Is There Thunder on the Left?

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

I’ve been wondering. It’s no secret that President Obama has alienated many on the left. His capitulation on the infamous deal raising the federal debt ceiling seems like the last straw. Talk of chutzpah. After signing the legislation, Obama said we can now move on to getting Americans back to work, even as the Democrats abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.

It isn’t that Obama hasn’t had opportunities to demonstrate bold leadership. As Paul Krugman pointed out in the New York Times, the president should have held his ground last December and insisted on an increase in the debt ceiling. He gave way on extending the Bush tax cuts, and blinked when the Republicans threatened to close down the government.

Since the Republican feint to shut down the government over the debt limit in recent months, one would think the Tea Party wing of the G.O.P. controlled all  branches of government, not just one of the  two houses of Congress.

It’s still very early – but, I wonder – if the president continues in blind pursue of a strategy to win over independents and moderates – might he not risk the loss of many liberals – the folks  who toiled for his election?

Right now it is most unlikely the president would be challenged for re-nomination. But there are precedents. The last time a sitting Democratic president faced a serious challenge was in 1980 when Ted Kennedy failed to unseat Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t what cost Carter re-election – Ronald Reagan was responsible for that – but the split in Democratic ranks took a toll

More costly have been challenges in the general election in more recent years. In 1992 Ross Perot won 19 percent of the vote to deny re-election to the first President Bush, his nemesis, and send Bill Clinton, with only 43% to the White House. In 2000, Ralph Nader got only 2.74% of the popular vote but it was enough to make the outcome between Al Gore and George W. Bush so close that election was ultimately decided by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court.

President Obama has plenty of time to mend fences and get his act together. I just hope he takes time to read  letters like the one I came across in Tuesday’s Times. It is from a woman in New York reflecting upon the despair among so many Democrats.

She writes, “I try to hang on to that magical evening in Chicago in November 2008 when there was much hope for the future but it is getting more and more difficult to find hope today. It’s true that the Republicans are set on bringing this president down, but perhaps he could at least go down fighting. Please President Obama, make us believe again!”

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Lessons from a Scandal

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

In the fallout from the tabloid scandal in Britain, the New York Times invited its readers to a dialogue on media practices, bias and influence in the United States.

The idea was inspired by a letter to the newspaper from Richard Stein, a retired professor of English at the University of Oregon. Stein asked, “Do British parliamentary inquiries into Rupert Murdochs’s media empire offer any lessons for the United States? Perhaps, if they alert us to the power of a ‘political-journalistic complex’ no less dangerous than the ‘military-industrial complex’ that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about half a century ago.”

He asks if “similar abuses have been committed here or do Fox News and others scrupulously observe the rule of law on this side of the pond?”

And he wonders whether our own elected officials are “too cozy with representatives of a news industry that is supposed to ‘cover’ them.”

As you might have guessed the answers are all over the place. According to the sampling published Sunday, readers gave spirited opinions on the connection between press and politics. They ranged across the spectrum of political beliefs.

Which brings me back to my days in daily journalism. I have no tales of hacking or other scandals to relate. But in the chase for news I did learn that sometimes the relationship between public officials and reporters can look too cozy. In the Reagan years I was startled to see White House correspondents and administration bigwigs dining festively together in a Washington restaurant. It may have been perfectly proper. Perhaps someone’s birthday. The old network hand I was with saw nothing unusual in the picture. But it looked bad to me. In Eureka, you’d catch it if someone caught you having lunch with the mayor.

The old network hand I mentioned had covered a major office in the Nixon days headed by a very important person. Over time, they got better acquainted, doing small favors for one another. Knowing the old network hand as well as I did, I couldn’t imagine his doing anything perverse. But I was shaken nonetheless to hear him talk about it.

What I take away from the Murdoch affair is not just the hacking, but perhaps a greater danger to a democratic society. Even after everything that had happened, as the New Yorker pointed out, Murdoch “would still be able to intimidate British politicians.” We’ve learned the media mogul was not only a concealed visitor to 10 Downing Street since David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, has been in power, but he was also on friendly terms with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the former Labor prime ministers before Cameron.

Can such power to “intimidate” our highest officials be wielded here? In a response to the dialogue he called for, Stein cites a 2004 book by Ben H. Bagdikian, “The  New Media Monopoly.” It found, Stein writes, “that more than half of the radio and television stations, daily newspapers, magazines, publishers and movie studios in the United States were owned by five companies.”

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Charting a Course to Reelection

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

By now it is abundantly clear that President Obama is charting a course to re-election by appealing to independent and moderate voters. This has disturbed many liberals but the fact is the U.S. electorate  is generally conservative, and almost always has been.

There have been  notable exceptions: FDR’s New Deal nearly 80 years ago in the Great Depression and LBJ’s Great Society thirty years later. LBJ  became president after Kennedy’ assassination. He made the most of the tragedy  and  demonstrations for equal rights by bullying Congress into passing historic civil rights legislation and Medicare.

If anyone still doubts Obama’s strategy they have only to note that he passed over Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer agency this week. Warren, a Harvard law professor, was the animating spirit behind its creation. As the New York Times noted, the decision to nominate someone other than Warren “reflects political realities.” Although she was the enthusiastic choice of liberals and consumer advocacy groups, she was too outspoken on behalf of consumers and “never won the full support of the president or his senior advisers.” Not to mention Republicans and bankers.

As chairwoman of  F.D.I.C, the federal agency that insures bank deposits and shutters failing banks, Sheila Bair has earned the reputation of a no-nonsense but impartial financial regulator. But she served at the displeasure of treasury secretary Timothy Geithner in particular and Wall Street in general, and as we’ve learned she’s gone from the administration. In an article in the New York Times magazine in June, the  columnist Joe Nocera told us that Bair found that the Obama administration wasn’t doing much better on modifying loan mortgages than the Bush administration did.

Nocera writes, “Early on the president told his staff to talk to the F.D.I.C.  about how to set up a loan modification plan,” since it had a wealth of information.

Bair told Nocera, with reference to the Obama staff: “They did talk to us,”  but she “always had the sense they were talking to us because the president wanted them to.”

Abroad, the president  defied the War Powers Act in intervening in Libya in a manner reminiscent of George W. Bush. It requires the president to seek approval by Congress  within 60 days of committing U.S. forces anywhere in the world. Obama contends the law does not apply because NATO is calling the shots in Libya.

These and other moves may upset liberals, but there is a strategy behind them, given the conservative, if not reactionary, state of American politics, as his defenders point out.. Obama’s job is to win in 2012. If he can’t, all the noble intentions in the world would be in vain.

In the meantime, in a piece in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under Clinton, proposed a jobs strategy to fill the “void in Obama’s phantom plan.”

“Unless we get this economy moving now,” Reich said in the article, “the long-term deficit problem will only grow worse.”

And if the job situation doesn’t improve all the reelection strategy in the world will be in vain.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

By Superintendent Cindy M. Cathey

Special to the Times

As I write this article, staff, students and families are looking forward to a much-deserved summer break.

This is a time when I reflect back on the hard work and accomplishments during the 2010-2011 school year.  First our seniors:  178  earned more than $620,000 in scholarships, 94%  plan to continue their education by attending 7 University of California campuses, more than 9 State University campuses, and private universities including Carnegie Mellon, Vassar, Pepperdine, New York University.  Many plan to attend our local community colleges as well.

More students graduated than ever before from our Adult School and from Lincoln Alternative High School.  Eight of our graduates will be entering four branches of the military.  Their accomplishments are something for our whole community to be proud of.

While our instructional program is extremely important to us, we also recognize that addressing the needs of the whole child is equally important.  We developed new counseling support programs this past year.  Our after school programs are thriving.  And, our parent training classes are over-flowing.  Because of its focus on physical activity, Jefferson Elementary School is one of nine finalists in the state in the running for a new fitness center.

Katy McCarthy, 2nd grade teacher at Washington Elementary School was one of 85 teachers in the nation to receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics teaching.  We also recognized the following individuals for their contributions to our schools:  Heather DiMaggio – Teacher of the Year; Shirley Harvey – Classified Employee of the Year; Alex Harp – Administrator of the Year, and Jeni and Jerry Engler – Volunteers of the Year.

Two celebrations this past school year were the long awaited grand opening of the Fred T. Korematsu Campus and the Arts Education Center, with the high school spring musical gracing the stage in April. These two elegant state-of-the art buildings are not only beautiful, they are providing our students with a rich learning environment and enhanced programming.

One division that will not get a chance to rest this summer is Facilities and Construction, as work continues on bond projects. This summer, Measure B modernization projects underway include restroom renovations at Bancroft and Muir Middle Schools and Roosevelt and Wilson Elementary Schools; classroom painting and new lighting at Bancroft, Roosevelt and Wilson, and San Leandro High School.

Extensive work will continue through the summer on the Career Technical Education Center at San Leandro High School.

One of our biggest highlight of the year occurred in November when San Leandro voters passed Measure M with a 62.75% vote. Measure M will help us achieve our goal of educating the whole child by supporting healthy, active living for students and the entire community by addressing critical sports facilities throughout the district.

Important projects include renovating Burrell Field, building a new SLHS Swim Center and a new track at Muir Middle School, creating walking paths and par courses at the elementary schools, Bancroft Middle School and Lincoln High School.

Yes, this past year had much to celebrate. I thank you for the opportunity to serve as your Superintendent for the San Leandro Public Schools.

We will be hard at work preparing for the opening of school on Wednesday, August 24, 2011.  Have a safe and happy summer break.

Citizen Murdoch

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

While trying to keep up with reports of phone hacking and police bribery and other scandals involving Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in Britain, I am taken back to New York in the 1970s when I was working on a profile for the Today Show on Andrew Wyeth, the famous painter of old buildings and fields and people in the localities where he lived in Maine and Pennsylvania.

To honor Wyeth,  the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was staging a mammoth show of his pictures; in fact, it was the first retrospective of the work of a living American artist in the museum’s history.

As I had interviewed the artist earlier up in Maine, the expert who guided me through the exhibition was Thomas Hoving, the Met’s director. As a camera crew followed, we toured gallery after gallery, Hoving pausing whenever a picture reminded him of a good story.

A word about Hoving. He was a member of a socially prominent New York family (his father headed Tiffany and Company). He had also done a turn as parks commissioner in the John Lindsay administration. In short, he moved in the very heart of the power centers of  the city’s life.

The night before we broadcast the Met show, Hoving had been up late at a dinner party at Rupert Murdoch’s Manhattan town house. But he looked none the worse for it in the greenroom in the NBC studio an hour or so before he was to be on the air with Today’s host. It took no prompting on my part for a description of the evening at Murdoch’s. Hoving was anxious to talk.

As he described the dinner, I was reminded  of a scene from “Citizen Kane,” the classic film directed by Orson Welles who plays a press lord presumably based on William Randolph Hearst. The episode is of a roomful of guests in an opulent setting cowering before the tycoon.

The dinner at Murdoch’s was in the days when the city was buzzing with rumors that Murdoch was buying a trashy and troubled tabloid, the New York Post. Hoving thought it was a done deal. But why, I asked Hoving, would anyone want to buy the Post, which in addition to its many faults was a money loser.

He was taken aback at my naivete. If Murdoch bought the Post, he  said, it would give him a say in the affairs of the city. Politicians would  not want to make him unhappy. By owning a  paper in New York, Murdoch would have a political power base in America.

How right he was!

In 1985, when Murdoch acquired the 20th Century Fox movie studio, he became a naturalized citizen to satisfy legal requirements that only U.S. citizens were permitted to own TV stations in the U.S. The following year he purchased 6 of them. In 1996 he bought the Fox News Channel. In 2007 he fulfilled a greater ambition by acquiring the Wall Street Journal with the aim of one day replacing his arch enemy, the New York Times.



Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The Supreme Court on Trial

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

John Thompson, a New Orleans man, spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, for a robbery and murder he did not commit.  One month before he was scheduled to die, a private investigator found evidence that  prosecutors had hidden which would have exonerated him.

“The D.A. Stole His Life/Justices Took His Money” is how the New York Times put it Sunday in a reprise of the case decided earlier this year by the Supreme Court. It is, in fact, an opinion piece by Lincoln Caplan, a member of the Times editorial board, criticizing sharply the 5-4 decision by the conservative majority authored by Justice Clarence Thomas.

After John Thompson was freed he won a $14 million civil lawsuit against the district attorney’s office “for its gross indifference to the incompetence of the prosecutors who violated his constitutional rights,” according to Caplan. But the majority on the court said no, Thompson does not have a case. The justice declared  that “the D.A,’s office was not liable for failing to train its lawyers about their duty under the Constitution to turn over evidence favorable to the accused.”

I’m not making this up.  A moment before my eye caught the Caplan piece I thought I might say something today about the Strauss-Kahn case but then asked myself what hasn’t already been said about it? Nearly two centuries ago Balzac anticipated Struass-Kahn when, he said, if you want to know how the world turns look for the money. I might have said a word about Hemingway who died by his own hand 50 years ago this month before his 62nd birthday. Remarkably, much of his work, especially the short stories, still live. But the case recycled  by Caplan  shook me out of my reverie.

“The lawyers,” he pointed out, “had kept secret more than a dozen pieces of favorable evidence over 15 years, destroying some. But the failure to provide training, said Thomas, did not amount to a pattern of  ‘deliberate indifference’ to constitutional rights.”

In her vigorous dissent, Caplan continued, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said letting prosecutors call for a death sentence without making sure they know it is their duty to turn over favorable evidence may be no less “‘deliberately indifferent’ to the risk to innocent lives” than a failure to train police about constitutional limits on the use of deadly weapons.

In the end, said Caplan, the ruling in the Thompson case “tore down an essential bulwark for ensuring that prosecutors are properly trained and severely diminished the right of citizens everywhere to hold them accountable. The Supreme Court’s decision to shield the district attorney’s office from having to pay a monetary award for stealing 18 years of Mr. Thompson’s life is shameful.”



Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Speaking of Patterns

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

The Lady Friend and I hadn’t been anywhere to speak of outside the Bay Area, all winter and spring. Anyway it seemed like a great idea: breaking away and seeing Humboldt County and Eureka again. As the hour drew near, I began having second thoughts. Was it worth the grind, three hundred miles north and three hundred miles south on 101? Everyone I cared about in the ‘50s and early ‘60s when I lived up there intermittently has been long gone.

My afterthoughts drove the lady Friend to distraction. “O.K.” she said. “Let’s cancel the reservation at the Red Lion right now!”

But, of course, we were going. In fact, I make the pilgrimage every year or two. Don’t ask why because I don’t really know. It’s just something I do, a pattern I fall into when the time comes around.

* * *



The time has come around for the “Stein Collection: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-garde” at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. The works were bought by Gertrude Stein, poet, novelist, critic, and brothers Leo and Michael; and Michael’s wife Sarah. All were expatriate Americans living in Paris in the early years of the last century   when they began acquiring the labor of  young artists, both radical and mostly unknown.

It is one thing to see the work of an established painter or sculptor in a museum; it is another to chance money on the unfamiliar. Gertrude Stein, who grew up in Oakland, put it well: “It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the uneasiness once felt when one first looked at all these pictures on the walls.”

Which reminds me. When I was with the CBS News show, Sunday Morning, I did a piece about a  New York collector who, getting on in years, was giving a large part of his art to a state university. When he was a young man he wanted to be a painter, but tiring of life in a Paris garret, he became a successful stock broker instead. He never lost his eye for art, the  meritorious as well as the meretricious. Like the Steins, he had the gift to recognize the real thing most of the time.

The kick was in gambling on the artist’ s future. Did young Henri or Paul or Pablo, have staying power? Would their stuff make it to the important collections? Like the Steins, the gambler I knew lost a few but when he won he won big.

More than 300 works by Matisse, Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-August Renoir, Jaun Gris and other immortals will be on the walls of SFMOMA through Sept. 6.



Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Speaking of Birthdays

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

It was my birthday. The Lady Friend had an elaborate weekend planned. She’d booked a lovely cabin in the woods in Inverness. It was only a few miles from Limantour Beach, a great favorite of ours for long walks.

The fog sculpted the images of the groves of redwoods as we made our way through Samuel P. Taylor Park. Some miles later, fog lay like a cloak over Limantour Beach. There we made our way down a path to the seashore.

Stray ghost-like figures emerged from concealment only to disappear a few moments later. But the fog soon lifted. We could see that the tide was ebbing. Canvasbacks, a wild duck, dove underwater for small marine animals. Marsh wrens inhabited the reeds and tall marsh grass. Marsh hawks soared. Walls of water crashed and flowed.

The wet sand slowed our progress. We managed about four miles in an hour and a half.

Weary but exhilarated, we left the beach and drove to our favorite café in Point Reyes. I ate a delicious lamb dish (osso bucco), the Lady Friend a tasty fish and chips. We both enjoyed a glass of wine.

It was getting dark when we got to the cabin, in plenty of time to witness the New England Patriots massacre the Buffalo Bills, 56-10. The Lady Friend slept and read a book, “Writers on Artists,” famous writers like John Updike writing on famous artists like Andrew Wyeth. I’d brought along “The Journals of Lewis and Clark,” a paperback, to put me in the mood for our adventure in the country. I never touched it.

Before we nodded off, we watched “Casablanca,” the World War II classic, with Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.

We never slept better, and ate a hearty breakfast — in the cabin — of bagels, cream cheese (fat free), fresh fruit, tea and coffee we’d brought from home.

The fog gone, the sun was welcoming. As we set out on the trail, we remarked about the autumnal colors and the green vegetation. After we’d gone a short distance — as if on cue from the shrill cry of a rooster — we came into a sunlit meadow that we thought would be ideal some day for a picnic. We made a mental note to come back on the Lady Friend’s birthday next March.

Since we were going home to the East Bay on Monday, we decided to take U.S. 1 rather than a more direct route to 101. Traffic, as we’d expected, was light. We were able to take our time over the winding coastal range, and take pleasure in the awesome seascapes.

The next day I sat down to write the column, but didn’t know what to say. The Lady Friend suggested I write about our trip to Inverness. I said it was all very nice but what’s the story?

“Your birthday,” she said. “I’ve known you for eight years. In all this time you claimed you weren’t going to make it. But you’ve made it. You’re 80.”

The Lady Friend, who will be 75 in march, added, “You get there by doing what keeps a person alive; exercise, diet and fun. Now don’t tell me that’s not a column!”

This column originally appeared on Nov. 22, 2007.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Republican Hopefuls Enter the Fray

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

It didn’t help my mood to be watching seven Republicans who want to be elected president in 2012 debate on Monday night. I tuned in already feeling sorry for myself. When it was over, I was inconsolable.

Maybe I missed the  former governor of Utah and President Obama’s recent ambassador to China. But John M. Huntsman Jr. declined an invitation to participate. It’s said he will get into the race soon. Maybe he’ll be the spark. I never thought I’d ever say this but I missed Sarah Palin. Maybe when she’s done her remedial reading on Paul Revere she’ll light the fire.

When I first typed this, I slipped and wrote 1912, instead of 2012 . Maybe my unconscious was telling me something. 1912 - that was the last time there were three first-class leaders competing for the office – Woodrow Wilson, the reform governor of New Jersey, the irrepressible Theodore Roosevelt seeking a third term, and the socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs. In the century since mediocrity or worse has too often been the hallmark of the nominees.

These days with the economy shaky and unemployment widespread,  the Republicans seek to pin the blame on President Obama. But it really belongs with his predecessor and party for their “anything-goes” years of tax breaks and favors for the rich and powerful and their costly military adventures. Yet people’s memories are short. When millions are in pain, as they are today, the president in the limelight is the target.

The news of Obama’s seeking to win back Wall Street cash with hopes of mending fences, as the New York Times reported, does not advance his stature as a tribune of the people. Nor does his silence on the problem of climate change. Nor on his promise to nominate and fight for strong people to protect consumers under the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.

It may be smart politics in today’s environment, but then again it may not. In his biography of FDR, Ted Morgan writes of a traveler passing through Toledo in the winter of 1931 “when the depression seemed invincible.” On both sides of the street of the industrial town crowds of men  “stretched endlessly.”

“They were not waiting for a handout or a soup kitchen. They were not rioting or picketing. They were doing very much the same thing that Mr. Hoover was doing, which was exactly nothing. They did not expect government to do anything for them. They did not think that government   could or should do anything for them. Underlying the depression was a vast national passivity.”

Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York and getting ready to run for his party’s nomination for president. By temperament and conviction, as Morgan wrote, Roosevelt was unprepared to accept the way things were.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

A New Anchor is Born

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Some twenty-five years ago, when I was producing pieces for the CBS News “Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt,” I was assigned to do a major story on drug smuggling in El Paso. My reporter would be a young man from a CBS bureau in Texas. He had never worked for the show before so, as I was told, I would have to be patient, guide him the best I could, and hope for the best.

“Sunday Morning” was not always able to pry top reporters loose for field work from the Evening News. We sometimes had to settle for something less.

As it happened, this young man needed little help from me. He hit the ground running, and possessed the “stick-to-it –ness” that  I once heard Carl Sandburg say was the key to success. After long days of chasing leads and angles and fending against authorities required to mask the truth, I’d find my reporter still on his feet, pursuing angles, digging for facts.

I don’t remember how good or poor a story we produced. Probably good, or good enough. There were no complaints. I would remember complaints.

Over time I’ve watched the reporter from Dallas climb. In more recent years he’s been one of the star correspondents on “60 Minutes.” His interviews, including some with presidents, are typically respectful but also probing and focused. I can’t think of anyone who  does big interviews better. Not Dan Rather,  Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters. You have to go back to Walter Cronkite, a great reporter and anchor, but, frankly, the interview was not Walter’s strong point.

When the reporter from Dallas was still new to the network,  the backbiting about him around the shop would have it that he didn’t quite fit the CBS mold, whatever that was supposed to mean. I remember one senior producer saying the young man was too nice and too self-effacing to make it big.

I wonder what she is saying this week when the young man from Dallas, whose name – soon to be a household word – is Scott Pelley, age 51. In case you missed it, Scott is the new anchor of the CBS Evening News, succeeding Katie Couric who’s left for other venues.

I know what I am remembering this week. “Hey, I think we can call it a night,” I sounded off back in El Paso on more than one occasion when Scott and I were working late on that drug story. The youngster paid no heed to me. He kept on digging.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Speaking of Politics

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

I attended a talk last week by Peter Schrag. He was the editorial page editor and political columnist of the Sacramento Bee for many years. Schrag still keeps the pot boiling, turning out books and pieces on California  politics.

Let me share a nugget or two from the lecture. Schrag says people should not have been scandalized by the recent news about Arnold. It was plain, or should have been plain, to anyone following the campaign in 2002. But people weren’t listening. So we got the governor we deserved, not the one many (not me) thought they were voting for. In so many words, Schrag dismissed Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California 2003-2011, as a Hollywood showman.

As for his successor, the former and present governor, Schrag was not impressed with Jerry Brown’s earlier performance from 1975 to 1983. Too much moonshine. But he does have hopes since Brown regained the office this year. Schrag draws inspiration not from Jerry but from the governor’s wife, Ann Gust, a former executive for the Gap, and a longtime girl friend whom he married in June of 2005. She’s the one Schrag seems to counting on to apply the toe weights.

Meantime in Washington,  as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman sadly noted, no one is seriously talking about creating jobs. “Not the Republican party,” he said, “unless you count its ritual calls for tax cuts and deregulation. Not the Obama administration, which more or less dropped the subject a year and a half ago.”

We could, he argues, have W.P.A. programs “putting people back to work doing useful things like repairing roads... We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners...”

He recognizes that any serious effort to tackle unemployment “will run into a stone wall of Republican opposition.” But that’s not a reason “to stop talking about issues.” As he sees it, the more policymakers “fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do.”

As we speak, Republicans in Congress are intent on putting the Dodd-Frank reform law in limbo. The legislation was intended to protect consumers, not bankers. But the Republicans in the Senate have served notice on President Obama that they would not confirm any nominee to run the new Consumer Protection Bureau unless Democrats agree to water down the new agency’s powers. Towards this end they have been giving  Elizabeth Warren, a consumer advocate and Harvard professor, who has been setting up the bureau, a very hard time. She has stood her ground.

“The only question,” said the New York Times in an editorial, “is when Mr. Obama will start pushing back.” The legislation was enacted into law nearly a year ago.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

A Couple of Dates in June

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

I heard the other day from an old friend who happened to catch the beginning of a new crime program. The intro dealt with the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan-Sirhan when Bobby won the California presidential primary on June 5, 1968.

“Do you remember where you were at the time?” my friend asked. He was at a TV station in Sacramento directing a remote broadcast from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Bobby addressed supporters. Moments later, the 42-year-old Kennedy left through a kitchen hallway where he was fatally wounded by a Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

“We were all in shock at what happened,” my friend remembered. He rushed to the phone to call his wife at home. “She had turned off the TV as soon as Kennedy and his entourage began to leave. Moments later, as she headed for bed, she heard our dog, Chips, howling in the kitchen! It was something the dog had never done before or since. Strange but true!”

I had no such mystical experience; but, like most people in the time of a memorable event, I remembered what I was doing. “I was working in New York, working for NBC,” I replied, “was at home, had watched the good primary of his California victory, gone happy to sleep, and maybe about 3 in the morning the phone rang. Donna picked up, said it’s NBC, and they want you to come in. I thought, what could that be about, took the phone and all they said was, you got to come in. I got downtown, still not knowing what I was doing until I reached the control room and then I found out. As maybe you and so many others, I thought Bobby was our last great hope.”

June 6, 1944 was the day of the Normandy Invasion, the beginning of the end of World War II, the famous “D-Day” in history, one of the most widely anticipated events in my lifetime. It had been scheduled for June 5 but delayed 24 hours because of the worst weather in the English Channel in 25 years. A teletype operator for one of the  news agencies in London reportedly was practicing for the historic moment — such was the competitive clamor to be first — when the “news” was prematurely flashed ’round the world. Back then, I worked after school as an office boy for the Associated Press in downtown Boston, so still retain such minutiae. When the calendar announces June 6, I remember an older cousin who took part in the invasion before dawn on June 6. Although gravely wounded at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge at Christmas time, one of the fiercest battles of the war, he went on to live a most useful life as a professor of forestry.

In a larger sense, D-Day, and the decisive Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, sealed the doom of Hitler and his war machine.

A couple of dates in June…

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .