Let Mitt be . . . what exactly is Mitt?

   The best line so far in the 2012 presidential derby? This from Joe Klein:

   "Authenticity is rapidly becoming a euphemism for simple ignorance. (Herman) Cain was authentic; Sarah Palin was authentic. Elitists — people who have actually studied complicated stuff and become experts at it — are phonies. Just ask Rush Limbaugh."

    Klein was contemplating the ongoing challenge for Mitt Romney in coming across as human, not humanoid.

    His point: Romney has a lot going for him — education, experience, smarts — but "authenticity"?

    It's odd that anyone would comment on Romney's genuineness, when; well, consider . . .

    Authentic? Serial adulterer Newt Gingrich professes his Catholicism.

    Authentic? Rick Perry, he of ballot security schemes that purge the poor, says Virginia "disenfranchises voters" because it won't bend rules to let him on its primary ballot.

     Authentic? Rick Santorum pontificates on evil government health care. And, um, his parents worked for the VA, and he grew up on VA hospital campuses.

     Still, this authenticity thing is a real concern for Romney, as it was for one other Massachusetts governor of note.

     What is Mitt about, except one who for eight years has been offering his hair for national office?

     Disquieting (if you are a Republican) similarities seem to exist between Romney and Michael Dukakis, the squat Massachusetts governor who out-vagued a very puny Democratic field in 1988. Dukakis became short work of George H.W. Bush.

    Republican voters want to fall in love with Romney, just as Democrats wanted to fall in love with Dukakis.

    Are voters destined to find in Romney, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, that "when you get there there isn't any there there"?

     Believe or discard: Like Dukakis, Romney is running on his resume. And like Dukakis, Romney is also tapping the potency of vacuousness in not saying much that will get him in trouble with any constituency.

     Will it work in the general election? Sure, it could. But it probably won't. Romney is going to have to show that there is a "there there."

     What was telling about Dukakis was that the only time his anemic candidacy started to show any traction with voters was when he started showing some red corpuscles and stopped running from the "L" word, something he had dodged vigorously.

      Seemingly tied to that formula (made in Massachusetts?) Romney has been expertly dodging any number of matters throughout a very successful primary quest. Consider the debate when Santorum said he agreed that states should have the right to ban birth control.

    Romney, given the chance to state his position, evaded most expertly, leading a lot of people to ask, "Really?"

    Wrote Miles Mogulescu in the Huffington Post:

    "Now, it might be easy to dismiss Santorum as an extremist outlier and assume that a President Romney would never do the same. But as Romney's evasive response . . . makes clear, that would be a profound mistake."

     Really?

     At this week's debate in South Carolina, Romney was similarly slippery when Santorum pressed him about federal law allowing allowing ex-convicts to vote if they completed their sentences. Romney's evasiveness was particularly odd because a pro-Romney ad attacked Santorum for voting for the law in the Senate.

      So, this is Romney's authenticity problem. It's not whether or not he can summon a "ya betcha" to win the adoration of Palin's moose-killing set, or whether as a businessman he can pull off the "The Herman Cain Show." It's what in fact he is about, policy-wise, principles-wise. It's about how long it will take for voters to figure that out, and/or whether Romney will figure it out in advance of when voters  decide for themselves.

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

So howl the hounds of gerrymandering

   Whenever she sees gratuitous spending, my wife thinks like a dog-cat lover. She thinks of the animal shelters that money could build.

   Don't look now, but whole cities of animal shelters are being expended in legal fees by states across the country to promote and defend something Americans least need: noncompetitive, lock-cinch, party-rigged political races.

   It's happening in Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court this week heard a Republican appeal to court-ordered maps for Congress and the Texas Legislature.

   It's happening in Arizona. The state Supreme Court intervened to keep the Republican governor from tampering with a nonpartisan redistricting commission.

    It's likely to happen in Florida. There, majority Republicans in the Legislature aren't happy with constitutional revisions meant to take politics out of the process.

    State lawmakers whose party has a controlling majority long have exerted as their privilege drawing districts that cement themselves and their kind into power, even if the districts look like barbells and mud puppies.

    It truly is one of the gravest conditions facing representative democracy as we know it. Democracy is not representative when lawmakers have no legitimate opposition on Election Day.

     Here's another problem with these practices, circa 2012: The population growth necessitating additional seats in Congress in these states is coming mostly from minorities, particularly Latinos, who are mostly Democrats. To figure out ways to contrive additional safe seats for Republicans based on this demographic surge requires even more grotesquely proportioned districts.

     And it contravenes the Voting Rights Act when minorities' ability to elect people is crushed in said fashion.

     The Supreme Court, in the Texas case, is asked to side with the politically driven Legislature against a federal court that drew up districts more hospitable to minorities, more competitive in general, and more in keeping with the Voting Rights Act.

     With relish, Texas Republicans will point out that the worm has turned, that the Democrats gerrymandered as well when they had a lock on power for generations. True.

     One should acknowledge, however, that toward an actual system that reflects democratic ideals, nothing truly representative can come of this.

     Pamela Powers Hannley, writing in Huffington Post, observes that, "To the world, Arizona is a firebrand red state solidly controlled by Republicans." Yet voter rolls show a 30-30-30 split between Republicans, Democrats and independents.

   "How could all of this happen?" she writes. "Gerrymandering."

    Arizona voters thought they changed this. They created an Independent Redistricting Committee, which indeed last month issued more competitive maps than majority Republicans want. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and legislative leaders have tried everything they can to derail it this process, including the ouster of the commission's chairwoman, later reinstated by the state Supreme Court. The majority party in Arizona isn't through trying to circumvent what voters intended. Believe it.

     In Florida, voters amended the constitution to make redistricting less partisan, and districts more competitive. This apparently is an untenable notion to majority Republicans and Gov. Rick Scott. They are seeking to overturn the new rules. The battle lines lead, of course, to court.

     In the Texas case, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to decide if what the Legislature wants best expresses the people's will. Of course, it does not. It's what a majority party wants.

    If allowed to, Democrat or Republican, that party will do anything it can to prevent voters from actually influencing elections, no matter how many animal shelters it expends fighting the public good in court.

      Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Of coal plants and meth makers

   Let's say your neighbor spent his working hours cooking methamphetamine.

   Let's say that instead of cooking it in the basement, confining lethal fumes to his home-sweet four walls and his two incinerated lungs, your neighbor cooked meth as one would a backyard brisket: over your fence.

   Let's say that, nauseated by the fumes, you complained to the sheriff (who happened to be on the take from the meth dealer).

   Let's say the sheriff granted that breathing meth-lab fumes is bad for you, but said the economic activity generated by the next-door business had to be weighed.

   "What you propose — shutting down this enterprise — is a jobs killer," let's say the sheriff said. "No can do."

   Welcome to the policy morass that has allowed utilities to spew deadly toxins over millions of backyard fences without a care. Hint: The policies have never been driven by breathers — until just the other day.

     That's when the Environmental Protection Agency, after two decades of deliberation (read: stalling), finally set forth some protections fit for its name. By 2016 coal-fired utilities would (1) install scrubbers to limit airborne poisons like mercury, cadmium, arsenic and nickel, (2) convert to another fuel like natural gas, or (3) shut down.

    This evoked exactly what one would expect. Republican U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, who calls global climate change "a hoax," called the rule a "a thinly veiled electricity tax" that would hurt jobs.

    On the campaign trail in Iowa, Rick Perry said that as president he would go after the EPA with a veritable pickax, "audit every regulation that's gone forward since '08, and if it kills jobs versus help create jobs, it's gone." 

     Listen to discourse in the GOP presidential race this year and hear the yearning for the days cataloged by Upton Sinclair in the The Jungle and Rachel Carson in Since Silent Spring — where commerce ruled over all, where labor and environmental standards were matters for industry to dictate. Hear Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and, of course, Michele Bachmann call for dismantling the EPA. And in its stead? Well, state or local control, of course.

    Now, come on, folks. Let's ponder what these people are saying. Really. 

     Local and state control? What happens when state lawmakers are on the take from polluters?

     Also, what happens when pollution from one state threatens the health and welfare of another next door?

     Days after the EPA issued its new mercury rule, notoriously recalcitrant states like Texas got a stay in court on another key EPA edict,  the "cross-state emissions rule." Under it, sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions in 27 states would be considered to have no boundaries when shared across state lines.

     As with the decades-long stall against mercury controls, this court victory was seen as buying polluters time to plug along with antiquated technology, even if they had the means to do the right thing.

     This is all dictated by dollars and cents for those calling the shots in each state capitol, and we aren't talking about elected officials or the people who elect them. We're talking about industry.

     Jobs? Actually, jobs come from supplying technology to clean up utilities.

     No, this is about the politics of stasis, of entrenched special interests having their way. It's the politics of convenience vs. the quest for sane and economical alternatives to things that kill us.

     Face it. The old-technology power plant, the never-easing dependency on fossil fuels, the blindness to pollution's pathologies — whether to individuals or the planet itself — is the face of the political conservative next door.

       Longtime Texas  newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.