Tribute to Tom Diemer

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD
SENATE
TRIBUTE TO TOM DIEMER

Mr. DeWINE. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the retiring dean of the Ohio press corps. Tom Diemer, a veteran reporter who spent more than 26 years at the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, has left the paper to pursue another career.

Tom is one of those rare reporters who truly do "get it." Tom understands Ohio. He understands Ohio government. He understands Ohio politics and certainly national politics. He understands what his readers need and what they want to know.

Tom Diemer began working at the Columbus bureau of the Plain Dealer in 1978. A few years later, in 1981, Tom was promoted to bureau chief. When the opportunity came in 1985 to join the Plain Dealer's Washington bureau, Tom took it. During his career here in Washington, Tom has covered four Ohio U.S. Senators: first, Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn; later on, myself and then GEORGE VOINOVICH.

With a healthy dose of skepticism, Tom reported to his readers in Cleveland about the activities in the U.S. Senate. But Tom was never a reporter to take a press release at face value or a prepared statement at face value. I think Tom was a skeptic in a good sense of the term. He required his sources and those he got information from to make the case to him, and he questioned them, questioned them hard. He asked them questions that showed he was looking for the story behind the story. Whether it was local issues, such as the Great Lakes or the Euclid Corridor, or national issues, such as a war declaration or the PATRIOT Act, we could always expect Tom to dig deeper and go further with his line of questioning than just about anybody else.

Tom would want to know the implications of a certain story or he would want some "color" for his story so he could capture the "feel" of an event for his readers. He would want to be able to take his readers here to Washington and let them feel and understand how things really work in our Nation's Capital.

I always got the feeling that when Tom wrote a story, his editors got off pretty easily. They really did not have to do much work. However Tom wrote it, that was probably just about the way the story appeared in the Plain Dealer because Tom got it right. No matter how tough his questions were to me, I always knew any story I read by Tom Diemer would be fair and accurate.

In Washington, Tom came to lead the Ohio press corps. His expertise about Ohio politics often made him the go-to person for C-SPAN or CNN or any of the national reporters anytime they needed someone to analyze the Ohio political scene during an election year.

I have always appreciated Tom's great professionalism, his thoroughness, his frankness, his fairness, his kindness, and the way he deals honestly, forthrightly with people.

Tom Diemer will still be writing, but he is leaving the Plain Dealer to set out now on his own. I certainly will miss him. I will miss my frequent contact with him. I certainly wish him the best of luck.
TRANSPORTATION SAFETY

Mr. President, I would like to turn to the issue of highway safety. Over 43,000 people lost their lives on our Nation's highways last year. That is one death every 12 minutes or the equivalent of two Boeing 747-400s filled to capacity going down every week with no survivors.

This past May, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, released its 2003 traffic safety report, which details when, where, and why so many Americans lose their lives on our roads. This information gives us an idea of how effective our efforts are at the local, State, and national levels and where we need to focus resources in the future to help save lives. Based on the preliminary 2003 data, we have, tragically, a long way to go.

Overall, fatalities increased 1 percent, from 42,815 in 2002 to 43,220 in the year 2003. This is the fourth consecutive increase in annual traffic fatalities. This is truly bad news, particularly in light of the progress we made throughout the 1990s, when the norm was a reduction in fatalities each year. On the other hand, the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled stayed constant at 1.5 from 2002 to 2003. While not an increase, this figure does show how difficult it will be to reach the Secretary of Transportation's very aggressive goal of reaching 1.0 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled by the year 2008.

The 2003 report also includes a number of other findings that shed light on the direction our country is taking as far as highway safety. Among other things, the report states the following:

Standard passenger car fatalities are down but deaths in sports utility vehicles, SUVs, are up in the past year, with most of the increase coming from rollover crashes. NHTSA estimates this trend may continue as SUVs grow as a share of sales volume.

Motorcycle crash deaths are up 11 percent from last year, now totaling 3,592. Further, drunk driving death rates are essentially unchanged from 2002, with 40 percent of crash fatalities involving alcohol in the year 2003.

Further, the number of fatal crashes involving young drivers, those between 16 and 20, declined by 3.7 percent, from 7,738 in 2002 to 7,542 in the year 2003.

While the report does bring welcome news with regard to young drivers who are much more vulnerable while driving than adults, it is also clear that progress needs to be made in a host of other areas, particularly rollover crashes and drunk driving. I have been working in the Senate, along with others, to see that we do just that through safety issues we have added and that the Senate added to the 6-year highway bill currently under consideration by the joint House-Senate conference committee.

These initiatives are designed to advance our ability to test vehicles for passenger protection and rollover crashes, get consumers vital crash test information when they need it most, and increase seatbelt use and reduce drunk driving through nationwide high-visibility traffic safety enforcement campaigns. Combined with increased seatbelt use, something that in my State of Ohio, Ohio State Senator Jeff Armbruster is working diligently to enforce in Columbus, better driver education, which the Ohio Department of Public Safety is focusing on, and responsible practices, such as using a designated driver, can in fact make a real difference.

These initiatives are contained in the Senate-passed bill that is currently being considered by the House-Senate conference committee. It is vitally important that they remain in this conference committee. They will, in fact, save many lives.

Traffic safety affects all of us. We all have a role to play in making sure that when the 2004 numbers come out early next year, they are headed in the right direction.

In a related matter, I would also like to discuss a very important development in the effort to make our Nation's roads safer. Earlier this month, Delaware became the 50th and last U.S. State to adopt a .08 blood-alcohol content per se drunk driving standard. Now every State in the Union has that standard.

This development constitutes the culmination of many years of work here in the Senate to get tough, uniform drunk driving laws on the books across our country. In 2000, the Senate took decisive action to help stop drunk driving by implementing mandatory sanctions for States that do not adopt a .08 per-se standard. Now we are finally seeing the full realization of this effort, as all 50 States now have .08 laws.

This is so important from a safety perspective because the fact is that a person with a .08 blood-alcohol concentration level is seriously impaired. When a person reaches .08, his or her vision, balance, reaction time, hearing, judgment, and self-control are severely impaired. Additionally, critical driving tasks, such as concentrated attention, speed control, braking, steering, gear-changing and lane-tracking, are negatively impacted at .08.

Beyond these facts, there are other scientifically sound reasons to have a national .08 standard. First, the risk of being in a crash increases gradually with each blood-alcohol level, but then rises rapidly after a driver reaches or exceeds .08 compared to drivers with no alcohol in their systems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in single-vehicle crashes, the relative fatality risk for drivers with blood alcohol levels between .05 and .09 is over eleven times greater than for drivers with blood alcohol levels of zero.

Second, .08 blood alcohol laws have proven results in reducing crashes and fatalities. Some studies have found that .08 laws reduce the overall incidence of alcohol fatalities by 16 percent and also reduced fatalities at higher blood alcohol levels. Now that all 50 States have a .08 law, we will have the opportunity to see its effects on a much larger scale.

The reduction in alcohol-related fatalities since the 1970s is not attributable to one single law or program. Rather, it is the result of a whole series of actions taken by State and Federal Government and the tireless efforts of many organizations, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Students Against Drunk Driving, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, and many others.

I thank my friend from New Jersey, Senator Lautenberg, for his continued dedication to fighting drunk driving. His hard work and perseverance have made the nationwide .08 standard possible. Mr. President, .08 was definitely a legislative effort worth fighting for, and now that all 50 States have a companion law in effect, I believe we will see why.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.