Morning Fog

Romney, Bush - Peas In A Pod

I just watched the PBS special "The Choice," which examines the life histories of Obama and Romney, seeking to shed light on what makes them tick. There are some interesting points, things about both men that I didn't know. 

What I found most interesting, though, was the eerie similarity between Romney and a different President:  George W. Bush.  The parallel I see is that both men had successful fathers who had made their way to the top in politics; both of them apparently revered those fathers, yet also seemingly felt driven to outdo them.   (Freudian? Oedipal? Or just kinky?.)  I would argue this duality led "Dubya" tragically to start a war in Iraq for no better reason than to get even for Saddam's making a fool of his pop, while also showing up daddy by completing what the older man had left unfinished.  

For Romney, it's possible that just achieving the Presidency, where his father failed, may of itself be the crowning touch that puts him a step above his father.  Certainly, as many observers have pointed out, the only immutable principle in his campaign for President seems to be his unshakeable conviction that he deserves to be President.   Yet it's worrisome to ponder where else he might lead us. 

Romney might do better to study his father a bit more closely and seek to emulate him before surpassing him.  George Romney, as "The Choice" makes clear, was a committed egalitarian, a moderate, and a man of principle and conviction.  His son, clearly not one wanting to be accused of being brainwashed, has abandoned principle in favor of crass opportunism, shifting views from week to week on every issue in the book as current polls dictate.  He pulled the very same switcheroo in his campaign for the governorship in Massachusetts. 

As Governor, he seemed to share many of his father's views.  Is that the real Mitt Romney?  Perhaps, but how will voters be able to tell until after the fact?  

Another angle:  Does Romney's propensity for the 180-degree turn only presage that he's flexible enough to craft a successful, pragmatic, and bipartisan solution to all that ails us?  And if he can do that, is it possible that as President, he could thus not only rescue the country, but also rescue the Republican Party from the extremist parasites gnawing at its innards?  Watching the show, you can almost come away with the thought that maybe Romney is just what we need to break our current deadlock, the guy who's not committed to a party position, the businessman who crunches numbers, analyzes, and works out a solution that works.

Almost.  But politics isn't business.  Maybe Romney-as-President would turn out to be that savior but I'm more inclined to fear that his lack of firmly grounded principles could make him a patsy for extremists in the party.  In this way, too, he would be an echo of George W. Bush.     

On Race, A Long Way To Go

A study of racist attitudes finds that a slight majority of all Americans' views are still colored (no pun intended) by considerations of race.

No big surprise there.  I always considered that - in an ironic turn of fate - Obama really owed his election to George Bush, the President who did so badly that even some overt racists were ready for a change.  It was the right time and right place. Otherwise, the U.S. still would not have experienced an African-American President.

The study suggests that while we may have come a long way in matters of race, there is still a long way to go.  Exactly so.

The Candidates' Foreign Policy Debate

Most Americans couldn't care less about foreign policy, especially in times like the present, when everybody is focused on the economy.  It's a little bit disingenuous to schedule a separate debate on the topic, and not surprising that the candidates try to steer the discussion back to domestic issues when they can.

That said, I was surprised that most post-debate analysts thought the debate didn't bring out differences.  Romney clearly sought - and mostly succeeded - to restore a sense that he's not a boat-rocker, and that U.S. foreign policy is nonpartisan.  Still, his remarks revealed (I thought) a few fundamental differences:

Romney comes off as a cold warrior.  He says our enemies should "fear and respect" us. He still identifies Russia as our key enemy.  He seems more concerned about the size of our armed forces than their capabilities.  He made a ridiculous and obviously meaningless statement that our navy now has fewer ships than at any time since 1917 (Obama's deflating response to that was right on).  He believes the size of our military budget is the most important measure of our security, and astonishly suggested that bulking up the defense budget is a better use of our funds than providing more comprehensive health care/insurance to our citizens.  

Second, he's got the cowboy mentality - go it alone.  Although he said he would never "dictate" to other countries, most of his positions on specific regions and countries seems to proceed from the assumption that we can and should do so.  He bewails U.S. "loss of influence" in the world, but in practice he seems to mean loss of the ability to dictate solutions.  He has criticized in the past "leading from behind," which is another term for the process of gathering some allies behind your cause before proceeding.  He belittled Obama's efforts to reach out to the developing world. 

Finally, Romney exhibits a disturbing impatience for results.  Usually, a longer view is needed in diplomacy.  He complains that Iran is "four years closer" to having a nuclear weapon, which implies an impatience with diplomacy and a willingness to start another war in the Middle East.  The Middle East, he intoned, is "in tumult" (implying this is Obama's fault, but wait - hasn't the region been in tumult for about 50 years?).  Romney says Pakistan now threatens to become a failed state; I think he's right, but I'd say it was put on an inevitable path to that status by the Bush administration's war on terrorism, which put predictable and fatal strains on the political fabric of the country.   

Romney is entitled to his views; there are many around, I suppose, who still share them.  But they're not today's reality.  The cold war is over, we've spent far too great a proportion of resources in trying to police the world entirely on our own dime.  On economic matters, Romney has lately taken to suggesting we could "become Greece," which I think is rather unlikely.  But let's ensure that we don't become Great Britain.  The future is in the more multilateral approach that Obama espouses because it offers the solution to the dilemma we face:  How can we keep from beggaring ourselves at home while still making ourselves secure in the world?   

 

Extreme Gerrymandering

Politics is all about gaming the system.  Misrepresentation, fearmongering, pandering can all be used in dealing with voters, but even better is rigging things behind the scenes so no one ever knows anything was "tilted."  In the old days, there was plain old ballot-box-stuffing (or the variation on the play, ballot-box disappearance).  We think those days are gone.  But there still remain such useful tricks as the current efforts to restrict voting, ostensibly in order to "clamp down on voter fraud," where courts seem to be making some progress. 

One of the oldest, and one that's proved highly resistant to efforts to fix it, is the gerrymander, which draws electoral district boundaries in a way that favors an incumbent candidate or party.  Some analysts have succinctly described this as "the candidate picking his/her voters, rather than the voters picking the candidate. 

In Virginia recently, our Governor talked a good game, speaking of a more sensible delineation of districts and commissioning a panel to make recommendations, but in the end, the ethereal presence of Mr. Gerry prevailed, with an understanding between the parties about which districts would be safe for each of them. 

In nearby Maryland, I'd been hearing tales of really over-the-top district-fixing (this effort strictly by Democrats), but the true extent of the problem didn't hit me until I saw, thanks to the Washington Post, the map of the Maryland Third Congressional District.  As the accompanying editorial says, the illustration takes the place of the usual daily political cartoon, and it is indeed cartoonish.  The map of the proposed revised district boundaries has to be seen to be believed, so I reproduce it here (the brown tinted areas):

And for those who don't know Maryland, I'd just note that it's a small state, and bits of this district are spattered over about two thirds of it.

What's needed are some reasonable guidelines for drawing districts, to allow both roughly equal populations, but with much greater emphasis on compact and contiguous borders.  Marylanders can start by disapproving the state's proposed new boundaries (several others are nearly as bad) but it's not clear how much better any alternative will be.  That's why I can't imagine how tackling this widespread problem could be left to the states; it needs to be a federal effort.  Or private ... perhaps there ought to be a PAC for that.  

Debt, Deficit, And Entitlements

I've been amused of late by Republican political messages berating Obama for big deficits, increases in government spending, and the like.  It's another shell game to get voters to focus on anything except the net results of Republican economic policies.  After all, the debt and deficits in question exist largely because of profligate spending by the Bush administration - on two pointless long wars, among other things -- and because of the cost of repairing the broken economy. 

For those who are seriously concerned about taming our raging deficits and getting the costs of entitlements under control however, I'd offer this thought:  No matter who wins the election in two weeks, we'll still have a closely divided and partisan Congress. It will be difficult to get things done, even though I doubt Democratic opposition to Romney will be anywhere nearly as unyielding as the Republicans' was to Obama. 

In that climate, a reelected Obama will be in far stronger position than a newly sworn in Romney would be, to push through hard decisions on cutbacks and reforms. 

Why?  Obama will begin with views already on the table, with a renewed mandate (no matter how slim, it will be politically significant, having occurred amid continuing economic woes), with no unyielding backbenchers in his own party and - most important - with no worries about preserving options for his next term.  Romney, on the other hand, can't start right away, will be hampered by his party's reactionary wing, and will always be looking over his shoulder to maintain popularity for running again.

Democrats have many reasons to vote for Obama.  Now, Republicans who so highly value fiscal responsibility and Clinton-style deficit reduction, also have one very good one. 

How To Get Women

In my youth, anyone reading the header "How To Get Women" might have expected some book of advice for college-age guys on how to meet women, get dates and maybe even literally how to charm the pants off them.

No more!  These days, of course, it's all about politics.  Both our big-party candidates for President are vying mightily to "get women."  (Romney likes his gals commodity-style, in binders; Mrs. Romney "loves women," presumably in a platonic way.) 

But seriously folks ... Women constitute a majority of voters.  Of course a winning candidate needs women's votes as well as men's.  Obama's Democrats seem to believe they are the natural political home of women and they have put all their advertising eggs in the basket labeled "preserving choice" in matters of birth control, planning, and abortion. 

Melinda Henneberger, the principal writer of a Washington Post blog on women's issues ("She the People"), has suggested more than once that the Obama emphasis on this single issue is a mistake. Most recently in "In quasi-defense of Mitt's binders" amidst musing about the polls showing Obama's lead with women melting away, she wrote:

My own view is that the tax plan Romney can’t explain won’t help either women or men who are not top earners. Yet today, Team Obama’s pitch to women is more of the same, sprinkled with some binder jokes. Obama’s ads, surrogates and spinners still reflect the conviction they can win with women, who are almost evenly divided on abortion rights — by tripling and quadrupling down on that one issue.  Another day, another press call with Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards. And if the president loses women, his team will doubtless conclude that they just didn’t talk about choice enough; what else could it possibly be?

I think she's right.  Moreover, a single-barreled approach seems a bit condescending, as if African-Americans were courted only with ads about affirmative action.

The Democratic campaign to win female votes needs to expand its approach.  Their strategists should take Ms. Henneberger's advice.

Up In Arms Against Our Fearsome Government

I want to follow up on my comments yesterday.   

There are those who believe, or profess to believe, that the U.S. government is an imminent threat to our liberties, and who think the Second Amendment is an assurance that we will be able to fight such a government.  I find both parts of this argument preposterous. 

Regarding the first:  The framers of the Constitution had experienced first a group of neighboring but often competing colonies, each separately and individually ruled by the king of a faraway land.  Then they'd had a few years in a loose confederation in which there was almost no centralized power, a setup they quickly saw as insufficient.  These men were naturally reticent to give too much power to the new national government they were creating.  They couldn't have known what might come out of it.  So they built in a fail-safe:  Each state would have its own force of armed citizens. 

From the perspective of well over two centuries later, I honestly doubt that such worries are rational any longer.  Concerns about states' rights versus federal rights still exist, but how many of us really believe that we'll be out in the streets fighting our own government, a government that's not foreign, but of our own devising?

So it's a very long stretch to suppose our government would seek to suppress us.  (If you believe it does now, sorry, you're paranoid. Get help.)  Oh, and by the way, the same fringe that takes it as an article of faith that citizens will have to defend themselves against their own government some day, are invariably also among those who criticize government as hopelessly ineffective.  If this terribly threatening government is a paper tiger, let's not worry ourselves so much over it.

But let's make that stretch and assume that our armed forces get, and execute, the order to come out of their bases and crush us under the treads of their tanks.   That brings us to the second part of the above argument, that those doughty armed citizens, acting with uncentralized leadership and in small groups, could be effective in resisting such a rogue government.  I truly doubt it. 

Instead, I'd keep in mind that (1) the National Guard is under the control of the individual states; many governors would resist any order to activate them for a war on the people;  (2) that all our forces, not just the Guard, comprise a cross-section of the population.   When civilian society has race problems or drug problems, the armed services have them too.  In the context of war against our own rogue government, that effectively means half of them would rebel and join the resistance, or refuse to follow orders. 

For me that’s a far better answer to tyranny than a few platoons of guys running around in the woods with guns.  The improbability of success is also a good deterrent to our own government turning against us in the first place.

USA Today Is Polling On Second Amendment Views

Today it came to my attention, through a forwarded e-mail, that USA Today was running a quick poll regarding readers' views on gun ownership.  The originator of the message (unknown to me) made some spurious claims about what Attorney General Holder believes regarding the second amendment, but also urged me to vote, and pass the idea along to everyone else I know.

Well, I was curious, so I went to the USA Today poll.  The question was "Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?"  The available answers were "yes," "no," and "not sure."   Sorry, too simplistic. This poll result will tell us nothing of value because it tries to force a false choice:  there's no answer here I can buy into. 

I can't check "not sure," because I am sure -- sure that neither of the other answers is right.   "Yes," I agree, the Second gives us the right to bear arms," but "No," because that right isn't absolute and answering "yes" would imply that it is.  

I believe the real answer is yes, individuals do have the right to possess guns, but it’s limited by that little bit of the Second Amendment that too many people just consider annoying and try to ignore – in the context of a “well-regulated militia.”    We have that militia.  It’s called the National Guard. The framers were thinking entirely about the issue of national defense (or actually at that time, defense of the individual states) and their experience of the revolution.  They weren’t thinking of hunting and such. 

So the Constitution really says nothing about the recreational use of guns, for hunting, bumping off an intruder, or just popping a few neighbors to liven up a Saturday night.  I do think people also have the right to own weapons for such uses, kind of like the right to own a cell phone, which also isn’t mentioned in the Constitution. And the founding fathers did too, I’m sure, because in that day everybody had them (guns, not cell phones).  But I don’t believe those uses are necessarily protected by the Constitution, and they are and should be subject to reasonable regulation.  (The Second Amendment itself refers to regulation.)

Finally, I believe the NRA and (at NRA urging) our recent court decisions, have needlessly complicated the issue by purposely mixing these two completely separate concepts of guns and gun usage.  If we were to divide them in the way I’ve suggested, most of us really wouldn’t have any reason to argue over this whole issue.

 

The Politics Of Misrepresentation

Shading truth has always been one of the weapons in the politician's arsenal for his war of election.   All politicians of all parties use it.   (Even George Washington.  You think he's famous for telling on himself, chopping down a cherry tree?  Hah!! Historians tell us that there never WAS any cherry tree.) 

So we have come to accept misrepresentation, i.e. when statistics are cherry-picked to put your policies or actions in the most favorable light, or the opponent's in the most unfavorable, as standard practice.  We've always viewed that kind of shading as unexceptionable, predictable, and possibly even necessary. 

But in the current political campaign, it seems lying has escalated considerably into pure and willful misstatement of basic facts, with the intent to deceive.  I believe the change is a direct and unanticipated consequence of the prevalence of super-PACs in political funding, because:

• More serious lies are coming from PAC-sponsored ads than from candidates' own campaign organizations (if we rule out Romney's current desperate attempts to deny positions he proudly held a month ago.)
• PACs are supposedly "independent" so a candidate they support has deniability and no longer risks being branded personally a liar.
• Many PACs are funded heavily or entirely by just a handful of individuals.  These donors have great wealth and are shadowy, if not anonymous, so they care not for public opinion, and have little to lose by lying.  (In their isolation, they may even persuade themselves of the untruths they tell.) 
• My strong impression from the media is that ads for Republicans are by far the greater transgressors on the truth scale, both in frequency and degree.  This is predictable since Republican-oriented PACs are far more numerous and well-funded. 

The only small silver lining in this cloud is that at this point, the lies tend to stand out like red flags.  Why?  Because of some of the inherent characteristics of PACs and PAC contributors (anonymity, isolation, lack of direct political experience), they tend to overreach, pushing narratives that are just too outlandish for even a child to believe.  There is, for example, a current anti-Obama screed that blames him for the huge deficits run up by the GOP's own George Bush.  In our Virginia race for Governor, one ad accuses the Democratic candidate of voting for huge defense cuts (they are actually referring to the sequestration) and wanting to shut down the Pentagon (as if any former Virginia governor, running for Senator, would favor closing down the Pentagon, which after all, is in Virginia).

Many of these ads are even laden with loud interjections by the announcer that "It's true!  It's the truth!"  I suppose the PAC-men think that no one could imagine anyone would be bold or craven enough to invent such over-the-top lies, so even the baldest fabrication repeated frequently enough can come to be accepted as truth.  This is the "Big Lie."  Hitler first coined the term and accused German Jews of using it; but his propaganda minister Goebbels made the technique his own, to the point that it's now a recognized propaganda technique.  

With practice, super PACs will surely become more refined in their technique, perhaps a little less obvious in their propaganda pieces.  Then what will we do?  Probably, ignore political ads as we now do anyway.     

Revealing Insight On Working With The Opposition

In Sunday's business section (Washington Post), columnist Ezra Klein did an interesting take on the first presidential debate, turning off the sound AND the picture and analyzing (GASP!) the transcript of what was actually said.  This approach led to some interesting insights, but if you want to see it yourself, you'll have to go to the actual newspaper, or to the online edition (look in the business section) -- curiously, it has disappeared from the Post's online news site.

One comment, though, I found particularly worth highlighting:  Revisiting Romney's defense of his "bipartisanship" when he argued that in Massachusetts, he had Republicans and Democrats come together, whereas the President, he claimed, had pushed through a plan "without a single Republican vote."

As Klein observes:

Got that?  Republicans refused to work with you, Mr. President, and that makes you a harsh partisan.  Democrats were willing to work with me, and that makes me a bipartisan uniter. 

The consistent Republican strategy of the past several years -- a near-absolute refusal to cooperate in any way to do the government's business -- has been one of the more unfortunate characteristics of our current deadlock. 

But Klein's observation dovetails interestingly with the astute commentary, in the same business section, by Steven Pearlstein, who points out that a refusal to cooperate may not be considered "unfortunate" by everyone.  In fact, by creating ineffectiveness in government, it's precisely what the libertarian extremists of the Republican right want.   (Pearlstein goes on to note how that's playing out in our courts, in what appears to be a conscious campaign to cripple government's regulatory powers.)