Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Primary Objective

Res Publica
The Primary Objective
by David Trumbull
January 10, 2014

The 2014 Republican State Convention will be held on Saturday March 22nd, at the Boston University Agannis Arena. Election of delegates and alternate delegates to the convention will take place at caucuses in cities and towns between January 11th and February 1st. Anyone who is a registered Republican as of December 1, 2013 is qualified to be a delegate. Interest in the convention has started rising with the news that Charlie Baker, Republican candidate for Governor (his second time, he ran in 2010 as well) will face an opponent for the support of the delegates. Mark Fisher, small businessman, owner of Merchant's Fabrication in Auburn and TEA Party member, announced last month that he, too, is seeking the Republican Party nomination for Governor. Assuming both men garner at least 15 percent support at the Convention and obtain the necessary 10,000 certified signatures on their nomination papers we'll have a Republican primary election to determine the party's nominee.

Already many "establishment" Republicans are calling for Fisher to back down in order to avoid a primary fight. The establishment in the party, for as long as I can remember, has preferred a hand-picked favorite rather than having a primary. They argue that a primary fight wastes resources and that by avoiding a primary the GOP's anointed one can concentrate, from the start, on running for the final, November, election. They are wrong and that kind of thinking is one of the reasons the Republican Party does so poorly in this Commonwealth.

Primaries are good for the party for several reasons.

1. The winning candidate gains the experience from the primary campaign.

2. The press will cover the race rather than using all its ink to cover the Democratic primary.

3. Independent voters who decide to vote in the Republican primary are more likely to vote for a Republican in November. If there is no GOP primary, voters may vote in the Democratic primary and then may have a tendency to stick with the candidate they supported in the primary.

4. While we cannot know who someone votes for in the primary we can know whether they voted in the GOP primary, that gives us a list of independent voters who are favorable to the GOP. The key to winning in Massachusetts is getting the independent vote. Knowing which independents (technically "unenrolled") voters lean Republican is very helpful, but expensive to find out. Here in Massachusetts the Commonwealth will tell you, for free, which unenrolled voters took a Republican ballot.

5. The primary can be a practice run for the November get-out-the-vote effort.

If the objective is to elect more Republicans, then give the voters more opportunities to vote for Republicans. Recruit more candidates for more offices. And have primaries.

Blending in with the Background

Res Publica

Blending in with the Background

by David Trumbull
January 3, 2014

On Thursday, December 26th, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (H.R. 3304). The massive bill (500 pages in length) funds the U.S. military and makes several changes to personnel and procurement policies. Of interest to me is a policy change that mandates all branches of the services to use the same camouflage pattern.

The change had been pushed by William Enyart, Democrat from Illinois' 12th District, who says he started wondering about all those different patterns of camouflage in the service branches after reading a Washington Post story detailing how the military now has ten kinds of camouflage and spends millions on camouflage design.

Enyart's proposal had bipartisan appeal given the duplication in the military at a time of austerity in government. A Government Accountability Office September 2012 report revealed that the military had spent $300 million in 2011 to purchase new camouflage and millions more for design. Over time, the study found, service branches have designed camouflage that distinguish one service from another. In a decade, the services introduced seven new camouflage uniforms with a variety of patterns and colors — two desert, two woodland and three universal patterns.

"Camo" is big business. Just in the year 2013 Depart of Defense contracts for camouflage clothing totaled $89.1 million. Much of the production of the camouflage fabrics that go into the uniforms is done in Fall River, Massachusetts, at Duro Textiles LLC. Hundreds of jobs have stayed in Fall River, rather than being "off-shored" to low wage and less regulated parts of the world due to a law, known as the Berry Amendment (U.S.C. Title 10, Section 2533a), which goes back to 1941 and was first enacted as part of America's preparation for World War Two which requires the Dept. of Defense to give preference American made products. In the case of clothing or textiles, every stage of production from fiber, to yarn, to fabric, to finished garment that will protect our men and women in uniform, must take place in America.

Some have argued that we should scrap "Berry" and get our uniforms, tents, and parachutes from cheaper overseas sources such as China. Such thinking is very shortsighted. Think what would happen when -- after the U.S. manufacturers had been put out of business by cheap foreign competition -- we found ourselves at war and unable to clothe and shelter our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guard because we could not get the supplies from a foreign source that was unable or unwilling to ship to us?


The new Defense bill, by preserving "Berry" but also requiring a consolidation of camouflage design across the services, assures that our uniformed personnel will have a reliable source of military clothing while saving money.