By trade, Patrick Tuohey is a public opinion researcher. He founded Market and Communications Research, Inc (MarCom) in 1999 and has conducted research studies for organizations such as Monsanto, Anheuser Busch, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and the National Sheriffs' Association. In addition to his professional role, Patrick serves as chairman of the Missouri Rights Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to protecting and defending the rights of Missourians against government power, and as chairman of Missourians for Responsible Government, a 501(c)4 group supporting the goals of smaller, less-intrusive and more transparent government. He is editor of The Missouri Record, a journal of state politics and policy.
Prior to launching MarCom, Patrick was the director of communications for Luntz Research in Washington, DC and a legislative aide to Representative John L. Mica (R-FL).
Patrick holds a BA in political science from Boston College and lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife and three daughters.
Patrick Tuohey
This Week’s Elections: Tea Party Post Mortem
by Patrick TuoheyDoug Hoffman lost his race in the 23rd Congressional District of New York, a seat held by Republicans for the past 120 years. John McHugh held the seat since 1992 and won with such large margins (he was even unopposed in 2002) that when I pitched him to provide polling for his campaign, it was a challenge to even argue why he needed polling in the first place.
Dede Scozzafava was chased out of the race by conservative Tea Party activists. Her campaign may have been inept, and local GOP leaders may have erred in selecting her, but activists had no business dictating terms from afar. Despite her flaws, Scozzafava was ahead in the polls before the Tea Party brouhaha. (So much for respecting local control.) Their result was to actually shrink the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. (Moreover, the newly-elected Democrat Congressman Bill Owens may provide the deciding vote on passing Pelosi Care, up for debate tonight in the House.) Just as conservative Democrats voted for Speaker Pelosi, liberal Republicans like Scozzafava would have supported the Party’s leadership. A RINO is better than no R at all. The good news is that the district is likely to support the Republican candidate in 2010 after what I suspect will be a vigorous primary.
The most laughable criticism of Scozzafava was that she showed no loyalty to conservatives by endorsing the Democrat in the race–this from Tea Partiers who showed no loyalty to the Republican Party by pushing a third party candidate in the first place.
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Tea Party Dilemma: Honey, I Shrunk the Party
by Patrick Tuohey
A national coalition of Tea Party activists called Thursday for rallies in several states to announce their dissatisfaction with the Grand Old Party. In an October 22 press release they state:
We are extremely disappointed that the Republican Party (and leaders like Newt Gingrich) has missed the message of the Tea Parties and continues to take conservative voters for granted. We applaud all courageous statesmen (Fred Thompson, Michelle Bachmann, and Dick Armey) and call on other GOP officials to put America’s values over traditional, often corrupt and morally bankrupt, power structures.
This is nothing new, and it is certainly nothing good. I am no partisan apologist, mind you, and would not support Ms. Scozzafava. My first significant political activity was on behalf of Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primary in New Hampshire against a sitting Republican president. You may remember how that ended: Buchanan lost the primary, and President Bush lost the general election.
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Renewable Energy: The Myth of Germany’s “Grün Energie”
by Patrick TuoheyOn May 27, President Obama remarked to an audience gathered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada that Americans, “pioneered solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in generating it, even though they get less sun than we do. They certainly get less sun than Nevada.” Today, Vice President Biden and a handful of Cabinet secretaries releases the Recovery through Retrofit report that will extol the virtues of green jobs and energy savings to be had if only the government had its way.
Observers of national policy may want to look at other countries’ experiences to see how they have fared with efforts to improve environmental policies. Previous research on green jobs policies in Spain showed that costs were high and benefits short-lived. But what of the President’s example of Germany?
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Making Political Candidates of Tea Party Patriots
by Patrick TuoheyA previous post, Turning Tea Party Patriots into Political Petitioners, examined opportunities for new activists to affect change in their home states. A natural next step is to discuss other options for getting involved.
It remains to be seen if the political activity that this summer generated hundreds of Tea Party protests and capacity crowd town hall meetings turns into a lasting political force. Many will participate in one event and go back to the daily grind. A few will remain active, and some may even use their outrage to invest their time and treasure into political campaigns.
For those who seek to become active, there are plenty of resources. Citizens In Charge and Ballotpedia.org are both aimed at informing citizens of ballot initiatives and expanding the rights of citizens to petition government directly.
There are also organizations that will train candidates and campaign staff. Since 1979, Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute has worked to train candidates and activists to run effective campaigns for office, mostly on the statewide and federal level. But traveling across a state or a large congressional district for weeks and months at a time can be too great a sacrifice for most.
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AMA Endorses Largest Denier of Health Care Claims
by Patrick TuoheyWhat appears to be the official blog of President Obama’s administration is all aflutter because the President will welcome, “doctors from across the United States to the White House to share their unique perspective on the struggles that American families face every day when it comes to health care.” (They posted today’s agenda in the name of transparency!)
The post even links to a National Public Radio (NPR) story in which a survey of medical professionals indicates they are among the biggest supporters of the so-called “public option.” A co-sponsor of the study, Dr. Alex Federman, indicates that, “physicians favored Medicare when it came to delivering care to patients. They thought Medicare was better when it came to autonomy and their decision making and their ability to get patients the care that they thought the patients needed.”
Furthermore, the American Medical Association (AMA) has endorsed the public option after an appeal from the President and despite, according to ABC News, the fact that “some member physicians at the group’s annual meeting [in June] likened the notion to communism.”
Beverly Gossage, Research Fellow for Show-Me Institute and founder of HSA Benefits Consulting wondered which insurance companies rejected the most claims. She found her answer in the AMA’s own 2008 National Health Insurer Report Card. The chart below appears on page 5 of the 16-page report.
Of the eight insurers listed, Medicare is most likely to reject a claim, sending away 6.85% of requests. This is more than any private insurer and double that of the private insurers’ average!
In short, the AMA is endorsing a plan whose closest existing example is the most frequent denier of claims. How the public option exemplifies “delivering care to patients” is unclear.
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Turning Tea Party Patriots into Political Petitioners
by Patrick Tuohey
As Americans rise up all across the country to challenge a political elite that many believe does not listen to them, it is important to consider the tools that people in many states have employed to directly affect change: the petition.
In Missouri, our Constitution includes the following passage:
The people reserve power to propose and enact or reject laws and amendments to the constitution by the initiative, independent of the general assembly, and also reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided. (Article 3, Section 49)
The document clearly states that the people possess the right to initiate laws and constitutional amendments, even though they grant those same powers to their representatives in the legislature. This is an important since it permits the people to enact laws directly and without going through the standard legislative process.
Unfortunately, in Missouri and other states where the people enjoy this right, the initiative process is continually under assault from state legislatures—Republican and Democrat alike—even to the point of adopting unconstitutional limitations to them. Such efforts have included the following:
- A 1969 law in Oklahoma required that petition circulators be state residents. In December 2008, the Tenth Circuit Court unanimously struck down that law as unconstitutional. The Court did the same to a similar law in Colorado in 2002.
- A 2005 law in Ohio that restricted petition gatherers from being paid per signature was struck down by the Sixth Circuit Court struck in March 2008. Ohio appealed the decision but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it. Similar pay-per-signature regulations have been overruled by federal district courts in Idaho, Maine, Mississippi and Washington.
- A Colorado law that required petitioners to wear badges with their name and whether they were a volunteer or paid circulator was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999.
A common argument for limiting the petition process is that it puts too much money into politics or that it invites fraud. Yet courts have found this not to be the case. In the 2005 ruling against Ohio, the Court concluded that prohibiting payment per signature would increase the costs and the time necessary to obtain the required signatures. The Court also rejected the evidence that this particular form of payment resulted in fraud.
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The New Nixon: a Coverup, Tapes, and a Modified ‘Midnight Massacre’
by Patrick TuoheyGeorge Santayana said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is certainly true in Missouri where the governor is embroiled in a burgeoning scandal dubbed ‘Ecoligate.’ His top staff apparently decided to keep secret a health report about a lake infected with higher-than-safe levels of E. coli. As every political junkie knows, it’s rarely the infraction that brings down a politician, it’ the coverup that ensues. Not only is Missouri’s governor a former 16-year attorney general, his name is Nixon.
These are the facts: On May 28, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) learned that regular tests of the Lake of the Ozarks found dangerous levels of E. coli. In two areas, tests indicates levels 19 times greater than state standards, and half the swimming areas tested higher than federal standards. In fact, some of the tests hit the ‘maximum sample limit.’ Department procedure dictates that this report should be released to the public.
But the results were not released. Instead, the DNR deputy director and general counsel, Joe
Bindbeutel, claims he believed recent rainfall might have only temporarily elevated the levels and that an announcement could scare away tourists. The results were kept secret.
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