Wow, this is going to be easy! That’s what I thought when I looked at the Trusted Traveler website. My wife and I were trying to sign up for “Known Traveler” cards and guaranteed TSA Precheck designation, which would help speed passage through airport security and customs lines.
The website encouraged us to sign up and prepay the $100 per person fee, then simply await conditional approval and schedule an interview. In our case that interview had to take place at the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offices at St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
So we signed up and paid our fees. About a week later we got word that we had been conditionally accepted. Now we had to schedule our appointment. Whoops! The soonest availability was some three months out. I guess I had blown past the alert on the website warning that “the extended partial government shutdown has resulted in a substantial backlog” of applications and renewals.
Oh well.

We made our appointments and awaited the big day of our interviews. When it finally came, we trundled off to the airport, fought the usual parking challenges and strode confidently into the CBP office. It wasn’t really an office – just a big empty lobby with locked doors all around.
We joined ten rather unhappy looking people. Most were sitting around looking bored. One was pacing and punching at his cell phone. Another was frantically working a red wall phone mounted near a locked door.

One of the calmer souls kindly told us to have a seat; she pointed to a sheet of paper on the wall that read, “The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is temporarily reducing staff at Global Entry enrollment Centers… Thanks for your patience and understanding.”
It listed weekday hours as 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM. But our appointment had been set for 11:30 AM! The other people also had morning appointments. One woman had been there since 9.

The prospects looked grim. We considered giving up the whole idea and leaving. Then we remembered the $200 we’d paid. New appointments were not being accepted until January. We agreed to wait until noon to see what would happen.

Several of the applicants had already tried knocking on the CBP door – no answer. Some had tried to call various CBP numbers – no answer. But gradually we realized we were all in this together. We began to feel the stirrings of camaraderie.

The next official person we saw would have to deal with all of us – in solidarity!
And so we waited. At 12:08, a lone CBP officer in a black uniform ambled into view, toting a soft drink and a small Igloo cooler. He was immediately set upon by everyone in the room. “What’s going on?” “We had morning appointments. 9. 10. 10:30.”

He declared that he’d accept people with appointments scheduled after noon – but none from the morning, because our appointments had been cancelled, and we should have gotten emails telling us so. “Wait, what??” No one in the room had received any such cancellation notice.

“Can’t help you,” the officer said. He explained that they were short-handed because the bulk of their staff had been “reassigned to our southern border.” But sensing a mounting fury in the room, he agreed to call his supervisor. He said she’d appear later to address our concerns. “Is there a chance we will be seen today?” we asked in unison.

He looked a little bit weary. We got the feeling this scenario had happened before. “Can’t help you, he said as he ducked into the CBP’s secure area, its automatic doors slamming and locking shut behind him.

And so we waited, again. About an hour later, the supervisor walked in. She looked like a supervisor. Sharp uniform, confident but relaxed gait, silver oak leaves on her epaulets. We all jumped up and began pelting her with questions. Calmly, she assured us that she would do everything possible to get all of us processed. Talk about grace under fire.

And she delivered. After 90 minutes, my wife and I, representing the last of the morning’s cancelled appointments, finally found ourselves sitting across the desk from the supervisor. She took our pictures and fingerprints, all the while making us feel comfortable with friendly small talk. She asked about our planned travels and patiently explained how the Known Traveler system works.
She’s been with CBP since 1997. And she’s seen it all. During the last government shutdown, her officers were required to work without pay, putting a strain on their everyday lives. And they’re currently working with short staff because so many officers are being deployed to the Mexican border. Consider too, how the reputation the of CBP has suffered for the handling of migrants at the southern border. No wonder these folks are stressed.

Even though she had to deal with frustrated and unhappy people day in and day out, this supervisor kept her cool. She got everyone processed and on their way, even though it took four hours. Despite the delay and stress, we were reminded that in even the worst of circumstances, a little kindness and respect go a long way.

[Lori Kesler contributed to this post.]

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If you’re a Republican, a standard criticism of Democrats is that they are bad with all things money – raising it, spending it, managing it and overseeing it. As new little “secrets” come out about the operations of the Democratic National Committee in the last presidential cycle, it’s clear that in many ways the Republicans have the Democrats correctly pegged.

Okay, Democrats can raise money. It’s ugly as they largely depend on a donor class that is about as far removed as possible from the traditional constituents of the party. It’s important to add a caveat here. Bernie Sanders largely raised his money from grass roots and equally importantly stayed away from money-bags that are the source of revenue for most Dems running for office. But Bernie had little to do with the DNC, and the latest revelations tell us that the situation was not accidental.

Donna Brazile, interim chair of the DNC, acknowledged, “An August 2016 agreement gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign partial control of the DNC months prior to Clinton winning the nomination.” This was before Brazile was chair; it was on Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s watch under the supervision of President Barack Obama. What would be the motivation for this? Could it have been that the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party thought that Clinton did not have the political power to win the nomination without their help? Is it that the powers thought that Clinton had such a corner on wisdom of the issues that no competing points-of-view were necessary?

It’s more likely that it was what we frequently see in corporate America, interlocking directorates. It is not secret that Wasserman-Schultz was a strong supporter of Clinton. And since it was clear that Obama was supporting Clinton and that he was in a position to determine key staff positions in the DNC, the Committee was obviously going to do whatever it could to ease Clinton’s way to the nomination.

One of the reasons why Republicans dislike government is their skepticism about bureaucracy, particularly the ways in which Democrats run them. Fortunately for Americans, the party does a much better job of running most of the essential agencies necessary for government than they do of their own privately-political enclave.

Brazile says that the party’s monthly expenditures doubled in the previous five years, in large part because of Wasserman-Schultz and Obama keeping expensive consultants on the payroll.  No one seems to know what the consultants were actually doing, but the outcome of their work, or non-work, was to lose the White House and have the fewest Democrats in Congress since before FDR.

Might it not be better to simply not have a Democratic National Committee? A party organization must stay neutral in the contests between nominees, at least it should if it says that is part of its mission. But the DNC did just the opposite. They said they were neutral, but they took sides.

Do they really need to raise money? Democratic candidates have become as skillful as Republican in the post-Citizens-United era that began in 2010 of raising money from deep pockets. If all that the DNC does is to raise money to line some pockets and self-perpetuate, then there is no need for it.

Someone needs to organize the quadrennial conventions and call to order meetings of state and local Democrats. But that could be done by a small, sleek and efficient office personed by a handful of staffers.

Like any organization, the Democratic Party will connect better with its members if the bureaucracy models the behavior that they would like to see. Democrats need to prove that they can be a lean, non-mean machine. Waste and inefficiency undermine the important goals of meeting the needs of the disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged among us. For now, let’s drastically pare down the role of the DNC, and while we’re at it, let’s have the candidates run campaigns that are better characterized by the needs of the core of the party’s historical constituency rather than the donor class. That’s what we can call the common good.

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