(Photo/pdeonarain, Flickr)

Just as federal law specifically penalizes hate crimes, the law also makes it a federal crime to threaten or commit violence against abortion providers, or to vandalize their clinics. Yet as The Washington Independent revealed last week, the criminal law was not being enforced.

The day after Dr. George Tiller was murdered, we obtained data revealing that under the Bush administration, criminal enforcement of the federal law designed to protect abortion providers and clinics had declined by more than 75 percent over the last eight years.

But there’s also a civil component to that federal law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act. That part of the law allows the attorney general to seek an injunction and compensatory damages for anyone who’s been harmed by any activity that violates the law. And it turns out that the Department of Justice over the last eight years didn’t use that part of the law to protect abortion providers, either.

Under the FACE Act, in addition to criminal charges, the Justice Department can obtain damages and an injunction against anyone who “by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with” anyone who provides or receives reproductive health services. It also allows the government to prosecute and sue anyone who “intentionally damages or destroys the property” of an abortion clinic, because they are frequently vandalized as part of protesters’ intimidation tactics. The clinic where Dr. Tiller worked, for example, was repeatedly vandalized, including just days before his murder.

Yet despite these broad powers that Congress granted the attorney general in 1994 to prevent and combat violence against abortion clinics and providers, the Bush administration almost never used them. From 2000 until 2008, during the eight years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department filed only one civil case under the FACE Act. From 1994 – 1999, in contrast, in just five years of the Clinton administration, the Department filed 17 civil cases under the FACE Act — in addition to its much heavier load of criminal cases that we’ve reported before.

It’s possible, of course, that the law was so effective in its early years that it deterred all future violations. “I do think that the statute was very effective,” and “for the most part there were fewer complaints coming to us,” said Cathleen Mahoney, vice president and general counsel of the National Abortion Federation and director of the Justice Department’s Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers until 2006.

But crime statistics provided by the National Abortion Federation show that violence did not stop when the Bush administration came into office. The group reports 3,291 acts of violence against abortion providers in the United States and Canada between 2000 and 2008 — and that’s only the number of incidents they know about. (The total number of incidents in the U.S. alone was not available.) The group warns on its website that “actual incidents are likely much higher.” That number does not include threats, vandalism and harassment, which are also violations of the FACE Act.

The NAF — the organization that most closely tracks such data in the United States — also reports that between 2000 and 2008 there were at least 17 cases of “extreme” violence against abortion providers in the United States, such as arson, stabbing and bomb attacks. At least 607 letters threatening Anthrax contamination (they did not actually contain anthrax) were sent to abortion providers between 2000 and 2002 alone. During the entire eight years of the Bush administration, the federal government prosecuted only 11 individuals for any acts of violence against abortion clinics or providers.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, although opposed by many abortion-rights advocates for his vehement opposition to keeping abortion legal, did prosecute the infamous anti-abortion activist and convicted felon Clayton Lee Waagner for the anthrax threats, which attracted significant public attention because they were sent just after lawmakers and news organizations received letters containing anthrax spores, prompting nationwide fears of deadly biological terror attacks.

Waagner was an easy target: a fugitive who’d escaped from jail in February 2001 while awaiting sentencing on federal weapons charges, he was already on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List, the U.S. Marshals Service Fifteen Most Wanted List, and the Ten Most Wanted List of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He was arrested in November 2001 and promptly claimed responsibility for over 550 anthrax threat letters sent to abortion providers in October and November. The letters were signed by the Army of God, an extremist anti-abortion group that openly advocates violence against specific physicians who provide abortions. Waagner’s supporters in the Army of God, however, were not prosecuted or even sued for civil damages or injunctions under the FACE Act, although the group was responsible for distributing a manual that supplies detailed instructions for attacking abortion clinics, manufacturing bombs and cutting off the hands of abortion doctors, according to SourceWatch. The FBI has characterized the prosecution of Waagner as a “counterterrorism case,” suggesting that the “Army of God” is considered a domestic terrorist organization by federal law enforcement.

Yet despite the prosecution of Waagner in 2001, the Army of God today continues to do much the same thing. The group and its members continue to support and advocate the murder of abortion providers. Its Website, for example, on Wednesday celebrated the Tiller murder in this banner headline:

“The lives of innocent babies scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller are spared by the action of American hero Scott Roeder. George Tiller the Babykiller reaped what he sowed and is now in eternal hell.”

It commends previous convicted murderers of abortion doctors as “heroes,” and continues to host the “Nuremberg Files,” a notorious list of the names of abortion providers and recipients, with a line through those that have been killed and names grayed of those who have been murdered. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002 found that these constituted threats to the doctors.)

As Rachel Maddow recently described the Army of God’s current Website on MSNBC:

“You can actually scroll through pages and pages of mug shots and descriptions of bombings and shootings and murders and attempted murders — all praising the perpetrators, and even suggesting ways to get away with the same types of crimes that these people committed but you could do it without getting caught.”

Although such conduct has in the past led to violence, the threats are often not prosecuted by local police. According to Dr. Susan Robinson, who used to perform abortions at the same Wichita clinic as Dr. Tiller did before it was closed: “they allow the anti-abortion protesters to set up dozens of crosses and leave them all day. Dr. Tiller went to the city attorney over the crosses, and complained that people block the clinic driveway,” she told journalist Amy Goodman. “He told me that the city attorney said, ‘I would rather be sued by George Tiller than the anti-abortion folks.’”

The federal law was enacted in part to fill in the gaps when local authorities refused or lacked the resources to bring charges. “Often local police won’t enforce the local laws against trespassing,” explained Mahoney, the former federal prosecutor. “It’s politically charged and local police want to stay out of it.” During her tenure at the Department of Justice, Mahoney said it was the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department that was charged with enforcing the FACE Act. That’s the same division that Inspector General reports and Congressional hearings eventually revealed repeatedly made hiring and enforcement decisions based on conservative political ideology rather than merit.

In the one situation in the last eight years that the Bush Justice Department decided did merit a lawsuit, in 2007, the charges were so serious that it’s not clear why the administration filed a civil suit rather than criminal charges. The federal government sought only an injunction — essentially, a court order telling the defendant to stop.

Yet this was no mere schoolyard-style harassment. According to the legal complaint filed by the Justice Department, John Dunkle, another member of the “Army of God”, had been publishing a monthly Web newsletter “encouraging readers of his publications to use deadly force against specifically identified reproductive health clinic physicians and staff, providing instruction on how to employ deadly force tactics; provoking physical and verbal confrontations with reproductive health clinic physicians, staff and patients at various clinics” and “publishing internet postings containing photographs and the home addresses of reproductive health clinic physicians and staff,” among other things.

The government also claimed that he “threatened a specific female clinic physician until she ceased providing reproductive health services in fear of the Defendants’ threats to her life.”

Those threats included “explicitly encourag[ing] his readers to kill the targeted individual by shooting her in the head”; publishing her name, photo and home address on his Web page and blog; and publishing instructions “regarding the specific means to kill the targeted individual, as well as how to escape detection upon the commission of her murder.” Such postings dated back more than two years, identifying the same person.

There is no question that such threats are criminal under the federal law, say legal experts. “Physical obstruction is not protected, violence is not protected and true threats are not protected,” said Louise Melling, Director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, which has submitted several amicus briefs to courts defending the constitutionality of the federal law. A “true threat” has been defined by the courts has a threat that would reasonably be interpreted by the person hearing it as a serious threat to their safety.

Yet in the case of John Dunkle, whose threats caused a reproductive health provider to quit her profession, the government did not seek criminal penalties or even any monetary damages to compensate the victims and deter future crimes; it simply asked the court to tell him to stop.

Department of Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar said that department officials decide whether or not to prosecute or seek damages in cases “on a case-by-case basis, and a number of factors are taken into account, including — among others — whether there is an identifiable subject and whether the matter is being pursued by local officials.” He was not aware of whether Dunkle had been prosecuted for related acts under state law, and there was no indication in the documents filed in the federal case that he had been.

Threats against abortion providers appears to have had a serious impact on the availability of the procedure, and particularly on the ability of women to obtain legal later-term abortions, even when the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, only two percent of all abortion providers in the United States currently provide such procedures, which are most heavily targeted by extremist anti-abortion groups. Women most commonly seek such abortions due to abnormalities of the fetus and threats to a woman’s health or life, and in many states they’re only legal if the woman’s health or life is in danger. Dr. Tiller and his clinic were therefore frequent targets of both violent threats and actions, up until the day before his death.

The FACE Act was adopted to prevent and prosecute this sort of violence, in part because Congress concluded that existing state laws and local law enforcement were unable to do the job on their own.

When President Clinton signed the FACE Act in 1994, he said: “We simply cannot — we must not — continue to allow the attacks, the incidents of arson, the campaigns of intimidation upon law-abiding citizens that (have) given rise to this law,” citing the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Florida in 1993, and the shooting of Dr. Tiller in both arms outside his clinic in Wichita that same year.

“No person seeking medical care, no physician providing that care should have to endure harassments or threats or obstruction or intimidation or even murder from vigilantes who take the law into their own hands because they think they know what the law ought to be.”

The statistics on enforcement of the FACE Act by the Justice Department suggest that during the Bush administration, protecting those physicians was no longer a high priority.

(Photo/Glynnis Ritchie, Flickr)

El Paso County is Colorado’s most-populated county. It’s also, undeniably, a GOP stronghold with a rich legacy of political hijinks and shenanigans — usually inspired by Republicans. And that leaves plenty of progressives leery that, come Election Day, Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink will do everything he can to make it difficult, or at least unpleasant, for non-Republicans to vote.

Which leads us to Democrat state Sen. John Morse’s claims of Balink’s 12-point strategy to suppress the vote.

“My goal as your county clerk and recorder is to deliver services and products to you in the most timely, cost efficient and secure manner possible, while treating you with courtesy and respect,” is what Balink has posted at the county’s official Web site.

El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink, left, and State Sen. John Morse. (Photos/El Paso County and State of Colorado)

2. Favor election machines that have only a limited audit trail and use election machines that have been decertified — if they’ve failed accuracy tests that makes them even better.

Again, Morse cites Balink’s support of electronic voting machines that had been decertified.

3. Hire unqualified people to do the work in the clerk’s office. This criticism comes in the wake of a recent report that Balink’s assistant chief deputy, John Gardner, who oversees the county’s election equipment, including accuracy testing, reportedly lied on his job application, claiming he had graduated from college even though he never did. “So you hire people who can’t do the work,” Morse jabs, “and then when things get jacked up and not done right you justify it by saying, ‘We’re working hard … this is a tough thing to do … counting all the votes is really hard.’”

4. Claim illegal residents are registering to vote and spend your limited time and resources to keep people from registering to vote instead of making sure people do register … and do it under the guise that — gasp — illegal immigrants are trying to vote! This point draws back to one of Balink’s most passionate issues of the past couple of years. He has said he has no scintilla of proof that undocumented people are attempting to vote in El Paso County but, as previously detailed by the Colorado Independent, Balink nonetheless ardently supports the notion that people should be required to prove their citizenship before they are allowed to vote. “America is under attack,” Balink claimed in one newsletter shortly before the 2006 election, calling for a “New American Revolution” of sorts, and demanding, “Where’s the outrage?” Says Morse: Balink should be working to register as many people as possible who are qualified to vote in the county — not chasing after a nonexistent bogeyman.

5. Purge the rolls of inactive voters and define the word “inactive” aggressively. Morse takes issue with the way that voters in El Paso County go right onto the “inactive” roll if they didn’t vote in a general election. (Liz Olson, the head of elections for the county, notes that inactive voters are sent cards in the mail when they miss a general election and are moved into the “inactive” category. In keeping with state law, inactive voters are purged from the rolls if they have not voted in two general elections.)

6. Send a letter to Colorado College — but not the Air Force Academy — with false information regarding voter registration. If you’re caught, claim you misinterpreted the law and pray no one actually looks at the law. Specifically, Morse is referencing a major dust-up of a few weeks ago when Colorado College, a liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, produced a letter from Balink’s office claiming that students there could not vote in El Paso County if their parents in other states claimed them as dependents in those states. That was incorrect, of course, and Balink subsequently claimed it was a big mix-up, and that his office had misinterpreted state law. The state statute — section 1-2-101 — Morse counters, is actually quite simple. Eligible voters must be 18 years old, a U.S. citizen and have lived in their precinct for 30 days prior to the election. Notably, the letter wasn’t sent to the Air Force Academy, also in Colorado Springs and presumably with a far more conservative student population than that of Colorado College.

7. Reduce the number of early voting locations so people can’t vote early and conveniently. Two years ago, El Paso County had six sites open for early voting; this year they closed three of them, including in Fountain, Monument and Falcon. Olson, the elections head, said that this year she expected a large voter turnout and opted to close those sites because of concerns they wouldn’t be able to handle the crowds.

8. Challenge each new voter registration. On Sept. 22, Balink announced that his office had determined a pattern of election “fraud.” Specifically, he cited incorrect addresses and invalid identifications, such as false drivers license numbers, among the indications of fraud. In all, Olson says, 19 suspected fraudulent voter registrations have been turned over to the district attorney for investigation. That’s out of 49,343 new voter registrations since Jan. 1 that have been processed so far, Morse notes — which hardly constitutes a pattern. “Bob Balink is not qualified to judge fraud — he needs to register people to vote and make sure they meet their legal requirements to do so instead of challenging them at every turn,” the senator says.

9. Process registrations as slowly as possible so people get their mail ballots slowly and don’t have time to vote by mail. Morse has been critical of the length of time the Clerk and Recorder’s office has processed the voter-related documents it has received. On Wednesday, Olson said her office has 9,000 documents, including new voter registrations, still to be processed.

10. Systematically challenge Colorado College students on the day of the polls. In 2004, many students waited for hours to vote at their precinct at First Presbyterian Church downtown and reported they faced tough scrutiny from judges, including challenges to the identification documents they produced.

11. Claim at every opportunity that you are saving the taxpayers money by limiting voting. By slashing early voting centers and opposing the cost of paper ballots, officials can claim they are saving cash and being “good stewards” of the taxpayers’ money. Last year county commissioners slashed the budget for this year’s election, a move Morse calls unconscionable. “Balink’s using the lack of a budget to justify suppressing the vote,” claims Morse, a former chief of police. “County commissioners should be shutting down the Sheriff’s Office before shutting down the election department.”

12. When accused of attempting to suppress the vote and limiting voting, stay out of sight. Whatever you do, don’t talk to the media. Just send out press releases denying plausibility. Balink, Morse notes, hasn’t responded to requests by news outlets and hasn’t shown up on camera to answer questions about the recent controversies.

Note: This week Balink, in his second elected term in office, did not respond to requests seeking response to criticisms of his office. His elections manager, Liz Olson, rejected claims that would-be voters were being purposely disenfranchised. “We have not stopped anyone from registering to vote,” Olson said. “We’re a public office — if someone wants to vote we register them.” She referred specific questions about her boss’s past statements to Balink … her boss.

Gabriel Nathan Schwartz, 29 and reportedly single, was robbed after he met a woman in the bar of the swanky Ivy Hotel in downtown Minneapolis and took her to his $319-a-night room.

“Victim reported suspect made victim drinks, told him to get undressed, which is the last thing he remembers,” according to the police narrative. “Upon waking, victim discovered money, jewelry gone; total loss over $120K.”

The haul, according to Pioneer Press reporter David Hanners, included a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, a necklace valued at $5,000, earrings priced at $4,000 and a Prada belt valued at $1,000.

The theft allegedly occurred hours after GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Sept. 3 acceptance speech — and also hours after Schwartz provided a particularly candid interview about his political views to LinkTV.org, in which he cheerfully opined that he is for “less taxes and more war.”

The United States, he said with a grin, should “bomb the hell” out of Iran, since it poses a threat to Israel.

And how should America pay for this attack against Iran?

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

Schwartz declined to comment to the Pioneer Press since the investigation is ongoing. But his flip comments and smug attitude during his TV interview has prompted the well-known Washington blogger Wonkette to weigh in — in spades. And suffice to say, she isn’t exactly feeling sorry for the victim of the theft.

Rather, in a scathing diatribe, Wonkette waxes on about “instant karma” — and what that means for “vulgarian lawyers” who wear tacky, jewel-encrusted wardrobes and cannot correctly pronounce the word “nuclear.”

Sign directing traffic to K Street, home to a row of infamous Washington, DC lobbying firms. (Photo/ M.V. Jantzen, Flickr)

It was one of the chief vows of the Democratic Party as it took control of both congressional chambers in 2007: to sever the cozy relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers brought to light by the Jack Abramoff scandals.

Congress passed sweeping lobbying and ethics reforms last year, and this was the first convention season under the stringent new rules. Yet, despite the enactment of the new regulations, campaign-finance watchdogs argue that much remains to be done to stem the abuses. The groups are pointing to the national conventions as evidence that ethics laws, both new and old, leave gaping loopholes still to be addressed.

“The law clearly had an effect,” said Josh Zaharoff, assistant director of campaign finance at Common Cause. “But there’s still very much of that element of companies using the conventions to gain access … Clearly these corporations saw it as a chance to buy influence.”

Zaharoff wasn’t kidding.

In Minneapolis last week, Republican leaders vowed to scale back the events surrounding their convention in recognition of those suffering from the arrival of Hurricane Gustav on Monday. Yet that call did little to break the partying spirit of convention attendees. Instead of scrapping the parties, many sponsors simply reconfigured them as charity events for victims of the storm.

Nancy Watzman of Political Party Time, a project of the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group focused on the federal government, trekked tirelessly from gala to gala in both Minneapolis and Denver — usually to be turned back at the door. She reported from Minnesota last week on a big-pharma-sponsored breakfast featuring an appearance by Rep. Michael Rogers (R-Mich.).

ABC’s Brian Ross discovered Mississippi River paddle-wheel boat excursions for Ohio’s GOP delegation sponsored by the chemical industry. Oil companies, he found, hosted the California delegation with a pig roast.

Despite Gustav, Ross concluded, “corporate lobbyists went ahead with their plans … to spend millions of dollars entertaining key Republican lawmakers and officials.”

The Democratic National Convention in Denver (DNC), meanwhile, looked like a party marathon. The DNC boasted more than 400 events sponsored by outside interest groups, according to a document created by Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a lobbying firm, and publicized by the Sunlight Foundation.

While many of those events were bare-bones, advocate-sponsored forums focused on issues, others were lavish, corporate-sponsored galas targeting members of Congress and other Democratic officials — everything from an AT&T-funded luncheon for the Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island delegations at the Pinnacle Club, a private event space high atop the Grand Haytt, to a gathering of Democratic attorneys general at the Ritz-Carlton, sponsored by AstroZeneca, a pharmaceutical giant facing numerous suits in federal and state courts.

Like many lobbying groups, the Poker Players Alliance sponsored events in both cities. To generate attention among many convention-related activities, the alliance brought along Hollywood stars. In Denver, for example, celebrities like Ben Affleck and Sarah Silverman were at the event. The alliance’s Web site does nothing to disguise the group’s intentions, saying it “is taking advantage of the concentration of delegates and members of Congress … to continue to lobby for the legalization of online poker.”

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

In the wake of a series of ethics scandals involving several Republicans’ illegal dealings with lobbyists — most prominently the separate episodes that sent former Reps. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) and Bob Ney (R-Ohio) to prison — Democrats in 2006 ran on a platform of distancing Congress members from the influence of moneyed interests.

“Our goal is to restore accountability, honesty and openness at all levels of government,” reads a passage from the House Democrats’ “New Direction” agenda. “To do so, we will create and enforce rules that demand the highest ethics from every public servant, sever unethical ties between lawmakers and lobbyists and establish clear standards that prevent the trading of official business for gifts.”

That vow culminated in the 2007 passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, a law that prohibits members of Congress from participating in lobbyist-funded events designed to “honor” or “recognize” lawmakers at the conventions.

But the ethics committees in each chamber interpreted that law differently. The House panel claims that the rule applies only to events honoring single members, and not to those recognizing groups of lawmakers. Watchdog groups say the trouble is not with the law itself, but with this interpretation.

“The rules are actually very, very good — and very sweeping,” said Craig Holman, a campaign-finance reform lobbyist for Public Citizen. “The problem has been the enforcement. … When you’ve got different interpretations [of the law], you see lobbyists exploiting that as a loophole.”

Fred Wertheimer, president and CEO of Democracy 21, a campaign-finance watchdog, issued a statement last month warning lawmakers away from a corporate-sponsored Denver event honoring the freshman class of House Democrats. The ethics committee’s ruling, he argued, should not set members above the intent of the law.

“This so-called ‘guidance’ not only is an incorrect interpretation of the new ethics rule,” he said, “it makes no sense.”

Watchdog groups are also critical of an interpretation of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign reform act that allows corporations and other donors to make unlimited contributions to a national convention’s host committee. That ruling, passed down by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), reasons that the donations are aimed to booster the host cities, not the political parties — something many watchdog groups dispute.

“It’s party leaders who actually head the committee and make the decisions,” said Zaharoff of Common Cause. “[The companies] wouldn’t do it if it didn’t benefit them.”

Watchdogs want to amend these interpretations, or enact clarifying legislation if the FEC and ethics committees fail to revisit the current laws. Holman of Public Citizen predicted that Congress would take up the issue again next year.

“The FEC,” Holman said, “has a history of not closing the floodgates that they open. We’ll have to revisit it with new legislation.”

4:15 a.m.
I’m developing a purely anecdotal theory about Republican drunkenness: that it’s related to ideology. The less ideological arrive back at the headquarters earlier in the evening, between midnight and 1 a.m. These are, in chronological order, the Romney and the Giuliani supporters. Both are East Coast, urban college grad, corporate types. They like to drink and reminisce about the Harvard-Yale game, but they also like to wake up early, shave and not smell like booze at committee meetings. The Giuliani people are secular and more openly lecherous. So they tend to drink a bit harder and stay out closer to 1 a.m. The Ron Paul people party past 1 a.m., but not much. And they shave but they don’t showboat.

The ones who stay out the latest and come back the drunkest, I notice, are the Huckabee folks, the party’s rural conservatives. They believe in Jesus, in the hard-bitten way of the true alcoholic. If they ever sober up, it’ll be by the grace of the Lord; and if they intend to stay on the sauce and continue living, then they’ll really need His loving kindness. If you intend to be drinking heavily until closing time — 4 a.m. in the Twin Cities during the RNC — you had better walk home with Jesus.

I can’t place true McCainites on the alcohol-ideology matrix. I think they were all asleep by 9:30 p.m.

“Here’s a little warning for the big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming,” McCain told a cheering audience of about 7,000 in a speech that sounded the theme of change that both campaigns are scrambling to claim.

If that line sounds familiar, it’s because it was part of McCain’s convention acceptance speech Thursday night. In fact, nearly all of his and Palin’s speeches were near-verbatim abbreviated repeats of their convention addresses, down to the punch lines.

Re-live the acceptance speech moments again and again at Michigan Messenger.

Stay tuned to The Colorado Independent for Jason Kosena’s dispatches from the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport rally to see if Coloradans get the real thing or retreads.

(Photo/2008 Republican National Convention and Reflections Photography)

A dispatch from our Iowa Independent colleague Jason Hancock with huge implications for Colorado’s renewable energy economy.

Republicans unanimously passed a platform on Monday that calls for the federal government to end a mandate that gasoline contain a set amount of ethanol, but Iowa Republicans say they oppose the proposal.

Under the agriculture section, the platform talks about food versus fuel concerns and states that the “U.S. government should end mandates for ethanol and let the free market work.”

The move is a major change from the 2004 platform, which supported expanding the use of ethanol as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil and increase revenue for farmers. It’s also a move away from the Bush administration’s views on ethanol towards those of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain.

Iowa’s Republican leaders disagreed with the move but shied away from being overtly critical of the platform and the party’s presidential candidate.

“I assume the platform was presented and voted up and down without discussion and ethanol was not discussed separately,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley in a conference call with reporters yesterday morning. “If we were going to have $140-a-barrel oil our whole life, we may not need mandates. But if we didn’t have mandates, we wouldn’t have the vibrant energy business we have right now.”

Iowa’s elected Republican members of Congress were not delegates to the convention, and thus did not have the opportunity to vote on the platform plank regarding ethanol. Many speculated, when it was announced that congressional Republicans would not be delegates, that it was because they disagreed with McCain on farm policy and ethanol subsidies. That rumor was quickly quelled, with Grassley specifically saying it was in order to allow more Iowans to be a part of the political process. Now, with the ethanol mandate portion of the platform in place, the speculation has begun again.

However, Republican officials would not address that rumor.

“[U.S. Rep. Tom] Latham believes that this industry is too young to embrace such a policy statement,” said James Carstensen, the Republican congressman’s chief of staff, in a statement. “He has always been a champion of ethanol, biodiesel and other biofuels as they are vital to the economic growth and security of Iowa while also helping to accomplish America’s energy independence by lessening our dependence on foreign oil.”

Other Midwestern Republicans were not so timid in their criticism of the platform plank.

“It’s proof that Republicans are not always right,” South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune told The Associated Press. “On this one, they just got it wrong.”

The renewable fuel standard was expanded in the 2007 energy bill to require a total of 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be blended into gasoline by 2022. However, the law gives the EPA the authority to waive portions of the law at its discretion.

In May, McCain joined 23 other Senate Republicans in sending a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking it to consider waiving ethanol mandates.

In August, U.S. regulators rejected a request from Texas Gov. Rick Perry to halve the ethanol mandate, which he blamed for driving up the price of corn and making it more expensive for farmers to feed their livestock.

“This item in the platform is not anti-ethanol, it is anti-federal mandates on the states, which is a traditional conservative viewpoint,” said Steward Iverson, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa in a statement from the convention.

The party adopted the platform Monday, one of the few formal actions taken on a day when the convention was scaled back because of concerns over Hurricane Gustav.

Under the energy section, the platform states that America “must continue to develop alternative fuels, such as biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol, and hasten their technological advances to next-generation production” and says that “because alternative fuels are useless if vehicles cannot use them, we must move quickly to flexible fuel vehicles.”

With Iowa expected to be a presidential battleground state this November, many wonder whether the anti-ethanol mandate plank in the national party platform will hurt McCain’s chances of winning Iowa.

Tim Hagle, associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa and faculty advisor to the school’s College Republicans, said the content of the platforms from either party haven’t been all that important for quite awhile.

“They are essentially statements of the party base of things they would like to see done or principles followed — at least for those participating in the process,” he said, adding: “More often than not such planks are used to try to create a ‘gotcha’ moment along the lines of, ‘Candidate So-and-so, your party has plank X, but you’ve said Y on the issue. How do you reconcile that difference?’ On the whole, the process of creating the party platform is a good exercise in grassroots democracy, but it’s certainly not critical to a candidate.”

Grassley said that he disagrees with that part of the platform because without the mandates he believes there wouldn’t be the investment in ethanol that there has been to date.

“We get 5 percent of fuel for our vehicles from renewables, and if we didn’t we’d be getting 5 percent more from foreign oil,” he said. “It would be sending billions of dollars more to Arabs, and I just don’t think that’s good economic security. It’s not national security, it’s not good foreign policy.”

Despite disagreeing with McCain and his party on ethanol, Grassley said McCain is still mostly right on energy policy, so he will continue to support him.

“I may have disagreements with Sen. McCain on other issues as well if you go through the platform. I might find one or two other things to disagree on,” he said. “But he supports expanded drilling, which I think is a bigger energy issue than where he stands on ethanol.”

Last week, 38.4 million watched Obama accept his party’s nomination — including 7.5 million African Americans, more than twice as many as watched McCain’s address. Five million more white viewers watched the Republican than watched the Democrat. Obama’s audience blasted previous records for convention speeches.

TV critics speculate McCain benefitted from NBC’s broadcast of the first regular season NFL game between the New York Giants and Washington Redskins, which ended right before McCain’s speech started.

On Wednesday night, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin drew nearly as many viewers as Obama in her first prime-time speech, with more than 37 million watching her accept the vice presidential nomination.

The Nielsen numbers don’t include PBS or C-Span viewers, or online audiences and households using digital video recorders. PBS estimates 2.7 million watched its coverage of the RNC Thursday, compared with 3.5 million Obama viewers. With those figures added in, Obama edged McCain slightly in the live audience contest.

On average, viewership of this year’s conventions is two- to three-times the audience for the parties’ 2004 gatherings. Nielsen measured viewers for McCain’s speech on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, Telemundo, and Univision. Two networks — BET and TV One — carried Obama’s speech but didn’t broadcast McCain’s.

Sen. John McCain in Denver speaking to the American GI Forum, July 25, 2008. (Photo/Bob Spencer)

Darkness had fallen over the city when Sen. John McCain stepped out from the shadow created by his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, after she lashed out at the Democrats and the media and intellectual elites the night before. He did so as a man declared politically dead in July 2007 when, facing dismal poll numbers and a campaign bleeding money, he let most of his staff go. Now resurrected, McCain delivered an acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination that reinforced his image of the elder statesman from the party in power that would keep America the great power in the world.

“I’m very proud to have introduced our next vice president to the country,” McCain said. “But I can’t wait until I introduce her to Washington. And let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming.”

McCain, 72, had arrived in the Twin Cities with much to prove. The self-described maverick has never been a favorite among the conservative base of his own party — despite repeated overtures. His past ability to work with some of the most liberal senators, like Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), had only increased the ire of many influential members of the GOP. That both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s almost and current vice-presidential nominees, have called him a friend, only reinforced his lack of conservative cred among the GOP base.

But the Republican Party could be ready to overlook all this. “They’re past their differences,” said Sara Taylor, a former White House political director in the Bush administration. “You can see the excitement in the hall. They understand national security is going to matter a lot for the country — and they understand John McCain is part of that future.”

McCain’s selection of the uber-conservative Palin as his running mate did much to quell the conservative backlash. But now it was his turn to prove that the man eviscerated by George W. Bush and Karl Rove during the 2000 South Carolina primary was truly one of them.

McCain’s task last night was to energize the core of the party and reach out to independents — in the same fashion Obama had done last week. He would have to do what he had regularly mocked his opponent for doing: For one night, he would have to do what he’s least good at — speak before a large audience and rock the house.

But more precarious was the lingering legacy of George W. Bush. McCain had to play to the base while disowning the legacy of Bush. Even as he acknowledged Bush at the opening, McCain had to make a quick pivot away from the president with the lowest poll rating in U.S. history.

How in God’s name does the party in power become the party of change? And how could McCain restore a Republican brand that’s become synonymous with corruption, urban neglect and a war policy gone terribly wrong?

“I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party,” McCain said, echoing words he’s used on the stump. “We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when, rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when, instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Sen. Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles.

“We’re going to change that,” he said. “We’re going to recover the people’s trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics.”

McCain had a bigger opponent to overcome last night than Obama. He had to overcome himself.

In the past months, McCain stump speeches have taken on angry overtones. He has gone from calling his opponent “naive” on foreign policy to questioning the Illinois senator’s patriotic ideals. Last night, however, he showed a graciousness to Obama not seen before, at least by this reporter. Early on, he acknowledged Obama’s historic achievement in winning his party’s nomination, while promising a fair fight to come.

“We’ll go at it over the next two months,” McCain said. “That’s the nature of these contests, and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and admiration. Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other. We’re dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. No country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn’t be an American worthy of the name if I didn’t honor Sen. Obama and his supporters for their achievement.” (Of course, this didn’t stop McCain from taking a thinly veiled shot at Obama late in his speech.)

No one has ever accused McCain of being a great orator. But this speech did play to his strength in foreign policy. It wasn’t folksy or colloquial. Shrugging off Code Pink protesters, he spoke with full declarations stressing experience and toughness, the primary themes of his campaign.

“We have dealt a serious blow to Al-Qaeda in recent years,” he said before that godawful light-blue background. “But they are not defeated, and they’ll strike us again if they can. Iran remains the chief state sponsor of terrorism and on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons. Russia’s leaders, rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power, have rejected democratic ideals and the obligations of a responsible power. They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world’s oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of reassembling the Russian empire. And the brave people of Georgia need our solidarity and prayers.

“As president, I will work to establish good relations with Russia so we need not fear a return of the Cold War. But we can’t turn a blind eye to aggression and international lawlessness that threatens the peace and stability of the world and the security of the American people.

“We face many threats in this dangerous world, but I’m not afraid of them,” he continued. “I’m prepared for them. I know how the military works, what it can do, what it can do better, and what it should not do. I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it. I know how to work with leaders who share our dreams of a freer, safer and more prosperous world, and how to stand up to those who don’t. I know how to secure the peace.”

Still, he missed where one expected him to miss. Since the end of the primaries, Democrats have hammered McCain for being out of touch with ordinary folk, for having an adviser in Phil Graham, who deemed the country’s economic woes “mental” and called America a nation of “whiners.” In many town halls, McCain has struggled to talk about issues like education and wages, the mortgage crisis and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

“It was probably the weakest speech of the four nominees,” said historian David Greenberg, author of “Nixon:The History of an Image.”

“The main problem is he really does not have a real domestic policy vision as late as Sept. 4. You can’t be a Teddy Roosevelt conservative and appeal to the present-day Republican Party. It was really kind of muddled. When he talked about domestic issues and people being out of work, it was like he was using rhetoric straight from the Democrats … It was like he was groping around to try and speak about the decisive issue of the election, which is economics.”

Of course, McCain was preaching to the converted. In the hours before he spoke, Montana delegate Karen Pfäehler sat where her delegation would be gathering. Still beaming over the Palin speech, she broke off our conversation when we started on the economic hardships faced by Americans, saying, “I trust him to keep us safe and I don’t trust Barack Obama. Without security, economic issues don’t matter.”

Echoing that same sentiment, Andrea Hoffman, an Oregon delegate and Realtor from Salem, wearing a red rhinestone-cowboy hat, said, “McCain gives us security and stability for the country. If we don’t have security, domestic issues don’t matter. Look, I’m proud to be an American and I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us.”

“This is a scary time and Barack Obama makes me nervous,” said Dave Johnson, an Ohio delegate who runs a ceramic tile business founded by his grandfather. “You have a country like Iran that wants nuclear weapons and wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Obama wants to sit down and talk to them. This is absurd.

“This is one of the most reckless, liberal candidates the Democrats have put up in quite some time,” Johnson said. “I’m frightful if he’s elected –- not only for the economy but for our national security.”

Acceptance speeches do not have to reach the heights climbed by the Democratic candidate in Denver. They can simply be moments of definition — where you reassure the base that you represent the best interests of your party and where you present a policy package before the growing number of independents who make up the U.S. electorate.

“We have 60 days to convince these middle-of-the-road voters that we have the right vision for the future,” said Yantis Green, a Texas delegate, who, like the rest of his delegation, sported a cowboy hat and a red-white-and-blue button-down shirt. “You can’t take away what Obama did last week. He did exactly what he had to do. No wonder their base was fired up. We know we’ve got work to do.

“What we’re suffering from is end-of-the-second-term fatigue,” Green continued. “You saw it with Reagan. You saw it with Clinton. And now you’re seeing that with Bush. For those middle-of-the-road voters, it’s going to come down to substance and issues — and we have a different set of issues than the Democrats. When we get down to the middle-of-the-road voters, we have to sell. Our plan is simply better.”

McCain enters the general election as the anti-Bush. He lacks the personal touch the current president displayed in beating Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. He is a man of Washington, a senator who will not come to the White House as an outsider. Moreover, he has a personal narrative that few of us can fully comprehend. But perhaps that’s not so bad.

“He’s someone you perhaps more admire than relate to,” said Kerry Healey, the former Massachusetts lieutenant governor, as she sat alone, waiting for the official events to begin. “For leaders, we want both. We want them to be both just like us and better than we are — and that’s a hard thing to do.

“He’s the president of the United States,” Healey said. “You’re not going over for a beer.”