Tag Archives: Election

Only in American English is “socialism” a four-letter word

You’d think we were back in the middle of the Cold War, what with all of the talk of “socialism” from the McCain-Palin campaign lately. Aside from the fact that, absent the bad word itself, if you described to the average American the major tenets of socialism, you’d probably encounter little resistance, and mostly outright acceptance.

Beyond the false pejorative, you have the greater problem that, well, Barack Obama’s ideas just simply aren’t socialist, at least not any more socialist than the way things already were in this country before George W. Bush took office.

Hendrik Hertzberg has (yet again) an outstanding commentary in this week’s New Yorker, discussing the matter. Some relevant highlights:

“At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

No, please! Don’t improve the schools, treat health care as a right, and make it easy for people to get around! Actually, it would seem a significant number of Republicans, of all economic classes, do seem to think this way, to which I simply have no retort. You can’t reason with the fundamentally unreasonable.

He continues, and here it’s worth repeating the entire paragraph:

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”

Right. Under Obama, our tax burden will soar to the unheard of rate of… well, slightly less than what they were 8 years ago.

And now, the best part. For those of you who don’t know, Alaska’s oil resources are collectively (yes, collectively) owned by the state, and oil companies are taxed for their use of the oil-rich land. Those taxes not only fund all state government activities, but provide enough of a surplus that each citizen of the state (including children) receives an annual check in the thousands of dollars. Did somebody say “redistribution of wealth”? No, no, of course not.

A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, [Sarah Palin] told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

Who’s the socialist again? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Special thanks to JW for tipping me off to this article via Facebook. I would have seen it eventually anyway, of course… when my print copy arrives a week after everyone else’s, as usual.

Impotent campaigning

About two weeks ago, someone decided SLP needed to be convinced to vote for John McCain, or so it would seem. She got a number of “robo-calls” and, over a period of three days, three different McCain (or, really, anti-Obama) mailers.

At first we were both rather frustrated and annoyed by this. Who did we know who had, as a prank, signed her up on the McCain mailing list? I myself had gotten a few emails from the McCain campaign a few weeks prior, but I had removed myself from their mailing list and hadn’t heard from them again.

But today, reading a Huffington Post article about McCain’s tactics in Wisconsin, I came to a new realization. The article features some quotes from a Sun Prairie woman who, like SLP, is beyond extremely unlikely to be swayed to the McCain side. It suddenly became clear: the McCain campaign is not well-organized; it cannot differentiate between potential supporters and complete wastes of time. As a result, the campaign is squandering its resources in a futile attempt to persuade the unpersuadable.

Obama FTW!

The presidency and the toll it takes

I’ve spent a lot of time tonight on the New York Times website, much of it reading about the long strange trip of Sarah Palin as well as the paper’s endorsement of Barack Obama.

The latter article also led me to an interesting interactive feature on the Times’ various presidential endorsements from 1860 to the present day. Aside from picking the winner in 22 of the 37 elections (59.5%) over the past 148 years, the Times has also provided some photographic evidence for the (not terribly revelatory) theory SLP and I have, that the presidency ages a person like few other jobs (outside of, perhaps, coal mining) could. Witness below the shocking deteriorations that a mere 4 years in the Oval Office can produce.

First up we have Honest Abe. Now we all know that his first term was probably about as rough as any in the history of the country. And it shows.

I’m not an historian, so I must confess I don’t know much about what was going on in the mid-1880s. Whatever it was, I get the impression Grover could have done with a little less of it.

In 1912, voters had just one question: Is this Mr. Wilson, who fancies himself a President-to-be, in fact, a bogey-man? By 1916, they had their answer.

By the time FDR took office, the suckitude of the job had once again reached levels not seen in 70-odd years. The only things we have to fear are fear itself and premature aging due to the rigors of the highest political office in the land. Having to pretend you aren’t paralyzed isn’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be, either.

Now, in 1980 Jimmy Carter at least does not show the ravaging physical deterioration typical of an incumbent. I suspect it may be due to the cannabis everyone in the country was smoking so heavily at the time (or so I’ve been led to believe). So he still has that youthful glow, but it’s clear nonetheless that something has harshed his mellow.

We all remember well enough what was keeping the smile on Bill’s face by 1996. But everything else in his life brought on the gray hair.