PeterGlenshaw.com

Winter Begins Its Slow Retreat

Up here, in the northern part of New Hampshire, we hardly notice when crowds gather around a Pennsylvania rodent in early February to determine if Winter will last another six weeks.  For us, it’s a given.  Winter will last another six weeks. 

In fact Winter hardly surrenders until late March or early April in this climate.  And even then, the bet is that cold weather and even the occasional snowstorm will carry forth while the rest of the nation enjoys daffodils amidst their Easter egg hunts. 

Not here.  My kids have always hunted for chocolate eggs and jelly beans when the ground stood cold, hard, and frozen on Easter.  Halloween is occasionally warm in northern New Hampshire, but Easter?  Never.

Even so, the signs that Winter has begun its annual retreat from our landscape are unmistakable. 

It starts with the most obvious and welcome of signs:  Mr. Sun.  By now, the Sun’s presence in our life is nearly as strong as it was before Halloween.  Even without the wonderful unfair advantage of Daylight Savings Time, the ground still glows and twinkles at 5:30pm thanks the Sun’s presence.  A full day of skiing no longer ends in the dark.  And a late afternoon cross-country ski has suddenly been extended by hours.  My headlamp hasn’t been used in weeks.  There is daylight, and every day brings more and more warmth and terror to Winter.

And then this:  the Red Sox.  Yes ma’am and sir, please welcome the Home Town Team.  Pitchers and catchers reported about a week ago, and it seems like almost everyone on the roster has made it to Fort Meyer, Florida by now.  There’s Big Papi, wearing shades, looking strong and lean.  Look, there’s Tek, Lowell, Youk, and our MVP, Dustin Pedroia.  The Boston Globe carries daily quotes from Tito, and I’m trying to remember the names of the new players (Scholtz?...National League guy, right?)

My backyard is completely covered in snow.  I’ve not thrown a ball against my aging pitchback since early December, and don’t expect to do so for another month or more.  If I have to walk my dog around the Lyme Common much beyond March, instead of throwing the ball to him via the pitchback, I think both Bear and I will go crazy.  It’s time again for baseball.  It’s time for nine innings of play.  Enough with the four-quarter madness of football and basketball.  Let’s get out there and throw a ball, hit a ball, catch a ball for a bunch of hours, day after day.  

And then, finally, this: fatigue with Winter. 

I know, it sounds heretical.  Fatigue with Winter?  How could it be so?

After all, we ski and snowboard and cross country ski and ice skate and sled and do just about everything there is to do in the snow and ice that dominates a northern New England Winter.  And we love it.  When the first flakes fall in October or November, the whole house explodes.  Kids and parents run outside.  We pull out the winter clothing.  We argue about whose gloves belong to whom.  We wonder what happened to that neck warmer (“that’s mine…..no, it’s not….I know it is mine…” etc).

But by now, we’ve done almost everything Winter could offer.  This Winter has been very strong.  Solid, almost Western-like snow fell throughout January, bringing fresh powder weekend after weekend to the hills of New Hampshire.  It has been so good that I’ve finally gone down every hill on the Dartmouth Skiway (Waterfall was my last double-black diamond to conquer), and even managed to finish a new extension of another double black-diamond, Lower Liftline.  The cross-country skiing has been equally fabulous.  Steady snow and solid grooming have made it a paradise.  Since December, I have often found myself in the office chair on Monday delighted to have simple place to sit for 6-8 hours after a weekend of going up and down snow-covered hills.  I’ve jumped.  I’ve fallen.  I’ve made turns unexpectedly and graciously.  I’ve gotten better and found room for improvement.  I’ve crawled into bed at 9pm at night and felt like it was 1am or later. 

But by now, I feel spent.   Each weekend in the Winter, we wake-up earlier than we doing during the week.  Tonight, with the exception of me, everyone in my family fell asleep by 8:30am.  We’re tired early and early each night.  A wake-up call at 7am feels like a chance to sleep late.   Each of us begins to yearn for mud-season, when the ground is dirt brown and wet and the air humid with 40 degree temps and everything in northern New England is ugly, because it means sleep and no wake-up calls and something called a weekend. 

That day will come.  I know it will.  Until then, we have about six solid weeks of Winter left, and four weeks of improbable, hard-to-predict weather ahead after that.  No one is breaking-out the spring clothes here.  We all know what is ahead.  We’re taking extra cold medicine and getting to bed earlier.  Winter is fading like an old movie star, and we know there’s nothing speedy to either process. 

Judd Gregg & the dead Republican Party

The news tonight that New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg has withdrawn as President Obama’s choice for Commerce Secretary comes as no surprise to those of us in the trenches of New Hampshire politics who confront the reality of a dying Republican Party on a daily basis.

Whatever the Republican Party might have been in northern New England 20 or 30 years ago -- moderate in tone, fiscally conservative, socially liberal -- there appear only two national figures today from this region who still represent those positions:  Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

My experience is that far too many Republicans in both New England and throughout the country have been captured by the take no-prisoners mentally led by a troika of Republican ideologues and operatives: most notably, Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove.

Consider Judd Gregg.  He was once a radical fiscal conservative who, as the Granite State governor in the early 1990s, railed against the expansive and expensive ways of the University of New Hampshire during a similar economic downturn.  In that light, Gregg’s silence on fiscal matters was telling during two terms of the Bush administration that saw an expanding federal deficit, fueled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the favor-the-rich tax cuts.  For a guy who publicly preached Republican values of small government and reduced taxation, Gregg nevertheless felt compelled to support the Bush agenda for eight long years with silence.

Why?

Because that was the game in DC, and Gregg decided he would rather play under the new rules than stand for principle. 

Under the Obama administration, however, the rules today for the Republicans appear far different.  Principles like fiscal responsibility are suddenly in vogue for Republicans.  We’re seeing it here in New Hampshire from John Sununu, Sr. who, like Gregg, remained silent during eight years of federal expansion and fiscal largesse under the Bush administration, but who has come roaring back into the political spotlight in 2009 to complain about Democratic spending both in the Granite State and nationally. 

The irony is that even a few weeks ago, Gregg was prepared to abandon even these principles.  A far greater political principle – personal advancement – was to be considered.  Gregg offered his name to the Obama administration for Commerce Secretary, knowing full well that Obama was a Democratic and he a Republican.  Asked if he could willingly support the President’s agenda, Gregg claimed he could do so in this time of national crisis. 

That was then.  With Republicans closing ranks (except for Collins & Snowe) against the stimulus, Gregg faced a squeeze play.  Would he abandon the Republican party for the principle of national unity, or would he return to the warm embrace of a political party at the expense of national unity?

For the last two years in Lyme, NH, I’ve worked closely with elected officials whose political and party affiliations are far more conservative than my own on matters related to school funding (I’m the chair of the school board here).  As you might expect in a town of less than 2,000 people, our exchanges have been cordial and pleasant.  We’ve worked cooperatively and spoken kindly to one another.  And yet, despite all of the polite talk and attempts to explain the basis upon which our decisions are made, and despite our ability to deliver budgets dramatically lower than previous years, I find these same conservative officials voting against any and all of our budgets in meeting after meeting.

At one point this year, a few of these conservative town officials even voted to fund our school library with a grand total of $1.00.  Although their motion ultimately failed, it nevertheless attracted three votes, all of them from nice, seemingly reasonable conservative elected officials.

So much for bi-partisanship.

The bottom line is that Republican Party is largely dead – not in terms of activists or money, though both are waning.  Instead its values and principles have died, and in the interests of expediency or desire to acquire or retain power, Republican values have withered on the vine.

In this regard, Judd Gregg had a wake up call this week.  Would he trade political advancement for values?  Could he find a way to compromise with those whose political philosophy differs from his own values?  In the end, Gregg did neither.  Like far too many Republicans today, Gregg decided to falsely embrace principles he had long abandoned because there wasn’t sufficient political cover to explain his actions.  At the same time, Gregg and far too many Republicans at the national, state, and local level have willingly forgotten how to compromise or work with officials with different political viewpoints.  They talk bi-partisanship, but can’t walk a mile in the shoes of a Democrat.

That’s a sure sign of a dead political party.  Ultimately, the renaissance of the Democratic Party came because a Vermonter named Howard Dean declared in 2003, at the height of the Bush presidency, that he came to represent “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”  The irony was, Dean as Governor of Vermont had worked closely with Vermont Republicans and often angered his own party with his moderate views.  At the same time, Dean passed health care and civil rights legislation that was ten years ahead of the rest of the country.  If only the Republicans could find someone like Howard Dean -- who could comprise without abandoning principle -- they might have a chance at legitimacy in 2009.

The Bus (or, Behavior in the Obama Era)

In light of the breakdown of Tom Daschle's nomination, and others like it (all of which is brilliantly captured in Steve Pearlstein's column tomorrow in the Washington Post), the conversation I had last week with a local CEO rings incredibly clear and revealing.

This CEO -- who runs a very public enterprise in the Upper Valley with some 150+ employees, who applies the label of "conservative" to political and economic views -- described the mode in which this she or he travels to a very high-powered, regular meeting in New England with some of its best known business leaders.

(If you can't tell, I'm working hard to protect the identity of this CEO.  No pronouns!)

"I take the bus."

Not a limo.  Not a car with a driver.  Not an airplane (even thought the meeting is more than 120 miles from the hometown of this CEO).

"I take the bus."

Why?

"I take the bus because I can get work done, because it's inexpensive, and drops me off very near my hotel and location for the meeting."

For the other CEOs in this highfalutin group, such behavior was unbelievable.  Take the bus?  My oh my!

In fact, this Upper Valley CEO got a lot of grief from the other New England CEOs for taking the bus.  One CEO in this highfalutin group took a helicopter to the meeting.  Many of the others arrive by chauffeured car or limousine.

But bus?

No way.  Not for these guys and gals.

Maybe, however, the tide has turned. 

In light of Tom Daschle's error of hypocrisy  -- who used to boast of his driving a mid-1970s Pontiac more than 200,000 miles, who used to say he wasn't one of those politicans in the limousine class, who did not used to wear red horned-rimmed glasses -- maybe the problem lies in the fact that far too many senior leaders in America (whether it be in politics, business, or other sectors) believe 1) they're entitled to different rules, and 2) favorable treatment comes with the job description of these high-and-mighty jobs.

News flash: Those days are over.  It's a brown bag world, even for the Masters of the Universe.  

For too long, the CEO mindset has swayed both the shareholders and boards of leading corporations and other organizations in this nation.  President Obama has set a high standard, and found some of the most loyal and capable (especially in the case of Daschle) people in his administration to be wanting. 

So be it. 

It's high time we applied a simple principle: to whom much is given, much is expected. 

I applaud this Upper Valley CEO and hope other leaders will do the same:  get on the bus.