Rove: Trump as GOP nominee would be disastrous

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Karl Rove came to Amarillo to hawk a book and to speak to an organization called the Senate 31 Club, which is run by the office of state Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo.

Seliger inherited the club from his predecessor, the late Teel Bivins.

And today, he brought in the man known around the country as “Bush’s Brain,” as Rove helped elect George W. Bush twice as Texas governor and twice more as president of the United States.

Rove is considered one of the smarter political operatives around.

His view of the crazy race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination?

He got right to the point today during a luncheon in the packed main dining room at the Amarillo Country Club in which he talked about his latest book, “The Triumph of William McKinley.” Seliger asked Rove to offer a comment on the current campaign

“If Donald Trump wins the nomination his chances of being elected president are slim and none,” Rove said.

The real estate mogul/reality TV star’s poll negatives are the highest among any of the remaining GOP candidates, Rove said. He continues to trail the still-presumed Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, in every poll taken.

I found it interesting that Rove would bring up Trump’s four bankruptcy filings, suggesting — to me, at least — that they will be factor that kills Trump’s chances of ever attaining the Oval Office.

The Democrats, Rove said, “will find every paint contractor, lawn care person, anyone who got screwed in these bankruptcies and put them on TV.”

If it’s Trump leading the Republican ticket this fall, the party stands a good chance of losing control of the Senate. The key race there? Florida, said Rove, which will have an open Senate seat because Marco Rubio — who’s also running for president — isn’t seeking re-election.

“If we don’t win Florida, we don’t keep the Senate,” Rove said.

Rove didn’t get into why Trump continues to lead the pack. He didn’t explain the candidate’s curious appeal to the “base” of a once-great political party.

I’m continuing to wonder whether that curious thing called “political gravity” will pull Trump back to Earth. However, given what’s transpired so far in this wild-and-crazy campaign, I’m not willing to wager that the Republican Party that many of us remember will be able to gather its wits in time to stop Donald J. Trump.

City seeks ‘change,’ but to what end?

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I understand full well what Amarillo voters intended when they voted to revamp the majority on their governing City Council.

They sought “change.” They got it. Some of it has been constructive, some of it has been, well, non-constructive. I won’t say “destructive,” because nothing has been destroyed.

Now comes perhaps the most significant change yet: the de-coupling of the city from Downtown Amarillo Inc., the non-profit agency set up to spearhead downtown’s redevelopment.

I look from my perch in the peanut gallery and keep asking: Why mess with a formula that has brought us significant positive movement?

DAI will continue to exist. It won’t get city money. It will operate as an independent agency. At this moment, it doesn’t have an executive director; Melissa Dailey, who led DAI in that position, quit early this week on the eve of the City Council’s decision to cut the city’s ties with the agency.

She saw what was coming and wanted out.

But the question in my mind remains: Have we enacted change just for the sake of fulfilling some general campaign promise?

I look back on my 21 years living in Amarillo and I see significant improvement in the city’s downtown district.

Polk Street, once the hub of social life in Amarillo, has begun showing signs of life again. New office complexes have sprouted up. The historic Fisk Building was emptied out and then re-cast into a first-class hotel run by Marriott. Southwestern Public Service has begun construction on a new office complex. The Chase Tower, which once was a decaying skyscraper, has been remodeled and modernized. We’ve seen the completion of loft apartments.

Did all this happen by itself? Well, no.

DAI had a hand in some — if not most — of the improvements we’ve seen.

I haven’t yet met the new interim city manager. Terry Childers seems like a mature, forward-thinking individual with a proven record of success. He’ll be running the City Hall administrative show until the council finds a permanent manager.

My hope is that he knows what he’s doing by recommending all these changes.

My fear is that he and the rest of governing machinery have tossed aside a winning formula without knowing what will take its place.

I am pulling for hope to override fear.

 

Bloomberg giving Democrats the jitters

NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 26:  Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg speaks on stage during the opening ceremony during Day One of the 2013 US Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on August 26, 2013 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City.  (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

Michael Bloomberg is creating a certain buzz as the presidential campaign starts to gear up.

The former New York mayor is pondering whether to run for president as an independent.

Not surprisingly, Democrats are trying to talk him out of it. Why? They consider him a potential spoiler in the party’s bid to retain control of the White House.

My own hunch is that Bloomberg won’t run if the Democrats appear set to nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton for president.

If it’s Sen. Bernie Sanders? And if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump? Well, then it becomes dicier for everyone involved in the election . . . in both parties.

This brings back memories of Ross Perot. Perot, the Dallas billionaire, ran twice for the presidency, in 1992 and 1996. Republicans keep saying that Perot’s strength decimated GOP President George H.W. Bush’s chances for re-election, handing the election to Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton.

The jury, though, really is still out on that. I’ve seen plenty of evidence that suggests that Clinton would have defeated Bush that year without Perot on the ballot, that Perot attracted nominally more Republicans than Democrats, but that his candidacy wasn’t necessarily decisive.

See analysis here.

Bloomberg’s entry into this race as an independent is hard to gauge.

He’s a friend of Hillary Clinton. He once was a friend of Trump . . . before the two men got tangled up in some business deal.

Given the utter madness that has enveloped the 2016 campaign to date, I am not willing to assume a single thing about what Bloomberg might do and what effect it will have.

Let’s just chalk this up to one more nod to the craziness that’s brought us to this point.

 

Trump wins by not showing up

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And the winner of last night’s Republican Party presidential debate is . . . ?

The guy who wasn’t there.

That would be Donald J. Trump.

Why did he win? Because he’s the individual most of American political pundit class is talking about this morning.

This individual’s ability to manipulate the media, those in the know, the public is simply astonishing. It’s the sole reason he remains the Republican frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination.

His ability to control the media narrative, of course, has not a single thing to do with any single idea he’s put forth. Trump’s showmanship is beyond belief.

He staged a rally for veterans while the rest of the GOP field was bashing each others’ brains in. Trump even lured a couple of his rivals from the “undercard” debate — Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum — to the vets rally to yammer about how they, too, were going to be faithful to veterans’ concerns and needs.

The veterans rally, of course, was a plug for Trump and had little to do, really, with the issue of veterans care. Every American already wants to do all they can to care for the veterans who are returning home from war. It has become a mantra — as it should.

Trump’s manipulation of this event, though, is what is so astonishing and is what gives this guy his political staying power.

The record is full of events that would have doomed a candidate who didn’t have Trump’s self-promotion skill set. The insults he has hurled at his foes, at media representatives, at foreign leaders, at voters themselves would have sent any other candidate to the proverbial showers long ago.

Not Trump.

He’s still standing at the head of the line. He boycotted a GOP debate because he’s feuding with one of the moderators.

But we’re still talking about him.

The guy’s a genius at one thing . . . and it has nothing at all to do with becoming president of the United States of America.

 

In other news, Challenger blew up 30 years ago today

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Republican presidential candidates are debating at this very moment.

I’m a bit weary from listening to it all, so I’ll recall a tragic moment in U.S. history.

Thirty years ago today, the phone rang on my desk at the Beaumont Enterprise. I answered it. It was my wife, who worked down the street in downtown Beaumont, Texas.

“What’s going on? I just heard the shuttle blew up,” she said.

I turned to my computer, punched up the wire and saw the bulletin: “Challenger explodes.”

I blurted out a curse word and told her “I gotta go!”

I turned on the TV. The video was horrific.

Seventy-three seconds into a flight the shuttle Challenger blew up and seven astronauts were dead . . . in an instant.

We were stunned at our newspaper. We stood there, transfixed by what was transpiring. We heard over and over the radio communication to the Challenger, “Go at throttle up.” Then came the blast. It was followed by silence before the communicator told the world, “Obviously a major malfunction.”

I wouldn’t feel that kind of shock until, oh, the 9/11 attacks 15 years later.

But what happened next at our newspaper was that we would plan to do something the paper hadn’t done since the attack on Pearl Harbor. We decided to publish an “Extra.”

It contained eight pages of text and photos from that ghastly event. It contained an editorial page, which I cobbled together rapidly. I wrote a “hot” editorial commenting on the grief the nation was feeling at that very moment.

We went to press about noon that day and we put the paper in the hands of hawkers our circulation department brought in to sell the paper on the street. It went into news racks all over the city.

Through it all the tragedy reminded us — as if we needed reminding — of how dangerous it is to fly a rocket into Earth orbit.

Of course, it would be determined that a faulty gasket malfunctioned in the cold that morning in Florida. The shuttle fleet would be grounded for a couple of years while NASA figured out a way to prevent such tragedy from happening in the future.

We would feel intense national pain, of course, in February 2003 when the shuttle Columbia would disintegrate upon re-entry over Texas, killing that crew as well — including the mission commander, Amarillo’s very own Air Force Col. Rick Husband.

They both brought intense pain to our nation.

Challenger’s sudden and shocking end, though, remains one of those events where we all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

And to think that some Americans actually thought those space flights were “routine.”

 

Ethan Couch back home . . . but what about his mother?

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Ethan Couch has returned from Mexico, having decided to forgo a fight against extradition back to the United States.

The 18-year-old Fort Worth resident whose trial for drunken driving brought us the term “affluenza” is likely to face a few more months in jail. He really ought to spend some years behind bars, but Texas law won’t allow it.

Couch killed four people two years ago — when he was still a juvenile — after getting roaring drunk and then driving his pickup. He got off with a probated sentence after his defense team brought in a shrink who said Couch’s upbringing by wealthy parents failed to teach him right from wrong.

Hence, came the term “affluenza defense.”

Couch then bolted to Mexico after violating the terms of his probation.

Who helped the kid? His mother. Tonya Couch already is back in Texas. She’s posted bail and awaits her fate.

No matter what happens to Ethan Couch, his mother deserves — and well might get — some serious prison time.

Given that state law won’t allow the court to throw Ethan Couch into the slammer for more than three or four months, it ought to look carefully at how complicit his mother was in enabling her bundle of joy to violate the terms of his probation and then flee to Mexico.

In a curiously ironic twist, Mommy Couch’s alleged complicity in this caper lends ghastly credence to what the shrink said at her son’s trial about how she and Daddy Couch didn’t teach their son about proper behavior.

It didn’t justify that ridiculously light sentence in the first place.

However, it does suggest that Tonya Couch needs to pay a stiff price if she’s convicted of aiding in her son’s flight from justice.

 

Media need an intervention for poll addiction

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Frank Bruni has it right.

The New York Times columnist has declared that the American media are addicted to polls. They can’t report on them enough. The issues driving the Democratic and Republican presidential primary campaigns? Who needs ’em!

We need to write about polls.

Broadcast outlets lead with them. Print media report on them constantly.

Bruni noted that during the Christmas-to-New Year break, Iowa voters were polled 11 times about their presidential preferences. The media reported on those polls dutifully.

The most hilarious element of all this is how media types keep bemoaning the fact that the media cover these campaigns like “horse races.”

I’ll admit that I am one of those who become fixated occasionally by polls.

Some of them are quite ridiculous, actually. National polls showing voter preferences between party primary candidates present one example. I’ve noted in this blog before how meaningless those polls are, given that the candidates — say, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — won’t face each other nationally; they are running state by state.

But hey, let’s poll voters nationally anyway.

Perhaps we can lay some of the blame for this fixation on Donald J. Trump, the leading GOP candidate for president. He loves polls. They’re huuuuge, as he says often . . . especially when they place him in the lead. Polls that place him behind someone else? Meaningless. They don’t count. Who cares about ’em?

Bruni notes in his essay, though, that Trump often starts his stump speeches off with results from the latest polls.

The media then report it.

I hope to hear it from a major newspaper newsroom or a broadcast/cable TV studio: Stop us before we report on polls again!

Let’s ask High Court to settle Cruz eligibility

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The U.S. Supreme Court is in session.

Sure, the justices have plenty on their individual and collective plates. How about giving them one more issue to decide?

Let’s petition the court to decide whether U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is constitutionally eligible to run for president of the United States.

An essay in Salon suggests that upon closer examination, Cruz’s “natural born” credentials are showing signs of weakness. I’m not sure I buy that notion. I believe he’s eligible to run, despite being born in Canada; his father is Cuban, but his mother is American. U.S. law granted young Teddy citizenship the moment he came into this world.

But the question is swirling nonetheless over whether Cruz qualifies as a “natural born” U.S. citizen.

What harm can be done by asking the court to take up the issue? It comprises a conservative majority. Oh, wait. The court is non-political, yes?

What might happen if the highest court in America decides against hearing the case? That could be construed as a tacit endorsement of the notion that the Texas Republican senator is, indeed, eligible to seek the presidency.

I don’t believe the issue is a terribly complicated one to settle once and for all.

The federal law that grants citizenship to anyone born to an American citizen — regardless of where the birth occurs — either is constitutional or it isn’t.

I believe Ted Cruz is qualified to seek the presidency.

Furthermore, I also believe it’s time for the nine men and women who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court to decide this issue — for keeps!

Just one more point . . .

Cruz criticized the court this past year for its narrow ruling allowing gay marriage, saying that “five unelected judges” shouldn’t be deciding what’s legal and what isn’t.

Would the senator say the same thing if, say, five unelected judges rule in his favor on the “natural born” citizenship question?

GOP fretting like crazy over Trump, Cruz

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The drama being played out in the inner circles of the Republican Party national network is among the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen.

Two men have emerged as co-favorites for the GOP presidential nomination — and the party brass is none too happy about either of them.

Donald J. Trump has managed to insult his way to the top of the still-large GOP heap; U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas antagonized his Senate colleagues to the point that it’s no generally understood that, well, no one on Capitol Hill likes, or even respects, the junior senator.

Republican statesmen, such as Robert Dole, say a Cruz nomination would bring “cataclysmic” losses to the party; it could cost Republicans control of the Senate and bring Democrats within striking distance of getting control of the House.

Aw, but today’s firebrands label the likes of former Sen. Dole as “has been,” “loser,” “RINO.”

That’s their view. It’s not mine.

Trump is now calling himself a conservative. His prior public statements about such things as abortion and universal health care betray his claim, according to so-called “true conservatives.”

But there he is. Looking down from atop the GOP heap. He’s going after Cruz’s eligibility to run for president. He’s feuding with a broadcast journalist. He’s managed to insult Iowa voters, Hispanics, Muslims, our allies abroad, every working politician in Washington, D.C., women, reporters and editors . . . and others I can’t even think of at the moment.

Hey, it’s all OK with those who think Trump is “fresh.”

Wow!

As for Ted Cruz, well, he took his senatorial oath in January 2013 and began hunting for every open microphone he could find. He had his presidential ambitions planned out even before winning a contest in his first political election . . . ever!

He’s trampled over Senate colleagues, broken long-established Senate rules of decorum by calling the body ‘s majority leader a liar. He questioned whether decorated Vietnam War veterans, such as Secretary of State John Kerry and former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, had a true appreciation for the military; and this came from someone who never donned a military uniform!

The Republican Party has a problem, all right.

What will the GOP do? How will it deny either of these men its presidential nomination?

Given that so few of us have ever seen such intraparty angst, I’m afraid the Grand Old Party is on its own.

Good luck, ladies and gents.

 

‘Mano a mano,’ Sen. Cruz?

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So-o-o-o, Ted Cruz wants to take on Donald J. Trump in a one-on-one debate, eh?

He said yesterday he is willing to go “mano a mano” with The Trumpster, a fellow Republican presidential candidate.

The young Republican U.S. senator from Texas is misusing a Spanish phrase that has come to be translated loosely to mean “man to man.”

It actually means “hand to hand.” I would think the son of a Cuban immigrant knows better.

Which means that Cruz is challenging Trump to a fistfight. Or perhaps a fight with clubs. Or brass knuckles.

I get that he means face to face, man to man. But come on, Ted. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Frankly, I believe I would pay real American money to see these two fellows actually go mano a mano.