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Monday, September 25, 2006

Ohio's Blackwell Points to Future of GOP

by Terence P. Jeffrey
HUMAN EVENTS

COLUMBUS, OHIO—As he runs for governor, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has been telling audiences about the values he learned from his parents that guide him to this day.

“I was raised in a Bible-believing, church-going, hardworking [family],” Blackwell told me as we drove through downtown Columbus to a campaign event at the Nationwide Arena. “My dad ... worked a couple of jobs. He worked as a meatpacker, and he served parties on the weekends for some of the affluent families in the greater Cincinnati area.”

“My mom was, for the most part, a stay-at-home mom,” he said. “She had been a drop-out. She had gone back and got a GED and became a practical nurse. But she was a stay-at-home mom. She had a big belief in the accelerating power of education.

“My dad was a devotee of Booker T. Washington’s philosophy. So his thing was work, work, work, save, work.”

“They believed in self-sufficiency,” said Blackwell. “They believed in economic independence. And even though my dad never ever—he died when he was 56 years old—owned his own home, he preached nothing if he didn’t preach: Own your own home.”

The Blackwells always kept their eye on the American Dream. “They both believed that they could make sacrifices, they could work, they could save, they could invest in their boys and their boys could do better.”

Now their son, Ken, who made a fortune investing in a chain of radio stations, and who has served as Cincinnati mayor, U.S. undersecretary of Housing, U.S ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission, Ohio treasurer and Ohio secretary of state, is seeking to become governor of the swing state that determined the last presidential election—and could determine the next.

Influential Conservative

If Blackwell wins, he will become the first black Republican ever elected as a governor. He also may become the most influential and inspirational conservative officeholder in the country.

But Blackwell is no new-comer to the conservative movement. For almost three decades, he has been working to advance conservative causes and principles in local, state and federal government. He is an outspoken champion of both the free market and cultural traditionalism. He has been in the front lines of the movements to cut taxes and unnecessary regulation and to protect marriage and the lives of unborn babies.

Blackwell served from 1995-96 on the National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform, which was empanelled by the Republican congressional leadership and chaired by Jack Kemp. With Blackwell’s enthusiastic support, the commission endorsed a flat tax. “The future health and strength of our economy will depend on lawmakers’ willingness not just to tinker with the system and make a change here or there, but on their willingness to uproot the entire tax code and implement a pro-growth system,” he said at a 1997 conference hosted by Empower America.

“On the Internal Revenue Service Building in Washington, there is a quote that says: ‘Taxation is the cost of a civilized society,’” Blackwell said that year. “We’re paying too much for too little civilization.”

In 2000, when he chaired Steve Forbes’ presidential campaign, he again argued for a flat tax.

Now, in his gubernatorial campaign, Blackwell is calling for converting Ohio’s progressive income tax into a 3.25% flat tax. He is also calling for abolishing the state death tax.

In recent years, Blackwell opposed Gov. Bob Taft, a fellow Republican, and the Republican controlled state legislature as they increased spending and hiked the state sales taxes. Earlier this year, he led the effort to place an initiative on Ohio’s November ballot—the Tax Expenditure Limitation (TEL) amendment—that would have limited both state and local spending increases to 3.5% per year or the sum of the rate of inflation plus the rate of population increase.

After Blackwell trounced his opponent, Atty. Gen. Jim Petro, 56% to 44% in the GOP gubernatorial primary, the Republican establishment capitulated and enacted a bill codifying the state-government spending restrictions in Blackwell’s TEL. The initiative was removed from the ballot.

But Blackwell is still pledging to repeal a 10% increase in the state sales tax enacted by his fellow Republicans.

When I asked him what the he sees as the core principles his party must defend now, he put individual liberty at the top of the list.

“First,” he said, “that the individual is at the center of our political system, not the state, not government. I believe in limited government. I actually believe that free men and free women and free markets can overcome any kind of economic challenge.”

“I trust in people to make good decisions,” he said. “I understand there are things, but only a limited number of things, that government can do that individuals and communities of individuals cannot do by themselves.”

One thing he insists government must do is defend the God-given rights of its citizens.

A member of the Bethlehem Temple Apostolic Church in Cincinnati, Blackwell finalized his formal education—and honed his debating skills—among the Jesuit priests at Xavier University, where, as an undergraduate, he majored in education and philosophy and then took a master’s degree in education.

He later became a teacher at Xavie, and one of its vice presidents. His wife, Rosa, whom he has known since 4th grade, and who is superintendent of the Cincinnati public schools, also attended Xavier and is on university’s board of trustees.

“I probably am among the rarified few who have read the Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul II, twice,” says Blackwell, referring to a series of lectures in which the late pope explained his understanding of the purpose and sanctity of marriage.

In 2004, Blackwell was the leading proponent of a ballot initiative for an Ohio constitutional amendment that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman and prohibited legal recognition of same-sex unions. The initiative won 62% of the vote on the November ballot that year and helped drive a record turnout in which a million new Ohio voters came to the polls. Given that President Bush would not have won an Electoral College victory in 2004 if he had not won Ohio, and that he won Ohio by only 118,775 votes, it is a reasonable to assume John Kerry would be President today had it not been for the Blackwell-led marriage amendment.

Blackwell has been endorsed by the Club for Growth as well as the Republican National Coalition for Life. “Ken Blackwell believes all innocent life is sacred and should be protected,” says his campaign website. “His opposition to abortion has been steadfast and consistent, he has always been pro-life. The first obligation of government is to protect innocent life. As governor, Ken would advance a culture of life, just as he has for 30 years, as mayor of Cincinnati, ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission and in statewide office.”

Beyond his credibility as a conservative activist, his long experience in public office, and his deep knowledge of the issues, Blackwell is a great campaigner. He has an unaffected, easygoing style—and wit.

At a fundraising event at the Nationwide Arena he was greeted by a group of former Ohio State and professional athletes who support his candidacy. They include Clark Kellogg, who played for the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and is now a network television basketball analyst; Granville Waiters, who played for the NBA’s Chicago Bulls; Lawrence Funderburke, who played for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings; and William White, who played safety for the Atlanta Falcons in the 1999 Super Bowl.

As we entered the room, Blackwell joked about his own brief career in the NFL. After graduating from Xavier, he says, he was invited to training camp by the Dallas Cowboys. When the Cowboys tried to convert him from linebacker to offensive lineman, he decided he didn’t want to play pro football after all and went home to Cincinnati. Some years later, however, he was invited to an NFL Alumni event, where he found himself teasing a long-time star of both pro football and politics.

“So I said to Jack Kemp,” Blackwell recalls with a laugh, “you played 13 years in the NFL and I played 13 minutes—and we still have the same alumni status.”

Had the Ohio gubernatorial election been held two years ago, Blackwell would be governor today, and conservatives around the nation would be clamoring for him to run for even higher office. But this year is a tougher year to be a Republican—especially in Ohio, where the party’s image has been damaged by Gov. Bob Taft, who pleaded no contest to ethics charges, and Rep. Bob Ney, who is under investigation for his dealings with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and who is not running again.

So far, Blackwell is down in the polls. But his campaign has just started to effectively define his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ted Strickland, as the liberal-masquerading-as-a-moderate he truly he is.

And something tells me conservatives are going to be cheering for Ken Blackwell long after this November.


Neutralizing a Beatle: The U.S. vs. John Lennon

By John W. Whitehead
September 25, 2006

In December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., John Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,” a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.

However, as Adam Cohen observes in the New York Times (Sept. 21, 2006), “What Lennon did not know at the time was that there were F.B.I. informants in the audience taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song…The government spied on Lennon for the next 12 months, and tried to have him deported to England.”

The government’s surveillance campaign against Lennon is the subject of a new documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. It could not have debuted at a better time—especially in light of recent revelations about the government’s efforts to spy on American citizens through phone calls and e-mails. Indeed, Lennon’s battle with the U.S. government is not only a chilling tale of paranoia and abuse of power—it is a lesson for our times. As Cohen recognizes: “It is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Yet Lennon’s battle with the government started long before that concert in Ann Arbor. By 1968, he had already philosophically moved a long way from the message embodied in Beatle songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And there was no mistaking his anti-establishment beliefs as expressed during a 1969 “Bed-In” with Yoko Ono in Montreal: “You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”

By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, there was no holding him—or his message—back. Having moved to New York City that same year, Lennon was ready to participate in political activism against the U. S. government, the “monster” that was financing the war in Vietnam.

He had learned that rock and roll could serve a political end by proclaiming a radical message. More importantly, Lennon saw that his music could mobilize the public. It certainly helped that he was a natural in the spotlight, with one of the most recognizable faces in the world. And with the Beatles having broken up the year before, Lennon and Yoko Ono were doing their own thing, posing for publicity photos, decked out in Japanese riot gear, and John was singing “Say you want a revolution, We better get it on right away, Well you get on your feet, And into the street.”

The subsequent release of Lennon’s Sometime in New York City album, which contained a radical message in every song and depicted Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao dancing together nude on the cover, only fanned the flames of the conflict to come.

Government officials had been keeping strict tabs on the ex-Beatle they referred to as “Mr. Lennon.” But the official U.S. war against Lennon began in earnest in 1972 when he and Yoko were served with deportation orders. While the orders were supposedly over a four-year-old marijuana conviction from Great Britain, what Lennon didn’t realize was that Nixon himself was driving the effort to have him deported.

FBI files, made public after years of lawsuits, reveal the extent of the Nixon Administration’s efforts to “neutralize” Lennon. (However, while ominous in tone, the term “neutralize”—as used by government agents—was never really defined.) With FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the helm and reporting to the Nixon White House about the FBI’s surveillance of Lennon, memos and reports had been flying back and forth between senators, the FBI and the U.S. Immigration Office. Clearly forces were at work to silence Lennon.

Nixon’s pursuit of Lennon was relentless—and in large part based on the misperception that Lennon and his comrades were planning to disrupt the Republican National Convention scheduled to take place in Miami in August 1972. The authorities’ paranoia, however, was misplaced.

Left-wing radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman—activists who were on government watch lists and who shared an interest in bringing down the Nixon Administration—had been congregating at John and Yoko’s New York apartment. But when Rubin, Hoffman and the rest revealed that they were planning to cause a riot, Lennon balked. As he recounted in a 1980 interview, “We said, We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence so you can overthrow what? And replace it with what? . . . It was all based on this illusion, that you can create violence and overthrow what is, and get communism or get some right-wing lunatic or a left-wing lunatic. They’re all lunatics.”

Despite the fact that Lennon was not part of the “lunatic” plot, the government persisted in its efforts to have him deported. Equally determined to resist, Lennon dug in and fought back. Every time he was ordered out of the country, his lawyers delayed the process by filing an appeal. Finally, in 1976, Lennon won the battle to stay in the country when he was granted a green card. As he said afterwards, “I have a love for this country…. This is where the action is. I think we’ll just go home, open a tea bag, and look at each other.”

Lennon’s time of repose didn’t last long, however. By 1980, he had re-emerged with a new album and plans to become politically active again. In his final interview on Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon mused, “The whole map’s changed and we’re going into an unknown future, but we’re still all here, and while there’s life there’s hope.”

That very night, when Lennon returned to his New York apartment building, Mark David Chapman was waiting in the shadows. As Lennon stepped outside the car to greet the fans congregating outside, Chapman, in an eerie echo of the FBI’s moniker for Lennon, called out, “Mr. Lennon!” Lennon turned and was met with a barrage of gunfire as Chapman—squatting in combat stance—emptied his .38-caliber pistol and pumped four bullets into his back and left arm. Lennon stumbled, staggered forward and, with blood pouring from his mouth and chest, collapsed to the ground.

John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He had finally been “neutralized.”

WC: 1,082

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at http://m1e.net/c?49385008-SmEDTxwRdiaWU%401928704-knCv1YQpka/8U.