Local politics should focus on local issues
When I was serving as a Navy JAG treaty negotiator in the White House, Kirk O’Donnell was chief counsel to Tip O’Neill, one of the most masterful politicians to serve as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Getting treaties ratified was rough and tumble politics, but I later got to know Kirk as a tough big-hearted Boston Irish political fixer who became a colleague and friend.
We collaborated working both sides of the aisle together for years on Puerto Rico political status issues, but discovered as much as we loved constitutional law and politics we were dads first. No father ever loved a child more than Kirk did his severely challenged special needs son. Kirk often told me about his cherished day-long outings to dig clams along blustery shorelines of Massachusetts.
When Kirk died of a heart attack after jogging in his old Irish neighborhood, his son overcame disability and gave a eulogy none of us will ever forget. Kirk would have been sobbing even louder than his family and friends if he had seen it, and of course we all believed he did.
Trading stories over drinks I recalled stopping a drug dealer beating up a prostitute in Columbus, Ohio on a hot summer night in 1985. Like Chevy Chase in Vacation, I took a wrong turn looking for hotel, in a big family station wagon full of sleeping kids, and ended up in wrong place at wrong time.
After sleeping through a 100-year thunderstorm and loud Beatles music to keep me awake until we got to Columbus, suddenly all my sleepy kids were waking up to an altercation I did not want them to see. Looking out at the mean streets of an urban war zone all around us, the kids took turns asking, “Daddy. are we...there yet?” “Daddy...where’s our hotel?” “Daddy why is that lady and man fighting?”
My first impulse was to flee, but something made stop, put my window half way down and yell, “Called cops on my car phone, gonna blind you for an hour if you hit her again.” I had no car phone, and was pretending the disposable cigarette lighter in my trembling hand was a pepper spray dispenser. He must’ve left his handgun at home, he just fired a few unrepeatable vituperative epithets at me then her, and stumbled down the street.
At that point Kirk was laughing so hard he had tears on those big Irish cheeks, looked over the top of his glasses and said, “Howard, you were a civil rights lawyer in Appalachia, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia, and you saved a down and almost out lady at midnight on the bad side of town…How could such a good guy be a damn Republican?”
I remember telling him, “Democrats get it right and get it wrong about as often as Republicans, usually just at different times, which is why the two-party system has made American federalism a success story.” It was a special moment for me when a man whose political acumen far exceeded my own replied, “Howard, this is one of the best political aphorisms I ever heard.”
That meant a lot coming from Kirk, who coined some of Tip O’Neill’s most famous gems of political wisdom. O’Neil gave Kirk credit for the one-line zinger that stopped Reagan in his tracks when Democrats thought he was going too far too fast on entitlement reform, declaring Social Security the “third rail of American politics, touch and you’re dead.”
But the white-haired legislative sage O’Neill was best known for the folksy maxim “All politics is local.” And that’s what this letter is about.
You can just feel it coming like an early change of season. It’s in the very air we breathe. Local political gadflies are all abuzz about the possibility of a Trump and Biden race. Or, are there real prospects for new political stars to rise?
I published a legal article about Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard being a fully qualified candidate even though she was born in Samoa. Readers from all over started writing me about her and other candidates, immigration, impeachment, FBI spying, trade wars, diplomacy for peace and strategic readiness if diplomacy fails.
If we let them, right here in Laguna Beach small town purveyors of boringly predictable national political drivel will suck up all the public affairs oxygen debating statewide, nationwide, and worldwide political party platform narratives. 2020 will be worse than ever before in our lifetimes.
So a special intentionality is called for to focus on preserving the integrity of local nonpartisan elections in which nonpartisan candidates take stands on nonpartisan issues. It is fine for nonpartisan candidates to have national political party affiliations, but I have seen up close and personal how party-driven national identity politics can obscure rather than clarify choices in local elections.
2020 will be a year when I will think about what Kirk would say, and try to remember O’Neill’s words “All politics is local.” In addition to being true in every political arena, those rods remind us that no matter what happens nationally, we can get it right locally.
If we do, neighbors who disagree on national issues will be able to stay civil and work together on local issues, when we can find common ground for the good of our town.
Howard Hills
Laguna Beach
