The week in politics
June 27, 2013
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Hope to get back to it on a more regular basis.
Anyway, the big news of the week (here in Boston at least) is the election of Ed Markey to the Senate seat vacated by Secretary of State John Kerry. This was no surprise to anyone unless they get all their news from the Herald, which alone of all the media I’ve seen kept finding inklings of a significant surge of support for Gabe Gomez. Markey has been criticized for playing it safe and “merely” mobilizing his base, but in fact that was all that was needed; turnout was in fact half of what it had been in the Brown/Coakley race. Gomez never gave people a reason to vote for him beyond his being a nice guy, a Navy SEAL, young, vigorous, and less partisan (i.e. less predictable in his positions) than Markey; the last-mentioned consideration actually counted against him, and the others weren’t enough to make up for it. As I wrote after the primaries, I never got the sense that the public mood this year was anything like what it was when Scott Brown scored his upset win a few years ago; moreover, Brown wasn’t the total outsider to politics that Gomez proudly presented himself as. As much as we sometimes gripe about the “insiders,” here in MA we tend to prefer elected officials with experience.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court started out the last week of its term with two decisions which were strongly conservative, though skating short of being radically so: they didn’t exactly end Affirmative Action and the Voting Rights Act, they just set standards of scrutiny that will make these policies harder if not impossible to follow. Then came the Equal Marriage cases. This time they gave the Left just enough of what it wanted, again without doing anything really radical. It seems that as long as the Court is dominated by two parties of four justices apiece, with one regular swing vote, we’re going to see more of these narrowly-crafted opinions; which may be the best thing from the point of view of the law as a whole.
Informed opinion all along had been expecting something like the DOMA and Prop 8 opinions, especially since the oral arguments. For one thing, the dominant flavor of conservatism on the Court is pro-business, not culture-war, though Scalia at least clearly falls into the latter category. Dumping DOMA was an easy step for the Court to take; the posture of the case made it at least as much about States Rights as about Equal Protection. The part of the law that immunized hetero-only states against Full Faith and Credit challenges was not in question; only the part that aligned the Federal Government with those states, causing legally married same-sex couples in the growing number of Equal Marriage states to miss out on Federal benefits they arguably were entitled to. Of course the decision will only increase the political pressure for Equal Marriage in the remaining states; same-sex couples there will fight more vigorously for their rights, and even people there who aren’t for same-sex marriage per se might be sensitive to the argument that couples shouldn’t be denied Federal benefits that similar couples in other states have.
As for Prop 8, again the Court did the easiest thing it could have done, from a judicial conservative point of view: it followed the long-standing tradition of avoiding potentially embarrassing issues by deciding that there wasn’t a valid case or controversy for it to decide. If the Governor and Attorney General of a state, as the original defendant in the case, are unwilling to defend their law on appeal, that apparently ends the matter; no other supporter of the law has standing, so there’s no case. What effect this has will have to be worked out by the Californians, but the executive branch seems quite willing to follow the District Court ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional.
This will bring the number of Americans living in Equal Marriage states up to around 30%. Only 30%, we on the Left complain, and rightly so; but let us bear in mind that 10 years ago the percentage was 0.
Finally a shout-out to Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who reminded us how filibustering was meant to be done. Take note, Harry Reid!!!
A bit of politics again
May 3, 2013
This week we had a primary here in Massachusetts, to choose the candidates for Secretary of State Kerry’s old Senate seat.
The winners were U. S. Representative Markey on the Democratic side, and for the Republicans (more surprisingly) a political newcomer (ex-SEAL, businessman) named Gabriel Gomez. The state is well known to be heavily Democratic, so Markey is favored in the upcoming election, but Gomez is considered to be the Republican most capable of pulling an upset, because he is an attractive personality, not publicly identified with extreme right-wing positions or causes, socially moderate-to-liberal, a Latino, and above all a fresh face compared to his opponent, who has been in Congress since the 1970s. A poll published today in fact shows Markey with a mere 4% lead, and Gomez leading among Independents.
People are wondering if Gomez will be another Scott Brown, who won the special election to succeed Ted Kennedy a few years ago; his opponent Martha Coakley had started out as the overwhelming favorite. It can happen; but there are factors working against Gomez as well. For one thing the anti-Obama mood of 2010, which helped elect Brown, seems to be behind us. Also, there is the fact that there’s already been a Scott Brown; the Markey campaign won’t be caught by surprise, they’ll know better than to be take the election for granted as Coakley seemed to do. They’ve already begun campaigning hard against Gomez, trying to portray him as more right-wing than he comes across in person, and also pointing out that however nice a guy he might be he’ll still be a vote for the Republicans when it comes to organizing the Senate (and very likely disrupting it with filibusters as they’ve been doing). On the other hand going after someone with a nice-guy image can backfire badly if the attack can’t be made to stick.
A couple of other things: Markey may be the consummate Washington insider, but locals here don’t seem have the same antipathy towards such types as they do towards Beacon Hill insiders. Moreover, Coakley was Attorney-General; in other states prosecutors may be popular heroes and have a leg up in seeking higher office, but here they seem to make more enemies than friends, as the people they feel they have to prosecute are often well connected. Scott Harshbarger, I seem to recall, ran into this problem when he ran for Governor in 1998…
An irony is that we wouldn’t be having this election at all, or the one in 2010 that gave us Senator Brown, if the Democrats hadn’t tinkered with the law in 2004. Until then Massachusetts, like most states, allowed the Governor to fill Senate vacancies by appointing someone to serve until the next regular Congressional election; but that year Kerry ran for President, and if he’d won Mitt Romney would have appointed his successor in the Senate. The overwhelming Democratic majority in General Court (as we call the state legislature) didn’t like that idea, so they reduced the term of an appointed Senator to just enough time for a special election to be organized. But Kerry of course ended up staying in the Senate; by the time an actual vacancy did arise we had a Democratic Governor, but it would have looked bad even by Beantown standards if they’d tried to change the law back.
I’m back
December 12, 2012
Previously, whenever I let time go by without posting on this blog, visits would drop off to a daily average of 0 until I resumed; this time, though, I have been surprised to note a steady trickle of visitors throughout. One day recently I actually hit double digits. So in spite of too much else on my plate, I have decided to start writing again. Let’s see how long I can keep it up this time.
Let’s see, what has been going on since my last post… Oh yes, there was an election, wasn’t there. More or less as I expected – or at least as I remember expecting, I haven’t checked to see whether what I actually wrote here confirms this – the Romney campaign focused on economic conservatism at the expense of other flavors, but failed to come up with anything to make such a platform more attractive to the general public than it has been since 1929. Romney seems to have taken it for granted that the widespread and understandable disappointment in the rate of the recovery since 2008 would translate automatically into an eagerness to embrace the Republican alternative; whereas in fact lots of us still blame Republican policies for the collapse itself and believe that returning to them can only make the situation worse. In fact the GOP has done as well as it has in presidential elections since World War II by focusing on things other than its classical economic program: patriotism, fear of street crime, concerns about increasing cultural diversity and the decline of sexual morality, all that sort of thing. The one time I can remember when a Republican won on largely economic grounds was 1980, when neither candidate actually embraced his own party’s traditional position: Carter did not run as much of a New Dealer, and Reagan claimed to be offering something radically new (which his running mate had actually called “voodoo” when running against him in the primaries). If the parties that year had nominated Bush Sr and Ted Kennedy instead, then maybe the election would have been a clear referendum on the New Deal. But we didn’t have one, most GOP candidates have done their best to avoid one, and Romney’s going all out for one seems to show an unprecedentedly naive trust in his own talking points. Now I’m not saying he couldn’t have won such a referendum, that an argument couldn’t have been found to win his case for him; I do tend to think it couldn’t, but my point here is that it didn’t seem to occur to Romney that some new or more vigorous argument was needed.
Nevertheless the election was a rather close one, nationally, though individual states and counties seem to be turning more solidly “red” or “blue” than ever before. So polarization is still very much in the news. A couple of weeks ago I finally read The Big Sort, the 2008 book on how liberals and conservatives seem to be crystallizing into two separate cultures with ever less contact and communication between them. I’ve also been going back to the origins of two-party politics in Restoration England. Maybe I’ll manage to post something on these subjects in the days to come.
Wish me luck!
Reviewed in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, two new books on the Civil War and the events leading to it. America’s Great Debate, by Fergus M. Bordewich, and Fateful Lightning by Allen C. Guelzo.
This topic resonates with me because of my recent thinking on political polarization. After all, the mid-19th century was the one time in our history we were undeniably at least as polarized as now: so much so that a large part of the country tried secession, and almost managed to make it stick. Of course there’s no real likelihood of another Civil War breaking out; our differences don’t follow state lines quite as closely as they did then, and Federal institutions (and firepower) are much stronger. But the way our major political subcultures are screaming past each other, totally incapable of acknowledging the legitimacy of each other’s viewpoint, is certainly reminiscent of those days.
It all makes me wonder whether sometimes polarization is so great, so deep, that the only way out is for one side to beat the [deleted] out of the other.
The Bordewich book interests me especially because of its focus on the Compromise of 1850. I first read about it in Profiles in Courage when I was a kid; the book had a chapter on the vilification of Daniel Webster for his (courageous, the book said) support for the Compromise. I’ve always tended to sympathize more with the anti-Compromise abolitionists; but would we have ended up worse off, as is usually suggested, if instead secession had happened 10 years earlier?
And what did possess Stephen Douglas, just 4 years after his work in getting the Compromise enacted, to effectively override it with the Kansas-Nebraska Act? Without that, could the nation have carried on “half slave and half free” even longer?
More to come. Whether I read the books or not, I won’t stop thinking about the topic anytime soon. For now I leave you with this sentence I just found in Jefferson’s famous “Firebell in the Night” letter, about the beginnings of sectional polarization in 1820: “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”