Dan Popkey: Idaho Gov. Butch Otter won’t break bread with reporters | Dan Popkey's reporting and columns | Idaho Statesman
Idaho’s governors have met with the Idaho Press Club during the annual legislative session since the tradition began with Cecil Andrus in the early 1970s.
They did it because they honored the media’s duty to inform.
But this year, Gov. Butch Otter begged off. On Feb. 25, spokesman Jon Hanian told a club organizer Otter would end the streak “due to scheduling constraints.”
On Monday, Hanian dispensed with the niceties. “The governor said, ‘Look, I’m not going to do it this year.’”
Lt. Gov. Brad Little has agreed to fill in Wednesday.
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Dan Popkey: 377-6438
I don't blame him, and the tone of this article is why. It's gotten to the point where no matter what a politician says or does, they're assumed to be lying, cheating, stealing, or avoiding the issue. They can't win, there's no way to get around this juggernaut of public opinion wherein once people have embraced you enough to elect you they will almost certainly and almost immediately turn on you because of the nature of the position you were willing to take. If you took it because you craved power, you are likely to fall because the scrutiny will be unlike any you've ever experienced. If you took it because people believed in you and you believed in yourself and you do the best you're able you'll come out smelling like roses in the end, but there's a reason the 'meantime' is called a MEAN time.
Government officials take the lead where people have determined we can't move forward together cohesively without a guiding force and give them the power to do so. They're human beings in those posts, taking us forward in uncharted waters. Every political step is a potential misstep, and 9/11 and the events surrounding and following it have made the political landscape a veritable minefield, as it's become fashionable to get up in arms about any little thing we can. It's becoming fashionable to take up arms about any little thing. School and workplace shootings barely make blips in the radar anymore. Killings of law enforcement officers have spiked in the last couple years. Politicians are harder to get to but their crazies are comin' out of the woodwork, too. I'd keep my head down and do my job to the best of my ability, too, in his position, and I wouldn't try to justify myself to people who'd proven as fickle as the wind or worse just plain hostile by dint of my position. What's the point?
I'm not sayin' I know anything about him personally, or really much about him professionally. I'm just sayin' it's a hard job we seem determined to make harder, and I've always felt like elections needed to be held completely spontaneously so that a person can never campaign with the intention of creating a peak of frenzy in their favor on that all-important day, but must work, every day, as though his or her job depended upon it, because in these position of all positions, it should. We might abuse that initially, hold an election every three days 'til we realize that a new leader doesn't automatically solve nor shift blame for old problems, but eventually we'd figure out that we need to give people time and try to work with them to get things done and we'd only choose to oust those who were truly not suited to or fit for the position, then only after careful and thoughtful consideration. Plus we'd get better at gauging who is suited to and fit for various things. :) Of course by the same token people would have to be able to step down whenever they felt like their time had run it's course, but that shouldn't be too difficult to handle in a system used to absorbing a bit of change all the time. In the meantime (:D), 'til we get to that, we have to live with this system's inadequacies as much as our elected officials do, and that'll be easier if we all look for ways to make what works work and fix or get rid of what doesn't.
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