Month: April 2018

The Lone Ranger’s wooden Indian guide, Tonto, was, above all else, an Indian.  So when they were surrounded by hostiles, and the Lone Ranger said, “This could be our last stand,”  Tonto replied, “What do you mean “we”, white man?”

Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” says that we’re all born with different tool kits.  We’re not all endowed the same.  It’s not that some people are better than the rest of us.  They just have a different tool kit.

Trump, like every person I’ve ever known, has his strengths and weaknesses.  One trait he seems to lack is empathy.  I understand, because I’m the same way.  If people are in trouble it’s their own damn fault.  We’re all responsible for the way we live our lives.  Nobody else.  During my two years on the Alaska Board of Parole, I made it my business to see that no sexual offender was given early release.  No exceptions.  No excuses.

It’s not an especially attractive quality, but it is what it is, and I’m not going to change.  We shouldn’t expect Tweety to either.

Trump likes to make fun of people, and so do I.  I think of him as a big blonde Tweety Bird, talking about his enemies like Tweety used to do about dat puddy tat.

A friend sent Babbie an email about interesting factoids.  One of them was that the attention span of a goldfish is three seconds.  So now I have a new image of Trump in my head  —   a big blonde goldfish.

 

When I got back into the Article V movement I was only 68 years old, and I thought I had enough gas left in the tank to help make a difference.  I’ll be 73 in September, and I’m about out of gas.  My old body is starting to break down.  I can’t do this anymore.  I did all I could.

I’ll continue with the blog, because I enjoy this kind of writing, and I’ve been doing it off and on since I was 15.  It’s good therapy for me, and I feel like I’m communicating with a group of friends.  I’ll keep writing as long as I feel I have something to say to them, to you.  But I won’t be flying around the country, trying to badger state legislators into voting for a BBA.

I hope to go to Denver next month, to speak to the Executive Committee of the NCSL.  I know a few people on it, and I want a chance to speak my case.  Article V doesn’t work, and Congress will never fix it, so it’s the job of state legislators around the country to fix it.  It’s a simple fix, a technical amendment, something the Framers would have gotten around to if they had stayed in Philadelphia a few more days.  But they all wanted to go home, as state legislators across the country want to do at the end of a long and contentious session.  We’ve all been there.  We know what it’s like from personal experience.

Things that are hard to agree to, sometimes the most important work of the session, are put off until the end.  It takes the pressure of a deadline before deals are finally cut, and decisions made.  That was what was going on in Philadelphia on that fateful day, September 15, 1787.  They saved Article V last, and debated it extensively.  Floor amendments were considered, and some adopted.

Given the primitive technology they were working with, the delegates had very little time to closely examine what they had done.  There was no disagreement among them that the amendment power was critical.   And they agreed it should be shared equally between Congress and the states.  But they screwed up on a quorum, and so the states do  not, in fact, share the amendment power.  Only Congress can propose amendments.  That’s not how it was supposed to work.

I don’t think anyone has more respect for those men in Philadelphia than I do.  But I don’t worship them.  They were brilliant, but they made a few mistakes.  They knew they would.  We all do.  My evidence of those errors is the Bill of Rights, and the 11th, 12th, 20th, and 25th amendments.

So I hope to be able to make that case to the annual NCSL meeting at the end of July.  The agenda will be decided in Denver next month.  There are 23 legislative leaders on the executive committee, Republican and Democrat, from all over the country.  I hope to be given an opportunity to speak to them.  As Tweety likes to say, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

I’ve been getting a lot of new subscribers to the blog, and friends on Facebook.  I hope you enjoy sharing some time with me.

When I was in high school, one of my columns in the student newspaper read like a blog.  My best friend, Jack McClenahan, said it reminded him of the daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle of the great Herb Caen.  I thought that was high praise.  I’m pretty sure Jack reads this blog today.  I think that’s pretty cool.

I’ve put off forming PeopleforPence.com.  I spent $11 on the domain name, and it wasn’t wasted.  It’s available for use for a year.  I hope the President sees the light and doesn’t try for a second term.  I’m erratic, I admit it.  But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.   That’s just me, and old leopards don’t change their spots.

I’m a year older than Trump.  At the end of his term he’ll be 75.  He’s taken better care of himself than I have, and at 75 he’ll still be at full strength.  But by the time he’s 79, four years later, his strength will have begun to fade.  That’s life, even for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a patriot, of that I have no doubt.  Because of that, I really think he’ll do the right thing in the end.

In the summer of 1979 Ralph Winterood, from Montana, the Reagan campaign’s western states coordinator, came to Alaska.  He was looking for a state chair for Reagan for President, and he asked me to visit him in his hotel room one Saturday.  He had heard of me from the unsuccessful effort in 1976, when Reagan came within one vote of winning Alaska at the state convention.

He offered to make me the Alaska Chair of Reagan for President.  I thought that was a high honor, and I only had one question for him.  Reagan was 68.  Did he have the physical vigor to do the job?  Ralph assured me, based on his personal experience with Governor Reagan, that he was more than fit.

But when he was 77, at the end of his Presidency, Reagan was far from fit.  Trump will be the same.  The old biological clock.  It gets us all, and we need to be humble enough to know when the tank is running dry.  Are you listening, Mr. President?

 

 

As far as fitness for office goes, I want to make clear that I, personally, never have been and never will be fit to serve in the office of the Presidency.  I’m as erratic as Tweety, without the work ethic.  Damn few people are temperamentally suited to the Presidency.  Pence sure looks like one to me.  He’d be a uniter, not a divider.  I think the country needs that right now.

The only man I’ve known personally who would have been suitable for the Presidency was Jay Hammond, the 4th Governor of Alaska, and by far its greatest.  And I really didn’t know Jay Hammond.  Very few people did, because he was an intensely private man.

I got to know him a little during the ’78 campaign, but he was a little stand-offish.  And his beautiful Eskimo wife, Bella, seemed to actively dislike me.  I wasn’t used to that, and I was a little mystified.

After he won the primary I was no longer involved with the campaign, and I understood why.  It was a cake walk, for one thing.  The Democrat, a good guy named Chancy Croft, never had a chance.  They didn’t need me.

And aside from McConkey and Clarke, Hammond’s people didn’t trust me, and quite a few of them really disliked me.  I was a Reagan Republican, and half of those closest to him were Democrats.  They thought I was just a political opportunist, and they were right.

So I never saw Hammond after the campaign.  He did appoint me to the parole board, because he knew I wanted to run for office myself, and I needed something on my resume.   I was disappointed.  I wanted a bigger plum.  For what I’d done, I deserved a lot more.

That came, as a surprise to me, in the 1982 Hammond legislative reapportionment.  In Alaska, the Governor alone reapportions the legislature every ten years.  After the 1980 census it was Hammond’s turn, and it was a very pro-Republican map.  I’m almost sure Hammond’s new Director of Communications, Bob Clarke, (who was also Hammond’s close friend, body man, and the editor of his autobiography, Tales of Alaska’s Bush Rat Governor) was heavily involved in that reapportionment.

Anchorage’s eight state senate districts were strangely divided into four two seat districts, with each district electing two state senators, one for a regular four year term, the other for a shortened two year term.   It just so happened that in the conservative senate district where I lived, there were no incumbent Senators, and only one serving House member.

I immediately filed for the two year seat, knowing that Republican Representative “Disco” Ray Metcalfe would take the four year seat.  No other Republican filed against me, and I ran unopposed in the primary.  Thank you, Governor Jay Hammond..

I only saw him one more time before he died.  This was during the Lewinsky scandal, and I was on the air from four to six (Fritz ’til Six) every weekday, on the only talk radio station in Anchorage, KENI 550.  Actually, I was the only conservative radio host in the state, and KENI’s signal was clear to over 60% of Alaska’s voting population.

I was maintaining my political viability.  I’d left the legislature, but I still wanted to run for the U. S. Senate, and political talent in Alaska is pretty thin.  If there was an opening, I had as good a shot as anybody.

I also had a little “law office” in the cheapest place I could find in Anchorage, on International Airport Road, on the second floor in a rundown old office building.  I had a desk, a chair, and a couch, and that was about it.  And a telephone.  I was surprised one day by a call from Jay Hammond, who was now spending winters in Anchorage with his daughters.  He said he wanted to come by and see me, so I gave him directions and he comes walking up the back stairs.

He’s looking good, in his trademark beret.  He said he wanted to tell me a story from his first year as Governor, 1975.  He went to a National Governor’s Association meeting, where he didn’t know anybody.  So when he saw a prayer breakfast on the program, he went.

There were two other Governors there, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.  He said he was really impressed with Clinton’s Christian faith.  He had these bright blue eyes that lit up with faith in the Lord.

At that point I was doubled over in laughter, and we talked just a little bit more before he left.  I think he wanted me to know that he liked and respected me.  That meant a lot.

My copy of his autobiography is inscribed:   —-   “To Pettyjohn with warm wishes from Alaska.  ‘May your moose cache be ever full of moose meat, Jay Hammond.”

The finest man I ever knew, and I just barely knew him at all.