NATION

Article(s) posted July, 2010

A Rebellion in the Middle: Independents Gain Favor

By SUSAN PAGE, USA TODAY

WARWICK, R.I. - Lincoln Chafee comes from a long line of Rhode Island governors, three in the previous four generations, all of them Republicans. Now the former Republican senator and mayor of Warwick is running for governor himself.

As an independent.

No independent has been elected to lead a state for more than a decade, since pro wrestler-turned-politician Jesse "The Body" Ventura became governor of Minnesota in 1999.

But this year there are three credible independent contenders for governor - a record.

If the "Tea Party" movement represents an uprising against the political status quo by the right, the independent campaigns and plausible prospects for gubernatorial candidates in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine reflect a rebellion from the middle.

There are more signs of centrists stirring as national politics remain sharply polarized, a factor some candidates cite for leaving or being pushed from their old allegiances. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who became an independent candidate for the Senate when the GOP seemed certain to nominate Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, now leads the three-way field. In California last month, voters approved a constitutional amendment to make primaries open and non-partisan, a measure intended to boost moderate contenders.

"One of the things we're seeing this year is a voter revolt against the extremes in both parties and a desire to find candidates who can be elected from the middle and who can govern from the middle," says Eliot Cutler, a former Carter administration official who is running as an independent for governor of Maine.

Gubernatorial candidates Cutler, Chafee and Tim Cahill of Massachusetts promise straight talk and tough love in a year when both parties are viewed unfavorably by most Americans. Sixty percent of those surveyed in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll say they are very or somewhat likely to vote for an independent candidate this fall, signaling at the least an openness to the idea.

"These are bad economic conditions and an extreme public disenchantment with the major parties," says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a former political science professor at Brown, in Providence. "That creates an opportunity for independent candidates."

"I think what voters want to hear is an honest recipe for recovery and some optimism," says Chafee, who left the GOP after losing a bruising battle for re-election to the Senate in 2006.

He may be testing voters' appetite for honesty: In his announcement speech, he suggested addressing the state's daunting budget gap by levying a 1 percent sales tax on food, clothing, over-the-counter drugs and other items now exempt from the state's 7 percent sales tax. In a six-way debate on WPRI-TV in June - among two Democratic candidates, two Republicans and two independents - Chafee's tax proposal was the first question raised by moderator Tim White and the prime target of attack.

"He wants to raise taxes and I want to cut spending," Democrat Frank Caprio, the state treasurer and Chafee's leading competitor, said after the debate when asked about his strategy. "That's the difference between us."

The Democratic Governors Association, trying to put the tax in the worst possible light, says on its website that Chafee's "shocking tax plan" would impose levies on "blind business owners, veterans, amputees (and amputee veterans)," noting the 1 percent tax would fall on equipment that the disabled need to drive cars.

Westerly to Woonsocket

Chafee's chances are boosted by his familiar name and a door-to-door brand of retail politics in what is officially known as the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. In the nation's smallest state, with a population of just more than 1 million people, a candidate can drive from Westerly at the southern end to Woonsocket at the northern in an hour or so.

Arriving for lunch at Iggy's Doughboys&Chowder House here, Chafee joins the outdoor line of those waiting to order. Iggy's owner David Gravino, 37, greets him with an enthusiastic handshake and back slap.

"He was a great mayor," Gravino says. As mayor of Warwick from 1993 to 1999, Chafee helped revitalize the surrounding hurricane-damaged area overlooking Narragansett Bay and attended the 1998 opening of the clam shack's indoor dining room.

As Chafee carries bags of the eatery's signature doughboys - a cardiologist's nightmare of deep fat-fried dough and crab - Antonio Ferreira, 67, comes over to get his photo snapped and a trio at the next table give him a friendly wave.

"I remember when he went to Cedar Hill Elementary School," says Hilda Poppe, 83, a retired librarian from Warwick whose younger daughter was in Chafee's class. She and her husband, Norman, 84, are having lunch on the outdoor deck with their older daughter, Nonnie O'Brien, 59.

"I always vote Democratic except for him," O'Brien says.

"He has a Republican name but he's always been independent," her father says approvingly.

What about his idea of raising the sales tax?

Norman Poppe hadn't heard about the proposal. "I don't like that," he says, frowning.

"But if it pays the debt," his wife chimes in. With the state's finances in trouble - there's a projected budget shortfall for next year of $405 million - she says any remedy will be painful.

"The others are saying they won't do it," her husband concedes, "but they might when they get in anyway."

Chafee acknowledges that suggesting the tax hike is a calculated risk. He's counting on voters to reward a straightforward discussion of the options ahead. If they don't, he says, the fault will be his own failure to communicate and convince them.

He cites former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas as a model. Tsongas' warnings about the dangers of the federal deficit and his ridicule of candidates' pandering helped him win the New Hampshire Democratic primary in 1992, though he lost the presidential nomination to Bill Clinton.

"I'm well aware of the dangers of honesty," Chafee says. His father, John, was defeated in his bid for a fourth term as governor in 1968 after he argued a state income tax was imperative. His successor, who had hammered him about it during the campaign, was forced to adopt one two years after taking office.

"It was devastating; he loved being governor," Chafee, who was 15 at the time, says of his late father, who also served in the Senate and died in 1999. "But I never heard him say 'I could have done it differently.' "

'A Wake-Up Call'

Chafee, 57, is a happier, more confident candidate than he was during his last race four years ago.

Then, he was challenged from the right in the Republican primary by Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey. He lost in November to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.

Chafee felt rejected by the GOP, which no longer seemed willing to include moderate Republicans like himself.

The worst moment, he says, was when conservative commentator Ann Coulter wrote a critical column titled, "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln."

"I was waiting for someone to speak out" against her, Chafee says of the party's leaders. "But no one did."

After losing the race, he taught at Brown, his alma mater, and wrote a book titled Against the Tide. In 2008, Chafee voted for Barack Obama, his first vote for a Democrat. He weighed joining the Green or Libertarian parties but found neither a good fit. Chafee considered Rhode Island's fledgling Moderate Party but thought the name sounded "wishy-washy."

Running as an independent frees him from defending party positions that are not his own, Chafee says - a liberation.

A Rasmussen survey in May, the most recent public poll available, gave him a narrow lead over Caprio and likely Republican nominee John Robitaille.

"I think this trend will continue and it should be a wake-up call to the parties," says Angus King, who was elected and re-elected governor of Maine as an independent in the 1990s. "If they continue to spend more time on picking each other apart and less time on problem-solving, the American people are going to find other options."

Still, running as an independent isn't easy, one reason that Democrats and Republicans have dominated American politics since the Civil War.

Not since Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive bid in 1912 has anyone besides a Democrat or Republican finished as high as second in a presidential campaign. In 1992, third-party contender Ross Perot helped shape the presidential race but ended a distant third with 19 percent of the vote.

Two current members of the Senate, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, were elected as independents. Both caucus with the Democrats.

Independents for any office lack the ready-made political infrastructure that major-party candidates can rely on, making fundraising problematic and voter outreach more difficult.

"You don't have party lists, and what that means is that you have to build an organization from scratch," Cutler says. Maine provides public financing for gubernatorial elections, but the thresholds set make it hard for independents to qualify.

That means independents have their best shot in small states such as Rhode Island and Maine with relatively low campaign costs. With a New England tradition of independence, both states have more unaffiliated voters than either Democrats or Republicans.

It also helps when candidates such as Chafee have the family wealth to loan themselves significant amounts of money. Chafee and Cutler each estimate that credible gubernatorial campaigns in Rhode Island and Maine, respectively, can be run for about $2 million. In Massachusetts, Cahill puts the price tag at $4 million-$6 million.

Independents also have to battle for credibility.

"The biggest obstacle an independent faces is convincing the voters that they're not a wasted vote, that they have a realistic chance," King says. Independent candidates who look strong in the summer often fade in the fall, as voters focus on the elections.

Then there are the attacks that independents have to fend off from both sides.

"You sort of get whipsawed," Cahill says.

A year ago, he was tied in a statewide Boston Globe survey with Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick in a three-way race, and he was on par with or ahead of Republican Charlie Baker in most statewide polls until this spring.

Then the Republican Governors Association unleashed more than $1 million in radio and TV ads attacking Cahill as "just another Beacon Hill politician" who was "practically the same" as Patrick.

Republicans "need him out of this race because he's dividing the anti-Patrick vote," says Jennifer Duffy of the non-partisan Cook Political Report.

The negative barrage succeeded in pushing down Cahill's support to 9 percent in a Boston Globe-University of New Hampshire poll in June.

"It has become more difficult," Cahill acknowledges in an interview. "I had a very formidable positive-negative rating, and they were successful in turning it upside down; now it's a net negative." He had hoped to save his resources until the fall, but he launched his first TV ads last week to try to rebound.

"My message," Cahill says, "was resonating with people."

New Database Helps Catch Criminal Aliens

By ERIN KELLY, Gannett Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - A rapidly growing federal database designed to identify criminal aliens has helped remove 31,000 convicted criminals from the United States in less than two years and is being aggressively expanded throughout the nation by the Obama administration.

It is already in use in more than 400 jails in 24 states, including Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

Local police agencies say the Secure Communities database uses fingerprint matches to help them discover exactly whom they have in custody so that they don't inadvertently let a dangerous criminal back on the streets. The database, which contains information gathered by the Homeland Security Department, can tell police whether a person under arrest has been deported from the United States before and whether they are wanted for serious crimes in another country.

From August 2008 to September 2009, the Secure Communities database helped deputies in the Harris County Sheriff's Office in Houston, Texas, identify about 6,000 criminal aliens, including a man wanted by Interpol for some gruesome killings in Mexico and some gang members wanted for murder in South Carolina, said Lt. Michael Lindsay.

"This is another tool to help us get criminals off the streets to protect your family and mine," Lindsay said.

Critics say the system could become an incentive for some local police agencies to arrest immigrants on minor offenses simply to run them through the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database to see if they are in the country illegally and try to have them deported. The result, they say, could be racial profiling in which Latinos and other minority groups are targeted.

"At first blush, this does seem like a generic computer program that is just about transmitting information," said Brittney Nystrom, director of policy and legal affairs for the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant rights' group. "But once you understand that it's dependent on who is being hauled into the police station in the first place, that raises serious questions for a lot of people."

To date, ICE has not received any complaints of racial profiling, said ICE deputy press secretary Richard Rocha.

He said the database may actually help prevent profiling because every person arrested - regardless of skin color or nationality - has his or her fingerprints run through the system. Police agencies that don't have access to the database use their discretion to decide whether to call ICE to check a person's immigration status.

"If we had a situation where there concerns of abuse of the system, ICE would investigate thoroughly, as I'm sure local law enforcement would," Rocha said.

Nystrom said she worries that use of the database is expanding too quickly before the full ramifications of the program can be understood.

"It's so new and it's just rolling out in more and more communities," she said. "We're still trying to get information about how it works. Until we understand the nuts and bolts, it's really hard to know if safeguards for due process are actually working."

The Secure Communities Initiative, which seeks to find and remove non-citizens convicted of crimes ranging from extortion to murder, began in the final months of President George W. Bush's tenure in October 2008 and has been picked up and aggressively deployed by President Barack Obama's administration since he took office in January 2009.

In the last few weeks alone, ICE has boosted the number of local law enforcement agencies using the ICE database from 197 in 20 states to 402 in 24 states. The agency's plan is to have the system in place nationwide at 3,100 jails by the end of 2013.

From late October 2008 through early May 2010, about 240,000 criminal aliens have been identified through the Secure Communities database, Rocha said.

Of the criminals identified by the database, nearly 31,000 have been deported or removed from the United States, Rocha said. The rest are either awaiting trial or still serving time in jail in the U.S., or ICE has determined that they cannot be removed from the country because they have become naturalized citizens or they are in the country legally and their crime was not sufficient to deport them.

Of those already removed, Rocha said, 8,584 were convicted of Level 1 crimes, which include murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, hit-and-run automobile accidents and terrorist threats. An additional 17,113 were convicted of Level 2 crimes, which include arson, burglary, money laundering, vehicle theft and embezzlement.

The remaining 5,149 were convicted of Level 3 crimes, which include immigration violations, extortion, property damage, gambling, bribery and violation of election laws.

Congress has supported the program by appropriating a total of $550 million for the database from fiscal years 2008 through 2010, Rocha said.

Without the database, it is much easier for people under arrest to lie about their identities and where they were born, said Lt. Rod Torres of the San Bernardino (Calif.) Sheriff's Office, which began using Secure Communities in April.

Although most police agencies already run fingerprints through an FBI database, the Homeland Security database has information that the FBI system may not, Torres said.

"We've already seen an increase in cases that are referred to ICE for removal," he said.

Still, a handful of police agencies - including the sheriff's departments in San Francisco and Chicago - have balked at hooking up to the system.

San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey has said he doesn't want to end up having to run people who commit minor crimes and traffic violations through the system and subjecting non-dangerous people to deportation. In Chicago, city and county laws prevent local law enforcement officials from reporting the people they arrest to immigration authorities. Some local agencies fear that if they are seen collaborating with ICE officials, immigrants would no longer come forward to report crimes or serve as witnesses.

Rocha said ICE is not forcing reluctant police agencies to participate in the program, which he said targets the most dangerous criminals rather than those convicted of petty offenses.

"We're going to continue working with (the agencies) to explain the program to them, but we won't force them to turn on the system if they're not comfortable," Rocha said. "We'll just move on to other jurisdictions that want it."

However, states may eventually end up requiring all their local law enforcement agencies to take part because of information-sharing agreements between the states and the federal government, Nystrom said.

Empire State Building Goes Green, One Window at a Time

By RICK HAMPSON, USA TODAY

NEW YORK - You want to ask him: How many do you break?

That's because Anthony Concepcion does windows - lots of windows.

He's working at the Empire State Building. As part of an effort to become certifiably green, the office tower is removing, retrofitting and replacing each of its 6,514 double-hung, dual-pane windows. That's 26,056 panes of glass.

"It's a lot of glass," says Concepcion, 39, work crew supervisor for the contractor, Serious Materials of Sunnyvale, Calif. "It's all part of going green."

The building, for four decades the world's tallest and still the tallest in New York, is spending $13 million on windows, insulation and other upgrades to cut energy use by 38 percent and save about $4.4 million a year.

Never has a structure so old and so tall gone so green. "It's the most recognizable building energy retrofit in the world," says Arah Schuur, director of a conservation program at former President Bill Clinton's foundation

If you can retrofit the Empire State Building, you can retrofit anything, says Kevin Surace, president of Serious Materials.

The building has earned a score of 90 (out of 100) from the Environmental Protection Agency's "Energy Star" program. That means a building constructed at a size (102 stories), a time (1930) and a pace (about 14 months) not known for energy efficiency now ranks in the top 10th of commercial office buildings.

Tony Malkin heads the company that runs the tower. He says the goal, in addition to cutting costs and making the building more attractive to green-minded tenants, is to give other office building owners a model.

The Clinton Climate Initiative, created by the former president's foundation, says buildings can account for three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas. But, Malkin says, "we're not talking about 'doing the right thing.' ... Extra energy efficiency makes you money."

The Empire State Building project has aroused interest among other high-rise owners, Schuur says, "but nothing far enough along to mention." Malkin says projects like his soon will be announced.

Ahead of Chicago Tower

A year ago, the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago announced plans to replace its 16,000 single-pane windows and put solar panels, windmills and gardens on the roof, all to help reduce electricity use by a whopping 80 percent. Kate Murphy, spokeswoman for the building, says finances have pushed back the project.

Malkin, whose Empire State Building energy retrofit is about half finished, is dismissive of his rival in conservation, saying, "It's important to distinguish announcements from actions."

The new windows, which have 2.5 to four times more insulation, are not really new. They are fashioned mostly from existing components by Concepcion's crew of 35. Working in two shifts, the crew assembles 75 to 80 windows a day in a noisy workroom on the fifth floor.

Each night, workers remove scores of windows from their frames on the building's office floors. They wheel them to the workroom, where the glass panes are detached from their sashes, pulled apart and carefully cleaned.

A sheath of transparent insulation film is laid between the panes, which are resealed and placed for an hour in a 205-degree oven to shrink the film in place.

Next, a mixture of inert gases is pumped into the space between the panes for insulation. Finally, the panes are put back in the original sashes and remounted in the office floor frames from which they were removed the previous night.

Surace, the Serious president, says he's never heard of a big building choosing to reuse, rather than replace, so much window glass - 96 percent. Malkin says he's saving about $2,300 per window and avoiding the environmental impact of trucking new windows from the factory and old ones to recycling.

Changes Go Unnoticed

Because the windows are removed after office hours and installed before most office workers return the next morning, one of the most ambitious projects in Empire State Building history is occurring without the knowledge of most of its occupants.

The morning after the 32nd-floor offices of Skanska USA, a unit of the Swedish construction giant, had its windows swapped, "people didn't have a clue anything had been changed," says Deborah Ippolito, a senior manager. "You couldn't tell by looking at them."

Skanska, which occupies the entire floor, is the kind of big, environmentally conscious tenant Malkin wants to attract with the energy retrofit and an overall $550 million renovation.

Famous as it is, the Empire State Building never has enjoyed real cachet as a business address. Tenancy was so low during its early Depression years that it was derided as the "Empty State Building" and supported largely by visitors' observatory fees. Ever since World War II, it's had relatively small tenants paying relatively small rents.

Malkin wants to rent larger blocks of space to more prestigious tenants at higher rents. A study by CoStar Group found that in the first quarter of 2009, green-certified buildings had fewer vacancies than other comparable buildings and that such buildings have commanded higher rents for several years.

Green windows - actually, the sashes and frames are all painted the same city-landmarked shade of red - are part of that strategy at the Empire State Building.

Which leads back to Anthony Concepcion and the issue of breakage. Normally jovial, he grimaces a bit at the question. "Some days, none. Other times, up to three," he says. "It averages out to about one a day."

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