Occam’s Razor

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

The price of incompetence

(This post is sort of a continuation of this one, which if you have not read it, you should.)

I was wondering if this year I could report that my wife and I were millionaires. It looks like we may have to wait a few years. In fact, given the fallen dollar, deflated house prices, deflated stock prices, rising unemployment and what looks like the return of stagflation, maybe we need to wait a couple of decades to celebrate our seven figure net worth.

Thanks to inflation, being a millionaire these days is no longer that a big deal. However, if we get there we cannot, like Jed Clampett, go buy a mansion in Beverly Hills with a “cement pond”. In the intervening forty years, one million dollars today is worth $164,000 in 1968 dollars, which was when The Beverly Hillbillies was at the top of the Nielsen’s. To reach Jed Clampett’s lofty income we would need about $6.3 million in today’s dollars, a total we are unlikely to achieve.

In fact, our portfolio is down rather sharply. I am trying to keep this unwelcome news in perspective. The reason our net worth was approaching a million dollars was because much of our portfolio was overvalued. Even so, at the end of 2007, Quicken calculated my net worth at $910,000. Today, just ten weeks later, it said our net worth is $860,000. What happened? Who took away $50,000?

Well, there was a drop in the assessed value of my home that I received recently. When the country assessed it last year, it was worth $511,000. This year, even though I put in new energy efficient windows, it is worth $479,000. In 2006, though it was worth $552,000. In two years, the value of my house has dropped 14%.

At the end of 2007, which had already seen the beginnings of a bear market, our investments were worth $479,000. Today they are worth $455,000, which amounts to a drop of five percent in a little over two months. What happened? The subprime mortgage mess kept happening and its effect is rippling across stocks and mutual funds worldwide. Between the losses in my mutual funds and the lower value of my house, since the start of the year, I have lost $54,000. Fortunately, I reduced debt and added income and that cut my total loss to about $50,000.

I am very mindful that we are some of the fortunate financially. Our house cost us $191,000 when we bought it in 1993, so even at $479,000, it has been a good investment, returning on average about $19,000 a year, if you do not factor in the costs of mortgage interest, taxes and upkeep. If we had been a first time homebuyer in 2006 when housing prices reached their peak, we might well be embroiled in the mortgage meltdown now. Most likely the net worth on our house would be negative. We would resent paying against a mortgage for our house when the loan value exceeded its value. We would be hoping we could keep up on my mortgage payments in our uncertain economy. Of course if we had been one of those reckless buyers who purchased a home with no money down and a variable mortgage interest, we would be likely be screwed. I doubt we could pay the higher interest rates and with our house’s value decreasing. We would be inclined to walk away from the whole mess.

There’s the rub of course. It did not have to be this way. There could have been regulations in place that ensured that only people who were reasonably solvent could buy houses. That has not been the governing philosophy of these last eight years. To quote the fictional Gordon Gekko from the 1987 movie Wall Street (and by implication the late Ronald Reagan), “Greed is good”. If you can earn a fast buck, it does not really matter so much how you earned it as long as you made the quick profit. This is the downside of laissez-faire capitalism. It is a primary reason why Republican ideology just does not agree with me. None of the current economic mess had to happen. Instead, we let it happen. We did not so much turn a blind eye to it as we opened the doors and let the bull into the china shop. As crazy as this sounds, we let the bull in because we thought it was good to have a bull in the china shop.

If Democrats had been in charge these last eight years it is likely much of this mess would have been prevented. Had Al Gore been president, his administration would have had an eye on the subprime mortgage problem and likely, it would have been nipped in the bud. Congress, being in Democratic hands, would likely have had oversight hearings, resulting in prudent regulations on the housing and financial industry to preclude these sorts of problems. Unquestionably, we would not now be embroiled in a winless war in Iraq, draining the economy of three billion dollars a week in direct costs and pushing the down the value of the dollar.

Instead, we have a Republican president and a largely Republican rubber stamp Congress. Whatever the President wanted the Congress went along with it. Congressional oversight became a joke. We had a government of, by and for the corporation and very rich people. Not surprisingly, it reflected the values of corporations and very rich people who, unsurprisingly, want themselves to get a lot richer and the expense of someone else. Tax cuts went disproportionately to the richest people. When wealth trickled down at all, it trickled down to shareholders, not to the laborers who sustained the economy. Moreover, all this additional wealth did little to improve the commonweal. Our infrastructure deteriorated. The resulting detritus is easy enough to see around you: homes foreclosed, gas prices going through the roof, a crumbling infrastructure, the recession that we know is upon us, and the return of stagflation.

My real financial concern is more personal. With the failure of the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns, the question is really, “Who is next?” Our portfolio is reasonably diversified, but we have over $150,000 in various Vanguard funds in a retirement portfolio. If Vanguard goes the way of Bear Stearns, will our portfolio be safe? In other words, just how safe is our financial system right now?

Doubtless, I am not the only investor deeply troubled by these events and wondering if there is a severe recession or even a depression around the corner. It is evidenced by $111 a barrel oil and gold priced at over $1000 an ounce. It is clear that savvy investors are lining up by the exit doors. It will take just one little jolt to have them bolt out of the room. The Federal Reserve is trying to preclude this possibility. That is why is took the nearly unprecedented step of offering Bear Stearns a line of credit of $200 billion.

I am irked because this financial crisis was completely avoidable. I am outraged though because I am paying the price for government incompetence. I can see it in my net worth, where $50,000 has disappeared from my portfolio since the start of the year. Multiply my small misfortune across the United States and we have a huge financial meltdown that could be catastrophic.

This is not business as usual, unless you expect incompetence. This is government abdicating its job. This is the White House and Congress largely asleep at the switch, reacting to events instead of preventing them. In case it is not clear to you, we have governments to protect the interest of its citizens.

Who will win the White House race in 2008? Who will win the Congress? There is no doubt in my mind. Democrats will win. You can see it in poll numbers, where self-described Democrats outrank self-described Republicans by more than ten points. You can see it in the primaries and caucuses where Democrats are participating at rates unseen in a generation. You can get a preview of the election by looking at the results of a special election held last week in Illinois to fill former House speaker Dennis Hastert’s vacated seat. A Democrat won it.

For eight years, we have seen what happens when Republicans order the government and the economy the way their principles dictate. What we have is a financial mess not seen since the Great Depression. That event was another completely preventable economic event that was brought to us by Republicans. Will we ever learn? Will Republicans ever understand that their economic principles are not just fundamentally bankrupt, but fundamentally wrong? I doubt it. They are clueless folk. They are looking at the mirage of Reagan’s shining city on the hill, while ignoring that America is falling apart around them.

At least the American public is now fully, painfully and nervously awake. I can only hope that we can get the government we need before our current economic danger devolves into an economic catastrophe.

March 16th, 2008 at 11:12am Posted by Mark | Politics 2008 | no comments

Send me to the Democratic National Convention!

Am I a good enough of a blogger to go to the 2008 Democratic National Convention? I don’t know, but I intend to find out. The New York Times reports that the Democratic National Convention Committee plans to be more inclusive toward bloggers at next year’s convention. While it will likely be more fun for bloggers to be across the street at ProgressCon2008, I am still intrigued with the idea of being a blogger at the Democratic National Convention. The convention is scheduled for the Pepsi Center in Denver from August 25-28th, 2008.

Starting in just one week the DNCC will begin taking applications from bloggers, who can apply to attend as either state or general bloggers. I will most likely have to apply as a general blogger. The application process will end on April 15th. It is likely that the number of bloggers given credentials will be in the dozens, not the hundreds, which unfortunately makes my chances of getting in rather minute.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I do have some good credentials. I am about to start my sixth year of blogging and few bloggers out there can say that. I have written close to 250 political posts in those years, or roughly one third of all my blog entries. Nor am I your typical blogger. No three line blog entries with misspelled words and punctuation for me. If I attend the DNC, my readers will get the high level of writing and perspective likely unavailable on many other blogs.

In the event that I am selected, it will not be a cheap event. Doubtless, the hoteliers will push up their rates for the duration of the convention. Airfares will be steep too. When I add in my other costs, this event could easily cost me $2000. This makes me wonder whether my readers would help subsidize the cost of my trip. Would having Occam’s Razor at the DNC be worth paying for? Perhaps you can let me know in the comments. If it looks viable and I am selected, I may solicit donations by putting up a PayPal Donate button.

How newsworthy will the convention be? If recent history is any guide, there will be little news to cover. The Democratic presidential candidate is likely to be selected by February. The vice presidential pick will likely follow within a few months. The reason to go to the convention is simply for the unique experience it presents. After all, it is an event that only happens every four years. Moreover, virtually any Democrat of significance will be there.

What would intrigue me the most though would not be meeting these Democratic luminaries, most of whom are likely to be too busy to shake my hand. I am more interested in documenting the atmosphere of the convention. Only a few of us have the opportunity to attend a national political convention, and in general, you have to be willing to spend years working with your state and locate political committees to get on the convention floor. Yet it sounds like the DNCC might allow bloggers access to the convention floor. Television is no substitute for being present. I want to take it all it in so that through my eyes you can be there too.

Probably next April I will let you know whether I was selected.

December 3rd, 2007 at 08:22pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | no comments

Presidential candidate marriages under the microscope

I know it should not bother me but it does. Fred Thompson is running for president. Fred is 65. His wife, the former Jeri Kehn is 41. Fred, at age 65 is looking, well, old, as in grandfatherly. Jeri looks like a fashion model. Perhaps when you are 24 years younger than your husband is this is to be expected. There is no question though. Jeri is a babe. Fred knows how to pick the lookers.

When it comes to May-December marriages, Fred is not the leader of presidential candidate pack. Think about one presidential candidate, Republican or Democratic, who you think is least likely not only to be married (secretly you think he is gay) but even if he were married, would have a much younger spouse? Raise your hand if Dennis Kucinich comes to mind. You are, by the way, spectacularly wrong. Dennis is on his third marriage. Dennis may be 61, but his far left leaning vegetarian lifestyle bought him quite a filly. She would be Elizabeth Jane Harper, born in 1977, whose resume includes working in Mother Teresa’s orphanages as well as the British House of Lords. She just turned 30.

I started this blog post thinking that if Republicans are the party of family values then their presidential candidates should not have as many divorces under their belt as the Democratic candidates. Conversely, Democrats, because they are left leaning liberals should have candidates rife with multiple divorces. Yet surveying the seven current Republican and seven current Democratic candidates, the presidential candidates for both parties are equally as likely to have been divorced. In this sense, both parties are fielding candidates who well represent the public on marriage, where approximately half of our marriages end up in divorce.

If you are interested, my statistics are summarized in a table in the extended entry. My survey should be taken with a grain of salt, since it involved about an hour of web surfing, much of it on Wikipedia whose veracity sometimes can be questioned. (If you find errors, please send them to me so I can correct them. Please note that Joe Biden’s first wife died in an automobile accident, so he has never been divorced even though he is on his second wife.) Many of the candidate’s spouses are good at hiding their ages from prying Internet eyes.

Rudy Giuliani and Dennis Kucinich might not appear to have much in common, but they top their party’s candidate lists in the number of divorces: two each. Which party prefers younger spouses? At least with the current crop of candidates, Republicans seem to like their wives younger. I was unable to find information on the ages of the wives of Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo, but it appears their wives are close to their own ages. On the Democratic side, Joe Biden, Mike Gravel, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson seem to have wives not anxious to reveal their ages. Based on the incomplete information I do have, Republican wives tend to be 11 years younger than their spouses are. On the Democratic side, the difference in ages between candidates and their spouses is 7.75 years. Among Republicans, John McCain is 18 years older than his spouse Cindy is, and Rudy Giuliani is 11 years older than his third wife Judi is.

Dennis Kucinich skews the statistics on the Democratic side. If I could ignore his candidacy (and most of us do), the Democratic candidates would show no average difference in ages at all with their wives. John Edwards’s wife Elizabeth is actually four years older than he is. Barack Obama’s wife Michelle is three years younger.

Most of us assume that John McCain is the oldest of all the candidates running. In fact, he is the third oldest. Mike Gravel is the oldest at 77. (He is also, I was surprised to learn, a fellow Unitarian Universalist. No wonder he has no chance of winning.) The favorite candidate of the Libertarians, Ron Paul, running as a Republican, comes in second at 72. John McCain is 71. Barack Obama is the youngest candidate at 46. The average age of Republican candidates is 63. The average age for Democratic candidates is 60.

Given the small sample set, there is not too much I can say with authority about presidential candidates. The evidence does suggest that Republicans running for president prefer much younger spouses and Democrats prefer spouses around their own age. So perhaps the Democrats can accurately state that their candidates are more representative of traditional family values. Who’d have thunk?

November 19th, 2007 at 10:22pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | 2 comments

The Return of Government of, by and for the People

Today marks the welcome and long delayed return of sane government.

Admittedly, it is just one branch of government that has regained its sanity, but it is a start. For many of us the end of our long, national nightmare did not occur when President Nixon resigned. It happened on November 8th when voters threw the Republicans out of both houses of Congress. Today, as a new Congress was sworn in, government of, by, and for the corporation and special interests came to an abrupt end.

While I felt the political earthquake coming before the election, I was still nervous whether its size would not be enough to dislodge Republicans from both houses of Congress. It was, but just barely. The Senate, where Democrats are in control by a single vote, still does not quite feel like it is in Democratic hands. This is because Democratic Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota remains in the hospital, after brain surgery. While his recovery appears to be proceeding normally, he has a long way to go before he can actively participate in the Senate. If he cannot serve, you can bet that South Dakota’s Republican governor will appoint a Republican to his seat. In this event, the Senate would split 50-50, effectively putting Republicans in charge since Darth Vader, a.k.a. Dick Cheney would become its deciding vote. Due to Senate rules, it takes 60 votes to pass any controversial bill. However, by being in the majority the Democrats will be able control the chamber’s business.

This afternoon found us with a new Speaker of the House who was, for the first time, a woman. Nancy Pelosi is going to surprise many people. Republicans will be the most surprised. They see her as a far left liberal. While that may be true, that does not mean that she will govern as one. She understands that if Democrats want to retain power their impact must be broad and mainstream, rather than serving a narrow constituency of supporters. This is a lesson the Republicans never quite grasped.

It has been a while since government truly worked on behalf of the average Joe. Except for a brief period when Democrats captured control of the Senate, it has been twelve years with a Republicans Congress. Until 2001, we had President Clinton to reign them in. Not that it has been easy. In 1995, Republicans interpreted their majority status as a reason to close the federal government. Over time, their Contract with America became inconvenient to their true mission: maintaining power for themselves and their friends. Term limit promises and rules about not accepting gifts from lobbyists went by the wayside. During this decade all pretenses were dropped. Time after time legislation was passed that gave great benefits to fellow Republicans, and screwed the rest of us.

The Republican Congress and President Bush gave new meaning to the word “chutzpah”. In the House of Representatives, Democrats were effectively locked out of legislative process. All sorts of tactics were used to diminish their power, including enacting rules that excluded them from bill markup sessions. Over in the White House, President Bush signed bills into law with accompanying signing statements. In many cases, these statements explicitly contradicted the purpose of these laws in the first place. He is still at it. On December 20th upon signing the Postal Reform Bill, he said he would interpret the law as giving him the power to open people’s mail without a warrant, even though it gave him no such power. I hope that one of the new Congress’ first acts will be to bring a case to the Supreme Court to test their constitutionality. It is hard to imagine anything more unconstitutional than the president refusing to abide by the law of the land. At least when President Nixon broke the law, he knew he was doing wrong.

What were Americans smoking during the last twelve years? Virtually everything that came through Congress was framed this way: if it was good for Republican interests, let’s do it, and the fiscal consequences did not matter. Consequently, we got obscene tax cuts for the rich and favors for corporations and special interests of all kinds. We got faith-based initiatives on the taxpayer’s dime. We got politicians more concerned about the feelings of fertilized blastocytes than people who lost everything in New Orleans. The most progressive thing Congress did was pass a Medicare prescription drug bill. However, it did not do it until it made it easy for drug manufacturers to keep their profits high. Instead of carbon caps, we had meaningless voluntary quotas on carbon emissions. Throughout these years, while Congress kept increasing its salary it could not find a way to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour. This is a wage so niggardly that you can earn it and be well below the national poverty line. It was selfishness run amok.

Today meant a fundamental change in this sort of wrong and selfish thinking. It may be that after a long spell in power the Democrats may go back to the kind of corruption that deservedly got them thrown out of office in 1994. On the other hand, perhaps Democrats have learned a lesson. A hopeful sign is that the House Democrats, as their first act, will prohibit representatives from accepting gifts from lobbyists.

Granted, after twelve years of Republican rule there is so much fundamentally messed up with the country that all the needed changes cannot occur overnight. The Republican Congress’ contempt for the American people, if it needed any more proof, was evident in their lame duck session. They left town without even bothering to complete passing fiscal year 2007 appropriation bills. However, a new day is dawning in Washington. Congress appears to be ready to be a government of, by, and for the people again. It may be that in 2009, a Democrat will be in the Oval Office too. In that case something quite remarkable will have occurred: two branches of government will have changed hands in just two years. Looking toward the 2008 elections, it is hard to see how President Bush can fail to be a drag on any Republican nominee. In the Senate, the number of Republicans up for reelection is much higher than the number of Democrats, which suggests that Democrats will build on their majority. In the House, it is unlikely that Republicans will be able to chip away at the Democratic majority in only two years. Most likely Democrats will increase their majority.

The fact is that the country is changing right under the Republicans’ noses. Unless Republicans reinvent themselves as a kinder, gentler and more moderate party, they are likely to keep losing seats. The 2006 election proved that the times are a changing. The Midwest is turning blue. Even the Rocky Mountain States are turning a shade of purple. As Generations X and Y age and discover their political power, they are unlikely to model the Republican Party’s values of narrow mindedness, xenophobia and a cultural monotheism. They are growing up in a different America, which is culturally diverse, and where Caucasians will no longer be in the majority.

I believe that history will show that in the first half of this decade that the Republican Party reached its political zenith. Its hold on the majority has always been tenuous because it so steadfastly worked against the people’s interests. Despite Tom Delay’s attempts at gerrymandering, the demographics no longer favor the Republican Party. America’s future is colored blue.

January 4th, 2007 at 07:38pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | no comments

Election 2006 Postmortem

What a difference two years makes! Two years ago this week I surveyed the results of the 2004 election with dismay. President Bush, who should have handily been defeated for bungling the War in Iraq, was reelected, although the difference in the popular vote (2.4%) and the electoral vote (35 votes) made it one of the closest wins in recent history. While the Republicans picked up only three House seats, they solidified a formidable 30-vote majority in the House. In the Senate, Republicans picked up four seats, making the odds of retaking the Senate this year so small that even most Democrats (like me) thought it was a long shot.

Now that the dust has settled, the results of Tuesday’s election are stunning. Democrats picked up 29 House seats while losing none. A number of elections in dispute are likely to add to this total. In the Senate, with the concessions today by Montana Senator Conrad Burns and Virginia Senator George Allen, the Democrats took a 51-49 majority. This majority though feels rather fragile. It assumes that the newly reelected Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, who ran his independent campaign more like a Republican than a Democrat, doesn’t feel a case of sour grapes and align himself with the Republicans. Amazingly, not a single Democratic incumbent running for the U.S. Congress lost, which may be a first for either political party.

This amazing upset hardly ends at the national level. Looking at state races, Democrats will now control a majority of the governorships (28) next year, up 6 seats. Five state legislatures switched from Republican to Democrat; not one went from Democrat to Republican. New Hampshire turned stunningly Democratic. (The New Hampshire House went from 37.5% Democrat to 59.8%. The New Hampshire Senate went from 45.8% Democrat to 66.7%. In addition, it elected Democrat John Lynch as governor.) Counting state Senate and House seats nationwide, Democrats picked up 349 seats out of 7393, a gain of 4.7 percent.

You have to look very hard for any Republican successes. If Republicans succeeded, it was in not making their losses completely catastrophic. Republicans held on to a retiring senate seat in Tennessee and a retiring governorship in Florida. That was about it. Tuesday was an overwhelmingly Democratic night. Republicans can take some comfort in that the margin of victory for Democrats was in many cases achingly small. Both Conrad Burns and George Allen lost by less than 1% of the popular vote. Still, it was remarkable how in very tight major races, they went consistently for the Democratic candidate.

There is no single reason why Democrats faired so well. Clearly, the voters were expressing extreme unhappiness of the last five years of one party rule. Many were voting to express their disgust with President Bush in general and his bungled War in Iraq in particular. Many others were expressing their unhappiness with their more precarious standard of living.

However, there were also demographic changes that came into prominence in 2006. This country is becoming less white and the minorities are voting disproportionately for Democrats. As young voters begin to vote, they vote predominantly for the Democrats. These demographic forces bode well for the Democratic Party’s future.

Those who discount the force of netroots are in denial. While the netroots community is overwhelmingly progressive, that does not mean they were myopic enough to give money only to progressives. Clearly, the netroots lost in Connecticut, but they picked up impressive victories too. Donations from the netroots to candidates like John Tester and Jim Webb were not only instrumental in their election, but they also made it possible for them to mobilize in the first place. Arguably, neither Tester nor Webb would be senators elect today had it not been from the netroots. The netroots are now a proven means of winning seats. Netroots won the U.S. Senate for the Democrats. It is not your father’s smoke filled room anymore.

Having won the reigns of legislative power, it is another question entirely whether Democrats will prove to be competent to govern. Voters in general were expressing more extreme displeasure at Republicans than enthusiasm for the Democrats. Democrats have traditionally been the “none of the above” party, rather than a party with a coherent message and platform. Perhaps after being out of power for so long they will absorb some important lessons. At least our initial rhetoric is encouraging. The likely next Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi talks about being the Speaker of the House, not the Speaker of just the Democrats. She is stressing bipartisanship. Senator Majority Leader elect Harry Reid is expressing similar thoughts. If history is a guide, this spirit will not last too long, but it is a hopeful sign nonetheless.

Having spurned bipartisanship, President Bush now has to embrace it if he wants anything in his last two years to be more than a footnote. His prompt dismissal yesterday of our disastrous Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a hopeful sign. (I called for it in 2004.) Bush’s dismissal is bizarrely inconsistent with remarks he made a few days earlier wherein he promised he was never going to get rid of him. Since the plans for Rumsfeld’s replacement were clearly well along before the election, essentially Bush was lying. He probably justified it as an attempt to attempt to fire up his base in order to win the election.

No amount of bipartisanship will solve some problems. One of them is our quagmire in Iraq. Both sides are likely to embrace the recommendations of the nonpartisan Iraq Study Group. They will use it for political cover, because it will be politically unacceptable to make a recommendation for withdrawal that is not contingent upon Iraqis achieving benchmarks that they will not be able to meet. For the next two years, expect that our troops will remain in Iraq. Perhaps some small percent will come home to give the illusion to the American public that we will extricate ourselves from the war. Undoubtedly, the real responsibility for Iraq will remain with Bush, not the Congress, because strategy and tactics are the responsibility of the Commander in Chief. This bodes well for Democratic prospects in 2008. It is quite possible that in two years our government will move from Republicans in charge of all branches of government to Democrats being in charge of all branches but the Supreme Court.

For myself I am savoring this exquisite moment of victory. I would like to think it is the first of many, but I am sanguine. What goes around comes around. Without a hardnosed attention to the people’s business, Democrats will be lucky if they are still in power ten years from now, despite the carnage inflicted by Republicans these last six years. I am trying not to think about these sad political realities right now. For a Democrat like me, Tuesday night was magical. It was perhaps a once in a lifetime event. The closest parallel was the Election of 1974 following Watergate. However, in that election, Democrats already controlled both Houses of Congress. I would dance from the rooftops, except I have two left feet. Nonetheless, I am beaming, as is everyone in my very Democratic household. I helped make this election possible through my own contributions in time and money. I feel vested in its outcome and am thrilled to have Jim Webb, my netroots candidate, as my new Senator elect.

November 9th, 2006 at 09:29pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2006 | no comments

Why Democrats should punt on a plan for Iraq

There are just eight days until the midterm elections. That pungent smell of rancid urine is not from trying to litter train your new puppy. It is from all the Republicans wetting their pants. It would be an understatement to say the Republicans are nervous. They are plain scared. They can feel power slipping away. Some like Republican strategist Karl Rove feign optimism. Nevertheless, by now even Republicans can feel the political earthquake approaching. The question now becomes, what will its magnitude be?

President Bush has been running around the country engaged in, what else, blaming Democrats. This is not new of course, but what is new is that he is blaming Democrats for his mistakes. “The Democratic goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq”, he said today at Georgia Southern University. “If you listen carefully for a Democrat plan for success, they don’t have one. Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, yet they don’t have a plan for victory.” President Bush has a point. It is hard to find any Democrat with a plan for winning with Iraq that passes the sniff test. Such as they are, most Democrats are calling for beginning a withdrawal of troops in 2007. They also want to involve regional powers in Iraq’s future. Mostly though Democrats sound wishy-washy on how to succeed in Iraq. Instead, they state the obvious by calling attention to Bush’s mismanagement of the War in Iraq. Hmm, maybe that is their plan.

If so, I think it will prove to be very politically effective. By calling attention to the Democrats’ lack of a plan for Iraq, what Bush is really trying to do is get the Democrats to share ownership his failure. He hopes that by showing that they are bereft of good ideas on Iraq, the cloud of doom that has been hanging over him and his party will lift. In this case, the lack of a Democratic plan should be construed as a short-term political blessing for the Democrats. It is a smart election strategy for the Democrats to keep the focus where it belongs: on Bush’s bungling the War in Iraq in particular and the War on Terror in general.

In reality even if Democrats sweep both houses of Congress next week, there is not a whole lot they can do to bring the troops home. They could in theory cut off funding for the war, but they will not have the votes to override a presidential veto. Congress’s power has never been in exercising the war, but in its oversight. However, if they control Congress, Democrats can exercise genuine oversight on the war. This has been sorely lacking with Republicans in charge. However, the power to run the war constitutionally will remain with President Bush. Iraq will remain his albatross for the rest of his life. I believe that its colossal failure will almost certainly make it impossible for a Republican to become elected president in 2008.

Here is the reality of our situation in Iraq, if it is not already apparent to you: we have lost. As I alluded before the war even started, we would lose because we had insufficient troops to secure the peace. Overthrowing Saddam and his government was a given and a no brainer. It was containing the inevitable and historical sectarian strife, along with occupying a Muslim country with forces perceived to be Christian that were the real obstacles to long term success. This is not to say that hope is entirely lost in Iraq. It is just that success at this point is so bizarrely improbable that only the willfully foolish think it can possibly happen.

No wonder Democrats are mum about a plan for success in Iraq. Unlike Republicans, most Democrats inhabit the real world. They know the situation in Iraq is so bollixed up that even a speculator with tons of spare cash would not waste any money betting on a successful outcome. Given that nothing Democrats can say or do will change this sad reality, why should they assume part of its ownership? If they did, in 2008 voters might assume they would do something equally foolish in the next conflict. It is better to leave Bush and the Republicans holding their ball. If Bush is the nation’s quarterback, the Republicans are on offense, it is fourth down and 99 to go, and there is two seconds left on the clock in the fourth quarter, it is better that the Republicans take the inevitable fall.

If Democrats must propose plans for the War on Terror, it is far better to focus on where there is some probability of success. Success in Afghanistan is looking dubious, but it is not virtually hopeless as it is in Iraq. Besides, Osama bin Laden is reputedly in Afghanistan, or in nearby northwestern Pakistan. At least we could leverage sufficient forces to go after those who actually hurt us on 9/11.

Besides, things can only improve when those who screwed up this war are out of power. If Democrats win Congress, one of the most effective things they can do is hold many hearings on the war. It needs to be clear that people like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were instrumental getting us into this mess. They need to account to the American people for their actions in public hearings. Why did Rumsfeld go into Iraq without a plan to win the peace? Why did Cheney forcefully assert Iraq had WMDs when there was no conclusive intelligence? Why were we repeatedly lied to? In making these public officials account for their actions, Democrats can help facilitate their ouster and position our government to being one that is accountable again. Democrats should demand these instigators be replaced with leaders who are grounded in reality.

It is obvious to voters that Bush does not have a viable plan for victory. Stay the course is not working. Democrats should demand that Bush present a viable plan for Iraq’s success. He is after all the Commander in Chief and it is his responsibility. Perhaps in the process, Bush will realize it is time to fold his hand. The reality is he has had nothing to show for years except bluster.

October 30th, 2006 at 08:58pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2006 | no comments

Rumblings of 1994

I hesitate to claim victory prematurely. Yet with less than 100 days to go before the midterm elections, it is getting harder to see how the Democrats can fail to recapture the U.S. House of Representatives in November. Even the U.S. Senate, once presumed off limits, may be looking Blue again. Could it be that beltway insiders, who are often notoriously wrong on elections but like to echo conventional wisdom, may be right this time? Could it be that I am engaging in wishful thinking? On the other hand, perhaps I really am hearing an approaching stampede of pissed off voters of all stripes.

Whatever. I have my fingers crossed. I have my toes crossed. I am glad to hop on one leg if that will improve the odd that Democrats will retake the Congress. Mainly, I just feel the coming change inside of me. I smell it in the hot, fetid, ozone-laden air that is resting here over Northern Virginia tonight. I hear it anecdotally at the office water coolers. What I am hearing is, “This country is royally screwed up. It is time to throw the bums out.”

One reason I do not think my prognostication is a result of all the glue I have been sniffing lately is this report from Charlie Cook. Cook is non-partisan and well respected. His outfit pays careful attention to the numerous House and Senate races out there. His judgments have an excellent track record.

In the latest Cook Political Report/RT Strategies poll, conducted last Friday through Sunday among 809 registered voters, only 27 percent said the country was headed in the right direction and 63 percent said it was off on the wrong track. In polling for NBC and the Wall Street Journal, conducted July 21-24 and for CBS and the New York Times, taken July 21-25, the right direction numbers were 27 and 28 percent, respectively, while wrong track results were 60 and 66 percent respectively. These numbers are about the same as they were at this point in 1994 and going into Election Day that year.

Out of touch. That is what I hear the most. I bet you are hearing it too. The Republicans controlling government have severed their connections with real life and in particular their constituents. Having control of all three branches of government, they simply no longer care what the voters think. A most recent and egregious example was the so-called increase in the minimum wage bill. It was passed in the House only because it was tied to estate tax cuts, which would exempt the first $5 million in estate taxes for singles, and $10 million for couples. Never mind our already stratospheric federal deficits. Who cares if these tax cuts would only worsen the deficit? This is compassionate conservatism in action. When fully enacted, the new $7.25 an hour minimum wage would still not come close to providing a living wage, but this bill would allow multimillionaires to pass on even more of their wealth to their heirs, who never earned it. Can you feel their love?

The Republicans whole approach to government has become faith based. It has become not just surreal but downright bizarre. You cannot make up this stuff. It reads like something in The Onion. President Bush is saying we cannot have an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon because it will not solve the long-term problem security problem. Instead, we must allow both sides to keep killing in order to ensure peace. Big Brother has been proven right: War is Peace, at least according to George W. Bush. We can cut the deficit by taxing less and spending more. We need to give public school students vouchers to attend private schools even though a Department of Education report shows that public schools and private schools perform equally with the same class of student. We can solve global warming by allowing corporations to choose if they want to meet emissions standards. Medical savings accounts will solve our high cost of health care, even though most people simply do not have the disposable income to contribute to such an account. Of course the biggest, baddest, most egregious and most insidious lie of all: we are winning the war on terror. If winning the war on terror equals Armageddon, it is time to throw a victory parade.

It would have been nice if Americans had sobered up in time for the 2004 elections. My belief is that they are fully sobered up now. All signs point to governmental incompetence on a level never seen in this country. Perhaps Americans would have preferred to keep their heads stuck in the sand. It is no longer possible. This current sensory overload can no longer be ignored. The country is badly off track and the current crew in charge does not even realize the country is off track. They think things are just fine. The lunatics are running the asylum.

I do not seeing it getting any better for Republicans before the election. Indeed, Republicans should be praying their house of cards does not fully collapse before then. Household savings rates are in negative territory: we are living off credit cards and our equity. Could a recession be in our near future? Iraq, if it is not yet is civil war, is likely to devolve into large-scale sectarian genocide, and our troops will be in the middle of it. Housing starts are down, and house prices are going down too. This means the equity on which we depend to live beyond our means is shrinking too. Interest rates are up. Stocks are trending down. Arguably, the NASDAQ is in freefall. Domestic car sales are off sharply. If Republicans are lucky, gas prices will not increase, but they too are likely to go up before November.

It is too bad that the Democrats, for the most part, do not have a plan. Actually, there is a Democratic plan out there; it is just that it was badly marketed. Most Americans have no clue as to what the Democrats would do if they recaptured the Congress. In such a situation, most political parties would loudly be marketing solutions that would assuage the public’s concerns. The public is now ripe for a real solution to health care costs. They want to hear that we will get out of Iraq on a rapid time schedule. Yet my party cannot seem to say these things. It does not believe that the tide has turned in their favor. It does not know how to capitalize on the moment. Here is the truth: one hard smack to the Republican Party and it goes down. Winning through intimidation has been their preferred tactic. All Democrats have to do is laugh at them and the whole country will laugh with them. Their mojo is gone.

It may not matter that the Democrats do so little to win this election. There is no other path out there other than to keep the current pillagers in charge of the government. Perhaps there is hope that once in power again the Democrats will develop something resembling spine. Instead, they seem more worried about being Swift Boated.

Billmon has said he does not want the Democrats to win. He argues that this mess is so big and so deep and so tall that Democrats will be blamed when they cannot clean it up. It is not often that I disagree with Billmon, but I do on this one. Democrats have a responsibility as citizens to put our country back into order again. We need to be a respected country in the world again. Someone has to throw out the bums out on the street. Someone has to take out the trash, sweep the floors, patch the window screens and tidy up the yard. Someone has to cut that national credit card in half and throw it in the trash.

If not the Democrats, then who?

August 2nd, 2006 at 08:19pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2006 | no comments

How to sustain a Democratic majority

About a year ago, I wrote that the Democratic Party needed to put together a new contract with America. How much in the 1994 election the House Republican’s Contract with America succeeded in aiding their rise to power is debatable. What are not debatable are the results. For whatever reason, be it “don’t ask, don’t tell”, Clinton’s health care initiative, or his actually very modest tax hike, American were in a surly mood twelve years ago. The results of the election though were stunning: Republicans picked up forty-four seats in the House of Representatives. The Republicans also took control of the Senate, picking up eight seats. In addition, the Republicans gained twelve governor seats, and won a majority of governor seats. Clearly, 1994 was a very good year for the Republican Party.

2006 offers the potential for Democrats to take back both the House and Senate, as well as claim a majority of the nation’s governorships again. Given that Bush’s poll ratings keep dropping (USA Today/Gallup today shows Bush at 31% approval) it may be that Democrats do not to do much to take back the Congress. You know things have gone from bad to worse when Bush’s support is eroding even among Republicans. Conservatives seem to be abandoning him, perhaps because he has actually vastly expanded federal spending instead of contracting it. Arguably, gas prices merely need to stay above $3 a gallon to seal the Democratic Party’s victory in November. This is certainly likely through Labor Day, since we have yet to hit the peak summer driving season and gas is already $3 a gallon in most of the country.

Democrats may discover that it is much easier being out of power than in power. Right now, they can claim not to be Republicans. That is plenty of incentive for people to vote for them, given the wreckage of the last six years of Republican government. However, that does not mean Democrats have a comprehensive plan to lead the country once they are back in power. It appears that now most Democrats are emulating Republicans, in the sense that they do not offer much in the way of an opposition platform.

Perhaps this characterization is unfair. Nancy Pelosi, currently the Minority Leader in the House, has recently announced plans for a one week blitz if Democrats win back the House. The plan includes raising the minimum wage, rolling back parts of the prescription drug plan for senior citizens, putting in place needed budget controls, and implementing new Homeland Security measures. I have sniffed around various Democratic web sites for the Senate, but Senate Democrats are missing an obvious comprehensive plan. Perhaps they think the odds of winning a Senate majority are too high to bother. There are many press releases from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s office saying what Democrats would do differently. Nevertheless, I can find nothing in the way of a comprehensive plan. If there is one, they do not seem anxious to crow about it.

Over at the Democratic National Committee, my man Howard Dean is on the right track with his plan to take back Congress and the White House. It involves a fifty state strategy and looks toward building Democratic majorities beyond the 2006 elections. He also has something that looks like a comprehensive plan to sell to voters. It includes such points as Keeping America Safe at Home, Affordable Health Care and Civil Rights. The only problem with his plan is that it is mostly an invention of the Democratic National Committee. How much of it will be embraced by Senate and House Democrats remains to be seen. For if Republicans are only recently discovering disunity, Democrats have traditionally embraced it. It would be harder to find two Republican senators as divided philosophically as Russ Feingold and Joe Liebermann. Moreover, many of the Democrats currently in office still have not learned to develop a backbone. A majority still seem to give lip service to winning the war in Iraq, even though a majority of Americans believes the war is unwinnable. Perhaps they think this is leadership. In reality, it looks increasingly foolhardy.

This lack of a plan will not do. What is the point of gaining back power if Democrats have no real plan on how to use their power once they have it? Where is the clear and distinguishing Democratic brand? It is very clear at this point to the vast majority of Americans what has not worked over the last six years. My suggestion for leadership can be summarized as follows: lead pragmatically, and not by ideology.

That is it. It is true that if Democrats were to capture Congress that there might be a clamoring from the left to attack a host of issues dear to them. They might, for example, want to allow gays to serve openly in the military. It is not that I disagree with them; it is just that concentrating on these issues, as Clinton did when he took office, when you are trying to solidify your base is the wrong approach. For a precious time we will have the tentative support of Middle America. If we want to get it back for the long term, it must be earned.

We can do it by acknowledging that the government’s mission has grown, it is not going away, so we need more revenue. Rolling back the tax cuts on the richest 10% of us is an obvious way to bring more money into the treasury with minimal pain to the country. We also need to curb the growth in defense spending which by all measures has reached the theater of the absurd. Our enemies are different now. While we still need to be prepared to fight one conventional war, and probably not two, what we also need is the ability to get better intelligence and have better strategies to handle asymmetric warfare better. Real homeland security, like inspecting all cargo containers coming into our country, is also an obvious thing to do.

We also need new environmental laws that address the reality of global warming. Even conservative Republicans seem to grudgingly acknowledge that global warming is real. Trying to meet targets in the Kyoto Treaty in the short term is unrealistic, but Democrats need to push for big changes in fuel economy standards and emissions for automobiles and trucks, with an emphasis on conservation of natural resources and minimizing the amounts of greenhouse gases that we emit. The energy debate should be reframed: it is not about having as much energy as we need (for we will always want more); it is about finding ways to have our needs satisfied with less energy. In many ways, it is a 1970s redux. It is about solar cells and solar heating. It is about requiring all new cars to integrate hybrid technologies and all trucks to use clean diesel technology. We need to be candid: the days of our wasteful energy use are over. We can never go back. Conservation of resources must be a criterion that directs all our national policy. In the process, we earn real national security, because we are no longer dependent on foreign supplies for our energy.

We also need to acknowledge what Bill Clinton knew early in his term and for which we foolishly pilloried him. We need to comprehensively fix our broken health care system. Our system is collapsing because employers are finding it nearly impossible to provide health insurance and stay in business. We need a tiered national health insurance system. I suggest Basic, Silver and Platinum individual and family plans. A basic plan should be available to all and should cover basic wellness and catastrophic medical costs. It would not cover prescription drugs. It would resemble the Medicaid system. A Silver Plan would look a lot like a HMO. It would offer prescription drug coverage and, yes, it would not cover every conceivable injury or disease. The employer could partially fund its cost. If the costs are fixed such that all employers pay equally, then no employer is disadvantaged. Businesses can get behind this form of national health insurance. Finally, there should be a Platinum Plan for those who can afford it, providing PPO and Blue Cross like coverage, with perhaps additional premiums born by the employee, or by employers who want to use it as a carrot for attracting top talent.

Clearly, both Social Security and Medicare need long term fixes. Medicare’s long-term viability is the larger problem, since it is likely to go broke sooner. Medicare and Medicaid should fold into a multi tier national health insurance system. All health care should morph into one system with three levels: Basic, Silver and Platinum. All need to be actuarially sound and be run by an independent board of governors (like the Federal Reserve) that are empowered to keep it that way.

Perhaps Social Security could also evolve into Basic, Silver and Platinum system. A Basic plan would be similar to what we have now, but with perhaps a later retirement age based on actuarial statistics and which makes it self-funding. A Silver Plan would include defined benefits from a 401-K like plan which would be paid for by contributions from both the employer and the employee. A Platinum Plan would include benefits beyond a silver plan funded wholly by the employee. It could be thought of as an IRA on top of a 401-K.

I could throw out many more ideas, but I think that these are common sense ideas that are likely to be embraced by most Americans. They would demonstrate that government could pragmatically deal with our toughest problems. They would also, coincidentally, keep Democrats in power far into the future.

May 8th, 2006 at 06:03pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2006 | no comments

Are people more courteous in blue states?

Over the last year and a half or so, I have taken up biking as a hobby again. Thanks to Bush’s Global Warming ^TM though we often get days during the winter that feel more like spring. Today was such a day: blue skies, temperatures in the 60s and low humidity. And since I had the day off, it was a good day for my first bike ride of the year.

I kept my bike ride modest: to Vienna, Virginia and back along my favorite bike trail: the Washington and Old Dominion Trail. The ride was about twenty miles altogether and took about two hours. It felt good to reconnect with my bike again. I mentally berated myself for not doing more of it lately. Our winter has been relatively mild so far and a bike ride is such an improvement over doing a workout at the local Gold’s Gym. In many ways when the weather cooperates, winter is the ideal time to bike. In the summer, I can return from a bike ride covered in sweat and with gnats and assorted tiny bugs all over my exposed arms, legs and face. Bugs are not a problem during the winter. The result is that when the weather is tepid in the winter like today, it is the optimal time for a bike ride.

I live in Fairfax County, Virginia. It is an increasingly cosmopolitan county just outside the Washington beltway. It is also turning from a county that tended to vote Republican to a reliably Democratic county. In general the further you live from the Beltway, the more Republican that Fairfax County becomes.

Consequently, by heading east on the W&OD trail toward Vienna, Virginia you move toward “blue” (solidly Democratic) territory. Head west on the W&OD trail and you move into “red” Loudoun County, (which is now showing signs of turning purple).

I have noticed real behavioral differences from the motorists I encounter depending on the direction I bike on the trail. The trail winds through a lot of suburbia in both directions. Therefore, bicyclists on the trail encounter many at grade crossings. (Fortunately, there are often bridges that take the trail over the largest roads.) Consequently, my fellow bicyclists and I have many opportunities to interact with motorists. The behavior I have experience has become so predictable that it is now beyond dispute in my mind: the further east I go into “blue” areas on the trail, the more courteous the drivers I encounter become.

On the other hand, head west on the trail and drivers can become ruthless. If there is a traffic light, you can usually cross safely but somewhat warily. If you have to cross a road by first yielding to the traffic, be prepared to pedal across the road quickly. The drivers are likely to try to accelerate if they see you trying to cross. I have also had drivers curse at me, even though my behavior was entirely lawful. The vast majority of them seem to drive their cars as if bicyclists do not exist. When they see us, they seem almost startled. “My goodness,” is what I imagine they are thinking, “It’s a bicyclist!” You would think we are Martians or something.

The W&OD trail crosses Hunter Mill Road between Reston and Vienna. While there are signs on the road asking motorists to yield to bicyclists, what really surprises me is that drivers routinely follow the law. Moreover, they do so quite happily. I nod or wave to them and they smile, nod or wave back. It is a nice feeling. The same thing often happens where the trail crosses Sunrise Valley and Sunset Hills Road in Reston. Once inside the Town of Vienna it gets even more courteous. It only gets a bit chancy crossing the major thoroughfare of Maple Avenue. Fortunately, there is a crosswalk there. Crossing Park Street or Cedar Lane in Vienna is not a problem. It is highly unusual for drivers not to stop for a bicyclist. Drivers in Vienna, as well as Falls Church, are very courteous and respectful of bicyclists.

Bike in “red” Loudoun County though and things can get dicey. Right now crossing Church Street is especially chancy, since the road is under reconstruction and you have to bike down to a traffic light. Further, out in Loudoun County, such as where the trail crosses Ashburn Road or Belmont Ridge Road it becomes just plain dangerous to be a bicyclist. This is SUV and pick up truck land and you are in something resembling country. The cars are going fifty miles an hour or more on a two-lane road. They really do not want to decelerate for some annoying bicyclist, particularly when they are coming swiftly over the top of a hill. I have learned the hard way to give drivers a lot of leeway out on the trail’s western side.

If you make it on the bike trail to Leesburg a bicyclist must be very careful. When you get your walk light, you had better hoof it quickly. The drivers are unlikely to be looking for you. From the looks of things, Leesburg does not get many pedestrians or bicyclists. I suspect the automotive culture is much more engrained in that city.

I have observed this phenomenon so many times now. I am starting to wonder if people are just naturally more courteous in blue parts of my state than in red parts. When I am in red territory, as a bicyclist I often feel that drivers do simply not see me. When they see me and especially if they have to modify their behavior by tapping their brake or something, watch out. That is when you are likely to get frowns, curses or their middle finger. Apparently, I am interfering with their high-speed automotive experience.

We all know that bicycles (with some exceptions) have equal rights to roads. The sad reality though is that bicyclists are wise to avoid riding on thoroughfares. It is just plain dangerous to do so. The shoulders are full of gravel, garbage and the occasional pothole, if we are lucky enough to have a shoulder at all. (They tend to appear and disappear depending on whether a housing development is nearby.) We bicyclists must exercise extreme caution when crossing any thoroughfare that is not in a residential neighborhood. It is nice to know though that my odds of survival seem to be much higher as I bike into “blue” territory. If safety were my primary concern, I would be better off limiting my biking to blue territory all the time.

January 20th, 2006 at 08:46pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | 3 comments