They Have 24 Hours

Otherwise, one less Republican.

In Dutch With The Dutch

Why the Netherlands' punctiliousness about politicians' claims won't work here.

Three Growth Spurts Urgently Needed

I've got just one question for Messrs. Obama and Romney. Five or six percent annual GDP growth would put people back to work, eliminate the federal deficit (as consistently strong growth did in the 1990s), and reduce both debt and cultural and social anxiety. Without a vibrant economy, we can't lead, we can't inspire, we won't be just and fair to one another, and our whole civic life becomes impoverished. How do you folks plan to address this crisis, nationally and globally?

Instead, according to Ben Smith via the "Dish," we get this:

President Obama himself invoked an old story about Romney strapping a dog to the roof of his car. The Chairman of the Republican National Committee shot back with a jibe about Obama having eaten dog as a schoolboy in Indonesia. Biden suggested that Republicans want to put voters back "in chains." Romney demanded Obama takes his campaign of "division and anger and hate back to Chicago." Obama's spokesman called him "unhinged." The atmosphere bristled with conflict, Twitter spilled over with gleeful vitriol, and the campaign reached the sort of fevered political moment when it feels like anything can happen.

Such as me sitting home in November unless somebody grows up.

The Severity Of Our Disengagement

Defending himself against Bill O'Reilly's wacky accusation that he's a communist, Robert Reich says Fox News and their ilk are burying the nation in "doo-doo" -- an unintentional allusion to the late Seamus Romney, one assumes, since Reich adds:

The 2012 election doesn't seem likely to clarify any issue. At this moment the candidates and their surrogates are debating the treatment of dogs.

Across the nation, conservatives right-wingers and liberal or progressive lefties have stopped debating their respective views, or even listening to anyone they disagree with. They just find broadcasters and bloggers who confirm their views.

We're even sorting by belief according to where we live. Today your neighbors are more likely to agree with your politics than disagree. We've settled into like-minded enclaves where we don't need to think because everyone we meet confirms what we assume we already know.

It's not that the nation is more polarized than it's been in the past. America has been through searing conflicts, some within the living memories of most of us. The communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were followed by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage.

What makes America's current polarization remarkable isn't the severity of our disagreements but our utter lack of engagement debating them.

Least Effective Junk E-Mail Of The Year

From Mitt Romney adviser Beth Myers, who's vetting his VP choices but evidently not his mailing lists:

John,

If you’re a stay-at-home mom, the Democrats have a message for you: you’ve never worked a day in your life.

A Pox On Both Your Parties

Nick Gillespie writes that 40% of voters now identify as independents:

If independent voters are the key to the presidency, what are the keys to independent voters? In its summary of 2011 attitudes toward government and political parties, Gallup concluded that the surge in independents stems from the “sluggish economy, record levels of distrust in government, and unfavorable views of both parties.” Indeed, a “historic” 81 percent of Americans overall are “dissatisfied with the way the nation is being governed” and 53 percent of us have negative views of the Republican Party and 55 percent of us have negative views of the Democratic Party.

Hat tip to Lisa Sparks

Not So Much The Handshakes Anymore

One aspect of the colorful mosaic being fashioned in retirement by my friend and mentor, the Rev. Canon Mark Shier, is lending his mellifluous instrument to the production of public domain audio books, which he does as a volunteer. Along one of his literary back roads he discovered an 1895 collection of short stories called Red Men And White by Owen Wister, who also wrote The Virginian. Mark sent along this excerpt from the author's introduction, which resonates pretty well this political year:

With no spread-eagle brag do I gather conviction each year that we Americans, judged not hastily, are sound at heart, kind, courageous, often of the truest delicacy, and always ultimately of excellent good-sense. With such belief, or, rather, knowledge, it is sorrowful to see our fatal complacence, our as yet undisciplined folly, in sending to our State Legislatures and to that general business office of ours at Washington a herd of mismanagers that seems each year to grow more inefficient and contemptible, whether branded Republican or Democrat. But I take heart, because often and oftener I hear upon my journey the citizens high and low muttering, “There’s too much politics in this country”; and we shake hands.

Skipping Stone

Roger Stone, the ultimate Nixonite, explains why he's supporting former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate in 2012:

[A] candidate for president who opposes the war in Afghanistan, favors a woman's right to choose, supports gay marriage equality, and backs the legalization of marijuana at the same time he supports deep cuts in spending, radical tax reduction, smaller government, gun owner's rights and an adherence to constitutional principles has a unique opportunity to impact the 2012 presidential race....

The American people have never been offered a candidate who is a fiscal conservative and social liberal. If you voted for the Republican because you favored spending and tax cuts you also had to swallow a ban on abortion and opposition to gay marriage. If you voted for the Democrat because you were pro-choice, you also had to support fiscal policies that would bankrupt us.

How We Treat Each Other

Historian Maarja Krusten and her twin sister, Eva, who died in 2002, both worked for the National Archives. For Maarja, Eva exemplified qualities of a bygone era in U.S. politics -- and, we had better hope, an era to come. Maarja concludes:

Sometimes, when I get discouraged because it feels to me as if we’ve given too much power to the angry, the disgruntled, the haters, the extremists, the people on the fringes, I think back on how my sister lived her life. Barack Obama recently said, very wisely in my view, that how we treat each other is entirely up to us. In the way she lived her life, my sister showed a type of grace which exemplifies what the President meant. Would that there were more like her, in both political parties.

Vote For Me. I'll Probably Do Just As Well.

Reflecting 0n the Jan. 20 "Fresh Air" on the proliferation (or, I'd say, the continuation) of violent rhetoric in politics, Geoff Nunberg says that Sarah Palin got a bum rap when she was accused of having had anything to do with inspiring the Jan. 8 shooter in Arizona. He concludes:

It's a strength of modern political culture that these apocalyptic metaphors no longer rouse people to armed insurrection. But then indignation has never had so many recreational outlets before. We can spend all our waking hours listening to broadcast political invective or writing sarcastic blog comments to excoriate the morons on the other side. That's the dirty little secret of political vituperation: left and right, we all enjoy going there sometimes.

But even if these violent reveries are almost never acted out, they coarsen the debate and dehumanize the other side. The scenarios behind those fantasies goes a long way toward creating the so-called climate of hate. If you're going to imagine yourself riding to the rescue of the republic, you're going to need to see your opponents as nefarious alien life forms. You put on a cowboy suit, and suddenly everybody else is an Indian.

As Nunberg notes, over the centuries a considerable amount of real violence has been sublimated into angry political conversation. Not only is it better to yell at than shoot each other, doing the former probably helps keep us from doing the latter. Palin's critics were seeing it the other way around.

And while I'd certainly enjoy more civility in political discourse, I wonder how practical that desire is in any system based on regularly scheduled, honest elections. Republicans wouldn't get very far mounting a challenge to President Obama by saying that while he's doing pretty well under the circumstances, they deserve a chance, too. It's hard to run against an incumbent without saying that all is lost if she continues in office; and it's hard to make that almost-always-incorrect accusation without doing a certain amount of rhetorical violence.

The alternative is to have elections only when we really need them. Anyone interested?

Looky-Cues

Ever noticed, when you're talking to someone and happen to look away for a moment, the person looks in that direction, too? Those with an eye on the data think they're seeing clues about political vision:

Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.

Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives' value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts....

Liberals may have followed the "gaze cues," meanwhile, because they tend to be more responsive to others, the study suggests.

Hat tip to Mark Shier

If Compromise Is So Bad, Why Do We All Want It?

Barack Obama didn't receive a mandate for radical change in 2008, and Republicans didn't get one Tuesday. Andrew Sullivan:

The pre-election NYT poll found that 78 percent want the Republicans to compromise with Obama rather than stick to their positions in the next two years; 76 percent want the Dems to do the same; and a slightly lower percentage, but still overwhelming, wants Obama to compromise too: 69 percent.

For archival purposes (well, maybe my reader will enjoy it, too), I'm reproducing a post I wrote on the Nixon foundation's blog a week before the 2008 election. I'll admit that, as an intestinal moderate, I'm mandate-averse. When any leader begins to envision himself or herself as a singular visionary, watch out. But Tuesday's result looked like nothing more than a rebuke of President Obama's overreaching (not because we didn't need health care reform, which we did, but because it kept him from focusing on jobs one in order to demonstrate a relentless desire to get his people back to work). Anyway, back to October 2008:

It’s not over yet. But while almost everyone will blame either Sen. McCain or Gov. Palin for the expected GOP debacle on Nov. 4, it’s important to fix the blame for the party’s dire prospects where it belongs — the plummeting economy, whose authors are Republicans and Democrats, Congresses and Presidents, Fed chairmen and Americans who borrowed more than they could afford in the hope that real estate prices would balloon indefinitely.

Amid the dread that millions of Americans are feeling, no different VP nominee would have helped McCain more, and no different GOP nominee — Romney, Huckabee, Reagan — could probably beat Sen. Obama. By the same token, Obama’s considerable gifts notwithstanding, Sen. Clinton would have done just as well. It’s just like 1980, when any Republican — Connally, Bush, Reagan — could’ve beaten Jimmy Carter thanks to the abysmal mess his administration had made of the economy and foreign policy.

President Reagan’s hagiographers have turned the 1980 election into a mandate for Reagan-Goldwater Republicanism rather than for the doctrine of anybody-but-Carter. They’re wrong. Not his election but his first-term tax cuts and tough Cold War line earned him his legacy, along with his unfailingly sunny demeanor.

If Obama wins, he won’t have an ideological mandate. Reagan could blame his predecessor for most of the nation’s problems in 1981 far more legitimately than Obama will be able to in 2009, especially now that Iraq war has taken such a positive turn. Even more than Reagan, who talked right but often governed as a moderate, Obama is more likely to succeed by walking right down the middle of the road. Just like Reagan, his greatest resource will be his temperament.

Which Obaman temperament I had completely misread, incidentally. A general outlook that appeared sunny and nonanxious during the campaign now appears to be prone to being gloomy, inflexible, and restive.

Your Government Inaction

"The Economist" predicts "two years of mostly nothing."

Mi chiamano Mimi (And JUST Mimi, Please!)

You can tell a California politician anticipates anti-incumbent sentiment when, on the ballot, she declines to state that she's a state Senator.

Ouch

In a Matt Bai analysis that attaches way too much cosmic significance to the fact that a couple of old politicians are back in the saddle, a slap at old voters:

[Jerry] Brown was famous then for dating Linda Ronstadt. You can Google her, or just ask your mom.

Washington Rules

It helps to be a post-modern guy sometimes. Speaking to Peter Baker, 44 skillfully self-diagnoses:

[Barack Obama] has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn’t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age.

Any Bells Tolling In Your Town?

I pay a fair amount of attention to politics, but I usually have no idea what's going on in my home town except what I learn every two years from the campaign signs on street corners when I go for a walk or drive to work.

For instance, next month in Yorba Linda, there's something up for a vote called Measure Z, which, depending on the sign, is supposed to be about either ethics or local control. Another sign says that a City Council candidate who is seeking reelection is against this "ethics measure." Does that mean she's unethical? Coming to that conclusion requires, among other things, an assumption that Measure Z is really about ethics. Often enough, proponents and opponents of state and local ballot initiatives unethically claim that they're about something they're really not.

Yes, I do know how to figure it all out. I could pour over the materials that come in the mail from the Registrar of Voters and scour the local weekly for the occasional reference to municipal policy debates. I could watch City Council meetings on cable TV, and if there were a pressing issue that affected me or my family, I could dig even deeper.

Perhaps I should be ashamed to say this, but I really don't have the time. And there's shame in numbers. In many if not most smaller southern California communities, elections for city councils and especially school and water boards are dominated by those who habitually and sometimes obsessively take an ongoing interest or are motivated by passion or ambition related to single issues. In some local elections, no more than 20-30% of the jurisdiction's eligible voters will turn out.

If the group of those who are active is small enough, can it be construed as a special interest? Perhaps. It would be better if more people paid attention, but saying so and its coming to pass are wildly different things.

In many cases, such as in Yorba Linda, the electorate's disinterest is justifiably blissful, a consequence of the city being well run. On the other hand, there's the scandal in the nearby city of Bell, where elected and staff officials were allegedly looting the treasury with the broad impunity that can only be granted through a tacit agreement between oblivious voters and negligent journalists (though it was the LA Times, while looking pretty slim and haunted these days, that finally broke the story). The Bell rang as a warning for most of us in suburban southern California whose passion about municipal government usually extends no further than complaining when candidates don't collect their multicolored litter soon enough after election day.

* * *

Thanks to the local paper, some internet research, and more careful examination of the political signs sprouting up around town, I've learned that the so-called ethics initiative on Yorba Linda's Nov. 2 ballot is measure Y, which indeed proposes a revision of the city's ethics ordinance. Measure Z has to do with higher-density, or so-called work force, housing in a part of our city called Savi Ranch.

I've also learned from local columnist Jim Drummond that campaign signs aren't supposed to be posted within 15 feet of an intersection, which means that some of our candidates are technically scofflaws.

Enough, Allredy

It takes some doing to evoke sympathy for a billionaire who's trying to buy California's governorship. Way to go, Gloria Allred!

Nine years ago her client, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, falsely told an employment agency and Meg Whitman that she was a permanent resident alien and got a $23 an hour job. She made her assertion under penalty of perjury. After Whitman announced for governor last year, Diaz Santillan told Whitman and her husband that she was undocumented. They immediately fired her.

In the thick of Whitman's campaign against Democratic opponent Jerry Brown, the ex-employee turned up with Allred at a press conference today, saying she'd been mistreated. Seen that movie before? I knew that you had. Brown supporter Allred and other Whitman critics say she should've known about Diaz Santillan's status. But you have to wonder about Whitman's motive for sticking her head in the sand, since she wouldn't have had much trouble getting a documented worker or U.S. citizen to work for $23 an hour.

The LA Times thoughtfully lists three "potential threats to Whitman's campaign":

Whitman has made a point in her campaign that employers should be held responsible if they hire illegal workers....

Pitting Whitman against a Latina who says she was badly treated could undermine the candidate's extensive outreach efforts to Latino voters, a segment of the electorate critical to winning.

The issue also could hurt Whitman among conservative Republicans, some of whom have criticized her for being insufficiently tough on immigration.

Let's take those one by one.

Diaz Santillan reliably claimed to be documented, so it's hard to accuse Whitman of hypocrisy.

As for Latino voters, like other voters, they're just as likely to conclude that Diaz Santillan treated Whitman badly by misleading her about her status.

No. 3 sounds like wishful thinking by reporters Michael J. Mishak and Phil Willon. It's hard to imagine this story prompting a rush to Brown among conservative Republicans, who, notwithstanding their varying positions on undocumented workers, hire plenty of them themselves.

Besides, the reporters have just predicted that the scandal will hurt Whitman with Latino voters. Was she too tough on Diaz Santillan or too soft on illegal immigration?

"Unlikely" Doesn't Begin To Say It

JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen on what's changed in politics since the first Nixon-Kennedy debate 50 years ago:

Though it seemed at the time to be a battle between two opposing worldviews, the truth is that the two candidates did not vastly differ in that first debate. And while Kennedy would probably find a home in today’s Democratic Party, it is unlikely that Nixon would receive a warm welcome among the Tea Party.

Is That Like Tin Soldiers And Nixon?

Battling in a tough race against GOP candidate Van Tran in Orange County's 47th congressional district, Loretta Sanchez (D-Santa Ana) recently said:

The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, (trying) to take this seat...

I was surprised to find this way back on page A-13 of the Orange County Register. Loose talk about "the Mexicans," when one is discussing U.S. taxpayers of Mexican descent, went out of fashion long ago. Do Vietnamese-Americans deserve any less respect? (It turns out OC Weekly broke the story on Monday. Before then, neither the Register nor the Tran campaign had noticed Sanchez's gaffe.)

She went on to call Tran "anti-immigrant" (though he's an immigrant himself) and "anti-Hispanic." Since Sanchez was being interviewed on a Spanish-language station, it looks like she's trying to keep her job by inciting resentment among members of one ethnic group against another -- just the kind of enlightened, responsible leadership America needs these days.

Reporter Doug Irving said Tran, a member of the state assembly, has asked for an apology.