Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

A few years ago Charlie Fogarty (Hey, remember Charlie Fogarty?  He used to be the lieutenant governor. What ever happened to him, anyway?) used to hold a news conference every few weeks to a couple of months about long-term care for the elderly.

The idea, he would tell anybody who would listen, was to keep older folk out of nursing homes and in their own homes for as long as possible.
It was a pretty popular proposal. Allow Grandma to stay at home surrounded by loved ones, save the family homestead from having to be sold to pay the nursing home, and reduce the amount the state has to pay for Medicaid.
Everyone wins!
Old people ate it up. After all, nursing homes, even the best of them, can be lonely, depressing places that cost a fortune — all too frequently a life’s savings — to stay in.
In fact, the idea was so popular, it was one of those things that seemed too good to be true. Fogarty was accused of pandering to the elderly, using the office of lieutenant governor to pitch plans like this to old people as a way to climb the political ladder.
But it was great for Fogarty, because who could dump on a guy who wants to keep our grandmothers and grandfathers out of nursing homes?
Well, fast-forward a couple of years. (The imagery is now fast-forwarding, as with a DVD; nobody uses pages flying off a calendar anymore.)
Gov. Donald Carcieri is dusting off what seems to be a very similar idea and selling it as a way to keep seniors at home and save the state $67 million dollars to help close the deficit.
He’s getting his head handed to him for it.
Carcieri is being painted as a cruel and vicious tyrant, forcing poor old people out of their safe, happy, comfortable nursing homes against their will toward an uncertain and cruel fate, as they clutch at the furniture in a screaming, futile attempt to stay while being dragged out by their feet and dumped into the street.
The depictions of the governor’s plan has me shedding a tear for the kindly nursing home owners being driven into bankruptcy and ruin because they are no longer allowed to care for their gray-haired charges.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Virtually the only thing different about the two ideas is the person who proposed them.
Fogarty is still looked on as nice guy Charlie, friend of the elderly.
Carcieri, who used to have a pretty formidable nice guy image himself, is now looked upon as the budget-cutting, benefit-squeezing, layer-off of state workers; the increasingly ideological Republican penny-pincher who will heartlessly heave welfare mothers and their undocumented babies into the snow-covered streets.
And so a once-popular idea is all of a sudden something verging on a scandal.
For anyone out there who doesn’t believe perception is reality in politics, this is an instructive case study.

Speaking as a football fan and a politics junkie, this has been a heady couple of weeks.
The game will be over by the time you read this (but, just for the record, it’s two hours before kickoff time and I’m saying the Pats, 35-24) so we will concentrate on politics, unlike most of the rest of the world.
It’s looking like Arizona Sen. John McCain is going to be the Republican nominee for president and that he his going to lock that up on Super Duper Tuesday tomorrow.
(Why didn’t any of the highly-paid political commentators think to call this near-national primary day by its traditional name — Fat Tuesday? Seems appropriate somehow. Except don’t expect any of the presidential candidates from either party to give up dissembling, spinning, posturing and outright lying for Lent. Laissez les bon temps rouler!)
The impression I will never shake of McCain when I was standing with a group of other reporters on the second floor of the Statehouse one day, waiting for something or other to happen, when an older-looking guy with white hair started walking past and one of the other reporters said to me, “Isn’t that John McCain?”
Yup, it was him. He was totally alone, absolutely by himself. One of the radio guys and I popped up (a couple of the other reporters didn’t recognize him, or couldn’t be bothered) and started talking to him.
The senator — this was long before the presidential race got serious this time around — said he was in the area and just stopped by to say hello to Governor Carcieri, a fellow Republican. After a few questions about the war and whatever other business was occupying the Senate at that time (my recollection of the encounter is a bit dim because it seemed surreal that this national political figure and onetime candidate for president — he had won the Rhode Island Republican primary in 2000 — was standing here all by himself, no aides, no retinue, no posse at all taking a few questions from reporters before ambling back to his car.
And by this time next year, that guy could very well be President of the United States.
It is not so clear who is going to be the Democratic nominee, but the smart money is probably going to be on former first lady Hillary Clinton.
It turns out this ridiculously early and front-loaded primary schedule is to her unique advantage this time around.
This is the case not only because she has the money and the backing of the Democratic political establishment for a coast-to-coast campaign blitzkrieg, but also because the format is uniquely detrimental for Obama.
Much is made of Obama’s youth, but the fact is, he is running for president 60 or 75 years too late.
His strength is in speechifying — getting a whole lot of people in a room or gathered in some other place, and just grabbing them by their lapels with his speaking voice and presentation and commanding their attention.
As the old saying goes, you had to be there. As handsome and photogenic and charismatic as Obama is, it just doesn’t come across the same way on television, or even the radio. You have to be there.
I can tell you about that first-hand, too because I was covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston when I and virtually the rest of the world first heard of Barack Obama.
I, frankly, wondered what the big deal was. This guy was a state senator in Illinois, who had lucked his way into a shoo-in election for a U.S. Senate seat because his Republican opponent quit the campaign in the midst of a sex scandal. (Fans of the TV show Shark, will recognize Jeri Ryan as Jessica Devlin, James Woods’ onetime boss, now his underling. She had been married to Obama’s Republican opponent Jack Ryan, until a reporter dug up their divorce records, where she charged him with trying to force her to go to sex clubs. Trekkies will know her as  Seven of Nine in “Voyager”.)
For some reason I couldn’t fathom, Obama was listed as the Keynote Speaker at the convention.
Well he hadn’t been talking for two minutes before I finally fathomed the reason. This guy is good; put a microphone in his hand and the lights seem to get brighter in the room.
He gave what has become known as his “Audacity of Hope” speech and he just killed. At one point, a lot of people listening to the speech were crying; at another they were stomping their feet and shouting.
If he had a primary campaign that lasted until June, where he could go from state to state and touch people with that magic, this might be a different race.
But as usual, inspiration and hope and ideals are once again just going to be ephemera in this campaign, like the funny hats and colorful banners left on the floor for the sweepers after everyone has gone home. What is going to matter is money and what ads it can buy in which media markets in whatever big state.
And we wonder why politics and government is what it is these days.