their base is telling them RFRAs are about religious freedom, and then they’re shocked when the mainstream sees it differently. Several have privately expressed a sense of betrayal.
The fact is, the echo chamber is far from the mainstream. And when RFRAs are out in the open, they’re failing. And the reason for that is—
3. Antidiscrimination
State RFRAs are a backlash to same-sex marriage—but, legally speaking, they’re not about marriage, but discrimination law. Should businesses—florists, pharmacies, hospitals, bakeries—be able to say “No Gays Allowed”? This is the question Gov. Pence refused to answer five times on Sunday morning.
And unlike marriage, it is not a close one, in terms of public opinion. Yes, public approval of same-sex marriage has risen sharply, to around 55% today. But public approval of anti-discrimination laws is much higher, around 75 percent.
This is why the focus on marriage (as in this thoughtful blog post at the Washington Post) is actually somewhat misleading. If this were really about marriage, it would be closer.
Now, will Gov. Pence’s “fix” be the one-sentence amendment that would bar its application in anti-discrimination contexts? The sentence is simple: “This chapter does not establish or eliminate a defense to a claim under any federal, state or local law protecting civil rights or preventing discrimination.” But we’ll see if it actually makes it into law.
If it doesn’t, RFRA will remain a loser in the court of public opinion. And also in the world of—
4. Business
As we also saw in Arizona, the corporate world has almost completely shifted on this issue. RFRAs are bad for business: they make states seem unwelcoming, turn away potential customers, risk costly boycotts, and make it harder to recruit the best employees. These aren’t ideological positions; they’re economic ones, supported by reams of data.
That’s why the Indiana, Texas, and Georgia Chambers of Commerce – dominated by pro-business Republicans have all opposed RFRAs. So have business-oriented Republicans in each of those states—including the mayor of Indianapolis. (Interestingly, Coca Cola, which has long touted itself as pro-LGBT, has remained conspicuously silent in Georgia.)
That realignment is a game changer. RFRAs aren’t being debated between Democrats and Republicans. They’re being debated between pro-business Republicans and social conservative Republicans.
Incidentally, because of GOP primary politics, that latter camp includes all of the party’s likely presidential candidates. We’ll see if the rightward pandering hurts them in the general election.
Indiana isn’t being singled out because of coincidence, or media spin, or just bad timing. Rather it’s because of a very mainstream, apple-pie value: because discrimination is not the American way.
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“Americans Are A Bunch Of Slackers”: Carly Fiorina, As Ridiculous As Every Other Businessperson Politician
Yesterday, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that the chances that she’ll run for president are “higher than 90 percent.” And what will Fiorina be offering? Why, hard-nosed business sense, of course! Her political experience may begin and end with one failed run for Senate, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t ready for the job. Let’s see her answer to the inevitable question of why she’s qualified to be president:
Because I have a deep understanding of how the economy actually works, having started as a secretary and become the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world, because I understand how the world works and know many of the world leaders on the stage today, because I understand technology, a transformational tool, because I understand bureaucracies—how they work and how you need to change them and our government is a huge bureaucracy, and because I understand executive decision-making, which is making tough calls in tough times with high stakes for which you’re prepared to be held accountable.
So she knows that decision-making is about making tough calls! And does the substance of those calls matter? Nah. If someone who had success in a field unrelated to business—let’s say a great trial lawyer—said to a corporate board, “Hire me to be your CEO, even though I’ve never worked in business, because I know how to make tough decisions, and that’s what business is about, right?” they’d be laughed out of the room. That’s not even to address Fiorina’s stormy tenure at HP, which wouldn’t put her on anyone’s list of highly successful chief executives.
But there are a couple of other things about this interview I want to point out:
Well, I think we have two fundamental structural problems in our economy. One is that we have tangled people up in a web of dependence from which they can’t escape. We’re leaving lots of talent on the field. Secondly, we’re crushing small businesses now. Elizabeth Warren is right, crony capitalism is alive and well. Big business and big government go hand in hand. But for the first time in U.S. history now, we are destroying more businesses than we are creating.
So the biggest problem with the economy is the “web of dependence” we’ve trapped people in. Americans are a bunch of slackers cashing their government benefits, and if we could just cut those benefits and get them off their lazy duffs, then the economy would be supercharged. OK.
And what is this about “For the first time in U.S. history now, we are destroying more businesses than we are creating”? I have no idea what she’s talking about, but the economy constantly creates and then destroys businesses. You may have heard that idea that 90 percent of businesses fail in their first year; turns out that isn’t actually true, but the majority of businesses don’t last more than five years. Create, destroy, create, destroy—that’s how capitalism works.
And I love her attempt at Republican populism: “Crony capitalism is alive and well. Big business and big government go hand in hand.” And if you think that’s a problem, the person to solve it is the one whose sole quasi-qualification is having been CEO of a huge corporation.
But the best part of the interview is this, where Fiorina drills down to the problem that’s really holding our economy back:
So, if we want mainstream and the middle class going and growing again, we’ve got to get small and family-owned businesses going and growing again. Washington, D.C., has become a vast unaccountable bureaucracy. It’s been growing for 40 years. We have no idea how our money is spent.
I think there are two things that would help tremendously. One, zero base budgeting, so we know where the money is spent. We’re talking about the whole budget and not just the rate of increase.
And two, pay for performance in our civil service. We have—how many inspector general reports do we need to read that say, you know, you can watch porn all day and get paid exactly the same way as somebody who is trying to do their job?
There you have it. If we could only get federal employees to stop watching porn, we could really get this economy going.
I’ve got some shocking news for Ms. Fiorina. You know those tens of thousands of people who worked for you at HP? Plenty of them were watching porn, too. It isn’t just something that federal employees do.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 30, 2015
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