Categories
General

Political Paradise in Two Paragraphs

I have never read a more precient statement about how politics should work – even in an imperfect world – than this comment by Charles:

I don’t think we should abandon partisanship, but we need to abandon incivility and mindless unfounded attacks. I don’t want conservatives or liberals to change their principles, or to compromise them to gain short-term political points. I want them to confront the many serious problems that we have in this country and articulate their proposed solutions. Instead of focusing on who is scoring points or who is ahead in the polling or who made the most recent boo-boo, let’s focus on policy ideas and substance.

Our media is unwilling to do its job. There are no serious long-term investigations, no serious analysis of policy ideas, and no holding of our elected officials to account (except for sexual misbehavior of course). All those things are too expensive and don’t bring in enough revenue. Having some partisan hack shouting down anyone opposed to him or inviting a parade of other partisan hacks to spout off incoherent, uninformed nonsense is both cheap to produce and profitable. It’s time “we the people” stopped listening to this. We have a political system to fix, an economy to fix, a pointless war machine to stop. We need to learn to work together not revel in transient “victories” over our political opponents.

If 60% of voters could come to believe this and act/vote accordingly our political culture would be healed almost overnight.

Categories
State technology

Evolving News

It’s interesting to watch as nothing turns into a news story. Here’s the roundup of one such process from this week.

Holly Richardson writes about Tim Bridgewater’s momentum. When she talks about his fund raising she doesn’t mention that over 80% of it was a loan to himself. Tim likes the coverage (naturally) and the next day he posts her article on his RedState diary. Tim gave all the proper attribution and everything – I’m not trying to accuse him of plagiarism. The day after that Thomas Burr writes that “Holly Richardson is boosting Tim Bridgewater’s campaign” over at RedState. Whether it was an oversight or a calculated move is open for speculation, but the fact is that Holly didn’t promote Tim over at RedState – unless she did so under Tim’s name. Finally, Tim gets to tweet about the article by Thomas Burr which declares how beneficial Holly’s support is.

So with a couple of nudges from Tim this little game of Chinese whispers has produced, with a little invented fact here (Holly promoting Tim on RedState) and a little omitted fact there (Tim providing almost all his own campaign funding), almost a week’s worth of positive coverage.

The point here is not to accuse Tim of anything untoward – it is to illustrate the cycle of coverage growing in a vacuum. Tim did nothing this week (at least nothing to garner more coverage in those articles) and yet he got a four days of positive news from a topic (fund raising numbers) that seemed to have died before Holly’s post.

Categories
culture General pictures

Multi-Dimensional Political Perspectives


photo credit: mkandlez

Jane Hamsher wrote about the 11 Dimensional Chess approach to health care legislation that the Obama administration tried. That sent me back to some earlier thoughts I had shared about how we visualize the political spectrum. The simplest way to view things is one dimensional. Like the opening image here it breaks down into a right/left, red/blue, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat, or another single-axis spectrum. Many people recognize how inadequate such a simplified view is and various people (including myself) have sought to devise two-dimensional representations of the political landscape.

Of the many maps out there I think the easiest to comprehend is this from the Worlds Smallest Political Quiz:

With an axis measuring personal freedom issues and an axis measuring economic freedom issues it is not difficult to grasp the lay of the land according to this graph. Unfortunately this two dimensional representation, like all other two-dimensional representations, falls short of accurately describing reality.

Categories
life Local

Mike Lee and the Constitution

I have been having a hard time getting the time to read and write here as much as I would like. Things are very busy at work, a bit crazy at home, and I am spending more time with offline political activities in preparation for the upcoming legislative session and this election cycle. The result is that I need to readjust my expectations here. I’ll try to put short posts up with some regularity, but not likely as much as has previously been the case. Hopefully this is only temporary.

Because of the recent discussion here about Mike Lee’s stance on the Constitution and his call for a couple of amendments I thought it would be appropriate to share Mike’s post – Why I Focus on the Constitution. I figure it’s always best to let people speak for themselves so here is what I see as the heart of what he wrote:

We must analyze the country’s current challenges and Congress’s proposed solutions through the lens of the Constitution. With such a view, we can accurately determine if the proposed solution incorporates and supports the proper role of government. We must also hold our elected officials accountable to the solemn oaths they have taken to support and defend this document. . . With truly committed constitutional leaders at the helm, we can shift away from a perpetually growing government and the corresponding loss of personal liberty, and instead preserve our freedoms and enjoy the prosperity our great nation affords.

I recommend that anyone who wants to understand Mike and his position in more detail should go read his whole post before trying to engage me in the topic because I don’t claim to know any more about Mike’s position than what he wrote.

Categories
State

Bob Lonsberry Contradicts Himself on Term Limits

It’s not really fair to expect everyone to have an up or down opinion on a candidate within a week of their campaign being announced. For that reason there should be nothing surprising about the fact that Bob Lonsberry is not sold on Mike Lee (yet). As he aired his minor reservations with our latest 2010 Senate candidate he got talking about term limits – because Mike Lee thinks we should have a term limits amendment (perhaps like this one) – and Bob’s position completely failed to add up. At first I was planning to just comment on Bob’s site, but I felt that this deserved a full post.

There is a disconnect between Bob’s position on term limits and what he says later in his article. Here’s what he thinks of term limits:

Yes, people serve way too long in Congress. Yes, we have a professional political class right now. But the insinuation that the era of the Founders was much different doesn’t stand up to the test of history. Several of the Founders themselves held elected office for years on end. Some for the majority of their lives, and our Republic was benefited by their service.

And any person with Mike Lee’s knowledge of the Constitution must understand that an amendment mandating term limits would go against both the letter and the spirit of what the Founders wanted. Term limits don’t limit the freedom of politicians, they limit the freedom of the voters. We don’t need term limits, we have elections. And if Mike Lee, or someone else, can pose a viable alternative to Bob Bennett, and convince voters of that fact, the Constitution’s existing system for replacing politicians will work perfectly.

Later he makes this statement which exposes the weakness of his position:

I’m also bothered by Mike Lee’s age. Not that a 38-year-old can’t serve well in the Senate, but that he’s got so much life left. True, he is saying that people shouldn’t make a career of Washington, but so too did the two current Utah senators, both of whom have since made a career of Washington. Everybody running against incumbents is against long tenure in office. And everybody running for re-election believes in experience and seniority.

My concern is that at 38, Utah could be biting off something it will take 30 or 40 years to chew. I’m nervous about that.

The one selling point for 76-year-old Bob Bennett is that, at his age, he’s got a built-in term limit. He’s also, as they say, the devil you know. (emphasis added)

In case you missed the disconnect, Bob says that the founders already established a way to limit terms through regular elections and then worries that we might be stuck with Mike Lee for 40 years because he’s relatively young.

Here’s the half-truth that opens up the heart of the problem:

Term limits don’t limit the freedom of politicians, they limit the freedom of the voters. We don’t need term limits, we have elections.

It’s true that term limits limit the freedom of voters by eliminating the option to elect a president they like to a third term (to use our existing term limit as an example) – that’s the only freedom of the voters that is being limited. The problem is that the freedom of voters is already severely limited by our lack of term limits because of our political environment where potential candidates often choose not to challenge an incumbent, especially within their own party. For proof of that just look at how many more candidates tend to run for open seats. With term limits we would lose the option to vote for an incumbent after a set time, but we would gain so many candidates who currently choose not to run against an incumbent.

Bob claims that the founders did not want term limits and he’s probably right (although I doubt they ever addressed the issue to prove that conclusively) but they didn’t want parties either (they did make that clear) and we have parties anyway. The party system without term limits makes the regular election cycle a very weak way to limit terms – especially in a place where one party is dominant. Bob says that if someone can pose a viable alternative to an incumbent and convince voters of that fact then the system works perfectly. The question is, how can that happen when the potential candidates remove themselves from consideration because of the system that tilts heavily in favor of incumbents? And what makes a viable candidate? If a viable candidate is one that has the capacity and interest necessary to tackle the issues and do the job of a senator then I am a viable candidate. If a viable candidate is one that voters are likely to believe in that I am nowhere near viable. The first one should be the criteria, and if it were we would have lots of viable candidates for any office.

In a nation that probably has 80 out of 100 senate seats safely in the hands of one party or another and only about 20 seats that actually have a reasonable chance of changing hands from one election to the next the method of limiting terms that the Founders established is virtually impotent. The era of the founders may not have been much different than our era but it was different in some important ways. In this environment the Founders might find term limits to be a very reasonable method to ensure that the voters had the maximum amount of choice in candidates.

Categories
General

Public to Private is a One Way Economic Street

photo credit: taberandrew

A post entitled The New Robber Barons got me thinking about what happens when public and private enterprises compete in a marketplace. Thinking about that led to some interesting observations. The first of which is that progressives are right in their assertion that public and private enterprises can compete without eradicating each other. The problem is that the progressives don’t seem to recognize that this only works in limited cases. They like to point to the post office as an example – let’s go explore that.

Categories
General

Term Limits in a Nutshell

I read what must be the most succinct summary of the term limit debate over at Utah Policy. LaVarr Webb said:

I am a big fan of congressional term limits if they are applied across the board. It would be foolish, however, for Utah to unilaterally impose term limits.

As long as power in Congress is amassed in its most senior members, Utah needs to play that game or be badly disadvantaged.

But term limits for all makes sense.

The response from trgrant:

I don’t agree in a legislated term limit.  There are people you will want to keep in office for longer than a certain term.

I would respond to trgrant by asking a question inspired by someone who had previously opposed term limits. How many hundreds of incumbent get reelected after “a certain term” despite widespread dissatisfaction with their service – now compare that to the number of people who you would really want to keep in after that time. I would bet the benefits of term limits in terms of removing entrenched and undesirable incumbents would outweigh the loss of established and desirable incumbents by at least 100 to 1. Besides that, of those who you wish to keep in, how much of the reason for keeping them is based mainly on seniority rather than irreplaceability?

To LaVarr Webb I would ask – if Congressional term limits are good, why not set the example by imposing term limits at the state legislature so that voters can begin to see the benefit locally and have more inclination to implement it federally.

Categories
National

It’s Not Too Late to Change Your Mind

Conservatives, for right reasons and wrong reasons, are united in opposition to the current health care reform legislation. Unfortunately many liberals are falling into the trap of “stand by our guys” that already landed us in NCLB, Medicare Part D, and Iraq during the last administration (for which I apologize to all my liberal friends even though I opposed all of those). Of course liberals have little reason to listen to a conservative like me so rather than make my own argument today I’ll share the conclusion from Fire Dog Lake:

The Senate bill isn’t a “starter home,” it’s a sink hole. It needs to die so something else can take its place. It doesn’t matter whether people are on the right or the left — once they understand the con job that’s about to be foist upon them, they agree. That’s why Harry Reid and President Obama are trying to jam it through as fast as they can, before people get wise. So email the list to your friends and family, tweet it and spread the word.

I was going to add my own perspective when I first started reading that, but it is too well done to be condensed. Go read all 10 Reasons to Kill the Senate Bill.

Many people, liberal and conservative, seem ready to give up because the Senate already cleared their first 60-vote hurdle. That’s exactly what Reid and his company of non-representative public officials would love to see. Please don’t give up yet or settle for this poor excuse for reform. We may not agree on all the right directions, but almost everyone who’s paying attention knows that this legislation is not anything close to what we need. Let’s not allow the Senate to pass this just so they and the president can say they passed something – that is simply not a good enough reason.

Categories
National

GOP Sheep with No Shepherd

Yet Another Fire Dog Lake post led me to this Progressive Change Campaign Committee poll. My interest in the poll focused on the results of two questions:

Would you favor or oppose a health care bill that does NOT include a public health insurance option and does NOT expand Medicare, but DOES require all Americans to get health insurance?

and

Would you favor or oppose a health care bill that does NOT include a public health insurance option and does NOT expand Medicare and does NOT require all Americans to buy health insurance — but DOES provide significant subsidies to low- and middle-income families to help them buy insurance?

I was specifically interested to compare the Republican responses to these two questions. The first question offers essentially what the health care bill has been boiling down to – a mandate with no public option or alternative. The second offers no mandate, no public option or alternative, but offers subsidies for those who cannot afford insurance. Republican leaders have been fighting against the first option openly without really talking about the second possibility. The results in the republican response are interesting. Those opposed to either option were virtually identical (61% and 60% respectively). Those who were undecided nearly doubled from the first question to the second because they had not been told what to think, had never considered the possibility themselves, and could not think on their feet. Because of that, the number who favored the first question – which is clearly the worst of the two – was 5 points higher than those who favored the second.

This party needs shepherds who know where to lead rather than goats who know only to oppose.

Categories
culture National

Missing the Boat

In a comment over at KVNU’s For The People blog Craig concluded that if I was right in my position about health care it would mean that basically everyone had been missing the boat on this issue. My response to Craig was that I honestly believe that this current reform debate is missing the boat on what reforms we need.

Meanwhile, over at Fire Dog Lake (again) I find another insightful post from a staunch liberal, this time it’s from Jane Hamsher (yesterday it was Jon Walker) who is talking about what she calls the left/right populist wrap around.

There is an enormous, rising tide of populism that crosses party lines in objection to the Senate bill. We opposed the bank bailouts, the AIG bonuses, the lack of transparency about the Federal Reserve, “bailout” Ben Bernanke, and the way the Democrats have used their power to sell the country’s resources to secure their own personal advantage, just as the libertarians have. In fact, we’ve worked together with them to oppose these things. What we agree on: both parties are working against the interests of the public, the only difference is in the messaging. (emphasis added)

This is another example of the media missing the boat. They play everything as Left vs Right. They promote the notion that anything which angers both the radical right and the radical left must be pretty good policy – that’s their definition of centrist. In contrast, Ms. Hamsher pits the left/right populist wrap around against the beltway insiders – or as some of my commenters have called them, the corporatists.

Being able to unite the left wing and the right wing in opposition to a policy does not make that a good policy. After all, the German Fascists were able to unite the American Capitalists and the Soviet Communists in opposition against them, but you won’t here anyone (except neo-nazis) arguing that the German Fascists were good because of that.

We’ve had a perfect example of that here recently. I consider myself to be more conservative than the “conservatives” in Congress. Charles considers himself to be more liberal than the “liberals” in Congress. We disagree on many issues, but we’d both like to see a government that represented the people of the United States. I don’t see how it can be argued that Congress is getting it right when I want to see my Republican senator defeated and have him replaced with a real Conservative and Charles want to see his Democratic senator defeated and have her replaced with a real Liberal. (Excuse me for putting words into your mouth Charles.)

There is a disconnect between the roots of representative government and the tree of elected officers. Anyone who thinks that is a positive sign or healthy in any way is definitely missing the boat.

P.S. Having two hits in two days means I will now be following Fire Dog Lake rather than waiting for others to point out their latest articles.