One day, in that terrifying thing we call the future, I will have children. And inevitably there will be two topics that can't be answered with the very satisfying "when you're older." The first will be sex, a topic that will be covered by showing my children their tuition bills and then telling them that unless they have that much money, they'd better keep it in their pants.
The second topic is politics. Hopefully, as I did, my children will have a course on the Constitution before they give any serious thought to Democrats and Republicans and all the rest. Bill Clinton was bad because my dad said so, and since I couldn't vote that was good enough for me.
Now, I promised myself that this post would not become "why I believe what I do about politics." You don't really need me to tell you that. And I couldn't really do it in any way that Milton Friedman couldn't do better. No, I'm here to talk about politics in general.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people: those with loaded guns and those who dig. No, wait, I got ahead of myself. There are two kinds of people in America. One the one hand are those who are partisan, or policy wonks, or political science junkies, or vote the party line all the way down the ballot year after year after year, or have strong feelings about how everything is just fine/terrible. We'll call them "the people who care."
On the other hand are the people who say "well, that W fellow can't string two words together, so I won't vote for him," or "John Kerry is a flip-flopper! I don't know what he flip-flopped on, but I sure won't vote for him," or "I'm not going to vote for a black man no matter how articulate he is," or "I'm not going to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency." These are the "apathetic twits." They don't really have the time to understand politics and will generally vote for the most amenable candidate with the whitest teeth and the most realistic smile (did you see any of McCain's or Obama's pictures during the campaign? It was all half-hearted grins from McCain and trust-me-I'm-a-used-car-salesman from Obama).
Now, contrary to what I said in my previous post, Barack Obama did not spend $6.65 per person getting "the people who care" to vote for him. Some of them (the registered Democrats) would, and others (the registered Republicans) would not. Barack Obama spent significantly more than $6.65 getting the "apathetic twits" to vote for him. Not that it was a very tough job given the utter inability of his real opponent to point out that Obama was running against him and not against an incumbent who wasn't on the ballot.
There's not much more I can say about the "apathetic twits." They're apathetic and they're not really twits, but they're the primary reason for all those nasty attack ads you see every fourth October. They're the ones who actually win the elections. There aren't enough party faithful - I mean "people who care" - on either side to do it alone. This is because there aren't that many "people who care." A lot of "apathetic twits" are apathetic because they have better things to do, or because they honestly believe that other people can run their lives better than they can. Come to think of it, a lot of Democrats believe the latter too, as do a depressing number of Republicans.
I guess here I should mention that there is a third group, made up of statists or libertarians. I hesitate to call "the people who care" good, although they're the only ones who usually know what they're talking about, and I even hesitate to call the "apathetic twits" bad, but I don't really have any qualms about calling this third group ugly. Or rather The Ugly. Statists tend to be socially conservative but economically liberal; no, you can't marry your brother and nor can you keep your money. Libertarians are the exact opposite; drugs for everyone, but you're the one who has to pay for your drugs. Statists who are more economically liberal than they are socially conservative will tend to vote Democrat anyway, but they may cross the line in some cases.
The Reagan Democrats were a mix of the "apathetic twits" and the statist/libertarian weirdoes. ("Weirdoes" is a term I'm comfortable with, and I described myself as a "right-leaning libertarian" for about three years.) This is one of the reasons why Republicans tend to chuckle whenever they're reminded that Reagan raised taxes that one time. Because when the Bad and the Ugly put you in office, sometimes you have to make decisions that are Bad or Ugly.
So that's We The People, nicely divided up into the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But the same can be done with political parties.
Naturally, to "the people who care," the Good is their party, right or wrong, even if that party nominates a gibbering moron or a senile centrist incapable of running a national campaign. The Bad is the other party, even if they nominate and elect a quasi-centrist who will cross the aisle occasionally and then get caught doing inappropriate things with a cigar (sorry, dad). The Ugly is that third-party candidate who steals all the votes for the Good and tips the election to the Bad. Greens, Libertarians, Constitutionalists, Socialists, that's you.
The "apathetic twits" see the Good as... well, they see the Good as "that nice old veteran, who looks like he'd have a heart attack if he tried to be as evil as Bush" or "that nice articulate black man who will solve all our problems for us." The Bad to these people are "that crazy witch from Alaska who can see Russia from her house" or "the guy who doesn't know that 'jobs' is a four-letter word." The Ugly? Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. Always. "Well, I'd give them a chance if I thought they had a chance."
And finally you have the weirdoes. I'm going to focus on the libertarian weirdoes here because I honestly know jack about the statists or why anyone would be one. So the Good for the libertarians? Ron Paul. Yes, that Ron Paul, the one who's the Ugly for both the "people who care" and the "apathetic twits." The Bad is the statist candidate for the libertarians and the libertarian candidate for the statists. And the Ugly are the candidates from both major parties.
Hopefully now you understand why American politics are so messed up. Having explained all this to my future children, I will give them Milton Friedman to read. And if that doesn't work, I will then go on to display their tuition bill again and ask them if I can buy their vote for that much money, not just a measly $6.65.
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