By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

We are living in a time of great promise, and probably unrealistic expectations.

Politics is changing at an ever-faster pace, spurred by unrealistic timelines, short attention spans and vast quantities of impatience.

Patience and looking ahead more than a year or two for future needs are virtues better understood in China than in our culture. The Chinese better understand timelines.

We are a tremendously impatient people who expect instantaneous solutions to difficult problems and we are prepared to tar-and-feather leaders who don’t cater to the simplistic notion of what have you done for me today.

Another way of looking at that is that our leaders may have done a poor job of setting realistic expectations and selling achievable timelines for accomplishments.

Most people today are not hard-core Democrats or hard-core Republicans. They are more independent than that and ready to turn against either party if it fails to meet minimal political expectations.

The media, which is also in a state of great flux and economic uncertainty, must share the blame for worshiping in the church of what’s happening now and why wasn’t it fixed yesterday.

Unrealistic timelines for solutions of long-term problems are set in today’s celebrity-and-entertainment-driven media, which is earning lower marks for trustworthiness along with most other institutions.

Bankers are depicted as thieves, lawyers as ambulance chasers, medical professionals as out-of-control profit centers, journalists as biased liars and politicians as worse than the rest of those professional scoundrals.

Why are the politics of our state and our nation seen as corrupted, out of touch and less than admirable?

Being a political leader today can be seen by as many as half the people as a little dirty, and suspect. Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” line is becoming a more commonly disbelieved defense.

When partisanship gets too intense, too pervasive, too prolonged and too nasty, the two teams that can’t play ball together earn scorn from non-affiliated independents as well as from the partisans of the other side.

It’s sort of like leveraging two-thirds of the public against your own excessive partisanship.

A lot of people view politics today as entertainment. This may feed some of the tendencies toward intense partisanship.

“In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment,“ reads the first line in the new book Game Change by a pair of veteran journalists, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

The presidential level does leave politicians open to be viewed as celebrities much more so than at the levels of politics closer to the people, and closer to the community. We are much more likely to treat neighbors as neighbors and as real people as opposed to celebrities when they are in political leadership roles at the local level.

But being a political leader does increase one’s visibility as just about any level above the soil and water conservation board, which is an elected position in Virginia somewhat quieter than the school board.

Still, unfortunate stereotypes become attached to many political leaders.

Democrats are depicted as tax-and-spend, terrorist-coddling baby killers and Republicans as pollution-loving, anti-tax, climate change denying, borrow-and-spend war mongers.

No wonder they can’t get along.

In truth, leadership involves the willingness and the ability to make ethical choices among competing goods and to compromise and work together to get things done.

Virginia has a long and distinguished list of political leaders and community leaders who, by and large, have understood the ethical demands and constraints of leadership.

At times, they can even work together.

One of those times in when government is divided as it is now and economic conditions are dire, as they are today.

A government that can’t compromise is a government that can quickly fail.

Now is a good time for injecting ethics, civility, respect and trust in politics along with a belief in the value of working together across the aisle to get things done for the people of our localities, our state and our nation.

Ethical choices involve timelines. What can we do today and what must we do for tomorrow.

By Bob Gibson
Political Notebook Sunday February 21, 2010
The Daily Progress

U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh is a centrist kind of guy in the Indiana-Virginia tradition of moderates who occasionally thrive in one party or the other.

The Indiana Democrat stunned fellow party members on Presidents’ Day with his announcement that he would not seek a third Senate term on Nov. 2 at the end of a politically volatile year in which party polls have suddenly turned upside down.

2010 is an upside-down weather year in which Virginia inherited New York’s snowscapes, an upside-down political year in which Democrats inherited the last few years’ GOP poll numbers and a generally wacky time of rapid change driven largely by fear in economic and housing markets uncertain about when up is really up and down is really down.

Bayh, 54, is a man caught in the middle.

Centrists, including Bayh and Virginia’s pair of moderate Democrats, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, have been unable to draw both parties in the tradition-bound and prima-donna-centric Senate into coalitions able to govern from the middle.

Both parties reward the kind of team-sport and ideologically driven party bashing of the other side that makes the middle of the political road, as Texans used to brag, a place for yellow-striped dead armadillos.

Even hungry Americans in states where roadkill is a legal food supply are not particularly attracted to armadillos, and even bold moderates can find the middle hazardous to political health when super-partisanship trumps the otherwise practical notion of compromise.

Bayh, a 1981 University of Virginia law school graduate, said he was sick of politics as blood sport, fed up with the lack of bipartisan spirit needed to allow compromise and not hopeful partisan gridlock in Washington is about to change.

A two-term governor before he became a two-term senator, Bayh has the credentials, if not the charisma, for making a national ticket. But that is a road he has been down several times as a potential vice presidential choice, and, a little over two long years ago, as a tester of presidential waters who found them too chilly.

Neither Indiana nor Virginia has been a prolific mother of presidents in recent years despite efforts by former governors Chuck Robb, Doug Wilder, George Allen, Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner to order up periodic pregnancy tests.

Since the late John Dalton was governor from 1978 to 1982, the only Virginia chief executives not to publicly check the status of the Old Dominion’s presidential womb were governors Gerry Baliles and Tim Kaine, and Kaine did a quite public vice presidential pregnancy test.

There may be no womb for moderates, despite the once more commonly held belief that governing from the center is the smart way to put together lasting coalitions.

For Bayh to try again for the White House, the subject of some speculation since he declared he was more an executive type of guy than a lover of legislatures, he might recast himself as an outsider to the Congress and a radical centrist.

He could try to ride a popular centrist agenda to tackle short-term job problems and long-term fiscal messes.

Nothing changes faster than change in our nation’s political life and fortunes these days.

One day a politician can be a tiger, tigress or hunk in the game of celebrity political Roller Derby played daily in different cable flavors, but the next he or she can be a washed-up hulk. Richard Nixon was the incredible hulk who bulked back up and returned to rule and then to ruin.

The inability of both political parties to face up to long-term problems is not changing, unless it’s worsening. Bayh sought entitlement reform and deficit reduction, which was undone by short-term partisan power jockeying.

A fitness fanatic who once had a union job in Washington during college summers building the Metro rail system, he knew the dangers of touching a third rail and risking political electrocution. His father was a senator, so he knew the job’s roles.

What he would have liked to have changed is the role and definition of moderate. Instead of being disrespected and run over, centrists could be operating in the public interest as respected bipartisan craftmasters of the compromise he believed is needed to solve longer-term problems.

In congressional time, there’s always plenty of time for partisan campaigning, but what Congress has not found time for in a while is bipartisan discussion and action that gets much more than lip service.

Bayh is still young and his time may still be in the future. Or, he may be the Senate’s latest member in both parties to leave office frustrated by a system that rewards and empowers the party pur-ists who pummel the other side hard and fast on everything, consequential or not.

Bob Gibson is executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institute.

By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

    A few decades ago, Virginia law forbade the sale of a mule after dark.

    That may have been good law a few centuries ago, before the dawn of electricity when fast talking mule salesmen might take advantage of a needy buyer on a moonless night.

    The mule-seller lobby may have been slack or lacked pull in those days of a more agrarian Old Dominion.

    Government also worked at a slower pace and was closer to the people. It kept up with mule hucksters and tricksters.

    Why the law grew musty on the books into the last decades of the 20th Century—long after the state’s dreaded mule tax was eliminated—tells a tale on state government.

    Richmond still reacts slowly to crisis and even more slowly when change has left in place a skeleton of law designed to handle problems that have moved on.

    Virginia’s tax structure, and even its unique system of entirely separate and distinct cities and counties, may have fit the needs and the state’s modernity of the 1920s.

    Its application to the needs of the 2010s leaves the state burdened with baggy skeletons of outdated tax structures that weigh Virginia down.

    The state’s adherence to fiscal conservatism is not enhanced by a bag of old law bones that never seem to die, be buried, reconnected to modern needs or reborn.

    We just carry them around, as if weightier books of law carry the magic of relevance to when they were born.

    They don’t.

      Do cities and counties need a personal property car tax or a business, professional and occupational license tax in 2010?

      Yes and no. No if they are given more modern and fair means of raising revenue, and yes if they aren’t.

      Instead, the state chooses to venerate the antiquated and celebrate only the least efficient and partial fixes, such as a Rube Goldberg contraption that funnels state taxpayer money to every local government in Virginia to pay a portion of car owners’ local tax bills. We Virginians double-dip pay part of our car tax out of one pocket as local taxpayers and part out of another as state taxpayers. It must hurt less that way.

      Who said inefficiency lacks rewards? No one had to raise a tax to create a system in which every taxpayer paid himself tax relief and the ability to pay car taxes out of two pockets instead of just one.

      Is the gross receipts business, professional and occupational license tax, or BPOL, tax fair? No.

      How fair is it to tax gross receipts even if there is no profit? What kind of business incentive is that when creation of jobs is a major goal?

      Is it antiquated? Yes.

      People waiting in traffic on Virginia’s highways can rest assured that governors come and governors go but some laws, like old taxes, will hang around until people forget why they were passed.

      At least it is now legal to buy a mule at midnight.