Picking Up Where We Left Off

OK, I’m going to cram the political stuff into this post, to spare anyone who would prefer to skip it. Posts later in the day will involve Raymond Chandler, Alec Guinness, and the like.

First, I want to thank Canadian-American reader B.C., who sent me this op-ed, which appeals to my baseline cynicism about politics, and my belief that no matter who wins this election, the U.S. isn’t going to miraculously turn everything around:

Mr. McCain said he would eliminate wasteful spending, while cutting taxes; Barack Obama said he would raise taxes on the wealthy, while cutting them on everybody else and spend a lot more money on a long list of programs. Neither approach is remotely plausible to balance the budget.

Speakers at both conventions promised to tackle the U.S. oil deficit, pledging to eliminate the country's dependence on foreign oil. The speakers were fooling themselves, or their audiences, or both.

Neither party talked about energy taxes... Neither party underscored the enormous U.S. foreign indebtedness, the result of the country's consuming more than it produces, importing more than it exports, and living on borrowed money, mostly from China.

But, I remain committed to figuring out whether Obama or McCain is the best man for the moment. That’s all we can do, right? I reiterate my history of respect for McCain. Have I come to believe that his temperament makes him a better thorn in the side of a party than a leader of a party? Absoultely. If his opponent were anyone but Obama, would I be pushing as hard as I am against him? No.

That said, I did fall into the political wormhole last week, here and elsewhere. I spent my time visiting political blogs, friends’ blogs, leaving comments that ran to hundreds of words, and reading the similarly long comments that were left in response. The debate geek in me has to vent somewhere.

A few thoughts from the experience:

Talking with my more conservative friends from Texas has been instructive. On the one hand, they keep me honest, because they’re among the smartest people I know and they don’t operate by the same assumptions that my more liberal friends do. They tend to be less idealistic, which I also tend to be (politically). They are also, to a person, not religious extremists, or even religious. When I quickly think of the first four who come to mind, I would classify them, respectively, as two atheists, a firm agnostic, and a believer who I can't remember ever bringing the subject up in a political context. So speaking on their behalf (and they’re free to correct me, of course), I don’t think any of them want to push God’s agenda through Washington.

In this year’s election, I still think they’re wrong. I also think they’re making some leaps of faith for which they would roast Democrats.

I’ve shown that I’m touchy when accused of seeing Obama as a savior. I defy the five people who have read all of my political posts to find one in which I argue that he fits that description. (Arguing that he’s the best option for the job, or that he might have the smarts and dignity to improve things doesn’t count, unless we’re radically lowering the definitional bar of “savior.”) Given that I don’t think he or McCain is going to part the waters (speaking of which, as an avid hypocrisy-watcher I loved that the Republicans mocked Obama for talk about “healing the planet” but cheered McCain for wanting to “restore the planet’s health”), the key question in my mind is who is less likely to pander to a dangerous constituency, and who is more likely to work in a spirit of unity (pardon the gauzy phrase).

This just in: There is no liberal base in this country. At least, not liberal in the sense that Romney and Giuliani and Limbaugh rant about... I’m not saying there isn’t a strict communist in a basement in Maine somewhere, or that “media elites” aren’t mostly liberal (though if you watch any mainstream media at all, the idea that they’re radically liberal is fall-down hilarious, and if you look at the last 30 years of governance in this country, the idea that they’re effectively liberal is even funnier), but there certainly aren’t enough of them to constitute a “base.” A Democrat who chose an extremely liberal running mate wouldn’t be solidifying 20% of their support, they would be committing political suicide. This is not a liberal country at the moment, except in the classical sense (an important sense, granted). This is why even the quite centrist Bill Clinton never won 50% of the vote in an election, and why he governed from the middle, though that middle wasn’t good enough for the far right, which is, famously and proudly, a base.

So, obviously, I don’t fear Obama falling into the clutches of, what . . . A revolutionary mob led by Noam Chomsky? A revivified Black Panther Party? Can we be serious, please? I am worried that if McCain takes office on religious support, we’re only feeding an already unreasonably large beast. But from what I can gather, my friends in Texas -- those who would not vote for a President Palin -- firmly believe that the past eight years of McCain’s career, and his current campaign, are a Trojan horse. That he will ride the evangelicals into office and then smite them. That somehow, he will defy the political math that says you have to have certain people in your corner in order to get anything done. That McCain will simply shed the supporters he doesn’t prefer once he’s in the Oval Office. Now who sounds like a savior?

Sarah Vowell wrote in yesterday's New York Times:

During a gubernatorial debate in 2006, Governor Palin claimed that if her daughter, then 16, were impregnated as the result of being raped, Ms. Palin would hope that the girl would “choose life,” which is a polite way of saying she would expect a tenth-grader to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

Here’s a not-so-polite fact about the United States: According to Amnesty International, a woman is raped here every six minutes.

Like his running mate, Senator McCain has been a true-blue opponent of abortion rights during his political career. Unlike his running mate, he supports the right to terminate a pregnancy in cases of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. So does President Bush. . . . This year, Senator McCain himself didn’t bother to stand up to the right wing of his party to insist that the rape and incest exception be written into the Republican Party platform.

The thing is, McCain hasn't really stood up to the right wing of his party in eight years.

I’ll close with a comment made here last week. A reader asked if I didn’t think that McCain would be better at working across the aisle than Obama would. I mostly responded by pointing out that Obama has received the support of many Republican politicians and many intellectual conservatives. The reader responded:

As for my question, I wasn't trying to make a comment about Obama at all. I think he would be perfectly willing to work with both sides of the house. However, I just don't think the Republican party, as a whole, would ever give him that chance.

Great. So this argument goes that Democrats would be willing to work with McCain, but Republicans wouldn’t be willing to work with Obama. So, tell me again: why is any remotely moderate person supposed to be rewarding this party?