Insureds,

For a New Year’s post and the last one before the start of Mississippi’s legislative session next week, I’m going to get a bit obscure on you.

The item from September says that the trade group representing 300,000 insurance agencies and brokerages filed an amicus brief opposing a class action settlement in federal court in Newark, N.J., in which Zurich Insurance agreed to require agents to tell customers how much Zurich IS PAYING THE AGENTS for the customers’ business. (Sorry about the capital letters; ITP just got a MacBook Pro and hasn’t learned how to bold face.)

Check out this quote from an Insurance Journal story. The Big “I” is the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America:

“Agents oppose having to inform their customers of Zurich’s compensation practices, and also object to other conditions set forth in the pact.” (Sorry, no italics yet either.)

The point is, check your calendars: it’s nearly 2007. Six years after Enron and two years after Spitzer turned the industry upside down on the issue of so-called “contingent commissions,” undisclosed payments from insurers to brokers in return for placing customers’ business, the agents are going to court to prevent Zurich from making them disclose how and how much they are paid.

Here’s a quote I find really problematic: “>If other carriers follow the Zurich settlement approach of requiring > agents and brokers to implement CARRIER COMPENSATION DISCLOSURES, the > multitude of forms will exacerbate CONSUMER CONFUSION, and > create inefficiencies in independent agencies,” said (Big I Chief Robert) Rusbuldt.

And here’s another, also pretty bad. > “If disclosures about compensation or ANY OTHER ASPECT OF INSURANCE TRANSACTION are NOT EASILY UNDERSTOOD by customers or are ignored, the > TRANSPARENCY intended to promote greater consumer understanding of > insurance transactions and costs would be ENTIRELY FRUSTRATED,” noted > Debra L. Perkins, Big “I” executive vice president and general counsel.

ITP says: Hmm. I don’t blame the Big I for not wanting to take on extra paperwork, but the argument — that COMMERCIAL customers might not understand it — is pretty lame. The problem, of course, is that they WILL understand it and see the conflict for what it is.

Listen, ITP isn’t against contingent commissions, it supposes. But, if I’m Big I — and I like Bob Rusbuldt very much for reasons I’ll get into later — I don’t want to be going to court on this. There SO MUCH more to say about those 300,000 AGENCIES (not just people) and their cost to the system. Again, I like the Big I, but I’m not sure they’re going to like the ITP. It’s been a great year.

But a couple things before we go. First, ITP’s congratulations are in order:
“Vermont’s Captive Industry Celebrates 25th Birthday.”

That’s super. Way to go, you Green Mountain guys ‘n gals.

On a more sobering note, here’s something to think about — and heed — before the holiday weekend.

28.5 MILLION PARTY HOSTS LIKELY UNDERINSURED

New Trusted Choice(r)Survey Finds Hosts Grossly Unprepared for their Liability

I think that speaks for itself. From all of us here at ITP HQ, Happy New Year.

I-Fans,

When can good news for policyholders be bad news for transparency? This story answers the question.

I’m all for policyholders getting paid what they are owed (and no more) as quickly as possible. That’s the point of insurance, and these people didn’t sign up for a crusade. I really don’t know about the merits of the Scruggs claim that storm surge is not a flood, but an integral part of a hurricane that should be covered under most homeowners’ policies. Regular Notes!(TM) readers know that ITP doesn’t see the benefit to insureds or taxpayers of dividing up perils in the first place. ITP believes lawyers mainly benefit from that public-policy turkey.

But insurers are clearly feeling some pressure, as this terrific Anita Lee scoop in the Sun Herald makes clear.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter, of Pascagoula federal court, sent a civil case brought by Attorney General Jim Hood back to state court in Hinds County, Miss., a victory for Hood. But ITP believes the key is found in this Lee paragraph:

“Hood believes his state court case and a favorable political climate in Washington will motivate insurers in the settlement negotiations. He pointed out that U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor and Sen. Trent Lott, both suing State Farm over their homeowner claims, plan to pursue insurance reform.

A settlement might soften the mood for reform, Hood indicated, including a call to remove the insurance industry’s exemption from antitrust laws.”

I-Fans by now are getting the meaning of all this.

Listen, ITP doesn’t necessarily want insurance reform, surge claims to be paid, the industry to lose its anti-trust exemption, the repeal of McCarran-Ferguson or federal regulation. ITP doesn’t necessarily not want those things either. ITP doesn’t know enough.

ITP wants to know what happened. Have insurers behaved basically like “child molesters,” as Taylor and other public officials and citizens, including Hood, Lott, many policyholders and even Commissioner Dale, as well as Louisiana Sens. Julie Quinn and James David Cain and many, many others in Louisiana have said, if not as vividly? Or is everything basically OK given the horrific circumstances, as my pal Bob Hartwig of the Insurance Information Institute, Allstate and many others say.

ITP knows only one thing: Both represenations of reality cannot be true.

Let’s get the freakin’ data. It’s out there. How can you reform something if you don’t know anything? What did people get paid per policy? Per amount they believe was owed? What is the Louisiana Recovery Authority finding in the 120,000 claims it is taking on? What’s in the 15,000 records the two sisters turned over to Scruggs and Hood? What’s in the Oklahoma records? What did State Farm Chairman and CEO Edward B. Rust Jr. say in his testimony? What do juries think of individual policyholders’ claims that insurer claims denials were peremtory, systematic and illiegal?
What ITP wants is a reasonable examination of insurer performance after Katrina. ITP believes its interest is in the public interest. Such is ITP’s chutzpah(1), it believes its interest is the public interest. And don’t even get ITP War Eagle started on this topic. Good thing he’s off chasing mice at the moment.

Look, Katrina was really big, but it wasn’t unique. It was a natural catastrophe, the kind for which we have insurance in the first place. ITP hasn’t had time to study all this, but it is aware that similar controversies over insurer performance have occured, like clockwork, after most major “nat cats” (2) since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, including the Northridge Earthquakes in California in 1994, the 1999 Oklahoma tornadoes (that’s actually no longer a controversy; a jury found against State Farm), Sept. 11, Hurricanes Isabel (2003), Ivan and Frances (2004) and now Katrina.
And as regular Notes!(TM) readers know, ITP believes Katrina puts on display important insurance industry issues that extend far beyond the Gulf of Mexico and way, way beyond homeowners’ insurance.
Paying Mississippi policyholders is good, but ITP isn’t really sure that solves anything.(3)

(1) Don’t play dumb, Ohio Muse.
(2) Hipster insurance lingo.

(3) Annoying editorial-page-type understatement.

Click here for Anita Lee/Sun Herald scoop.

Insureds,

We are brief today. No doubt all have probably heard something about the options-backdating scandal, in which corporate boards are accused of setting dates on options grants in the past, when the stock was low, so that the receiving executive was guaranteed to make money at the expense of other shareholders. This scandal already forced out William McGuire, the former chairman and CEO of the nation’s second-largest health insurer after Wellpoint Inc., which owns my carrier, Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

Listen, I-Fans, this could have been any type of corporation — many are under scrutiny. A health insurer just happens to be at the center of this one, although that is troubling. To me, health-insurance executives occupy a special position of trust. McGuire’s 2005 compensation: $124 million. (ITP War Eagle shakes head sadly.)

I offer it, however, to point out the contrast between the capacious protections and glittering transparency offered to stock buyers compared to the nearly non-existent protections and unbelievable opacity confronting insurance buyers and policyholders.

I’m ambivalent about the SEC, but, having covered it, at least I know it’s a big brawny agency (especially post-Enron) with big-brainy people working there, at least until they move on to Skadden Arps to make $1 million/minute.
.
But much more importantly, stock buyers and shareholders have access to a ridiculous amount of information, and more is always on the way, and you get find it by going to the clunky, hard-to-use — but invaluable — Edgar. If you are rich or work for a fancy national newspaper, you buy 10-K Wizard, which lets you search under a company’s ticker symbol (e.g. “ALL,” for Allstate) for a word or string of words (e.g. “investigation”). Unfortunately, this would not work for State Farm, which is not publicly traded.

Point is, though, you can learn more than you want to know about many important things. If you haven’t tried it, you should. The options-back-dating scandal was unearthed by business-school professors first at NYU, then at UCLA and Stanford and later Iowa.

Here’s a blurb from a Fortune story:

“The scandal has its roots in a 1992 SEC decree that companies list in their annual proxy statements the exact dates that they gave stock options to top executives.”

True, the data was found only in mail-in hard-copy filings that no one ever looked at, but that, I assume, has changed or will.

Now, contrast that with data about insurer performance. True, you can go to the site of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the regulators’ trade group (Huh?! What’s that mean?! See http:insurancetransparencyproject.com at this
link.) Records at the “NAIC Store” (ITP kids you not) are a mere $10 –each for “key” and “non-key” annual statement pages. Holy uncovered perils! Wow!

Actually, a much better deal is to go straight to the closely held A.M.Best & Co., which sells its own compilation of public records (for cryin’ out loud) for a minimum of
$695 a year for Best’s Aggregates & Averages (includes a subscription to Best’s Review magazine)

Sorry, I-Fans, but nothing gets ITP War Eagle’s feathers in a bunch, its talons squeezing its magnifying glass, like public records not available to the uh, public, unless the public’s name is “Greenberg” (1).

Private note to anyone working on, uh, federal insurance-reform legislation: It’s 2006. Put public records, collected at government expense, online and watch what happens.

Click here for short options story

(1) Insurance mogul M.R. “Hank” Greenberg, a billionaire many many times over.

Insureds

The “Dale” above is, of course, George Dale, the gentlemanly Mississippi insurance commissioner and state fire marshal who has served in those posts since Reconstruction, or 1975, ITP isn’t sure which. He was talking to a civic group in Gulfport.

A Jefferson Davis County native, he is a former high school coach, a deacon of his church and, like ITP, a history buff, and, unlike ITP, a volunteer at various charities. (ITP is going to get back into that, he promises.) Dale is also chairman of the State Rural Fire Truck Acquisition Assistance Review Committee and the State Liquified Compressed Gas Board and a half-dozen other boards.

Point is: good guy, works hard, serves on boards with funny names. By many accounts, he is assisted ably by Deputy Commissioner David Lee Harrell, an attorney.

ITP hears and appreciates what Commissioner Dale is saying about being bothered by the performance of some insurers toward some insureds. ITP is also bothered. But, with all respect to the commissioner, when he says “some people” were “done wrong” by “their carrier,” ITP wants to know only three things:

1. How many people?
2. How wrong?
3. By which carrier?

See, this is the point of ITP; the “T” stands for “Transparency.” What if the market could see what various insurers have paid on average per policy, by county? A small thing, you say? ITP says the whole conversation changes. Instead of talking about how much in gross losses insurers have paid, the financial hit they have taken, we are now talking about why we bother having insurance in the first place, if all we’re going get is — an educated guess here – 10 cents on the dollar, after a fight.

Since, we’re on a roll, let’s ask how much each carrier has collected in premiums, by county, over the past 10 years. Now we see the degree to which Mississippi homeowners’ coverage is actually profitable. Throw in auto coverage, and forget about it.

Now, let’s ask how many of customers are suing their insurance company. Who is being sued more? Are State Farm’s customers (just to use an example) more litigious than, say, Chubb’s (again, just to use an example)? Why? Then let’s compare those lawsuit figures to how many people are suing — oh, I dunno — their bank, their brokerage, their newspaper or their carmaker

Ok, now we are getting a view of an industry in crisis – from its customers’ point of view.

But why stop ITP when ITP is feeling it? What if we apply we have learned to other forms of insurance, especially, health insurance. What if insurance buyers became as savvy about all forms of insurance — their third-biggest consumer expense, running a minimum of $7,000 a family — as they are about refinancing their homes, which is to say, very?

Now what I like to call the Insurance Reformation has begun. Customers, empowered with performance information, are bypassing agents, brokers and other intermediaries, driving down prices and rewarding good insurers and punishing the bad. At this point, America has become a more financial secure place, the divorce rate plummets, entrepreneurship and risk-taking take off and we are Sweden, with baseball.

After their tickertape parade down Broadway, ITP and ITP War Eagle accept thanks of Pope Benedict XVI and the Mufti of Jerusalem and sail to a Balinese fishing village to calculate the return on their term life annuity wrap, or whatever you call those.
Thanks to Sugar Lips in her Christmas morning ‘jammies in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Insureds:

No, the above headline is not from The Onion.

With the approach of Christmas — a story about, among other things, not having a home (or health insurance, when you think about it) — I pass along an AP story about the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent, announcing a $280 million pilot program to replace FEMA trailers with module homes.

“The cottages are safer, more-permanent structures than travel trailers or mobile homes. The modular homes look like traditional houses, but are smaller.”

Sen. Lott calls them a “giant step forward” in Mississippi’s recovery.

” ‘Helping people to live in a real home will speed Mississippi’s reconstruction efforts, not just in terms of restoring physical structures, but also by helping to improve the spirits of those still without a good home,’ ” Lott said in a news release.

Listen, I love Sen. Lott these days, and ITP is happy about the homes. You literally cannot swing a dead possum around those FEMA trailers. I would also understand, I guess, even needing semi-permanent modular homes 16 months after Katrina, given the magnitude of the storm and the tight market for contractors and construction materials.

But, you know ITP. As a condition of getting a modular home, if I’m FEMA, I would ask: 1. Did you have insurance? 2. What happened to your claim? Without the data, we have no idea about whether we’ve got a problem getting claims paid.

And remember, insurers say they will pay $45 billion in Katrina related claims (ITP will be checking), but total economic damage of Katrina, according to Swiss Re, was $135 billion. That’s a $90 billion gap. I-Fans, $90 billion is big money in New York City, let alone Louisiana and Mississippi. Insured damage from 9/11 was a mere $21 billion — and you know what construction costs in New York. A tenth of $90 billion is big money, I mean the difference between ruin and recovery. I’m not saying insurers owe that and didn’t pay. Clearly not, or not all of it.

But think about it. We’re not even asking.

Oh, and I’m not crazy about the spectacle of Gulf states fighting over what, by comparison, are scaps.

“The nation’s five Gulf Coast states competed for a total of $400 million in funds, with Mississippi slated to receive 70 percent. Louisiana, by comparison, will get $75 million, leaving officials there complaining the Bayou state “got the short end of the stick.”

“Under FEMA’s upside-down decision-making, Louisiana gets the short end of the stick for alternative-housing programs by almost 4-to-1,” U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu said in a statement.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour issued a statement late Thursday saying he’s “delighted….”

By the way, ITP doesn’t need a political-science degree to figure out what’s going on here. I don’t mean to be naive, but put it this way: Do not let ITP War Eagle find out that relief efforts are being politicized.

ITP is sorry to be a downer before Christmas and will bring the yucks for New Year’s.

click here for story

Insureds,

I’ll keep it short today, but I wanted to pull a couple paragraphs from a Mowbray/Times-Pic piece about the Louisiana Insurance Rating Commission, which last week tabled requested rate increases of up to 138% by the state-owned insurer, Louisiana Citizens, and rejected outright a request by Allstate for a 5% “hurricane deductible” statewide.

For one thing, the story shows the panel isn’t just angry but is also aware that this is beyond the ability of a single rating panel to solve.

Here’s the story’s sub-headline:

“Legislature needs to fix problem at the root, rate commission says.”

ITP obviously agrees.(1)

Read the whole story for an interesting account of officials wrestling with a devil-and-deep-blue-sea dilemma . If Citizen’s does raise rates, it adds to already-burdened homeowners and businesses, retarding the recovery, such as it is.(See Bob Herbert’s NYT column today under the headline “America’s Open Wound” for a look at how that’s going.) If doesn’t raise them, it won’t have enough to cover a big disaster, leaving the whole state exposed, and, to boot, will hamper the development of the private market.

This quote from a New Orleans commissioner says it all:

“If you don’t get the rate, the system won’t work. That doesn’t seem fair. But if I don’t do it, we’ve got a real problem,” said New Orleans member Jabari Ragas. “We’re getting a Band-Aid for a stab wound.”

And it will get worse. Citizens is already the third-largest homeowners’ insurer in Louisiana, and it’s about to get much larger after an emergency ban on insurers’ dropping some coverage expires March 1. Citizen’s Secretary (chief) Terry Lisotta here tries to assuage worries, but not very successfully:

“Asked how much Citizens was expected to grow, Lisotta said that it’s anyone’s guess: estimates range from 60,000 policies to 200,000. But Citizens has hired new staff, switched to taking applications electronically and is making other operational changes so that it can handle 10,000 new policies a month, Lisotta said, and the group is ready to handle the stream of new policies.

‘We’re trying to update the system. We’re moving the process along,’ Lisotta said.”

And for those who think that all ITP does all day is think of ways to hammer ALL, Allstate’s regional counsel makes a pretty fair point in this exchange with Ragas.

“Commission members said it seemed unfair that the entire state should get slapped with a fairly hefty mandatory deductible, and asked whether it was possible to come up with a tiered approach. ‘I have an issue with the 5 percent statewide deductible,’ Ragas said.

Lorrie Brouse, regional counsel for Allstate, said her company also would favor a more tailored approach, but a state law says that on existing policies, companies must make deductible changes across the board and treat all policyholders in the state equally.”

I’ll spare you my usual why-state-based-insurance question.

(1) ITP is talking about itself in the third person these days, sometimes offline. ITP may need h-e-l-p and must check his (its?! Mommy!) health policy.

Thanks to Louisiana Lawyer Supreme.
Also thanks for yesterday’s item to Mississippi Legal Lion.

InsNerds,

Just a brief note to contrast the solutions proposed by Commissioner Dale in this Anita Lee SunHerald story with what I see as a growing insurance sophistication among Gulf-area residents.

The above-mentioned story doesn’t mention what new the rights would entail, and I’m sure they couldn’t hurt, but, put it this way, The Insurance Transparency Project(r)(c)(TM)(XYZ) doesn’t see this solving Mississippi’s insurance crisis. I also draw I-Fans’ attention to this paragraph:

“Numerous measures are under consideration for the upcoming legislative session in January. Special taxes, such as a percentage of gambling revenue from the Coast, could be devoted to the pool for reinsurance, which would insure the pool against losses in future hurricanes.”

So money that would go for schools and whatnot would help out insurers with their reinsurance bills. Hmm. As I-Notes! noted already, Allstate’s earnings for the first three quarters of ‘06 alone ($3.7 billion) nearly eclipsed Mississippi’s annual tax revenues ($4 billion). And the industry’s 2005 and 2006 net income figures will be on the exam at the annual ITP party/final exam at the Last Exit on Atlantic Avenue.

As Borat might say, Please to view this chart: Allstate, the most-battered, exposed, least-reinsured insurer, has crushed the S&P 500 over the past five — hurricane-filled – years. It is not even close. I wish I could paste it, but I dunno how.

click here for chart

Commissioner Dale is a gentleman, a history buff, a former high school coach, a wonderful conversationalist and a very experienced regulator. I think he was Jefferson Davis’s insurance commissioner. But bills of rights and subsidies for insurers — from Mississippi? — are part of a very tired discourse that really needs to change.

ITP, however, is optimistic. Here’s a scrap from the Sun Herald’s “Sound Off” feature, where readers, uh, write things:

“All or nothing, State Farm

• Not just the six Coast counties. George Dale, if the six Coast counties are no longer covered by State Farm wind insurance, they should have to take the whole state or none at all. Why should they just get the gravy? Get out of Mississippi completely.”

Well, it’s a start. And consider this Op-Ed piece written by a neighbor in Ormond, Fla., that appeared in the Sun Herald.

“• No insurance company should be allowed to “cherry pick” lucrative markets (such as auto) or geographic areas. The actuaries can conjure up any doomsday scenario they want. The fact is that most full-line companies have effectively used reinsurance as a vehicle for virtually eliminating risk in the windstorm arena. They are trying to pass this on 100 percent to policyholders.

• We have tried “bribing” companies to stay. We need to work with other states and the U.S. Congress to prevent companies from pulling out of California due to earthquakes, the Midwest due to tornadoes and coastal areas due to hurricanes. Insurance is based on the “Law of Large Numbers.” A large property/casualty company operating in all 50 states effectively spreads the risk over a broad geographic area. The United States is unlike Europe and much of the world in that we regulate insurance companies on a state-by-state basis. In doing so, we play into their hands.”

I should just bold face the whole paragraph, but that defeats the purpose of bold face, just as artificially chopping up markets defeats the purpose of insurance.

And, here’s one I haven’t seen before.

“• Insurers who play ball and underwrite all areas should be given preferential treatment for state and municipal contracts.”

Ok, so it was written by a retired investment banker. But still, it just seems to ITP that regular people are beginning question why insurance looks the way it looks and whether the bureaucratic, legal and institutional structures (a little red meat for all you academics out there) that underpin this very important system — and remember, we’re not just talking about homeowners’ insurance — really can be justified. (ITP anthem swells; cut to shot of ITP War Eagle Battle Flag rippling over Bay St. Louis.)

click here for story

Insurance Fans,

I know one and all have anxiously awaited word of Eliot Spitzer’s choice for New York insurance superintendent. ITP certainly has.

Actually, most non-Notes! ™ readers probably don’t care, but the choice of Eric Dinallo suggests an interesting national political confluence on insurance that, if I am the insurance industry, I am keeping an eye on. (Cue ominous string music, tracking shot of lone woman walking down shadowy, rain-swept street, trash blowing around.)

An alumnus, like Spitzer himself, of the office of legendary Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau, Dinallo polished his back-stabbing skills at the white-shoe firm of Paul Weiss before being named by Spitzer to head the AG’s Investment Protection Bureau, the office that turned upside down such lightweights as Merrill-Lynch, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and the rest of Wall Street. Spitzer, of course, would also take on Putnam and the many-trillion-dollar mutual-fund industry, Dick Grasso and the New York Stock Exchange, not to mention Midwestern polluters and the music industry. After Dinallo left in 2003, the office tore through the insurance industry, including the world’s largest commercial brokerage, Marsh & McClennan Cos., forcing the ouster of Jeffery Greenberg, scion of industry legend Hank Greenberg, then Greenberg himself from A.I.G., the largest, most successful and most politically powerful insurance company in the history of the world, and I’m not kidding. Also put in Spitzer’s schvitz, Warren Buffett himself.

Now, whatever you think about Spitzer(FB), put it this way: the guy now running Marsh is Spitzer’s former boss at Morgenthau’s office, and Hank Greenberg had to have his Asian art collection shipped to him in boxes from A.I.G. headquarters at 70 Pine Street.

While Dinallo did not take part in the insurance investigation, I assume he read the papers (hopefully, The Washington Post’s gritty coverage of the scandal) from his office at Willis Group Holdings, the third-largest commerical insurance brokerage, where he was general counsel, learning all about insurance.

The point: the insurance regulatory revolving door is jammed in New York State. Someone has entered through the skylight, and he’s no dummy and neither is his boss.

What’s that got to do with Katrina? Actually, nothing. But as regular Notes readers know, big things are also brewing in Washington. Rep. Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat, decorated U.S. Coast Guard search-and-rescue commander and Robert Redfored look -alike, is leading insurance reform efforts in the House. You doubt ITP? Check out the first four items on his Congressional home page:

“1. Investigate the Katrina claims practices of insurance companies that contract with the National Flood Insurance Program.

2. Repeal the federal antitrust exemption as it relates to price-fixing, bid-rigging, or market allocation in the market for property insurance.

3. Establish all-perils disaster insurance coverage (ITP says: yes!) backed by the federal government (ITP says: ‘don’t do it!).

4. Establish stronger federal oversight of property insurance practices.”

Meanwhile, Trent Lott, who, like Taylor, is also suing his insurance company, is now Minority Whip.

Finally, a big chunk of the industry iself is looking to gut state regulation via the National Insurance Act of 2006.

And ITP War Eagle wheels in the sky above, turning in a widening gyre.

FB=”False Balance.” You had to be there to appreciate how an office that traditionally dealt with coop disputes and bogus phone cards was enlarged to challenge and overturn some of the most longstanding and lucrative practices in U.S. finance, practices that everyone knew were unkosher, but no one, including, I’m sorry to say, my business, the business press, did anything about until Spitzer made it safe to pile on. These include Wall Street’s bogus, research; favored treatment for some mutual fund customers at the expense of others; excessive secrecy, log-rolling and ineffective oversight at the Big Board; and legal and illegal payments by insurers to brokers (like Marsh) in return for steering them corporate business. In any case, Spitzer’s winning margin in the governor’s race makes him formidable nationally, too.

click here to view article