Loading ...A Decade of HPR 1994-2004
Decade of HPR 1994-2004: Looking myself in the mirror during Indiana’s Golden Age The two of us stood clench-jawed in 1993 when I finally blurted at my editor at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, “I know I can look myself in the mirror tomorrow morning.” The editor, Craig Klugman, had just fired me. I had written too many memos to Publisher Dick Innskeep and his daughter, Julie Inskeep Walda, about management’s treatment of staff. It was a revolving door newsroom where people were quitting without other jobs lined up. And it was very painful to be fired. It put extreme pressure on my marriage, that would fail three years later. But looking back, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I had to reinvent myself. I went from a career as a newspaperman who received a corporate check every week, to that of an entrepreneur, a businessman, who decided to make a living writing about the thing I loved best … politics. Hoosier politics. Today I watch former colleagues who have lost their passion for the profession, working for people and corporations for whom they have no respect. I work for myself. My platform - The Howey Political Report - is tiny, when compared to the Journal Gazette (Klugman dropped the hyphen after I left) or the Indianapolis Star. After one year of television at WKJG-TV, I launched The Howey Political Report in August 1994. I wanted to do an anniversary edition last August, but the governor’s race was too hot and compelling to take time to do that. But now, as Gov. Elect Mitch Daniels assembles his team and prepares for what should be an absolutely extraordinary four years, it’s time to do what I promised Klugman I could do every morning: look at myself in the mirror. The gaze reveals that there were mistakes. There were extremely lean years. In 1995, an HPR subscription check I received on Dec. 23 gave me enough money to buy Christmas presents for my family. I remember asking renown analyst Charlie Cook how long it took him to establish himself in Washington, D.C. “About seven years,” Cook said. “There were plenty of weeks when my wife stocked up on hamburger for the freezer.” Here in 2004, a decade after I got the crazy idea to challenge Indiana Legislative Insight - from Fort Wayne, no less - HPR has established itself in the Indiana political mainstream. It will gross more than six figures this year. The Howey newspaper column runs in 24 newspapers across the state. Despite our tiny size, we have had an impact covering three governor’s races, a changing of the guard at the state parties, tax restructuring, and the loony idea we concocted several years ago - a Constitutional Convention for Indiana to restructure state and local government. That notion isn’t residing on the lunatic fringe any more. So I hope you don’t mind my indulgence, of taking a look back at a wonderful decade of reporting, analysis and commentary, and a future where our eyes are to the sky, and the sky is our limit. The greatest day in the golden age When I walked out of the Congress Hotel in Chicago on a hot August day and boarded a bus, I had no idea this would be the most exhilarating day of my life on the campaign trail. Actually, there were three buses lined up, all heading for my hometown of Michigan City, Ind., to see President Clinton arrive after his “21st Century Express” train tour. We had a police escort out of Chicago, across the Skyway, on to the Indiana Toll Road. There were quick stops at Gary, where Attorney General Pam Carter gave an absolute stemwinder. Gov. Evan Bayh, Lt. Gov. Frank O’Bannon, Carter and other luminaries were on the bus. On the way there, Bayh and O’Bannon swapped stories with the press that included Jack Colwell from the South Bend Tribune and Terry Householder from the Kendallville News, Mary Beth Schneider from the Star. There was a certain innocense about the trip. The bus missed a turn and ended up on Lake Shore Drive at Long Beach, paralell to the dunes I had galloped on as a kid. We were running late, but the bus passed some kids’ lemonade stand and Gov. Bayh ordered,”Stop the bus!” and he and O’Bannon and the whole entourage bounded out to greet the startled children and their mother. Usually presidential speeches are a hassle. There is intense security and reporters and spectators must wait around for hours in order to hear routine stump speeches. Clinton was the first since President McKinley to come to Michigan City and he spoke at the Washington Park bandstand, a place I used to climb around as a young boy. But watching Clinton speak in Michigan City, it became starkly clear that this was a presidential candidate on par with the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. I once asked legendary Republican L. Keith Bulen what he thought about Clinton and Bulen responded, “Best politician I’ve ever heard, seen or dreamed of.” Clinton noted that it had been 97 years since President William McKinley had made the last, albeit reluctant, presidential address here. “All I’ve got to say is the rest of ‘em didn’t know what they were missing,” Clinton said. The crowd lapped it up and the president, paying no heed to schedule, shook hands for nearly an hour. “You know, unless I run for the school board or something someday, it will be the last race I ever make. And I wanted to take this trip to the heartland, to look into the faces and eyes and the hearts of the people,” Clinton said. We watched Clinton board a helicopter that flew northwest across the big lake to Chicago for his second nomination, the 11 tallest skyscrapers visible to these Hoosier eyes. We boarded the buses to head back to Chicago at twilight, traveling south down Franklin Street, as people streamed out of the glowing storefronts I used to frequent as a kid, and waved. I can still see the whole scene in my mind. The drama didn’t end there. The next night at the United Center, Gov. Bayh was to be in the national limelight, giving the first national convention keynote address by a Hoosier since Rep. Charlie Halleck in 1952. What was memorable wasn’t so much the speech, but just getting there. It became evident as the evening wore on that there was some high stakes maneuvering going on. Bayh’s keynote was changed, harried, rescheduled, unannounced and widely panned by the critics. There seemed to be a tug-of-war going on between him and Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hillary Clinton, who spoke earlier. On the bus ride to greet Clinton, Bayh was philosophical about his big speech. “(I) remember we had that convention where the president gave his acceptance speech and remembered that great American leader, Hubert Horatio … Hornblower,” Bayh said of President Carter’s 1980 speech and his botched Humphrey line. “There are times when things are hard to work with and yet you’re happy they didn’t turn out like that.” Yes, Bayh said, his speech might have worked better leading up to Hillary Clinton’s. It might have worked better had the introductory video been played and the lights turned down to calm the crowd. It might have played better had he taken consultant Dick Morris’ phone calls in which the now-scandalized figure was going to tell Bayh to go on the attack mode. Instead, Bayh hurriedly reached the podium at 10:59 (EST), prompting the networds to allow the keynote to run over East Coast local news broadcasts. Bayh recalled the conversation he had with President Clinton after he spoke. “You did the right thing,” the talkative Clinton told him, even as an operator was cutting into his pre-paid cell phone line with the message, “You have two more minutes.” Was that Mike Delph? In 2002, Rex Early was lying in the recovery room at a hospital just after his hip replacement surgery. He peered up from his morphine-altered state and saw … young Mike Delph, Republican candidate for secretary of state. Later, the former Republican chairman asked his wife, “Was Mike Delph in here? Or was I hallucinating?” No, Mrs. Early said, Mike Delph had been there, seeking Early’s signature for filing documents. Lugar at Drake University Indiana doesn’t have much of a presidential primary anymore, so when Sen. Dick Lugar ran in 1996, HPR hit the road several times, driving out to New Hampshire and Iowa in the summer of 1995 and the winter of 1996. The most vivid moment of this sequence occurred on the campus of Drake University in Des Moines just before the Iowa caucuses. Lugar was there to speak before a political science class. He was impeccably dressed in a dark suit and began addressing students on such weighty topics as why Africa mattered and the fact that we would probably see “the destruction of an American city” due to terrorism in our lifetime. It was a typical Lugar delivery: professional, intellectual, polite. The news media wondered why Lugar was talking about such arcane topics. About 10 minutes into Lugar’s talk, he returned to a more standard part of his stump speech. That is generally rare. Lugar is one politician who doesn’t repeat things over and over, he tailors his talks to match the group he’s with. I walked out of the room and wandered through the classroom building. I could hear a commotion down the hall in the student newspaper office, the Times-Delphic. I peered in. There were Lugar campaign manager Mark Lubbers and his communications director Terry Holt, each holding a cell phone, each screaming, “I want those %$* *&%#@” and “You better get those $^%#*& %^%$# off their ^%$#&!” I looked in a corner and there were a couple of students cowering in shock and awe. The contrast between the candidate and his political functionaries couldn’t have been more extreme or amusing. I went skiing The Lugar presidential campaign didn’t fare too well in Iowa and New Hampshire but it had great talent. Lubbers was a former aide to Gov. Robert Orr and played a huge role in the recently completed Mitch Daniels campaign. So did Ellen Whitt. Holt, who helped manage George Nethercutt’s upset of House Speaker Tom Foley in 1994, would go on to be the communications director of the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign. On the day of the 1996 New Hampshire primary, I could have joined the rest of the press corps and followed Lugar around all day, gathering information that would have been obsolete by the time the polls closed. So I did something different. I ran into Holt, who like myself is an avid sailor and downhill skier, as the disappointing returns came in. “Guess what I did today?” I asked Holt. “I went skiing” (yet another perk for the independent publisher). “You %$#* *&^$,” Holt responded. RFK, Nixon and the political writer Why did I become a political writer? I was a newsroom rat as a kid at the Michigan City News-Dispatch and later the Peru Daily Tribune where my father was managing editor. During the 1968 Democratic primary, my father came home and nonchalantly told us he had spent the day traveling with Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Days later, Peru was abuzz with the news that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was going to make a campaign whistle stop on the Wabash Cannonball. Peru was a Republican town, but the schools let out early and that afternoon several thousand people turned out at the N&W tracks as the Cannonball chugged in. RFK gave a speech that was well received. There was a kid with a sign asking for an autograph and Bobby signed it. As the train pulled out, there were Bobby and Ethel Kennedy waving goodbye, a truly haunting image, given that he would be assassinated just weeks later. Five years later I went with my parents to an Associated Press Managing Editor’s convention at Disney World. There, an embattled President Nixon conducted a nationally televised press conference that is remembered to this day. Asked about the Watergate scandal, Nixon blurted out, “People deserve to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” It was a stunning moment, with people in the gallery exchanging glances like … did he really say what I thought I heard? He had. Those events hooked me into a passion for politics. Roudebush and Hartke “I was the great dove,” said the bespectacled elderly man seated across from me at the French Lick Springs Hotel in August 2002. My lone campaign experience occurred in 1970 as a Young Republican in Peru. U.S. Rep. Dick Roudebush was the political source of my teenage affiliation, and the villain was this very same man I was speaking with, U.S. Sen. Vance Hartke. Hartke was a liberal Democrat who represented a generally conservative Republican state for 18 years. My hometown of Peru was Nixon territory, an Air Force town, and most of us supported the war in Vietnam. My family doctor’s wife, Betty Rendel, got me to join the Young Republicans and I worked with youthful vigor against the evil Vance Hartke. He was one of the first Democrats to split with President Johnson over Vietnam, and was referred to derisively as the latter part of “Senators Bayh and Bought.” Hartke won in 1970, by about 4,000 votes, or less than a vote per precinct despite my efforts distributing emory boards and yard signs. I learned many lessons from the Nixon years: that politicians, even the president, could lie and break laws. As a college student in the mid-1970s, the entire “domino theory” ruse was revealed. Twenty years later, LBJ’s tapes revealed that from the get-go, he and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara knew that Vietnam was unwinnable. How tragic. None of this was enough to save Hartke from defeat at the hands of Dick Lugar in 1976. In the summer of 2002, Vance Hartke re-emerged pushing the 8th CD candidacy of his nephew, Bryan (complete with straw hats), and even at 83 years old, he was vibrant, funny and reeled off story after story. The war drums were beating in Washington as a prelude to the American invasion of Iraq, and here I was sitting with the man who had led the peace movement, redeemed in time. “I was the only senator who spoke at the Moratorium,” Hartke recalled. “The Kennedys wouldn’t do it. I was the great dove.” On Jan. 8, 1965, Hartke was the first Democratic senator to break with President Johnson on Vietnam. “It hurt me back home,” he said. “People have not forgiven me to this day in Indiana for breaking with my own party. They said it should be, ‘My country right or wrong’ and I would say, ‘No, that’s not the phrase. It should be ‘My country right or wrong, may she always be right, but if she is wrong, put her right.’” Not long ago I rummaged through a desk drawer and found a 1970 “Hartke, Of Course” button. I had written at the end, “Not.” But in a dresser drawer in my room, I had a U.S. Senate key chain, in a tiny velvet pouch. It was something Sen. Hartke gave me at French Lick in 2002. ‘Don’t ever write about my humor again’ Stephen Goldsmith was the strangest political creature I’ll ever know. He was brilliant, yet acerbic and callow. He could be extremely funny, once telling Indianapolis Star reporter Kevin Corcoran, “When I see you, I think of urban problems.” In the homestretch of the 1996 gubernatorial race, I wrote two newspaper columns on the personal side of Frank O’Bannon and Goldsmith. I wanted to flesh them out for my readers. The Oct. 10 column went like this: “It was a campaign flight for Stephen Goldsmith and thirst took over. A young campaign aide decided to get a soft drink and asked the Indianapolis mayor if he wanted one. “Something diet,” Goldsmith said. The aide retrieved a diet cola for Goldsmith and a diet root beer for himself before settling back into his seat. “Why the Diet Coke for me?” Goldsmith asked, as the cabin grew still. “Maybe I wanted something a little out of the ordinary, like a diet root beer.” Quickly, the uneasiness broke with laughter and the aide realized Goldsmith was tugging his leg. Campaign manager Anne Shane quipped to the mayor, “Maybe you don’t have enough to do.” A few days before the election, you could feel the air rushing out of the Goldsmith campaign. I went up the the Allen County Republican Bean Dinner and Goldsmith showed up late, spoke and then left early. I ran into him and his wife, Margaret, in the halls of the Scottish Rite Cathedral. Mrs. Goldsmith glared at me. “You’re gonna pull this thing out, aren’t you?” I asked. Goldsmith responded, “Do me a favor and never write about my humor again.” The comment floored me. The following January, Harrison Ullmann hired me at NUVO Newsweekly in part because he wanted to open up some kind of dialogue with the Goldsmith administration at City Hall. It went well for awhile. I had several interviews with the mayor. He closed ranks with Gov. Frank O’Bannon to get the Conseco Fieldhouse deal done. One interview I did with Goldsmith was on the issue of education. Instead of writing a story, I just did a Q&A. There wasn’t anything particularly controversial in the conversation, but I later got a call from his media staff. “Why didn’t you tell us you were going to do a Q&A?” From that point on, Goldsmith refused to talk to me again. He was famous for interviews while peering into a laptop. He seemed to be on the fast track for the second Bush administration. When word got out that George W. Bush had no room for grandstanders who would take cell phone calls, you knew that Stephen Goldsmith was a better fit for the ivory towers at Harvard, and not the White House. Lunching with Dan Quayle One of the most intense congressional race in HPR history was the 1994 battle between David McIntosh and former Secretary of State Joe Hogsett. That McIntosh even got the nomination — Ann DeVore forgot to file — was pure luck. By the fall of 1994 you could feel the heft of this showdown that included vigorous debates. McIntosh called in some heavy support in his former boss, former Vice President Dan Quayle. He stumped with McIntosh in New Castle one day and got good responses. At noon, the Quayle-McIntosh entourage decided to chow at McDonald’s. When they arrived, folks recognized Quayle and created a commotion in the parking lot. Suddenly, a McDonald’s manager appeared. They would have to leave, he said, no campaigning on the premise. Quayle protested, saying, “We actually came here to eat. We’re hungry. We’ll go someplace else that’s friendlier.” I pointed out a Rax across the street, reminded Quayle that “President Clinton likes McDonald’s” and then made a beeline into the place before the entourage could reassemble. Rax was peaceful and humming, like that village in “Apocalypse Now” before Capt. Kilroy and Air Cav showed up. It was a perfect situation to blend and watch the evolution of people reacting to a celebrity coming in out of nowwhere. Then a young McIntosh aide came in and summoned the Rax manager. “Is it all right if Dan Quayle eats here?” he asked. The Governor’s Chevy Caprice Joe Hogsett called out the big gun to match McIntosh and Quayle in late October 1994. By this time Democrats knew they were in big trouble as the GOP tidal wave developed. Old buddy and Gov. Evan Bayh was going to do a five-city tour with Hogsett. I decided I would follow along in my 1992 Pontiac Grand Am. Bayh used an ugly, old 1987 Chevy Caprice state police cruiser. But as we pulled out of New Castle for Shelbyville, the trooper stomped the gas and that inconspicuous car took off, going a good 90 mph, leaving me a little white speck in their rear view mirror. When I caught up with them in Shelbyville, Bayh was sitting in the front seat, waiting, reading a newspaper. “Ah, here’s your column,” he said. I could tell by his look and the trooper’s that there was some amusement over the idea of blowing the doors off the reporter. Writing, talking with Harry “You know, Brian, sometimes when I read your stuff I can’t hear your voice,” Harrison J. Ullmann told me one day. I was his project when he hired me at NUVO in 1997, setting off three years of pure fun, talk and impact. The single most fascinating interview I was involved with came in December 1998 at the Airport Ramada when Harry and I talked with Sen. Lugar and his aide, Andy Fisher. Ullmann zeroed in on Lugar’s role in the “Shortridge Plan” that had temporarily desegregated Indianapolis Public Schools. His IPS School Board colleagues rescinded the plan in the mid-1960s, setting off 30 years and billions of dollars of forced busing. “Has anyone ever conducted an audit to find out if it was worth it?” he asked Lugar. “No,” the senator responded, “and it’s been a train wreck.” I worked up the original story and when I next saw Ullmann I asked, “So, what did you think?” He replied with his impish smile, “I rewrote it.” He did a great job. That story had an impact. Within a year after publication, federal Judge S. Hugh Dillin began to roll back the busing order. And I can still hear Ullmann’s voice. Watching a parade of beautiful young women passing our morning perch at the Monon Coffee Company in Broad Ripple, Harry would say, “I love everything about a woman that is different than a man.” On the idea that the average lifespan might push 120, Ullmann observed, “That would be great if I could have an extra 40 years as a 40-year-old, as opposed to having an extra 40 years as an 80-year-old.” Ullmann directed NUVO’s coverage of the 1996 Meridian Street police riot that ultimately undid Goldsmith’s gubernatorial run, printing the internal affairs police report almost verbatim. He would definitely declare in his column, “Well, f— you, Officer Friendly, I’ll write what I want to write.” His columns were funny and compelling, chiding the “rat’s ass Republicans” and poking fun at longtime Council President Beurt SerVaas, who was “serving his fifth posthumous term in office.” At Ullmann’s own funeral, coming at the relatively young age of 65 in 2000, I scanned the crowd at All Saints Episcopal Church and there was SerVaas sitting in the back pews. ‘Go out and find the truth’ You always remember when the “nice guy” shows a flash of anger. Lt. Gov. Frank O’Bannon had long cultivated good relations with the Statehouse press corps, inviting them to his near northside home each summer. In early September, 1996, those relationships paid off. An angry Frank O’Bannon stood before the microphones, looked into the eyes of the Statehouse press corps, and exhorted reporters to confront what he called “distortions.” The impetus for this uncharacteristic O’Bannon fire was a Stephen Goldsmith TV ad running in the Chicago TV market and aimed at Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties in Indiana. “O’Bannon voted to raise your taxes at least 38 times,” the ad began. “Higher taxes on everything from gasoline to food, from cars and boats to haircuts. Frank O’Bannon never met a tax he didn’t hike.” O’Bannon was furious. “This is not about buying Chicago TV,” he said. “It’s about distortion. Negative advertising differentiates the way a person really is. If you do it by character assassination, it shows a poor way to run government in a democracy.” In the Goldsmith campaign’s “Frank O’Bannon Tax Hike history” release, a majority of the tax hikes were actually fee increases. Many others were innskeeper taxes requested by places like Clark, Floyd and St. Joseph counties. Goldsmith characterized his own fee increases in Indianapolis as not being tax hikes. He told Mary Dieter of the Louisville Courier-Journal, “You’re right. User fees are a different matter than tax hikes.” “Why are his fees taxes and yours aren’t?” asked Mary Beth Schneider of the Indianapolis Star/News. “He had raised taxes at least the number of times that are in that commercial,” Goldsmith said. “He has raised fees more than that number of times.” Schneider followed up: “Are there at least 38 tax increases that aren’t fees?” Goldsmith responded, “I’m not sure how many are taxes and how many are fees.” When historians look back on why Democrats had 16 years of rule at the Statehouse, the key reason is that Republican challengers didn’t get their facts straight. In 2000, David McIntosh used a line that former Republican Chairman Al Hubbard had used: That property taxes had doubled. But they didn’t, something Gov. O’Bannon would use against McIntosh in July of that year, killing his chances of upset. Character assassination, circa 2004 The irony here is that the Kernan-Davis campaign ended on the same kind of turf as Goldsmtih did eight years prior. The issue wasn’t taxes, but the IPALCO sale. Gov. Joe Kernan explained, “It’s the results that matter. These retirees lost a lot of money. These are people who played by the rules.” Gov. Kernan was asked if he was calling Daniels “greedy,” words used by one of the IPALCO retirees in an ad. “Those aren’t my words,” Kernan responded. “Those are his words.” When pressed further, Kernan said, “I stand by whatever that person said.” Indiana Democratic Chairman Kip Tew pressed Daniels on the timeline of the stock sale and showed a video clip of shareholders questioning the IPALCO board on the sale to AES. “Mr. Daniels not only was at that meeting, but heard some concerned shareholders raise questions about executives and directors dumping their stock. How can Mr. Daniels claim he knew nothing about this?” Tew asked. Daniels would respond by saying that the real "issue is the governor’s conduct now. He’s disgracing his office." Gov. Kernan replied, "All he can do is call me names." This exchange brought to mind a comment challenger Bart Peterson made in October 1999 as he attempted to end 32 years of GOP rule in Indianapolis. “I guess now I know why dynasties never die gracefully,” Peterson said after taking attacks from Republican nominee Sue Anne Gilroy. When historians look back on how the Republicans ended the 16-year rein by Democrats, the answer could lie with what Gov. O’Bannon said about “character assassination.” The IPALCO attack squandered Gov. Kernan’s most valuable asset: his nice guy image. HPR’s national mark The first time HPR hit the national limelight occurred in the Feb. 20, 1995, edition of Newsweek. Publisher Brian A. Howey had gone to his mailbox, picked up his copy of Newsweek and as he normally does, opened it up to the “Perspectives” page where he read through quotes from White House spokesman Mike McCurry, Al Cowlings of the O.J. Simpson trial fame, Darryl Strawberry, Mario Cuomo, and this from HPR’s Brian A. Howey on a potential Dan Quayle gubernatorial run: “It would be hard to go from a life of state dinners and exotic travels to doing Republican Lincoln Day dinners at Nelson’s Golden Glo Port-a-Pit Hall in Wakarusa.” Hey, I’m celebrating Indiana Democratic Chairman Joe Andrew brought energy and audacity. In one weekend in 1997, Andrew spoke to Democrats in Evanville, Merrillville, Angola and Batesville, literally the four corners of Indiana. Democrats saw him as Hurricane Andrew. He called Secretary of State Sue Anne Gilroy a witch. Then he apologized to Hoosier witches for calling Gilroy a witch. Indiana Republicans were incensed. “That’s not a very classy thing to do,” said Republican Chairman Mike McDaniel. But Andrew didn’t care. He was not stepping lightly on Election Night 1998 when Democrats ran the table in what was supposed to be a disastrous second mid-term election. When WIBC’s Eric Berman asked Andrew and McDaniel to hang on during a commercial, Andrew blurted out, “Hey, I’m in a celebration!” A House Divided HPR printed a critique of the Indiana Republican Party under Chairman Mike McDaniel in the summer of 1999. The party had endured a run of the table in the 1998 legislative races. McDaniel read it, and fuming, called me up. “Howey, what is this?” McDaniel yelled. “Mike, I just happen to be downtown. I’ll come over and you can yell at me in person,” I said. It was a hot summer day and I was in jeans and a T-shirt. I walked past Hooters, past the foodstamp office, up the elevator and into McDaniels’ office. He took one look at me and a smile crossed his face. “Howey, that’s not fair.” I was wearing a T-shirt from the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, with a picture of a younger Abe surrounded by the quote, “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand.” O’Bannon and speech I always enjoyed covering a presser by Gov. Frank O’Bannon, in part because he wasn’t a very good public speaker. But he always spoke from the heart. And he tended to ramble. He would call the press in on Fridays, give an opening statement and then take questions. Figuring out how to get the next question in was always a challenge, because the governor rambled. When reporters thought he had finished an answer, you’d hear a series of single syllable “Wha …” or “Why …” and then O’Bannon would resume the syntax, however busted it was. I had tapes of press conferences that were pocked with long, rambling answers, short syllable bursts from wanting reporters, and more rambling prose. At the Indiana Democratic Editorial Association convention on Aug. 23, 2003, Gov. O’Bannon was to be the keynoter. Some Democrats decided to skip the dinner; they weren’t interested in hearing him speak … they’d been listening for 15 years. When O’Bannon began speaking, I was seated at a table of journalists and didn’t plan on taking notes. But about a minute into the speech, I picked up my pen and starting writing. Gov. O’Bannon was in a groove. He spoke without notes. Gov. O’Bannon was lucid and in stride, operating out of a maximum comfort zone. He seemed to be at the top of his game. At French Lick, Gov. O’Bannon recalled how New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a National Governor’s Association meeting in West Baden in 1931. He marveled at what Roosevelt found when he looked at what was the largest free-spanning dome in the world at the West Baden Springs Hotel. “I wondered what they thought,” O’Bannon said before he talked about his two proud achievements, the 2002 tax restructuring plan and this year’s Energize Indiana legislation. “We’re not in decline, we’re in ascent. I’ve been to eight commerce regions and there are four more scheduled. We need you to be our messengers to get to the naysayers who denigrate and want to tear the state down. We want to build the state back up.” And O’Bannon talked of West Baden Springs Hotel architect Harrison Albright, “who stood on top of the dome as the supports were taken out.” O’Bannon explained that many thought the dome would collapse, instead of standing for the next century. “I feel like I’m on that dome tonight,” O’Bannon said. It would be the last words most Democrats heard him say, for he would pass away within the month. Hamilton before the tidal wave U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton along with Sen. Lugar are the two true Hoosier statesmen of this generation. His speech before the IDEA convention in August 1994 served as a precursor to the Gingrich Revolution and the GOP Tidal Wave that would sweep Democrats out of control of Congress. The speech was interspersed with an emotional Hamilton asking at one point, “What’s going on here?” and several times he would sigh and say, “Oh my.” Hamilton warned of Hoosier voters and their “anti-government, and anti-elitist” feeling. “It’s very, very strong. It’s as powerful as I’ve ever seen in Indiana politics. Sometimes when I’m standing at a public meeting, I feel a curtain drop between me and the people I’m talking to. I’m a politician, and therefore they say my word cannot be trusted.” Hamilton made an observation that Mitch Daniels appeared to heed 10 years later. “You know what I worry about a little bit? The role of the political consultant. I see it all over the place. I rarely find a political consultant who does not believe that he or she knows more than the candidate does. If the candidate wins, the political consultant believes he or she did it. And if the candidate loses, the consultant believes it was because the candidate ignored their advice. And let me tell you something. Political consultants are replacing political parties in this country and I don’t think that’s a good trend. I don’t know where that leaves me, but I think we ought to get rid of some of them.” Sources told HPR that for a period on Election Night 1994, Hamilton thought he might lose to Jean Leising. He won, would serve another four years before retiring. But his service was far from over, culminating with his appointment to the 9/11 Commission a decade later. After Sept. 11, I asked him if America took its eye off the ball during the impeachment of President Clinton. What we should have been concentrating on was Aug. 7, 1998, when 224 people were killed and more than 5,000 were injured at United States embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. We should have been concentrating on Osama bin Laden. Hamilton told HPR, "That is a gross oversimplification, but it is not totally wrong either. It has an element of truth in it. It was one of the distractions at the time that made our response to terrorism less than effective. The top leadership did not react as strongly as it should have." ‘And they were calling my name’ House Speaker John Gregg pulled the ultimate stunt on me. Out of nowhere in the fall of 2001, my alma mater — Vincennes University — decided to make me one of three alumnae of the year. I called Gregg and VU Trustee Rex Early to find out how this happened. Out of Prof. Fred Walker Jr.’s journalism program, I wouldn’t have ranked in the top 25 students. Hell, maybe even the top 50. Gregg fessed up and said it was his conspiracy. I’m a person who likes to blend, not stand out. I called on my best friend, HPR’s Mark Curry, to come from Washington to hold my hand during what I thought would be a strange experience. There was a parade featuring Santa Claus through downtown Vincennes and I had to sit on the back of a convertible and do that parade wave. I saw Gregg, his wife and two kids by the theater and he was having a good ol’ laugh. Curry and I turned this into a running joke. “Mark, they were calling out my name ….” and he would say, “Yeah, they were saying, ‘Who in the hell is Brian Howey?’” At the honors banquet that Saturday, we all showed up wearing ties and suits. Gregg showed up wearing a red and black lumberjack shirt. But in the most trying times, opportunities arise. The week before this event, word came out that Speaker Gregg would hand down House Enrolled Act 1083 for an override of Gov. Frank O’Bannon’s veto (see page 14). O’Bannon was a publisher, and he understood that keeping e-mails by public servants out of the reach of journalists was a dangerous precedent. My family had a stake in this. My father, Jack E. Howey, had advised State Sen. Ed Pease through the Hoosier State Press Association on the development of Indiana’s Sunshine laws in the 1980s. Now the legislature was poised to pull a huge component — e-mails — out of the public’s right to know. So the lunch presented a golden opportunity. I pleaded, begged and implored Gregg not to hand down the bill. He listened politely, but was noncommital. When I left the banquet hall, I used a “Rexism” to describe what I had just done, telling Curry, “I feel like I just threw up in the punch bowl.” A week later, Gregg refused to hand down the override. “You were not given the credit you personally deserved on the issue of the media bill and the override,” Gregg said. “You told me it would’ve been disastrous to hand it down and you were right. That is a decision I’ve never regretted and I owe you a big one on that.” As it turned out, there was a silver lining to this fame. The parade at Vincennes occurred on a sunny day. Epilogue Democracy needs maintenance. By writing The Howey Political Report and my newspaper column, it is my contribution to the process with analysis for the insiders and the masses. When the Indianapolis Eye returns in 2005, I will play a much greater role with the masses. But The Howey Political Report is my true passion. I will never retire. I hope they find me slumped over my keyboard, pounding out another edition some 20 to 40 years down the road. One decade of doing this just isn’t enough.
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Brian A. Howey @ December 3, 2007