OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
Congress shouldn’t
let Trump silence
public broadcasting
O
nce again, congressional conservatives are considering
cutting — or eliminating — federal funding for the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it’s a serious
threat that could be devastating locally.
Nonprofit public-media platforms receive allocations from
the CPB, which they combine with other fundraising and rev-
enue generating efforts to cover operating costs. In Oregon the
recipients, among others, include Oregon Public Broadcasting
and Coast Community Radio, which consists of KMUN in
Astoria, KCPB in Warrenton and KTCB in Tillamook. The
local broadcaster provides a variety of shows produced by com-
munity members, with local news, music and other entertain-
ment, including national programming. Coast Community Radio
also serves as an emergency service, providing a medium for
regional communication during power outages, emergencies and
disasters.
The newest threat to CPB funding arose in President Donald
Trump’s blueprint budget for fiscal 2018 which was unveiled
this month. The budget
proposes defunding the
Public
CPB, and its most famous
grantee, National Public
broadcasting
Radio, which conserva-
is part of the
tives have long viewed as
sympathetic to left-wing
fabric of our
views and an inappropri-
free society,
ate use of government fund-
and it needs to
ing. According to the Pew
Center’s 2016 Fact Sheet on
stay that way.
Public Broadcasting, NPR
has an average weekly audi-
ence of 26 million, and it’s programming is carried on more than
1,000 stations nationwide. Trump’s budget would also defund
the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment
for the Humanities and more than a dozen other agencies.
The budget, however, is subject to congressional review
and may look very different by the time the process is com-
pleted. We hope it does, but as Coast Community Radio General
Manager Joanne Rideout says, the budget threat could be “the
real deal.”
The cuts would deeply impact rural areas like Clatsop
County. According to the CPB, 43 percent, or 248 of the 575
stations currently receiving CPB support, are considered rural.
CPB’s allocation to Coast Community Radio, for instance,
amounts to 26 percent of its revenue budget, and Rideout says it
would be hard-pressed to operate without the CPB money.
Despite the current GOP temperament in the nation’s capital,
past attempts to cut off CPB’s funding have failed.
U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Portland Democrat who
founded and leads the bipartisan Public Broadcasting Caucus
in the House, points out that in 2005 the GOP-led House
Appropriations Committee recommended cutting 25 percent
from the CPB’s $400 million outlay, leading to a weeklong pub-
lic outcry. All but six of the House’s 202 Democrats voted down
the proposal, with 87 of 140 Republicans joining.
We hope that trend continues because the CPB has the gen-
eral public’s support. A new Quinnipiac University national poll
says 70 percent of American voters oppose the proposed elimi-
nation of CPB funding.
Blumenauer and Republican Rep. Dave Reichert, of Auburn,
Washington, are working to build support for a letter backing
funding for CPB, Ready To Learn and public broadcasting’s
interconnection system, to be sent to colleagues who serve on
the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related
Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, which handles CPB
funding. It’s chaired by Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, and last
year’s letter was signed by a bipartisan group of 132 members of
the House.
The letter this year, in part, states, “These federal investments
are critical to public media’s mission to provide unique services
in the areas of education, public safety, and civic leadership to
all Americans. … In rural areas, where public broadcasting sta-
tions can be the only source of free, high-quality local program-
ming available to families, funding from CPB can amount to
more than half of some rural stations’ budgets. This is a gap that
cannot be closed by increased underwriting revenue or donor
support.”
U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat whose district
includes Clatsop County, strongly supports the fund-saving
effort. She calls cutting the funding “wrong and short-sighted,”
especially at a time when the president “is proposing to add
more to an already bloated defense budget and build a massively
expensive and unnecessary border wall.”
Bonamici’s right, and her congressional colleagues should
take notice and support the effort. Public broadcasting is part of
the fabric of our free society, and it needs to stay that way.
Triumph of incompetence
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
New York Times News Service
O
ne of President Donald
Trump’s rare strengths has
been his ability to project
competence. The Dow Jones stock
index is up an
astonishing 2,200
points since his
election in part
because investors
believed Trump
could deliver tax
reform and infrastructure spending.
Think again!
The Trump administration is
increasingly showing itself to be
breathtakingly incompetent, and
that’s the real lesson of the collapse
of the GOP health care bill. The
administration proved unable to
organize its way out of a paper bag:
After seven years of Republicans’
publicly loathing Obamacare, their
repeal-replace bill failed after 18
days.
Politics sometimes rewards brag-
garts, and Trump is a world-class
boaster. He promised a health care
plan that would be “unbelievable,”
“beautiful,” “terrific,” “less expen-
sive and much better,” “insurance
for everybody.” But he’s abysmal
at delivering — because the basic
truth is that he’s an effective poli-
tician who’s utterly incompetent at
governing.
It’s sometimes said that pol-
iticians campaign in poetry and
govern in prose. Trump campaigns
in braggadocio and governs in
bombast.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s
merits, this competence gap raises
profound questions about our
national direction. If the administra-
tion can’t repeal Obamacare — or
manage friendly relations with allies
like Mexico or Australia — how
will it possibly accomplish some-
thing complicated like tax reform?
Failure and weakness also build
on themselves, and the health care
debacle will make it more difficult
for Trump to get his way with
Congress on other issues. As people
recognize that the emperor is wear-
ing no clothes, that perception of
weakness will spiral.
One of the underlying problems
is Trump’s penchant for personnel
choices that are bafflingly bad or
ethically challenged or both. Mike
Flynn was perhaps the best-known
example.
But consider Sebastian Gorka, a
counterterrorism adviser to the pres-
ident. Gorka, who is of Hungarian
origin, founded an extremist right-
wing party in Hungary in 2007, and
The Forward has published articles
claiming that Gorka had ties to the
anti-Semitic Hungarian right and
is a sworn member of a Nazi-allied
group in Hungary called Vitezi
Rend.
Members of the organization use
a lowercase v as a middle initial,
and The Forward noted that Gorka
has presented his name as Sebastian
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
President Donald Trump holds up a pen he used to sign one of various
bills in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.,
on Monday. From left are, Sen. Tom Barrasso, R-Wyo., Rep. Don Young,
R-Alaska, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Vice President Mike Pence.
L.v. Gorka.
Gorka’s background might
have become a problem when he
immigrated to the U.S., for the State
Department manual says that Vitezi
Rend members “are presumed to
be inadmissible.” Karl Pfeifer, an
Austrian journalist who has long
specialized in Hungarian affairs,
told me that Gorka unquestionably
had worked with racists and
anti-Semites in Hungary.
It’s sometimes
said that
politicians
campaign in
poetry and
govern in
prose. Trump
campaigns in
braggadocio
and governs
in bombast.
Gorka and the White House did
not respond to my inquiries. But
Gorka told The Tablet website that
he had never been a member of
Vitezi Rend and used the v initial
only to honor his father. He has
robust defenders, who say he has
never shown a hint of racism or
anti-Semitism.
Ana Navarro, a GOP strategist,
tweeted: “Donald Trump attracts
some of the shadiest, darkest, weird-
est people around him.”
In fairness, Trump has also
appointed plenty of solid people:
Jim Mattis, Elaine Chao, H.R.
McMaster, Dina Powell, Gary Cohn,
Steven Mnuchin and more. And
Trump’s Supreme Court nominee,
Neil Gorsuch, is a first-rate lawyer.
Yet Trump’s record of appoint-
ments overall suggests a lack of
interest in expertise. I’m not sure
that this is “the worst Cabinet in
American history,” as a Washington
Post opinion writer put it, but it
might be a contender. The last two
energy secretaries were renowned
scientists, one with a Nobel Prize,
while Trump appointed Rick Perry
— who once couldn’t remember the
department’s name.
Trump appointed his bankruptcy
lawyer, David Friedman, to be
ambassador to Israel. He chose
Jason Greenblatt, another of his
lawyers, to negotiate Mideast peace.
He picked Omarosa Manigault,
who starred with him on “The
Apprentice” and has a record of
inflating her résumé, to be assistant
to the president.
The director of Oval Office
operations is Keith Schiller, a for-
mer Trump bodyguard best known
for whacking a protester. And the
Trump team installed as a minder
in the Labor Department a former
campaign worker who graduated
from high school in 2015, according
to ProPublica.
So see the failure of the
Republican health care bill through
a larger prism: The measure
collapsed not just because it was
a dreadful bill (a tax cut for the
wealthy financed by dropping health
coverage for the needy). It also
failed as a prime example of the
Trump administration’s competence
gap.
Democrats may feel reassured,
because ineptitude may impede
some of Trump’s worst initiatives.
But even if Trump is unable to
build, he may be able to destroy: I
fear that his health care “plan” now
is to suffocate Obamacare by failing
to enforce the insurance mandate,
and then claim that its spasms are
inevitable.
Of all the national politicians
I’ve met over the decades, Trump
may be the one least interested in
government or policy; he’s absorbed
simply with himself. And what
we’re seeing more clearly now is
that he has crafted an administration
in his own image: vain, narcissistic
and dangerous.
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