Category Archives: Politics

A stoney silence

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The most senior reporters in the Missouri Capitol have seen state officials and state lawmakers facing the possibility of imprisonment far more willing to answer reporters’ questions about their actions than Governor Nixon has been willing to talk about what his Revenue Department is up to. 

Nixon issued a statement yesterday blasting lawmakers for only funding the state motor vehicle licensing division for eight months in the next fiscal year.  Legislators say they’ll provide the remaining four months of money if the Revenue Department stops illegally scanning and keeping personal information from people seeking drivers licenses and other forms of state license or ID. 

Nixon called reporters to his office where he read his statement saying he’ll lay off employees because of the legislature’s actions, which he says could harm Missouri’s great bond rating and then hightailed it out of the room  without allowing reporters to ask any questions. 

Shortly afterwards, Senator Kurt Schaefer, who is the architect behind the fund-withholding movement,  met with reporters to react to the Governor’s announcement.  Reporters asked him 14 questions.  He answered every one including the one about the bond rating statement, which he called “absurd.” 

Fourteen questions answered by Schaefer.  Zero questions answered by the Governor.  You can decide whose image was enhanced based on those two events.

Then there is the Missouri House which has kicked up its share of dust about the Revenue Department’s accumulation of information, particularly about owners of concealed weapons permits and distribution of that information.  Somebody using a House computer tried to hack into the Office of Administration computer system to see that list.  OA wants to know who the hacker was.  The House has refused an open records request from OA about who did that or whose computer was used.   Back home that’s called dishing it out but not being able to take it.  

The passage of time and the perspective it brings will evaluate this entire situation someday.  But for now it’s clear that ambitious Republicans have seized on this issue and they’re going to beat this drum as long as they can.  GOP legislators, many with their eyes on their own aspirations for 2016, have found an issue that hits Mr. and Mrs. Joe  Missouri in the card pockets of their wallets and purses. Additionally, they’ve found something they can use to attack Nixon if he aspires to something beyond the governorship that same year.  In fact, the commercials are running already.  

There are far more elements than these in this confrontation.  In a few days when the legislature has ended its imprisonment of our existence, we might be able to sort back through the stories we’ve done for the last couple of months and look at what is substance and what has been bluster.  But after yesterday’s events, we offer this observation:

The senior reporters in the Capitol press corps have through the years noticed some things about stones and politics.   Some people throw stones.  Some people use stones to build bunkers. Sometimes they’re the same people.

Did Nixon say “no?”

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Sometimes it is what you say.  And how you say it.

Every now and then we catch the British Parliament’s “Question Time” on C-Span.  It’s that time when the Prime Minister  goes before the Lords and the MPs and answers policy questions, often defending positions he and his government have taken.  Sure, it’s political. 

There are some things that are impressive about these events.  Although the questions are often pointed and highly partisan, they are asked with respect for the system.  The responses often are greeted with dignified derision that seems completelly foreign to those of us who watch political debate here in the colonies. 

Another thing that is interesting to watch is the way the Prime Minister responds.  We have never seen a PM flustered.  We have never seen one stammer and stumble and let an answer just dribble away.   

Jay Nixon would never make it in Question Time.  He’s great at reading speeches and he has a really good speech writer.  But off the cuff?   Let’s just say it’s an adventure for those of us who deal in soundbites to get a clean 20 or 30 seconds that constitutes a complete answer.  

Of course, that can be to his advantage when he doesn’t want to answer a direct question with a direct answer.  It can be to his disadvantage when somebody tries to figure out exactly what he says.  Unscripted moments are not his strong suit, and that’s not good for someone who (the Capitol rumor mill is whispering) might have national aspirations when his time as governor ends.  

We have run across highly-intelligent people, some of whom are accomplished politicians, as Governor Nixon is, who have minds that race far ahead of their vocal cords, where ideas collide before words form, resulting in garbled expressions. 

We got a phone call  Friday (the 26th) from Nixon spokesman Scott Holste.  We’ve worked with Scott for many years and we’ve had a good relationship.  So when Scott questioned one of our stories, we paid attention.  We had reported on the air and on our website that House Speaker Tim Jones said Nixon was not going to comply with a subpoena issued in a southeast Missouri lawsuit challenging the Revenue Department’s data accumulation.  “That’s not true,” Scott told us.  Scott said Nixon told reporters in St. Charles that he was letting “the lawyers” handle the issue.  Scott had recorded the Q&A. I asked him to email it to us. He did.

Scott also called our friend Jim Butler at KMOX to question the story posted on the KMOX website. Some thing.   Jim called us.  We discussed it.  He said KMOX was standing by its story.  

Understand that people like the Missourinet and KMOX don’t go around misquoting people.  Recorders are a great protective tools. 

So we listened to the recording.  John had listened to a recording  in which one of his reporters, Brett Blume, asked Nixon if he was going to appear at the May 3rd hearing the subpoena was for.  A lot of crowd noise makes it difficult to pick up every hem and haw and uh and eh in the Governor’s response.  The Missourinet and KMOX have some electronic editing tools that help us clean up audio so it’s easier to understand—–not as sophisticated as some of the stuff we see on the cop shows on the teevee or in spy movies, but it’s adequate. 

John and the folks at KMOX determined Nixon’s answer was “No.  I, I, I’ve, people, by golly, guys, I’ve been in public service for 26 years. I’ve been, uh, huh, eh, I’ll leave that to the lawyers to talk about.”   John is sure the governor said “no” at the start.    Here’s the segment of the interview from Scott Holste’s recording:

                                       AUDIO: The Holste recording

We did some noise reduction work and then tried to amplify a little “bump” after Brett’s question before Nixon started stumbling around with “I, I,…”   Was that the “no?”   Here’s the segment after our filtering and our amplification.

                                       AUDIO: cleaned version

So what do you think?  It’s not unusual for someone in his position to say “no…” at the start of an answer before going on with a more complete and sometimes contradictory answer.  It’s an almost automatic response.  Sometimes, though, the first response is the real response.

We don’t know after listening to this recording several times if the governor said “no.”  His final answer to the question, though, was that he’s letting the lawyers handle the situation.  That’s not an unusual answer.,  We’ve covered a lot of political figures who’ve gotten into some difficulty and sooner or later they tell us they’re letting their lawyer handle things.  

The rest of the answer to the question, however, was vintage Nixon.  Figuring out what he meant, let along what he said, is about as much an exercise in trying to figure out if he said “no.”   At the end of the ramble, the final answer was that he was letting the lawyers take care of things.

And we’ll leave it there, I guess.

Kerfluffle

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This is Bob Priddy reporting from Kerfluffleland.

A Kerfluffle is a fuss and a fuss is a matter of worrying over trifles.

Governor Nixon got his Fruit of the Looms in a big knot yesterday afternoon when reporters didn’t ask him questions about what he wanted to talk about, just after he had read a stemwinder of a Medicaid expansion speech to a rotunda full of folks who thought his words were golden.

His message in the rotunda was similar to the message he’s been preaching all over the place about the need for the legislature to approve Medicaid expansion.  So what he was doing was hardly new–or news.

What was new –and what was news–was that the speech came shortly after he had told the Revenue Department to quit scanning and keeping records of people with concealed weapons permits.  That’s been an increasingly important issue as the legislature questions the operations of the department’s Motor Vehicle Division and the division’s collection and retention of a lot more private information than ever before demanded to get a driver’s license or any other kind of state identitification card. In recent days when he had paused long enough for a reporter to ask him about the increasingly strident accusations of misdeeds by his Department of Revenue, he wandered through a set statement that amounted to saying nothing was wrong.

When reporters kept trying to get a clear understanding yesterday of what he had done with his CCW order and why he had not done other things or why he decided only people with concealed weapons permits should not have those documents scanned and kept, he began to sputter and charged the entire senate committee inquiry into deparatment operations was a “kerflulffle” designed to take attention away from Medicaid expansion.  He sputtered a few other things about CCW permit holders and then bolted for his office with the intrepid Phill Brooks trying to ask another questions.

 AUDIO: Nixon

There are plenty of people, however, who think the whole revenue department document scanning and retention operation is something more than a trifle.  There are those in the capitol, particularly those who have pronounced Medicaid expansion a dead issue despite the governor’s tub-thumping for it, who might argue that the Medicaid rally was a kerfluffle  intended to take people’s minds off privacy invasion concerns.  One person’s kerfluffle is another person’s cause for war.

We’ve been around long enough to know the capitol is stuffed with kerfluffle from January to mid-May.  My isue is a crisis. Yours is kerfluffle.

Accessibility has never been a priority for this administration.  Managing the message HAS been a priority.  In Jay Nixon’s case, it’s always preferable to read a speech than to answer questions about what he’s doing and why.

So Nixon does something that alters the actions of his revenue department.  But it’s only one action on one of the issues that has Republican legislators in both chambers in a mini-froth accusing the department of violating public privacy and state laws.

Nixon decided to let reporters crowd around in a corner of the rotunda for a few precious minutes after his big speech and went off in a huff when the reporters didn’t want to talk about another Medicaid expansion speech but instead start asking why he did one thing but not another; what was his reasoning for doing what he did, and does he think more action should be taken.  There was no time and apparently no inclination for a quieter, more organized discussion with reporters in his office of Medicaid or of the revenue department.  So he got urinarilly agitated and stalked away because reporters preferred to ask him about what was new–and news.

Bob Priddy, from somewhere in Kerfluffleland.