A note about Arlen Specter
I’ve had this draft sitting around for a few weeks now (end of the semester was hectic, what can I say) so bear with me while I beat a horse that’s been long-dead in the political blogosphere. It may be old news, but it’s a good example of game theory in a political context and, I think, still interesting to think about.
The basic issue is this: Specter doesn’t want to run as a Republican, because he doesn’t think he could win as a Republican but does think he could win as a Democrat. Most of what I’ve heard is either criticism of this sort of selfish motivation, or resigned praise that he’s at least being honest about having a selfish motivation. But isn’t this* exactly the right way for a politician to behave?
We expect companies to pursue profit, not because profit has a moral quality on its own, but because it acts as a measure of real worth. If people like what you’re selling, they’ll buy it, and you’ll make money. A company that relentlessly pursues profit will (most of the time) be trying relentlessly to make as many people happy as possible.
Similarly, we expect politicians to try to get themselves elected and reelected. “He’s already campaigning for reelection” is often said with derision, but there’s really nothing wrong with it. Trying to get elected means trying to make your constituents like you and want you in office. True, there are some limits on this with respect to corruption and voter superficiality, but in general, we respect elections as a mechanism of choosing who deserves to hold political office. If you’re a politician and you don’t think that doing what you’re doing will get you reelected by the people you represent, we expect you to change what you’re doing.
However, if you really think that what you’re already doing is the best way to be a politician, it’s reasonable to have a bit of integrity and resist changing it. Maybe you should try to make the case to the public that your ideas and actions are worth valuing, worth electing. But let’s suppose for a moment, just hypothetically, that that isn’t working. That perhaps you really believe in strict measures for national security and in the right of women to choose abortion, and the majority of voters who elected you don’t understand how those ideas could go together.
What would we expect a company to do, if in the same situation? What if they can’t convince anyone to buy the high-quality aprons they sell, except for those couple people they heard of one time who tied them up into some really nifty handbags for themselves? Should they close up the apron shop and look for other careers? Or should they make the most of the fact that with a slight repackaging of the product they already make, they could reach a brand new and much larger market for their goods?
Arlen Specter knows he’s providing valuable services to his nation and his constituents, but he can’t convince enough PA Republican voters of that. He paid attention to polling and noticed that PA Democrats really like the job he’s doing, and also noticed that that had something to do with the fact that his ideology and actions would be at home in the Democratic party. So Specter had three choices. He could keep doing the governing he thinks is best, and get voted out of office by Republicans who don’t appreciate him and Democrats who’d rather vote for someone with a D by his name. He could compromise his ideals and vote the way that the Republicans want him to vote, just to keep his job and the R by his name. Or, he could agree to write a D by his name and get the chance to continue his work using the ideology he believes in.
Sure, I suppose it’s selfish, but we’ve constructed the system in such a way as to make personal interests and public interests motivate each other, so acting selfishly is not immoral. Specter isn’t somehow rigging the system in order to trick the American public into voting for him. He’s trying to make himself into the sort of politician the American public actually wants to elect. What more could we ask for?
* I realize some other political games were played after the initial announcement of Specter’s party switch. I’m not talking about those, mostly because when I wrote this, they hadn’t happened yet. At any rate, I want to talk about the initial incident and people’s reactions as a case study.
Carnival of the Elitist Bastards XI
Welcome to the eleventh edition of the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards. CEB is a monthly blog carnival that celebrates the intelligent and the exceptional, and decries willful ignorance and uniformity. Some may call us elitist bastards, but we prefer the term “awesome.” I thought the submissions this time fell into three general categories: politics/policy issues, science and other fact-related pursuits, and everyday life stuff. Let’s dig in:
Elitist law, politics, and policy
Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds explains the Employee Free Choice Act. Not content to listen to generalizations from the Wall Street Journal and others reporting on the proposed legislation, she read it herself in order to break down what it really says and does.
Mike at The Big Stick discusses why a revolving door for teachers isn’t so bad. He argues that alternative certification procedures would allow more qualified and excited individuals to become teachers, and that’s better than the status quo for students even if these new teachers leave after a few years for other jobs.
Cujo359 at Slobber and Spittle writes about what history can teach us, specifically regarding the Obama administration’s public statements compared to the outcomes of Obama’s policies as president. King John didn’t write the Magna Carta on a whim alone one day; the British aristocracy held him accountable and pushed for the type of government they wanted.
Just the elitist facts, ma’am
John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack deconstructs statements from the Discovery Institute’s Michael Egnor, who argued that intelligent design ought to be taught as science since most Americans are creationists. John points out that this reveals not only that the real agenda behind ID is creationism, but also that ID proponents seem to think science is merely a popularity contest.
Dana Hunter at En Tequila Es Verdad recommends two books by Richard Dawkins on understanding evolution. The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable deal with the somewhat non-intuitive idea that complex beings could have “randomly” evolved. Understanding what the word “random” really means is one of the most interesting parts.
Blake Stacey at Science after Sunclipse mourns the death of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section. They’re going to push a few science-related articles into the business and lifestyle sections if they fit, both space-wise and content-wise it seems.
Two people sent in links about Jon Stewart’s takedown of financial reporter Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. After a week-long feud between the two (Stewart mocked CNBC in a brief segment and Cramer took it upon himself to defend his show “Mad Money” and the station as a whole), Cramer came to Stewart for an interview. It’s pretty painful. Dana Hunter walks you through the gory details. Cujo359 turns it into a case study about how being ignorant of the facts and encouraging ignorance in others spells disaster for anyone, whether you’re a TV personality or not.
Living the elitist life
George at Decrepit Old Fool suggests that we do one impossible thing every year — not literally impossible, but seemingly impossible, something we can’t do yet and maybe never imagined we’d try. He’s learning to ride a unicycle. What will you do?
Blake Stacey also alerts us of the coining of the word TeXgefühl. If you’ve ever written in the typesetting system LaTeX or its variants, you’ll appreciate the notion that it takes a particular instinctive sense to get it right. My TeXgefühl has been gathering a bit of dust lately, but I think the existence of a word is motivating me to get it back in gear.
Here at It’s the Thought that Counts, I wrote about the Spread the Word to End the Word campaign (against the word “retarded”) and why it’s misguided. Respect for others is important, but I think we shouldn’t confuse respect with blind political correctness.
That wraps up CEB XI. Thanks for stopping by! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to host. See you next month!
Volcano monitoring
I finally got around to watching Obama’s speech and Jindal’s response. (Thanks, C-SPAN.) I thought Obama made some bold promises while staying on the whole realistic. I’ll always wince at the stories of regular folks doing great things, though… it sounds so forced, even if they really did do great things.
What I really want to talk about is this moment in Jindal’s speech where he calls out Congress for passing a stimulus bill that includes this silly, silly earmark for “something called volcano monitoring.” Oh, those nutty Congressmen and their pet projects!
I agree that earmarks are to be avoided, and I understand the strategy of naming ridiculous earmark spending in order to embarrass legislators. It’s effective when you point out millions of dollars going to a nonexistent Grape Research Center, or half a million for the Sparta Teapot Museum. But you have to make sure it sounds really silly. It seems that Republicans, in their fervor to criticize legislative pork, have been gradually forgetting how to determine this. At least as it was starting, they were calling reasonable projects by silly-sounding names — which made them sound uninformed, but at least worked on uniformed voters. It would have been unreasonable for a planetarium to spend that much an an “overhead projector,” but that’s not really what it was. It could sound like “fruit fly research” was a waste of time, if you didn’t know that work on Drosophila melanogaster laid the foundation for modern genetic research and is still extremely relevant today.
Tacking on the words “something called” helps when you’re talking about the World Toilet Summit (yes, that’s another real one, apparently) but it doesn’t work when everyone knows why the thing is called that. Something called volcano monitoring? Well, Bobby Jindal, probably that involves monitoring volcanos. You know, like keeping an eye on them. To predict when they’re going to erupt. For someone familiar with the US government’s previous lack of response to national disasters, I’d think you’d want people to be on the lookout for future ones so everyone could be prepared.
Time for Kennedy to go
[Note from Z: Hey, look! My coauthor A is back!]
Ted Kennedy has, without doubt, had a long and influential career in the US Senate. While I’m not far enough to the left to idolize him in the way that some do, there is little question that our country is better off because he served. He has been an excellent senator. However, as he has struggled with illness recently, I have increasingly wondered whether it was wise for him to remain in his seat. With his most recent difficulties, my mind has been made up. The responsible thing for Senator Kennedy to do now would be to resign his seat.
I see little reason for him to stay. He is fighting serious health problems, and unable to put the time and focus on his work that should be expected of a senator. I could of course understand someone pushing to stay when they know their replacement will have a different political stance. If you think certain policies are what are best for the country, then just keeping a vote in the Senate for those policies is very important. Kennedy, though, is from Massachusetts, a state with a Democratic governor who will appoint someone with very similar stances, and a state with no shortage of qualified Democrats to consider for the position. That person will continue to hold the seat easily in future elections. There really seems to me to be little reason for him to stay other than a desire to be personally involved in the decisions. That urge is of course totally understandable, but I think it would be appropriate if at this point, when a massive workload is being dumped on Congress, Senator Kennedy let someone else step in and take up the torch.
Kennedy hasn’t even been able to vote in the Senate recently. If he is unable to vote, there is no doubt that he is also unable to thoroughly research and understand whatever decisions he does make, and unable to try to influence other senators, participate in negotiations, and in general do his job. Naturally, it’s hard to push for someone who has serious health problems to resign. Everyone supports him personally and wishes him well with his illness. Being a senator is not a normal job, though, and you have an obligation to put your constituents above yourself. If an action is good for your constituents, you should do it, even if it’s unfair to you. This is one of those things, and it’s time for Kennedy to move on.
Mandatory ultrasounds
Via blog.bioethics.net: 11 state legislatures are facing proposed legislation to offer or require women seeking abortions to see ultrasound images of the fetus, and in some cases listen to the heartbeat. Lest you be confused, these are women who have, in at least the vast majority of cases, already decided to have an abortion. Some of these proposals allow the ultrasound to be done right up to 30 minutes before the abortion procedure. Several of the states graciously allow an 18 or 24 hour waiting period. (The AP story lists 12 states in total, but one in their list is actually South Carolina’s extension of an existing 1-hour law to a 24-hour one. Very sweet of them.)
The goal of these proposals is obviously, in Dr. Johnson’s words, “that [the woman] might catch a glimpse of her unborn fetus and change her mind.” If only they knew it had a heartbeat! pro-life legislators are musing. They assume that women getting abortions are doing so on a whim and have never really thought about the implications. This is insulting. It’s obviously a terribly difficult decision which every woman facing it agonizes over. Admittedly there is the occasional irresponsible person, but the real effect of any of these laws passing would be to put thousands of women through intense psychological trauma, on top of what is already an emotionally taxing experience.
Unable to actually ban abortion outright, these lawmakers are erecting bizarre barriers around the procedure to serve as criminal sentences. Their intentions are plainly to punish women, but they do so in a cruel and scarring way and under the perverse pretext of medical regulation. If abortion is not illegal, we shouldn’t be punishing the act.
I know random and strange legislation gets proposed all the time without any real hope of passing. However, the fact that this has popped up in a dozen states at once makes me worry that there’s some real initiative behind this horrible idea. I hope the other legislators step it up and vote it down.
President Obama
The long-anticipated inauguration ceremony went very well, I think. I found Obama’s speech to be gracious while still pointed. I don’t want to say much more about it, because every blogger who’s ever discussed American politics is posting something like this today, and I don’t really have anything new to add. I just want to say congratulations to President Obama and Vice President Biden. Here’s hoping that we were right to have hope.
Speaking of which, I want to point you to the Obameter, maintained by PolitiFact.com, if you haven’t seen it already. They’re keeping track of the 500+ promises that Obama made during his campaign, and marking each one with their status (kept, broken, in the works, etc.). I saw it mentioned first on the Reason Hit & Run blog yesterday, and at a few other places since then. I’ve generally seen it discussed with a sort of sore-loser snark (at H&R, not so much in the post itself as in the comments) but I think it’s something we should all be celebrating, even if we’re happy that Obama won the election. It’s a fantastic example of how technology can bring us better government, increase transparency and promote accountability through availability of information.
Politicians have been making campaign promises all over the place for as long as there have been politicians. Everyone gripes about how they don’t follow through. Oh, politicians, those dishonest, lying crooks! (Insert melodramatic fist-shake here.) But seriously, I think a lot of things just get forgotten. We’re talking about many hundreds of statements made. It’s not malice on the part of the politician, but simply things getting hectic and other issues taking the forefront, displacing that half a sentence in a speech to the crowd outside the Piggly-Wiggly in Tuscaloosa. If the public is really invested in that promise being carried out, a website like this one can serve as a reminder to the politician that he or she did make it. On the other hand, the website might reveal to citizens that the “big” promises do get the follow-through, while smaller and less important daydreams and wishes don’t get a politician’s priority. Either way, it’s a valuable reality check for everyone.
I also want to caution against becoming too obsessed with these records. Some of these promises hinge on Congress going along with what Obama wants, and while the president ought to work with the legislature to get his agenda through, he doesn’t have 100% control over the outcome. Additionally, some things have changed over the past year, and the president ought to reconsider his positions when the relevant information has changed. (I mean, really, if we’ve learned anything from the last eight years…!) Finally, we need to get real and understand that saying “I will work for x” is not the same as “I promise, x will definitely happen immediately when I take office.”
As happy as I am to be able to say “President Obama,” I won’t give him a free pass. We should all hold our elected officials accountable, which is why I’m glad the Obameter is up and running on inauguration day. Still, guys, remember he’s only been president for three hours. Give him a little more time to get started on the tax code.
What to do with Roland
The Illinois legislature has been frantically investigating Governor Rod Blagojevich’s many alleged acts of corruption. Not wanting to be overly hasty, but simultaneously not wanting Blagojevich to sneak in some more bribe solicitation in the meantime, they were reassured by his attorney’s statement that he would not attempt to make an appointment. Then, of course… he did. And so it happened that Roland Burris made America’s acquaintance.
He’s quite an unusual man. He’s named his children Roland II and Rolanda. He’s already bought himself a mausoleum, which he has preemptively emblazoned with his many great achievements, such as being the first African-American non-CPA member on the Board of Directors of the Illinois CPA Society. While these things are not illegal by any means, I think they betray a way of thinking that’s extremely divorced from reality. If it were up to me, this man would get nowhere near any office with official decision-making authority.
The more blatant problem with Burris, though, is that he has displayed a complete disregard for the public trust. Who in their right mind would accept an appointment from Blagojevich in the middle of all this scandal? Could he possibly expect to be respected by his constituents, or by his fellow senators? I have no idea what Burris thinks (see above), but here in reality, the answer is clearly no. The right thing for a politician to do during a major corruption scandal is to get as far away as possible, and denounce the corruption thoroughly and completely. Even if his appointment involved no bribes at all, his service will always be under that cloud of suspicion.
Nevertheless, I don’t understand the basis for all that talk about the Senate “not seating” Burris. Congress doesn’t get to choose who joins Congress. They get to make laws with general guidelines about election mechanisms and other bureaucratic things, and that’s it as far as this situation is concerned. Blagojevich appointed Burris. The governor is empowered to make that appointment, and he really is the governor. After verifying all that, there’s nothing more they can do.
That’s not the end of the story, though. The Constitution also says that “all civil officers of the United States” may be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” That term refers to acts of misconduct and impropriety, and is unrelated to actual criminal statutes. This is perfect for Burris. His seat has been gained in a manner easily describable as improper. I think this is the correct solution, allowing for the best of both worlds: ridding the Senate of an embarrassment and disgrace, while simultaneously obeying the law.
Academia versus politics?
I’m thrilled about Obama’s pick of Steven Chu for Secretary of Energy. In case you haven’t heard, he’s an experimental atomic physicist and Berkeley professor, as well as current director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Oh, and he won a Nobel Prize. I’m glad that someone with scientific expertise — and lots of it! — will be in Obama’s cabinet.
I’ve been simultaneously entertained and saddened, though, by the stories surrounding Chu’s training for his confirmation hearings. Erika Lovley at Politico reports:
While Chu’s appointment is expected to be fairly non-controversial, statements he made as an academic could come back to haunt him. Murkowski and other lawmakers, who have scoured his record, plan to raise concerns over comments that suggest he supports a steady increase in the federal gas tax over 15 years to adapt the country to more efficient vehicles.
Obama opposes a gas tax hike now, an area where experts warn Chu must be careful not to contradict the president-elect.
“A lot of academics held that belief, but it’s not something we think Republicans will support,” said Robert Dillon, spokesman for Murkowski.
It seems that back in September, Chu told the Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” and they’ve just now gotten around to reporting on it. I understand that his views are more newsworthy now than they were before he was named Secretary of Energy, but perhaps for the same reason his advocacy will be tempered by the Democratic party platform. He’s not an idiot, guys.
More importantly, he’s right. Gasoline prices are ridiculously low in the US, especially when you compare to Europe. If the price is going to go up to $4 a gallon, it should be because of taxes, not because of sudden supply fluctuations. That way, the money goes to the government, which can spend it on research and innovation to help reduce the amount of gasoline we consume (or reduce other taxes to improve incentive structures), rather than oil companies, which will just use it to line the pockets of their CEOs.
Mostly, though, I just think it’s funny to hear that there is a consensus among energy experts and economists that a particular policy is the best, but that it’s not politically viable. Please, people, they’re called experts for a reason. Academia and politics shouldn’t be warring factions. Politicians should be listening to the people who have done the research and crunched the numbers, and should work on selling their recommendations to the public — rather than championing the public’s ignorant opinions in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
New York’s soft drink tax
Last month, New York Governor David Paterson proposed adding an 18% statewide tax to non-diet sodas and sugary juice drinks. Though it does have some supporters, the plan has drawn plenty of criticism from nutritionists as well as small-government proponents. Fox News is even getting their fair and balanced panties in a twist about it. Despite all the criticism, I think it’s a great idea.
I know that nobody likes taxes. At the same time, though, most people like police and fire departments that are operational, public schools that can afford textbooks, and courthouses that can handle enough trials. The government needs to collect some tax revenue. The real question is, where should we take taxes from?
Every time the government taxes something, it changes the incentives for doing that thing. Income taxes make working less valuable, because they lower the wages you receive. Sales taxes discourage making purchases. Property taxes discourage owning property. (All these things are really only visible at the margins. Imagine that you have five dollars in your pocket and you want to buy a sandwich that costs $4.95. After sales tax, you can’t afford it anymore. Now, instead of thinking about how much cash you have on you right now, think of it in terms of a long-term budget, and you’ll get the idea.) If we want people in society doing a certain thing, or we want to make sure they are able to, we should keep taxes low on it. That’s why many places don’t tax groceries; they’re a necessity of life. Inversely, if we want people to stop doing something, we ought to tax it as high as is feasible. That’s why cigarette taxes exist, and why there should be a higher tax on gasoline. Taxes allow consumers to consider the externalities of their behavior. The tax is like adding on the social cost of people’s behavior, spread out over each individual act of consumption.
It’s bad that so many Americans are obese. According to Governor Paterson, nearly one in four New Yorkers fits that description. This puts a burden on New York’s medical resources, both in terms of time and space and in terms of funds available for government healthcare assistance. Therefore, it makes sense for New York to disincentivize obesity. They’re not locking people up in prison for it. Just making it a little less appealing.
If a tax can be used to achieve some social good like this, it means other taxes can remain lower (or can be lowered, depending on the current state of things). It seems to me that it’s a win-win situation. Better health in society, better allocation of taxes. Some people (like our friends at Fox News) think that this is cynical and hypocritical. Steven Milloy writes, “Combating obesity is not grounds for the tax; it is, instead, camouflage for it — and not very good camouflage at that.” This is a serious mischaracterization. What happens is, either New Yorkers drastically reduce their soft drink intake, which is a good thing, or New York makes a bunch of its tax revenue off a negative behavior rather than a positive one like working or buying groceries, which is also a good thing. No one is camouflaging anything.
Now, some of the criticism has been more along the lines of, “This isn’t enough.” It’s true that reducing the amount of soda you drink won’t instantly put you at your ideal weight. There are other types of food that are bad for you. Exercise still matters. However, this sounds to me like arguing that if you have anvils crushing both your feet, it’s not worth it to try to move the one on the right. Doing something in this case is still helpful, even though it isn’t everything.
Who can be my president?
I’ve been mulling over the proposal, from our friend Progressive Conservative, that we all take and publicize the Wendell Wilkie Pledge. He’s named it for the Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkie’s “Loyal Opposition Speech” is a reminder that politics is about choosing the best policies rather than about personality clashes, and that one can continue to oppose a party’s or politician’s ideas while respecting the rule of law and authority of the office held. In his explanation of the pledge, he writes:
When we vote we are making a promise. A promise to honor the results. A promise to honor the office. A promise to claim the president as our own, even when we disagree with him most. That is the oath I ask you all to take. I urge you to accept the results of this election. Regardless of who you vote for in November, our country can only go forward if we give our new president our loyal support, though I am not asking anyone to blindly follow this President.
I like this idea very much, and I wish that I was writing this post to affirm my support for the pledge and call on others to join me. However, I think the circumstances of this election make that impossible for me to do. I personally support the Obama-Biden ticket, and I would of course honor the results even if the McCain-Palin ticket were to win instead, but I don’t think I could wholeheartedly refer to McCain as “my president” when he and his campaign have gone so far out of their way to specify that they are absolutely no such thing.
I confess: I’ve finished college, and I’m a graduate student. In physics. I don’t live in a tiny town in a landlocked state; I live in a big city, near a coast. (Horror of horrors — the one on the east!) I’m not a Christian. I don’t even believe in a god. Because I’m an educated, metropolitan, “East-coast liberal” atheist, John McCain and Sarah Palin are willing to demonize me and others like me in an attempt to win the votes of everyone else. Why should I pledge my loyal support to a ticket that charges me with the problems of our time?
This hateful rhetoric is not new to Palin, though she did recently refer explicitly to “real America” and “the pro-America parts” of the country. Her speech at the RNC was all about how small-town people are good people (and not-so-subtle implications that if you don’t meet the Mayberry R.F.D. stereotype, you don’t really love your country). I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the irony meter-breaking RNC speech delivered by Mitt Romney, who ripped on “Eastern elites” despite being one himself. Just recently, McCain campaign adviser Nancy Pfotenauer dismissed northern Virginia as not “real Virginia,” but merely infiltrated and contaminated by “Democrats [who] have just come in from the District of Columbia.” North Carolina representative Robin Hayes told a McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” Today, McCain explained to NBC’s Brian Williams that the “elitists” live “in our nation’s capital and New York City.” (In the same interview, Palin pointed out that an elitist is anyone “who [thinks] that they’re better than anyone else,” which puts an interesting new twist on the concept of a political campaign.)
Can you imagine what would happen if Obama and Biden were campaigning in the same way? What if they repeatedly warned of what “conservatives from fly-over states” would do to the government? What if they promised to rid Washington of “Texas bigotry,” or “backwater Mississippi racism,” or “evangelical Christian ignorance?” What if when Republicans derisively referred to Obama’s Ivy League education, Democrats countered by pointing out that McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his college class, and that the best of the four colleges Palin transferred around between was the University of Idaho? I’d love to see each use of the adjective “latte-drinking” as an insult followed by a reminder that the McCain-Palin ticket is instead targeting the alcoholic demographic. Imagine if they argued, as Adam Cadre did not too long ago, that “Republican political ads spew insults — or at least epithets that Republicans think are insults — while Democrats hold out their hands and coo that ‘There is no them — there is only us.’ There’s a reason the guy who said that moved to New York after his presidency instead of back to Arkansas: New York is better than Arkansas.”
Of course, this would be outrageous. The media wouldn’t let the Democrats get away with a presidential campaign with that kind of language in it, and neither would the voters. Even though many of us do believe, deep down, that there’s something seriously wrong with states where creationism is taught in science classes, or where racial segregation is still the norm, or where everything from terrorism to hurricanes gets blamed on “the gays,” we believe that it would be both rude and unproductive to accuse everyone in an entire region of being blindingly ignorant or racist or bigoted as part of a campaign. A candidate willing to make such sweeping and divisive generalizations would be difficult to vote for, even if there were some truth behind them.
It feels like many eons ago now, but there was this time back in April when Obama, at a closed fundraiser event in California, commented that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter” about the government and the economy and as a result “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a reasonable characterization of what’s going on, and while it’s not something anyone would be happy to hear said about themselves, it doesn’t seem particularly vicious. I could even see it as sympathetic. But when his comments got out, the only words anyone remembered were “cling to guns and religion” which was interpreted to mean that Obama wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban God. Obama backtracked, calling his statement “boneheaded.”
So then, why is it acceptable, even encouraged, for Republicans to make much worse comments in the opposite direction? I’ll set aside the obvious fallacy of assuming that everyone in New England is a liberal or that everyone in the Deep South is conservative. While that is insulting to our intelligence, it’s at least statistically likely to be true. My bigger problem here is with the divide between the supposedly good Americans and supposedly bad Americans. Republicans seem to think that the good Americans live in the small towns, with limited education, limited exposure to other countries or cultures or ways of life, and limited sobriety. They all work in manufacturing or construction or farming, and this is good, honest work. They all live in “real America,” the states or districts that are colored red on electoral maps. On the other hand, there are the bad Americans, who live in cities big enough to have more traffic lights than you can count on your fingers, tend to go to college and occasionally travel abroad, and have a wide variety of ethnic background and religious traditions. As a result of their college education, they have bad jobs in fields like law, journalism, or scientific research, which means they live in an elite Ivory Tower where they scheme about ways to ruin the lives of good Americans. Naturally, they do not live in “real America,” because their states or districts get colored in blue.
I wish I was making all this up. I wish I could honestly say that we can all get along, but I didn’t make this divide — I usually speak out against it. But when the demonization has gone so far that we appear to have a new Joe McCarthy in Congress, I think it’s gone beyond what I can handle in personal conversations. Republicans need to stop talking about who’s “pro-America” or “anti-America,” who lives in “real America” and who doesn’t. We all love our country; we just have different ideas on how to keep it great and make it better. If Republicans continue to characterize any and all opposing viewpoints as “anti-American,” I don’t see why anyone should be willing to be their “loyal opposition” providing respectful and reasoned debate. Unless John McCain and Sarah Palin suddenly decide to vehemently denounce this kind of rhetoric and seriously apologize for the tone of their campaign and the direction in which they’ve led their party, I just can’t see being able to call McCain “my president.”
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