Once There Were No Primaries-- And The Party Bosses Just Picked The Presidential Nominees

There dream of the Republican establishment this year-- stopping Herr Trumpf and the hated Ted Cruz with a deadlocked, brokered convention-- looks pretty moribund at this point. It looks like Trumpf is on the way to be able to march into Cleveland with all the delegates he needs for a first-ballot nomination. And the Establishment seems resigned to convincing themselves that the world is wonderful because at least they won't have to deal with Cruz. But deep in their hearts I bet they're longing for another era, when party bosses picked presidential candidates, not primaries and caucuses. The interview with Geoffrey Cowen, author of Let the People Rule, gives you a good look into how presidential candidates were picked irrespective of the will of ordinary voters up until quote recently.

A few days ago Ari Berman, author of Give Us The Ballot, penned a review of the book for the NY Times and, with the threat of a Mike Bloomberg third party presidential run, a look at the 1912 presidential race Cowen highlights is well worth reexamining. The election itself pitted Republican President William Howard Taft against Democrat Woodrow Wilson, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt running as a Progressive, and Socialist Eugene Debs. Before we get into Berman's review of Cowan's book, let's get the results out of the way:

• Wilson- 6,296,284 (41.8%)-- 40 states, 435 electoral votes
• Roosevelt- 4,122,721 (27.4%)-- 6 states, 88 electoral votes
• Taft- 3,486,242 (23.2%)-- 2 states (Utah and Vermont), 8 electoral votes
• Debs- 901,551 (6.0%). no states, no electoral votes

At the Democratic Party convention, Gov. Wilson was nominated on the 46th ballot-- beating the Wall Street candidate (Champ Clark). At the Republican convention, Taft beat Roosevelt with the help of the conservative GOP establishment that hated Roosevelt for his anti-trust policies. The GOP nomination battle was further complicated by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, who was further left than Roosevelt. La Follette won 2 primaries, Roosevelt won 9 and Taft won 1. The rest of the states didn't give voters a role in picking the party nominees. As Berman reminds us in his review, Roosevelt said, in finally coming around to backing primaries, that "The right of the people to rule is the great fundamental issue now before the Republican Party."

But at 9:28 p.m. on June 22, 1912, William Howard Taft was renominated by Republicans at their presidential convention in Chicago. Only minutes later, 150 delegates loyal to Teddy Roosevelt marched out of the Chicago Coliseum, mimicking the rumbling sound of a steamroller, and headed for Orchestra Hall, where thousands had raucously gathered to inaugurate Roosevelt as the leader of the new Progressive Party. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt proclaimed. The machinations that led to Roosevelt’s exit from the Republican Party and the creation of what became known as the Bull Moose Party is the subject of Geoffrey Cowan’s Let the People Rule.

After leaving the presidency in 1908, Roosevelt had named Taft as his handpicked successor. Yet, upon returning from a lengthy trip to Africa and Europe, Roose­velt grew disillusioned with Taft and decided to challenge his former secretary of war.

Cowan explains how Roosevelt’s shrewd support of primaries gave him an opening against Taft while co-opting the message of more radical reformers like the Wisconsin governor Robert ­LaFollette. Roose­velt’s campaign “popularized presidential primaries and increased the number of states that embraced them,” Cowan writes. “His rhetoric helped to enshrine the cause of popular democracy in the nation’s vocabulary.” But Taft still maintained a huge lead in delegates chosen by the party machinery from states that did not hold primaries, which forced Roose­velt to bolt the party after the Chicago convention.

In many ways, Roosevelt’s Progressive candidacy was ahead of its time. It promulgated innovative ideas like social security and a federal minimum wage that were later adopted by Roosevelt’s fifth cousin Franklin in the New Deal.

Yet the primary system wouldn’t be reformed until after 1968, when Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee at his party’s disastrous convention, also in Chicago, despite not having won a single primary. Chaos in Grant Park was the result, forcing both parties to change their rules and become more democratic.

...Cowan paints an admirably nuanced picture of Roosevelt, exposing the hypocrisy of his call to “let the people rule.”

Though the Progressive Party endorsed woman suffrage and welcomed black delegates from the North, Roosevelt, in a bid to woo conservative white Southerners, refused to seat African-Americans from the South at his convention. “I believe that the great majority of the Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for suffrage,” Roose­velt said, echoing the Southern white supremacist sentiments of his day.

His gambit failed in the general election, when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson carried every Southern state, winning 435 electoral votes and 42 percent of the popular vote. Roosevelt won 88 electoral votes and 27 percent of the vote. Taft garnered only eight electoral votes and 23 percent of the vote. But the Progressive Party collapsed soon after. “The dog has returned to its vomit,” Roosevelt said of the Republicans in 1914.

Primaries have not become the democratic remedy Roosevelt was hoping for. Yes, voters have much more say now than they did in 1912, but primary contests have often pushed the parties toward their respective extremes, particularly the Republican Party, while the cost and length of campaigns skyrocketed. “Let the people rule” remains more an aspiration than a reality in American politics today.

For the political history junkies, since I mentioned that Taft only won Vermont and Utah, the 6 states that Roosevelt won were California (by just 200 votes), Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Washington. People interested in where Debs did best-- and 1912 was his best run of his 5 presidential campaigns-- may be surprised to see that all the double digit states were out west:

• Nevada- 16.47%
• Oklahoma- 16.42%
• Montana- 13.64%
• Washington- 12.43%
• Arizona- 13.33%
• California- 11.68%
• Idaho- 11.31%

In an unrelated post in The Atlantic Sunday, David Greenberg pointed out that Teddy Roosevelt "ushered in an age in which presidents would be perpetually engaged in the work of publicity and opinion management-- the work of spin" and he illustrates it with Roosevelt's "historic 1906 quest to clean up the shoddy and predatory practices in the stockyards and meatpacking houses where Americans got their daily diet of beef." This is exactly the kind of thing that earned him the undying enmity of the Big Money Republican Party establishment and why they stuck with the unpopular Taft rather than embrace Teddy Roosevelt in 2012.

After decades of unchecked industrial growth, American businesses and industries were in need of federal regulation—to protect workers, consumers, farmers, or simply other competitors in the marketplace. Addressing the issue of unregulated meatpacking and other foods had been on Roosevelt’s to-do list for some time when he raised it in his December 1905 message to Congress. “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers,” he declared, “should be forbidden.” The Senate, dominated by business interests, resisted, but Roosevelt hoped to prevail by enlisting public support. To do so, he seized on a popular outcry triggered that spring by the reporting of a crusading, 27-year-old socialist with whom, despite profound ideological disagreements, Roosevelt locked arms.

 ...When his book appeared, Sinclair undertook a promotional campaign. That effort included writing a slew of pieces about the sordid state of Chicago meatpacking for a variety of magazines. It also entailed mailing out copies of The Jungle to important people. One recipient was Theodore Roosevelt, who, fortuitously, was just then considering how to marshal public support for regulation of the so-called Beef Trust.

 Never one to mince words, the president deemed Sinclair a “crackpot.” But he shared the novelist’s dim view of the meat moguls. He wrote Sinclair a three-page letter that mocked the young man’s “pathetic belief” in socialism and offered a critique of The Jungle-- but one that concluded with: “The specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have the power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt extended an invitation to the White House.

By this point, Roosevelt was at work on his own plan. He had previously asked the Agriculture Department to investigate conditions in Chicago. The president thought that if he could confirm even a portion of Sinclair’s report, he could galvanize public opinion and force the balky Congress-- which was warring with TR over his reform agenda-- to move on meat-inspection legislation. When Roosevelt shared the news of this preliminary step with Sinclair, the novelist demurred, fearing, as he told the president, that having the Agriculture Department examine the issue “was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.” Instead, Sinclair urged Roosevelt to open “a secret and confidential investigation” by a disinterested party.

...Public support for reform was building. With Roosevelt’s backing, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana introduced an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that imposed stringent rules on meat inspection, including dating canned meat, with meatpackers forced to pay the costs. Spurred by this flurry of activity, the Pure Food and Drug bill-- which prohibited the adulteration and mislabeling of foods, beverages, medicines, and other drugs-- also now started to advance, separately, toward passage.

On the defensive, the meatpacking and livestock industries joined forces. They warned that any legitimation of Sinclair’s charges would dry up foreign markets for U.S. meat; federal regulation, moreover, would shift control of the industry from the businessmen with the relevant know-how to “theorists, chemists [and] sociologists,” as one spokesman said. When it became clear that some version of the bill was likely to pass, the industrialists switched to trying to strip out the most severe provisions. The beef companies even placed newspaper ads inviting readers to visit the packinghouses and judge for themselves.

The beef industry had been routed in the court of public opinion. As the packinghouses literally whitewashed their facilities as part of a desperate cleanup job, the press grew withering. The New York Evening Post offered doggerel: “Mary had a little lamb/And when she saw it sicken/She shipped it off to Packingtown/And now it’s labeled chicken.” Before a House committee, Neill and Reynolds rehearsed with fanfare their gory findings, including an account of a pig carcass that fell into a urinal before getting hung, unwashed, in a cooling room.

House conservatives made a defiant stand, and Roosevelt and Beveridge ultimately made some concessions. But the Indiana senator proclaimed the final bill “the most pronounced extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted.” Its achievements far outweighed its deficiencies, and it established important standards and precedents. On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt, with a stroke of the pen, made meat inspection the law of the land—and with another stroke signed into law the Pure Food and Drug bill. “In the session that has just closed,” he said to the press, “The Congress has done more substantive work for good than any Congress has done at any session since I became familiar with public affairs.”

The meat-inspection episode showed the president’s skill not only at discerning public opinion aroused by the press but also at using statements, leaks, and the cultivation of journalists to pass his progressive agenda. In an article hailing “The Reign of Public Opinion,” the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens called it “the real power behind Theodore Roosevelt.” Congressmen submitted to the presidential will, Steffens said, because he was “the leader of public opinion” and they feared popular retribution if they defied him. Even Sinclair, who had wanted a stronger bill than the final compromise, praised TR: “He took the matter up with vigor and determination, and he has given it his immediate and personal attention from the very beginning.”

Roosevelt is remembered as the first president of the modern age not simply because he used presidential power on behalf of sweeping reform-- a feat in itself-- but because he redefined the president’s job by governing with an acute consciousness of his power to reach the public.

Is Ted Cruz Really The Political Reincarnation Of Joe McCarthy?

Hopefully you remember Corey Robin and his amazing, penetrating book, The Reactionary Mind. Yesterday he was tweeting about a NY Times apologia by Robert "Mr. Republican" Taft's grandson, John G. Taft, The Cry of the True Republican. It starts with an admission: "I am a genetic Republican." And then veers off in an attempt to disassociate his family's heritage-- and identity-- with Ted Cruz and the sociopaths who have captured the once-respectable GOP.

Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do-- position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.

Speaking through the night, Senator Ted Cruz, with heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes, conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens, but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: “blow it up if we can’t get what we want.”

This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by Republicans in Congress evokes another painful, historically embarrassing chapter in the Republican Party -- that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose anti-Communist crusade was allowed by Republican elders to expand unchecked, unnecessarily and unfairly tarnishing the reputations of thousands of people with “Red Scare” accusations of Communist affiliation. Finally Senator McCarthy was brought up short during the questioning of the United States Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, who at one point demanded the senator’s attention, then said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He later added: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Watching the Republican Party use the full faith and credit of the United States to try to roll back Obamacare, watching its members threaten not to raise the debt limit-- which Warren Buffett rightly called a “political weapon of mass destruction”-- to repeal a tax on medical devices, I so wanted to ask a similar question: “Have you no sense of responsibility? At long last, have you left no sense of responsibility?”

There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.

Corey called him on his historical rewrite on the touchy subject of the relationship between the Republican Party and the ugly McCarthyism it has been identified with. "Let’s turn," he writes, "to the Wayback Machine, shall we?"

First, it’s important to remember that in 1946, the year McCarthy was elected to the Senate, Taft was the leader of the conservative Senate Republicans who were eager to use redbaiting to help Republicans get elected. Taft had no compunction about claiming that the legislative agenda of Democrats in Congress “bordered on Communism.” That kind of talk helped put the entire Congress back in Republican hands for the first time since 1930. So forceful-- and out there, ideologically speaking-- was Taft’s leadership that after the election the New Republic editorialized that “Congress… now consists of the House, the Senate, and Bob Taft.”

Second, Taft was the author of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, one of the most infamous rollbacks in twentieth century American history. (Far from being a genteel defender or “steward” of tradition, as Taft the grandson suggests, Taft the grandfather aggressively sought to counter the New Deal. When he ran against Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952, Taft was the candidate of domestic rollback, not accommodation, including rollback of such policies as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which required companies receiving government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race.)

Among Taft-Hartley’s many provisions was the prohibition of closed or union shops, which paved the way for states to pass “right to work” laws and other anti-union legislation of the sort that we’ve seen many right-wing state legislators pushing since 2010-- particularly in those states where both elected branches of government were suddenly in the hands of the Republicans, thanks in no small part to support from the Tea Party.

In addition, the anticommunist provision of Taft-Hartley was one of the more potent pieces of legislation contributing to the developing atmosphere of Cold War hysteria around communism. That provision mandated that all unions seeking the protections of the Wagner Act had to have their leaders take an oath affirming that they were neither members nor supporters of the Communist Party or any other organization seeking the overthrow of the United States government. That provision provoked a wave of red-baiting and red-hunting within and around the labor movement, which proved to be a kind of social corollary to what the government was doing in and around the executive branch.

Taft was not the opponent or even just the helpmate of this repression; he was a leading agent of it. More than three years before anyone outside of Wisconsin had even heard of Joseph McCarthy.

But on the question of McCarthy himself, the record is clear: Taft did not merely “allow” the man and the ism to dominate; Taft actively coddled, encouraged, and supported him and it at every turn.

As early as March 23, 1950-- four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia-- Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.”

When Truman attacked McCarthy’s speech-- no amateur when it came to red-baiting, Truman called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”-- Taft responded in kind, accusing Truman of being “bitter and prejudiced” and of “libeling” McCarthy, who was “a fighting Marine.” (Asked whether he had indeed libeled McCarthy, Truman responded, “Do you think that is possible?”)

While the Tydings Committee conducted its hearings about Communists in the State Department, Taft denounced the hearings as a “farce” and a “whitewash,” and pushed for even more aggressive inquisitions into subversion of the executive branch. As late as 1952 Taft would be harping on the issue of Communists in the State Department. He claimed that Dean Acheson had welcomed the Communist takeover of China because “in the State Department there’s been a strong Communist sympathy, as far as the Chinese Communists are concerned.” Sensing a major political opportunity in the coming presidential election of 1952, Taft said, “The only way to get rid of Communists in the State Department is to change the head of the government.”

…Taft personally endorsed McCarthy’s reelection bid during the Wisconsin primary of 1952, claiming that “Senator McCarthy has dramatized the fight to exclude Communists from the State Department. I think he did a great job in undertaking that goal.” He even campaigned for McCarthy-- despite the fact that McCarthy never returned the favor by endorsing Taft… This was the man they once called “Mr. Conservative” who is now being held up as the paragon of moderation. To paraphrase Woody Allen: a moderate Republican is a right-wing reactionary plus time.

I'll just add one small point that was made very well in Predisposed by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford, who are grappling with what makes someone a liberal or a conservative.

To get an idea of how a set of predispositions toward these bedrock dilemmas can provide a constant anchor underneath shifting issues and labels, consider contemporary attitudes on military intervention, an issue much fought over by the left and right in the United States. Generally speaking, it has been the right--Republicans-- that has been more supportive of this sort of thing, while the long hairs on the left are more opposed. Military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama and Grenada was launched by Republican presidential administrations, and a big chunk of the public support for those operations was provided by rank-and-file Republicans. Vietnam was fought primarily under Democratic administrations, but the war was strongly supported by many Republicans. The domino theory that communism, if not stopped in Saigon, would spread to the rest of Southeast Asia, then Honolulu, and then Berkeley was widely advocated by the G.O.P. Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater criticized his Democratic opponent, Lyndon Johnson, for not doing enough to defeat the communists in Vietnam and Johnson responded by portraying Goldwater as someone who was ready to start a nuclear war over Southeast Asia. Republicans similarly supported Korean operations when Democrat Harry Truman was president, and often bashed him for not doing more-- in particular for his refusal to drop nukes on China as suggested by that sensible General MacArthur. What’s interesting is that the aggressive and interventionist streak of the Republican Party in the last half of the 20th century is in fairly strong contrast with its record during the first half of that century.

If you go back to the late 1930s, powerful Republicans-- with plenty of support from the rank and file-- were among the strongest voices arguing for an isolationist stand to keep the United States out of a spreading European conflict. One of the biggest organizations pushing the isolationist message was the American First Committee (AFC), which had international icon Charles Lindbergh as its most prominent and visible spokesman. Lindbergh gave nationally broadcast radio addresses urging American to avoid involvement in the “European War,” the basic pitch being that if the Old Countries wanted to go another round that was their business. America, on the other hand, should sit this one out. Lindbergh’s words struck a chord. At its height, the AFC attracted nearly a million members. Though it drew considerable strength from merging with the more left-leaning Keep America Out of the War Committee, the AFC was primary a product of the American right, particularly the Republican Party (it was founded by a Yale Law School student, Robert Douglas Stuart, Jr., heir to the Quaker Oats Company, who in the 1980s would be appointed by Ronald Reagan as ambassador to Norway).

This isolationist stance was not surprising-- Republicans had taken this as the party line for decades. Twenty years earlier, just after World War I, Republicans played a key role in keeping the United States out of the League of Nations. Powerful Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, feared the prospect of future European entanglements and wanted no constraints on American sovereignty. Two decades on, many Republicans were singing the same isolationist tune. United States Senator Robert Taft, for example, one of the most powerful and best known Republican Party figures of the 20th century, adamantly opposed supporting the allies even as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe.

That decades-long isolationism of the Republican Party went out the window with PearlHarbor and never really came back. Senator Taft, who in 1939 favored avoiding any involvement at all in spreading a war in Europe was, in 1951, in favor of bombing China in support of a mainland invasion by Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist forces.17 In the decades sinceWorld War II, interventionist policies consistently received higher support from Republicans-- sometimes, as we have seen, even from the same Republicans who had once been strict isolationists. Fortress America isolationists becoming Cold Warrior interventionists; where is the unifying thread in that?

I suppose it would be unkind to point out that the isolationists-- Taft and Lindberg particularly-- strongly identified with Europe's right-wing regimes and were apologists for the fascism they saw as so very kindred to the "ideal" Republican Party. So, of course they opposed U.S. involvement on behalf of the democracies they despised fighting Hitker and the Nazis they admired. And the turn around… a psychological overreaction to how wrong they had been, made far easier because their militancy was directed against the left-wing and "Commies." Some things really never do change.

NOE INDICTED FOR HELPING STEAL 2004 ELECTION FOR BUSH (AMONG OTHER REPUBLICAN CRIMES)

When I started Down With Tyranny, people kept asking me if I lived in Ohio. I don't. But I was writing all the time about the Republican scandal epidemic there. And at the center-- surrounded by Governor Bob Taft, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, arch crook and DeLay/Abramoff henchman Congressman Bob Ney, Attorney General Jim Petro, both U.S. Senators, half a dozen other Ohio congressmen, half the state legislature, and a gaggle of other GOP offcials, is Republican kingpin Thomas Noe. Today's Toledo Blade, the crusading newspaper that uncovered this scandal while the one party state of Ohio fought furiously and viciously to cover it up, has announced that Noe has been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for laundering money into Bush's re-election campaign, allowing Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell to steal the state's electoral votes for Bush (and hence handing him "re-election").

A few months ago a local California magazine asked me to write a summary of the Ohio scandal-- with an L.A. point of view-- but the editor resigned and the article never got published-- until now:

Outside of Ohio not too many people have heard about "Coingate," although it could turn out to be the biggest political/financial scandal since Teapot Dome! Even though it's been headlines for weeks in Ohio, the national mass media doesn't seem to want to talk about it. Maybe it's a little too complicated. Financial shenanigans involving political figures are always FAR MORE complicated than celebrities accused of molesting young boys or a runaway bride or a man who kills his wife. But since Arnold Schwarzenegger has now been implicated in the whole mess, maybe it's time for Californians to start paying some serious attention. Briefly, here's the story so far:

An Ohio Republican Party kingmaker (and former GOP Lucas County Chairman), Thomas Noe, is at the center because he was able to convince the state of Ohio to make a couple of extraordinarily risky, highly unorthodox-- some would say "bizarre"-- investments with the State Workmen's Compensation Fund. Noe, a Bush-Cheney Pioneer (which means he was able to raise at least $100,000 for the presidential campaign), has been very-- make that very, very-- active in financing Republican candidates in his home state, at least a couple of governors, a couple U.S. senators, the state auditor, state attorney general, the secretary of state, a gaggle of congressmen and state legislators... 5 of the 7 Supreme Court judges. What a generous guy! Civic minded? Well, turns out that Ohio state government is pretty much an experiment in one-party rule-- no checks, no balances. Every non-judicial statewide official is a Republican. So it wasn't all that difficult for Noe to get his hands on millions of dollars of Workmen's Compensation Money and put it into (what was termed "invest in") his highly speculative rare coin (and collectible baseball cards!!) fund.

Aside from making hefty commissions on the "investments," the Republican Party high-roller seems to have lost (literally) MILLIONS of dollars in coins. This isn't just a case of coins decreasing in value, but a case of tangible, physical items... just gone. And "strangely"-- according to an anonymous law enforcement source quoted in the Toledo Blade, records show, for example, Noe bought one coin for $100,000 but then claimed to have sold it for $1. (What happened to the other $99,999.00 from that "sale?") Meanwhile the generous contributions continued to flow unabated into GOP coffers. In fact, Noe was illegally reimbursing anyone he could coral into donating to the 2004 Bush Cheney campaign. Noe (currently extremely incommunicado) is under investigation-- in fact almost half a dozen of them. Many of his Republican-best-buddies-in-high-places have been returning some, though by no means all, of the money they got from him, including President Bush (a paltry $4,000 of the over $100,000 Noe gave BushCheney), Governor Taft, and the man many Democrats claim corrupted the Ohio presidential election results in 2004, Secretary of State/current GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell. Did what looks very much like stolen money wind up unduly influencing the presidential election? Perhaps a nonpartisan Special Prosecutor will be appointed? Not likely; like Zimbabwe, Ohio is functioning as a one-party state. Meanwhile, the first non-Ohio politician other than Bush, to have been a known recipient of Mr. Noe's largesse has been identified: the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Ohio coin dealer gave the money last year to a Schwarzenegger fund that supports the California governor’s legislative priorities. In other words, the tainted $10,000 Noe gave him, very likely stolen from Ohio State Workmen's Compensation funds, and which Ohio newspapers are reporting Schwarzenegger won't return, is being used along with other contributions from multinational corporations to push Arnold's highly dubious agenda in the "special election" he's foisting on California in November. The irony of using working people's money to push viciously anti-working people laws is seen as the height of irony by many Democrats.

Schwarzenegger, who campaigned in the state of Ohio for Bush-Cheney in the closing days of the 2004 election, has business interests including the Arnold Classic bodybuilding competition in Columbus. "Allegations about Mr. Noe became public a year after we accepted his contribution," Marty Wilson, executive director of Schwarzenegger’s fund, said Friday. "As he was an active Ohio Republican party fund-raiser and donor, we had no reason at the time to question his contribution."
Under California law, the California Recovery Team organization (the front for Schwarzzenegger's special interest/corporate money collection operation he plans to use to blanket the state of California with TV and radio advertising to push his reactionary agenda before the Special Election) can accept unlimited corporate or individual contributions. Schwarzenegger and his team have gone back and forth on whether or not they plan to return the $10,000 to the Ohio Workmen's Compensation Fund, saying yes one day and no the next day.

It sounds pretty bad-- around $55 million in Workmen's Comp money "invested" and something like $12 million missing. But it gets worse! As the investigation-- driven almost entirely by pressure from readers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Toledo Blade-- expanded it suddenly turns out that the poor Workmen's Compensation Fund was being looked on by Republican office holders charged with the fiduciary responsibility for protecting it as a honeypot for political donors even beyond Noe. Last week it was publicly announced, although the Governor Taft and Attorney General Petro have been aware of this-- and denying it-- since just before the election, that another $225 million have been lost. This time it was a different firm, one in Pennsylvania which runs hedge funds, and which is also a major donor to Ohio Republican politics.

Meanwhile Ohio officials responded to the unfolding scandal by attacking the newspapers pressing the investigations, claiming, at first, the whole thing was a vendetta and that the so-called "investments" were profitable. The Governor (of Ohio) who has not been indicted yet, was quoted on April 8 as screaming at a reporter from the Blade that "[Noe] was making money for the state; what's the problem?" Noe and his wife Bernadette (who was GOP chairman of Lucas County during the presidental election) have personally donated over $200,000 to Ohio Republican candidates and PACs in the last 15 years-- and those are just the above-board contributions, not the illegal ones like the reimbursements to Bush-Cheney donors. The Pittsburgh hedge fund managers have shovelled hundreds of thousands more into the Ohio state GOP-- but it turns out to have been money well-spent for them-- and for the Ohio GOP, if not for the state tax-payers. Youngstown Democratic State Senator Marc Dann is calling the mess "a culture of corruption... It's more than a guess that some of the money could have made its way to the campaign committees of Republican officeholders, starting at Toledo city council and going up to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the president. I can now go into any bowling alley or barber shop and mention Tom Noe's name and have everyone understand what corruption in our state means," continued Dann. "People understand when money is stolen, and they understand the connections to the Republican Party. The GOP might try to give back the money, but they're still tainted."