Short answer: McAdams spent the whole time trying to say he isn’t one of THOSE Democrats, Miller spent the whole time trying to say he isn’t Sarah Palin.  Miller is far, far more glib and facile.  He has a lawyer’s abilty to use words.  He also has a lawyer’s ability to not answer a question and try to make you think he did.  McAdams never expected to be doing anything other than making arguments to Lisa Murkowski about things he thought would be good for Southeast Alaska, so he was pretty much out of his league.

So, do I trust Miller? No, not really.  I think he’s a lot like Palin; he knows what to say to punch the right electoral button.  Is he a good candidate?  Yes, within the limits of his opposition.  I might have fun with the parry and thrust of questioning with him, but McAdams would be bleeding out pretty quickly.

Miller has the simplistic and ideological answer that everybody who has never had their name on the door likes.  The World and the US Senate aren’t that way.  He’ll either learn the “nuanced” answer, or somebody will teach it to him at re-election time.  And, yeah, I know all you purists hate me and office holders over that nuanced answer, but when you’re the one that actually has to do it, nuances become important.

Anyway, I think it is over tomorrow.  There are still lots of people who really can’t accept a Palin/Miller nomnee, but they can’t accept a Democrat either.  The odds of winning a write-in are abysmally small, so MUrkowski most likely will wish Mr. Miller well tomorrow.  But one day, I suspect Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin are going to have a very serious disagreement.

I tore down my parents’ house this year.  Glad I wasn’t there to watch it.  It was built in the ‘teens from timber off the property by my Grandfather and the menfolk of the family.  The bird’s eyes in the rafters were cut by hatchet and the sills were shaped by an adze.  But after 70 or 80 years, and old house is just an old house; spending a hundred thousand bucks on an old house doesn’t make a hundred thousand dollar house; so I tore it down and hauled it away.  And I hauled away all the stuff that was still in it.  I lament some of that, but since none of it had been particularly useful to anyone for twenty years or so, it might as well go to the dump.

It’s not easy; my sister and I were conceived in that house and grew to almost adulthood there.  I say almost, because leaving for college doesn’t make you an adult – even though you think it does.  In the dark hours when I am melancholy and thoughtful – like now – I can’t really calculate the balance; was it a wonderful, naive childhood or was it just Southern white trash poverty?  I lean towards the white trash poverty but there was some wonderful in there.  There was a wonderful self-reliance, a wonderful faith, not Faith, that you could do what you needed to do.  I heard “Thy Will be done” used as an excuse all too much in my youth.  To my mind, God’s will, if there was a God, was for you to get off your ass and do something for yourself.  I think that was a lesson often lost in the rural South.

So now I’m doing what I always envisioned my kids doing; cleaning up the family place.  Twenty five years is an eternity in today’s world.  I’ve lived in this house for 25 years!  When Wife 1.0 and I split up, I needed a place not associated with her.  I did first a lease purchase and then an illegal wrap-around mortgage, you could do that if you had a job in the oil crash days, on a ’60s three bedroom, single bath ranch in a not very good neighborhood.  I sold my old Dodge pickup and camper to pay the closing costs and with that sale surrendered my rights as a free man; if you have some tools, a pickup, and a camper; you’re a free man.

I and we raised four kids in that house and yard.  The first few years were just me and my daughter.  If you haven’t raised a teen-aged daughter as a single father, don’t talk to me about parental responsibility.  In retrospect it was funny.  She didn’t much care who she was sharing her Cheerios with as long as she didn’t see her as a threat; this was, By God, her house.  I could troll some bit of fluff in and she’d just say “Hi.”  But, let an older or more serious woman come along, and the claws came out.  When my now-wife and I decided it was time to live together, the first issue was the “woman of the house.”  So, I moved her to the dormitory at the university.  You’d have thought I had put her in a burlap bag and took her out the road to throw her in the ocean.  But she got over it and after a while couldn’t have been brought back home with dynamite.

The back yard saw never-ending baseball games.  There was the eternal struggle between my insistance that they play with tennis balls and their desire to destroy all neighboring property with baseballs.  There was a “jungle-gym” of epic proportions for many years.  There were camp-outs in the yard; many of which ended with freaked-out children sleeping on the living room floor.   There was the God-damned trampoline, and you know, I loved the pleasure that the kids took from those trampolines, but if you have a trampoline and you kids have friends from all over the neighborhood, you might as well just have a lottery for which kid’s parents get to own you your house and your retirement.  Fortunantly, nobody ever got seriously hurt or killed, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

So, now they’re all gone.  There are no more baseball games and the trampoline was long ago sold to a neighbor.  The yard is now eccentricly decorated with all sorts of statuary and “stuff.”  The sideyard is beautifully lit to accent the gargoyle and backlight the arrowhead picket fence that I built.  My family bet against me on that fence; I finished it before winter and they bought the pizza.   And I put in all the fancy doors, and the trim, and all that other “stuff.”   After all these years, that house is pretty much exactly as I wanted it to be.  My hands have been on every single square inch of that house.

And now to the point; the kids don’t want it.  They have their lives in SEA and ANC; they don’t want to go back to a backwater like Juneau just to have an old family house.  They loved the dogs and cats buried in the little plot complete with headstones in the back yard, but they don’t want to come here and take care of it.  Well, maybe, If we didn’t charge them rent for living here.

So, I’m selling it.  The highest and best use is for some developer to buy it, tear it down and put a zero on it; the land is the valuable part.   I just don’t think that family tradition is a part of American life any more.  I know I abandoned it for fast cars, old whiskey, and pretty women.  My kids abandoned it for what they saw as economic opportunity.

Miranda Lambert has a song about, “The House That Made Me,” that is pretty popular theses days.  I can relate to it; that old country farmhouse in Georgia made me, and it broke my heart to accept that there was nothing for it anymore but to tear it down and haul it away.  So, now, I have the house that I’ve spent the last twenty five years in.  The kids say, “don’t sell it,” but none of them want to live in it.  Tomorrow, I sign the listing agreement.  Maybe it goes to a young family that can see their kids grow up in that wonderful back yard.  Maybe it goes to a developer that just shows up with a bulldozer.

Vassar, you’re right, that house that you can hand down to your children is a fundament.  For people our age, it is why we did what we did.  But the reality is the kids don’t think they want the house.  They may later; they may blame you later for getting rid of “their” house, but those “family” homes that we all thought we needed to build were really just for us; the family doesn’t give a damn.

So, Miller was so into being the “true conservative” that he went batsh*t crazy on some issues.  The Democrats already have their “extremist” ads all tuned up and unfortunately, a lot of them are true.  I’ve told you all over and over that Alaska isn’t a conservative state as many of you define conservative; there’s a lot more bars and whorehouses than churches.  Libertarian plays really well here on most issues; they’ve just never had the organization to elect a lot of candidates.  Most of the Rs here are pretty much libertarian except on the economic issues due to Alaska’s unique governmental and revenue structure.

So, Miller has pinned himself into the far right corner, and he can’t get out because he and the Tea Party types spent a whole bunch of money telling everybody just how Lisa was a liberal and Joe wasn’t.  OK, that apparently got him a nomination, but he can’t walk it back  Joe Miller is stuck with everything he said while he was calling Sen. Murkowski a liberal.

The Democrats have their twenty and change percent of the committed vote; the rest they have to get from independents, 60% of the electorate, or disaffected Republicans; there ain’t gonna be a whole lot of disaffected Republicans in this one.  Miller’s pinned in the Right corner, McAdams, whoever the Hell he is, is pinned in the Left corner, and Lisa has the middle.   If Lisa jumps out into the L column, the Ds spend their money somewhere else because she still has a lot.  I don’t think the Libertarian Party has ever had a US Senator before, but is isn’t inconceivable now, thanks to all the “true conservatives.”  Oh, and the oppo research is going to have fun with Joe Miller.

I lost a friend today.  We weren’t close, personal friends, but Ted Stevens and I knew each other well enough that if we met at a grip ‘n grin, he’d say “Hello, Art,” even if the aide might have whispered my name in his ear as I approached.  The last dealing I had with him in his official capacity was when my son in Afghanistan wasn’t getting mail for weeks at the time.  I contacted the Senator and very quickly my son was getting mail.  Whatever he or his staff did, it was enough to cause some of his command to ask my kid to tell his parents to back off.

The story of Ted Stevens and the story of the State of Alaska are almost coincident.  So is the story of my life here.  The Senator had just won re-election in ’72 after his appointment in ’68 when I came to Alaska in ’74.  I was pretty much your basic long-haired, dope-smoking, FM radio-listening Democrat back then and I worked for organized labor, but organized labor liked The Senator back then.  That was back when organized labor was still guys, and yes, I mean guys, who got their hands dirty.  We might rough somebody up, “requisition” some material, or stuff like that, but we didn’t sit behind desks and plot politics like the eunuchs in a Turkish whorehouse like the modern incarnation does.  I don’t remember the first time I met him, sometime in the mid-’70s at some grip ‘n grin I’m sure; seems like I’ve always known him well enough to say hello.

We weren’t always on the same side, then or later.  The first time I actually had a conversation beyond, “Hello how are you” with him was not a pleasant one.  Stevens advocated taking the Carter/Democrat Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in ’80 because he thought he’d gotten all that was on the table for us.  We here in Alaska didn’t much see it that way and neither did Senator Gravel (D-Alaska), and we in organized labor were backing Gravel and opposed to ANILCA.  I met a lot of the people who would be very important in my later life, even important in my ultimately becoming a Republican, during that time.  Back then organized labor and the business community could still work together pretty well.  I was working for the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education, the AFL’s PAC, at the time.  I worked with some prominent Chamber of Commerce types to raise the money for double truck ads in every major newspaper in America; newspapers were still important in ’80.  The Senator had given many of his friends cufflinks when he was appointed to the Senate.  They were diamond shaped and engraved around the diamond was, “To Hell With The Politics; Do What’s Right For Alaska.”  We put a picture of those cufflinks in the middle of two newspaper pages, “Senator Stevens, Please Come Home” across the top, and the names of practically everybody who was anybody in Alaska across the bottom.  He was incensed and I had a very heated telegram, remember those, and later phone call over how unfair it was.  But the opposition over that was a political near-death experience for him and from there on out he pretty much followed the dictum on those cufflinks.

There is no doubt he got too far from Alaska and too close to DC in his later years.  I really do believe he had no idea that what Bill Allen was charging him didn’t resemble the market value of what he was getting.  He knew he was getting bills and paying them, and that was it.  Any of you done a construction estimate from 5000 miles away lately?

All of you who know me know my stand on what many of you call porking; the US owns a lot more of Alaska than the State of Alaska does, and the US spending money on its own stuff isn’t the same as porking.  I don’t know what piss-off Coburn was acting on, but the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” didn’t add one dime to Alaska allocation of federal highway money, it just dictated to the Alaska Legislature how some of that allocation would be spent.  History proves why he did it; Sarah Palin kept the money but spent it in the Railbelt rather than in Southeast, which is exactly why the Ketchikan bridge was earmarked.  You should see the new overpass and cloverleaf between the Glenn and Parks Highways that takes you to Wasilla.  And I wanted to retch hearing her praising him today when she kicked him to the curb when he was being mau-maued by the Public Integrity Section’s goons.

I’ve now reached the place where headlines and obituaries really make me feel old.  I knew everybody in Gov. Parnell’s press conference about The Senator’s death today.  Gov. Hammond died a few years back; I knew him but never worked for him.  Gov. Hickel died a few months ago.  I worked for him from ’90 to ’94 and he’s one of the few people in the same league as Sen. Stevens in making this State.  Now today, Sen. Stevens is taken, but at least it was in a fitting way.  He was an active, agressive man, and it would have been horrible to watch him fade away as was the case with Governor Hickel.  He died doing what he liked doing and in the place he loved.  You can’t ask for much more.

For those of you not familiar with Alaska, to get from the capital, Juneau, to Anchorage, the real capital, you have to take a boat or a plane; there is no road access.  Alaska operates one of the larger ship lines under the American flag, the Alaska Marine Highway System composed of vehicle/passenger ferries that link Alaska’s coastal towns with the US and Canadian highways.  The system operates for the convenience of its unionized employees and assures the maximum inconvenience to the travelling public.  Consequently, the departure time for the M/V Matanuska’s (See here: http://www.alaskaferry.com/Ferries.shtml#matanuska) voyage from Juneau to Haines, AK was 1:15 AM, too late for dinner, and the 6:00 AM arrival in Haines was too early for breakfast – and the bar was closed too!  Haines was one of those towns established as an entrepot for the Klondike Gold Rush and also became important in WWII and the Cold War as a military point of entry to the Far North and Alaska.  Its importance has diminished with the opening of a road from Skagway to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, but it remains the point of entry to the highway system if you’re going north.  The ferries haven’t changed in my almost forty years here; the hippies are in their sleeping bags in the solarium and you can get high on pot just walking through.  The short distance travelers are in the forward observation lounge or in the recliner lounge.  The tourists and other travellers from the Lower 48 have staterooms and you don’t see them in the middle of the night.  We put the car on and hit the recliner lounge.  We’re out of practice at this, so we weren’t all that well equipped for uncomfortable and inconvenient travel, but we did have a couple of stolen airline blankets and I found a way to get coffee.  The trip was uneventful and would have been scenic if I hadn’t seen it all before; it still doesn’t get totally dark at night this time of year.  I slept about as well as you can in a chair.  We got off in Haines and tried unsuccessfully to find a place open for breakfast.  You’d think that a place dependent on travellers would know the ferry schedule, but apparently serving breakfast at 6:00 AM is too much like work in Haines, so we hit the road, the only road, from Haines, AK to Haines Junction, YT, a hundred and change miles away.  The road is pretty good by Alaska standards; not too curvy and pretty well graded, but those of you only used to interstates wouldn’t like it, did see a couple of nice bears though.  Canadian Customs is very casual and really only seem to care whether you have any evil firearms and have enough money to get you out of their country.  We finally got some breakfast in Haines Junction.  Everything in Canada is the same as in the US except that it is all a little different.  I don’t know if that just happens or if they do it on purpose.  All the road food in the Yukon and Alaska is heavy and greasy, so manage your appetite and plan your rest stop breaks well; the rest stop toilets are truly disgusting.

At Haines Junction you turn left on the Alaska Highway, also known as the AlCan Highway, the World War II highway cut through the wilderness to give surface access to Alaska, at the time under Japanese attack.  When I first came to Alaska in ’74, I stopped in Haines Junction to camp for the night.  I saw eyes reflecting the lights of my Toyota LandCruiser as I got out to pitch the tent and decided that sharing the campground with a Grizzly wasn’t a good idea, but I really needed some sleep so I could drive safely, so we just crashed in the truck.  I was awakened at about 4 AM by the dog going crazy and the truck rocking from the Griz on the right side running board; I got the Hell out of Dodge.  It was Fall and raining and snowing; it rains and snows in the Fall in this part of the World, and the AlCan was still dirt and still mostly on its WWII right of way.  I kept the LandCruiser in 4WD pretty much all the way from Watson Lake, YT to the Alaska border.  And it wasn’t because I was scared, it was because the road was soup about six inches deep in the good places.  It cost me twenty bucks at the quarter car wash in Tok, AK to sorta’ get the vehicle clean; five years later when I sold it there was still AlCan dirt in it.

In ’74 there was little difference between Alaska and the Yukon; the road was paved from the Alaska border but not very well and nobody would accuse the AlCan from the Border to Fairbanks of being a good road.  It was maybe a little more developed in Alaska than in the Western Yukon, but not much and it was all still a world of no electricity, no phones, no television, little radio; back then Radio Moscow was the most powerful station on the dial if you had a shortwave, and most did.

We drove from Haines Junction to Beaver Creek, YT and stayed in the Westmark Hotel there.  Westmark started life as an Alaska hotel chain owned by former Governor Bill Sheffield (D-Alaska), but I think it now is owned by Holland America Cruise Lines.  No phones or TV but a really good dinner show; not Broadway, but a Helluva bunch better than you’d expect in Beaver Creek, YT.  The road from Haines Junction to Beaver Creek is paved now but it gives bad road all new meaning.  They even have burgers  in Yukon lodges named SHAKWAK, the acronym for the joint US-Canada deal to pave the Highway; of course the US pays for most of it.  Memo to file: a lowered, tricked up Chrysler 300M is NOT a car for the AlCan, even in its modern, paved incarnation!  I didn’t break anything but the front mudflaps – yeah, you put mudflaps on cars in this part of the World, but it was anything but a relaxing drive avoiding the potholes, pavement breaks, and frost heave whoop de doos.  There are only two seasons in this part of the World: Winter and Construction, and we were travelling in the height of construction season, so stops were frequent.  Oh, and did I mention mosquitos?  If you’ve never been to the Yukon or  Alaska, you’ve never seen mosquitos.  The car has heated mirrors so there’s always a little airflow from the heat/ac to the mirrors.  Whenever you stopped, within seconds the mosquitos would sense the heat and carbon dioxide from the inside air coming out the mirrors and there’d just be a cloud of them around each outside mirror.  And with that, we come to the point of this.

In ’74, there wasn’t really much difference between Alaska and the Yukon.  In ’10, there is almost no comparison.  Those of you who live in urban areas would be really uncomfortable in Alaska today, but at its worst most of Alaska on the road system isn’t much different from the rural areas of the Lower 48 and the cell phone service comes on pretty soon after you cross the US-Canada Border; you can surf the ‘net betwen the Border and Northway, AK, and that’s about as far from anywhere as you can get in the US.  The dinner show chorus in Beaver Creek has a song about being 301 miles from nowhere, the distance from Whitehorse, YT to Beaver Creek, YT; if you live here, you understand it.

The further you get into Alaska, the more modern and developed it becomes.  By Tok Junction, two hundred and change miles east of Fairbanks on the AlCan, you have most of what you’d expect in a small city in the Lower 48.  Along the right of way of the Richardson and Glenn Highways they’re putting in a fiber optic cable that will connect even these remote places with high speed internet.  About three hundred miles down the Richardson and Glenn Highways you come to Palmer and Wasilla, Sarah Palin’s stomping grounds.  Now you have the Big Box stores and all the amenities of modern American life.  Sarah likes to claim that she was one of those “small government” conservatives that didn’t tax the Wasilla residents to provide this, that, or the other.  She didn’t have to; the State of Alaska taxed the oil companies and thus you to pay for the things that made Wasilla possible.

In ’74, there wasn’t a red light between Fairbanks and Anchorage or between the Border and Anchorage.  The intersection between the Glenn and Parks Highways near Palmer that led to Fairbanks or Anchorage was a flat intersection with a stop sign.  Palmer was the important town and Wasilla was a spot in the road.  Now there is a fancy Interstate-style cloverleaf interchange, complete with some pretty fancy 1% art, and you have to get off the main route to go to Palmer.  Billions of State and federal dollars made Wasilla possible.

Whether you go right and north to Wasilla or left and south to go to Anchorage, you see what oil taxation and State and federal spending can do.  In ’74, it was all two lanes with flat intersections and stop signs, today it is all to interstate standards.    Other than an overabundance of redneck kids in fancy pickups running up in your mirrors at a hundred miles an hour, those of you who commute in the Lower 48 would feel right at home.  There is a new, modern, and very fancy police headquarters in Wasilla.  I don’t know who paid for it, but I’m reasonably certain the good citizens of Wasilla didn’t.

So, the point of this is, you can do really good things with government spending.  Some of you are thinking that this is all about that corrupt porker Ted Stevens, but the US owns more of Alaska than Alaska does, so those roads and other accoutrement are in its interest too.  And, the State paid for much of this stuff too.  The citizens of Alaska paid for almost none of it except as a share of the commonweal.

I drove up that long, demanding dirt road in ’74 because life in the Lower 48 had just become too confining and I was sick of having to carry a gun to safely get to work in Atlanta.  Alaska was a primitive and scruffy place back then.  The only places you could get a salad that had green lettuce was the Hotel Captain Cook, which flew it in, and Alaska Airlines, which flew it in for them.  My daughter grew up thinking lettuce was brown and milk was powdered; she was in her teens before she saw a live TV show.  In ’74, the nightly news came on in the morning and only if the plane bringing the tape from Seattle made it in.

The trip that defined my life after ’74 required a well equipped 4WD vehicle and substantial wilderness/camping skills.  Last week I made it in a near-luxury car and slept in decent hotels and ate decent meals, and all that was done with government spending.  There are two sides to the equation.

The original Progressives were 19th Century activists who recoiled at some of the abuses of the unfettered capitalism of that day.  Some of them were budding Socialists, a few called themselves Communists, but they were far more likely to be Presbyterians or Quakers, or various deriviatives of the Unitarian/Universalist sects.  In those days, going back to at least the 1830s and ’40s, the conflict in America had a religious basis, either you believed in the perfectability of man or you believed that original sin made man inherently imperfect.  The Yankees were all about perfectability and salvation by works.  The Southerners were all about original sin; man was imperfect but could be saved by faith.  That one led to a four year war and over a half-million dead, but the battle didn’t end; The South just settled back into its belief that one should just accept man’s imperfection and say, “Thy Will Be Done.”

The Progressives of the late-19th Century through to JFK and LBJ were Americans who believed in America and American exceptionalism.  They were as religious as cynics can be, but they believed in a fundamental notion that man was, should be, and could be perfected and government was an instrument of that perfection.  They were all at least nominal Christians and nominal capitalists, and they were all proud to be Americans.  Though he didn’t write it, I believe that JFK’s Inaugural Address describes his heart.

But somewhere in the 1920s and ’30s another line of progressivism intersected the American Progressivism, Soviet Communism.  One thing we allowed to immigrate to America in our rush to acquire more and more cheap labor in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was on Helluva bunch of, mostly, Southern and Eastern European Communists, activist, true-believing Communists and the communist version of trade-unionists.  Here there was no secret police and they could make enough money to actually act on their beliefs.  By the time the Soviet Union was fully formed in the ’20s, the Comintern was fully activated in America and the CPUSA was taking its orders from Moscow.  By the ’30s, Progressive was simply code for Communist, with a capital “C,” or a fellow traveller who, because of security reasons or fear of reprisal couldn’t openly be a member of CPUSA.  Those lines intersected in the FDR Administrations and FDR may be faulted for not purging his Administrations of various open and obvious Communists but we did have to keep them as allies during WWII, so that excuses some of it – sorta, maybe.

Then in the late ’40s, America had had enough of Communists generally and Communist dominated unions specifically.  Enter the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, loyalty oaths, and the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Sen. McCarthey gets the rap from the Left, but repudiation of Communists was pretty universal in public life in America.  They followed the Italian Communist thinker, Gramsci’s, prescription and cleaned up and went below the radar and began to go beyond mere infiltration to outright capture of academia, much of government bureaucracy, the media and entertainment.  The old trades unions were fundamentally a conservative lot, but the new industrial unions and even newer public employee unions were and are fertile ground.

While most of America thought that the ’60s radicals had put on a suit and tie and become Yuppies rather than Yippies, they really hadn’t.  Some just cleaned up and went stealth into great corporations and into the maw of the capitalist beast of Wall Street, many more went to the unions, especially the burgeoning public employee unions, into government employment, even into elected and appointed office.  Many, many had to stay in school to keep their 2-S deferments during the draft so they wound up with a Ph.D. and stayed in academia pouring communism into empty little skulls.  While nobody was really paying attention, they hooked up with a bunch of speculators, investment bankers, currency manipulators, and trust fund babies and decided to take over America using Comrade Obama as their instrument.

These guys don’t believe in the perfectability of man, they believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat – as they define proletariat, meaning people like them – and they really don’t have much in common with dour Presbyterians who just thought that people ought to behave better and live better.

Wolves are everywhere in Alaska.  Sometimes I can hear them howling in the woods around my house.  There was a black one that locals named Romeo who inhabited the mud flats below the Mendenhall Glacier for years.  He liked to “play” with people’s dogs and it is alleged that he ate one or two.  He hasn’t been seen in a year or two.  He wasn’t young, so he may not be with us anymore, but then, again, he might have found a new love and moved in somewhere else.  Nobody knows; it’s just the way things work.

My best wolf story is from a trip to Prudhoe Bay many years ago.  I was coming down Atigun Pass (those of you who watch Ice Road Truckers know about Atigun) and nature called.  There wasn’t anyone within a hundred miles in any direction as far as I knew but habits are habits so I stepped over to the brush along the road; there’s nothing taller than about two feet at this latitude, but … Anyway, I’m doing what I came to do and I see two yellow eyes reflecting the lights of my truck.  I know better than to do anything quick or stupid so I just finish what I’m doing and walk back to my truck with a keen eye on my companion.  As I get in my truck I see about 125 pounds of gray wolf go over and hike his leg and “erase” me from his territory.  This place can make you feel small.

In 1959, Alaska was so firmly Democrat that it was only admitted to statehood simultaneously (almost) with Hawaii, then just as firmly Republican.  Walter Hickel was one of those archetypal Alaskans who got off the ship in Valdez with thirty-seven cents in his pocket and became a multi-millionaire.  In 1966, he became Alaska’s first Republican governor and the first Republican to hold statewide office.  In 1968, President Nixon appointed Governor Hickel Secretary of the Interior, but later Nixon fired Hickel over policy differences on Vietnam and other matters.  Hickel came back to Alaska and continued to be a “mover an shaker” in Alaska business and politics and narrowly lost a bitterly contested Primary to Alaska’s only, so far, two term Republican governor, Jay Hammond.  In 1990, the open Republican Primary nominated State Senator Arliss Sturgeluski for Governor.  Alaska Republicans of the day were hardly conservative, including Hickel, but Sturgelewski was an outright liberal, in many ways more liberal than the Democrat nominee, Anchorage mayor Tony Knowles.  Having either of them as Governor of Alaska was more than Hickel could bear.  He arranged to have himself made the nominee of the Alaska Independence Party and in a largely self-financed campaign was elected Governor a second time.

I was still a registered Democrat but had been largely apolitical since I’d left organized labor in late 1980.  When I had been in private business, I had made enough campaign contributions to make sure my calls would be returned, but they went to both parties and to the extent that I was involved in politics at all it was purely the poltics of self-interest.  The oil-price crash and a divorce had sent me into the clutches of government work in the late ’80s.  By the ’90 election season, I was working representing the State in labor negotiations, arbitrations, and labor board hearings a couple of levels below an appointee.  Again my only politics was that of self-interest and I had actually given some money to Knowles in the Democrat primary but only because his opponent had promised the AFL-CIO my head on a platter upon his election.  Mind you, I was a merit system employee, not an appointee, but Democrats can do things like that.

We were involved in very controversial concessionary bargaining with all the State’s unions.  The unions were themselves in turmoil because in ’88, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) had decertified the independent association that had represented the bulk of the State’s gray and white collar employees since bargaining began in ’72.  Putting that block of employees in the AFL-CIO fundamentally changed both union politics and Democrat politics in Alaska.  Even though we had a Democrat Governor, Steve Cowper, the State had not been “union-friendly” because we simply didn’t have the money.  By the election season, we were headed to interest arbitration with the unions that had access to it and it was evident that the unions were going to get some fairly substantial awards from arbitrators.  In the political climate of the times, that meant we were going to “lose” those arbitrations and I wanted some company in that loss.

The Anchorage business community had been very, very vocal in their opposition to State spending and specifically in their opposition to any increases, they wanted decreases, in wages and benefits for State employees.  Two civic groups in Anchorage were most vocal, Common Sense for Alaska and former Governor Hickel’s group, Commonwealth North.  My appointee-level boss had checked out and his boss was clueless, so we were essentially unsupervised.  My direct supervisor and I did what ‘crats do; we made sure there was somebody to blame besides us, so we contacted those groups and told them that we were going to give them their big chance to convince an arbitrator of their position.  Technically, we called them as State witnesses in the arbitration though we muttered some disclaimers about how the law required the arbitrator to consider the public’s interest and we were allowing them to testify as public members.  Needless to say, the unions went nuts and their screaming phone calls awakened our sleeping appointee boss who went nuts.  Though he threatened, we weren’t really worried about getting fired; you don’t fire high-level employees in the election season because they’re safer inside the tent peeing out that outside the tent peeing in.  In any event, bringing Commonwealth North into those arbitrations was how I got to know Governor Hickel and some of his people.

Governor Hickel was introduced at the inauguration by Juneau’s former Senator, Bill Ray, a Democrat.  Sen. Ray ended the introduction by referring to JFK’s inaugural lines about the torch having been passed to a new generation and concluded with, “They’re back!”  As we were walking back to the State Office Building, aptly called the SOB in Juneau, a Democrat appointee acquaintance of mine remarked, “This is going to be like having to ask your parents for the car keys again.”  That remark says a lot about Democrat attitudes towards Republican officeholders and the fact that both she and her appointee husband kept their jobs for the whole administration says a lot about Republican officeholders too.

This Administration was where most of my beliefs about government and governing were formed.  Governor Hickel was in many ways a visionary and had a deep love for the State, but that doesn’t help you find the light switches and rest rooms.  Almost all of his appointees were from private business and fancied themselves self-made men, mostly, and Captains of Industry who could make things move and shake.  Well, the largest private business in Alaska would only be the fourth or fifth largest department of State government, and these guys were clueless!  They were endlessly ridiculed, leaked, thwarted, and sabotaged by the holdover Democrats they left in place.  Watching the misery that administration endured at the hands of holdovers and congenital ‘crats is what convinced me that any Republican MUST fire every appointee in a government to have any chance of governing effectively.

But they knew me and my, then, supervisor and while we were ‘crats and Democrats, they kinda, sorta trusted us.  They ran off our appointee boss, though typical Democrat, he had a hidey-hole for himself in the classified service and stayed around for years longer.  (And, to be honest, I had one too when I was an appointee, but I didn’t use it; I’d had enough!)  And we found ourselves effectively in charge of a sovereign government’s relations with its employees and with the government’s impact on the State’s wage economy.  We had a canvas to paint on and paint we did, and with broad strokes and bright colors!  We learned quickly that the Governor had no taste for criticism or bad press, so we learned to take the strategic offensive but remain on the tactical defensive.  In other words, we would position the government in a place where we knew the unions couldn’t stand for us to be, but we would just sit there and they always obliged us by attacking.  That way we could tell our shaky principals that we were just defending them.  That is the only way you’ll ever get a Republican government to do anything so long as we don’t have a Republican political class like the Democrats do.  Those “hail fellow, well met” types from the Chamber and the Rotary just cannot stand the criticism and controversy, so they have to have functionaries below them to do the dirty work.

We poked and prodded and explored the contours and limits of our bargaining law in arbitration, before the labor board, and in court.  We had a zillion grievances, unfair labor practice complaints, and lawsuits filed against us and won one Helluva lot more of them than we lost.  The AFSCME unit preferred politics to bargaining and we obliged them by keeping them without a contract for three years of the term and refusing to enforce their compulsory dues provision.  They were racked and stacked for decertification, but Republican fratricide elected the Democrat in ’94, and their made man, Knowles, saved them.  The senior people were on a very public “hit list” by the ’94 election and for years I had tapes and affadavits of AFSCME agents pounding their chests about the pool they had on how many seconds we’d be employed after “their” governor took office.  Those would have been useful if the Democrats had had the guts to fire us.

Governor Hickel gave up on trying to get the government to do what he wanted and I think he and his wife were bitterly disappointed by the press criticism he got.  Well before the end of the term he announced that he would not seek re-election and, typically, the remainder of the term became a free-for-all especially for the unions who were slithering around threatening and promising.  We didn’t take it too seriously because we didn’t believe it was possible for a liberal Democrat to get elected in Alaska.  We didn’t count on Hickel’s Lt. Governor deciding that the Republican nominee was not a pure enough conservative to suit him and reprising Hickel’s run as the AIP candidate.  He didn’t have Hickel’s money and organization, so he didn’t win, but he elected Tony Knowles.  My new boss walked in and bragged about how he had campaigned with the unions for the job and one of his campaign promises was to fire us all.  They never got it together to fire us, but you can only do things you hate for people you hate for so long, so the senior staff all got our affairs in order and we were gone by the second year.

The then-13 unions had dozens of agents, millions of dollars in dues income, and thousands of members.  The State never had more than four or five people actually representing it in dealing with them during the Hickel years.  Those people went on to head the Executive Branch’s personnel and labor relations functions, the Court System’s personnel and labor relations functions, the University of Alaska’s personnel and labor relations function, and one, the only one of the senior staff not now retired, still heads the Juneau city government’s personnel and labor relations functions.  One of the junior people at that time is now the personnel and labor relations head for a large utility and another is just below the appointee level for the State of Nevada.  Not bad for a bunch of people whose careers the Democrats sold to the unions.  Along the way I had carried enough water for the Republicans that when I told the Democrats to take this job and shove it in ’96, the Republican controlled Legislature thought enough of me to throw me enough bones to keep me alive for a few years until even the Democrats couldn’t stand their union friends anymore and hired me back to clean up the mess.  Oh, and somewhere along the way, I became a Republican.

It was never a really close-run thing but it left many of us corrupt old boys, RINOs, and Juneau liberals, as we were often reminded we were, in a quandary.  We need to have these people to assemble a minimum winning coalition, but to many of them it seems the idea of being in the tent means owning the tent.  If I wanted to be a Constitutional Party, AIP, or Libertarian Party member, I would be one.  If these people want to turn the Republican Party into one of those parties, why don’t they just go for the real thing and join and work for one of those parties.  And what makes these people, especially the young ones, think that being agressively obnoxious will persuade anyone to agree with them?  As The Beatles reminded the left many years ago, carrying pictures of Chairman Mao meant “you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow,” somebody needs to remind some of these young men that looking and acting like you’re rehearshing for a Hitler Youth recruiting commercial don’t make with anyone anyhow either.

For those of you who’ve listened to ColdWarrior and others and just took the first steps to become involved in Party operations, you’re going to be facing this as you begin to take an active part.  You’re either going to be one of those agressive, obnoxious people that the majority quickly comes to resent or you’re going to have to learn to deal with those people.  Randy showed far more diplomacy and restraint than I could have ever mustered; the “out of order” and gavel whack would have come down a lot more frequently had I been in the front of the room rather than in the back.  That diplomacy was even more impressive in light of the fact that their primary purpose at the Convention was to un-elect him and they did and said some pretty nasty things in pursuit of that goal.  Randy was right, but it was frustrating and irritating; we need as many of these people as we can keep in the tent, but undoubtedly many of them will return to the couch or to their more natural haunts amongst the black helicopters after this unsuccessful foray into Republican politics.

But it wasn’t all Party politics, there was some real politics as well.  Senator Murkowski and Congressman Young were both there and addressed the group.  The Senator sounded more conservative than I’ve ever heard her and very clearly is quite angry about the way business is being done in Washington these days.  The Congressman was his usual jocular self and said all the right things.  The declared candidates for Governor all appeared in a candidate forum and had booths.  Governor Parnell is clearly the front runner and has the most money, but his continuation of Palin’s administration and policies has already put him in conflict with the Legislature and there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction amongst Party regulars.  Former Representative Ralph Samuels has some good ideas and some solid insider backing but thus far his campaign hasn’t really gained much traction.  Bill Walker’s whole emphasis is on natural gas development and especially a badly needed instate gas line from the North Slope.  He’s a sharp solid conservative who also has some strong insider backing but I don’t know if he can manage to garner wide appeal.  Lt. Governor Craig Campbell has announced that he will not seek re-election.  Representative Jay Ramras and Anchorage radio talker Eddie Burke are contending for the nomination.  Many, many people would like to see someone else throw their hat in the ring.

I’ve never been much of a Party guy.  By the time I became involved in Republican Party business and internal politics, I was a high-level ‘crat or political appointee, so I didn’t work my way up and I don’t always play well with others.  The last time I had to worry about meeting rules and Robert’s and such was when I was a union operative thirty odd years ago.  So, it was an interesting and mostly enjoyable learning experience and it was good to be in the company of people solidly committed to restoring adult supervision to our Country and keeping it in place in our State.  We’ll learn how to deal with the new people coming to the Party, at least most of them.  I was a young fire in the belly radical once too and I finally figured out that I needed to either learn to like losing or learn to get people to like me enough that I could persuade them to my point of view.  These new people will either learn that or they won’t but we old folks will also have to take some steps to try to bring them in.

A dirty and bedraggled U.S. Grant suffering from a migraine headache met Lee in Wilbur McLean’s parlor in the town of Appomattox Courthouse.  Grant offered far better terms than Lee expected from a man whose very initials had come to mean Unconditional Surrender.  The men were allowed to keep their personal possessions and horses and mules if they had them.  The officers would be allowed to keep their sidearms and walk or ride away with dignity.  Grant also provided rations to Lees starving army.  The details were worked out on the 10th and 11th.

On April 12th the Army of Northern Virginia made itself up as spit and polished as its bedraggled state would allow, formed ranks and marched to its end.  A few Yankees shouted and taunted at first but their officers put an end to it quickly and in order and in silence, the Army of Northern Virginia led by Georgian Gen. John Brown Gorden, still well-mounted, presented itself to the conquering Yankees.  Brown brought himself to the US commander, Chamberlain, I think, brought his horse to its knee and touched his toe with his sword, then surrendered the sword, which was returned to him.  The men in their ranks stacked their arms and surrendered their colors and The War in the East ended.  Johnson surrendered on April 26th, once commemorated in most of The South as Confederate Memorial Day.  The last Confederate field command, Stand Watie’s Cherokee Brigade didn’t surrrender until May.  The last Confederate flag was struck when the CSS Shenandoah surrendered its colors in Liverpool in November after evading the US and British fleets across the Pacific, around the Horn and through the Atlantic.  And then it was over.

I was bored and disgusted in those days.  I was still working for the Murkowski Administration and had done my job of making sure all the State’s unions were quietly under contract and wouldn’t be much of a factor in the upcoming general election.  Retirement had been very much on my mind since 120 days service in a calendar year gives you credit for that year.   I got all my labor agreements approved by the Legislature without even a hint of debate or controversy and I really didn’t have much to do.  I could assume the coveted role of ROAD Staff – Retired On Active Duty – and let my ambitious subordinates do my job for awhile.

The wheels had completely come off the Administration and it was pretty clear that Murkowski wasn’t likely to even survive the Primary and if he did was a sitting duck in the General.  My direct supervisor, a Deputy Commissioner, left about that time to go work for a Primary opponent of Murkowski and that sent a shudder through the appointee ranks.  I called him and let him know that I was still dancing with who brung me but if he needed anything, he could feel free to call me.  Somewhere in there Sarah Palin piled into the Governor’s race as well.  So, it was evident that to get 120 days in 2007, I was going to have to become friends with John Binckley or Sarah Palin or make peace with the Democrat, Tony Knowles.  Of course, making peace with Knowles, who I’d worked for before but not as an appointee, would mean giving up the appointed job and I didn’t have much interest in going back to doing the line work.  So, I was struggling with picking somebody to back, sitting it out on the assumption that whomever won wouldn’t fire me or at worst I’d be back in the classified service, or just pulling the pin and going fishing.

The picking someone to back was the toughest.  I didn’t want to be disloyal to Murkowski but I didn’t feel any obligation to go down with the ship; I hadn’t done anything to cause his troubles.  I liked Binckley, but his campaign just seemed unable to get any traction.  My sense of Sarah Palin was that she was a lightweight being propped up by the Democrats and the Daily News because they thought she’d be easier for Knowles, the Democrat annointee, to beat and I didn’t like her for how she’d left the Administration and played “kiss and tell” with the Daily News.  I frankly thought that Knowles was going to be Governor again and I would have to either go back to being a classified employee or retire during the transistion.  There wasn’t much sense in waiting to get fired by Knowles other than to make a few more bucks before I had to take the demotion or retire.  And to make it more interesting, my boss’s slot was open and you never know who’ll wind up in a political appointment in the waning days of an administration; usually it is somebody who really, really, really shouldn’t have the job but wants it on their resume and has some chit or another they can call in.  I knew I didn’t want it, but I sure wasn’t anxious to have to break in a new boss either.  Turned out they put a former subordinate of mine in it for reasons that had little or nothing to do with her managerial talents and much to do with her other talents and that made the decision really easy for me.  I was already disgusted with the Administration and when I looked down the hall at the Commissioner’s Office, I didn’t see anyone for whom I had the slightest bit of professional or personal respect.  That’s a good time to quit!  Somewhere in those early days here I wrote a diary reporting on the first Republican gubernatorial debate and I wasn’t too flattering to Sarah Palin; that got me a bunch of love from her buddies here in Alaska and sort of set the path of our dealings.

I came to RedState as I was going through a big transition in my life.  For twenty years my identity had been inseperable from my job.  I really didn’t have any idea who I was without that job.  I’d been through all the levels of it from the production employee doing grievance responses and routine hearings, to the tactician in bargaining and the specialist in high-stakes arbitrations and labor board hearings, to finally being the one who pretty much set the State’s policy in its dealings with its employees.  I still answered to the Commissioner and the Governor technically but not much really.  And in April of 2006 when I first came to RedState, I was beginning to seriously think of giving it all up; color me conflicted.  Ultimately, I made the decision in mid-June, gave my notice, and went on with my life, actually discovering that I had one without having that job.  Along the way being here for a part of almost every day has just become a part of my routine.

The people of RedState exhibit some of the best social and political thinking and writing available anywhere.  The opinion here is generally better than in the magazine and newspaper linked blogs because few here are campaigning for something or trying to be noticied or curry favor as is so often the obvious case in other places.  I certainly don’t always agree with all the opinion here, but I know that in almost every instance it is honestly formed and expressed opinion.  Along the way I’ve been involved in and generated perhaps more than my fair share of controversy, but I’ve also had perhaps more than my fair share of kind words, complimentary comments, and diary recommendations.  I can’t say I’ve much enjoyed the last four years politically, but I have certainly enjoyed sharing the politics of those four years with the people here.  Hopefully on my fifth anniversary here we can be talking about how the new Republican majority is doing in one or both bodies of Congress and on my seventh anniversary we can be evaluating how the new Republican President is doing in his, or maybe even her, first four months.  It has been an honor and a privilege to be among the good folk of RedState for the last four years and I appreciate the kindness of your sharing yourselves.

You have to set out some rules immediately.  The first rule is that you and yours have to be Caesar’s wife, beyond even the suspicion of reproach.  The rule used to be that if it didn’t involve a live boy or dead girl, you were OK.  That rule was made when Democrats were in power.   Democrats have a monopoly on money and sex.  Hell, they even get away with live boys and dead girls.  Let’s make it simple: they can, and you and yours can’t.

If your laws allow it, do background checks on potential appointees.  Better yet, have your potential appointees thoroughly vetted before you take office.  That way, you don’t have to worry about troublesome little things like being a governmental actor infringing on their privacy.  President Bush’s little peccadillo with Bernie Kerik should illustrate this point well enough.  The problem here though, is how do you do it?  After election but before taking office, you do not have access to the cops’ databases and such.  After taking office, there may be serious privacy issues in your using the cops’ resources.  First, you need a good lawyer to sort out the legal issues and second, you need the money to hire a good PI before you take office.  You can’t trust the cops before you take office since they are still led by your predecessor’s appointee.  You can’t trust the cops after you take office, because at the political level, cops just are not that trustworthy.  Political level cops derive their power from the arrest they didn’t make and the information they didn’t disclose.  You may be able to get a head of your police agency that is loyal to you, but you can bet there are lots of lieutenants and captains below him that have their eye on the appointed job and they are loyal to whoever is making the best promise.  Vett your people using campaign and Party resources, not government resources, and get it done before taking office if at all possible.

Democrats don’t have to worry about their business or personal dealings.  Democrats are definitionally good people and good people never make or accept bribes, defraud their stockholders, cheat on their taxes, or have conflicts of interest.  And if they do, it is just a serendipitous trade in cattle futures, a misunderstanding, or a vast right-wing conspiracy; and it’s OK.  Democrats don’t have to worry about women who aren’t their wife or men who aren’t their husband.  That is a purely personal matter for them, and they’re good people.  You, on the other hand, are a Republican, and you are not a good person.

If you are a Republican and own a business or stocks or make more money than the nearest homeless drunk, you are rich and therefore definitionally evil.  If it can be made to look like you or your friends might make a profit from one of your policies or programs, you are going to be slammed by the Left.  There is a line on the right side of which you will be OK, but where that line is may be very hard to gauge – the press will let you know though.  Republicans practically have to take a vow of poverty to hold office.  Of course, if we did take a vow of poverty, they’d accuse us of being right-wing religious zealots.  If there is the slightest twinkle in your eye at the sight of a well-turned leg, you are the biggest whorehound in history.  If you actually have a relationship with a member of another gender that can be colored with the slightest tint of sex, your resignation will not suffice.  Only public castration, drawing, and quartering will satisfy the Left.  And even then, they’ll want your body in an unmarked grave.

Republican women seem to have evaded the sex issues by doing a good impression of the Virgin Mary.  I wonder what the going price is for some guy who will more or less credibly claim to have had a fling with Sarah Palin.  A few thousand years of human history teaches us that this strategy is easier for women than men.  Generally, women need a reason, men just need a place.  Women have lots of reasons not to, and powerful men have access to lots of places.  Most men who aspire to power somewhere along the way accepted that if it were not for fast cars, old whiskey, and pretty women, we could just work at Wal-Mart and life would be much simpler.  So this one is tough for men.  You will be amazed at how attractive your aging, balding self becomes as soon as you have an elected or appointed title associated with your name.  Monica wasn’t the first or the only political groupie, and lady lobbyists really know how to be persuasive.  A Republican man who accepts political office had better have a good wife or take a vow of celibacy – even if the vow of celibacy makes you a right-wing religious zealot.

The only alternative to sainthood for Republican men, I don’t know how it would work for women, may only work if you come out of the bureaucracy into an elected or appointed position.  If you’ve established yourself as a “real bad boy,” to borrow a line from a country song, the rules are a little different.  I spent the early years of my career as an advocate in arbitrations and labor board hearings.  I fancied myself a lone gunslinger and lived like one – hard.  I lived on airplanes and in hotels and hotel bars.  I also lived with the certain knowledge that my union and Democrat friends were watching my every move so that they could drop a dime on me to my boss, my wife after I remarried, the cops, or the press.  I assiduously cultivated a really bad reputation for drinking and womanizing in my early days.  I can only wish I’d done the things that many think I did.  I never lied or invented exploits, but people think what they want to think and I let them think it – I may have even helped them sometimes, but I never gave them any evidence.  Later on after I came to higher positions, whenever some rumor came along, I was just living down to my reputation and nobody even noticed.  You have to be real good to get away with this one though.  You also need to have a real good wife and fortunately I do.

Bottom line, anything that involves money or sex will kill a Republican officeholder or appointee.  Being legally innocent is not enough.  Even if you are innocent, if it will not go away quickly, you have to take one for the team.  Take a vacation and discover while on vacation how much you miss being with your family.  Come back and announce that though you are ever so pleased and proud to be a part of the administration, you have with the greatest regret decided that you have to spend more time with your family.  Maybe while you are out in the wilderness your friends will toss you a few scraps, but since they are Republicans, don’t count on it.

Once you have your elected and appointed house in order, you have to turn to the bureaucracy and fire some people.  Yes, no matter what you’ve heard, you can fire public employees and you need to.  After a long period of Democrat control, especially in unionized functions, your supervisors do not dare supervise, shop stewards are accustomed to veto power over management actions, and the general employee attitude will be like the old saw from the Soviet Union, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

In the ‘60s the communists backed the “Mau Mau” rebels in the then – Belgian Congo.  The Mau Mau’s tactic of choice was gruesome execution of village headmen, teachers, and such who might side with the government.  The Viet Cong also employed this tactic until the US suppressed it in Operation Phoenix – interestingly and not coincidentally an operation much criticized by the American Left.  “Mau mauing” supervisors is the tactic of choice of public employee unions since they can be confident that Democrat administrations will not back the supervisors.  Left unmolested, AFSCME is masterful at this.  And yes, they do openly call it “mau mauing.”  If you are having trouble believing that this tactic is consciously used, just look at what the Left did to John Bolton, President Bush’s UN nominee.  They drug out a bunch of his former subordinates in the bureaucracy to tell tales about how mean to them he was.  Any manager who steps in and tries to get real work out of bureaucrats inured to Democrat misrule is going to be thought of as mean.  With the trail of bodies I’ve left behind, I’d hate like Hell to face a confirmation hearing; the ex-employees bitching about how mean I am would have to take a number and wait their turn.  If a supervisor or manager actually dares to direct the work or, God forbid, discipline an employee, the union swings into action.  Sometimes the first act is a visit by the steward or union agent in which the supervisor is invited to consider her future, usually accompanied with a threat to have a talk with her politically appointed boss.  Sometimes the union goes on a grievance campaign in which the supervisor’s every word and deed is grieved.  Often there is a fake poll of the employees to demonstrate how terrible the supervisor is and how miserable she is making the employees’ lives.  If this doesn’t get the supervisor to sit down and be quiet, the union moves on to singing songs and carrying signs and vicious, public, personal attacks.  When Democrats and unions are in charge, it does not take long for supervisors to learn that it is they who are most likely to be punished for employee misconduct.  Being of sound mind, they stop disciplining employees and if it goes on long enough, they stop even attempting to get them to work.  After a few years of this, some significant percentage of your workforce will be completely unproductive and another smaller but still significant percentage will be outright insubordinate.  It’s all in the Mau Mau playbook, so you just put up with it until they give you a chance to take a union rep out. 

If any of your workforce is unionized, whether or not you have union shops, you need to move your labor relations functions under your direct control.  It is best to have it under an appointee one or two steps below you to provide some insulation for you, but if your structure doesn’t lend itself to that, put it right under your thumb.  Alaska’s structure of an appointed director of labor relations reporting to an appointed commissioner of administration who reports to the governor works well.  That gives the administration two opportunities to step in if an action has political implications prior to the situation winding up in the governor’s lap.  Tailor it to your situation, but get it firmly under your direct control.

If your government is one of the many that uses lawyers and consultants to interact with unions, you need to start growing your own labor relations people.  Using lawyers and consultants wastes money and time and especially in the case of consultants puts your labor relations policy formation and implementation in the hands of someone with divided loyalties – they have to get work from governments all over the political spectrum and sometimes take work from unions as well – you want someone loyal only to you.  I believe the ideal labor relations function is comprised of an appointed head and merit system career labor relations people who live with the day to day interactions with employees and their unions and who do the whole gamut of the function; advising and assisting managers and supervisors, answering grievances, representing the government in arbitrations and labor board hearings, and negotiating the labor agreement.  This total involvement gives such a staff a level of intimate knowledge that you cannot buy, no matter how well dressed and expensive the lawyers are.

Here I depart from the ideology of many mainstream Republicans; this is about how to govern in a unionized environment, not about how to get rid of unions.  In a Blue or near-Blue state, getting rid of public employee unions is an Armageddon battle that will consume your whole administration and I’m not volunteering for that.  You could probably repeal a state or local bargaining law with a citizens’ initiative in the states that have them – everybody hates public employees, but I do not believe there is a legislative body in the country that has the guts to repeal a bargaining law.  This is not a battle worth having unless you ran and were elected specifically on a promise to do it.  If you did that, I bow to you; let me know how it turns out.  If you are thinking of running on this, talk to Arnold Schwarzenegger first.

You must not be afraid to bash unions when it is necessary to further your administration’s interests.  You must be prepared to break a union if that is what it takes to get terms acceptable to your government.  But I distinguish doing these things if they are necessary to carry out your programmatic agenda from making doing these things into your agenda.  The unionized states have been so for the last fifty years in the private sector and the last twenty five or thirty years in the public sector.  Throughout this piece I advocate taking the government the way you find it and making it work.  Fundamental changes in what the government does, including whether or not it allows employee unionization, is for a whole campaign that sets out that change as its fundamental purpose.  If you can do that, you are leading a revolution, not just trying to run a government efficiently.  I’m a bureaucrat, not a revolutionary.

You and your head of employee relations need to be on the same page regarding the style of interaction with unions and employees.  Republican administrations cannot be publicly confrontational with unions or employees.  Remember, you are rich, mean-spirited, and definitionally anti-worker.  As bad a movie as it was the Patrick Swayze character in “Road House” had it right, “Be Nice.”  Your employee relations representatives must have a carefully controlled public image, an image that must extend to the bargaining table and the hearing room.  They are well dressed, soft-spoken, totally professional, and utterly ruthless.  No matter the circumstance, your public position is all about how pleased and proud you are to deal with the union in seeking responsible agreements and how optimistic you are that there will soon be a mutually satisfactory outcome.  Say it like you believe it.  We’ll talk later about what you actually do.

Getting that “Be Nice” image means eliminating the lawyers, or at least eliminating lawyers that act like lawyers.  The minimum qualifications for my journeyman level labor relations staff were either six years of professional level human resources administration or graduation from an accredited law school, and I tried to keep the staff about half HR professionals and half lawyers.  I did not let my lawyers act like lawyers or say they’re lawyers; putting “Esq.” or “Counsel” on the appearance line was a hanging offense, though they tried sometimes; it is hard to break bad habits.  Lawyers come out of school with only minimal advocacy skills, often with none.  They have good analytical skills and, usually, good writing skills and that is what you are buying.  You have to teach both the HR people and the lawyers how to put on an arbitration or negotiate a labor agreement, so that means there must be continuity in the function so that there is someone to teach them.  You may have to go out and buy this management skill since Democrats do not really negotiate with unions, they conspire with them. 

Lawyers know two things that real people usually don’t: rules of evidence and how to be unabashedly obnoxious.  Neither of these skills is useful in the collective bargaining environment.  Jury trial advocacy is about knowing how to yell “Objection” to try to prevent a lay jury from hearing something that is impermissible or that doesn’t further your case and about aggressively promoting even the most farfetched theory of the case in order to get at least one moron with a driver’s license to form a doubt about the prosecutors case.  Arbitrators and labor boards are not lay juries and do not need to be protected from unreliable or irrelevant testimony or evidence; they are hired or appointed because they are, at least theoretically, experts in labor relations.  You want an advocacy and representational style that makes hearings and bargaining sessions look like what they are: business meetings, not adversarial proceedings.  This style does two things: it saves money by making the proceedings shorter and it prevents the unions from turning hearings into Stalin-style show trials for organizing purposes.  You want even the most portentous hearings to be boring – that helps keep the reporters away too.

Likewise, lawyers don’t come out of school knowing much if anything about negotiation, though people are endlessly hiring them to negotiate things.  Negotiating labor agreements requires intimate knowledge of the actual operation the agreement will cover.  That is far more valuable than all the “interest based bargaining” or “getting to yes” stuff that the so-called professional negotiators claim to use.  In fact, most of the “getting to yes” stuff is useless since it is based on the willing buyer and seller dynamic of commercial negotiations.  There are no willing partners or even much shared interest in labor negotiations.  Here you need career HR people and program managers that know the work and can write clearly to turn work processes into contract terms.  You need a skilled labor relations practitioner to develop goals, strategy and tactics and to oversee the negotiations to insure that administration goals are met and the law is more or less followed, but the actual work at the bargaining table is best left to people who know the work.  Your people can never engage in histrionics, but should be able to provoke the union to go nuts at will.  It is all done with quiet, studied discussion of proposals and a firm resolve that you will never give in on any item that does not fit into your bargaining agenda.  And, like hearings, you want it to be excruciatingly boring.  You need exquisitely disciplined labor relations people and you need to treat them well because you are asking them to make sure that nobody can have any fun or raise any Hell in a hearing or at the bargaining table by making it all excruciatingly detailed and boring.  There is a reason most labor relations people drink a lot and don’t play well with any but their own.

Unless established in statute, remove all labor relations authority from the operating sections of your government and make it a firing offense for any of your appointees to have direct dealings with a union agent outside the formal grievance and bargaining process.  This will be especially difficult in your law enforcement and corrections units since the supervisors and managers, even your appointees, will tend to have come up through the ranks.  The “Blue Wall of Silence” is real and powerful among people with badges and guns.  No matter how close to you they may have seemed, even your appointees who wear a badge will push back if you try to do anything the “boys” don’t like.

To the extent that labor agreements will allow it, eliminate joint committees.  You do not need the union to manage, and there are legal ways to get employee involvement without union involvement.  For every one of these trendy things that did something good, there were hundreds that just gave the union a way to reward activists and malcontents with travel or time off from real work.  Once you have fired or neutered all the prior administration’s adherents, you will find a world of local agreements, special understandings, and personal special deals all over your government.  Your head of labor relations must, in writing and with copies to the unions, formally renounce all oral understandings and any written agreements between people who did not have the formal authority to enter into them as well as all past practices not specifically incorporated into contract or rule.  There are some limits on what you can do with all of these, but this can be sorted out in arbitration or the courts.  Any good labor relations person will know how to sort it out.

What you are doing here is destroying a whole world of private fiefdoms, and it will not be taken well.  Nothing is so jealously guarded as an ill-gotten gain.  Any remaining holdovers and adherents to the prior administration in the non-appointee managerial and supervisory ranks will push back since it is their power under attack.  Give them a direct, written order to adhere to your policies or be fired and if they don’t, fire them.  Mythology about firing public employees notwithstanding, this is one area where you are absolutely safe.  If you give an employee a lawful order and tell them they will be fired if they don’t follow it, they are fired if they don’t follow it.  Unless the employee or the union can prove that you have not fired other employees who did the same thing, there is not an arbitrator or judge in the country that will overturn the firing.  On this one, even inconsistent enforcement is not per se fatal.

Labor boards, arbitrators, and judges have a keen sense of what is important to an administration.  Under union-backed Democrat administrations, they know that pro-employee and baby-splitting decisions will not be appealed and reversed, so they do not have to make tough or unpopular decisions.[1]  When I returned to the executive branch in 1999, arbitrators, the labor board, and judges were running roughshod over the State’s managerial prerogatives and doing so with impunity.  I started laying for them, structuring every arbitration and board matter for appeal to the Courts.  An ascending young arbitral star from Seattle concluded that an employee’s conviction for theft from one of our departments did not have an employment nexus to her job in another department.  Since there was no nexus, there was no just cause and the fired employee was ordered back to work with full back pay.  Even Democrats could not swallow that one, so the State appealed.  We had to go all the way to the Supreme Court with it, but we had the arbitrator’s decision vacated.  The reversal sent a shockwave through the West Coast arbitrators’ academy and they groused a lot, but they have been very careful ever since.  Like so many of the steps I advocate, you only have to do it once or twice and the word gets out[2].

This is an appropriate spot for a word of caution about people like me.  You need to make absolutely certain that your top-level labor relations and human resources administration people are either loyal to you or totally apolitical technicians.  If the heads of those functions are appointed, they need to be both very competent and loyal – somebody that you met at a cocktail party and who wants a job will not do, you need real skill.  Public sector employee relations is such an arcana that only another skillful practitioner will have a clue what a skillful practitioner is doing.  Democrats are much more skillful in and attuned to the workings of the bureaucracy than Republicans, and my Democrat masters never had a clue that I was setting up a situation that their union friends would hate, but which they would have to carry through on no matter the union’s objections.  I boxed them in time and time again and there was almost nothing they could do about it because the situation would be fully developed before they figured it out.  If I could do that to them, someone can do it to you.

You need to let your supervisors and managers know that they are free to do their jobs and that they will be backed up.  Write them all a memo and have your managers call them in for pep talks to reinforce the point.  If there is not a good supervisory training program in place, stand one up quickly.  Review any extant supervisory training programs left over from the prior administration.  They are as likely to be training for collaboration as they are for supervision (I use the term collaboration in its WWII meaning – not the way it is used in silly business administration courses.).  If so, trash them and build new ones.  Most public employers have very poor supervisor selection and training programs.  Generally, either the best widget maker or the best brown-nosing widget maker is promoted to Widget Making Supervisor.  They are then given no training and no support.  And why are we surprised when public employees are not very productive?

Poor selection and training or not, most of your supervisors can and want to supervise.  As soon as you tell them they can, most of them will, and some employees are going to be in trouble.  They are not going to be able to just go out and start whacking people.  Democrats in recent times have figured out that the way politicians get in trouble is by breaking technical rules about ethics, financial management, personnel selection, or purchasing.  So, in the name of efficiency and streamlining, they just did away with most of the rules.  The rules that remained were not enforced if you had a friend in high places or if the union objected.  When I returned to the Executive Branch in 1999, there was not even a desk manual for the front desk clerk; the whole place just ran by rote.  We had to write processes for everything just so we could get bills paid and letters mailed if a clerk quit.  It took all of five years to more or less restore processes that just happened like magic before eight years of misrule.  Government like any other culture is very fragile; it is easy to break and very hard to restore.  You need to set your managers and supervisors to reinstituting rules and processes, publishing new Standard Operating Procedures manuals and the like.  Until this is done, you will not be able to do much in the way of correction and discipline for incompetence and slovenliness in performing technical tasks.  It will take a year or more to restore minimal functions.

But a lot of rules fall into the “any damned fool should know” category and you need to start enforcing them with a vengeance.  There are lots of employees out there who have been padding their overtime and premium pay, often with their supervisor’s complicity.  After a few years of Democrats, you don’t have supervisors, you have co-conspirators.  There are lots of employees who just could not resist using that government credit card for a little something for themselves.  There are also some employees out there who could not resist using their government procurement authority for a big something for themselves or their friends.  There are lots of employees out there, especially union stewards, who have forgotten that the employer can actually tell them what to do.

Upon taking office, I set my staff on what I styled the Empty Chairs Program.  Basic thinking here is you cannot show the flag everywhere so show a big flag and make lots of smoke and noise wherever you can.  It has a remarkably positive effect on employee morale and motivation when a couple of suits from headquarters show up and someone leaves and never comes back.  My staff became masters of delivering the German Choice.  We did our investigation, called the employee in, gave him enough information, told him we were confident that he would make the right decision, and left the pistol, in this case a resignation memo, on the desk.  Most just signed the resignation, some we wouldn’t let resign and just turned over to the cops.  Others wanted to fight, so we took them and their unions to arbitration and/or court and won almost all of them.  Empty Chairs was our Operation Phoenix; we took out the bad guys and showed everyone else that the unions were impotent to help them.

Understand, we did lose some; sometimes we overreached, sometimes we screwed up, sometimes we did it just to show we could and played the odds.  It got sorted out in the grievance and arbitration process.  That is what unions and grievance processes are for.  As adversarial as I am towards unions, I would be reluctant to work non-union in a production-level job for a large government; supervision is at best inconsistent and management is as often as not self-serving or just plain incompetent.  Incompetent management probably won’t get the average employee fired, at least not quickly, but petty jealousies and political agendas will.  Even at their best, governments are big and cumbersome and no matter how you try, things will get done wrong.  An outside, objective check against error and injustice is a good thing.

A program like Empty Chairs will take care of the really bad actors, quiet radical stewards, and give your supervisors some confidence in the first year.  Get your supervisors and managers trained so that what I said about them in the previous paragraph is not true by the second or third year.  Dealing with processes and productivity issues will take the rest of your term, and the next, and the next, but you will have initiated the process of making government more accountable and productive.  You can never let up.

The unions may choose to fight back outside the grievance and arbitration process.  This usually involves PR campaigns and singing songs and carrying signs.  If this starts, you and your employee relations people need to get a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the modern leftist public employee union playbook.  This work from the early 1970’s is all about how to get calm, rational, problem solving people like you to do something stupid.  The best rule in response is, “don’t get in a peeing contest with a skunk.”  Your employee relations head may not understand this game, but she needs to quickly.  It is all as much politics as employee relations, but any good public sector labor relations hack should have a pretty good handle on the politics of collective bargaining.  The unions want two things: first, a lot of attention, and second, for you or someone connected to you to do something dismally stupid.  Your head of employee relations needs to be like a middle linebacker on this, read the play and call the defense – and her word is law.

If they do not get a lot of attention and you do not do anything stupid, they will just do crazier and crazier things trying to get you to.  Let them be themselves!  As they do crazier and crazier things, they will lose more and more support from the public and the employees.  Sooner or later, they will do something crazy enough or stupid enough for you to strike.  What to do and how to do it depends on the circumstances, so you will have to work with your employee relations people on the plan, but when you strike, “shock and awe” should be your purpose.  Without belaboring the details, the first time we ran this out with our AFSCME local there were three fired shop stewards and one fired union business agent when the dust settled.  They have been as quiet as mice ever since.

This is a good place to say a bit about union agents and stewards.  They go by all sorts of titles, but there are basically two kinds; those employed and paid directly by the union and those employed and paid by you.  Most unions have elected officers and an Executive Board to nominally run the union.  If the union is large enough, the Board hires a Business Manager and the Manager hires a staff of Business Agents.  The officers are commonly unpaid and do not really have much power.  The Business Agents, some unions call them Business Representatives, NEA calls them Uniserve Representatives, are paid by the union to do the day to day contract administration, grievance filing and handling, and supervisor threatening.  Business Agents also commonly do a lot of lobbying, though most larger unions also have a dedicated staff lobbyist.  Sometimes Business Agents represent the union in arbitrations and labor board hearings, but that is becoming more and more the exclusive province of lawyers.  Stewards, different unions call them different things, are employees who have been designated, sometimes elected, by the union to represent the union in your workplace.  Quite commonly, contracts provide that grievances can be filed by Stewards and often provide some amount of paid time for Steward activity.  Stewards can be a real pain the behind!

Neither the paid staff jobs nor steward appointments are really “merit” jobs; the skills they require are far more about internal union politics than about any real knowledge of labor relations.  Some are trained and knowledgeable, most are not, and almost none are any match for a well trained professional employer HR or LR representative.  They have as much power and influence in your workplace as you will allow them.  As a matter of law, you have deal with whomever the union designates as its representative, and it is an unfair labor practice to try to “interfere, restrain, or coerce” the union in its choice of representative.  But you do not have to take any crap off them!  Unless your government has bargained it away, you have the right to insist that non-employee agents notify you before coming on your property, and you can push that notification pretty close to permission.  You can restrict how much time stewards spend on union activities and insist that they secure prior approval before absenting themselves for union business.  And you can insist that they be nice.  Within the scope of his representational duties, a steward is entitled to be treated as an equal with management; you cannot fire him for insubordination for arguing with a supervisor for example.  But you can discipline him or even fire him for assaulting or threatening a supervisor.  In today’s world, mere use of profanity is not per se violative, but at some level and in some circumstances it is.  Certainly personal name calling or using profanity or obscenities will get a steward disciplined or fired.

The biggest problem with union representatives is that politicians and appointees think they are important.  My professional staff had the lives and livelihoods of most state employees and a big chunk of the state’s budget in their hands, and I know that almost no member of the Legislature would even recognize one of them.  At most they might vaguely recognize one of them as another nameless, faceless state employee.  Some of this is, of course, organizational culture; merit system employees, even very high level ones, are not encouraged, in some cases not allowed, to hang out in the legislative halls.  Union reps live in the legislative halls and nearby watering holes, and they are always ready to whip out an expense account credit card to pick up a tab.  Legislators and appointees will hang on every word uttered by some low-level malcontent because she holds some union office.  Do not let your appointees hang out with union reps and lobbyists and absolutely prohibit your managers and supervisors from dealing with them except as is required by law or contract for grievance handling or bargaining.

Never forget that almost all union employees and representatives, especially in the big pure public employee unions, are also activist Democrats.  In all their dealings, in their very lives, they exhibit all the characteristics usually associated with activist Democrats: they are arrogant, nasty, and hypocritical, though some can hide it pretty well if they need to.  They firmly believe that they are better than you.  The better trained ones, or more correctly, the more indoctrinated ones are dedicated Marxists and they firmly believe that the revolution is its own morality.  They look at you and yours the same way radical Islamists look at infidels; you are not human and none of the normal restrictions on behavior towards other humans applies to their behavior towards you.  Never deceive yourself into thinking that you can trust a union representative.  That seemingly amiable backslapping union agent does not put his arm around you as a show of affection, he is feeling for the soft spot!

Those of you in right to work states or states without public employee bargaining may have rolled your eyes back in your head over all the talk of unions.  That is a fatal mistake.  Many of you, especially in this day of the 911 Halo over cops and firemen, have police and fire bargaining of some sort.  And all of you have some form of the NEA.  No matter whether they bargain or not, the NEA, including its quasi-independent state affiliates, is not just a professional association, and they certainly are not dedicated only to “the children.”  Your shields should go up anytime you hear that something is for “the children.”  “For the children” is just Democrat code for something that is for them.  Everything I say about the NEA is just as true in a no bargaining or right to work state as anywhere else, they still are who they are and they still have enormous political power.  Even if they cannot compel dues in your state, nothing stops them from spending money they collected somewhere else.  Ignore this at your peril.

There is a reason that this section is peppered with references to various groups of communist rebels and homegrown radicals; that is who and what you are dealing with.  I would think more of the local level union leaders if I thought they knew that they were following the paths of Lenin, Trotsky, and, especially, Mao, but I know they don’t.  They are the people Lenin described as “useful idiots,” especially at the steward and elected union officer levels.  You can rest assured that their masters back in Washington, D.C. know exactly where the strategies and tactics come from.  Many of them were carrying Mao’s Little Red Book in their pocket way back in the halcyon days in the ‘60s.  Any good public sector labor relations practitioner needs to be every bit as familiar with Marx and Mao and Alinsky as he or she is with Elkouri and Hardin.[3]

Some of my ancestors went from freeholders to tenant farmers and sharecroppers as the result of serving in the Army of Northern Virginia.  My gg/grandmother went from the relatively well-off wife of a teacher and successful farmer to the Indigent Widows and Orphans Relief list between 1864 and 1868 and re-married far “beneath her station” to keep body and soul together and her children fed and clothed.  Some of these diaries remind me of the Southern firebreathers saying that they could mop up all the blood that would be shed with their pocket handkerchiefs.

Here’s what I was thinking almost a year ago: http://www.redstate.com/achance/2009/04/06/election-consequences-april-6-1865-sailors-creek-virginia/

And now there is outrage!  We’ve endured PETA and other crazies for years over wolf hunting issues.  The greenies and animal rights types, most of whom live in cities with no non-human predators, seem to genuinely believe that a 125 pound wolf is just a cuddly creature like a domestic dog.  They aren’t, and every PETA member should have to watch a film of a pack of wolves taking a moose – over and over until they retch out breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  So, linked is the Anchorage Daily News’ story and the reader comments.  Since Palin’s rise to prominence, the ADN has a large Outside audience, so I don’t know how much of the commentary is our crazies and how much is yours.  Well, some of the Alaskans are pretty obvious; they’re the ones who want to go kill all the wolves around Chignik Lake, Alaska.  So, here’s the story: http://www.adn.com/2010/03/11/1179368/teacher-likely-killed-by-wolves.html

Please keep this young woman, her family, and her friends in your thoughts and prayers; I can’t think of many worse ways to go.

Ok, this is another excerpt from Red on Blue that I’m about finished with.  It is long and for some it will be boring, but for all of you who really, really want to eliminate government departments, this is your chance to see how they actually work and what you can do to make them work better.  The format is kinda sucky but it is the best I can do going through a couple of versions of Word and coypying it into RedState.  So, give me your thoughts.

Department by Department

The Majesty of the Law:

Most real people do not have a clue what a Law Department or Attorney General’s Office is about.  That is probably a good thing, since they would not like it if they knew.  There’s a long-standing saw about how nobody should ever see sausage or laws made.  While that saying is about the legislative process of articulating laws and is certainly true there, it is even truer in the executive branch function of deciding which laws to enforce and against or for whom.  If you believe all the lawyer propaganda about the search for truth, I have a bridge I want to talk to you about.  In today’s world, Law is usually just a search for political advantage as the Law School elite defines advantage.

Law Departments are not big by comparison to departments like Health and So-called Services or Transportation, but the patronage and contracts they dispense are in many ways more important.  Serving as stint as an Assistant Attorney General or District Attorney is a well worn path for young lawyers to go from nobody to partner.  Getting a contract to represent the government in a big bucks lawsuit is a surefire path for a law firm to follow from obscurity to fame and fortune.  Both the lawyers and the firms really, really want this kind of opportunity and will do bad things to get it.

I have no experience in dealing with an elected Attorney General or District Attorney, but if they are not friends of yours, it will be a daunting prospect.  The only thing I can see is that you have to have friends outside the government who will help keep an opposing AG or DA honest.  If the AG or a DA opposes you on some vital issue, you are likely to be hamstrung in bringing government resources against him; they are the government too.  To the extent that it is legal, you can coordinate with the Party and aligned interest groups to intervene against him in suits or to attempt to join in as amici.  You can also use your considerable political power against him, but since in many states AG stands for Almost Governor, he is likely almost as powerful as you are.  If your legislative body is friendly, you can certainly put his staff and money into play.  If he wants to oppose you, let him figure out how to do it with no staff and no budget.  You may not be able to tell him what to do, but a legislative body can.  It is hardball, but it works – it will be noisy however.  If both the legislative body and the AG are unfriendly, you are on your own and it is all politics – ask Swartznegger.

I have worked with a lot of appointed Attorneys General, and I’ll admit that I have wished for an elected AG more than once, though I got over it.  Republicans can be astoundingly naïve about picking AGs.  Republicans are commonly defensive about their appointments, so the temptation to go for the solid gold resume is often insurmountable.  If your pick graduated cum laude from Hahvud, Yale, or Stanford, her credentials are beyond reproach, right?  Take this to the bank: if your potential nominee went to an elite law school, everything she heard from every one of her professors was inimical to everything a Republican office holder is about.  Now there are some lawyers who never became mind numbed liberal robots and some who got over it, but you had better make sure your nominee is one of them.  The last thing you want is some Allen Dershowitz clone implementing or defending your policies.  Get to know your nominee really, really well before you put her name forward.  If she starts talking about penumbras and emanations, be afraid, be very afraid.  If you do not understand what that means, you need to get someone close to you who does.

Most governments employ a bunch of lawyers.  Their status varies from government to government; some are essentially political appointees, some are merit system but non-union, some are unionized – and you need to try to do something about that.  Some are pursuing government service as a way to get experience before going to private practice (watch them closely), some are working for the government because they like the work and government lawyers do not typically get the long hours and thankless work common at the lower levels in a firm, and some are government lawyers because they would starve to death in private practice.  Obviously, if the AG or DA doesn’t work for you, you cannot do much about the quality or activities of his staff except watch their activities closely and make the elected AG or DA pay if he crosses you.  If the AG or DA works for you, you and she need to be on the same page, and she needs to supervise the subordinate lawyers closely.  As I discussed elsewhere, a lawyer can throw a case or manipulate its outcome at will, and only another lawyer will even know it.  Watch them closely to make sure they are really doing what you want done.  Close supervision will get rid of the political ones and the incompetent ones pretty quickly.

Taking a matter to an administrative forum or the courts is just as much a political act as setting a policy, promulgating a regulation, or sponsoring legislation, and all the same pressures are brought to bear on whether and how you do it.  Political amateurs want to pass or repeal laws in legislative bodies; professionals want to promulgate or rescind regulations or provoke situations that will lead the dispute to court on grounds of their choosing.  When you take office, immediately find out what matters are pending before administrative tribunals and courts.  Buy time by getting extensions or continuances as necessary and take a look at your position on each and every one; if the matter fits your agenda, keep it going, if it doesn’t find a way to get out of it through settlement or withdrawal.  There is no reason to use your political capital in carrying on your predecessor’s agenda except in the unlikely event that it also fits your agenda.  Be very careful about cases that are just ever so important to people who became your new-found friends during the campaign; they might have become your friend just to get you to drop that case that is pending appeal to the Supreme Court.  It may very well need to be dropped, but make sure that dropping it is consistent with your programmatic objectives, not just a favor for a friend, and get ready to be accused of doing a favor for a friend.  Elsewhere I discussed the importance of timing in court battles, and your law department has a lot to do with that timing.  Watch everything they do, and make sure they’re doing it for you and not someone else.  It isn’t that lawyers are untrustworthy; it is just that they are lawyers, and they can’t help it – it is in their character.

Taking Care of People:

The biggie in almost every government today is Health and So-called Services.  There is no point in a work like this to argue about whether state or local government should do these things; the thirty pieces of silver were taken long ago.  You get the government the way it is when you’re elected or appointed, so there is not much opportunity to decide what it does, you just deal with how it does it.

Were it possible, the best thing to do would be to ban anyone with a background in the social sciences from any supervisory or managerial position; these people simply cannot make a decision.  Whatever else the government schools have done in the late twentieth century, they’ve produced a whole class of allegedly educated people who simply cannot think logically or critically.  These people will spend the first twenty minutes of any meeting discussing whether all the people ordered or invited to the meeting “feel good” about having the meeting.  Then, they will spend a few hours trying to achieve a consensus about whether or not anything should be done, then another few hours trying to achieve another consensus about what should be done – on the condition that they achieved a consensus on whether or not something should be done.  And then they will waste some more time discussing whether or not everyone feels good about whatever they did or didn’t do.  These are simply useless mouths.

If you cannot do anything much about the programs these people purport to execute, you certainly can do something about how they execute the programs.  These are the “caring and sharing” people in your government.  They can’t or won’t make a decision, they absolutely flee from the slightest hint of controversy, and couldn’t bring themselves to criticize or discipline an employee – as long as they “like” the employee.  They move in herds, engage in total groupthink, and so long as you are one of the group, you can do no wrong.  If a person or entity ever falls out of the group’s favor, these “caring and sharing” people are astoundingly vicious.  Those out of favor become a sort of Weberian “other,” or to use a homier analogy, they become the “sick chicken” and are pecked to death and eaten by the group.  Most of the disciplinary actions I’ve abandoned or lost in arbitration have been Health and So-called Services cases.  Most bureaucrats will joke about people coming to work and finding they have a new office with no windows and a seat that flushes; these people will actually do it – I’ve seen it.

The first thing to do is develop and ruthlessly enforce budgetary and performance standards.  The social services types spend money more enthusiastically than even a drunken sailor could imagine – after all, the “most vulnerable of us” have needs.  And they have meetings and conferences more often than Moslems have prayer.  It would probably be cheaper to send them to Mecca, but they prefer DC, New York, San Francisco – especially San Francisco – and other stylish and expensive places.  When they are looking for a raise, which is most of the time, they are eager to tell any who will listen about their professionalism and years of schooling.  But, for such highly educated people, they certainly seem to need a lot of “training,” also usually in some stylish and expensive place.  See everything I said above about controlling traveling and training, be ruthless, and fire a few people.  It won’t change them, but it will slow them down.

One key to reining in their budgets is re-drawing their organizational charts.  The herd mentality shows here: every manager surrounds himself with a retinue of useless mouths, door openers, and briefcase toters.  A typical operating subdivision of a social services function will have more overhead than a coalmine.  Move all the infrastructure functions to the highest level possible, get rid of as many supervisors and managers as you can, and get rid of all the Assistant Deputy to the Deputy Assistant parasites.  You do not have to fire them; just re-organize and lay off all the useless mouths.  That way you don’t have to deal with legal inconveniences like “just cause.”  You will probably get some constructive discharge grievances if the work is unionized, but that places a very high burden on the union and the employer usually prevails.  You will get some whining press about how these selflessly dedicated public servants are being ousted by uncaring and mean-spirited politicians, but it won’t last much longer than any other root canal.

Developing and enforcing measurable performance standards will get vehement resistance, but you must do it.  The employees will wail that their work requires long years of study and high standards of professional judgment, so only another highly skilled professional can measure their accomplishments – and certainly no uncaring, mean-spirited politician should be able to hold them to account.  Even though I think that most social so-called science is just post-modern shamanism, I’ll give the “professionals” the benefit of the doubt on therapeutic strategies and the like, but uncaring political types like me can damn well measure how many patients/clients they see, how long they see them, how long they are patients/clients, and, most controversially, whether they can screw them – yes, I am using that word in its carnal sense.  Likewise, we “unprofessionals” can set and enforce how many client contacts case workers have, how long the contacts are, how long a case is open, how well documented a case file is – there are all sorts of objective performances measures that can be established and enforced.

As I discussed above, you will have a hard time finding a Republican to run a social services agency, especially if you follow the norm and go for someone with a social sciences background.  A social sciences brainwashing does not normally produce Republicans.  Unless it is cast in stone or statute somewhere that you must hire someone with a social sciences background, just go with someone with good management skills; you’re not hiring them to be a social worker or psychotherapist, their job is to manage budgets and make sure people do their jobs.  Someone with a medical administration background is also a possibility since they are not as likely to be as mind numbed as the social sciences types.  Be nice to whomever you hire because you are dumping a huge load on them.  If you put a layman in charge, be very careful how programmatic decisions are made and to the extent possible let the program people make them.  Your and your managers’ jobs are to stop them from wasting money and time on the programs.  Only when you have a firm grip on the business practices should you turn to analyzing programs and deciding which to continue or modify.

Once you have established good business practices and performance measures, you have to enforce them and here the real work begins.  Because they are so highly educated, the first and only Commandment is: Thou Shalt Not Judge.  So what if John only saw three clients when the standard is ten when he is a “good person?”  So what if thirty-year-old Sara confused sex with therapy for fifteen-year-old Jim when she is a “good person?”  I’m not kidding, that is the response you will get.  And if you want to discipline John and fire and prosecute Sara, you are a bad person who is being judgmental and intolerant.  Just sit the supervisor down and ask him if you have a problem with him or with Sara and John.  You will have to fire some supervisors and quite a few Saras and Johns.  You will never change their thinking but you can change their behavior and shut them up.  Fear works.

Roads and Buildings:

If your department of Health and So-called Services isn’t your largest unit, your department of Transportation (or in old fashioned states, Highways) probably is.  Unlike the rampant waste of the DHSS, here you have just plain old-fashioned graft and corruption – and incredible laziness.  If your DOT also has your public facilities, you have doubled the opportunity for graft, corruption, and laziness.

Almost anywhere this work is done under a union contract, it takes three guys to do one guy’s work; there is the guy with the shovel, the guy standing there with him to hand, hold, and fetch, and the leadman to watch the other two.  If you add another guy with a shovel, you get another hander and holder and another leadman.  Now that you have six guys on the job, you have to have a non-working foreman to watch them.  So to get two guys working unenthusiastically with shovels, you have five other guys standing around, and you do not want to think about what they are being paid by the hour.

The pork barrel feeding frenzy in Washington has poured transportation largesse into the states, and the Boston Big Dig is only the worst example of how the pork has been wasted.  Much of the work – all in the union states – is done at Davis-Bacon wage rates and the looting of the Treasury only begins there.  First, while Davis – Bacon, originally a racist law to protect the unionized Northeast from Southern contractors using Black labor, ostensibly protects “prevailing” wages on public contracts, actually nobody gets paid that much except on public contracts.[1]  Private businesses could not survive with Davis – Bacon wage costs, so you have to have an IV line straight to the State and federal treasury to pay them.  Second, many of these projects, especially the largest and most controversial, are done under what are styled “project labor agreements” in which the construction unions are guaranteed the work and the members before the job ever begins – something that can only be done legally in the construction industry.[2]  A private company can and actually might challenge a union’s right to represent the employees if there is a doubt as to its majority, but a Democrat government never would do such a thing or allow one of its contractors to do so.  A sane Republican might balk at these cozy arrangements, but there are good political reasons not to do so, at least not until you have a very firm grip on power.  By letting some of this stuff stay in place you can avoid exciting the trades and crafts unions in your area and exploit the growing schism between the old time unions and the pure public employee unions – of which, more later.

Everything I said earlier about controlling money and stuff is true here but more so because here is where the real money is and here is where many of your friends and contributors may be players.  Remember, Republican supporters tend to have businesses and property, and they really would like to make a little money from time to time – you were supposed to help them with that.  Remember?   People pay really well to have their useless property rather than someone else’s condemned at a very high price under imminent domain.  Those people are on the lookout for one of your right-of-way agents who might be a little less than scrupulous.  There’s always someone out there who’d like you to use his gravel, or his topsoil, or his asphalt, or especially, rent his office building.  Mid-level bureaucrats are making all these procurement decisions and, depending on the area, they will have everything from Mafiosi to billionaires trying to influence their decisions.  The economic and lifestyle pressures on Narcs makes better movies, but the pressures on your procurement people are just as great and they usually make less than the cops.  Probably only shipbuilding has been more corrupt and for longer than road building, so you are not likely to be the one that cleans up the industry, but you do need to take reasonable precautions to protect your administration from scandal.

Dealing With Bad Guys:

And then there are the boys in blue.  Law ‘n Order and Republican are practically synonyms, so there should be a working symbiosis between the boys in blue and your administration.  Yes, but …  Every state and almost every city and county has some sort of law enforcement unit and some sort of jail or prison guard unit – in unionized states don’t call them guards; they are correctional officers or in California correctional peace officers.  They get very touchy about being called guards.  Once they reach the status of correctional officers they are very well paid and if you add “peace” to the title, they become exceptionally well paid and very politically powerful.

The Cop Shops are different from the departments discussed above.  Only in some of the really blue places are they inherently corrupt, but people like us don’t have to worry about them, we don’t live there and we sure as Hell aren’t getting elected there.  In the places where real people live, the police forces and the fire-fighters and the jail guards are basically honest operations.  That said, the police and jail parts are always going to attract some bad people and there are always bad things going on there.

Real cops – state police, city police, and some sheriff’s officers – deal with really bad people, sometimes in really dangerous situations.  The good ones and even the ordinary ones deserve your respect and support.  They deserve to be well paid and politically secure, but they do not deserve the halo that the media and the Democrats have placed over them since 9-11.  The media don’t know any better and the Democrats know a political issue when they see one.  I’ll admit to a certain admiration for people who will run into a situation that other people are running out of, but I will go ahead and be the iconoclast here; the “first responders” who died on 9-11 were proud and brave but they died because of non-existent situational awareness and abysmally bad command and control.  Since the average American does nothing more dangerous than take the tag off the mattress, the word hero has been cheapened to the point of meaninglessness.  Just doing your job, even a dangerous job, does not make you a hero.  The purpose of this semi-rant is to prepare you for what you are going to hear from all the boys in blue whenever they want something.  The 9-11 Halo over “America’s Heroes” is costing everyone in America a bunch of money.

Only teachers have more pervasive unionization than fire and law enforcement employees.  Even many Southern right-to-work states that prohibit organization of other public employees allow police and fire organization.  Almost every Congress sees federal legislation for police and fire collective bargaining, often including the most insidious form of collective bargaining, interest arbitration.  Most states that have public employee bargaining have some form of interest arbitration for police, fire, and jail employees.  It does not have to be, but interest arbitration is usually a very, very bad thing.

Since police, fire, and jail employees’ services cannot be done without for even the shortest period of time, they are not allowed to strike even in full collective bargaining states.  When the public employer and the union cannot reach a voluntary labor agreement, the employer and the union choose an arbitrator and submit their respective proposals to him or her and the arbitrator decides what the agreement will be.[3]  This process is called interest arbitration.[4]  If you don’t know any better, this might seem like a good, fair system.  It can be, but it usually isn’t.

As I discussed earlier, arbitrators are keenly aware of the political climate in a particular government.  With a Democrat or weak Republican government, they will just avoid the hard decision and make the unions happy.  While you are thinking that will not happen with you in charge, be aware that the most common criterion for arbitrators’ decisions is comparability to other jurisdictions.  If your blue neighbors have given away the farm, the comparable will be giving away the farm.  You can appreciate the importance of this if you look at what California under Gray Davis gave to law enforcement generally and correctional officers specifically.  Interest arbitration and whipsawing between jurisdictions have made unionized law enforcement officers and firefighters among the best paid and most secure public employees.  Law enforcement and some firefighter units tend to stand a bit aloof from other public employee unions and many are not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.  Law enforcement units tend to be more conservative than other public employee units and you may be able to garner some support from them, but they will never really be your friends though they might try to act like it sometimes.

To the boys in blue, there are cops, crooks, and victims, and the cops spend more of their time with the crooks than the victims.  Civilians are not even a part of their world – unless they’re pretty.  Cops live in their own world and they have erected a blue wall of silence around it.  As I discussed above, even your appointees will see themselves as having more in common with the boys than with your government.  The good ones and the ordinary ones won’t lie, but they won’t necessarily tell the truth and you have to ask them exactly the right question to get anything out of them.  This is true even of the ones that are at least nominally your friends.  You must always be mindful that a cop’s real source of power is the arrest he didn’t make and the information he kept to himself.

Bad cops give bad a whole new meaning because they are very good at being bad and their brothers in blue and even some prosecutors cover for them.  You will always have some cops that like to physically abuse arrestees (they call it “thumping” them).  You will always have some cops that will let the prostitute go for a little sample of her, and occasionally his, wares.  The temptations of the drug trade are well known and all too true.  And it is undeniable that there are some women who just cannot resist a man in uniform and cops are well aware of that fact.  The Alaska State Troopers once won an award for being the best-dressed police force in the country.  Cynics that we were, the labor relations staff joked that the only thing wrong with the uniform was that the zipper should have been in the back.  We had transferred our fair share of them out of some small town or village one step ahead of a vengeful husband.  And they aren’t always subtle about it; as I write this, the headline in today’s paper is about one of Alaska’s finest taking a plea for not bothering to obtain consent from at least four different women in a small Alaska town – busy boy.  So far it has only cost us about a million dollars.

Correctional Officers – COs – are cops confined to a small area.  Some are cop wannabes and have a chip on their shoulder from not making the force.  Some others are retired military and aren’t much into letting work interfere with their stately progress towards vesting another retirement.  The qualifications and background checks usually are far less demanding than for cops, so some of them are not stellar characters to begin with.  In the course of their work day, cops work with both crooks and civilians and from time to time get to do nice things and deal with nice people; COs don’t.  From 40 to 84 or more hours a week, COs are locked up in jail with the lowest forms of human life and after a while, it shows.[5]  Rest assured that every one of the temptations that cops on the street face are faced by COs in a jail, they just cost more inside.  If anything, the opportunities for physical abuse are greater in a jail than on the street.  Drugs are plentiful in most jails and somebody has to let them in and cover for their presence.  And while there are a few sweet girls who just embezzled a little money to feed the kids, most women in jail are veterans of the drug and sex trades and are inured to violence.  They are also very good at getting over on weak-minded men.  Alaska only has a little over 700 COs and I long ago lost all track of how many forced resignations or dismissals I had been involved in for what we euphemistically call “undue familiarity” with inmates.  And the male COs certainly do not have a monopoly on it.  Interestingly, in all the years I never had but one male fight the dismissal and never had but one female not fight it.  Once a female decides a convict is her man, the decision is cast in stone – just ask the widow of the CO in Tennessee shot by the former corrections nurse helping her convict escape in August of ‘05.

I could regale you with cop and CO stories almost endlessly because I lived in the world of arbitrating their discipline and dismissals and negotiating with their unions for the better part of two decades.  The CO union is one of my clients today.  One thing I liked about the Palin Administration is that they did enough stupid stuff for me to make good money off it.  Cops and COs live in a filthy world and your law enforcement appointees will come out of that world and feel more commonality with its denizens than with mere civilians.  Except in the big cities that nobody reading this book as more than a know your enemy course will ever get elected in, the departments are pretty clean and pretty well run; the problems are with the people – the ones you deal with and the ones who work for you.  You will never stop bad things from happening with cops and COs; they live with the dregs and sometimes it rubs off.  You must, however, make it clear to your appointees that they are not to tolerate it or cover it up and make it clear that if they do, they will be the first casualty.  And keep an eye out for that unmarked car tailing you and that strange guy in the corner booth who seems just a little too interested in what you are saying and doing.  By the way, did it ever occur to you that the lithesome thing in the spaghetti strapped cocktail dress that just sat down beside you might be working undercover while you’re thinking about working your way under her covers?

Masters of Disasters:

I have the advantage of writing this as I watch the greatest breakdown of governmental control in modern America; the New Orleans flood.  This is aimed mostly at state governments, since that is where I come from.  I write from a place where ultimate disaster is not an if but a when.  If I stay here long enough, I probably am going to die in an earthquake or tsunami – and if I don’t, it won’t be because of the government.  The Atlantic Coast has its hurricanes and floods, the Pacific Coast has its earthquakes and tsunamis – I’ll take a hurricane any time, anyone with a brain has time to get away.  The rest of the country has tornados, spring floods, ice storms and all the other things that Mother Earth serves up to us.  If you come to power in a formerly Blue state or in a state that has a doughnut city, any natural event is a political issue, and it is your fault.

Take note of what President Bush said in a press opportunity a week after Katrina struck; “we’re problem solvers.”  See what I said earlier, leaning on David Horowitz, about the political consequences of problem solving.  It is a politically tenable strategy to never solve problems – it is the Democrat stock in trade; but it doesn’t work for Republicans generally and specifically it doesn’t work in response to a natural disaster.  You have to do something, even if the people you are doing it for don’t deserve it.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying the poor schmuck that lost his house doesn’t deserve your help, I mean the district assemblyman or councilman or mayor who just screwed the pooch.  You are going to have to fix his screw up and then take the blame for it.

Different governments put their Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) analog in different places; some in the office of the governor or mayor some associate it with the military or law enforcement.  FEMA and its state and local analogs are strange and difficult agencies.  Nobody had much even heard of FEMA until the end of the Cold War.  For most of its history FEMA was a blacker than black agency, maybe blacker than the CIA.  Its mission was American reaction to a Soviet nuclear attack, so you can bet it owned a lot of companies and had a lot of money, and you weren’t going to find out where that money was or came from with a FOIA request.

Bill Clinton was America’s first post-Cold War President and was – is – the highest form of the lowest political order.  Slick Willie didn’t have to deal with no stinkin’ Cold War, and he found all that beautiful money that FEMA had.  Slick Willie found a “disaster” in just about every congressional district in which a Democrat was running.  Somebody ought to tally how much money he gave away in eight years, but a good example is the Koyokuk Flood in Alaska in the early nineties.  For a flood that affected about 250 souls, the US spent about $70 MM, but a Democrat from that area was running for Congress at the time.  We could have bought every family in the area a condo in Maui and given them $100K a year for life for less, but it helped the Democrat to get a little less soundly trounced by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska).  In the Clinton era, FEMA was just a device to contribute money to Democrat campaigns; all the storms and hurricanes were dealt with by state, local, and occasionally federal resources, then FEMA came in and poured out money, and maybe bought a few votes.

You would have to be an Administration insider to know enough to speak truly authoritatively, but I believe that the Bush Administration over-reacted to Clinton’s politicizing of FEMA by relegating it to a backwater role in the Department of Homeland Security.  I think that FEMA actually did a pretty good job with Katrina.  FEMA is not designed to be a first responder; its job is to try to restore normalcy after a disaster.  FEMA has or can get a whole bunch of money, and is pretty good at getting it to people, but its job is not disaster relief if that is defined as getting people off roofs or digging them out of collapsed buildings.  Think ATM for the Administration.  The Clinton propaganda machine put FEMA jackets on the scene at every disaster without ever saying what they were doing.  FEMA is a bureaucratic agency that does bureaucratic things; it doesn’t save people[6].

You need a good bureaucrat to run your emergency management agency, but he or she should not be a highly visible member of your administration.  Clinton truly loathed the military and did not want the bellicose image of OD green associated with his “caring and sharing” lot, and consequently Clinton used those blue and gold FEMA jackets to show that his administration was on the scene.  FEMA and its state and local equivalents are good at spending and distributing money, not saving people.  Clinton propaganda made an unrealistic expectation for the agency by making it so visible.  Your presence needs to be in camouflage, Army or Marine green, or Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard blue.

In the twenty-four hours before Katrina struck New Orleans, President Bush was in a damnable position.  He had to beg the school marm governor to order merely voluntary evacuation; he took the precaution of declaring a disaster well before the storm even struck.  Then, as a matter of law, he had to sit back and wait until the mayor and the governor “got off their asses” – to use Mayor Nagin’s words – and asked for Federal assistance.

This is one area where William Faulkner was right when he said, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”  A part of the price for Southern support for Hayes in 1877 was the complete removal of Union troops occupying The South.  That bargain and the passage of the posse comitatas law put stringent limits on the use of federal troops for any law enforcement purpose in a state.  In the simplest terms, somebody wearing OD green cannot come into a sovereign state absent the governor’s invitation.  That just came back to bite Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin’s descendents, and more importantly politically, the descendents of their slaves[7].

President Bush could have stepped in on the morning the hurricane struck; it was obvious to any thoughtful observer that Louisiana was about to be overwhelmed, but at what price?  His only legal authority was to declare that a state of insurrection existed in poor, Black, Democrat, and victimized Louisiana.  As I recall, that is something like what President Lincoln did in April of 1861, and a few years of unpleasantness ensued.  Now it isn’t likely that the rest of The South would have risen in arms to aid their Louisiana brethren facing hordes of invading Yankee Vandals, but the Poverty Pimps and left wing would have done about the same thing politically.  Spin this: George Bush declares that a Black male Democrat mayor and a white female Democrat governor are not competent to handle it all, and his oil man, honky dog Republican federal administration is taking over.  You can bet that Jesse Jackson would be praying that a Federalized National Guardsman, or better yet some highly trained killer from the 82^nd Airborne – preferably fresh from Iraq, would shoot some poor oppressed Black looter who’d just stolen a plasma TV because his family had no food or water.  The President was at their mercy, and now he cannot even defend himself without being accused of “blaming the victims.”  In a nation that looks to government for everything, that has not educated anyone in thirty years, and which uses television as bread and circuses, that is just the way it is.

The moral of this story is do your own disaster planning and be prepared to fend for yourself for three to five days – and don’t whine.  Your people are a lot tougher than your bureaucrats and the reporters, they’ll be OK.  As Churchill said, we did not get to be who and what we are by being made of sugar candy.  Get on TV and radio and be a leader.  Guliani’s police and fire management screwed the pooch on 9-11, but Guliani and Kerik got on TV, they acted like men, and nobody has dared to talk about how bad the first response really was.

Your first response is local police and fire then state police; we’ve talked about their good and bad, but most of them will do their job.  Next is the National Guard and they can be a problem.  Legally, they work for the Governor, but they are all ex-active military and get paid by the Fed, so they tend to think of themselves as something other than the governor’s subordinates.  At the field level, say Captain or Major and below, they are good troops, maybe not as sharp as an active combat unit and a little out of shape, but generally good at what they do.  From Lieutenant Colonel up, they can be a problem.  From Light Colonel up, if they’re good, the active military is going to keep them and promote them.  From Light Colonel up, if you are not going to become a Brigadier General in the active military, you are going out of the military or to the National Guard, and as often as not, you bring an attitude.

A governor has to pick an Adjutant General, the commander of his National Guard, and in most states this is a cabinet position, so you get to pick him or her as a political choice, usually subject to confirmation.  This position is usually an afterthought – oh, yeah, I do command the National Guard, who can I put in charge of that?  Think hard about this.  With any luck it won’t matter who you pick, nothing will happen, but if something does happen, this is probably the most important appointment you’ll make.  There are going to be a whole bunch of charming devils with eagles on their shoulders out there for you to pick from.  And they are good guys; you met them at the Rotary, they are socially and politically active, and they talk a good fight.  You might run into an extraordinary one that defies this advice, but be careful about that charming devil, especially if he or she is wearing that eagle in the Guard[8].

Today’s American active military is the scariest thing the world has seen since the Roman Legions.  I am a fairly serious student of history generally and military history specifically, and I must admit that the leadership of the modern American military is astoundingly bellicose[9].  The coolly efficient lethality of a modern Infantry rifle squad is greater than the lethal power of a whole country a century ago – these people are scary.  You are going to have to be a good leader to follow this advice, but you need to find a man who has led these troops in combat to be your Adjutant General.  You need a man, and I do mean man because thankfully we have not yet put women in these positions, who has led brave men in desperate battle – OK, I stole that line from “Patton.”

Ignore that charming Colonel you met at Rotary.  It does not matter if the guy you find was a Sergeant when he was in, you get to make him a Brigadier General.  If you can find one among your friends and supporters, an older, retired combat or combat support commander is who you are looking for; a retired General or Admiral is better and will be better accepted by the troops, but a Sergeant will do.  You want somebody who when you need him will kick ass, take names, and get it done, and to Hell with bureaucratic niceties.  This person is not likely to play well with others or be a good bureaucrat.  These are guys like Lt. Gen. Honore, the task force commander in Louisiana, who will angrily dismiss a Congressman’s allegations against him as “BS” on national television.  It is worth your while to spend a little money to hire a bureaucrat or two to make sure his bills get paid, and you might have to apologize a time or two for something he says.  If something bad happens, he’ll save your butt.

Educating the Kiddies:

It is hard at a personal level for me to deal with this: my great-great grandfather was a teacher before he joined the Army of Northern Virginia and was killed in Mahone’s counterattack at the Battle of the Crater in 1864.  My grandmother, a teacher, was maybe the greatest influence in my life.  She always told me that if I couldn’t speak, read, and write Latin and at least read Greek, I’d always be a barbarian – she was right.  She had ten years of what passed for public school in 19^th Century Georgia and two years of “Normal School.”  In her eighties she could still recite long passages of Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin, quote Shakespeare and the King James endlessly, and rattle off out of her head the proofs to those Geometry theorems that were driving me to distraction.  My sister is today a teacher in a public school in rural Georgia.  Teaching, real teaching, is a noble profession.  The craft that the Ed Schools, Educrats, and National Extortion Association have conspired to produce is anything but noble.

The world was a better place when the highest authority in education was a county school board comprised mostly of practical, hard-handed farmers and small town merchants.  Since the advent of state and, especially, federal departments of education, there has been a precipitous decline in our literacy and our culture.  If we had learned in the ‘50s or even early ‘60s that the KGB had developed a plan to do to our culture and productive capacity what the education schools, educrats, and the National Extortion Association have done since World War II, we would have pre-emptively nuked the Soviet Union to stop it.

Some states are still pretty close to that hard-handed farmer ideal in the administration of schools, but they still have to deal with NEA teachers, Ed School “educated” educrats, and State Board approved curricula.  Then you have to agree to celebrate diversity, develop self-esteem, and all that other rot to get the federal funds back that were confiscated from your state to begin with.  Others, particularly in the West, have state run education systems with no farmers to act as a brake.   In the West, there is no hope.  There are lots of people who are lots smarter than I who have broken their pick on the education mess.  All I can say is that it should be self evident to anyone who even pretends to be a Republican that the current state of public education is criminal.  Anyone who believes in republican democracy must believe in a free public education, but it is clear that our experiment in government monopoly education has failed.  This is one place where I won’t pretend to offer a solution within the current structures.  The only thing I think is a really good idea is to force the political subdivisions to have their school board elections on General Election day so the School Board will be harder for the National Extortion Association to buy.  I know that you can try to run it with the same diligence that I recommend for Health and So-called Services and you will make the mess better, or at least less wasteful.  But that said, saving a little money and meeting a few performance goals won’t stop our children from becoming left-wing mind numbed robots who feel really, really good about being ignorant.  I’m usually pretty arrogant about my ability to solve problems, but here I have no solutions to offer as long as the current government monopoly continues.  Unless you can enact and get court approval of vouchers, good luck.

The typical teacher has little more than a high school education in subject matter and usually was no more than a mediocre student.  Their college curriculum was the minimum required subject matter and the rest was all pedagogy – how to teach stuff you don’t know.  The pedagogy is mostly sophistry and shamanism; there is no academic rigor in an Ed School.  A literate janitor armed with a copy of McGuffy’s Reader, published in 1876, can teach a kid to read better than an “education professional” teaching with “sight reading” or “whole language” Ed School techniques.  Anyone who knows their multiplication tables and is willing to sit their kids down and make them work through My Dear Aunt Sally (Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract) is a better math teacher than all the “New Math” scholars.  And the plain old subject, verb, object analysis of grammar was just so boring that the teachers couldn’t be bothered to either learn it or teach it.  English is a dead language.  Over a drink, I’ll tell you what I really think.

At a practical – for God’s sake do something – level, do away with tenure.  Tenure is a foolish notion for production workers like K-12 teachers.  There is no practical distinction between teachers and school janitors; they are bought for a body of skills and follow a prescribed regime of work.  The teacher’s body of skill takes a little longer to acquire, so we pay a teacher more than a janitor; that’s the only real distinction.  Tenure and academic freedom may, just may, mean something at a university where research and a “life of the mind” still maintain a vestigial existence.  But teachers follow a state board prescribed regime of spouting curriculum just as mechanically as the janitor follows a checklist in mopping the floors and cleaning the restrooms.  K-12 teachers do not do seminal research and probe the edges of human knowledge, they spout board approved politically correct pabulum contrived to produce mind-numbed robots.

The whole notion of free speech or academic freedom is meaningless, even a non sequitur, in the public school context.  A teacher spouting a lesson plan based on a Board approved curriculum is not engaging in personal speech; she is the voice of the government that pays her.  The 1^st Amendment protects the individual right to speech, not the government’s speech.  Short of shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre, a teacher can say whatever she wants in her private capacity, but between the school bells – do they still have bells? – she speaks for the government; she is, in fact the government speaking.  The 1^st Amendment isn’t even relevant here.  She is paid by the government to say what the government pays her to say; there is no personal speech involved.  If the government pays her to say the Earth is flat, between the school bells, the Earth is flat, and was created by God in seven days – if that is what the lesson plan says.  Of course, there might be some 1^st Amendment problems there.  In any event, a teacher is paid to speak for the government; freedom of speech is for her own time.

Either explicit legislation, state court holdings, or union contracts guarantee teachers dismissal only for cause, so they aren’t going to get fired for running afoul of a band of peasants with pitchforks and torches.  All tenure really means is that a bad teacher gets a bite of the apple before the board, before an arbitrator, and before the courts before they can get the dismissal they deserve.  It is difficult enough to discipline or dismiss an ordinary public employee under the just cause provision of a state personnel act or a union contract, adding the additional hoops imposed by tenure makes it nearly impossible and very, very expensive to dismiss a tenured teacher.  Since they are so hard to fire, they don’t often get fired and can keep on spouting crap into skulls full of mush.  If you can afford it, home school your kids and use your power in government to make other parents able to afford it.  When the “education professionals” are working at WalMart and the people working and shopping at WalMart can privately educate their kids, the world will be a better place.

Revenue, Resources, and the Environment:

State governments have enormous power over agriculture, fishing, logging, and mining.  City and county governments often regulate these as well and in addition make and enforce zoning and use laws controlling real estate development.  In addition to controlling use, both governments can influence use by taxation policies.  Between the two, government can determine whether you can use your property, how you use it, and ultimately whether your property is worth anything or you can make any money from its use.  That is real power, second only to the power to lock you up or kill you.

Running these departments is no different from any of the others; control the money, people, and stuff, and don’t let people do bad things.  That part is simple, and all you have to do is follow out what I’ve laid out above.  Doing that will keep you out of the little troubles and the little scandals.  But, these departments can give you really, really big problems.  Here there be MONEY, real money.  Health and So-called Services and Highways or Public Facilities live on taxes and transfer payments.  That is peanuts compared to the kind of real wealth that comes out of the ground, the lakes and rivers, and the ocean.  It could be permitting a gold mine or oil well in Alaska, granting water rights on the Colorado River, approving a building permit adjoining the Nantahala National Forest in Georgia, or, God Forbid, building a refinery in California; somebody has a bunch of money riding on your decision.  While these are local or state decisions, they are all national issues.

When Farmer Brown gets tired of losing money and his children don’t want anything to do with farming, Farmer Brown sells his 160 acres to Acme Development, buys a motor home and sets off to Arizona or Florida.  Unless Farmer Brown’s place was in that great Cartesian Paradise, the Great Plains, his land has irregular borders and was maybe one – half tended farmland.  The rest was woods, creeks, lowlands, and the high ground that Great-Grandpa Brown built the family house on.  Acme Development applies for zoning and building permits to build a residential subdivision, and all Hell breaks out.  The South Podunk Conservation Council, a subsidiary of the Sierra Club, challenges the development alleging inter alia that there are protected woodpeckers in the woods, the creeks have some rare, precious and beautiful fish in them, the lowlands are a priceless, non-renewable resource, and the old Brown Place is so unique that it should be on the National Register of Historic Places.  And to make it more interesting, Acme Development gave you a whole bunch of campaign money.

The greenies get to triple dip in opposition to your government and Acme Development.  They administratively challenge the permitting at every step, then they challenge the permits once granted in the state courts and simultaneously in the federal courts.  There is even a fourth bite sometimes; they challenge your state court decision in the federal court if they can assert a federal question.  All the time that they are mounting the administrative and judicial challenge, they are mobbing public meetings, standing around singing songs and carrying signs, and relentlessly writing letters to the editor accusing your administration of sacrificing the precious environment to greedy, grasping, uncaring special interests and accusing you of being bought and paid for by those special interests.  If all this sounds vaguely familiar, the greenies come from the same ideological place and use the same playbook as the public employee unions, but they are harder to deal with than the unions since they don’t all work for you.  You can find the ones who do work for you and make their life more interesting though.  This is another place where federal grants set up little sinecures for greenie sleeper cells; find them and get rid of them.

If your views are those of the typical Republican, you are somewhere between “ people are more important than woodpeckers, fish, wetlands, and old houses” and “we can make it possible for woodpeckers, fish, wetlands, and old houses to coexist with people.”  If you know on taking office that there are excessive environmental restrictions in your government’s permitting processes, change them immediately upon taking office.  Governor Murkowski did this; effectively breaking up some environmentalist cells in Alaska’s government immediately upon taking office.  Doing it this way has the advantage of not having to address any specific pending projects.  The employees and the greenies groused a lot, but it was over pretty quickly.  The suicide move is to step in to change the rules specifically for Acme Development.  If you do and you got money from Acme Development or appointed someone close to Acme, you are going to face Ethics Act or similar charges and if the trying board or court is still Democrat controlled, you are going to be found guilty.  Forget all that law professor stuff about the search for truth; these tribunals are a search for political advantage.  It doesn’t matter if you are ultimately acquitted; the charge will get screaming headlines, the acquittal will get two column inches on page 86 a year later, and you will have been successfully branded as a tool of Acme Development.

A big company like Acme can thread its way through a regulatory morass and it really does not need your help on the technical and legal side of the process.  Acme knows this and the greenies know it too.  Acme can afford the lawyers and experts; what they cannot afford is time, and the greenies know it.  So the greenies and their allies, witting and unwitting, in the bureaucracy just drag out the zoning and permitting process until Acme throws in the towel.  Here you can legally provide assistance at little political risk; keep the process moving.  Ride the bureaucrats mercilessly to meet or beat all the timelines and do not let them catch you up in the “need more information” game – that is the bureaucrat corollary of the Democrat “we can do it better” game.  And don’t even think about bending or breaking the rules; it will bring your administration down.

Most of the issues involving resources, the environment, and taxes are more public policy than strategy and tactics, so I am not really addressing that in this piece.  If you are an ideological conservative, you know where you are on these issues.  The Left hates private ownership and personal discretion.  If you love these things you will not let your government interfere with private ownership and personal discretion.  After that, it is all just strategy and tactics.

The semi-rational problem solving approach by the automakers isn’t going to work any more than being nice and bi-partisan has worked for Republicans. The government and the unions don’t want these cars fixed and couldn’t care less whether or not there is anything actually wrong with the cars; the only thing that will “fix” these cars is signing on to the UAW’s pattern agreement and backing the Obama agenda in DC.

The toolkit will soon be expanded to finding some SEIU, AFSCME, or NEA types who own a non-union transplant auto; the “buy American, buy union” thing has never much applied to the service and public employees. They’ll then start a PR campaign of horror stories these poor consumers have endured as the result of foolishly owning a non-union car. They’ll get some of their friends in the media to start doing articles trashing the companies for the poor quality of the cars and for the intolerable working conditions in the plants. Somewhere in there they’ll start using their local unions to start pressuring the dealers in their area with Op-Eds about how “something has to be done” and letters to the editor and postings on local blogs. Along about here is where the lawsuits will start and it will rain damages suits which will all come to trial in rural, high-minority jurisdictions that have proven themselves to be reliable in sticking it to those evil corporations. All of this will be accompanied by a whole new level of attention from the USDOL, the EPA, the IRS and whatever other federal agencies they can sic on them. This will be reinforced by a parallel effort by state and local governments in areas under Democrat control.

In the face of all this attention, the companies might find a spine and begin to fight back but I’m not holding my breath. They know that all they have to do to make it all stop is call their friendly, local UAW agent and sign the piece of paper, so my money’s on that course of action. They could be Republican leaders!

When you take office, somebody who gave or raised money for you is going to tell you that you need to keep the government running smoothly, so you can’t do anything too drastic.  The person who told you that is some sort of lobbyist or player that you think is your friend, or at least your contributor.  That advice is for their benefit, not yours!

After allowing yourself a moment to shed a tear for the lost hopes, dreams, girlfriends, boats, and houses, fire everyone in the government that you have a colorable legal right to fire, and maybe a few more just to show that you can – you, the courts, or God can sort it out later.  Do it within ten seconds of your hand coming off the Bible.  You got that earlier advice because that lobbyist or player had a relationship with those people that he does not want to lose.  That is not your relationship, and you might want to question your relationship with the person who gave you that advice.

The very hardest thing you could do is to stop government from running.  You could fire every politically appointed director, commissioner, or whatever, and nobody would know the difference; the government would just keep on doing what it does.  Behind every one of those political appointees that someone wants you to keep is a career bureaucrat that actually does all the work.  You only need a political appointee in the places that you want to make a change of direction.  The rest of government can just run itself, and it will do so indefinitely.

A few of the political appointees from the prior administration will have supported you.  Keep them – at least for a while, but it’s a lot like marrying a woman that was screwing around on her husband when she hooked up with you – are you sure what she’s doing tonight?  Some of the appointees are relatively apolitical subject matter experts; fire them all and hire back any that are any good – after they kiss the ring.  Let the rest of them lose their houses.  Political appointments are not career jobs, and anyone who bought a half-million dollar house based on their earnings from a political job deserves what happens to them.  The Democrats will bleat and wail.  The day you fire them, they will have starving babies and mommies with cancer on the 6 pm news, but these days the news cycle is 24 hours or less, and everyone will get over it.

The only exception to the “fire them all at once” rule is the potential poster children.  If there are some appointee level employees that behaved badly enough, keep them on and fire them for cause; prosecute them if the situation warrants it.  Even if they resign on their own accord, hunt them down and prosecute them.  Generally, the way to get rid of the prior administration’s appointees is to demand their resignation upon your assumption of office.  You just tell them you are going to do things differently and they don’t fit into your plans.  Generally, the rule is “any reason, no reason, but not an illegal reason.”  The distinguishing characteristics of true appointees are that they are not selected competitively and cannot appeal dismissal; they are as close to “at will” or “serve at the pleasure” employees as you get in government.  But they are not that “at will;” in most states, if you state a cause, you had better be able to prove it has a basis in fact.  If you can identify a truly corrupt one, don’t honor him or her by just demanding the resignation; fire him for cause and make smoke and noise doing it.  By corrupt, I mean true lying and stealing that Joe Sixpack can identify with, not esoteric policy stuff or bureaucratic rule breaking.  If you really have the evidence, hope he sues you for wrongful discharge.  This is all just to make a statement and to improve the morale and productivity of the survivors.

Republicans have never been willing to do the necessary housecleaning, unlike Democrats.  You can be certain that if the Democrats return to power in your government, anyone who even might have thought like a Republican, even merit system employees merely following orders, will be out on their ear.  They do it every time, they do it ruthlessly, and nobody ever says a word since Democrats are good people.  Republican reluctance is based both on the perception that mass firing would be disruptive and an unwillingness to take the bad press.  This conventional wisdom is wrong on both counts.  The government will run just fine without appointees for a while.  As to the bad press, you do not have a choice; you are going to get bad press whether you keep some of them or fire them all, so get your money’s worth.  It is like coming home late; once you are late enough for your wife to be mad, she’s not going to be much madder a couple hours later and making up might even be better.

You need a good lawyer for taking out the trash.  In states where the Attorney General is elected, AG stands for Almost Governor, and he or she is not necessarily your friend.  If the AG is appointed, you are probably safe with her advice.  If you’re not sure, get a good lawyer, one who actually knows employment law, in your kitchen cabinet.  Many states that have had long time Democrat dominance have lots and lots of jobs that look like political appointees but are not.  There is a line of U. S. Supreme Court law, interestingly mostly out of Chicago, that says that if the employee is not in a policy making position, they do not serve at the pleasure no matter what your state law may say.  Make sure that your reach does not exceed your grasp because the lawsuits can be expensive and embarrassing when you fire some clerk because the job was ostensibly appointed – Democrats can get away with things that you cannot.  The trick here is to put the job under the merit system, assuming you have one, and if the person does not meet the qualifications for the merit system job, they hit the street.  Sell it as reform; you are reducing the number of appointees.  It will take your first year to sort all this out, but the process will not make the headlines after the first one or two.

After you find that good lawyer, you need some people to help you run this thing you just took over.  You’re going to have one Helluva time finding them.  It does not matter whether you are the President or a Governor looking to appoint a Cabinet, a Commissioner or Secretary looking for directors or department heads, or a director or section chief just looking for good help, you are going to have a very hard time finding good people to run or work in a government agency.  First, the money stinks, so you are not likely to be able to recruit from the business world.  Second, most of the ideas that make you successful in business doom you to failure in government.  Third, you cannot recruit from academia because they are almost all lefties who hate you, besides, they can’t do anything anyway – those who can, do; those who can’t teach.  This old saw is especially true in Law, Political Science, and Public Administration.  And fourth, there is a Helluva lot of scrutiny of people in high places, especially of Republicans.  Most of us reaching this level of power are Boomers and we have pasts – an affair here, a joint or a line there, a DWI somewhere.  You can hire those people, but they have to give it up on the spot; no “I didn’t inhale” or “I didn’t have sex with that woman” for Republicans.  The correct Republican answer if you’re asked if you ever smoked dope – and you did – is, “Hell yes and I’m disgusted by somebody who was such a hypocrite that he pretended to inhale.”  You just cannot do that sort of thing anymore and you can bet nobody is going to fish your car and dead secretary out of a river and pretend it didn’t happen.  You have to be straight up about it all – just don’t go around volunteering information.  You will get some grief for 24 hours and then it will be old news.  If you try to evade or dissemble, it will go on forever.   If your appointee has a past, he or she had better be totally honest about it and totally straight now or life will be Hell.

Republican success in legislative bodies in recent times gives a new executive some former legislators and legislative staffers to draw on, but you and they will learn quickly enough that being a member of the legislative branch is not much of a training ground for the executive branch.  You are left with those of your true friends who will take a government job, a few people with legislative experience, and the bureaucracy itself.  You will not have much of a bench, but you cannot afford any slackers or failures; bench them and play short – any failure will be yours, not theirs.

You should worry most about your friends.  I use friends here in the word’s political sense.  I am not talking about the person you grew up with and who knows your deepest thoughts – though I could be.  I’m talking about all the friends you acquired on your way up the political ladder.  With the Republican ascendancy of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, there are lots and lots of born-again Republicans around just ever so eager to write a check, put up a sign, or host a fundraiser.  Those people you met campaigning, at the Chamber, or at Rotary don’t know much about government except that it dispenses lots of money, and you could be their ticket to have it dispense some of that money to their business or friends.  One of my Democrat bosses headed the agency that bought all the State’s computers and went straight from the State to one of the largest computer companies in the world, Ethics Act be damned.  He was a Democrat, Democrats are good people, good people do not do bad things, and therefore, he didn’t do a bad thing.  It is OK for them to do things like that.  You can’t.  If you or your friends even look like you might make a single dime off something you want to do, you can’t do it.  Business as usual for Democrats is graft and corruption for Republicans.  They will hang you from the masthead of every paper in the state.  James Carville had it right when he said, “you spend the election f**king your enemies and the transition f**king your friends.”  Mostly, you are better off without friends.

A special category of friends is lawyers.  You will find lawyers who have gravitated to the Party or to you personally.  The first question you should ask is, “why aren’t they making so much money in private practice that they wouldn’t be interested in government work?”  If you have satisfied yourself with the answer to that question, then you must look at what lawyers are all about.  Any halfway good lawyer can find an argument for anything and a justification for everything.  That skill is what they paid all that money to learn how to do.  Little things like ethics and morality are only a part, often only a minor part, of their analysis.  The other way that lawyers get you in trouble is that they always think they are right.  A lawyer has to believe he can win.  That is his job, wresting a verdict from a jury.  That is all OK when they are out practicing law, but when you involve them in policy, it has real risks.  A lawyer turned political manager will ride his policy decisions right over the nearest cliff, oblivious to the fact that the cliff was perfectly obvious to real people.  Republican leaning lawyers are a source of talent for you, but you had best watch them like a hawk.  Governor Murkowski learned that the hard way with his longtime associate and Attorney General – the fallout from that little “indiscretion” continued to bedevil for his whole term.[1]  Attorneys just don’t think like real people, and that can get you in real trouble.

Republican legislators have done the Party and the nation a great disservice by being so frugal.  To show how lean and mean they are, they have very small staffs and employ few consultants, and then they don’t pay any of them worth a damn.  First, this puts them at the mercy of the executive branch, which has subject matter experts coming out its ears.  Second, it gives them no place to put friends from the executive branch when those friends get in trouble with Democrats.  And third, it means that most of a legislative staffer’s experience is constituent service, not nuts and bolts government.  None of these are good things.  But Republican legislative staffers do give you a cohort of loyal talent to draw on, though they, like you, won’t know where the light switches and rest rooms are.

If you follow my advice and fire everyone in political appointments from the prior administration, there are going to be what looks like a whole bunch of jobs vacant and some supporters who want jobs.  Today’s typical Republican supporter and voter are so antigovernment that they believe, with some justification, that any damned fool can run any government agency better than it is being run.  That may be true at the policy level in a Blue or near-Blue state, and it is certainly true even down into the bureaucracy in a doughnut city or one of the big longtime union and Democrat dominated cities.  The Party and your supporters are going to give you Hell, but you cannot put people in jobs who don’t know the job – you’re better off leaving it vacant and letting the ‘crats just keep on keeping on.  A lot of the positions are unnecessary sinecures for Democrats anyway, so eliminate them.  Every campaign lives or dies by the people who do the political grunt work, but licking stamps, putting up signs, working the phones, or raising a little money really does not qualify someone to run a major agency, no matter how much the people who do that sort of work might think it does.  Just look at what happened to President Bush for putting the former counsel of a horse breeding association in charge of FEMA.  I’m sure his connections and his Republican credentials were impeccable, but he damn well didn’t have the qualifications and experience to run a major federal agency.  FEMA and the Katrina response probably would have looked just as bad no matter who was running it, but the questionable appointment just made the Director and the President into a spectacularly good target.  There are jobs you can put the 22 year old son of a major supporter in, but they shouldn’t be responsible for anything.  There are plenty of “positions” in government to hire the people you just have to hire into, just make sure these people understand that they don’t have a job other than looking good and that you’ll fire them if they cause the slightest upset.  Tell them to think of it as a job shadowing opportunity.  And tell them not to even think of telling the ‘crats what to do.  If they have a problem with what the ‘crats are doing, they tell you or your appointee above them and let somebody competent deal with it.

And then there is the bureaucracy.  I am not talking about the appointee level.  Remember, you fired all of them as soon as your hand came off the Bible.  The upper level of the merit system bureaucracy – the people who didn’t get their jobs at a cocktail party – is mostly competent and mostly apolitical.  They are relatively affluent and secure and most are pretty conservative – some of them might have even voted for you.  Fundamentally, they don’t care for or about you.  My attitude always was that I knew every political type was going to make me happy at least once; I was going to a going away party.  High level but non-political bureaucrats do their jobs like those British officers built the bridge over the River Kwai; they have a job to do, and they don’t think much about why or for whom they are doing it.  But fundamentally, if a right-thinking person comes along and reminds them of who they are, they will blow up the bridge if asked. 

This is your greatest asset.  The government will keep on keeping on.  The roads will be maintained, the laws will be enforced, the welfare checks will go out, and the paychecks will cash no matter what you do.  Make it clear to them that they are free to do their jobs even if their boss just got fired.  Odds are they didn’t like the boss much anyway; most government agencies run in spite of political managers, not because of them.  A few of the merit system supervisors and managers might have political ambitions and act on them.  If they do, squash them like bugs.  You won’t have to do it but once or twice, and the rest will get the message.  Some of them are dangerous in another way; working for administration after administration at a near-policy level has made them completely cynical and amoral; they will do anything if asked without the slightest thought for whether it should be done, so make sure you have someone loyal to you over every function and keeping an eye on them.  If your personnel system allows for it give the top-level employees the money the political appointee would have been making; “acting” is the common term for it.  That way, you don’t have to appoint anyone, the work gets done, and someone is going to be appreciative of a better paycheck.

After you take out the trash, you will not have much political level management around.  Your true friends and loyalists will give you enough people to put someone in charge of the big subdivisions – usually styled departments – in the government and a pool of people to put in charge of some of the operating subdivisions of the government where you have a need for immediate change of direction.  For now, that is all you can expect.  Now you have to make a government that a Republican can actually run.

Rearranging the Furniture

Most state and local governments roughly emulate the departmental structure of the federal government.  Stop right here and think a moment about who built the federal government’s structure and why.  The modern federal government was built by Democrats to serve Democrat constituencies.  The Environmental Protection Agency was a Nixon era concession to a Democrat Congress and serves the Greenies.  No Greenie is ever going to support a Republican.  The Department of Education was Carter’s gift to the National Extortion Association.  No teacher is ever going to support a Republican.  Hell, usually half or more of the delegates to a Democrat convention are National Extortion Association members.  The Department of Labor exists to keep Davis – Bacon wages high, workers on Workers’ Comp rather than the unions’ health insurance trusts, and to funnel grant money to training non-profits headed by former union officers.  The Department of Health and Human Services exists … well don’t get me started on DHHS.  Suffice it to say that the employees and clients of a social services agency are not a likely Republican constituency.   Knock out some walls and rearrange the furniture of your government.

To the degree that your government is comprised of elected heads of functional units, you are stuck with them until you can get the necessary statutory or constitutional changes.  If you have the votes, go after those changes immediately.  Remember, you just won an election and even those who hate fear.  Use your executive authority to reorganize everything within your authority, and maybe a few things that aren’t – a good expensive appeal to the Supreme Court might get you some lawyer support.  Do it all with Executive Orders or your government’s equivalent; you do not have time for legislation.  At this time, speed is your friend and their enemy.  You cannot give the Democrats and the bureaucracy time to even breathe much less coalesce in opposition to you.  The best time to kick them is when they are down.

Every government does pretty much the same things: it has to regulate itself; control its assets and revenues; arrest and incarcerate bad guys; operate and maintain the roads, airports, and ports; promote and regulate labor, commerce, and natural resources/agriculture; educate the kiddies; and provide for those who can’t or won’t provide for themselves.  While the economies and structures of governments vary, those groups pretty well encompass all the things that a government does.  Use your executive authority to organize around these functional groups.  You have a good chance of finding competent, loyal heads for six or eight groups, but never will you find the fifteen or twenty or more, in some states many more, that some governments require under Democrat structures.

In Alaska our logical functional groups were: General Government comprising our departments of Revenue, Administration, Commerce, Labor, and Education; Public Protection comprising our departments of Public Safety, Corrections, and Military and Veterans’ Affairs; Resources comprising Environmental Conservation, Natural Resources, and Fish and Game, and our two biggies: Transportation and Public Facilities and Health and Social Services are each independent units.  Your government will be different depending on what is important to your area and constituencies, but you get the idea.

We were not able in the Murkowski administration to reorganize the whole government this way; the lobbyists won that one, but we did organize all our human resources administration this way to prototype it.  The internal opposition was significant but the reorganization has been successful in the main, though its future is uncertain in the Palin/Parnell administration.  Governor Palin kept the reorganized system in place, but the assault continues.  It certainly saved us money and helped ensure that employees were actually qualified for the job to which they were appointed and paid appropriately.   Under the old system, fifteen different departments were paying employees fifteen different ways for the same work – almost always wrong and almost always too much.  We had tremendous competence problems with people who were once under department authority and are now under central authority and supervised by people who know something.  When the departments bitched about mistakes, we just told them we didn’t give them lobotomies when we brought them over.  Your objective should be to absolutely control the money, the people, and the procurement.  Even if you are forced to deal with an elected head of a functional group, if you control his money, hiring, and buying, you control him.  If he’s not a friend of yours, he is not going to like the feeling.

Every government entity needs money, people, and stuff.  Move the control of the money, people, and stuff to the highest organizational level where there still is commonality.  If your government has central administration – finance, personnel, and procurement – under the chief executive or in its own department under an appointed head, this is fairly easy to do.  Just sharpen your pencil, redraw the organization charts, rewrite the delegations, and give some orders.  If your government has these functions under an elected head, e.g., an elected secretary of state, it is much more problematic, especially if you are not friends.  I have never had to deal with it, since most Western states have powerful central governments.  But even with an elected administrative head, you are the governor or mayor and he isn’t; use some muscle.

Most governments do everything in at least triplicate.  There is a governor or mayor’s budget office, and each department has a budget office, and each division of the department has a budget office, and so on for accounting, people, and procurement.  None of the subordinate ones add value, but each of them is dedicated to hiding what it is doing from all the levels above it.  Move it as close to the top and to someone loyal to you as you can.  Only where there is a truly unique function should it be allowed any independent control of money, people, or stuff.  And then audit everything it does.  I’m not being paranoid; I just know government.  Well yes, I am paranoid; the question is, am I paranoid enough?

Now you have an idea of what to do, then there’s the doing of it.  First, you do not need a damned consensus; you got one when you or your boss got elected.  As soon as you say anything about reorganization, somebody is going to tell you that you’ve got to get a bunch of ‘crats together and get “buy in” from them.  ‘Crats are amazingly clear-headed when they have a gun to their heads, and I’ve almost never seen one make a bad decision when given all the relevant information.  Tell them that their world is going to be a certain way tomorrow and the only choice they have is whether to be in it or not.  You will have your “buy in.”

Governor Murkowski wholeheartedly adopted two reorganization initiatives early on; human resources centralization and information technology centralization.  We called it “integration,” since centralization had acquired a hot button political connotation in the Hickel administration.   Planning for the HR integration was done by a select, loyal few by dark of night.  The players, including a bunch of Knowles’ holdover directors, were brought into the Governor’s Conference Room, told how it was going to be, and told they were on the program or out of the game.  That reorganization is now ancient history; there’s still a certain amount of backbiting, but no one would dare openly oppose it.  On the other hand, a holdover director convinced the powers that be that they needed a consultant to “facilitate” a “consensus” amongst all the “stakeholders” and “customers” in the IT integration.  They are still talking about IT integration and, if there is any change at all, IT is even more decentralized today than when we took office. 

Take note of the buzzwords I used in the two preceding paragraphs.  If anyone around you uses the words “buy in,” “consensus,” “stakeholders,”  “facilitator,” or “customers” in any discussion about your administration’s policies or organizational structure, threaten to fire him.  If he does it again, fire him.  Those words and the concepts of government that underlie them are designed by Democrats and academics to prevent change and further the agendae of the elites.  The primary product that the Democrats use to keep their behinds is the big chairs is talking about how to do things better.  “Examining our processes” is a buzz phrase synonym for talking that you should add to the list of words above.  You have to actually produce a product, and that is not done by talking.  You’ll be called an autocrat or worse.  Just make sure it is the right people calling you that.

Hillary the Harridan, the Lady McBeth of Little Rock, wrote her thesis on Saul Alinsky.  You think she’s not a good little communist?  Why can’t we remember that the original Clintonista Agenda was pretty much as radical as Comrade Obama’s except the unions weren’t as big a piece of it.  When the Harridan failed to get HillaryCare and the Republicans took back the Congress for the first time since ’54, Bill decided that discretion was the better part of valor, put the Harridan in a closet, and made nice with the Right.

Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton was the Democrat nominee precisely because it is the expectations of his makers and string pullers that he WILL NOT do that.  Just like we had a bunch of stupid DC insiders and network talking heads blathering on His election about how He was going to govern to the center, we now have the same people who are famous for being famous, including some FOX ones that should be smarter, blathering about how the VA, NJ, and MA defeats are going to turn Comrade Obama right.  No, they’re going to turn him mean.  He may hold off on outright mean until after the ’10 election, but his job and his mission in life is to “transform” American into the neutered, socialist country that His makers desire.

In some ways we’re in a more frightful place now than we were on Monday.  OK, so they go all bipartisan and offer to compromise.  We’ve got plenty of stupid Republicans who’ll want to be nice and go along with all that.  So, the fury subsides.  Even Brown becomes a rainmaker and a concilliatory figure that “brings them together” – don’t rule it out, the guy has a politician’s ego and has spent waaaay too much time with McShame.  So, peace and love breaks out all over.  With a little help from the Ministry of Information, the MSM, the Administration convinces the ignorant middle that things are on the mend and before long Happy Days Will Be Here Again.  The Ds hold their majorities and unleash Hell in ’11.  If they can pass Card Check and Cap and Trade in ’11, American will no longer be a democracy in any meaningful sense in ’12 and the permanent Democrat rule has been established.

I know I’m paranoid, I just wonder if I’m paranoid enough, and so far, I’ve been pretty much right about what this lot was going to do.

Couple of weeks before Christmas, the notice comes here, he hadn’t been much on those changes of address forms, that he’s been called back up to active duty for a stint in Iraq.  He spent Christmas and New Years with us and his brother came up from Seattle too.  They spent the holidays in a fin d’sicle orgy of dissipation but that’s what young guys do when they have a chance and then it was back up to Anchorage to get his stuff in order so he could report to Ft. Benning yesterday.  His mother couldn’t stand it so she went up to “help” him and see him off.  I had a nice long phone call with him before he caught the plane Saturday afternoon.  I’ve also had several very emotional conversations with my wife since she saw him last at Security at AIA.

Now here’s the irony and the part I really don’t like about this.  He’s a grown man and a well trained, well-equipped, and hopefully well-led American soldier.  He’s at least as safe carrying a SAW in Afghanistan or Iraq as he would be working on a fishing boat, oil rig, or construction site in Alaska.  I worry about him but not really a lot more than you worry about any young man who really hasn’t settled down to a house and a good woman.  But, his life and my and my wife’s lives are being disrupted and his put at risk so that he can go to Iraq to make sure that they can have a free and fair election in March.  I’m pretty much OK with American soldiers giving the people of Iraq that opportunity.  What I want to know is if my son’s Commander in Chief is going to allow the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to have a free and fair election tomorrow, and I have exactly zero confidence that He will.