Heeeeeeeere's Bob . . . and the governor!

This is by way of being a public service touting tonight's programming on WMRA . . ..

Tonight at 7 p.m., on all Virginia Public Radio stations (of which WMRA is one), veteran political columnist and reporter Bob Gibson will sit down with Virginia's governor and ask him some difficult questions about these difficult times.

What's more, you'll have a chance to ask the governor a question as well, as VPR's Assembly Conversations is a live, state-wide, call-in show.

Which means that, thanks to Virginia Public Radio, for one hour, our governor is actually ours.

About Mr. Gibson. . .

It seems to me I met Bob when he was an undergraduate (Virginia 1972), although I'm not absolutely certain about that.  I am absolutely certain I've known him for many years, always liked him, and always respected him as a journalist.  Also,  Bob Gibson writes well, and I'm very picky when it comes to writing.

Bob is also one of the three people I know who really understand Virginia politics in ways most of us just don't. (The other two are the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Jeff Shapiro, and WMRA's Tom Graham.) Bob Gibson not only keeps up with what's going on currently in the Commonwealth, he is, from his years of  writing about state politics, able to put current events into their historical and political context.

Since I hope you'll be spending an hour with Mr. Gibson and the governor this evening on WMRA, I asked Bob to e-mail me a short work history, so you can put him in his context:

Bob Gibson, doing what he does so well ...  talking!

My experience in radio began at student-run WUVA in the early 1970s. I worked full-time as news director at WCHV in Charlottesville from 1974 to 1976, and then went over to the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Worked there (as reporter, editor, and political columnist)  from August of 1976 through March of 2008 when I left  to become Executive Director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. I've hosted a weekly political call-in show with guests from around Virginia from 1993 to 2000 on WINA in Charlottesville, and the call-in show Evening Edition on WVTF almost monthly since 2001. 

In our e-mail back-and-forth yesterday, Bob said he expects redistricting to loom large in tonight's discussion. "Three weeks ago, Gov. Bob McDonnell signed an executive order creating an independent bipartisan redistricting commission. The 11-member commission is purely advisory in nature and has voted to hold its meetings in public. Some members of the Virginia General Assembly doubt the commission will have a significant impact on the usually quite partisan remapping of legislative and congressional districts across the state."

(If you're interested in some background on redistricting, I highly recommend Mr.Gibson's  Charlottesville Daily Progress blog post "Who knows what impact sunlight might have on back-room redistricting?" ) 

Bob also expects there to be discussion of plans to fund transportation through borrowing money or by auctioning off ABC stores or licenses.

What else will the governor be asked? That could be up to you.

If you'll forgive a short Martha Harangue: Our state government only works responsively if you and I work it! Tonight is one of your best chances to ask Governor McDonnell a direct question and/or express your concern about decisions being made in Richmond. Of course, if you are too shy to ask questions, you could let Bob do it. He is many things, but shy is not one of them.

The call-in number for the Assembly Conversations is 866.611.6397.

Can we be bought?

What hath the Supreme Court wrought by gutting campaign finance reform?

 Virginia Insight yesterday was about teaching public service, but if you listened you also heard guest Bob Gibson mention the startling (and, to this listener, appalling) amount being spent on midterm elections.

Also, thanks to the Supreme Court, it's really unclear who's writing a lot of those big checks. As Washington Post staff writers T.W. Farnam and Dan Eggen put it in a recent article on midterm spending. . .

Interest groups are spending five times as much on the 2010 congressional elections as they did on the last midterms, and they are more secretive than ever about where that money is coming from.

The $80 million spent so far by groups outside the Democratic and Republican parties dwarfs the $16 million spent at this point for the 2006 midterms. In that election, the vast majority of money - more than 90 percent - was disclosed along with donors' identities. This year, that figure has fallen to less than half of the total, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post.

The trends amount to a spending frenzy conducted largely in the shadows.

There's an interesting interactive graphic in this morning's Washington Post that breaks down this dollar-spewing frenzy a bit. Note that among the spenders are both old campaign war horses (The US Chamber of Commerce  and the National Association of Realtors) and some very fresh fillies (The American Future Fund. and American Crossroads)

Who are those guys?

(Remember that line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when our two anti-heroes are being pursued by some very dogged guys, and Butch and Sundance kept asking each other, "Who are those guys?"  So, again, I ask you . . . Who are those guys?)

Yesterday the redoubtable Christian Science Monitor ran a worried  editorial about the midterm election spending frenzy.

Whether money flows to Democrats or Republicans (and the interest groups heavily favor conservatives this time), record spending undermines American democracy. At a minimum it reinforces the appearance that money influences votes.

Just as harmful is when voters can’t see who is behind the money that is behind political ads. “Transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages,” the US Supreme Court found in a landmark campaign finance ruling in January, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Even as eight of the nine justices upheld the idea of disclosure, the court’s 5-to-4 majority did open the floodgates to election spending by corporations, unions and other special interest groups.

It ruled that these entities can spend unlimited amounts directly on political messages as long as there’s no coordination with campaigns. The decision was based on the court defining nonperson entities like corporations as having free-speech rights under the First Amendment.

Okay, so the Supreme Court decided that big-money entities have the same rights to free speech as individuals. There's nothing we, as voters, can do about that. And it does seem pretty obvious that corporations and unions are spending freely in the belief that their loud, money-backed free speech will drown out the free speech of individual American citizens.

Most of the ads corporations and other big-spending groups are offering in this election seem to this observer skewed, inaccurate, and inflammatory. But I would like to remind us all that corporations still can't vote.

I remain hopeful that American voters will prove to be intelligent life forms rather than gullible lemmings. I'm optimistic that we will search out our own sources of accurate information and considered opinion and vote accordingly. I really do believe that our votes cannot be bought.

Why not let Bob do it?

Note from Martha: I've found myself thinking a lot about what Evan Bayh's decision not to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate says about the way Americans undertake their political business. And to me, as WMRA's designated blogger, "thinking about" eventually means "writing about." Until I found the following essay posted on Bob Gibson's Facebook page.

Most of you probably know that Bob has been writing and reporting (for The Daily Progress) and commenting (on WINA, WVTF, WAMU) on politics since his 1972 graduation from the University of Virginia. He's also been Tom Graham's frequent guest on WMRA's Virginia Insight. Bob's current full-time occupation is Executive Director of UVa's Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership.

(On a personal note, Bob's married to Sarah McConnell, the host, doyenne, and driving force of With Good Reason. As I've known them both for 30 years and eschew formality whenever I can, I've posted Bob's Facebook picture, which is charming and shows them both.)

To get back to Bayh's resignation, once I read Bob's essay, I thought why write another one myself, when Bob's already written such a good one?

So I asked Bob Gibson if I could post his essay on the WMRA blog, and he said yes, provided I let you know it will also appear as his regular Sunday column in The Daily Progress.

What Role for Centrists?  by Bob Gibson

U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh is a centrist kind of guy in the Indiana-Virginia tradition of moderates who occasionally thrive in one party or the other.

The Indiana Democrat stunned fellow party members on Presidents' Day with his announcement that he would not seek a third Senate term on Nov. 2 at the end of a politically volatile year in which party polls have suddenly turned upside down.

2010 is an upside-down weather year in which Virginia inherited New York's snowscapes; an upside down political year in which Democrats inherited the last few years' GOP poll numbers; and a generally whacky time of rapid change driven largely by fear in economic and housing markets, uncertain about when up is really up and down is really down.

Bayh, 54, is a man caught in the middle.

Centrists, including Bayh and Virginia's pair of moderate Democrats, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, have been unable to draw both parties in the tradition-bound and prima-donna-centric Senate into coalitions able to govern from the middle.

Both parties reward the kind of team-sport and ideologically driven party bashing of the other side that makes the middle of the political road, as Texans used to brag, a place for yellow-striped, dead armadillos.

Even hungry Americans in states where roadkill is a legal food supply are not particularly attracted to armadillos, and even bold moderates can find the middle hazardous to political health when super-partisanship trumps the otherwise practical notion of compromise.

Bayh, a 1981 University of Virginia law school graduate, said he was sick of politics as blood sport, fed up with the lack of bipartisan spirit needed to allow compromise and not hopeful partisan gridlock in Washington is about to change.

A two-term governor before he became a two-term senator, Bayh has the credentials, if not the charisma, for making a national ticket. But that is a road he has been down several times as a potential vice-presidential choice; and, a little over two long years ago, as a tester of presidential waters, who found them too chilly.

Neither Indiana nor Virginia has been a prolific mother of presidents in recent years despite efforts by former governors Chuck Robb, Doug Wilder, George Allen, Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner to order up periodic pregnancy tests.

Since the late John Dalton was governor from 1978 to 1982, the only Virginia chief executives not to publicly check the status of the Old Dominion's presidential womb were Govs. Gerry Baliles and Tim Kaine, and Kaine did a quite public vice-presidential pregnancy test.

There may be no womb for moderates, despite the once more commonly held belief that governing from the center is the smart way to put together lasting coalitions.

For Bayh to try again for the White House, the subject of some speculation since he declared he was more an executive type of guy than a lover of legislatures, he might recast himself as an outsider to the Congress and a radical centrist.

He could try to ride a popular centrist agenda to tackle short-term job problems and long-term fiscal messes.

Nothing changes faster than change in our nation's political life and fortunes these days.

One day a politician can be a tiger, tigress or hunk in the game of celebrity political roller derby played daily in different cable flavors, but the next he or she can be a washed-up hulk. Richard Nixon was the incredible hulk who bulked back up and returned to rule and then to ruin.

The inability of both political parties to face up to long-term problems is not changing, unless it's worsening. Bayh sought entitlement reform and deficit reduction, which was undone by short-term partisan power jockeying.

A fitness fanatic who once had a union job in Washington during college summers building the Metro rail system, he knew the dangers of touching a third rail and risking political electrocution. His father was a senator, so he knew the job's roles.

What he would have liked to have changed is the role and definition of moderate. Instead of being disrespected and run over, centrists could be operating in the public interest as respected bipartisan craft masters of the compromise he believed is needed to solve longer term problems.

In congressional time, there's always plenty of time for partisan campaigning, but what Congress has not found time for in a while is bipartisan discussion and action that gets much more than lip service.

Bayh is still young and his time may still be in the future. Or, he may be the Senate's latest member in both parties to leave office frustrated by a system that rewards and empowers the party purists who pummel the other side hard and fast on everything, consequential or not.