Another Data Point

Last month, I made an allusion to Don Knotts (well, really, Barney Fife, who was played by Don Knotts).

I guess I touched a nerve:
“Don Knotts is Dubya”

A lot of maps have been thrown up on TV screens showing the red state/blue state divide and what it all means.

Well, here’s mine:

Thanks to Pascal and Kai for the inspiration.

Kathleen Parker, a syndicated columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, recently wrote that the Democratic Party’s problem was elitism.

Seems we have 56 million elite voters in the country. Strange to call 48% of the voting public elite.

Union workers are elite? Economically struggling elderly and single moms are not ordinary Americans?

The genius of deceivers like Karl Rove had been to convince people — including Parker, apparently — that the party of the hyper-rich corporate powers is not the party of the elite. As happened a century ago, the American voters will soon realize that they have been offered a false choice between a good and evil.

Frankly, I don’t think electoral choices are a sensible test of a person’s morality. In fact, I’m convinced that most Americans — most humans — share fairly high moral standards. Where Americans honestly differ is how to devise public policies that harmonize with our shared moral sense.

Politics ought to be about resolving those differences regarding public policy, not about who is more moral — and certainly not about privately held morals and values. Karl Rove and his ilk have distorted the political discussion, and cheated the American public out its greatest heritage, a democratic policy-making process.

Morality?

There’s something a bit disorienting about learning that morality was the single most important issue among people who voted for Bush. I have two words for these people.

Karl Rove.

Rove is responsible for some of the most despicable lies and distortions seen in politics in the last 20 years, and, knowing this, George Bush has hired him.

Bush himself has conducted a campaign full of distortions, deceptions and character assassination, either personally or by proxy.

How is it moral to corrupt the political process? In my mind, it’s the height of immorality because it’s destructive of the most valuable aspects of the American way of life, democracy.

How is it moral to attack a country and cause tens of thousands of deaths unnecessarily?
(more…)

Gloating conservative writers like Cal Thomas notwithstanding, a few percentage points in the electorate does not constitute a mandate for radical reform of the sort we can expect from President Bush and the Congress. And in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that the public doesn’t really want radical reform, like the destruction of New Deal and Great Society programs.

(In fact, there’s a significant body of evidence that suggests the public doesn’t know what it’s getting. See, e.g., the recent report from the Program on International Policy Attitudes.)

But, even supposing that Bush’s supporters do want radical reform, it seems to me that enacting radical reform with only half the electorate on board seems like a recipe for intensified division in the country. It would make more sense to me to take a more measured approach than George Bush is likely to, or than Cal Thomas and his ilk would like him to.

President Bush called for healing and unity, Cal Thomas is calling for the opposite.

As I write this, George W. Bush, is leading the popular vote by 4 million votes. To me, that means whatever happens in Ohio, Bush ought to be President.

But my heart isn?t in it.

I still believe that he?s the worst man for the job in my lifetime and I have grave concerns about the future of our country.

But I?ve been saying for while ? though not in the space ? that whoever won the election, there?s a larger, longer battle to be fought. I believe the country has succumbed to a politics of fear and distortion, and that would have been true regardless of who won the election.
(more…)