A Curious Little Blog

I've always been a little ambivalent about the push to convince Americans to vote in every election.  In principle, I agree that having more people vote is good; on the other hand, it seems kind of overbearing, in the way that the anti-smoking campaign seemed well-intentioned but became overbearing.  I will not wear the "I voted" stickers, for instance, because it seems infantile.  Then again, maybe it's just because I'm so contrary. In either case, I thought it would be a good idea to consider the other side of getting more people to vote.  Thinking of it in economic terms, we can consider the marginal voters -- the ones who don't vote now but will be the next ones to be convinced to do so.  It seems logical that people who are motivated to vote are also the ones who are motivated to research the issues, and that people who haven't thought much about the issues will be the ones who care the least and are least likely to vote.  Therefore, by convincing m...

I heard several analysts on Tuesday night saying that Trump was the only one who saw the wave of populism and figured out how to get on it.  I think this is giving Trump way too much credit for being in the right place and time.  I certainly won't say that he deserves no credit for winning the election, but let's think about the populist wave and resentment against Washington. There is always a lot of resentment against the government.  If you don't think so, you probably live in a wealthy section of a big city, because I am sure it is there and I hear it all the time.  In many ways, Reagan's election was the same theme, and there have been many would-be populist candidates in the meantime.  Think about Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Hermann Cain, Bernie Sanders...They all lacked something.  One thing they lacked is that they never got a major party nomination.  Perot didn't even try.  If he had (and I don't know which party that would have been), I'...

I hear that Hillary Clinton gave a magnanimous concession speech.  Nevertheless, I suspect she is still bitterly disappointed at the moment.  I know I would be.  She might be directing her anger at a lot of people:  Trump, of course; Jim Comey; Julian Assange; maybe Anthony Weiner; maybe a little for Bernie Sanders as well.  But I'll bet that, in the long run, the person she is most angry at is Barack Obama. The 2008 election was hers to lose.  Everybody knew.  Everybody knew that the Republican candidate would face very difficult odds with such an unpopular sitting president.  Hillary Clinton seemed set to be nominated.  There was hardly any opposition.  I'll bet that Obama himself didn't expect to win when he started his candidacy; he was probably laying the groundwork for the future.  And then this thing happened, and he got all this support, and suddenly Hillary was sitting on the sidelines watching him sweep to victory for th...

There is a popular video on YouTube right now, a skit from Saturday Night live about a game of " Black Jeopardy ."  If you haven't seen it, you should, both because it is funny and because I think there are a lot of things about race relations in America to learn from it (though perhaps not always the things that most people take from it). But I don't want to talk about race relations; I want to talk about politics.  At one point, Tom Hanks's character responds to the Jeopardy "answer" "They out here saying that every vote counts" with "Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens."  And in the skit, it is axiomatic that this is a standard view of blacks in America, as well as an assumption shared by many whites.  This strikes me as extraordinary. I say it is extraordinary, although I grew up among people who thought along similar lines.  What is extraordinary is that no political analysts that I am aware of ever ...

This election is going to be bad for conservatism no matter what the result.  I think the tendency is for conservatives, even those who don't like Trump, to think that a victory for him would still be marginally better than another Democratic presidency.  That may be -- but then again, it may not be.  I know the primary reason for this feeling is that it is the only hope of keeping the Supreme Court from being completely liberal.  This is true, but I'm not sure this is a winning battle in the long run.  Conservatives hope the Supreme Court won't invent new "rights" and entitlements that further expand government and limit freedom, but liberals have little to fear from an activist conservative court because conservative justices are, on principle, opposed to activism from the bench.  Moreover, the court system as a whole is so filled with liberal judges that conservatives often need the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that have already been mad...

The presidential election teaches us an important lesson, but not the one that most people have been drawing from it.  It's not that the Republicans are a minority party.  They may be, but there is no way to reach that conclusion from a single presidential election.  In general, people are far too hasty to draw long-term conclusions from short-term events.  In 2000, we learned, supposedly, that America was hopelessly divided between blue states and red states.  In 2004, it looked like Republicans had a virtual lock on the presidency, having won 7 of the last 10, and only one of the three Democrats elected had won a majority.  In 2008, we learned that Democrats were permanently ascendant, and Republicans would no longer be a political force in 10 years.  Obviously, that turned out to be very wrong, as did the previous predictions.  That's one of the reasons that I am sceptical this time around. Another reason is that there is a bigger lesson:...

In accordance with my contrarian nature, I disagree that the other Republican presidential candidates are not up to par. I don't have a strong favourite among them, but I think almost any would do a good job. I admit that I was excited about Herman Cain briefly. In general, I think it is good to get outside opinions into Washington, so much so that I strongly support term limits. My concern with Cain was that he had no previous political experience, not even on a local level. I was afraid that he might get into office and make some embarrassing mistakes because he just didn't have the political background to know how to handle situations, much as our current president has made a number of gaffes, especially in foreign affairs. I acknowledge that this is a trade-off: you can't ask for an outsider and at the same time get the level of comfort that comes with a political insider. I certainly wouldn't rule Cain out because of his lack of experience, but it was a concern. ...

Since I am conservative, you might think that I would be following the Republican primaries closely. I used to: when I was in 5th grade, I carefully tracked the race between Reagan, Bush, and Anderson on a piece of graph paper, recording percentage vote and delegates for each state. In the meantime, I have become jaded. Not that there is anything wrong with the process, but I have so little to do with the outcome that I don't bother to learn much about it until it gets much closer to the convention. Being unimportant and ill-informed does not, however, prevent me from sharing my views with the world. I have never been as down on Romney as most people are. To begin with, he is absolutely right about the distinction between state vs. federal mandated health care. Not too long ago, I was arguing this point with someone who said, "Don't be naive, Virginia's constitution is more restrictive than the federal constitution, yet Virginia requires people to buy automobile insu...