Occam’s Razor

The Cold War Returns

It is now looking like The Cold War did not so much end as it was postponed.

It sure looked like it ended back in 1989. For those of us of a certain age, the images of the Berlin Wall being torn down brick by brick (with many of the bricks being carted off as souvenirs) are indelible. Sometime in the early 1990s, I remember going to sleep with the realization that for the first time in my life, there was virtually no possibility of our country being attacked by nuclear missiles. No country had a reason to lob one at us. We were safe at last!

Over the last ten days or so, we have seen what sure looks like an opening salvo in The Cold War, Version 2. Russia and Georgia have been having a little tiff. It started over the largely ethnically Russian province of South Ossetia in Georgia. It was allowed quasi-independence from Georgia because Georgia feared Russia, its big brother. Who started this war? It is hard to say for sure, since there were plenty of skirmishes on both sides leading up to it, as The Washington Post cataloged yesterday. It looks like the Georgian army was the first to tip the apple cart by brazenly sending its troops into South Ossetia to show them who’s boss. To Georgia it was, “Well, excuse me for reclaiming my territory.” To the residents of South Ossetia it was, “Hey, I thought we were independent! Russia! Help!!” To Russia, it was “Let’s squash those Georgian buggers and send a signal that the Bear is back”.

Moving troops into South Ossetia was a spectacularly stupid move by Georgia, but one that was probably inevitable at some point. Disputed regions never remain disputed indefinitely. Eventually one side gets into a big enough huff and moves their chess piece. The Russian Army showed that Georgia’s forces were paper tigers. This left Georgia to squeal to its Western allies to help negotiate a cease-fire. Maybe Russia will withdraw, maybe not. Point made.

This war is not really about South Ossetia or neighboring Georgian territories under occupation by the Russian army. Telling this to the thousands of civilians who appear to have died because of this conflict is doubtless of no comfort. No, the roots of this event go back to that day in October 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the subsequently poor job the West did integrating Russia into the free world in the years since. Unsurprisingly, much of the blame can be laid on the Bush Administration, who have proven ever anxious to push its ideological saber when it could. This administration believes that possession is nine tenths of the law. That is why it never thought twice about suspending Habeas Corpus. If you have power, you should use it, whether earned or not. So of course we were going to overtly and covertly do everything we could to encourage Russia’s neighboring states to adopt our values. We needed an enlightened approach toward Russia. What we got was ideology.

In 1962, when the Soviet Union put mobile missile launchers in Cuba, the United States nearly became engulfed in a nuclear war. The result was the well-known and truly scary Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, just because we can, we are pressing new NATO states like Poland and the Czech Republic to accept our missiles as a “defense shield”. We are doing this supposedly to protect them from rogue states like Iran that might want to lob missiles at them. Of course, we are not doing it because Russia sits right next to them and has a habit of making sycophant states out of Eastern Europe. Why, we even invited the Russians in to check it the missile’s guidance systems. See, they’re not targeted at you. Never mind that in a couple minutes, they sure as heck could be targeted at Russia. Never mind that Iran has zero interest in lobbing missiles at the Czech Republic or Poland anyhow.

With the retirement of Boris Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the Russian government gave up governing by vodka. With Putin, smart leadership was back. His methods were hardly democratic, but he was a man of practical action. He knew he could leverage the power and greed in the West for Russia’s own aims. Democracy became inconvenient toward a more powerful goal shared by most Russians: wiping away the stain of humiliation over their defeat in the Cold War. Russia has enormous amounts of land and natural resources. Western capitalism became the means to reinvigorate their economy. Naturally, we in the West and elsewhere were more than happy to earn some fast bucks. Communism is gone, as it is pretty much in China as well. What is not gone is the tendency on both sides toward hegemony. And the bad news is that while America is now just coming off its energy high having consumed much of its most valuable natural resources, Russia has what is likely the largest natural resources in the planet, much of it untapped. It also has all sorts of metals and oil reserves needed to run a first world country. Moreover, we greedily facilitated the process by providing it with the technology and expertise.

Nuclear missiles, which used to be relatively far away in places like West Germany, may be but a relative stones throw from Russia if the West succeeds in putting these missiles in places like Hungary and the Czech Republic. In other words, 2008 looks very much like 1962 did to us, which is why recently one Russian general remarked if missiles go into Poland, it could be subject to Russian attack. Maybe this sort of delayed karmic experience is inevitable, but it did not have to be this way. It required the West, and the United States in particular, to act in a more enlightened manner instead of an ideological manner. Russia’s reaction to these new threats was entirely predictable. Consequently, they were wholly avoidable.

What would have been a more enlightened way to deal with Russia? Some ways were attempted. Russia was invited to attend the G-7, which became the G-8. We sent over venture capitalists and some that tried to teach America’s style of democracy, which proved to be a culturally imperfect fit. What was really needed was a slower and lower key approach. Eastern European countries had good reasons to want to become NATO and European Union members. Living under Russian occupation or its dominion was rarely a happy circumstance. What was also needed was a more respectful attitude toward Russia. If you want to avoid paranoia, you need to set up circumstances that reduce paranoid feelings. A slower and gentler approach toward helping emerging democracies would have been better. Providing military aid and advisors to neighboring countries like Georgia do nothing but inflame paranoia that the United States has motives beyond spreading freedom.

And so both sides are continuing their games of geopolitical chess which if we had acted in an enlightened manner we might have ended forever in 1989. Instead, the Cold War is reemerging unnecessarily, and doubtless its costs will be at least as high as they were during the last go around. Communism vs. democracy is no longer its animus. On the surface it appears to be about things like oil, free trade and keeping vital shipping lanes open. What is really going on is that the United States senses that it is an empire in decline, much like the British a century earlier. We also see Russia as a true empire for the first time. This time Russia is not saddled with the ideology that made it so inefficient. Our hope is that by sponsoring emerging democracies like Georgia, and by making sustaining friendships with strategic trading partners like Saudi Arabia the weight of these alliances will counter the newly unshackled Russian and Chinese states.

The effect of these changes is a new Cold War that in some ways is not that much different than the old one, and may well be scarier. The USSR is replaced by Russia, which is smaller, but by being more ethnically-pure may be more united. China is still China, but having embraced capitalism is also stronger. Then there is the United States. We thought we were the world’s only remaining superpower, but we were deluding ourselves. The United States is both stronger and weaker, both enabled and hobbled by being continents apart from the competition.

It remains to be seen how the emerging powerhouses of India, Indonesia, South Korea and Iran will fit into all this. It does appear that many more chess pieces are now in play and the game will get more complex from here on. All sides have studied the board for a long time. Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia is Pawn to King 4.

August 18th, 2008 at 08:12pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments
Tags: Cold War, Russia

Johnny, we hardly knew ye

Lord, another politician has fallen. If politicians were trees in a forest, citizens would be going deaf from all the careening trees of late. Today’s infidelity poster boy is John Edwards, the handsome and charismatic ex North Carolina senator blessed with teeth so wide and bright they could burn your retinas. Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and was a twice a Democratic presidential candidate.

Count me as one of those not the least bit surprised by these latest revelations. Part of my problem with John Edwards latest presidential foray was that he was too good: too handsome, too eloquent, too slick, too squeaky clean. He was more rock star than presidential candidate. He was the politician’s equivalent of a traveling evangelist. He could fill up a tent, or a town hall and like the Pied Piper have the crowd in the palm of his hands. Among liberals, he was the clear favorite for president. Until he dropped out, he consistently outpolled the other candidates on the liberal blog Daily Kos. Many of his supporters were heartbroken when he dropped out of his presidential campaign. Many of them now are furious, for they gave hundreds or thousands of dollars to his campaign and poured out their passion because they believed in him. They thought he was the real deal. They believed not just in his politics, but his image. Here at last was a handsome, charismatic man dopily devoted to his wife, who was also a few points lower than him on the attractiveness scale. That he was standing by her in spite of her terminal illness made him even more of a principled human being.

Instead, he was getting a bit on the side. Her name is Reille Hunter, age 44 (Edwards is 55), a skinny platinum blonde whose firm also earned a cool $100,000 from Edwards’ political action committee for producing four short web videos. To quote George Gershwin, it’s “nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try.” I bet Hunter did not have to try too hard. Oh, she did have to change her name. Lisa Druck just wasn’t cutting it. Reputedly, the two first met in a bar.

Why did he do it? Only John Edwards can answer that one, but I would view any rationalization he comes up with suspicion. If I had to guess the real answer would be very close to Bill Clinton’s: “Because I could”. Hunter was younger than his wife and arguably prettier. Hunter must have found plenty of men to admire in the Edward campaign because she produced a child that Edwards says is not his, but instead is apparently one of his staffers. For John’s sake, I hope he wore a condom.

I have ruminated before on the subject of infidelity. Among the recent politicians with problems keeping their pants up was the former governor and attorney general of New York State, Eliot Spitzer. Virtually everyone publicly decries infidelity. (It also keeps a number of newspapers and magazines in business.) It is also probably true that something like half of all marriages have at least one incident of infidelity. With statistics like these, you would think the shock value would wear off.

However, when you are a politician running for office, it’s all about trust. Fidelity with the voter has to be your main selling point. Biologically you may have the same yearnings as the rest of your brethren, but you must sell yourself as someone beyond the casual, tawdry affair. Few spouses who have been cheated on can even muster the courage to trust their partner with a checkbook. Can politicians successfully compartmentalize, as Bill Clinton seems to have done, and really keep their bedroom shenanigans separate from their public duties?

Since most of us cannot compartmentalize like this, when we find out our politician du jour is capable of such infractions, we would rather see the bum kicked out. Yet, infidelity is hardly a death sentence for a politician. Rudy Giuliani cheated on his wife openly in front of the press corps, and yet for months was considered the most likely Republican to win the nomination. Ironically, he lost to another adulterer, John McCain, who clearly was getting a bit on the side from Cindy well before his first marriage ended. He likely got some other tail during this period too. Yet, people seem to look the other way regarding his infidelity, perhaps because the press doesn’t want to raise the issue. Or perhaps it is okay in McCain’s case because he is a maverick and thus being consistent with his persona. So I would not assume that John Edwards political career is over. At least his failing was typical stuff. At least he didn’t grope for sex with men in airport restrooms. If you have to cheat, Americans can be more forgiving if she is a hot babe, and that seems to be the case with Reille Hunter.

I guess what amazes me the most is how effectively Edwards mesmerized us in spite of his egregious sin. His wife was fully aware of his moral lapse, and he ran with her apparent blessing. I remember seeing a news report in 2006 or so when this affair was taking place. It showed him and Elizabeth eating at a McDonalds where they had their first date. They made a habit of doing it on their wedding anniversary. It was just so cute and seemed so heartfelt. He seemed so dopily devoted to Elizabeth. Yet, he was stepping out on her.

In any event, I saw Edward as one of the slickest of the slick. He was too slick, which made me naturally suspicious of his genuineness. Given that many of the positions he espoused running for president in 2004 were discarded for the 2008 campaign, my suspicion was probably somewhat grounded. His slickness was the principle reason I avoided endorsing his candidacy and remain a bit leery about Obama’s. I sensed that something was not quite right. My unease has unfortunately now been validated.

I expect his rehabilitation will be complete by 2012, providing there is an opening in the Democratic race, and if not by 2016 for sure. I bet he will still look plenty handsome. I do not know what it will take for him to remake his reputation, but I am confident that Edwards will find a way to make us believe that he has been reborn.

August 8th, 2008 at 09:21pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008, Sociology | no comments
Tags: Infidelity

For Obama: some environmental cheers and jeers

No candidate running for president will run a perfect campaign and that certainly includes Barack Obama. When I endorsed him in January, I said he too was a flawed candidate. Overall, Mr. Obama has pleasantly surprised me with his post nomination campaign. He comes across as very thoughtful and articulate. It is clear that his campaign is remarkably well managed and on message.

If a presidential candidate is serious about winning, some accommodation toward the politically fickle winds of the moment is generally considered necessary. So we have seen in the last few days some statements by Barack Obama that have my head shaking. Pandering may seem necessary when winning at all costs is the goal, but when it happens it lowers my opinion of the candidate.

Obama’s proposal to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was one of these political accommodations that made me wince. What a bad idea! Yes, I know his plan is to remove the easily refined light sweet crude oil from the SPR and replace it with the harder to refine heavy crude oil. This is supposed to result in no net loss from the SPR. As a result, he believes this will provide some working relief to the middle class, which is still reeling from the latest oil shock.

The SPR is there for a reason: to accommodate the nation’s needs in a national emergency. No such emergency exists. I grant that many families are suffering under the burden of $4 a gallon gasoline. Still, the economy is in no danger of collapse. Artificially lowering gas prices, if it works, simply encourages more of the dependence that got us in trouble in the first place. Obama says such a release would be temporary. He points to the effect of a decision made late in the Clinton administration to sell oil from the SPR and says that decision reduced gas prices. It is unclear whether it would have that effect today, but it would make it harder for America to get over its addiction to oil and move toward a post oil age. This is a politically expedient decision but overall a call I think he will regret.

Another bad call: tacitly agreeing with John McCain that we need to drill for oil off our coasts. Obama characterizes this change of heart as one part of an overall energy strategy and suggests such drilling would be limited. He knows that any oil we discovered would have but the most modest effect on oil prices. If oil companies started drilling tomorrow, it would be at least six years before we would see any oil from these fields.

There are a few reasons that oil companies are not drilling in these tracts that they are already allowed to drill in. Their geologists have surveyed these oil fields. The likelihood of getting oil in the quantity desired is slim and the cost of drilling in these deeper waters is high. In addition, you cannot force an oil company to drill for oil. Oil companies will look out for their bottom line, and if it does not increase it they will politely spurn politicians’ suggestions. This means that both Obama’s and McCain’s calls for drilling are specious. There are the many coastline states that have prohibited offshore drilling. They recall California’s 1969 experience that fouled 35 miles of beaches. Any oil that is recovered would have only the most modest effect on oil prices and would do nothing to move us to a post oil economy. Even if there were no oil spills, the drilling would have a major environmental impact on our seaboards.

What the nation needs is a comprehensive energy strategy that moves us into a post oil economy while simultaneously moderating greenhouse gas emissions. It may not get much in the way of votes, but if the nation had a strategy like this backed up by money and commitment it would be good not only for the nation and the environment, but good for the economy too. It would stimulate growth in jobs that are environmentally friendly.

However, I did like Obama’s speech today in Berea, Ohio. Obama pointed out a few days ago that a great way to reduce oil consumption is for drivers to make sure their car is tuned regularly and their tires are properly inflated. Republicans for some reason latched on to it as a crazy idea and began handling out tire pressure gauges to draw people’s attention to the proposal. This attitude is particularly odd coming from Republicans, who are reputedly big on individual responsibility. His proposal is not laughable; it is effective and can be made workable.

If I were running for president, I would do more than just suggest that Americans do these things. I would give modest tax deductions or credits for having your car tuned. Aside from the 1-3% reduction in oil consumption, if Americans practiced this regularly, it would help get Americans into the habit. Most Americans are too busy to be proactive about car maintenance. Knowing they can get a tax deduction for being kind to the environment (and their wallet) can lead to a pattern where most people will have their cars tuned regularly.

Getting people to check their tire pressure regularly can be accomplished too. We could offer modest credits for gas stations that add or expand air pressure hoses. A tire pressure center should provide tire pressure gauges on site and easy guides for determining the correct tire pressure for your tires. Why not add a penny to the gasoline tax but offer a penny a gallon rebate for checking your tire pressure within one hour of filling your tank? Simply insert the same credit card you used for your gas purchase to activate the tire pressure system at your gas station where you filled your tank to claim your credit. These modest steps, along with regularly increasing CAFE standards are pragmatic steps toward energy independence.

I suspect that before this campaign is over we will see many more accommodations by both Obama and McCain to lure in swing voters with proposals that are stupid. I just hope that these latest proposals from Obama are not serious and are discretely dropped when, as I expect, Obama wins the election in November.

August 5th, 2008 at 07:51pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments
Tags: Barack Obama, Energy Independence, Environment

Growing Pains

It may not seem like it, but this blog is growing.

My web host is still complaining, like it did last December, that I am using too many resources. It doesn’t appear that I can run this blog on a $16.95 a month virtual private server any longer. While my visits and page counts are relatively static (200 to 300 page views a day, as documented by SiteMeter), my blog seems to get a lot of search engine traffic. This is likely due to its breadth (five and a half years, 850+ posts, 954,000 words) and my half-hearted attempts at clever marketing (all those links running down the side of my web pages). I suspect that search engines are the culprits driving up my resource usage. As a result, I get stern warnings from my web host.

Call it vanity but I want this blog to be visitor friendly and search engine welcoming. This blog has become something resembling my raison d’etre: my reason for living. The Buddha might suggest that my enlightenment recedes the more vain I get about my blog. Yet, like most humans, I want to feel that after my body turns into dust that I will have left the world a little better than I found it. This is getting increasingly hard to imagine when I consider my personal carbon footprint. This blog may sometimes amuse readers. It may occasionally instill anger. It may annoy, bore or simply make most you zoom on to the next site of interest. But perhaps all this effort is worth my time and increasing expense for the opportunity to communicate an interesting thought, articulate a well-turned phrase or spawn an insightful idea or two. A century ago, creative people like me had to hope we could write something worthy of publishing and then hope someone would read it. In the Internet age, the playing field is more level. We blog and hope for the best.

In any event, when SiteUpTime (which monitors my site hourly to make sure the server is responding) tells me it frequently cannot access the site, I have to assume you are having the same problem also. Timeouts are not acceptable to me, so I am digging a bit deeper into my pocket and rehosting again. My new web host is Media Temple. What is new this time is not my virtual private server, but that I have dedicated server memory that is all mine. No one else can have it. It is not much but I am hoping that 256MB of dedicated RAM will be enough to give readers the fast response time they deserve and search engines the ability to easily plumb my site for its content.

I spent the last couple of days, among many other tasks, buying this new hosting account and moving my content across the Internet. It went from some hosting facility in Providence, Utah to this newest one in Culver City, California. If $42 a month will not suffice (the effective rate if you pay for a year of hosting at a time, otherwise it is $50 a month for their lowest end Virtual Dedicated plan), I may have to dig into my pocket a little deeper still. Fortunately, I can pay for my hobby easily enough by selling my own Internet skills and picking up some occasional money from hosting ads here. I no longer have to pull from the family till to pay for my hobby.

So I hope you notice things run a little faster around here. I also hope that this is my last web host. Lord knows I have been through enough of them. Only time will tell.

August 4th, 2008 at 07:56pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments
Tags: Blogging, Web Hosting

A new inconvenient truth: we need to raise taxes

Way back in 2003, I penned this post that more than five years later still gets regular hits. (It has received eighty hits since the start of the year, according to Google Analytics.) I was very politically incorrect back then when I suggested that we are not paying enough in taxes. I still feel this way and I am sad to say that recent news articles bear me out. We are woefully behind simply maintaining the infrastructure that we have. This was tragically borne out a year ago with the catastrophic bridge collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis that killed thirteen people. As a direct result of this event, federal and state money suddenly materialized to replace this bridge. The replacement bridge will cost $234 million and is scheduled for completion by Christmas.

You would think that this event might have changed the dynamics. However, as the Associated Press found, just twelve percent of our most structurally deficient high use bridges have been repaired. It would cost an estimated $140 billion to repair just the bridges that need to be repaired right now. Yet, President Bush is threatening to veto a transportation bill because it spends $1 billion more than he likes. It will not surprise you to learn that Bush’s motives are wholly ideological. He is a conservative and conservatives do not believe in raising taxes or spending money on projects not considered essential. Apparently, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, bridge construction is not essential to this president. Our War in Iraq though is essential, and at least some of that money is going to build new bridges for Iraqis. Apparently, bridges are essential for Iraq, but are not essential for the United States. Go figure.

I picked bridge repair as an example only because it is easy to see the consequences of inaction. In fact, our infrastructure is crumbling all around us. Here in Virginia, our state House of Delegates once again bollixed up attempts to raise transportation taxes. The result is that not just bridges that are suffering, but cars spend much time sitting in traffic and consequently unnecessarily spewing emissions. So far this year there have been three Code Red air quality days for the Washington region, and twelve Code Orange days.

Better air quality, like safe bridges, are solvable problems. Neither is solved by rocket science but by the application of money and will. Just as maintaining your car means you extend its useful life, bridge life can be extended through regular maintenance too. Instead, we would rather defer the cost of maintenance to have a little more cash in our pockets today. The result is like driving your car on a half a quart of oil. You can do it for a while, but at some point, you are looking at some very expensive consequences. It is pennywise and pound-foolish.

The anti-tax crowds, epitomized by nuts like Grover Norquist, are pennywise folk. They are convinced that all expenditures of money by governments are ultimately wasteful no matter how much they address a public need. Their philosophy though amounts to living in the moment and closing their ears when the application of their philosophy results in inconvenient news, like what happened in Minneapolis one year ago exactly on August 1, 2007. These problems do not go away by ignoring them. They simply get worse and more expensive to fix.

The irony is that if instead of aggressively cutting taxes we had prudently kept the old tax rates then we would have had the money back then to fix many of the systemic problems that are cropping up all over the place today. Our tax rates seemed quite acceptable to the American public when our president was inaugurated. We were even paying back some of our massive debt. Granted, even back in 2000 we were not quite spending what we needed to spend to address problems like deteriorating bridges. This was due in part to federal gas taxes not having changed since 1993. However, construction costs have increased during that time. The result is that there is less money available to fund projects like bridge maintenance. Rather than raise gas taxes, thus far Congress’ solution is to charge it. Hopefully only as an interim measure, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to add eight billion dollars to the Highway Trust Fund by supplementing it with money from general Treasury funds. In other words, we will go into more debt to pay for it and pass its cost on to future generations.

Our fiscal crisis in many ways mirrors our blindness with the oil crisis. We buy more foreign oil because we are used to an oil-based economy and do not want to think about how hard it would be to change to something else. We know that recoverable oil is a finite resource that in general will only get pricier because it will be harder to extract. Similarly, we borrow money from creditors on the expectation that they will always be willing to lend it to us. As some overleveraged homeowners are finding out, if your liabilities exceed your assets no one is willing to loan you any money. The same can happen to the United States government. Our weak dollar, trading at record lows, suggests the time may not be that far off.

To solve the oil crisis we must realize that we cannot drill our way back to our previous lifestyle. To solve our fiscal crisis, we have to realize that we cannot indefinitely depend on our creditors unless we first show a willingness as a nation to roll up our sleeves to fix some of these problems. In short, we need to raise taxes.

Raising taxes is never convenient, particularly at a time when so many Americans are struggling. That is why my suggestion will go over like a lead balloon. That is also why if I were ever inclined to move my fantasy run for president into a real run for president, my message would fall mainly on deaf ears. Like John Anderson in 1980, I would lose spectacularly.

Still, most of us, if we stop listening to the spin and start listening to our hearts, know that we face a new inconvenient truth. The cost of not raising taxes today simply means that to fix these problems tomorrow will cost even more. So yes, for a while, those extra taxes would hurt. At some point, you sufficiently address the under-funded infrastructure problems and taxes can be eased. Nevertheless, taxes must never be eased beyond the point that we can adequately maintain the infrastructure we need to run our modern society.

Instead of running for president, all I can do is be that fly in the ointment. I am more than willing to pony up my share of additional taxes. Most likely, I would pay disproportionately more in taxes than many of you, since I have a six-figure income. I do not like paying more taxes either, but I am willing to do so. I do know that despite laughably naïve men like Grover Norquist, we are interconnected. We critically depend on our infrastructure and our social safety nets. Since like you I get great value from these things, I am not afraid to pay my share.

As was true when I wrote about it in 2003, things cost money! They cost what they cost because that is how much it costs! No ideology can change this. I expect to pay close to $200 on Monday to have a locksmith fix a bad lock, which must work with our house key. It seemed like a lot of money to me too, but that is the going rate for fixing a problem that I cannot fix by myself. I would rather pay the $200 than find that anyone could get into my house or that I could not get out when I needed to.

We have a great nation that thanks to the low tax mantra is rapidly moving from first-class status to second-class status. I think I am a patriot by coming forward to proclaim that I am willing to have my taxes raised to make sure we remain a first class nation.

August 1st, 2008 at 12:46pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | 3 comments
Tags: Environment, Grover Norquist, Taxes, Transportation, Virginia Politics

My fantasy run for president

It will not surprise you to learn that I am not running for president this year. There are many reasons for this.

• I am a virtual nobody, just some guy who runs a blog
• My closest brush with political office was being vice president of the condominium association, hardly the sort of qualifications most voters are looking for
• As you will find out, my positions would make me unelectable
• I tend toward introversion. Shaking hands, kissing babies and making speeches are all things that I do not enjoy.
• I hate telephone soliciting. Yet if you are serious about running for any office, unless you are independently wealthy your first act is to call everyone you know and schmooze them for dollars. Where’s the fun in that?
• I am a federal employee. There is this inconvenient law called The Hatch Act, which means if I wan to run for any political office, I must first quit my job. I am quite attached to my pension and do not want to diminish it.

Still, if dumpy middle-aged guys can give tens of thousands of dollars to attend fantasy sports camps, I can run a fantasy presidential campaign. I thought that since this is a fantasy I would give you my positions on the issues so you can cast your fantasy vote for or against me. You will quickly see that I am unelectable. In my defense, I will say that if my positions could be enacted into law, the world would be a much better place. Unfortunately, my positions while they probably would be effective would also be politically unacceptable.

While my run for the presidency is fantasy, I am quite serious that these are my real positions on what should be done on some of the important issues of the day.

Civil Rights. I believe that not only are we all created equal but also we all must be treated equally by the law. I would require that all trial attorneys spend a court specified percentage of their time to ensure that the poor and indigent get the same quality of legal representation as the rest of us. All lawyers would be reimbursed for their services, but all at the same rate based on the local cost of living. Citizen review committees would assess the quality of a lawyer’s legal representation for those who cannot afford a lawyer. If a trial lawyer failed to provide roughly equal representation for his poor clients compared with his paid clients, he would be disbarred.

Defense. I think our defense budget is vastly bloated with much of it going toward weapons systems that attempt to solve military problems with 20th century solutions. I would work to chop it by at least a third and invest some small amount of the savings into greatly expanding the State Department and our foreign aid. Let’s turn at least some swords into plowshares! The Peace Corps would be dramatically expanded. We would typically operate as part of multinational forces based on broad international consensus. Our defense budget would go principally toward dealing with 21st century threats, including deterring nuclear proliferation, securing existing nuclear sites, securing our borders and expanded intelligence gathering operations.

Economy. Future growth must be environmentally sustainable. The key to smart growth is not just to invest in clean technologies, but for the government to get its fiscal house in order too. This means a government that is on a financially sound footing, which does not spend beyond its means and is not afraid to raise taxes to avoid deficit financing.

Education. We need to pay teachers commensurate with the future value we expect from their pupils, which means a pay increase of roughly twice what they currently get. This would make teaching much more competitive resulting in better teachers. Yet, we cannot raise test scores in a vacuum. We must also address the socioeconomic problems that result in so many students doing poorly academically. If a parent cannot provide the nurturing and stable environment needed for a child to succeed in school, courts should have the power to remove children from these homes and place them into social environments that will nurture them personally and academically.

Energy and the Environment. We all have to learn pollute less and consume less energy. We should embrace Al Gore’s challenge to have all our electricity come from non-carbon producing sources by 2020. We should not allow another tract of undeveloped land to be developed until all existing tracts of land that are no longer used are developed first. I would massively increase our public transportation and fund initiatives to build bike trails in our communities.

Ethics. Politicians should adhere to the same ethics laws as federal employees. This would effectively mean public financing of campaigns, because no outside source is allowed to give this civil servant anything worth more than $25 in value.

Faith. Your faith or lack thereof is your own business and not the government’s business, but your faith must be practiced openly and must not harm children. Faiths that raise their children in isolated compounds and make them marry older men while they are not of legal age would not be a protected religion. Public money should never be given, directly or indirectly, to religions or faith based groups.

Family. We must work toward a stable population in this country or future generations will not be able to live in a sustainable world. To achieve this as benignly as possible, we should allow tax exemptions for the first two children in each family only, unless the children are adopted. We should encourage single-family households by doubling tax exemptions for these families. We should end all discrimination against gay and lesbian couples as parents. Parents should be required to take parenting classes before the birth or adoption of their child. Parents should get tax credits for taking continuing parental education courses.

Fiscal. The government should live within its means and only deficit finance for true national emergencies such as unprovoked wars or national catastrophes.

Foreign Policy. The United States needs to stop being an arrogant nation and to project a humble foreign policy instead. We should work quietly with other nations working for the greater world good, not just our own parochial interests. We should become much more invested in and supportive of multinational organizations, and work to reinvigorate the United Nations. I would decrease aid to Israel by ten percent each year until a comprehensive peace has been negotiated with its neighbors.

Healthcare. We need universal health insurance now. There are plenty of successful examples out there among developed countries. Let’s pick one example that looks like it would work best in our culture and implement it, adjusting based on lessons learned as we go.

Iraq. Our troops would be out by the end of 2010 except for military personnel needed to train Iraqi troops and secure our embassy.

Poverty. It is time to narrow rather than widen the gap between the have and have-nots. This means the rich need to pay much more in the way of taxes. In the long term, poverty is addressed by investing in our children’s education and addressing the socioeconomic conditions that cause poverty.

Signing statements. Signing statements would not be allowed. Attempts by the president to execute the law other than faithfully would be impeachable offenses.

Social Security. Mend it, don’t break it. Make it fiscally sound even if it means higher payroll taxes or waiting longer for retirement.

So, it’s clear: don’t vote for me!

July 26th, 2008 at 05:28pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments
Tags: Election 2008

Conservatism’s harvest

It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

William F. Buckley
First Issue of NATIONAL REVIEW
November 19, 1955

Granted, the late William F. Buckley’s idea of conservatism as it should be practiced differs substantially from those of our current president, whose approval ratings are now at 28%. Based on ever-rising gas prices, a tanking stock market and increased unemployment his anemic approval ratings are likely to collapse even further before his term expires in January. Still, both Bush and Buckley, like many conservatives, based their conservative philosophy on the assumption that what worked before has value, so change should be resisted.

The problems with conservatism have been borne out in the last eight years and should be plain for all to see. Just because you want societal progress to stop, does not mean that it will. Human behavior is that way. We act like a stream. Sometimes it crests. Sometimes it ebbs. Sometimes the stream overflows its banks. Its currents will transform the land around it. The stream, like society, is ever dynamic and changing. It is only when its image is frozen in our mind that it appears static.

Based on many millenniums of observing our species, we can safely assume that we humans will continue to be irascible folk. We will continue to defy neat categorization. We will continue to do dumb and stupid stuff. We will increase our population beyond the planet’s ability to sustain us. We will fight bloody wars for ethnic, racial and economic reasons. We will also do amazing stuff, like putting our species on the moon, making scientific breakthroughs and generating visionary and inspiring leaders that transform nations and the world.

Law, morals, ethics and governments exist to try to bring order and predictability to human affairs. These artifacts though work only to the extent that they fit within man’s current condition. When they do not they are easily overcome by our natural human behaviors, which on a mass scale can rarely be controlled for long. Moreover, when you try to counteract these natural human forces, the effect is invariably counterproductive. The damage of trying to fit the square peg of the past into the round hole of the present over these last eight years is all around us.

We are witnessing the train wreck of a principled but unworkable ideology called conservatism. Giving tax cuts to millionaires did not raise the boats of the middle classes, any more than it did in the robber baron age. Funding abstinence-only sex education has not reduced teen pregnancy. Voluntary cuts in carbon emissions have not reduced pollution. Freeing the free market further means fewer people are watching for foxes in a much larger and more complex financial henhouse. Proactive wars fought with 20th century tactics make us more insecure and prove financially ruinous. Less government, while potentially emboldening freedom, also means less oversight and exploitation. Its result is a nation that today more resembles a patch of weeds than a garden. What we are witnessing today is simply the natural consequence of conservative government refusing to give any ground to modern realities. We are witnessing that the tactics that worked for us fifty years ago are now foolish and counterproductive.

Why? Because we are not the same people that we were fifty years ago! For one thing, we have roughly doubled the number of us on this planet. This has affected how we think and behave. Increased travel and trade have mixed us up more, allowing us to live less insular and more connected lives. At least in the first world, we are much better educated than previous generations. We are less industrialized and more technology based. We have moved on from the past because the past no longer fits us.

Consequently, when conservatives govern we get huge disconnects. The Supreme Court tells us we have the constitutional right to own a gun even though we have no need for militias and the Indians are unlikely to attack. Today, most of us have a neighbor within shouting distance, not miles away. Not surprisingly when you put more of us closer together and you allow us to have guns, more of us are going to be victims of gun violence.

Effective government must adapt to fit the context of its times or it proves counterproductive. It must address today’s issues with tactics likely to work within the current environment, not with solutions that worked for a different age. Some like to call progressivism a philosophy. It is not. Liberalism is a philosophy. Progressivism is not the least bit ideological. Progressivism is pragmatic. It comes down to this: deal with the reality of what is before you by working with its dynamics rather than against it. As you might expect, I am a progressive.

William F. Buckley spent a career eloquently articulating the case for conservatism. Yet conservatism works only to the extent that its constituents do not change. Feudalism kept society stable and worked for centuries. Modern day feudalism, such as practiced by the Taliban or the Bush Administration, no longer works. One size no longer fits all.

In my fifty years, things have changed enormously. There are times when I too pine for the way things were. The order I perceived in the past provides a feeling of comfort. This is probably because I had few cares. I had my parents to worry about the real world for me and for them it was likely as messy as mine is today. I also know that time has passed forever. I would not now give up my computer, or my cell phone, or my unleaded gas, or my hundreds of entertainment choices to feel this way again. As I age, my world will continue to morph just as it always has.

Conservatism at its roots amounts to the desire to revert everyone to a myopic and unrealistic view of the past that was always more image than reality. Life was simpler for me in 1957 when I was born. However, to get that feeling of simplicity I would not want to return to the era of the Cold War. I would not want the pervasive racism that our country had back then. Nor would I want its pervasive conformity. I would not want my spouse to be a Stepford wife who had few career opportunities beyond that of mother and housewife. I would not want homosexuals to live in shame and in the shadows. I would not want just three television stations (all in black and white) and a few commercial radio stations. I would want the feeling of neighborhood and family connectedness that I had back then. I think we are recreating these for the times that we live in. In today’s world, these feelings are extended toward a larger community in cyberspace. My wife is one of many people whose social circle dramatically expanded with the Internet. Now they are very much her real friends. Fifty years ago, she would never have met any of these people.

We need to realize that while huge changes have occurred in our lifetimes, there have also been huge amounts of progress, much of it for the better. Fewer of us live in poverty. Our health care is better and we live longer and more meaningful lives. Most of us will not spend our final years in poverty. There is less discrimination in the workplace and in society in general. It is easier for us to be, as Martin Luther King prophesized, judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin. Barack Obama is a modern manifestation of King’s progressive vision.

We should want the best of both the past and the present, not just the past, and be mindful that what is new can be good as well as bad. I hope that by creating a better present, the future will unfold to be a happier and more enriching experience for all of us. I do know, as you should know also from the past eight years that trying to go back to the way things were done, is very damaging. Like communism, conservatism is one of these great ideas that stimulate the imagination but just do not work in execution. My hope is that after these last eight years, we will, like its great proselytizer William F. Buckley, give it a civil burial and move on.

July 16th, 2008 at 06:41pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | one comment
Tags: Conservatism, Neoconservatism

Some candidates are more equal than others

It’s great to be a millionaire! You get to have all that money, live a lavish lifestyle and have your capital gains taxed at rates that are maybe one third to one half the rate of any income you happen to earn. Chalk up a new privilege for having deep pockets, thanks to a June 26th Supreme Court ruling. If you want to run for office, and so many millionaires do, you are also guaranteed to have an advantage over any less moneyed opponent.

The court has long held the dubious opinion that money is equal to freedom of speech. The obvious inference is that those with lots of money have a whole lot more freedom of speech than the rest of us. If I want to have the freedom of speech that millionaires have, say to put a full page advertisement in most of the nation’s major metropolitan newspapers, I might need to raise a couple million dollars. A millionaire though just writes a check. Done. I guess you have to wonder what is the point of having money, it being a completely fungible commodity, if you cannot spend it like you want. Some millionaires use their money to buy condominiums in Trump Tower while others use it to run for office. (Some do both.) No wonder that politicians like John McCain and John Kerry marry rich. Unless you have a certain personal magnetism like Barack Obama or have extremely good party connections, most politicians of modest means have to grub for campaign money the old fashioned way.

The so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment”, an attempt at campaign finance reform sponsored by Senators McCain and Feingold, was an attempt to even out the playing field for the less moneyed candidates. It was based on the assumption that all candidates should have as equal a playing field as possible so their message can be as equally heard as possible. This would allow voters to make a more informed choice and would promote a more effective government. The court had already invalidated limits on how much a millionaire can spend on their own campaign with their own money. The Millionaire’s Amendment simply stated that when a candidate spends more than $350,000 of his own money to run for office, his opponents’ contributors can spend up to three times as much as the normal $2,300 personal campaign limit otherwise imposed by law.

In this ruling, the Supreme Court once again proved that it is far more concerned about the free speech rights of millionaires than people like you and me. On the same day it overturned 200 years of precedent by saying that citizens have an absolute right to own a gun it also came out with this squirrelly opinion right out of Animal Farm.

Surely, you have read the George Orwell classic, right? In case you missed it, the book is a parable that tells the story of animals on a farm revolting against their oppressive owners and taking collective ownership of the farm. Only, as was true of the communism that it satired, the animals discovered that while all animals were in theory equal, some, specifically the pigs, were “more equal” than others.

Citizens, your Supreme Court agrees. The Declaration of Independence solemnly proclaims that all American citizens are created equal, but since those exact words are not in the constitution, the Supreme Court instead decided to parse the freedom of speech clause. Freedom to speak is apparently equivalent to the freedom to spend your own money anyway you want, which I mistook for the concept of liberty. If you are rich and running for office, your money gives you a disproportionate advantage to get out your message. It is like you having a sound truck going up and down the block while your opponent is reduced to speaking at a street corner. Guess whose point of view you are likely to hear? Guess who has a disproportionate influence?

The Millionaire’s Amendment was simply an attempt to even out the playing field a bit. There were no constraints on how much a millionaire could spend on his campaign, but it did allow his opponents to be heard a little louder. At least that was true until this ruling invalidated it. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the slim 5-4 majority, said that it “imposes a penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises that First Amendment right” to “engage in unfettered political speech.”

You would think that a millionaire’s opponent would have that same unfettered right, but apparently only to the extent of their own less sizeable assets. In short, the Supreme Court has very explicitly stated that some people’s rights to finance their campaign are more important than yours, and you can measure the size of that right by the money in their pockets. Any attempts to rectify the situation through law, even when it does not restrain the millionaire’s right to spend his money as he pleases, are likely to be ruled unconstitutional by this court.

Clearly some animals are more equal than others and it appears the Supreme Court is going to make sure it stays that way.

July 7th, 2008 at 07:09pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments
Tags: Election 2008

Who’s a strict constructionist?

I am no constitutional scholar. I also confess to being a supporter of gun control, which would not make me popular with the neighbors if my opinions were known. Still, if I was one of these people passionate about appointing only strict constructionists to the bench, I would be alarmed by today’s ruling on the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court. Sorry, this ruling passed by judges who claim to be strict constructionists is so expansive that it would make members of the Berger Court shudder.

In their decision today, the Supreme Court struck down a long-standing District of Columbia gun control law, which prohibited its citizens from privately possessing and storing guns within D.C. The court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, which remarkably is the first time it has seriously interpreted its constitutionality, is also at great variance with established precedence, which hitherto has generally been a strict constructionist interpretation.

Granted, trying to interpret the amendment as it is written is hard because it can be interpreted in so many ways. In case you have not read it, here it is in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

With today’s Supreme Court ruling from our new supposedly “strict constructionist” court, the amendment can be shortened to simply:

The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Despite centuries of precedence by lower courts that have suggested localities have certain rights to regulate possession of guns, the court has said that all Americans have the constitutional right to possess firearms and keep to them in their homes. It acknowledged that subsequent rulings may refine this right, but right now, it looks open ended.

I hope that the right does not extend to bazookas and automatic weapons, but right now that is not entirely clear.  Someone will doubtless press the issue in court. After all, why should a law-abiding American not have the right to possess a shoulder-fired cruise if he wants to? It is nothing more than a very big gun and the court has now said that you have the right to possess guns. The argument may sound silly to most Americans. Yet there are plenty of people that will passionately argue that you should have this right. After all, there is nothing in the amendment that defines constitutes an “arm” is. Some dictionaries interpret “arms” to be armaments, which are not limited to firearms. A crossbow was construed as an armament for hundreds of years. Why not a shoulder-fired cruise missile?

I guess what I was really hoping for from the Supreme Court was an answer to the question that should draw a strict constructionist to it like a duck to water: in the event that a government does not choose to have organized militias, can it then infringe its citizens’ right to bear arms? Most of us have no idea what the heck a militia even is because we have never seen one. In Colonial times, a militia was a temporary entity consisting of local men that responded to threats of invasion or insurrection. As people back then were widely scattered, it was a practical solution to a general problem. If it wasn’t the French or the British out to kill us, it was the American Indian.

If militias were permanent entities, they would not be militias; they would be armies. During the Revolutionary War, there was a Continental Army. They could not be everywhere, however, which is why they were frequently supplemented by local militias. Some battles of the Revolutionary War were fought entirely by militias. The “well-regulated” portion of the amendment came from the Continental Congress, which required all militias be constituted by the government. With people very spread out and with the need to constitute armed militias quickly, it was entirely reasonable to ensure that the constitution did not infringe on the people’s right to bear arms. Failing to do so might jeopardize national security. Arms were also necessary by the populace for basic protection and for food. Unless you lived in a city or town with a good police force, not owning a gun was foolish.

That of course was then and here we are more than two hundred years and 300 million more people later. The amendment is still there but the militias are long gone. Perhaps some state still requires able-bodied men to register with their local militia. I am not aware of any of them. An argument could be made that members of the National Guard are part of a militia. Except for some annual training or when called into dubious wars like in Iraq, they stay home and live otherwise ordinary lives. In modern times, though the National Guard has never been called out to suppress invasion or insurrection. Moreover, those armories that you see in most major cities are there not just to host special events. They were built to serve the needs of the National Guard. Firearms can and often were stored in these armories. In times of trouble, they serve as a convenient location for local members of the National Guard to assemble. If there is no local armory, it might make sense for National Guard members to store arms in their home. It would save time in an emergency.

A militia as it was understood when the Second Amendment was written though is obsolete. It is possible, though unlikely, that in the future we will need militias again, maybe to repel a future Santa Anna and his army. Thus far, illegal immigrants crossing are border have been considered a matter of local law enforcement, with occasional help rendered by the local National Guard. It would be stretching credulity to say that the National Guard was assisting in order to repel invasion.

It strikes me that a normal Supreme Court should look at this history and context, look at the precedence in the lower courts, then look at how modern society is organized, and rule that until such time as militias are needed again, the state does have the right to restrict the possession of arms by citizens. That appears to be in part the logic used by the District of Columbia government. After all, it is only 68 square miles. Its danger of invasion or insurrection is nil at this point. Moreover, if the danger existed, the D.C. has an armory near RFK Stadium. (The Beatles performed there.) One can certainly argue that D.C.’s gun ban has proven ineffectual, given the number of homicides that occur annually within the city. One can also argue that because no militia is needed to protect the city from invasion and insurrection, and given the problem of gun violence in the city, that the public safety requires limiting firearms to law enforcement individuals only.

The Supreme Court obviously did not buy this interpretation, although D.C.’s ordinance is but a more liberal interpretation of ordinances that exist or have existed in many states and cities. Justice Antonin Scalia says that the historical context of early America supports the majority opinion that he joined. Maybe so, but this is a strange argument from a strict constructionist, who is supposed to apply the text of the law as written, and no further.

Warren Burger and Thurgood Marshall though would have understood where these supposedly strict constructionists were coming from. They would also agree that these justices are being hypocritical to the judicial philosophy they claim to follow.

June 26th, 2008 at 09:16pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | one comment
Tags: Guns

The audacity of stupidity

I have been trying to understand the rage of Hillary Clinton supporters now that she is out of the Democratic presidential race. Naturally, none of their rage seems to be directed against her personally for failing to win the nomination. Unsurprisingly, much of it is instead directed at Barack Obama who had the audacity to run a better campaign, present a better pitch to voters and, yes, sorry to dash your illusions Hillary fans, but also win the Democratic popular vote.

There are also many passionate Obama supporters out there. Had he lost and Clinton won, which I argued was what should have happened, I suspect many Obama supporters would be upset too. Perhaps they too would threaten to do what a quarter of Clinton supporters tell pollsters they will do: either sit out this election or vote for John McCain. The fact that some of Clinton’s supporters would actually vote for John McCain tells me how strongly they were vested in Clinton’s campaign. That they would actually vote for a candidate who is against almost all the interests that Clinton stood for strikes me as exercising the Audacity of Stupidity. Dogbert would have a field day with this line of reasoning.

As readers know, I support Barack Obama for president. However, I never was one of those Obama fanatics. I liked all the candidates and could have happily voted for any of them. I only narrowly chose Obama over Clinton. I could have happily voted for Clinton in the general election, despite her statements during the Pennsylvania and West Virginia primaries that sure sounded racist to me. I could vote for her because she is smart, personable, has values that are similar to mine, has a fair amount of political experience and also because I would have liked to see a woman in the Oval Office. Those obliquely racist comments about being best able to represent the values of the downsized, lower income white middle class were, I realized, mostly a desperate attempt to change the dynamics. (Moreover, it was probably untrue, given that Obama grew up living on food stamps, and she grew up in a comfortable Republican household.) This was clear to many others and me that by the end of March she just wasn’t going to be the nominee. Obama speaks of the Audacity of Hope. Hope though is predicated on at least something tangible. By the end of March, Clinton’s best hope was that some racist nut would assassinate her opponent. You do not plan a win based on such a strategy.

History will be the ultimate judge of why Obama won the nomination and Clinton lost. A few things are already clear. Obama ran a much better campaign. It is not that Obama’s advisors were all that cleverer, but that Clinton’s advisers were running her husband’s campaign. They never spent much time looking past Super Tuesday, which they assumed would set dynamics in play to seal the nomination. They raised money the old-fashioned way, on the rubber chicken dinner circuit and by networking their well moneyed friends, instead of the tapping the power of the Netroots and the Internet. Bill Clinton certainly did not help her. His own vaguely racist comments solidified the African American vote for Obama, which polls suggest she actually led at the end of 2007.

Mostly Clinton lost because when Democrats pondered it long enough she was not quite the candidate the majority of Democrats were looking for. As much as many of us wanted a woman president, she came with known baggage. Her negatives were well known and overall she was as unpopular a political figure as a popular one. Obama understood that this would be a change election. Clinton did not represent a clean break with the past and a fresh face. Given this dynamic, it is remarkable that she did as well as she did. It is doubtless cold comfort, but she came very close and split the last two primaries with Obama. She was not trounced. She set an excellent example of how to a woman should run for president. I am sure she inspired the woman who will someday hold the job.

Her claim to be the more experienced candidate struck me as rather strange. Like with her dubious claim of having won the popular vote, one can also play the numbers with experience claim. If one counts only time in elective office, sorry, Obama wins. Obama spent eight years in the Illinois senate and is closing in on his fourth year as a U.S. senator. Let us call his political experience a dozen years. By the same yardstick, Clinton’s political experience is eight years, all of it as a U.S. senator. Clinton of course wishes to discount Obama’s time in the Illinois state senate, but it was certainly a political office. She also wants to count her time as First Lady. The position is of course an honorary one and not a political one, although she did manage (and ultimately bungled) an attempt at national health insurance. Yes, she worked on other political campaigns, but Obama also spent many years as a community organizer making $12,000 a year. Personally, I think it is a wash. I do not think either candidate could credibly claim more experience. Clinton could legitimately claim the experience of being in the White House and understanding its unique political culture. There is a big difference though between observing it as First Lady and actually having the responsibility that her husband assumed.

So what drives the animus against Obama by a sizable number of her supporters? I have been reading blogs, news stories and asking Clinton supporters personally trying to find out. Clinton supporters cannot credibly claim that Obama is a misogynist. Quite the contrary, he arguably has as good if not a better record on women’s issues than Clinton. Throughout the campaign, he has been uniformly polite and deferential with Clinton. I will grant you that many commentators showed their misogyny, as this will attest. Mostly they represented forces that already disliked her, and were principally on the right. Remarks about her cleavage, for example, irritated me as much as it did millions of women.

Obviously, given their passion Clinton partisans saw more in her than I saw. Even so, I was overall impressed with her as a politician and as a candidate. While not the perfect woman to run for this office, she was at least eighty percent there. I actually did shake Hillary’s hand once when her husband was running for president. This was in Atlanta in 1992. The brief time I spent in her presence convinced me that she was a woman of substance.

Clearly, I am not a woman. However, I think I can put myself briefly into the minds of her supporters. I think women who supported her felt at last here was a woman who could truly be elected president. She had the right set of political and personal skills to pull it off. Many women also feel victimized by life. This is likely because most of them have been repeatedly victimized. (Men get victimized too, but that’s for another blog post.) They get crass come-ons from horny coworkers, bosses and construction workers. They earn on average 70% of what men earn. They are stuck with the majority of the childrearing business. They have people anxious to tell them what they can do with their own bodies. They were denied the vote until the 1920s. It is our time, it is our turn, I suspect is what they were thinking. Then out of nowhere comes this mixed race African American, another damn man, and snatches away her victory in an incredibly close contest with what looks like unearned charisma and smoke and mirrors. If this is how Clinton women feel, I can understand their anger and exasperation.

I am sorry that this election will mean that we will have another damn man in the Oval Office. I am sorry that no male president can think like a woman because he has a sex organ hanging between his legs. Nonetheless, it would be a profoundly stupid thing for any Clinton devotee to sit this election out or vote for John McCain. It is counterproductive to the values Clinton supporters claim to stand for. A vote for John McCain is a vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. It is that simple. I hope their anger can be redirected before November where it belongs: on McCain and Republicans in general.

No, we will not have a woman president this go around. But it looks likely that we will have a distinguished and energetic man of mixed color who has fought for women’s issues all of his adult life and whose wife is a die hard feminist. It may be half a loaf, but it is at least half a loaf. Sit tight, American women. I think you will find America will have a woman president much sooner than you think.

June 12th, 2008 at 09:05pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments
Tags: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election 2008, Hillary Clinton