GOP, look to Eisenhower election for guidance

BY LEROY GOLDMANThe Charlotte Observer

Special to the ObserverDecember 23, 2015

GOP, look to Eisenhower election for guidance

On December 7, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged a dinner for 20-plus GOP power brokers at the posh Source restaurant in Washington. That they gathered on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor is too delicious to overlook. Their purpose, if possible, was to prepare for a contested and possibly brokered national convention in Cleveland next July, in the hope that the delegates nominate a candidate who can win in November.

Their task, while essential, is fraught with danger. It must be accomplished without so angering Donald Trump and his supporters that he and they bolt the party. If Trump is either nominated or bolts, the Republicans lose. Think Charles Bronson and Death Wish.

There is, however, a way to thread the eye of this needle. The mainstream candidate the GOP kingmakers seek must not come from among those Republicans currently running. Any effort to pick one of them to leapfrog Trump will drive Trump and his followers out of the party.

In a recent column in Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende sets forth the odds of winning the nomination for each of the 14 Republicans currently running. Not surprisingly, Trump leads the pack, but at only 20 percent. Trende’s odds for the remaining baker’s dozen are far worse than Trump’s. His odds that no one wins enough delegates tops Trump at 25 percent. Thus, Trende believes we’re headed for a contested or brokered convention.

Looking back to the 1952 election is the way to find the GOP’s exit ramp out of this snarled traffic jam. Then the Republicans believed they could recapture the White House after two decades of Democratic rule. But their leading candidate, Senator Robert A. Taft, held isolationist views that led him to oppose the creation of NATO. The party elders knew that to successfully oppose communist expansion and win the election they needed an internationalist. They needed an alternative to Taft.

Thus, leading Republicans attempted to persuade an outsider, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to run. Initially Ike was reluctant. He had not even voted until 1948. No one knew whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. And wisely, the Republicans didn’t care.

In January of 1952, Ike announced that he was a Republican and that he would seek the presidency. In a battle over seating disputed delegates at the contested GOP Convention in Chicago, the Eisenhower forces out maneuvered Taft. Ike won the nomination, and in November he cruised to the first of his two overwhelming victories.

Today the Republicans need another outsider in the Eisenhower mold. Remarkably his office is only four blocks from the Source restaurant where the panicked GOP elders dined on December 7.

It’s the office of the director of the FBI. James Comey is a Republican who President Obama nominated to lead the FBI in 2013. The Senate confirmed him 93-1. As acting attorney general in the Bush administration in 2004, Comey successfully stared down those in the Bush White House who were willing to violate the rule of law in order to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

He is a principled man of impeccable character. He’s conservative, but not crazy conservative. He knows how government and politics works, but he does not have a paper trail that can be used to destroy him. He can not only unify the GOP, but can win most independents and some Democrats.

If approached, he will likely say no. But like Ike, he likely will change his mind. James Comey is the GOP’s exit ramp in Cleveland next Summer. Tempis fugit.

Goldman worked on Capitol Hill and at the National Institutes of Health. He has retired to Flat Rock and can be reached at:  EmailMe

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Hillary doesn't control her destiny

By

LeRoy Goldman

BlueRidgeNow.com

December 13, 2015

The calendar will soon say 2016, and that’s when the campaigns for the White House will kick into high gear. The Clinton Campaign has done all that it can to exude a sense of confidence and inevitability about first securing the Democratic nomination and then winning the general election. It appears that her nomination is in the bag.

Her competitors, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, don’t even rise to the nuisance level. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who would have been a formidable opponent, demurred. Vice President Joe Biden teased us for a couple of months but then said no.

But do not let appearances deceive you. All is not as rosy as it might seem. Clinton faces two existential challenges that may well derail either her nomination or her election.

The first is the ongoing FBI investigation into the private email system she created and controlled when she was President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. And the second is the daunting task of trying to separate herself from the problematic policies of the Obama administration in which she served without putting at risk the African-American and Hispanic voters she will need to win.

Last August, the inspector general for the intelligence community said some of Clinton’s work-related emails from her private server contained top-secret information. And that revelation led to the ongoing FBI investigation by that agency’s counterintelligence section. Details of the investigation are appropriately shrouded in secrecy, though FBI Director James Comey has testified to Congress that he is following the investigation “very closely.”

The centerpiece of the inquiry is whether Clinton’s use of her private email system compromised national security. If Clinton or her aides knew the server contained classified information and it was mishandled, they may be exposed to criminal prosecution.

In addition, Secretary Clinton signed nondisclosure agreements with respect to the handling of classified information. In so doing, she acknowledged that “the unauthorized disclosure, retention, or negligent handling of Sensitive Compartmented Information by me could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation.”

Also, it appears the FBI probe is looking into whether Clinton or her aides may have made “materially false statements” to agents conducting the probe. That, too, is a violation of federal law, which can result in a prison term of up to five years.

It’s reasonable to assume that the results of the FBI investigation will be public before the Democratic National Convention next summer. And, while none of us knows now what the investigation will conclude, we do know this: Comey is a man of principle and beyond reproach. Comey has testified to Congress that politics will not be a factor in the investigation. He said, referring to the investigators, “If you know my folks, you know they don’t give a rip about politics.”

An FBI report that does not give Clinton an undiluted clean bill of health could destroy her presidential campaign in a nanosecond and leave the Democratic Party twisting in the wind.

Even if Clinton is exonerated by the FBI, she’s not out of danger. The outcome of most presidential elections is determined by the economy. And, while there is no doubt that the economy will be a central issue in 2016, it is also the case that foreign policy and national security concerns will play a pivotal role, too.

The stalemated Korean War destroyed any hope that Harry Truman might have had for another term in 1952. After the Democrats tried and failed to recruit Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, they nominated Adlai Stevenson, who lost in a landslide.

On March 31,1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek another term as president. He was a casualty of the failed American war policy in Vietnam. And his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon.

President Jimmy Carter was denied a second term in office in large measure because of his failed attempt to free American hostages in Iran.

Obama’s election in 2008 was made inevitable by the fact that most Americans had turned against President George W. Bush’s pre-emptive war in Iraq.

The point is that when the American people come to believe that their president can’t handle foreign policy, can’t win wars or can’t keep us safe, he and his party flame out.

The evidence suggests that we may be there again. If so, Clinton will pay the price for the nation’s increased vulnerability to radical Islamic terrorism and, even worse, a president whose arrogance and bubble isolation leads him to believe the American people are stupid enough to not figure out he neither knows what to do nor how to do it.

Clinton is caught in a vice. As Obama’s secretary of state, her fingerprints are all over the Obama administration’s foreign and national security policy. And it has been a policy of failure in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Iran, the Palestinian State and Israel. And now the long arm of ISIS has demonstrated its ability to kill and terrorize innocent people from Paris to San Bernardino.

Look at it this way: If Hillary Clinton is nominated, the American people may do her a favor and save her from having to move out of the White House for a second time complaining that she and Bill are “dead broke.”

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:  EmailMe

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By

LeRoy Goldman

GUEST COLUMNIST

Asheville Citizen-Times

December 4, 2015

The 2016 number 1 draft pick: James Comey

By now everyone’s familiar with America’s latest get rich quick scheme, Draft King and Fan Duel. They offer the gullible the opportunity to combine fantasy football with gambling. They hold out the false promise of free money. Some of their ads close with the line, “Get off the sidelines and get some.”

There are lessons to be learned if we apply the evanescent appeal of Draft King and Fan Duel to the unfolding race for the presidency next year. Maybe we ought to avert the coming disaster by drafting someone for the job instead of sitting back and accepting the inevitable train wreck that’s headed our way.

It’s increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. For the Republicans Donald Trump continues to be the frontrunner by a wide margin.

What’s worse is that the election of either of these two individuals guarantees the continuation of gridlock in Washington. In order to win, Clinton will of necessity be forced to support most of President Obama’s policies. Doing otherwise puts at risk the African-American and Hispanic votes she must have. If elected, she will certainly face a Republican House of Representatives that will thwart her every move. The Republican radicals, who will continue to control the House, will morph from Obama hatred to Hillary hatred.

If Trump is elected, virtually all of his major initiatives will flame out in the Senate. There is no chance that the Republicans will have the 60 votes necessary to prevent the Democrats from using the filibuster to turn the Senate into a Trump graveyard.

Although time is short, it’s not too late for the American people to rise up and draft a candidate who’s qualified, and who can end gridlock. His name is James Comey. As you may know, he is the director of the FBI, was appointed by President Obama, and is a Republican.

Here’s what you probably don’t know. And it’s what sets Comey apart from the two stooges described above.

In March 2004 Comey was acting Attorney General because his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, lay gravely ill in George Washington Hospital. Comey had temporarily suspended President George W. Bush’s domestic spying program because he and other officials at Justice believed parts of the program were illegal, especially those respecting the enormous data mining operation that ultimately were exposed years later when Edward Snowden released classified information from the National Security Agency.

On his way home on the evening of March 10, 2004 Comey learned that White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card were on their way to the hospital with the intention of having Ashcroft overrule Comey and reauthorize the covert program. Comey immediately called FBI Director Robert Mueller and asked him to join him at the hospital. Think of this meeting as a shootout at the O.K. Corral.

At Ashcroft’s bedside Gonzales and Card attempted to do just what Comey anticipated. But Ashcroft would have none of it. Moreover, he pointed out to them what they were requesting was impossible because the powers of the Attorney General had been transferred from him to James Comey.

Shortly thereafter a furious Andrew Card called Comey and demanded that he come to the White House immediately. Comey complied, but he took the Solicitor General of the United States, Ted Olson, with him as a witness. There they met with Card and Gonzales.

The next day the program was reauthorized even though the Justice Department had not attested to its legality. At that point Comey wrote his letter of resignation. It quickly became apparent that FBI Director Mueller and John Ashcroft were also going to resign.

Two days later the firestorm was averted when President Bush met with Comey one-on-one. In that meeting President Bush authorized the Justice Department to put the program on a sound legal basis, which is exactly what Comey then did.

It’s no wonder that when President Obama nominated Comey to head the FBI in 2013 he said Comey was a man of “fierce independence and deep integrity.”

Those are the qualities we need in a president. They are qualities that can’t be faked.

When you vote in your presidential primary, whether it is a Republican Primary or a Democratic Primary, write in Promo Code: Comey, that’s: Comey. Get off the sidelines, and put your country back on track.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:  EmailMe

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