Planet Utah

My post-election project for conservatives and the GOP

Following the conservative/GOP bloodbath next Tuesday, I'd like to see Republicans and/or conservatives undertake the following project. First, conduct a series of focus groups and random sample surveys designed to fill in the blank at the end of this sentence: "I'd be willing to vote for Republicans/conservatives, if only they would..."

Obviously, you want to talk to people who actually DO vote, and whose votes you actually need and want--that is, people whose votes, if the GOP had gotten them, would have turned defeat into victory on November 4. So, I'm okay with it if your focus groups do not include a lot of white, pro-life, gun-owning, married, evangelical Christians from Mississippi; or a lot of black, pro-choice, anti-gun, gay, atheist university professors from San Francisco. They're not really your target demographic.

Now, some of these people might answer the basic question the way my dad does: "I'd be willing to vote for Republicans if they didn't want to outlaw abortion, if they supported gun control, and if they would commit to pulling all of our troops out of Iraq immediately." My response to that, as I'm sure you've already guessed: "Then they would be Democrats."

No, what I'm really looking for are people who are persuadable, that is, who have some of the basic conservative/Republican DNA, but who believe that: a) the GOP and conservatives do not have much to say about one or two or three issues that are really important to these people; and/or        b) that Republican and conservative solutions to the issues these people care about are unlikely to work; and/or c) that Republicans and conservatives have really screwed up some things that these people care about, and therefore need to prove that they can be trusted to manage them correctly the next time.

(I realize that you're also going to get a lot of answers that have nothing to do with public policy, e.g., "If they stopped running such negative campaigns...", but that's not really what I'm looking for here.)

Okay, so now let's say that you've done your focus groups and your surveys, and you've got a set of maybe 10 issues on which Republicans/conservatives need to prove themselves in order to persuade the persuadables. The next thing you do is take your 10 issues to the best conservative think tanks in the country, and to the top conservative/libertarian professors who are interested and involved in public policy. (And if you need a place for the latter group to meet, I've got a pantry that will provide MORE than enough room.) Then you say, "Okay, here are our issues. What ideas do you have?" And you sift through those and pick out the best.

Final step, you go to assorted conservative/Republican governors around the country, explain the work you've been doing, and then say, "Would you be interested in trying out one or two of these ideas?" So, for example, you go to Bobby Jindal in Louisiana and say, "People really want conservatives/Republicans to have some way of getting us to universal health care coverage, but they don't want government to be so involved that it screws up all the good stuff about our system. Here are the three best ideas we've got. Would you be interested in trying one or more of them in Louisiana?"

Now, fast forward to 2012, or even better, 2016. If your project has gone well, you've planted a thousand seeds. Some of them have grown into beautiful flowers. (Also, some of them have failed to sprout. Some of them have been eaten by birds. Some of them have been dug up by Democrats and redistributed to less productive gardens. Etc.) In the next go-around, you present your beautiful flowers to the electorate and say, "Will you be mine? As you can see, I've changed..."

Footnote: The major risk here is that by 2012 or 2016, you'll be fighting the last war, that is, the issues people care about will have changed, so your ideas and your successful field tests of them will not seem so relevant. Obviously, then, you'll need to take some precautions to ensure that: a) your issue list remains fresh, and b) the issues to which you devote most of your energy are hardy perennials, that is, are issues that tend to remain important to people from one election cycle to the next.

Better late than never

Way back in June, I wrote a post about the potential consequences of Barack Obama's decision to eschew public financing this fall, despite having pledged--multiple times, in fact--to accept public financing and forgo private donations. This was a broken promise, justified with a lie. I thought the media would hammer Obama for this because they tend to pounce on broken promises and lies (especially those that insult their intelligence). To my surprise, Obama's decision was greeted with a collective media yawn.

Until now. Now that the election is effectively over, CNN rides in on its high horse and bravely--even sarcastically--speaks truth to power. Check out Campbell Brown.

If she had started telling this story four months ago rather than six days before the election, it might have made a difference.

Footnote: I think that after all four debates were done, the Obama people must have gone to a bar somewhere, ordered up a round of shots, high-fived, and said, "Can you believe it? Not a single question about how we're paying for all of this. And to think we were worried..."

Carnuba...carnauba...let's call the whole thing off

My car is a little more than seven years old, and today I waxed it for the first time. (That shrieking you hear is my father, a car guy if ever there was one.) Why today, after seven years? Well, it was starting to look pretty run down...most likely as a result of not having been waxed in seven years. So, anyway, I noticed a funny thing on the wax bottle. It said that it was "carnauba wax" rather than "carnuba wax." When I was a kid, I could have sworn that everything was "carnuba wax." But now, everything is "carnauba wax." Who decided that?

The same thing happened with Kate Beckinsale. When she first showed up, I was dead certain she was Kate Beckinsdale. Then one day she started going by Kate Beckinsale, and I found myself asking, "What happened to the 'd'?"

I don't know, maybe there never was a "d," and maybe it was always carnauba wax, not carnuba wax.

Footnote: You can find plenty of references to Kate Beckinsdale, with a "d," on the Web. I think this one is my favorite, though. It appears to have been written by Borat: "Kate Beckinsdale is not Kate Beckinsdale is for spelling of bad for america is not liking. Kate Beckinsale is very looking niiice from england."

You can also find multiple references to "carnuba wax," with the letter "a" appearing only twice rather than three times. This one even seems pretty official. But if you Google the phrase, you'll get that helpful Google question, "Did you mean 'carnauba wax'?"

Anklenote: I rarely mention my dad here, but I want you to know that I did not get my lax waxing habits from him. When I was a kid, he told me to wash my car at least once a week, and to wax it at some fixed interval that I've long since forgotten. (I'm pretty sure it was more than every seven years, however.)

Before I started my first big boy job, too, he told me that I should polish my shoes every night. "Every night?!", I responded. "Yes," he said. "I know it seems like a minor detail and a lot of work, but it's very important." Well, needless to say, I didn't polish my shoes every night. Or even every week. Or once a month. They consider themselves lucky if they get a real polishing once a year. The rest of the time, I take whatever socks I'm going to be wearing that day, turn them inside out, wipe down my shoes with them, turn my socks back to right side in, and that's that.

Kneenote: Interestingly enough, my dad was less fastidious in his advice about dating and sex: "Sleep with whoever is willing. Some day you'll get married, and the sex will stop cold. So live it up while you can, with as many people as you can, without regard to race, age, man or woman, straight or gay, any of that crap. Don't worry about protection, either. They haven't come up with the venereal disease that a half slice of grapefruit won't cure. And if the girl gets pregnant, that's her problem to deal with, right? Okay, good talk, son."

And yes, those were his exact words.

NO THEY WEREN'T! I'M TOTALLY JOKING!

The campaign that might have been

I know that professional campaign consultants get sick of all the unsolicited, and largely uninformed, advice they have to put up with. Be that as it may, I'm going to do some armchair quarterbacking on the McCain campaign that might have been.

This should have been a liberating campaign for John McCain. Why? Because almost everything was working against him. You have to think about every move carefully when you're in an election that's expected to go down to the wire. But when political conditions are such that you'd be fortunate to lose by five points, it's pretty hard to screw things up or make them worse.

So, let me describe a few aspects of the campaign I would have liked to have seen.

First, though McCain did a good job of acknowledging that Republicans had screwed up over the past eight years, he did a lousy job of saying how he would be different. Talking about earmarks, repeatedly invoking his maverick status, and referring to himself sarcastically as "Ms. Congeniality" was about as close as he got. I would have liked to have heard him say, "President Bush promoted X, but I promoted Y. Republicans in Congress promoted A, but I promoted B. Republicans in general believe THIS, but I believe THAT. So, a McCain administration would look very different from what you've seen in the last eight years."

I'm not talking about getting overly specific here...not talking about, for example, a cap-and-trade system vs. mandatory, site-specific pollution reductions. I'm talking about general principles in, let's say, three or four specific--and important--areas. Just enough to give people a concrete sense of how/why a McCain administration would differ from a Bush administration, and why that should matter to them.

Second, I would have liked to have heard McCain talk about three or four big ideas, in the same manner that Reagan did. Pretty much anyone with a pulse can tell you that Reagan campaigned on: a) cutting taxes, b) cutting domestic spending, c) increasing defense spending, and d) challenging communism rather than seeking peaceful coexistence with it. But can you tell me what John McCain's three or four big ideas are?

Third, John McCain should have made Barack Obama's liberalism a central issue in this campaign, the way George H.W. Bush did with Mike Dukakis. Forget Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright; just talk about the things Obama has voted for and against during his career, and the bills he has sponsored. Of course, Obama could do the same thing to McCain. One would hope, though, that the truth would matter. And the truth is that McCain has a more moderate record than Obama does. That truth should have gotten more play during this campaign.

Fourth, because Obama couldn't campaign on foreign policy experience, he had to campaign on judgment. I think it's indisputable at this point that if Obama had had his way, the war in Iraq would be lost, with extremely unfortunate consequences for the U.S. I don't think John McCain made that point once during this campaign. He should have made it a thousand times. Further casting doubt on Obama's judgment, McCain could have ticked off a long, long list of the things about which Joe Biden has been wrong in foreign policy. But that would be just a sidebar. The main point, worth hammering until you were sure that people got it, should have been this: chiefly because John McCain got his way, we are in a position to win the war in Iraq; had Barack Obama gotten his way, the war would already be lost. Knowing that, whom do you want in charge of the war on terrorism?

(Of course, Obama could argue that he was right about going into Iraq in the first place. I think McCain, however, could make a good argument that the decision to go in was the right one--for all the reasons President Bush gave at the time--but that the execution was remarkably poor. That poor execution could be one of the areas in which he could trumpet his disagreements with the Bush administration; McCain wanted more troops from the get-go.)

Fifth, I would have liked to have seen McCain spend a lot more time talking about all of Obama's campaign cash. By the time this thing is done, he will have raised and spent more money than any candidate in history. In the course of doing that, he broke a pledge he made--indeed, a challenge he issued to other candidates--to accept public financing in the general election so as to keep a lid on the ostensibly corrupting influence of private campaign contributions. He also took a very large amount of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Again, McCain has taken plenty of contributions from unsavory donors over the years, and Obama could have made hay with that. But again, too, one hopes that the truth matters. The truth in this election is that Obama has abandoned all restraints on fund-raising and spending, while John McCain is using no private funds in the general election, and is the guy whose name is one-half of McCain-Feingold. So, which of these two do you think is more credible on the subjects of change, reform, and a different kind of politics?

And finally (no applause, please), I really, REALLY would have liked a little straight talk on entitlements. I would have liked to hear John McCain say, "Look, we all know what's going to have to happen on Social Security and Medicare. We're going to have to reduce payments under the former and benefits under the latter. Period, end of story. The only people who deny that basic truth are politicians who are more worried about losing an election than they are about bankrupting the country. The alternative to spending reductions is to raise payroll taxes, which are already highly regressive, and which are complete job-killers. Or we could raise income taxes, but those are too high as it is. Basically, we've built two programs that are larger than what we can afford, so now we're going to have to scale them back. We've got enough time that we won't have to start making any real reductions for 15 years or so. But if we don't start planning for those reductions, we're going to face either budget deficits or tax increases of a magnitude that would destroy our economic future."

Can you imagine? Sure, he'd take a beating from the left, but he'd also induce at least a temporary media swoon. (They're suckers for a politician who tells inconvenient truths.) If Obama chose to engage in demagoguery--denying the need for fundamental changes in Social Security, for example, as John Kerry did--he'd look like just another craven politician. And to the extent the demagoguery worked, so what? As I said up front, this was an election that John McCain was supposed to lose anyway.

Early predictions for an Obama presidency

So, let's say Barack Obama wins the election on November 4th. What's going to happen after that?

Let me toss a few thoughts out there for you.

First, I think he's going to follow a much different foreign policy from the one he has advertised during the campaign. I do NOT think he will be sitting down, without preconditions, with assorted dictators. I do think, however, that he may sit down with them WITH preconditions...or engage them without preconditions at a level lower than the office of the presidency. I expect, too, that he'll devote special attention to Middle East peace. This is an area in which people generally expect the U.S. to be involved (especially the brie and Chablis crowd), in which you can make some progress even as a novice, and in which no one will blame you if you fail. Plus, it's an area that plays to Obama's conceit that any problem can be solved if we just make a good-faith effort to really talk to each other, and really listen. Finally, I expect much more of a real-politik approach in foreign affairs than what you might fear. In the primaries, and even to a certain extent in the general election campaign, Obama has had to keep the moveon.org crowd happy. Come next January, though, he will be president of the whole country, not just the Daily Kos kooks. That, I think, will mean a much more militarily aggressive, much less humanitarian, much more interventionist foreign policy than the one he has been talking about over the past few months.

On health care, I don't think we'll get any sort of fundamental overhaul of our system. There are still too many vested interests who will fight that. Instead, we'll have more creeping statism...expansions in Medicaid, S-CHIP, Medicare, and other government-sponsored health programs that will get us closer to universal coverage but not nearly all the way there.

There will be some kind of tax increase in Obama's first term, but it will be considerably smaller than what he has proposed, and it will not result in a recession.

The Democratic Caucus in the House and Senate will ensure that Obama governs fairly far to the left in his first two years, which will result in some general public disenchantment, which in turn will mean big GOP gains in 2010.

Conservatives will find their voice again in opposition, which will get a lot of us excited about the prospect of another era of conservative governance, which excitement will then dissolve into crashing disappointment when we DO get our shot at governing again and realize, for the umpteenth time, that while a lot of American voters call themselves conservatives, they don't really support the ideas that conservatives find sexy (e.g., school choice, private Social Security investment accounts, selling the National Endowment for the Arts to Sweden, etc.).

Obama will be an extraordinarily political president, by which I mean he will not seek to rise above the fray in the style of Reagan, but will think of the world in "with us or against us" terms in the fashion of Clinton and Nixon, and will seek to put the screws to the "against us" crowd (rhetorically, I mean). The mainstream media will pretend to be repulsed by the pettiness of it all, but will cheer when they are sure no one is watching. Increasingly, no one will be watching, or reading.

In general, Obama's first few years will be like John Kennedy's or Bill Clinton's: amateurish in many respects, with minor accomplishments here and there, but also with a steadily increasing display of confidence and competence. By the time Obama is up for reelection, he'll finally be ready for the job. The media will fall out of love somewhere in the course of the first year--they'll realize that Obama is really NOT a transformational figure, but is instead a fairly conventional, if very talented, politician--but they'll fall back in love in time for the reelection campaign. Speaking of which, Obama's campaign in 2012 will comprise the second largest sector of the U.S. economy, finishing right on the heels of health care-related goods and services.

Possible surprises? I can think of a few. First, more Clintonian triangulation--that is, despite his instinctive liberalism, Obama seeks to pass himself off as the sensible center, holding off the GOP loonies to his right and the Democratic crazies to his left. Second, first-term entitlement reform. Third, the capture of bin Laden.

Thoughts? Predictions of your own? Fire away...

Socialism (is) for Dummies

A few weeks ago, an astute observer pointed out that there was something fishy about Barack Obama's claim that he would cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. The problem was that only around two-thirds of these families pay federal income taxes. How are you going to cut taxes for people who don't pay them in the first place? Well, you could cut payroll taxes, which everyone pays...but Obama wasn't proposing to do that, either. If you cut payroll taxes, you are cutting the ostensible funding source for Social Security and Medicare. And if you try to do that, AARP will have you killed. Literally. Five cents of every dollar in AARP membership fees is set aside for wet work.

So, again, we were stuck with the question: what taxes, exactly, will Barack Obama be cutting for these working families? Turns out he won't be cutting taxes at all for about one-third of them (very roughly). Instead, he'll just mail them a check.

Two observations on this point. First of all, Al Gore ran this same game in 2000 and got away with it, too. He kept referring to a tax cut for working families, when what he was really talking about was an expansion in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC does reduce federal income taxes for working poor families, but it also serves as a direct cash payment to most of these same families. In fact, most of the outlay on the EITC comes in the form of checks from Uncle Sam (totaling roughly $40 billion per year--yes, billion) rather than tax reduction. Accordingly, referring to an expansion in the EITC as a "tax cut" is a blatant misrepresentation; it's about 20 percent tax cut and 80 percent cash payment. But George W. Bush and his posse, along with most of the mainstream media, either didn't understand this or simply chose not to pursue it.

The same thing has happened in this go-around. As in 2000, I find myself embarrassed for both the GOP and the media. They've largely given Obama a pass on this talking point, which: a) has been central to his campaign, and b) is flat-out dishonest.

Nice work!

Second point: to the extent that people have begun to understand the truth behind Obama's "tax cuts," they've accused the candidate of promoting socialist policies. I suppose they say this because socialism has as one of its goals the elimination of a class structure, and one way to eliminate a class structure is to level all classes through income redistribution.

Obama has proposed an extremely modest income redistribution policy, but I suppose that maybe, if you really wanted to reach, you could say that one of his proposals has a little bit in common with one of the ideals of socialism.

You'd have to say the same thing about John McCain, however. He proposes taking money from people in their prime earning years and giving it to people who have no earnings, and in many cases have NEVER had earnings. In doing so, he levels the economic distance between the first group of people and the second group of people, just like Obama. Where Obama does it through "tax cuts," however, John McCain does it through the Social Security program. So, if supporting income distribution of this sort is socialism, I suppose we are all socialists now.

Beyond that, though, true socialism doesn't seek to eliminate classes through redistribution of income. True socialism seeks to eliminate classes through government ownership of the means of production. In a socialist system, everyone is a ward of the state. The state is your employer, your teacher, your doctor, your mechanic, your grocer, and your landlord. By controlling all enterprise, the state can determine everyone's standard of living. That is how, in theory anyway, socialism eliminates the class structure.

So, to bring this full circle, I'd say that the government owning Fannie, Freddie, and most of AIG is a heckuva lot more "socialist" than Sen. Obama's plan for income redistribution. If, therefore, you want to call Obama a socialist, you ought to apply that label to President Bush, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and most of Congress as well.

Footnote: In truth, I don't think Bernie Sanders would mind if you did.

Is there a double standard?

As I've noted before in this space, one of the staples of the conservative media is this argument: "If a Republican had said/done this, he'd be finished. But the Democrats get to do it with impunity."

I usually don't have much sympathy for this argument because the cases are almost always hypothetical, or are not directly comparable. For example, when Joe Biden made a comment about Franklin Roosevelt going on television in 1929 to discuss the stock market crash, Republicans said that if Sarah Palin had made the same kind of flub, it would have haunted her forever. I don't disagree. However, Joe Biden has been around a long, long time. During that time, he's shown himself to be a basically likable guy, and to be capable of moments of seriousness and eloquence. So, even though I don't think much of his mind or his judgment, I can understand how reporters cut him slack that they wouldn't cut Sarah Palin. She hasn't yet built up a reservoir of good will, or shown that her dumb remarks are more the exception than the rule. Biden has...at least I think that's what the mainstream media would tell you. (But he still says some very stupid things.)

What about Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers? Conservatives claim that we haven't read nearly as much about this as we ought to have. Charles Krauthammer in particular says that if John McCain had gotten his start in politics in part through a relationship with an abortion clinic bomber, he would not today be the GOP nominee. The press would have hounded him out of the race. I think Krauthammer is probably right, but how can one know for sure?

I guess the reason I'm writing this post is that I'd like to see some rigor brought to the double-standard question. If there is a genuine double-standard in the media, it ought to be exposed and hammered on until either: a) it no longer exists; or b) the media definitively lose their claim to objectivity. I don't see either of those things happening now, however, because bloggers, conservative magazines, and talk radio hosts are making largely anecdotal arguments. I think it would be worth it for some think tank fellow, graduate student, or young professor somewhere to take on this question for real.

Two service/product ideas, and a question

Okay, here is the first service/product idea. You set up a Web site on which people can ask if a certain product exists, and if so, where they can find it, whether people recommend one brand or other, etc. If you need to make money off the site, then you allow retailers to advertise there. Or maybe you even allow them to participate in the forums.

What I'm NOT talking about is a site on which someone would say, "I'm looking for the best 42-inch high-def television. Anybody got a recommendation?" What I'm talking about is a site on which someone would say, "I'm looking for a 42-inch high-def television with an attached espresso maker. Is there such a thing? If so, where would I find it?"

If such a site existed, I would go there and post something along these lines: "I have an MP3 player, but the idea of pulling down one song at a time off of Pandora, or even off of my own CDs, doesn't really appeal to me. What I'd like is a service that says, 'You tell us what kind of music you like, and we'll put together a mix of songs for you: 25, 50, 100, even 500 songs, if you want. Then with one simple click, all of the songs are downloaded to your MP3 player at once."

Of course, I know I'd have to pay for the songs, but I'd be willing to pay for the service, too.

Does such a service exist? If so, where can I find it? If not, why don't you set it up and become the next Internet millionaire? Please just remember the little people once you've made your fortune.

Footnote: If Vox and/or Woods don't comment on this, I'll be very disappointed. I may even stop blogging altogether.

Book update

I recently finished Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It, which attempts to bring some sanity to the global warming debate. (You may know Lomborg as the author of In Defense of Holocaust Denial. But I kid! He actually wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, and for not accepting the complete agenda of the environmentalist watermelons--they're green on the outside, but pink on the inside, i.e., they're commies dressed up as environmentalists--he was compared to Holocaust deniers.) Lomborg doesn't deny that global warming is real, serious, and at least partially man-made. His interesting take, though, is that it will be far more cost-effective over the next 100 years to deal with the consequences of global warming than the problem itself. Specific example: if global warming will result in an increase in malaria risk, let's spend our money dealing with that risk directly rather than trying to reduce the carbon emissions that will cause the increased risk.

Why treat the symptom rather than the cause? Lomborg argues that there is basically nothing we can do at an acceptable cost to forestall temperature increases, but there is LOTS we can do at a very reasonable cost to mitigate the consequences of temperature increases.

A couple of other points worth noting. First, Lomborg does say that we need to invest heavily over the next 30 years in R&D on alternatives to fossil fuels. In other words, he's not prepared to let the globe heat up forever. Second, he says that we're not in danger of any imminent calamities from global warming, so if it takes a hundred years or so to stabilize the upward trend, we'll be fine.

I also am reading the best, most comprehensive book I could find on the subprime mess. It's called Financial Shock, and it was written by a guy named Mark Zandi. It came out earlier this year, just as things were starting to go to hell. (It wasn't a rush job, though; it was obviously already in progress.)

On the key question of regulation and deregulation, over which I have wrung my hands in this space before, I'll summarize Zandi's conclusions. There was no relevant deregulation that led to the dramatic increase in sub-prime lending. There was, however, somewhat of a bi-partisan, hands-off attitude with respect to private lenders. So it's not that de-regulation created the private sector problems; it's more that there was no active regulation. Why not? Well, you can't really regulate prudence. Furthermore, even if you could regulate prudence, unless there are a lot of defaults, which there were not in the heyday and immediate post-heyday of subprime lending, it's hard to persuade lenders that loans that obviously seem imprudent in retrospect were imprudent at the time. Housing values were going up, people were paying on their loans, refinancing was available, etc.--at least for a while. And finally, the Bush administration was seeking to put tighter reins on Fannie and Freddie, which meant that if you wanted to keep the good times rolling, you had to keep looser reins on private lenders. So, again, it's not so much a question of deregulation--and in fact, there were efforts to impose more regulations on Fannie and Freddie--as non-regulation. There's some question, though, about how much federal regulators could have done without dictating specific underwriting standards. What's more, the federal government had actively encouraged the loosening of underwriting standards in order to extend homeownership to traditionally underrepresented groups. So, had the feds turned around and said, "Hey, you're getting a little sloppy here in your underwriting practices," banks might have said, "Make up your mind. Do you want us to be conservative and limit opportunities for home ownership, or do you want us to have more relaxed standards and expand opportunities?"

That's Zandi's story, at least as far as I've gotten. I would add a couple of notes of my own. First, the very nature of a bubble is that: a) it's driven by irrational thinking; and b) most people don't recognize that the thinking is irrational until after the fact. So, a quick answer to "how did this stuff get so messed up?", is this: "That's the nature of a bubble; if you want to understand it better, talk to a psychologist, not an economist...or, God forbid, a political scientist." Second, I still haven't gotten to the question of regulation of mortgage-backed securities, for which the GOP may (or may not) bear some significant blame. For now, though, I tend to think that Obama's deregulation argument is nonsense, and I'm frustrated that he was not forced to defend it during the debates.

Is there anything that isn't thinly-veiled racist code?

This guy says that "socialist" REALLY means "black," wink wink. You also have the people who say that "community organizer" means "black," too, within the not-so-secret code of the GOP. Then there are those who claim that when John McCain said "that one" in the second debate, he was trying to dehumanize Obama, something white America has done to black America since the time of slavery. And you have Josh Marshall saying that the attack on the sex ed legislation Obama supported in Illinois was really designed to prey on white people's fears about black men wanting to violate their daughters. And you have Bob Herbert making pretty much the same point about the McCain "celebrity" ad, in which showing pictures of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and the Washington Monument in the same 30 seconds clearly indicated McCain's intent to stir old insecurities about black men sleeping with white women. (The black man in this case was symbolized, quite obviously, by the Washington Monument.) Featuring Franklin Raines in an ad is racist, too. He's black, right? And when Sarah Palin says that she likes her coffee with a little bit of cream and sugar, isn't she REALLY saying that "black" is unacceptable?

Okay, the last example was fabricated, but all of the others are real. It leaves a person feeling as if he can't say ANYTHING without being accused of racism.

Come to think of it, that's probably the idea...

Footnote: Back in graduate school, I offered some written and verbal commentary on a scathing report put out by PSOC, or Political Scientists of Color. PSOC's report described a political science department teeming with racists and racism. In my commentary--which was directed only to the authors of the report, and a few additional members of PSOC--I questioned the report's methodology, and therefore some of its conclusions. This questioning, I was told, was evidence of the VERY SORT of racism that had been documented in the report itself. (And the fact that I'm repeating the story here, with an ironic smile on my face as I type, is yet FURTHER evidence that I'm racist, I'm sure. As if any were necessary!)