Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: The Democrats - 8/29/2008

The Democratic presidential candidate made his acceptance speech in an outdoor stadium, and frankly, despite the man’s overwhelming charisma, it wasn’t very good.

Even his closest supporters said so. What’s more, most people thought his Republican rival delivered a much better acceptance speech a few days later. It was better delivered, more statesman-like. And as a result the Republicans lost the election.

Yes, you heard right. By now, you have guessed that I am not talking about Barack Obama‘s speech last night. No, I am talking about the only other acceptance speech ever delivered in an outdoor stadium. John F. Kennedy did that in 1960. He wasn’t at his best.

As Theodore H. White observed in his classic book The Making of the President, Kennedy was tired and haggard from the long nomination fight. His voice was high and a bit shrill.

Across the country in Washington, Richard Nixon watched on TV, What he saw pleased him. He could take this young kid.

No problem. Yes, he told his aides, he would accept his rival’s invitation to a series of debates on TV. But by the time the first one began, Nixon was tired and haggard from campaigning and an infected knee. Now, the cameras would show both men in closeup.

Nixon sweated like a pig, looked shifty, nervous, tense. What he said was fine. Those few who heard the debates on radio though he won. But it didn’t matter. Kennedy had won in the court of public opinion. That helped lead to a narrow victory on election day. And the two candidates’ acceptance speeches were totally forgotten.

I told you that story for a reason. Its meaning is that there are still more than two months to go.

Barack Obama’s speech last night was perhaps the best political speech I have ever heard in my life. In fact, I can think of only two others that compare: JFK’s inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.

If he wins the presidency on Nov. 4, it will become a classic.

But if he doesn’t, it is likely to be totally forgotten. Today, the Democrats have to feel good. Their convention was everything they could have wished. The setting was beautiful. The so-called “rift” between Obama and the Clintons seemed easily healed, in part it existed largely in the world of cable TV news

Now, it is the Republicans‘ turn.

Then the campaign will really start.

Remember this: Michigan. Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia. The election will be decided in those ten states.

Last time, George Bush won five; John Kerry five.

Obama needs to win seven out of those ten to be sure of the White House. McCain has to win one of the first three: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, or he can‘t win. We’ll be seeing a lot of both men over the next two months. This has already been the longest presidential campaign in history.

And I just can’t wait for it to really start.

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Interview: Steve Carmody - 8/29/2008

The Democrats wrapped up their National Convention last night with a speech by nominee Barak Obama. But… did the Democrats get done what they needed, and wanted, to get done? And, are the rifts in the Michigan Democratic Party healed? Reporter Steve Carmody covered the convention for Michigan Radio. Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Time to Act - 8/28/2008

Let’s give Governor Jennifer Granholm credit for framing the removal hearing for Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in exactly the right way. She intends to remove him if the evidence shows he either, A) “authorized settlement of police lawsuits in pursuit of his own personal and private interests.”

Or, B) “concealed from or failed to disclose to the City Council information material to its review and approval of the settlements,” which amounted to nearly $9 million dollars.

The vast weight of the evidence seems likely to indicate the mayor has done both things. It is now virtually impossible to believe that the governor doesn’t intend to oust the mayor.

So - is she trying to send him a signal by saying how she intends to proceed before the hearing starts? Indeed she is. Essentially, that message is: Surrender, or be destroyed. The mayor has a little less than a week to make his best deal and resign. However, the ball may no longer be in his court.

The person calling the shots is likely Kym Worthy, the Wayne County prosecutor who has brought eight felony counts against the mayor. The mayor might be willing to resign for a deal that includes no jail time. But the prosecutor may feel she has him dead to rights. She seems so certain she hasn’t even shown interest in talking to Christine Beatty’s lawyers about a plea-bargaining agreement.

Beatty, remember, was the mayor’s chief of staff, with whom he exchanged thousands of text messages that seem to indicate perjury, at the very least. Prosecutors like to bag big game – especially if they have any desire to move up the ladder.

Worthy doesn’t need to fear the wrath of the black community. Not only is she black, she is the prosecutor who sent two white police officers to prison fifteen years ago for beating a black crack addict to death with a flashlight. Yet she needs to see is that this is all far bigger than the selfish man-child who let the voters down so badly. His city was financially sick to start with, and now is in a sort of paralyzed toxic shock. Nothing good will happen as long as he is there.

What’s needed is for the prosecutors to, “do an Agnew.” Now almost forgotten, Spiro Agnew was a political hack from Maryland who was vice-president of this nation under Richard Nixon. During the worst of Watergate, it was discovered that Agnew was taking bribes from crooked contractors.

The U.S. attorney general had more than enough to send him to prison.

But the country couldn’t wait. They needed Agnew out of the line of succession. So he was allowed to plead no contest, pay a fine, and leave. That led to Michigan’s Gerald Ford becoming vice president. Ten months later, the nightmare was over

Detroit also needs this to be over. The governor may have to do it. But it would be far better for all concerned if our poor and once mighty Motor City did not have to wait.

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Interview: Peter Henning - 8/28/2008

While the joyous drama of anointing a Democratic presidential nominee reaches a climax tonight in Denver, a very different type of drama will be playing out in Detroit next week.  Starting Wednesday, Governor Jennifer Granholm will hold hearings on whether to remove Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick from office.  Peter Henning is a law professor at Wayne State University.  He’s been following Mayor Kilpatrick’s case closely.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke to him.

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Essay: Reclaiming Exhaust - 8/27/2008

Let me ask you something about the interview you may just have heard with Michigan State University scientist Tim Hogan.

We were discussing efforts to convert wasted exhaust heat from our cars and trucks into energy to help power our vehicles -- and save gas as a result. The question is, do you really doubt that we can solve this problem? Don’t you have to believe that American technology and a can-do attitude can get this done?

I certainly do. Not because I have any technical or engineering skills myself. If our ancestors had been like me, we’d still be eating our meat raw and living in mud huts.

But thankfully, I am not typical. We are a nation of innovators. Our auto industry may be a little beaten up these days, but it really was America who put the world on wheels. The Mustangs and Flying Fortresses of World War II were pouring into the skies less than forty years after the Wright Brothers managed to get a pile of sticks and canvas off the ground for twelve seconds.

Later, in 1961, John F. Kennedy asked the nation to take on the task of figuring out how to land a man on the moon and return him safely, and of doing so within the next ten years.

We did it in eight years. And we did so without personal computers or the internet, with technology we made up as we went along. That has to be the most amazing technical feat in history.

Compared with that - or with transplanting a heart - squeezing a little more power out of our hydrocarbons can’t be that big a deal.

I’ll tell you what surprised me when I was researching this topic. According to General Motors, when you are driving your car, only about a quarter of the energy produced by the gasoline is used to actually turn the wheels. About seventy percent is wasted.

Most of that goes out the tailpipe. A GM researcher told the Associated Press that he believes that he can recapture some of it and convert it to electricity, which would both improve the gas milage and power accessories like the radio and maybe the water pump.

So why wasn’t this done years ago? Dr. Hogan disagrees with me on this one, but I think the answer is obvious: There was no great need to do so. Nobody in Saudi Arabia was ever going to invent central heating.

And as long as fuel was 29 cents a gallon and we had all the oil we needed in Texas, why bother to wring a few last miles out of every last gallon of cheap gas?

We live in an entirely different world now. I have no doubt that the world’s oil supplies are coming to an end, or that we need to find new alternative fuels. But if we are smart, and our engineers are encouraged to keep improving efficiency, we may be able to stretch what oil remains further than we ever suspected.

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Interview: Timothy Hogan - 8/27/2008

One of the downsides of a world powered by the internal combustion engine is the exhaust fumes. In fact, they’re a sign that a majority of the energy being produced is actually being wasted. But now, scientists are working on a process that would recapture some of that lost energy and convert the exhaust fumes into more energy. Which, in turn, could actually save gas. Timothy Hogan is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University. He is among a select group of people who have been studying this science. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: The Democrats - 8.26.08

It would be hard to write a Hollywood script with as much poignancy as we saw at the Democratic National Convention last night. There was Teddy Kennedy, the lion in winter, valiantly fighting brain cancer, the last son of the Democratic Party’s royal family.

You knew that no matter what, he would make his way to the platform to give what’s likely to be his last nationally televised roar.

Now, he is one of the oldest senators. Once, forty-five years ago, he been the youngest. He was presiding over a half-empty Senate chamber when the first bulletins came from Dallas.

Marian Robinson, a clerk in a Chicago catalogue house, was seven months pregnant that day, November 22, 1963.

Two months later, she gave birth to the baby girl who was last night’s main attraction. Michelle Obama has no real memories of John F. Kennedy or Robert Kennedy, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They all died before she was five years old.

She honors them, but is focused on the future. For many of the older delegates, black and white, male and female, last night had to be an evening of bittersweet happiness.

I felt a bit that way myself. I met Teddy Kennedy on an elevator in Detroit’s Renaissance Center in April, 1980. President Jimmy Carter had sent a task force to try and rescue our hostages in Iran. It had been a disastrous failure, and eight Americans had died.

I had gone looking for Kennedy because of that. . He was in Michigan that day because he was challenging President Carter for the nomination -- something highly unusual.

He was trying to win the state’s Democratic caucuses, which were held the next day. Kennedy did win them, by a single delegate.

But it was already clear that he wouldn‘t win the nomination. I don’t remember whatever he said about the rescue disaster.

What I remember is how big and powerful he was, muscular rather than fat, still boyish with a great shock of dark hair just starting to gray at the temples.  Last night the voice was still recognizably magnificent, the spirit the same, though the sleek and powerful forty-eight year old in that elevator was nowhere to be seen.

I remembered suddenly that Edward Kennedy had been born on George Washington’s 200th birthday, and realized that these conventions are largely about the persistence of memory and the passing of torches. When he was young and slim and devastatingly handsome, Teddy Kennedy campaigned with Dr. Martin Luther King.

Tomorrow night, on the forty-fifth anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech, another young black man with a gift for oratory will make a speech that will be seen by far more people.

It may not be as good as the speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but it will contain a line that even MLK probably couldn’t have imagined any black man uttering: I accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for president of the United States of America.    

Whatever your politics, that has to be inspiring.

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Interview: Rick Pluta - 8.26.08

The Democratic National Convention last night included tributes to both the party’s past and its future, with dramatic speeches by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Michelle Obama. But how did that -- and everything else on the convention‘s first day-- go over with Michigan’s delegates? Rick Pluta is in Denver covering the convention; he is the Michigan Public Radio Network‘s Lansing Bureau Chief. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Medical Marijuana - 8.25.08

For years, those who are in favor of legalizing marijuana have let me know they are disappointed in me for not taking up their cause.  I have not done so, largely for selfish reasons.

I drive more than a hundred miles every day, for work-related reasons. This past weekend, I drove nearly seven hundred miles.

I have had a lot of close calls, some at the hands of drunks. The idea of increasing the number of stoned people behind the wheels of motorized death machines doesn’t exactly thrill me.

Marijuana doesn’t do it for me either. I’ve tried it exactly twice, the last time being February of 1976, in case any law enforcement people want to make an issue of it. I didn’t get very high, and frankly didn’t want to; I don’t like feeling foggy or losing control.

Plus, it is a carcinogen, the doctors say. So -- no thank you. However, marijuana is quite pervasive in parts of society today. I have friends in their fifties and even sixties, respectable middle-class people, who occasionally use it.

None of them seem particularly worried about being arrested; some even get their stash from their kids. While I don’t share their taste, and worry about their lungs, that’s fine with me, as long as they stay off the road while high.

However, there are people who do need marijuana. They have medical conditions such as glaucoma, or chronic pain from a variety of diseases, whose symptoms are eased by smoking pot.

Very few are apt to become major drug dealers, and it should be simple enough to enact harsh penalties for any who do.

What offends me more than the potheads is the utter self-righteous hypocrisy of some politicians who oppose it. Take Tonya Schuitmaker, a 40-year-old representative from the south-central part of the state. She told the Kalamazoo Gazette she sympathized with suffering individuals, but too bad for them.

She actually used the Vietnam-era cliché that letting sick people have it would be “a slippery slope,” and would lead to “legalizing a drug that has had a detrimental effect on society.”

I wonder if she has any idea how many of her fellow mortals daily self-medicate with another drug that has had a detrimental effect on society. We call it alcohol. She ought to; she went to Michigan State, where binge drinking is regularly in the news.

Another west Michigan representative, Fulton Sheen, is more of a statesman. He is deeply conservative, and opposed medical marijuana until he saw it bring relief to his dying brother.

He changed his mind. Now, he says, “I look at it as a kind of prescription drug for those who are very sick.”

Naturally, this isn’t an issue the legislature will ever take up. Dealing with it would require political courage. This fall, the ball is in our court. We’ll close the voting booth curtain and decide what’s more important; our prejudices or the chance to relieve suffering.   

I never get stoned, but that’s a no-brainer for me.

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Interview: Lance Gable - 8.25.08

While we don’t know who our next President will be, we do know now what proposals will be on the ballot. And while a lot of attention has been paid to a government reform proposal that didn’t get on the ballot, another once hotly controversial initiative did make it -- medical marijuana. Michigan voters will decide whether to allow people to seek a doctor’s approval to not only use but possess small amount of the drug and to grow the plants.  But what are the potential legal and ethical implications of the law if it does pass?  Lance Gable teaches law at Wayne State University; he is an expert on public health law and bioethics.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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