Tag: politics

By Ken Blanchard

Carrying a gun, like driving a car, involves a very heavy moral and legal responsibility. Carelessness and error can have grave consequences for which the person is liable. This responsibility is heavier still when a private individual draws a weapon to defend himself or someone else. If someone is armed and observes a school shooting about to happen, what should he do? Most of us would say he should stop it if he can, even if it means firing the gun. If, however, he has misinterpreted the situation or injures a bystander, he must know that he will bear the responsibility for that.

When George Zimmerman set out on foot, armed, to follow Trayvon Martin, a young man who was not engaged in any criminal activity, it resulted in a violent confrontation and the death of Martin. It seems to me that Zimmerman should have been held criminally responsible for his behavior. Firing”a warning shot” or even pointing a weapon at someone (say, a police officer) can land you in the slammer, while falling well short of murder.

That said, there is a very good reason why Florida police did not initially charge Zimmerman with murder or manslaughter. They had no case. Once the story became racially charged, political pressures led to a special prosecutor and a charge of second-degree murder. The affidavit on which the charge was brought excluded exculpatory evidence in Zimmerman’s favor, something that is ethically and legally suspect. That the special prosecutor was inclined to such mischief supports the original decision not to bring charges.

Zimmerman claimed that he shot Martin in self defense. It doesn’t matter that Zimmerman was the initial aggressor. If Martin responded to Zimmerman’s non-deadly aggression with deadly force, Zimmerman was entitled to defend himself with the same. According to eyewitness accounts, Martin was on top of Zimmerman, beating him”mixed martial arts style,” when Zimmerman fired his weapon. Zimmerman sustained injuries to the back of his head.

It was the responsibility of the prosecution to refute the claim of self defense. To do that, they would have had to convince the jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Zimmerman did not believe that he was in danger of serious injury or death when he used deadly force to defend himself.

That is the question that the jury was instructed to answer. It was not whether Zimmerman was a racist or whether he profiled Martin. It was not whether Zimmerman might have shot Martin with some kind of criminal intent. To convict Zimmerman, they would have had to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that he was not acting in self-defense. Presented with the evidence mentioned above, a responsible jury could hardly have reached such a conclusion and this one did not.

If you think that Trayvon Martin was an innocent victim, you will certainly be disappointed by the verdict. Some voices in the media are now declaring that it is now”open season on black boys.” There will probably be calls for reforming our criminal statutes to make sure that the next George Zimmerman cannot escape. While such reactions are understandable, it might be a good idea to take a breath and ask what that will mean. Who will it benefit and who will it injure if we make it easier to convict young men, African American or otherwise, of murder? Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Two summers ago, I opened this “From the Left” column by wondering if I’m really the leftist folks think I am.

Forty-nine columns later, I return to the question of my political ambidexterity in the context of the only elected political position ever entrusted to me: a seat on the Lake Herman Sanitary District board.

Actually, “elected” and “entrusted” are exaggerations. I was appointed to the board in 2005. I’ve gone through two election cycles, and no one has ever run to replace me. So I’ve never been elected, and I’ve probably been less entrusted than unnoticed.

Regardless, I’m part of a governmental entity that can tax, spend, and use eminent domain to address wastewater issues. Practically, the Legislature created sanitary districts back in 1947 to allow rural neighborhoods to build central sewer systems. Here in Lake County, Lake Madison has built a central sewer. Brant Lake is building its first central sewer right now. But in 30-plus years, Lake Herman residents have never worked up the cash or consensus necessary to replace their individual septic tanks with a shared sewer system.

The main obstacle has always been cost. The sanitary district just commissioned a feasibility study that found building a central sewer for Lake Herman would cost around seven million dollars. Divide that cost among 124 current households and another 40-some neighboring places we could annex, and the cost per household would be a $5,000 hook-up fee followed by monthly sewer bills of $261.

Sanitary districts often get grant and loan assistance from the state and federal governments for sewer projects. But however the burden might be divided between local effort and state/federal aid, somebody’s tax dollars would be paying for a seven-million-dollar project to serve about 170 households around one lake. For perspective, the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources just awarded $4.9 million in grants and loans for wastewater and other environmental projects serving thousands of users in a dozen South Dakota communities.

Put on your stereotypical leftist-vision goggles, see spending tax dollars to replace individual septic tanks with centralized infrastructure, and you should think, “Holy cow! Leftists should love sanitary districts!”

Yet I’ve opposed building a central sewer for Lake Herman since joining the board. Individual septic systems cost maybe $5,000 to install. After that, there is no monthly bill. Pumping out a septic tank (it does fill up with yucky stuff) costs about $200. Most households should pump their tanks every two or three years. Septic tanks should last for 20 years. If Lake Herman had $7 million, we could build and maintain individual septic tanks for every property around the lake for over 100 years.

In rural areas, properly installed and maintained septic systems can treat household wastewater safely and more efficiently than a central sewer. So on the Lake Herman Sanitary District board, I’ve been the fiscal conservative advocating individual solutions over bigger government. I’ve adamantly opposed the idea of imposing a central sewer on all residents (when a sanitary district builds a sewer, residents cannot opt out) and using eminent domain to take property for pipes and holding ponds.

I’ve always voted on sanitary district issues on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds. But apply your ideological lenses to my opposition to building a central sewer at Lake Herman, and you tell me: am I still a leftist? Am I turning back into a right-winger?

Or am I just a cheapskate trying to avoid a big sewer bill?

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

By Ken Blanchard

I confess that I have a somewhat pernicious sense of humor, something I apparently share with Mother Nature. The white-throated needletail has been spotted in Britain only eight times since 1846. I know nothing about this creature except that it is a bird with a white throat and rather sharp tail feathers.

Recently forty stalwart Limey bird watchers gathered in the Hebrides, a group of islands just off the coast of Scotland, to catch a glimpse of this rare avian survivor. They got one, but unfortunately the guest of honor didn’t survive. After two hours of ecstatic bird watching, the bird flew into a wind turbine and was flattened like a fly with a fly swatter.

There may be many morals to this story, but one is surely this: well-meaning plans often have unforeseen consequences. Wind turbines may be part of a smart energy package, though I have my doubts. What is beyond doubt is that they kill a lot of birds and bats. A study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimates bird fatalities from wind turbines at 573,000 per year. That includes 88,000 raptors, which is worth mentioning only because raptors are really cool. I know I’d be a poorer man if I never saw an eagle fly. I am not sure what seeing an eagle fly into a wind blade would do to my balance sheet.

The carnage is considerably worse for bats. Wind turbines apparently knock about 888,000 of these winged mammals out of the air every year. I really like bats. They are basically mice that scoop the air with big webbed fingers. Some of them use sonar to hunt for creatures I am less fond of, like mosquitoes. Some years ago I set up camp in the Ozarks just as the sun was setting. We were suddenly swarmed by mosquitoes. Then the bats came out and in about a half hour they had scoured Sylamore Canyon clean of the pests.

I don’t know how many bats we can afford to sacrifice annually to these gleaming white pinwheels, especially since bat populations are suffering a dramatic population decline due to a pernicious fungus. Nearly a million seems like a significant cost.

It is not a cost the wind industry needs to worry about. According to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles or other protected species. Instead, they have shielded the industry from any liability. This is not how they treat oil companies or power companies when birds drown in waste pits or fry on power lines. When a protected species hits the fan it is, in principle, a federal crime. The Administration has resolutely kept a blind eye.

You can decide for yourself whether wind power, which generates 3.5% of our electricity nationally, is worth the loss of fur and feathers. If you pretend to care about all about our airborne cousins, you might be concerned that President Obama wants to double”renewable” energy sources by 2020. If wind power expands to contribute 7% of our power, what will that mean for birds and bats?

It is possible that technological innovations will produce less lethal fans. No one seems knows how to do that. It’s also possible that, with more efficient turbines we can double the energy yield without quite doubling the number of blades. Still, a doubling of the energy yield will almost certainly mean more blades and that means that the dreadful numbers mentioned above will go up. A policy dedicated to expanding renewables will necessarily have to go on ignoring that.

President Obama has a great faith in the power of central planning. As Ron Bailey points out in Reason Magazine, his recent energy policy initiative amounts to a Soviet-style Five Year Plan, only with less than four years to go. We know how central planning works and we can see it in the Administration’s handling of the bird problem. When central planners decide to do one good thing, they usually commit to ignoring everything else.

The birds and the bats are not the only ones who will suffer from energy policies driven by pretty ideas. In his speech, the President praised Germany for”going all out in the race for clean energy.” One of the results of that all-out rush is that German households pay about three times as much for a month of power as their American counterparts. If you tell me that I have to chop falcons and bats into McNuggets in order to keep my house well lit at night and warm in the winter, I might reluctantly buy in. If you tell me I am going to kill those creatures so I can pay three times as much for electricity, I am opting out.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

Pastor Steve Hickey explained why the death penalty should be abolished in a recent sermon.

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Steve Hickey is a pastor, a Republican, a legislator and an occasional blogger. Since our entry into the South Dakota blogosphere, the good Rev. Rep. Hickey and I have disagreed on the death penalty.

But not anymore. He’s changed his mind. Rep. Hickey now agrees with me that South Dakota should abolish the death penalty. He has decided the death penalty in modern America is neither Christian nor good policy. He plans to introduce a bill in the 2014 Legislature to abolish South Dakota’s death penalty.

To fight my own sinful, prideful urge to gloat, I yield the floor to Reverend Hickey. He explained his switch in something he calls a “Hot Potato” sermon in his Sioux Falls church on June 23. The audio of this 48-minute sermon is available online; I offer my own selective summary, with minor commentary.

Hickey’s firmly Christian case against killing prisoners is not all warm fuzzy love-thy-neighbor talk. He notes early in his sermon that we all deserve death. Those who disagree, Hickey tells his parishioners, “have an inadequate concept of your sinful nature.” God could kill us all, for darn good reason, but He relents. (Yes, sometimes atheism is a more comfortable worldview.)

Jesus on the Cross, says Hickey, should have been the last execution. That one act of “substitutionary atonement” paid the price for all sins. Our continued executions thus do nothing additional to restore justice; they only punish. We can make a case for punishing killers, but Hickey says God is testing our ability to extend mercy to others.

Mid-sermon, Hickey shows his flock a chart of executions by country. The U.S. ranks fifth for killing convicts, behind China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen. Hickey rattles of a list of Muslim countries below us and asks “What are we doing in league with those nations?” We should all pause before an argument that says we should change a policy to avoid acting like those bad Muslims. Fortunately, Hickey broadens the picture for folks who don’t see themselves at war with Islam: “We are the only developed predominantly Christian democracy in the world that still retains the death penalty. Two-thirds of the countries of the world have abolished it.”

Hickey says that majority of modern nations have abolished the death penalty because it doesn’t do much. He dismantles five main reasons given for the death penalty:

1. Retribution: yes, but the Gospel, says Hickey, invites us to the higher spirituality of mercy, not judgment.
   
2. Deterrence: Nope. In the U.S., higher execution rates correlate with higher murder rates. Hickey says the death penalty would deter crime if it were “swift, painful, ugly, and public,” but a nation that abides by Christian principles, due process, and the 8^th Amendment can’t go there.
   
3. Safety: Hickey treads carefully here, acknowledging the murder of guard Ron Johnson at the South Dakota Penitentiary two years ago. But he notes that the Pen has implemented policies to reduce such danger from convicts. And besides, the prisoners who killed Johnson were not on death row.
   
4. Closure: Death penalty proponents profess that killing killers does victims’ families a favor, putting their suffering to an end, helping them move on. Hickey says that victims’ families report no such emotional benefit. Their loved ones are still dead. The Reverend says we learn more from the stories of victims’ families who forgive and even reach out to the killer.
   
5. Economics: The main way to make the death penalty cheaper would be to shorten the appeals process. Again, Hickey says swift justice is poor justice. As long as we respect due process, especially in the case of irreversible punishment, it will always be cheaper to house criminals for the rest of their lives than to try to execute them.

Hickey ends with the modern church-in-a-nutshell question: “What would Jesus do?” Faced with a convicted killer, “Would He flip the switch, or would He switch places with the person?” (In case you missed it, Jesus already answered that question.)

Hickey still wants to punish killers. But he says the New Testament calls a restorative system, not retribution. “If we went for redemption, reformation and transformation, we’d be following the higher road to which the Bible calls us.”

I’m still not putting my faith in the Bible on which Reverend Hickey bases his new position against the death penalty. But I’ll be happy to walk that higher road with Representative Hickey as he makes his case to the Legislature to end South Dakota’s death penalty.

P.S.: On Monday, South Dakota announced it will kill Ron Johnson’s other murderer in the dead of winter, sometime between January 12 and 18, 2014. The Legislature opens its 2014 session the same week.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Two South Dakota ladies born one day apart are generating this week’s big South Dakota political headlines.

Congresswoman Kristi Noem, born November 30, 1971, announced yesterday that she will not run for the Senate seat from which Tim Johnson will retire next year. Instead, she intends to run for re-election to her House seat.

Noem’s announcement unexpectedly cuts off a decision timeline that she said less than month ago would probably take several months. What sped up her decision? Maybe she didn’t want to take on the nasty Wadhams-Rounds machine. Maybe she did, but the ultra-conservative groups whose support any Rounds challenger will need told her she wouldn’t make their grade. Maybe Noem is like water: flavorless, and taking the path of least resistance. Why challenge a well-funded fellow Republican in a surely costly and divisive primary when she can remain every Republican’s friend, focus on beating up on a less threatening (and as yet undeclared) Democratic opponent in the 2014 House race, and save up to run for mentor John Thune’s Senate seat in 2016? (Pure speculation: maybe Noem got a memo from the Dirksen Building that Thune was just kidding those Mark Twain second graders last February and plans to run for President. If I were Noem and I got that memo, I’d certainly change my plans as fast as Noem did.)

Whatever Noem’s motivations, her decision rejiggers the Senate race. Dems, bloggers, and the mainstream media (admit it, guys: it would have sold papers!) were hoping for a Rounds-Noem-ageddon. Now Mitchell newspaperman Seth Tupper declares Rounds’s ascension to the Senate “as close to a foregone conclusion as conclusions get in politics.” Tupper says the Dems with heft seem to be out, and he dismisses declared Democratic candidate Rick Weiland as “that guy who lost that race against somebody that one year way back.” (Hey, Seth, for your information, Rick’s that guy who lost two races, against two somebodies, in two years, thank you very much. Third time’s the charm!)

Annette Bosworth, born November 29, 1971, hopes the Senate race is anything but concluded. Last week, the Sioux Falls doctor let leak information that she’s considering a run for the GOP Senate nomination. She and her husband traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend a conservative conference at the swanky Willard International. As anyone who attends any kind of conference will tell you, one doesn’t go to a conference to get educated; one attends to network. Bosworth is fishing for campaign cash to make her challenge to Mike Rounds viable.

On paper, one could read Bosworth as at least as good a candidate as Noem in 2010. Bosworth is smart and passionately articulate. With zero political experience, Bosworth can make a more authentic claim to not being a career politician than two-term state legislator Noem did in her first statewide campaign. And Bosworth is an established professional with a loyal following and expertise in the important policy area of health care.

Alas (for those of us who enjoy a good primary), Bosworth doesn’t appear poised to mount a serious challenge. She has no Republican credentials or connections to help her circulate petitions, let alone raise money and get out the vote. She has no record of policy statements or study on any issue outside of health care. Her initial, amateurishly transparent efforts to generate online buzz reek of a lack of strategy. And perhaps most importantly, not once in this initial week of attention has Bosworth addressed the primary challenge of any Republican entering this race: differentiating herself from M. Michael Rounds.

Bosworth is a day older, but Noem is a decade wiser, politically speaking. Noem sees that drawing daylight between herself and Rounds is too high a hurdle to her continued tenure in Washington. Bosworth has yet to recognize the enormity of that task, let alone demonstrate she’s up to it.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.

By Ken Blanchard

To no one’s surprise, Tim Johnson will retire from the Senate at the end of this term. It is worth saying that Senator Johnson is a fine man. We have every reason to be proud of the way he represented our state in the upper house of Congress. His departure opens up a piece of electoral real estate that might determine who controls the Senate in 2015. A year and a half out, it is a good time to take the measure of both parties.

Governor Mike Rounds is the only announced Republican candidate for that Senate seat. He is unlikely to face serious opposition from within his own party. Rounds’ victory in the 2002 Republican gubernatorial primary was the great surprise of that year. The two leading contenders took each other out in a bitter fight, leaving Rounds with the nomination. He won office with fifty-seven percent of the vote and won again in 2006 with over sixty percent of the vote. With two statewide victories under his belt and his popularity intact, he looks to be a formidable candidate.

Kristi Noem is the only Republican who might offer a serious challenge to Rounds, but it seems very unlikely that she would choose to do so or find support within the party if she did. However, if Rounds had not thrown his hat in the ring, she would have been well placed to compete for the Senate seat. Like Rounds, she has twice won a statewide election. South Dakota Republicans have a strong bench.

The Democrats do not. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin would have been the best candidate to challenge Rounds in the general election. She won statewide four times, including the special election in 2004 that first put her in office. However, she declined to run, as did Senator Johnson’s son, Brendan. The leading contender for the Democratic nomination is Rick Weiland, who enters the contest with the backing of Tom Daschle.

I met Rick Weiland in 1994 when he appeared on a televised panel with his opponent for the House seat, John Thune. Weiland was charming, intelligent and articulate. He won six of our state’s sixty-six counties and thirty-seven percent of the popular vote. In the 2002 Democratic primary for the at large House seat, he lost nearly every county to Stephanie Herseth and carried only thirty-two percent of the Democratic voters.

Rick Weiland and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin represent two sides of the Democratic coin. In 2010 Rick’s brother Kevin considered challenging Herseth Sandlin for the nomination, largely because she voted against ObamaCare. He did not do so, but that was a sign of a division in the party that helped elect Kristi Noem. It is possible that Herseth Sandlin decided not to run in part because she could not count on the enthusiastic support of her own party. If so, that does not bode well for the near term future of that party in the Rushmore State.

Weiland may better represent the core of the Democratic Party, here and nationally. If he is going to be competitive in 2014, he is going to have to win more than six counties.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

Former South Dakota governor M. Michael Rounds is running for U.S. Senate in 2014.

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

M. Michael Rounds announced last week that he’s bringing Colorado Republican consultant Dick Wadhams back to South Dakota to help his U.S. Senate campaign. Wadhams last wrought political magic (or mischief, depending on your persuasion) on South Dakota’s electorate in 2004, when he led John Thune’s campaign to oust Senator Tom Daschle. That “nasty but effective” campaign had national observers touting Wadhams as the next Karl Rove. But a series of subsequent losses put Wadhams on the political skids. Perhaps Wadhams need Rounds more than Rounds needs Wadhams for a rÈsumÈ-refreshing win.

What did that nasty but effective 2004 campaign look like? Wadhams declared Tom Daschle a “pathological liar.” He merrily aligned Daschle with Michael Moore, Saddam Hussein and sodomy. He harangued Daschle as a prairie boy gone sour with Beltway bucks. John Thune, the handsome, homey, all-South Dakota boy who himself spent a lot of time living and lobbying in Washington after losing to Tim Johnson in 2002, said he wouldn’t say such nasty things himself, “But that’s why I hired Dick.”

Daschle and Dems duly decried negative campaign tactics, but those tactics worked. Wadhams successfully drove South Dakotans’ attention away from policy to personal politics. His fake-grassroots bloggers (unacknowledged as part of the Thune payroll until after the election) drove changes in local media coverage. And Thune beat Daschle by 4,508 votes.

The conventional wisdom says that Rounds won the governor’s office in 2002 because South Dakotans preferred his nice-guy image amidst the mudslinging that broke out between his GOP primary contenders, Steve Kirby and Mark Barnett. Hanging back and playing nice may work when you’re the third guy watching two other guys throw mud at each other, but not when you’re the lead dog everyone else is targeting. By hiring Wadhams, Rounds is saying he will throw big, stinky mud at whoever challenges him in 2014.

Like Rounds, I don’t subscribe to some fantasy that negative campaigning doesn’t work or that decent, God-fearing South Dakotans are above such tactics. South Dakotans vote for negative campaigners. We did it in 2004 for Thune. We did it again in 2010 and 2012 for Kristi Noem, whose team piled negative attacks on Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and Matt Varilek.

Frankly, I see nothing wrong with negative campaigns. They ought to be coupled with positive statements about what one’s preferred candidate will do. But if an opponent supports bad policies that will cause bad things to happen, it is negative yet perfectly fitting to say, “Her policies are bad! Here’s why! Don’t vote for her!”

What grates my cheese about Wadhams’s return to South Dakota is that his tactics show that M. Michael Rounds doesn’t plan to use the 2014 election to lead South Dakotans in an honest and thorough discussion of the practical policy issues facing our state. Rounds will use Wadhams to distract us all with a circus of synthetic scandal and character assassination.

But hey, whatever works, right, Mike?

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

What wing’d chariot?

“Mom! Dad! I’m applying for a new job. The interview process lasts for a year and a half, and it’s totally public. I’ll have to quit my current job, put 30‚Ä’40 thousand miles on my car, and spend 30 times as much money interviewing as I’ll make in each year if I get the job. I’ll have to beg for money every day. If I don’t get the job, every newspaper in the state will call me a loser. What do you think?”

The proper parental response is, “You’re nuts.”

By that parental good sense, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin is saner than Rick Weiland and M. Michael Rounds put together and squared. In her widely reported Monday morning Facebook post, Herseth Sandlin said she’d rather spend the next year and a half enjoying her current job as Raven’s legal eagle and getting her son ready for kindergarten than give that up to run for Senate in 2014.

I can understand Herseth Sandlin’s logic. Six years ago, I was living in Madison but teaching in Montrose. I love teaching, and I love driving the Valley Road. But when my daughter was born, the daily commute lost its luster. When an opportunity arose to work closer to home and help my wife more with our little one, I took it. I missed being in the classroom and directly serving the community… but doing any job well is a form of service. So is being a good parent.

My daughter’s in school full-time now, and I’ve had the good fortune to get back in the classroom. Herseth Sandlin, too, has plenty of opportunities ahead to get back into the public service she loves. She’s 42, just eight months older than I. She has world enough and time to enjoy her family and her private-sector work. She can wait five or ten years or more to offer her talents in Washington again or in Pierre.

Just ask Rick Weiland. He ran for House twice, unsuccessfully, in 1996 and 2002. After that second loss (a primary loss to first-time campaigner Stephanie Herseth), Weiland did cool stuff like helping develop the nation’s first green construction code and helping his wife get a restaurant going. And then he realized, “Hey! My party and my country need me, and I’m at a good point in my life to offer my help.”

Candidate Weiland and citizen Herseth Sandlin both show us that running for office need not be a lifelong, non-stop career. To bend Marvell, we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we need not run madly after him. We can tend our fields, and see what the next sunrise brings.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.

By Ken Blanchard

In a famous parable, the Buddha spoke of a man who was shot by a poisoned arrow. Before he would allow the doctors to remove it and treat him he insisted on knowing who shot the arrow, what his social status was and where he was born. Moreover, he would not allow the doctors to proceed until someone could tell him what kind of arrow it was, how the bow was constructed and out of what materials. To put it mildly, this is a bad strategy for a man who wants to survive a poisoned arrow.

Such a man now seems to occupy the Oval Office. Last summer the President drew a”red line” that the Syrian government would cross if it used chemical weapons against the insurgents. It is now clear at least that the U.S. Government believes that that line has been crossed. When he was asked at his press conference on Tuesday, he had this to say:

We don’t know how they were used and when they were used and who used them. We don’t have a chain of custody.

You don’t have to be a master strategist to know how awful those words are. As one cartoonist put it, the Syrians are now”perilously close to the purple line, which is dangerously near the tangerine tangent, the sable streak, and the dreaded periwinkle squiggle.”

When the President draws a red line, he had bloody well better be prepared to do something dramatic if it is crossed. When he responds as he did above he makes a fool of himself and thereby makes a fool of the United States. This goes well beyond his policy, or lack thereof, on Syria. His ability to manage the situation in Iran depends on the power of his word. If the Iranians know that he doesn’t mean what he says, they can safely ignore any warnings he issues regarding their nuclear program. The Israelis now know, if they didn’t before, that his assurances to them are nothing they can rely on.

I am not arguing here in favor of military intervention in Syria. I am not sure that we have any idea how to effectively intervene in that nation’s civil war. Providing lethal aid to the rebels, meaning weapons, and perhaps grounding the Syrian air force, might have made sense earlier in the game. We might, and I repeat, might, have been able to nourish moderate forces among the insurgents and saved thousands of lives. Now the country has been flooded by foreign fighters whose love of the United States is not noticeable. That is the situation that the ditherer in chief now faces.

What strikes me as so damning in the President’s pitiful remark is not only that he apparently didn’t think the red line through before he drew it but that he doesn’t seem to have thought about it since. Can his staff really be so incompetent that no one anticipated the question? The only explanation is no one had been working on it until walked out to face the press. That would help explain why it was delayed and then delayed again.

The rest of Mr. Obama’s remarks on Tuesday were almost as weak. When asked why he was so ineffective in getting his agenda through Congress, he answered that it was all their fault and that it is not his job”to somehow get them to behave.” Of course that is precisely his job. That is the reason the Constitution gives him the veto power: so he has some leverage in exercising leadership over the legislative branch. To use that power effectively, he has to form relationships with the leadership in both houses and this is something the President has never shown any interest in doing.

No one in my lifetime has come to the Presidency as innocent of any actual experience in leadership as Barack Obama. It is entirely possible that he will leave office with that innocence largely intact.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.