Guest Commentary by Walt Shotwell and Lee Hamilton
Please, WHO Radio, cancel Limbaugh
Walt Shotwell
When that earthquake hit, President Barack Obama was quick to promise help to Haiti. So Rush Limbaugh slithered out of his manure pile to accuse Obama of supporting Haiti only because most Haitians are black — like Mister Obama. Limbaugh then said money contributed to Haitian relief could wind up in President Obama’s campaign coffers.
How much longer will WHO Radio cater to Limbaugh for his ratings? Joel McCrea, General Manager of WHO Radio, said the station does not intend to cancel Limbaugh because he has a large audience and his show encourages expressions of opinion. That position is understandable. McCrea is doing his job.
I grew up listening to WHO Radio. As a Des Moines Register reporter, now retired, I wrote many positive stories about WHO Radio and its history. Many people have forgotten that the “HO” in “WHO” stood for the “Home Office” of old Bankers Life Company, which then owned the radio station. Then, as now, WHO Radio is the “Clear Channel Voice of the Middle West.” Talk about clout.
As a fledgling newscaster at KRNT Radio, I competed against Jack Shelley. For many years he was the dean of Iowa news broadcasters and became a journalism professor at Iowa State University. Shelley was as widely popular as Herb Plambeck. Farmers throughout Iowa relied on Plambeck for reports on everything that affected agriculture. And no one can forget Jim Zabel, still the “Voice of the Iowa Hawkeyes” who bleeds black and gold and revels in saying “I love it! I love it! I love it.”
Throw into this mix the twisted mind of Rush Limbaugh. But just to make sure I got it right, I contacted some former and present WHO Radio people. Let’s just say that everyone I talked with had contempt for Limbaugh: “A jerk. A travesty. Everything that’s wrong with broadcasting.” You get the drift.
Will WHO Radio? CV
Walt Shotwell is a former Des Moines Register reporter and columnist who writes occasional commentaries for Cityview.
Governing is grueling
Lee Hamilton
With Congress close to finishing a bill on health-care reform, it’s worth a moment’s reflection on the back-breaking legislative labor we’ve just witnessed. Lawmakers spent most of 2009 struggling to reconcile conflicting ideological interests and competing political agendas, and sorting through the immensely powerful corporate and business interests at stake, in an effort to extend coverage and lower health-care costs for many millions of Americans. The deliberations have been tortuous.
But that’s what governing this country entails. Solving the nation’s problems might seem easy when it’s just you and a few friends sitting around a lunch counter, but that’s not actually how the work gets done. Policy fixes not only need to make overall sense as appropriate and just, they also must be politically realistic. It does no good to come up with a solution that can’t be enacted into policy.
Few Americans realize how hard it is to get to that solution. It is difficult enough to do this when most Americans hold Congress in low esteem and the political atmosphere is so poisonous. It’s even harder when you take into account our slow, complex and untidy legislative process; the need for compromise demands deals that are repulsive to some players, objectionable to many, and irritating to all.
As messy and laborious as this sounds, it’s better than the more efficient but less democratic alternatives the world around us offers. Legislating and governing are hard work — but with a patient and understanding electorate, the payoff can be effective policy-making. This is no mean feat in a nation as diverse and politically divided as ours is today. CV
Lee Hamilton is Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
