Remembering John B. Anderson

SimonSezback Saturday today pays tribute to John B. Anderson, who died this week in Washington, D.C. at the age of 95. The Republican Congressman from Illinois was the first person I voted for in a presidential election, first in the 1980 Minnesota Republican caucuses, then in his Independent candidacy for the presidency.

We college students for Anderson were a devoted bunch, and I've seen a lot of Facebook comments from people my age who are still proud to have voted for him, and have never voted for a Republican candidate since. In the small town where I went to college, we vastly outnumbered supporters of all the other candidates —put together!— at the local caucuses, held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary.

John Anderson campaigning at UW-Parkside, March 27, 1980.

But by the time of the Minnesota Republican Convention to select the state's actual delegates to the National Convention, representatives from non-college districts had the votes to send a delegation committed entirely to the presumptive nominee, Ronald Reagan.

What endeared Anderson to us brand new voters was his earnestness and his willingness to go against a politician's instinct to say exactly what the people in the room might want to hear. From his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Anderson refused to pander, telling voters in Iowa that he favored President Jimmy Carter’s embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union after it had invaded Afghanistan. He called for a gasoline tax of 50 cents per gallon — when a gallon cost $1.15 — to save energy.
Early on, when all six of his rivals for the Republican nomination assured the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that they firmly opposed gun control legislation, Mr. Anderson said, “I don’t understand why.”
“When in this country we license people to drive automobiles,” he added, “what is so wrong about proposing that we license guns to make sure that felons and mental incompetents don’t get a hold of them?”
He was roundly booed.

My cartoons of John Anderson in 1980 betray the humorless earnestness of a dewy-eyed supporter of a doomed cause (and the difficulty I've always had with drawing hands). My characters were stiff and two-dimensional in more ways than one.

Anderson's campaign left me with a lasting dislike of media coverage that focuses on the poll du jour. But for third-party candidates like Anderson, popularity polls have a real and practical effect on whether the League of Women Voters allow them to participate in televised debates, or even whether they can get on the ballot at all.

So too election rules crafted by the two major parties to safeguard their own interests. Anderson had to fight to get on the ballot in Ohio, where the deadline for an independent candidate to get on the November ballot was in March, well before either major party's nominee had been decided. In Anderson v. Celebrezze, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Anderson's favor, reasoning that

"Not only does the challenged Ohio statute totally exclude any candidate who makes the decision to run for President as an independent after the March deadline, it also burdens the signature-gathering efforts of independents who decide to run in time to meet the deadline. When the primary campaigns are far in the future and the election itself is even more remote, the obstacles facing an independent candidate's organizing efforts are compounded. Volunteers are more difficult to recruit and retain, media publicity and campaign contributions are more difficult to secure, and voters are less interested in the campaign. It is clear, then, that the March filing deadline places a particular burden on an identifiable segment of Ohio's independent-minded voters."

Mainstream cartoonists who had welcomed Anderson as a breath of fresh air in February were dismissing him as a quixotic kook in October. Still, I desperately clung to the prospect that The Issues were more important than The Polls. I even let the candidate of the Libertarian Party (which had a small but vocal presence on campus) in on the act.

President Carter in the above cartoon alludes to the brand spanking new Stealth Fighter planes (the F-117 and B-2 Spirit) announced by the Carter administration earlier that year.

This last cartoon was an extra wide oeuvre which you probably need to beclickify to embiggen to eulegibilitous size. I expect most readers to recognize the poem (itself a parody) and the song parodied by Ronald Reagan and John Anderson in this cartoon; the James Russell Lowell hymn parodied in the Jimmy Carter panel is more obscure today (my Lutheran denomination dropped it from its hymnals after 1978).

Ah, the zeal of youth! Been there. Voted that. Bought the t-shirt.

Thought I still had the bumper sticker, too.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Checking up on the lyrics to "I've Got a Little List" yesterday, I found that there is a long tradition of altering the words to the song.

And no wonder. The second verse is such that I don't feel I can quote it directly:

There's the [n-word] serenader, and the others of his race,
And the piano-organist — I've got him on the list!
And the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face,
They never would be missed — they never would be missed!
Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And who "doesn't think she dances, but would rather like to try";
And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist —
I don't think she'd be missed — I'm sure she'd not be missed!

My parents had an LP of Martyn Green singing "Famous Gilbert and Sullivan Songs," so in the recording I grew up with, the "n-word" was replaced with "banjo," and the singular anomaly became "the girl who's never kissed." The latter works just fine as far as I'm concerned, but "the banjo serenader" is only slightly less racist, Steve Martin notwithstanding, given the rest of the line.

But you can't change "others of his race" without figuring out what other offensive thing peppermint eaters might do.

I don't remember how the second verse was sanitized the first time I ever saw the song performed live, sometime during the Jimmy Carter administration. I only remember that in the third verse:

And that nisi prius nuisance, who just now is rather rife,
The judicial humorist — I've got him on the list!
All funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life —
They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed.
And apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind,
Such as — What d'ye call him — Thingamabob, and likewise — Never-mind,
And Tut-tut-tut — and What's-his-name, and also You-know-who —
The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you.
But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list,
For they'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!

"What's-his-name" was followed by "Y'all-know-who." A few years later, I saw it performed with a Reaganesque "Welll...." in that line, which, frankly, missed the mark because Reagan's reputation was not that of an apologetic compromiser.

Something performers and directors might keep in mind if tempted to interpolate an "I can tell you" or "Believe me" in there.

I've Got a Little List

Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget

As someday it may happen that a victim must be found,
    I’ve got a little list – I’ve got a little list
Of societal expenses who might well be underground,
    And who never would be missed – who never would be missed!
There's the students who eat breakfast at their schoolhouse every day —
    And the oldsters who get meals on wheels — what bloody use are they?
All writers and musicians and artists of all kinds —
    All teachers dedicated to expanding little minds —
The veteran, the ranger and the foreign analyst —
    They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!

You may put 'em on the list — you may put 'em on the list;
And they'll none of 'em be missed — they'll none of 'em be missed!

Calumnated Ruins Domino

I started this week with a caricature of Donald Joffrey Trump's head of the Environmental Plunder Administration. Now that the administration has released its budget proposal cutting EPA funding by nearly a third, let's end the week with a Sierraback Saturday retrospective of the Trump gang's model for environmental policy. My cartoons below date from December, 1981 to July, 1984.

"I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80% of the air pollution in this country. ... Well now, he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80%. I said 92%—93%, pardon me. And I didn’t say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93% of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we’ll still have 93% as much as we have in the air today." —Ronald Reagan, Oct. 9, 1980. (The 1979 quotation Kennedy was referring to: "The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees." —RR)

Republicans have long had a receptive ear for industrialist complaints that any attempt to protect the nation's air, water, forests, and purple mountain majesties are a job-killing, profit-choking nuisance. While Ronald Reagan's first budget cut funding for the EPA by 25%, it is useful to remember that the agency was established by a Republican president.

My cartoon above imagines that president phoning from his beachfront San Clemente estate to complain about Interior Secretary James Watt's plan to to lease a billion acres of offshore oil fields to petroleum interests.

Watt's fire sale of federal lands and waters also benefited the coal industry and suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch, later Burford, his first head of the EPA (as discussed here a few weeks ago, now that her son is poised to claim Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court), was happy to ignore pollution of the nation's air and water in the interest of protecting commercial profit margins. When scandal forced her resignation, the Reagan administration tapped the first administrator of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, to return to the agency's helm.

Contrary to my cartoon, Ruckelshaus is generally credited with restoring public confidence the EPA, staffing the agency with competent personnel committed to its original mission. In a later interview since removed from the EPA's web page, Ruckelshaus said, "At EPA, you work for a cause that is beyond self-interest and larger than the goals people normally pursue. You're not there for the money, you're there for something beyond yourself."

James Watt's mission to make sure there was no speck of nature left unspoiled when the Lord returned was foiled by his uncanny knack for making inappropriate statements in public. He snarked that there are two kinds of people in this country, "liberals and Americans"; described Native American tribal rights as "socialism"; and banned the Beach Boys from the Washington D.C. Fourth of July celebration because they would "attract the wrong element."

He might have had a point if the Beach Boys had continued making hallucinogenic music in the mold of Smile. As it was, Watt was forced to back down and apologize. Turns out, Reagan liked the Beach Boys.

The last straw was his claim that his sale of more than a billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming was above criticism because on his federal coal commission "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

A friend and colleague of mine at the UW-Parkside Ranger, Rick Luehr, satirized Watt's remark with his Hallowe'en costume that year, donning a wig, blackface, and fake breasts covered by a pair of mogen Davids. The wheelchair was already a part of his daily life.

Aside from providing the template for Donald Trump's Twitter habit, Watt pushed genuinely destructive policies that now find favor in the Very Famous Trump White House. Unlike today, however, Watt faced a Congress willing to push back:

Watt's earlier forays included a declaration that he would open wilderness areas in the West to drillers and miners. Congress put a stop to it: the House voted 350 to 58 to withdraw wilderness lands from mineral development. Fifty-two senators cosponsored similar legislation. Watt also proposed a major dilution of the Endangered Species Act and asked Congress to hold off its review of the law. Congress ignored him and renewed the law without significant weakening amendments.

He was replaced by a long-time friend of the President, jack-of-all-trades William Clark.

Clark's crowning achievement in his two years at Interior was keeping himself out of the headlines. The policies instituted under Watt continued, but without the media-eye-catching bluster and bombast.

This Week's Sneak Peek

There was great news out of Illinois and Hawaii this week as the states joined the ranks of those with marriage equality. So as an editorial cartoonist making a career out of criticizing everyone else, I'm reminded of a Gilbert and Sullivan song from Princess Ida:

Oh, don't the days seem lank and long
When all goes right and nothing goes wrong,
And isn't your life extremely flat
With nothing whatever to grumble at!