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Federal News Radio
After the All
Star game, all hell breaks loose
By Tom Temin
July 11, 2016
Federal managers need to brace for a few weeks of nuttiness. Like
listening to mommy and daddy scream at one another, career people will
find it hard to tune out the coming noise
Before that we have the fun of this week’s All Star break. Tuesday
evening Major League Baseball will indulge in its annual orgy of
nostalgia and self-worship. It’s a great spectacle. Teams mainly hope
none of the players they send gets injured in a game with no real
importance.
Then things get interesting. Next week’s big spectacle will take place
in Cleveland, when the Republican National Convention gets underway.
The Democratic party convention starts a week later in Philadelphia.
Perhaps the GOP event will produce something approximating drama, given
the range of feelings Republicans have about Donald Trump. The outcome
of the Democrats’ shindig is more certain.
One thing for sure. the rhetoric coming out of either city won’t be
pretty. It’ll present wildly differing visions of how you’re likely to
spend your next four years.
In truth, the rhetoric has always included the bitter. Charges of
corruption, softness on communism or overly persecuting suspected
communists, putting America first or trying to be a good citizen among
nations — it all sounded loudly in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then, it
envisioned widespread self-dealing , deceit or betrayal happening deep
in the ranks of people populating federal agencies.
Today people are less restrained.
Interesting that even Supreme Court justices are making their opinions
of candidates known. At least one did, anyhow: Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a
New York Times interview. She talks more about sociology and politics
than about the Constitution, but maybe that’s a sign of the age we live
in.
Maybe people are more hardened in their party positions, I don’t know.
I remember the secretary in the audio-visual department of my high
school. Always ready to talk politics, she had a bumper sticker on her
Beetle supporting Angolan independence. A lifelong Democrat, she
surprised me by recalling how she’d voted for Republican Wendell
Willkie in 1940 against Franklin Roosevelt, even though she agreed more
with Roosevelt’s views. Why? “I thought two terms was enough.”
Oddly, Willkie and the far-seeing Roosevelt became allies in the
Lend-Lease movement as the Nazi threat in Europe increased. It’s hard
to see how a Hillary or Donald would find a way to make use of, or be
useful to, one another. But you never know
Writing in Politico this week, Jeff Greenfield has an essay recounting
the nomination of Harry Truman to be Roosevelt’s 1944 running mate.
People close to a visibly declining Roosevelt were certain — and
correct — FDR wouldn’t survive his fourth term. Whether the convention
rooms were actually filled with smoke is conjecture. But in those days
people really went into a convention not knowing for certain what would
happen, and party elders held a lot of sway.
Nowadays no one seems to leave elected office poor. Or if they need
money, it comes showering down on them from law firms, corporate
boards, consultancies, speeches and book advances. Presidents didn’t
get any kind of pension until after a law passed in 1958. This week,
President Barack Obama can sign a bipartisan bill upping the modest
presidential pension to $200,000 — minus, dollar for dollar, any
earnings former presidents make above $400,000. The Roll Call explains,
if a future former president earns $435,000 in, say, speaking fees, he
or she would only receive $165,000 in pension.
Truman had to take out loans to make ends meet after he left office. He
was saved financially by the advance on his memoirs. An old photograph
shows Truman putting a penny in a parking meter in Independence,
Missouri after becoming a private citizen once again. He drove himself
around.
Read this and other articles at Federal News Radio
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