(And why the Beatles will be forgotten by 2064)

I hate popular music.

Since I met and married Rachel – the Center Of My Universe and the Reason For My Existence – I have been subjected to a particular genre of popular music each morning as she and I drive to some useless location in an effort to rid her pants of ants. I perused the website of Billboard which, I am told, is the popular music business’ commercial compass but was unable to discover the particular genre to which I am subjected each A.M. (morning, not “dial”).

My Beloved’s favorite station touts itself as the “Home of Soft Rock” but Billboard has no such classification. In my youth, radio stations were at leisure to inform their listeners of the title and artist of each presentation, but the competitive nature of modern FM radio must be such that precious air-time cannot be devoted to such trivia, so I am forced to provide you with a list of tunes based on sketchy information.

* Miley Cyrus employs a southern accent to discuss “other mountains” and “uphill rides (?)”.
* Some other female vocalist moans about the fact that she “keeps bleeding”.
* Another female named “Fergie” (I trust this is not the ex-wife of Prince Andrew), informs me that “big girls don’t cry”, something I thought Frankie Valley had already told us.
*A group of men who have assumed the name of a CIA airplane sing that they still haven’t found what they’re lookin’ for.
* Kelly Clarkson is a regular feature, shouting (with a terrific voice) that she is afraid to cross the street, walks away, ponders about her life since you’ve been gone, and has hazel eyes.
* Yet another female asks “how do I live?”
* Some guy repeats, about a billion times, “Say what you mean to say.” Say it, already.

Popular music is trash because it is written, performed and marketed to be disposable. That which we dispose of after use is, by definition, trash.

As an outsider, my impression of the mechanics of the popular music industry is that it is in constant need of fresh material which, once unearthed, is played to extinction on popular music outlets such as radio, which creates the demand for yet more new material. Billboard serves as both midwife to the newborn and undertaker for the recently disposed. Billboard accumulates sales data on a piece of popular music and uses this data to track the health of the song through its charts of rising and falling pieces. What gives the whole process a “chicken or egg” dilemma is this: If radio airtime drives sales and sales drive Billboard and Billboard drives airtime, how does it get started? It is, as Rachel says, a quandary. My theory is that a secret coterie of Illuminati, housed deep within the earth below the Bavarian Alps, picks works of popular music at random and they drive the whole thing.

When a piece of popular music has been played to the point where the mere hint of its opening theme causes drivers to swerve around the road as they desperately punch buttons on their car radios, sales will invariably fall off and the piece will begin its slide into pop oblivion. Sales go down, Billboard lowers the rating of the piece, radio stations give their listeners a break and only play the damn thing sixteen times a day instead of forty, which further depresses sales, etc., etc., etc. Back under Munich, the gnomes rub their hands gleefully and throw another dart.

Now, I confess to be a lover of “Classical Music”. By that I mean the orchestral and operatic masterpieces of the past 400 years. When She Who Is The Light Of My Life was orchestrating our wedding ceremony four years ago, she instructed the deejay to play “classical music” as a token of her love and affection for me (because she loathes the music I love). What we got was an evening of Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme and other lounge singers – that’s what “classic” meant to the r-e-t-a-r-d running the CD player.

More on that anon, but first, here is a five-part test you can conduct on the music you hear on your radio, I-pod, music library, the crap they play in grocery stores and every other enclosed space where people tend to congregate. Tell me if I’m wrong.

1. Musical Time: 99.9% of all popular music is written in standard time, i.e. two or four beats per measure. In the past six months I have heard precisely one melody in three-quarter (three beats per measure) time. By contrast, not only are there plentiful examples of classical music written in other than standard time, some are written in musical times that defy toe-tapping. The opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien” and Wagner’s “Siegfried’s Funeral Music” are both written in something like nine-sixteenths time – difficult to play, but wonderful to hear.

2. Theme: 95% of all popular music has “love” as its theme. Getting it, abusing it, losing it, regaining it, whining about it, missing it, hoping to regain it, dying for it, living for it … in short, everything about love other than cooking it for breakfast. Other thematic elements appear from time to time, such as trucks and prisons (Country-Western) rape and cop-killing (Rap). To my (limited) knowledge, there has not been a strictly instrumental popular piece since “Wipe Out” (‘60’s) and “Classical Gas” (70’s). Contrast this with the bulk of Classical music which contains no lyrics. It’s important in the same way that the Mona Lisa is a superior piece of art than a poster of a daisy with the words “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” The former demands something of the viewer in order to realize its importance. The latter is a spoonful of Pabulum poured directly into the ears and brain of the observer. It is not important because it was never meant to be so.

3. Instrumentation: 85% of pop music is scored for guitar, bass guitar, keyboard and percussion. There is a good reason for this. Popular music must be as portable as possible, else the coming wave of new artists will never emerge because they’re too busy schlepping around orchestras. These guys have to bust their humps in the minors for many years before the Alpine Seers choose them for stardom, at which point they can go on the road with entourages, roadies, groupies, agents, camp-followers and all the other hangers-on whose purpose seems to be nothing more than to deplete the income of the stars. Their concert appearances are replete with pyrotechnics, light displays, gaudy visual effects, etc. Some performers – Celine Dion comes to mind – perform musical arrangements with a violin or two, perhaps a flute and maybe even a harp. In contrast, consider the piano composition “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Musorgsky. It does an adequate job of presenting its themes, but Ravels arrangement of the piece for a full orchestra – with more than twenty different instruments – is nothing short of magnificent. The “Polish Cart” section features saxophones and they manage to convey this cumbersome beast of a vehicle with amazing accuracy. Various permutations of the “Promenade”, as Musorgsky strolls through the gallery, express the musician’s mood as he views the various pieces painted by his recently-deceased friend. “Pictures” is a minor classic but popular music has yet and never shall produce its equal.

4. Vocal Quality: 70% of the people who yowl the lyrics of pop music have no vocal talent whatsoever. It is remarkable to consider that popular music, which is almost completely lyrical, grants no importance to the quality of the voice(s) which deliver those lyrics. Make it easy on yourself – listen to some really good singers like Celine Dion and Kelly Clarkson.  Afterwards, listen to the vocal quality of almost anyone else purveying their goods in popular music and you should immediately understand my meaning. The truly adventurous should then go on to experience Pavarotti’s rendition of “Nessum Dorma” from Puccini’s opera Tourandot or Maria Callas’ performance of Bizet’s opera Carmen. Some will then understand that the human voice is a musical instrument more difficult to play than any mechanical contrivance found in the orchestra pit.

5. Structure: Perhaps you should pull off the road for this part. 65% of popular music observes the following structure: First refrain, chorus, second refrain, chorus, instrumental interlude, chorus. The percentage is so low because what follows the instrumental interlude can vary considerably. Nevertheless, the marketing requirements of popular music are such that three minutes more-or-less is allotted to each performance before it is crumpled up and disposed of.

Popular music has a half-life of one generation. Testing this theorem requires a minor assumption. For our purposes, we will assert that a generation is whatever number of years has elapsed since you and your parents were in high school. I will use my own family as an illustration. My parents were in high school when big bands and swing music were popular. Only half of my generation appreciates this music (and I count myself among them). I know nothing about what my parents’ parents enjoyed. My son knows a lot about my generation’s music (because he was a brief fan in his pre-adolescence). He is completely familiar with his generation’s music but pays scant attention to swing jazz and absolutely none to what his great-grandparents enjoyed. Once he and his wife provide me with a grandson, the kid will have access to a completely new variety of popular music which will shock his parents just as hip-hop has shocked me. He will abhor mom and dad’s music and appreciate his grandpa’s psychedelic music not at all. Swing? Never heard of it.

By 2064 – 100 years after they broke into the bigs by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles will be forgotten by that generation. The existence of billions of the Fab Four’s oeuvre immortalized on tapes, L. P.’s, sheet music and C. D.’s will be of negligible consequence because nobody will care.

At the aforementioned wedding between Rachel and my humble self, she selected, as the processional music, Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major”. Many people would recognize this melody without knowing who wrote it or when because it has the power to soothe frayed nerves and bring about tranquility (something we both needed on that memorable occasion). The composition has no lyrics with which to accomplish its purpose and must rely on the subtleties of harmony, melody, theme, orchestration and contrapuntalism (look it up). The composition is 325 years old – more than three times my estimate of the Beatle’s musical duration, yet hardly a day goes by when some chamber group somewhere does not perform the work to an admiring audience. If anyone can produce a piece of popular music that old (and popular music has been around at least that long), I will eat my hat, tie, shirt and trousers.

Classical music abides despite the fact most of it was created at a time before copyright laws, electronic means of sound reproduction and university professors of “popular culture”. The works of Beethoven, Mozart, Puccini, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and others are timeless because the vision that drove their creators was likewise. It is not the words of Rossini’s “La Centerentola” that makes the opera immortal, it is the music itself. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mahler’s First, Mozart’s 41st, Rachimaninov’s First and Verdi’s “Mass” will live forever because they represent more than any poster-words can ever express. They represent “beauty” which will not tolerate explanation.

I have observed that the lovers of popular music can no more tolerate classical music than the lovers of classical music can abide the popular variety. Each camp describes the music of the other as “boring”. Nevertheless, they are wrong and I am right. I am no slave to research, but I have been able to find only one piece of eighteenth century popular music that continues to be performed on a daily basis. The tune was penned by John Stafford Smith for the amusement of the Anacreonic Society – a British collection of gentlemen of an artistic nature who met from time-to-time to raise their glasses in praise of high culture and good ale. The tune was adopted by an American poet after he witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor in 1814 and his verse was later set to Smith’s music. In 1931 Congress adopted Francis Scott Key’s lyrics, set to the tune of John Stafford Smith’s music, as the National Anthem of the United States of America. Other than this, the popular music of the past is dead and forgotten.

I support same-sex marriage.

Actually, I would be even happier to see the government abandon recognition of marriage as a specific legal status, and simply recognize contractual obligations between individuals, regardless of their sex. But I’m a realist, and am not holding out for my libertarian utopia to come to fruition.

However, the tactics devised by advocates of same-sex marriage have been nothing short of deplorable, and occasionally brazenly self-serving at the expense of the same-sex couples. With this in mind, I have a few thoughts in the aftermath of the California Supreme Court’s decision regarding Proposition 8.

“Hate” is not the issue. Advocates of same-sex marriage are constantly referring to Prop.8 as an example of “hate”. They’re never specific as to exactly who is doing the hating, but they’re damn sure their use of the term is called for. The lack of specificity when the term is applied leads one to think that a vote for Prop. 8 can be, without further review, automatically attributed to “hate”.  Is it not possible that, in lieu of seething rage toward homosexuals, 52% of Californians are simply reluctant to redefine an institution almost as old as human history itself? Regardless of whether or not this fear enjoys empirical foundation (it does not), we should at least be willing to remove the horns from the heads of Californians who voted in the affirmative.

It’s not a “human rights” issue. Let’s put things in perspective: the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, female genital mutilation, and Nazi gas chambers are human rights issues. The lack of state recognition of same-sex unions is a tragedy which will be rectified by the gradual evolution of human society. Referring to the latter as a “human rights issue” degrades and defames the victims of true human rights abuses. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which reads more like a letter to Santa Claus than a legal and philosophical declaration – fails to address the issue of same-sex marriage, probably because its authors could not fathom a world in which such an issue would receive widespread public attention. Obviously, they were wrong (knock-me-over-with-a-feather-and-spill-my-gin).

Equality is the problem, not the solution. Advocates of same-sex marriage are constantly employing “equality” as their rallying cry. This is, I feel, mostly due to the fact that using the term is politically expedient, as it appeals to the left’s growing neurotic obsession with equality as a concept (they’re rarely able to specify exactly what should be equal – only that equality is good and that they’re in favor of it). The irony here is that equality is the problem: the law treats every adult as if they want to marry a member of the opposite sex. That is, it treats everyone equally. Historically, arguments in favor of equality under the law have addressed legally prescribed practices based on a particular attribute (for example, “if you are black, you may not vote”). The exact opposite is the case with same-sex marriage, as all homosexual individuals are afforded the exact same opportunity that is afforded to their heterosexual counterparts: the ability to marry someone of the opposite sex. The problem, of course, is that gays and lesbians don’t want to marry someone of the opposite sex. As such, the problem is that the law does not serve all segments of the population well. Moreover, while Jim Crow laws were deliberately constructed in an effort to specifically address a group (or groups) of people, the opposite-sex definition of marriage is simply an artifact of history. When laws regarding legal recognition of marriage – I assume this can be traced back to English Common Law, but have not done enough research to be sure – the notion of same-sex unions was simply not entertained. It was not until advocates of same-sex marriage sought to strong-arm the American populace into legally redefining what constitutes marriage that idiotic constitutional amendments such as Prop 8 were seen as necessary.

It’s not a matter for the courts. I am trying to post to this blog with greater regularity. As such, I have to resist the temptation to meticulously document every point I make, and will avoid enumerating the countless examples of commentators, journalists, and (dare I say it) academics who have indiscriminately applied the term “lawmakers” to the California Supreme Court, which has received much undue criticism from gay rights activists who were apparently absent from their high school civics class the day the separation of powers was discussed. Had these critics gone to the trouble of actually reading the opinion in question, they would have seen that the court was unhappy with the consequences of its ruling, and did so only out of an obligation to… well… do it’s damn job. The court’s job is to interpret the law, not make it.

Perhaps this is the best lesson for individuals who favor same-sex marriage, myself included: after duking it out in the courts for years, we must ask ourselves, “what hath it profiteth us?” With constitutional and/or statutory bans on recognition of same-sex unions in place in 38 U.S. states, are gays and lesbians better off today than they were before this idiotic crusade began? Would we not have been better off to seek public support first, then a change in the law?

This leads me to a final point about left-wing movements: the moral superiority factor. I have often mentioned my disgust with religiously-motivated, right-wing professions of moral certitude. But those emanating from the left are even more odious. At least Christian conservatives have the decency to base their moralizing on the injunctions of no lesser an entity than God Himself. Those on the left who consider themselves to be morally superior have the audacity to claim that they just know – either that, or they just don’t feel it necessary to explain themselves.

Sorry, friends, but your shit stinks too. It’s high time you wake up and smell it.

Then, get to the task of changing American minds on the subject of same-sex unions.

In 2000, Walt Disney Studios released “Remember the Titans”, the story of  Coach Herman Boone (played by Denzel Washington) and his first year as head football coach at T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia.  One of the things that makes this a great movie is that it never overtly states the movie’s theme:  high school football in the south was one of the factors that eased the transition to integration in that region.  Most of what follows is personal reflection since there has not been (to my knowledge) any systematized study of this phenomenon in the scholarly literature (not that I would be able / trouble myself to discover it).

The story takes place in 1971, which was two years after I graduated from high school in 1969.  Five years earlier, in 1964, I vividly remember sitting in junior high school homeroom for about 45 minutes listening to the school principal as he read the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act recently passed by Congress and signed by president Lyndon Johnson.  The man read the Act without particular emotion – as though it were something the law required him to do, having no especial meaning for him.  At the conclusion of his address, we went to our usual first-period classes without any discussion.  The school’s administrators may have thought that the subject held no meaning for their charges but, if they did, they were quite mistaken:  we students debated the issue of integration with no less passion (and ignorance) than our elders.  In any event, Robert L. Osborne Junior High School was not suddenly flooded with black students, because all the black students lived within the city limits of Marietta and that city had its own, segregated, school system.

In 1967 the Marietta school system closed the all-black Lemon Street High School and integrated Marietta High School along with the rest of their system.  This was approximately midway through coach French Johnson’s illustrious career as head coach of the Marietta High School football team.  Coach Johnson had a better-than average career leading the Marietta squad up to that time, but with the 1968 season, Marietta High became a football powerhouse.  Given the resources of Lemon Street students previously denied him, Johnson retired in 1972 with a record of 125 wins, 46 losses and 7 ties.  Thats a 70.2 win rate.  Prior to his arrival, the school could only boast a 45% win rate from its founding in 1920 to coach Johnson’s arrival.

The Marietta Blue Devil Marching Band also changed.  Prior to 1968 they were excellent – being one of only two bands in the district capable of playing music and marching at the same time.  Everyone else marched to a drum cadence and performed standing still.  Beginning with the 1968 season, they were fabulous!  They added capes to their uniforms.  Their drum major was a vision of the future Michael Jackson.  They didn’t just march, they STRUTTED across the field, leaning back and forward in time with the funky music they performed.  They didn’t just lift their legs while marching, they kicked and bobbed and flung their capes in a spectacular display.  Obviously, someone else was also taking advantage of the new talent pool from Lemon Street.

And the community changed.  For years after 1968, black and white students at Marietta High segregated themselves within their integrated environment.  But after the first integrated class graduated in 1970 that began to break down bit-by-bit as new arrivals paid less-and-less attention to the racial divide.  That racial divide began to transform into the more usual cliques in high school society.  Jocks stayed with jocks, social climbers with social climbers, shoppies with shoppies and nerds with nerds.  If you took a photograph of the Marietta fans in Northcutt stadium on Friday nights over the years, what you would see in 1968 was black fans sitting with black fans and white fans sitting with white fans.  Over time, that snapshot would slowly evolve until now, it doesn’t matter.  Everyone sits wherever they like and the race of the person next to them is superfluous because they are all there to support the Blue Devils.

High school football is a serious business in the deep south.  It is followed in the local press by fans who pack the local stadiums on Friday nights.  Citizens debate the virtues of individual players without reference to race.  In the final analysis, if a kid makes a great play, it matters not to the local fans if he is white or black – he is OUR kid, playing for OUR team.  When a true sports fan waxes eloquently on some player’s athletic virtues or faults, race is NEVER an issue worth considering.

Not mattering is the key to racial harmony.  I lived for several years in the central Georgia town of Cordele, deep in the black-belt.  The city council was comprised of black Democrats and white Republicans and they argued among themselves in the unseemly manner we have all come to expect from politicians.  But they were in solid and fraternal agreement that Cordele’s football team could whip any other team in their division.

Midway through Remember the Titans, the local peckerwoods heave a brick through coach Boone’s living room window.  Several weeks later, after securing a place in the division championship series, Boone returns home and he and his family are greeted warmly by their previously aloof neighbors.  Obviously, there’s a bit of theatrical telescoping involved here, but the point is justified nevertheless.  It didn’t matter that coach Boone had integrated the football team.  It didn’t matter that he had supplanted the previous (white) head coach.  It didn’t matter that he and his family lived in the “white” part of town.  What mattered was that he had built a winning football team and lead it from triumph to triumph.  Had he failed to do that, I have no doubt that his race would have been a prominent feature in the local discussions regarding his failure.

If not mattering is the key to racial harmony, then sports is the perfect place to find it because, in the grand scheme of things, sports does not matter.  I’m no fan, but I can still appreciate the awesome skill of Michael Jordan in basketball and the fielding wizardry of Andruw Jones in baseball.  A joke circulated several years ago and I remember it only imperfectly.  It went something like this:  “There is something seriously wrong in the world when the greatest golfer is black, the best basketball player is Chinese, the most popular rap artist is white and …” (I don’t remember the fourth element).  The first phrase is intentionally wrong.  What the joke means is that some things are becoming seriously right.

In a recent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, columnist Jay Bookman praised greed the way I am going to praise Jay Bookman.  Mr. Bookman is an artful wordsmith; his prose is always a pleasure to read, marred only by the fact that his ideas are usually rubbish.  I believe that I have complimented Mr. Bookman – ideas, both silly and profound, are abundant while the ability to write with elegance is rare.

Bookman praises greed as the sine qua non of capitalist productivity and wealth-creation.  He correctly points out that, despite its signal virtues, greed must be restrained for the benefit of the common weal lest its unbridled culmination impoverish us all.  Bookman concludes by noting that political power seems to be the only way to keep greed safely yoked to the plow and cautions that balancing greed and power is the most momentous challenge humans face today.

Bravo.

I’d like to expand upon Mr. Bookman’s theme.  Given that I am not subject to the space limitations imposed on him, it is my hope, nevertheless, that what follows will meet with his general approval (but mostly I hope he enjoys my writing).

In the 1987 film Wall Street, director Oliver Stone has Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) state that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”.  Greed is good because it wrings out the inefficiencies in an organization.  Some people may get hurt in the process but the market is a mechanism of efficiency – not sympathy.  In defiance of my enthusiasm for Ayn Rand’s philosophy in my youth, I now believe that government has a valid role in rounding off some of efficiency’s corners and harnessing greed to the betterment of the common folk.

We shamelessly tax producers for the benefit of non-producers and much of that money, no doubt, is directed to the trashier elements.  The system is milked by a variety of scoundrels whose individual take is paltry but, in the aggregate, may be truly astounding.  Contrast these nickels and dimes with Robert Nardelli, former CEO of The Home Depot and current mis-manager of Chrysler, LLC.  At Home Depot, Nardelli was compensated about $240 M per annum for approximately seven years and bailed out with a $210 M platinum parachute.  My calculator has a limited number of zeros, but it tells me that Bob pocketed (before taxes, mind you), 1.89 BILLION SMACKEROOS before vamoosing to Chrysler and leaving his board of directors to explain to outraged stockholders why their shares were diminishing in value.

I don’t mean to single out Nardelli for particular criticism; for all I know he’s a prince and most of that dough went to worthy causes while he and his bride live in squalor.  I just doubt it.  But the government surely got a goodly chunk of that money and used it to assuage the suffering of some folks somewhere for some period of time.  Government power hitched itself (or attached a sucker to) stockholder/management/corporate greed and hopefully helped some people who really needed it.

When greed arrives a la Gordon Gekko, it might be comforting to just assume that the ones being hurt are stupid, greedy, certainly inefficient.  But that is not always the case.  When Enron closed its doors in 2001, no one saw taped footage of executives trading in their Bentleys for Ford Fiestas.  No.  We saw clerks and mid-level executives packing their family photographs and potted African violets into boxes as their universe crumbled.  The problem with greed is that it frequently has an adverse affect on real people with real families, real mortgages and real dreams for their own and their childrens’ future.  Those dreams do not include Alpo for dinner twice a week.

Purely as an aside, I once read that Russian audiences in the glasnost-lubricated Soviet Union cheered Gekko’s speech and generally mixed up the good-guy/bad-guy character orientations.  They thought Bud Foxx (Charlie Sheen) was a putz and Gordon was a hero.  They have now had ample time to recognize the difference between a capitalist and a criminal.  Gordon and Bud were the latter.

One of the tools society uses to blunt the edge of greed is law.  We declare that some greedy activities are illegal – those activities generally considered to harm the innocent or unsuspecting.  Forgery, armed robbery, mugging and burglary are obvious examples.  A few societies have tried to eliminate greed entirely by this method, declaring the practice itself illegal.  They have never prospered.  When you amputate Adam Smith’s invisible hand, it soon becomes clear that it was on the economic tiller at the time, and now the ship is drifting aimlessly.  No one cares about anything – least of all economic efficiency.  In his memoirs, Michael Gorbachev revealed that Soviet productivity was so inefficient that creating a ton of steel required TWICE the industrial inputs (iron, power, labor, etc.) as needed in the United States, while agriculture devoured FOUR TIMES the inputs of seed, fertilizer, harvesters, etc. as the United States for the same bushel of corn.  With no one allowed to greedily sop up the economy’s gravy, no gravy got made.  Say’s Law tells us that production creates demand.  If demand is suppressed, guess what else gets depressed?

If we are not to have the unbridled capitalism of Ayn Rand nor the stifling collectivism of Karl Marx, how do we rationally determine how much law we want to impose on greed to maintain general affluence?  In the Scandinavian countries the answer is “a lot” whereas in the former colony of Hong Kong, the answer was “practically none”.  In all likelihood, neither society would prosper if conditions were reversed because there really is such a thing as “national character”.  It is no easier to imagine a brawling Swedish open-air market than it is to imagine an orderly queue in Kowloon.

If the political remedy for unchecked greed is to be found in the application of laws and regulations, however, it has to be understood that lawmaking and regulating are functions of governments and governments are themselves governed by politics and power.  It is a mistake to assume that the object of greed is always material – frequently, its object is power itself.

I once put forth what I called The Iron Law of Political Suitability:  in order to succeed in politics, LP must exceed HP.  LP is the love of power and HP is the hatred of politicking.  Running for public office is a dreadful business and one can only endure it if his love for political power is greater than his hatred for the process he must endure to secure it.

Harnessing the horse of material greed to haul the wagon of general prosperity is all well and good.  But if the teamster holding the reins is more interested in whipping the horse than in delivering the goods, nothing very good will ever come of it.  Having unburdened myself of what is probably the worst metaphor in written English, allow me to point out that greed for power is no less a threat to the commonwealth than greed for filthy lucre.  I have known dozens of successful politicians during my career and not one of them would have exchanged power for mammon under any circumstances.  Most thought they could achieve both, but none of them would have relinquished their power for any amount of earthly brass.

The exercise of political power to reign-in material greed is an imperfect strategy at best and a path to ruin at worst.  Our current economic woes should reveal to us another emotion besides lust for power or gold – fear.  Greed is a powerful emotional drive but it can’t hold a candle to fear because I may not be able to imagine how much wealth is sufficient for me, but I can easily envision the loss of everything I have.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is a case in point.  Of the three volumes, Dante’s description of the toils of Hell in The Inferno is much more compelling than his sojourn in either Purgatory or Paradise.  Curiously, it is easier to imagine and feel horror than it is to envision bliss, which is why there is no “Bliss” section at Blockbuster Video.

Politicians and others who lust after power realize that fear may render material greed comatose but it is meat and bread for them.  When an entire national – global, rather – economy teeters on the brink of ruin, citizens rightly or wrongly will demand that government (spelled P-O-W-E-R) exercise its god-like influence and restore the situation.  Those who greedily desire power are more than happy to do so.  If the Republicans can be called upon to represent material greed (and why not?), then the Democrats can stand in for power greed and last November we handed control of the country over to that group of politicians who can and will seize that grant of power and exercise it without restraint.  Republicans are required by their creed and convictions to wax warmly on the virtues of the unrestrained market whereas Democrats are under no such compulsion.  They never trusted all those market greed-heads in the first place and it is simplicity itself to cast the market as the villain of the piece.  Bernard Madoff and the vacuum-domed wizards of American International Group are pronounced two peas in the same pod.  The former robbed unwitting investors to the tune of $50B whereas the latter has received government bail-out money equal to the gross domestic product of Chile.

And while we’re on the subject of those with a vacuum between their ears, where were all the regulators and lawmakers while Madoff was stealing and AIG was threatening the financial integrity of the entire planet?  A bowlful of alphabet agencies were, no doubt, chloroformed by eight years of Republican stewardship.  Thus snoring at the switch, they allowed all manner of perfidy to go unnoticed.  There is just enough truth in this characterization to render it credulous to the credulous.  Here is a paradox:  enterprises across the world are closing their doors and hurling their workers into the streets.  Yet, people still desire the products and services these businesses once produced – that has not changed.  People still want to work and provide for their families – that has not changed.  The greedy still want to enrich themselves by producing those goods and services those people still desire – that has not changed.  Only fear has changed.  Fear is just as potent in 2009 as it was in 1933 when FDR identified it as the major problem we faced in the great depression.

In the matrix of greed, power and fear, fear trumps all.  For better or worse we have turned to those who seek power to deliver us from the fear which they recognize as their vital sustenance.  How can it possibly work?  The genesis of our current woes is, by unanimous agreement, the previous profligacy of lending lavished upon the housing market.  Today we are convinced – again by unanimous consensus – that our troubles would recede if only the banks would resume lending.  We need to make up our minds about this.

I have an idea so simple [minded] that it might just work.  To-date we have pumped upwards of a trillion simoleans into the banking, auto and insurance industries in the hope that this extra cushion of cash would overcome lenders’ fears and convince them to extend credit.  It seems that even this gargantuan amount is insufficient to overcome fear.  Lenders are still scared and, from this morning’s headlines (03-06-09) it appears that one of the recipients of this largess, General Motors, may need to take our dough into the bankruptcy courts.

The Federal Funds Rate is that amount of interest that the Federal Reserve Board dictates banks shall pay to each other when they borrow money from one another to cover day-to-day cash shortfalls in their asset accounts.  It is the Fed’s primary tool for encouraging growth and/or taming incipient inflation because most loan interest rates rise or fall with this index, and, with it, the availability of credit is determined.  The Fed tends to move this rate in increments of .25 points and the current rate is .25 points.  The Federal Reserve seems to have smacked into a brick wall because a Fed rate of 0% seems to be ludicrous – and is.

Suppose, however, that the Federal government established a “capital extension” rate of .05 percent.  For every dollar a bank lent out, the Treasury department would stroke a check for a nickel – maybe a dime.  The underlying value of the assets securing the loans would remain unchanged by this device, so lenders would still have to determine that the assets were sufficient for the risk.  Nevertheless, a 5 or 10 percent inducement to release the cash should go a long way toward easing fear, especially since the money would immediately be recorded in the assets column of the lender.  At 5% the taxpayers would cough up $50,000 for every million dollars thus lent out.

My calculator has finally run out of zeros so I’ve reverted to a spreadsheet for what follows. If Washington is willing and (politically) able to borrow a trillion bucks from our progeny’s prosperity to ease the existing crisis, what would that amount of debt purchase for us in immediate lending as an alternative? First of all, the trillion bucks (just for fun, let’s write that out in all it’s zero-laden splendor; $1,000,000,000,000) would remain in our childrens’ future wallets until such time as some bank somewhere actually coughs-up an actual loan and applies for a license to pick the future’s pocket. One of the questions being asked is, “how much is needed?” My plan is self-regulating because the amount needed will automatically equal the amount spent on loans (up to a theoretical trillion) plus 5%. What will the banks do with this charity? Well, they will face a hard choice: if they give their cuckold executives a million bucks in bonuses, their assets account will be reduced by same. If, instead, they loan the money out to promising enterprises who employ real people and produce real products and generate real profits, they will, at the very least, ADD $50,000 to that account. That means the banks get to add an additional 5% “interest” on the loan (provided by your grandchildrens’ college fund). This money would go to keep businesses afloat when they experience cash-flow (as opposed to profitability) problems, which is a vital and historic function of the banking system. And that money remains in our childrens’ future should banks still be reluctant to fork over the dough. If 5% is insufficient, the rate could be raised until whatever magic number is needed.

In any event, it would cost us less and do more good than merely throwing shekels at the American financial system. It would immediately address the overwhelming power of fear and would, as a fortunate byproduct, relieve the government of its ownership interest in failing enterprises. We the people now own a sizable percentage of large banks around the country and, if history is any indicator, we will treat them the same way we oversee public restrooms in national parks. Banks may be worthless at many things, such as monitoring the health of the global economy, but at least they can keep their bathrooms clean.

I’m just an unemployed political consultant / construction manager but if I could come up with this harebrained idea, why couldn’t the GOP’s in Congress do the same? The plan needs a lot of fleshing-out and, as usual, the devil is in the details. When I contrived the Iron Law of Political Suitability I also formulated Rife’s Rule of Rodent Retaliation which states that, while the world will flock to the door of whoever builds a better mousetrap, the mice will similarly flock to the door of whatever rat figures out a way around it. The rats will always be with us, but I have not noticed that the unending presence of burglars has prevented us from crafting suitable laws to inhibit their predations. The key here is the underlying assets – all those enterprises which are now closed but whose products we still all desire, whose jobs we still need and whose profits the greedy still covet. They are still there, awaiting nothing more than a willingness of lenders to smooth out the hills and valleys of cash flow to allow them to continue.

Greed is best tamed and turned into a public asset by LIMITING the degree of interference by power in its activities (instead of eliminating it altogether).  If we must spend our childrens’ inheritance on measures intended to secure the same, we can best achieve that purpose by taming both greed and power equally.  The matrix of greed, power and fear provide us with a wide range of policy choices to bring them back into profitable balance  The first among these is fear.  Eliminate it via the plan I have outlined, and power may just have a chance to put greed back into harness.

Where politics is involved, I have strict standards of exposure to which I rigidly adhere.

DIRECT MAIL DURING PRIMARIES:  Democratic candidate submittals are trashed without review.  Republican offerings are scrutinized with great care.

TELEVISION ADS AT ANY TIME IN THE PROCESS:  Like most American males, the television’s remote control is my scepter.  It is always close at hand lest any political commercial threaten to disturb my Wa.  I can manually locate the “previous” button without recourse to illumination or sobriety.  I will usually watch each manifestation one time only for the purpose of validating my refusal to witness a second.

DEBATES:  I will watch these only if rendered immobile by physical or psychotropic means.  I already know who I will vote for; why should I waste an hour of my life on foregone conclusions when it could be spent more profitably watching Entertainment Tonight or playing mumbly-peg with my wife?

CONVENTIONS:  In solidarity with the major news organizations, I ignore them almost completely.  I will sometimes watch the first night of the Republican confab on C-SPAN for the sole purpose of witnessing some GOP stemwinder slander the Democratic Party.  But I have my standards:  If the act is carried out with wit and panache, I will persevere.  However, if the speaker resorts to axes and bludgeons, I regard it as too much firepower for so insignificant a subject.  In such cases. Emerill is always cooking something somewhere.

ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE:  Unless I have placed a wager on some particular outcome, I will watch a broadcast of “Beach Blanket Bingo” (Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon) instead.  Rather than subjecting my retinas to network maps and my tympanic membranes to expert analysis, I prefer to watch the next day’s roundup.  I have the same opinion of athletic events.  Why should I devote three hours of time watching a football game (the outcome of which I cannot affect and the drama of which I cannot appreciate), when I can more easily watch the final five minutes of ABC’s early morning broadcast and observe 100% of the previous day’s athletic artistry?

INAUGURATIONS:  C-SPAN is my political network of choice because it is poor.  Both C-SPAN networks are funded by the cable TV industry and anyone who has perused his or her cable bill will agree that charity is not a virtue highly regarded by that enterprise.  Therefore, C-SPAN is not encumbered with expensive commentators and vacuous talking-heads.  A few camera operators train their lenses on the dais and the crowd, and viewers are left to figure it all out for themselves.

But I don’t follow inauguration festivities in real-time anyway.  On Tuesday afternoon it competed with a Stevan Seagal epic on Encore which I had not seen a sufficient number of times to accurately recite every word of dialogue.  This was an easy choice.  Nevertheless, for a variety of stupid reasons I was ambulatory at 2:00 AM Wednesday and observed the ceremonies on my favorite channel sans celebrity chit-chat and bigfoot commentary.

Those who lack the proper historical and political context may be excused for seeing an inauguration as nothing more than a tedious parade, a boring melange of speeches and a passel of fiestas where partisan swells whoop it up with dignity – a contradiction in terms.  Even a party of hip, celebrity-infested Democrats celebrating the inauguration of the nation’s first black Chief Executive is nothing more than a bunch of middle-aged white folks dancing like … well … middle-aged white folks.

On January 20, 2009 Barak Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States.  He is the first African-American president in our nation’s history.  The president is black because, according to the race laws in force in America at the time of his birth (and silently observed to this day), he would be so designated even if no one other than his great-grandmother were black.  In America, the qualifications for “whiteness” are strict while the rules for “blackness” have always been overly-generous.  He swore the oath of office with his left hand resting on the Bible previously used for the same purpose by his fellow-Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln.  On the previous day the nation celebrated the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  A symbolic line was drawn from the murdered president who ended slavery in America, to the murdered civil rights crusader who demanded that America live up to her creed, to our first black president.  I now have to say the following lest some pinhead draw the wrong conclusion:  Pray God that our president does not share the same fate.

The inauguration of an American president is a potent ritual and it is vital to the preservation of the American system.  The ritual is important because humans always surround their most cherished activities with pomp and circumstance.  Baptism, briss, confirmation, bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, flags, war memorials, labor, law and mothers are granted special significance by the rituals we observe to honor them.  There are those who see in ritual nothing more than empty gestures that individuals who have little appreciation of their importance perform by rote.  That may be true, but the fact that those individuals know that they should cover their heart during the national anthem and uncover their heads during prayer is persuasive evidence that even the uninformed appreciate the power of ritual.

Inaugurating a president is not the same as installing the Program Chairman at the local Elks Club.  It is an event filled with significance, canopied with solemn protocol and vastly different from any similar event in the world.  Over a span of 220 years 43 men have participated in the peaceful transfer of executive power in the United States.  One man, holding the primary authority of government in our nation, willingly – even graciously – hands that awesome power to another man.  Some have had that power thrust upon them by their predecessor’s death, but no man has ever achieved it by force.

The United States is a relative newcomer in the community of nations, but it has the oldest government on earth.  During our time the rest of the world has marveled at the ease with which we take power from one group and willingly hand it to another for no other reason except that this is how we have always done it and we will tolerate no alternative.  It is nothing short of a miracle and we do it every four or eight years without breaking a sweat.

Not that this miracle is cheap; American’s will cough-up about $124 M for the p & c of president Obama’s inauguration.  That amount of money would feed an unknown number of people for an unspecified period of time.  It could be used to increase teacher salaries somewhere, clean up a toxic waste site or two, hire more police in several communities, or any number of Worthy Causes.  Instead, we spent it on parade security, grandstands, high school bands and an armored Cadillac for the Obama’s ride.

What a bargain!  The ritual of inauguration and the price we pay for it testifies to the fact that this event is important and we and the rest of the world should pay attention to it.  Yet again, the United States of America has transformed itself peacefully.  What we bought for $124 M is the installation of a new president with the suitable trappings and finery appropriate for him to assume that office properly and take his place as the leader of the world’s most powerful and awesome nation.  For less than it would cost to swap-out the front end of an aircraft carrier, we have assured ourselves and our friends that American policy can reverse itself overnight but the FACT of America does not change and our fundamental appreciation of peace, stability and liberty remains intact.

Our enemies see it all differently.  They lack the basic philosophical equipment to see America, as Lincoln put it, as “the last, best hope of mankind”.  Our foes in World War II regarded America as a weak, mongrelized, money-grubbing society.  Hitler believed we were fit only to make refrigerators and automobiles.  Well, the automobiles became over 300,000 combat aircraft and the refrigerators became rations, ordnance, uniforms, ships and thousands of other appliances of destruction.  The money-grubbers sacrificed some lucre for victory and the “mongrels” provided us all with an example to admire.  Black servicemen struggled and suffered humiliation for the “privilege” of risking their lives to defend the nation that treated them so shabbily.  German POW’s, traveling through the segregated south to prison camps, were allowed to eat in any restaurant along the way while their black, American guards were denied entry.  Last week I saw a sweatshirt which read, “Rosa sat so Martin could march, so Obama could run”.  Perhaps “Tuskegee flew” should be added at the beginning.

I disagree with president Obama on virtually all substantive issues of our day but I retain great hope for his success.  His path to the White House may have been strewn with the death, scandal and overconfidence of his chief opponents, but only Jimmy Carter could seize the prize based only on these.  President Obama may also possess a quality rare even among American presidents – leadership.  Leadership is the ability to direct masses of people with divergent interests in one direction.  Part of his perceived leadership is provided by the American people, who expressed in the late election their desire to be led somewhere – anywhere – but the direction we were headed.  The balance is provided by the president himself.  Like Ronald Reagan – the last president with the quality of leadership – Mr. Obama has a vision for America’s future.

The president also has charisma, but that is different from leadership.  John Kennedy oozed  charisma but couldn’t lead an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to pass a Civil Rights bill (largely because it was overwhelmingly Democratic).  Lyndon Johnson had zero charisma but, as Senate Majority Leader and during his first term as president, he was the veritable template for leadership.  LBJ led the Congress and the American people to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act before his general election confrontation with Barry Goldwater, handed the previously “Solid South” to the Republicans, and still kicked Goldwater’s butt in November, 1964.  Political science students still study Johnson’s leadership qualities because he has no peer.  President Obama seems to have this quality but it is a bit early to tell.

A few observers, mostly on conservative talk radio, mumbled some discontent about the elephant (or donkey) in the living room – race.  Wasn’t there just a bit too much emphasis placed on race when we are striving, in our slow, inept, but heartfelt way, to put race behind us?

Well … I could say that most Americans are proud of our nation’s diversity – until it moves in next door.  It’s fine and dandy when educated foreigners wait in line to seek opportunity in America but it’s not so fine and dandy when impoverished people who will never live long enough to reach the head of that line, scale a physical wall to achieve the same blessing.  We rail against immigrants who take domestic jobs from native-born Americans almost as loudly as we denounce them for taking the same jobs while remaining at home.  I’ve lived in the American West where the black population is small to non-existent, but it’s OK – there are plenty of American Indians to take up the slack.  Asian-Americans raise the entrepreneurship and scholarship bars so high that “regular Americans” can’t compete.  Yes indeedy, diversity is a fine thing and a vital component of American culture so long as it doesn’t get uppity.

Despite the individual prejudices of tens of millions of Americans directed toward various segments of our diverse population, the American political and cultural system has managed to elect as president a representative of the only immigrant group to arrive on our shores unwillingly.  Once again, the miracle that is America expresses itself almost despite ourselves.  America absorbs all who come into contact with her and makes a place for them.  On this occasion, the place is at the head of the table.

During the campaign, Michelle Obama was unjustly criticized for saying that “for the first time”, she was proud to be an American.  She should have waited until after the votes were counted and  the source of her pride had been made manifest.  The last time I saw black Americans stand in solidarity with their nation was on September 11, 2001.  Last week I saw it over and over again and nobody had to die.  I have often said that America is better, wiser and stronger than any of the men we have elected to lead us.  I can now sincerely state that America is also better, wiser and stronger than any one of us.

Last week the dunces driving America’s automobile industry down the washboard road to oblivion, left their corporate jets in Motown and drove hybrid cars to Washington, DC to once again plead their case for a bailout. Having seriously misjudged the symbolic (and, therefore, political) importance of modes of transportation, these transportation moguls were, for a while, the highest-paid drivers in America.

The peculiar character of lame-duck Washington made for a bizarre outcome. Democrats are known for their opposition to corporate welfare but they couldn’t shovel the swag fast enough. They agreed with the United Auto Workers union and the Detroit spittoons that forcing GM, Ford and Chrysler into bankruptcy would be a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions. Republicans, on the other hand, are supposed to love padding corporate nests but their opposition in the Senate brought the whole cause to naught. Politically, the issue was never the fate of auto company stockholders, aftermarket retailers, parts manufacturers or repair shops. The issue was the UAW, whose backside the Democrats need to kiss and the Republicans want to kick.

The union claims to represent 640,000 active members and 500,000 retirees in North America. Even the Cook County Democratic party cannot deliver that many votes in a national election and Democrats needed only to sense that tug on their nose rings to whip themselves into line. Of course, the union opposes using taxpayer dollars to enrich the plutocrats of Detroit as they continue to exploit the toiling masses who are getting poorer by the day, slaving away in inhuman factories to enrich the bloated …

Oops. Actually, the union leaders came with the executives to Washington (perhaps they did the driving). They know better than anyone that their membership will only vote for them and the Democrats so long as their union contracts allow them to live like Republicans. The dirty little secret behind the bailout is that a General Motors, Ford or Chrysler in bankruptcy will be allowed to void all its contracts, including the fattest one – with the UAW. The slab-tubbed execs of autoworld pretend to play nice and chummy with the UAW because they recognize that someone will need to pull the lifeboat’s oars should Uncle Harry Reid and Aunt Nancy Pelosi provide one. Rest assured that if the Republicans have their way, the autoworkers’ union will be the first to be heaved over the gunwales.

Aside from knee-jerk anti-union sentiment, why are the GOP’s standing tall in the tricycle saddle? The short, simple and true answer is that any proposed solution to the nation’s economic woes will bear a Democratic donkey stenciled on its side and killing it is more a matter of impulse than cool reasoning. Repulicans been snoring at the switch for years and the only solace they can take from the late electoral Cannae is that the Democrats will likely do no better. At least, not while the Republicans have anything to say about it.

Meanwhile, American Insurance Group (AIG) almost snuck in under the radar when they awarded 168 top executives “retention bonuses” in lieu of forbidden “performance bonuses”. It’s like this; “performance bonuses” would have required the executives to stroke a check to the Treasury because their performance sucks. AIG’s leadership has decided that it cannot regain its premier place in the American financial landscape without retaining the talent that brought them to the abyss in the first place. “Bob, your underwriting of lint-secured mortgages last year made a doughnut-hole of our financial performance. Since you’re the only guy in the firm who has a clear understanding of fuzzy derivatives, we want to make sure you don’t leave us and start a naval-vacuuming company. Here’s a million bucks courtesy of the taxpayers if you’ll promise to stay on and screw the pooch for at least another year.” AIG claims the bonuses were approved by a “compensation committee” which, to my knowledge, contained no taxpayers. In 2004 AIG’s stock price made it a company valued at 366 billion smackeroos. The United States government now has an 80% stake in a company that is currently valued at $5 billion for which we tapped our collective wallet to the tune of $173 billion proving, lest anyone doubt it, who the biggest fool really is. And for all that dough we still can’t get a peek at the payroll department’s books.

I can almost understand why Citibank is important to the nation’s financial substrate, but why is an insurance company so important? I only have two personal experiences with AIG. They provided workman’s compensation coverage for a state prison project I built in 2002. Every Thursday at 2:00 PM, their agent, Joe, would arrive on site and conduct an unannounced workplace safety audit. Frayed electrical cords, improperly secured safety harnesses and the use of flat-bottomed water cups instead of the required cone-shapes were duly noted and the superintendent would catch hell from the home office as a result. For the record, the site suffered one injury in two years; a roofer who sprained his ankle stepping on a 2 X 4. On the ground. AIG also has a billboard outside my town which boasts that the firm has no lizards or cavemen – just swell insurance. But GEICO has not requested taxpayer loot, despite the fact its name is an acronym for Government Employees Insurance COrporation.

I recall that the necessities of life consist of food, clothing and shelter and the Bible calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and provide shelter for the indigent. Gaining heaven does not, however, require us to place them in Cadillac Escalades, finance them at 110% and replace those vehicles should the poor, starving, naked drivers slam them into bridge abutments.

The construction industry can rightly lay claim to providing one of the three necessities mentioned above but, at least this time around, they will not get a nickel of federal largess. The Chrysler website claims that auto industry employment figures argue in favor of the bailout so I did some checking – something I usually don’t bother with. What follows is chock-a-block with numbers, percentages, financial comparisons and other trash, all of which argue against giving your childrens’ money to the auto industry.

According to the industry’s own numbers, 2.9 million souls work for them directly and another 2.5 or so million work for companies that depend on domestic auto factories and retail outlets. That’s 4% of the U.S. workforce. Chrysler does not give any details about who these 2.5 million dependents are or why they will perish if PT Cruisers vanish. I’m sure it includes the lads down at the brake shoe plant, but for all Chrysler is telling us, it might include the lumberjacks who chop down tire trees in Borneo for Firestone and workers in the vital Christmas-tree-shaped-auto-air-freshener industry.

In the not-so-salad-green year of 2008, however, the construction industry directly employees 7,069,000 people or 5.16% of the American non-agricultural workforce. The National Association of Home Builders does not track employment of “dependent industries” as the automakers are so careful to do, but it’s a sure bet that there are fewer job site trailer manufacturers, roach coach drivers and Jiffy-Jonnie cleaners. Twice as many people bang nails and pour concrete in America as weld bumpers in auto factories but no one (except NAHB) is hollering for a mooch-wad of taxpayer dough for that industry.

And what an industry! The residential sector is not just dead; its corpse has rotted and its relatives can’t remember where they buried it. Nevertheless, the remains managed to produce over $310,000,000,000 in shelter last year right here in America and that product will remain in America. Say what you will about the construction industry, the fact remains that you can build Ford Fiestas in Mexico but you can’t build condos in Mexico for yuppies in Chicago.

But you can get Mexicans to come to Chicago illegally and build them. AAAHHH!! Therein lies a hint as to why Detroit may get a boost but carpenters can pound sand instead of nails. Bear with me. About a year ago the AFL-CIO joined forces with civil libertarians and pro-wetback groups to successfully block any attempt by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to effectively verify the citizenship status of workers in America. Now, why would American Labor hinder an effort by the government to collar illegal aliens who, as they will quickly and loudly tell us, take jobs from American workers?

The American labor movement apparently believes that organizing amigos is the key to their future prospects. Stopping DHS and SSA from pinpointing illegal aliens is a token gesture in favor of what the labor bosses see as their future dues check-off constituency.

Wrap-up. The United States Government can actually bail out the auto industry because it is concentrated in three entities. The people who work in that industry are native-born, unionized, registered voters. On the other hand, the construction industry consists (or used to) of thousands of firms whose employees are not, for the most part, unionized and cannot vote because many of them are here illegally.

Most important, even government money will not create housing demand in a market with three years worth of vacant inventory. Neither will government money create new car demand that Honda, BMW, Kia and Toyota cannot easily fill. If no one is ready, willing and able to drive that Lincoln Navigator off the lot, what point is there in subsidizing the firm that keeps making the damn things?

The figures below are only for Ford and GM because Chrysler is privately held and doesn’t have to publicize its incompetence with numbers; merely with pleas for lucre. During the past five years, Ford stock has tumbled from a high of $16.00 to a low of $1.01 per share of common stock. During that same period, GM stock has gone from $53.00 to $4.25 per share. That’s more than $226,427,000,000 of paper value blown through the corporate catalytic converter and it doesn’t even produce pollution as a byproduct. The entire drug-rich nation of Columbia has a lower GDP than that. We are being told that mom, pop, uncle Dave and Rover will suffer a loss of retirement income in their pensions and mutual funds if the Big Three go tango uniform but that’s a shuck! Any mutual fund or pension fund manager who stood by with his thumb up his existential orifice while Ford upchucked 93% of its value is a moron second only to the bigger fools who purchased the shares from them on the downslide.

GM and Ford no longer exist as viable economic entities. Their stock value is less than the resale value of their plants, equipment, real estate, office supplies and whatever “goodwill” they may still possess. The same may be said of Chrysler without the benefit of hard numbers.

There’s an economic law whose name I can’t remember which holds that everyone benefits when people (and companies and nations) do only what they do best and allow others to do what they do best. Americans do not craft coconut-shell brassieres for sale to tourists because there are more palm trees in the South Pacific and the folks there provide all our novelty underwear needs at a very reasonable price. The arrangement allows us to look silly at parties and provides the islanders with a sustainable, if not lavish, livelihood. In due course, the islanders will accumulate sufficient capital to start producing clip-clop sound effects devices which yield more revenue. The crafting of coconut lingerie will move down the artisan food chain to chimpanzees in African rain forests.

But if we stop building cars, how will our economy survive in a competitive world market? We can answer that question by looking at what we did when it was no longer possible for us to produce ships, steel mills and locomotives in a ditto world market. What the American economy does best is think up new ideas. Most of the mechanical and electronic gimcrackery, the manufacturing of which is currently polluting the skies of Japan, Korea and China, was conceived of right here in the good old U. S. of A. We come up with great ideas like motorcars, computer chips, digital television and Wonderbras. Then we license their production in foreign parts (or China just steals them), and get back to the drawing board. Our two biggest categories of exports are agricultural products and entertainment. The world eats our food and dances to our tunes. Our students do poorly on standardized tests compared to children elsewhere because ours is not a culture that emphasizes finding the correct round hole for the proper round peg. Instead, we invent omni-dimensional pegs that can fit into a variety of holes and hire Sri Lankans to make them for us.

The industrial cycle in America has passed beyond making cars, just as it previously passed beyond making ships, steel and boom boxes. Other countries – mostly Asian – have taken our place in these industries because they can do it better and cheaper. They can build Kia’s in Seoul, haul them across the wide Pacific, put them on trains to Hackensack and still sell them for less than a Ford Focus. Before long, Asians will have to find something else to do because South Americans, Africans and, for all we know, Antarctic penguins will be welding cars and smelting pig iron.

We can also finance and insure stuff around the world – or we could until recently. So maybe there’s some justification for giving Junior’s college fund to Citibank and AIG – prime the pump, so to speak, of sectors better-suited to our capabilities and future. Mark Twain understood that thinking and managing were better ways of earning a living than working and doing. Global finance and insurance are the former while assembling cars nobody wants to buy is the latter.

Remember how we sniggered when the new Russian government insisted on subsidizing failed, inefficient former state enterprises of the USSR? The Russkis were trying to keep people employed making clothes people couldn’t wear, cars that wouldn’t run and apartments no one could live in. We lectured them on what a mistake it was to cram capital into places, people and factories that couldn’t use them effectively. When allowed to flow freely, capital will always seek the best return but getting the flow where it’s needed most frequently involves leaving some areas high and dry while others get swamped in a gullywasher. Nevertheless, in the long run (that place where we all end up being), it’s still the best way to achieve prosperity.

History is made! For the first time since 1961, small children will live at the White House. Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but neither was really a child anymore, and neither was (at the time, at least), particularly photogenic. Some social scientist somewhere should examine why three of the last four Democrats elected to the office of president have had children young enough to live at home while zero of five Republican presidents serving during the same period have had any. Perhaps it says something about the seasoned nature of GOP presidents or the youthful exuberance of Democratic presidents.

Or not.

I wonder if the Obama’s choice of educational facilities for their tots will generate the kind of media attention afforded the previous Democratic incumbent’s decision. Some may recall that the Clintons set themselves up for considerable criticism when they – stalwart supporters of the public education movement – nevertheless decided to send their daughter to a toney private school rather than enroll her in the D.C. public school nearby. My guess is that the Secret Service was instrumental in this politically-charged decision. For the record, Amy Carter went to public schools so the Secret Service excuse may not be valid.

Given that I rigidly adhere to a policy of remaining blissfully uninformed about matters of public policy, I am free to roam where the responsible fear to tread. It is said by many commentators – including me – that Mr. Obama is the first African-American elected to the White House. But, in fact, the president-elect is only half-black given that his mother is Caucasian. How utterly fitting it is that the United States; a nation that has struggled with race relations from its founding, butchered 600,000 of its citizens to end slavery and disgraced itself with another 100 years of Jim Crow should, in 2008, effect a compromise by electing the junior Senator from Abraham Lincoln’s home state.

President Bush will join his father as a man whose political fortunes rose with international crises and dropped with economic ones. The economy felled Bush Sr. and did likewise to the Republicans in 2008. More on that anon.

“President-elect” is becoming an office unto itself. The stock market rose almost 500 points when the P-E’s choice for Treasury Secretary was leaked. Some sage at NPR pointed out that the current financial crisis is so profound that the P-E’s understandable desire to maintain a low profile during the transition had to yield to the market’s equally-understandable desire for some signal of his intentions. The market consensus seemed to be that any signal other than the incumbent’s behavior was positive, even if the signal was “more of what the incumbent has been doing”. And Obama back-peddled on his pledge to drive a stake into the Bush tax cuts – announcing his intention to allow them to die a natural death in 2011 instead. My guess is that the tax cut will enjoy the same fate as any other un-staked vampire.

The Feds are pumping billions and, perhaps, trillions of dollars into resuscitating the economy. Soon, dollars will be scratch-pads on international monetary markets.

Stupidity abounds. Detroit automakers brought tin cups to Washington in corporate jets. These are the descendants of the wooden-heads of the ’70’s, intent on completing the destruction of the American auto industry their predecessors inaugurated. Thirty years ago they said “Give ‘em fins, V-8’s, lots of steel and 8-track tape players”. Today’s morons have had to jettison the 8-tracks only because CD technology is predominant. Behemoth trucks for accountants and Humvees for soccer moms rolled off Detroit’s assembly lines right up until the moment gasoline mysteriously became scarce. The auto execs stood around with that “who cut the cheese?” look on their pusses and wondered how the price of crude could go from $43.00 a barrel to $143.00 and back to $50.00 despite the fact that the inscrutable Chi-coms were still consuming gas that rightfully belonged in American tanks. These “captains of industry” should be busted down to “bilgewater” in due course.

Citibank wallowed in the slops of the mortgage boom and then lost 97% of its share value in six months. If Citibank is so central to the American financial system that its collapse will endanger bums cadging quarters on Peachtree Street, perhaps we should appoint it the successor to the Federal Reserve and replace the FDIC with AIG insurance. At least then we might be able to go to hell in a Gulfstream IV instead of a handbasket.

If we’re all going to have to suffer an economic downturn and subject our progeny to a future of penury, the least we should be able to get out of it is a witch-burning. I’ll stack the first fagots by suggesting that every Republican officeholder above the level of county surveyor be consigned to the stake. In Congress and the White House they were all so busy congratulating themselves on the fact that millions were achieving the American Dream of home ownership, they failed to notice that no recently-minted wealth stood behind any of it. Mortgage lenders collected huge fees by including them in their clients’ loans and, thus, pay “no closing costs”. A borrower’s ability to re-pay the loan was determined by having an internal body temperature of 98.6 degrees or thereabouts and a level of language and math skills equal to contemporary American high school students. These loans to idiots were then “bundled” and shipped off to other idiots – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which behaved like all “public corporations” by slurping them up and fobbing them off to the ripe sucks of Wall Street. Everybody made money. Everyone was happy. There seemed to be no lack of bigger fools.

4.3%, interest-only sub-prime teaser rates blossomed into 9.5%-plus-your-first-born-child-(and, by the way, you’re upside-down on your mortgage) man-killers. Unlike all other Ponzi schemes, those who got into the game early (the borrowers) lost their shirts and everything else, while those at the tail end got bonuses and taxpayer dough. Lucky borrowers were able to sell their homes and only had to stroke a check to their mortgage company for the privilege.

My home state of Georgia has examples aplenty of greed and stupidity. In 2003 the GOP found itself in possession of the Governor’s mansion and both houses of the Legislature for the first time in the state’s history. Mortgage industry lobbyists met with the leadership and hinted that a measure passed in the previous Democratically-controlled Legislative session and signed by the now-defeated Democrat incumbent should be deep-sixed. The law required that mortgage lenders do unpleasant things like actually seek documentation of a borrower’s ability to take on a loan. The prospect of campaign contributions inspired the incoming Republicans to gut the law and allow loans for houses to be awarded on roughly the same basis as payday loans (“your job is your credit!”). Then, the Republican solons sat like toilets with their lids up as the contributions poured in. *

My own Representative in Congress stuffed himself into an improbable laissez-faire sack and announced that he was opposed to the initial bailout because it allowed financial Bozos to retain their golden parachutes. He was joined by others of like-mind and the initial proposal was defeated which caused the Dow to lose a squintillion or so points the next day and threaten the financial stability of the entire planet. Worldwide financial markets have been rising and falling (mostly falling) like the graph on an electrocardiograph to this day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of principle, but we’re at least 80 years beyond the day when someone in government could piously state that the “business of America is business” and be taken seriously. I wrote the chump a letter and predicted just the kind of voter response as took place on November 4th.

And the elections are not even over. As of December 11, the results in Minnesota are incomplete. A Florida-style recount is taking place to determine if incumbent Republican Norm Coleman will retain his seat against the challenge of Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate Al Franken. Franken used to be a “liberal humorist” but his humor is akin to that of middle-aged teetotaler ladies with pinched faces, square glasses and fixed opinions on demon rum. Anything that makes them laugh should strike horror in the hearts of decent people.

Georgia held a runoff election on December 2nd. Incumbent Saxby Chambliss successfully defended his seat against Democrat Jim Martin. In the general election contest, Martin complained that Chambliss supported the first corporate bail-out. In the runoff, he groused because Chambliss won’t support the second one. Martin needs to make up his mind about this. I like Chambliss because he supports the FairTax, but his presence in the next Congress will do nothing to advance that idea in a Senate with 58 – 59 Democrats.

What can we expect with the Democrats in control of all the whistles and bells for the first time in fifteen years? Not much. For one thing, there’s no money. It was all shipped off in boxcar lots to stave off disaster for everyone except foreclosed homeowners – many of whom left their homes with nothing more than what they could stuff in the minivan. There are a half-dozen or so single-room, no-deposit transient lodges in my town and their parking lots are crammed with late-model vans and SUV’s. These are not the vehicles of crackheads and welfare queens.

We should see a temporary diminution of violence in Iraq. Continued American vigilance as we withdraw our forces over the next eighteen months will be augmented by ammunition conservation on the part of Sunni and Shia’h contestants stocking up for the coming bloodbath. The conflict in Afghanistan will continue because we are there to liberate the Afghans from the Taliban, support our ally Pakistan and hunt down Osama bin-Laden. The Democrats will be no more successful in achieving these goals than were the Republicans.

The balance of America’s foreign policy will be outsourced to the United Nations.

But Republicans have no grounds for either anger or fear. Consider the sacred principles which the GOP has manfully talked about since 1980 and tell me if they actually DID anything to achieve them. Is government smaller? No. Is the deficit tamed? No. Is abortion banned? No. Are public school students mumbling bureaucrat-written prayers? No. Is Creationism taught therein? No. Has the drug “problem” been removed? No. Have Americans retrieved their sacred right to own assault weapons? No. Is government less-involved in the market? No. Are we drilling for oil in Alaska or Florida? No.

Republicans have failed because they believed that the conflict was political. It is not. It is cultural. Sixties-era radicals have long held tenure in America’s universities. The Fox News Network is no match for CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. Conservatives used to have ideas but that ended when the American Spectator decided in the ’90’s that Troopergate, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky and Hillary were more important.

Only a profound and sustained cultural and intellectual campaign will convince Americans that security must come from government but prosperity never can. When the sum of human strivings are distilled from paleolithic clans to the California gay marriage ban, what can be discerned is that those who love to exercise power over their fellows have always been a threat and remain so today. Nobody can expect to overcome 6,000 years of human history in one election cycle.

* This wonderful image is from P. J. O’Rourke’s book Parliament Of Whores. I swiped it so that I could use this space to wish him a speedy and complete recovery.

(With an Added Bonus Regarding Negative Politics)

What follows is an excerpt from a book I sort-of published in the mid-1990’s.  By “sort of”, I mean that it was rejected by some of the finest publishing houses in America because it was too long (560 pages) and had a limited potential market.  The Republican National Committee agreed to take it off our hands (there was a co-author whose name is not revealed to protect his reputation) and we were paid the equivalent of lunch money for each disk sold to potential GOP candidates across the country.

From “In the Trenches” published by Ripon Press.

Successful attacking involves the judicious use of logical fallacies.  Crafty attackers never lie and they never spread vicious rumors.  Rather, they engage in what we call shabby honesty.  … It all depends on how shabby you want to be and the depth of shabbiness tolerated by your electorate.  This varies from region to region.

If you are not willing to be illogical (not immoral, mind you), you’re in the wrong game and public office will forever elude you.  Very few contests feature one candidate who is completely out of character with his district because politically astute people are not, generally, boneheads.

Your disagreements with your opponent will likely be at the margin and political reality demands that you do everything you can to sharpen, highlight, and throw into stark relief those disagreements.  Since your opponent will not oblige you by being a wacko, it is up to you to make him look like a sort-of wacko anyway.  The use of logical fallacies accomplishes this goal.  We call it “shabby honesty” because we abhor attempts to sugarcoat what it is we are about.  If your morals do not permit your indulgence in shabby honesty, we understand.

The most popular fallacy for achieving shabby honesty is the slippery slope argument.  Slippery slopes are hard to detect, frequently true and very convincing.  They are fallacious because they seek to infer an irresistible and causal link between some current horror and projected horrors to follow.  When Atlantic City was debating legal casino gambling, opponents declared that approval would open their fair city to the influence of organized crime.  This argument was fallacious on two counts.  First, it assumed that organized crime was not already in the city, which was ludicrous.  Second, it sought to convince voters that organized crime was caused by legal gambling — a convincing but erroneous argument.  Slippery slope arguments are used to carry your enemy’s issue position to its (il)logical conclusion.

The false choice fallacy is also useful because it simultaneously bolsters your own position while trashing that of the enemy.  “I believe that if we don’t double the number of police cars in our city, crime will mushroom out of control and we’ll be forced to remain behind locked doors (slippery slope added for good measure).”  The choice is false because it assumes, fallaciously, that only two alternatives exist and ignores the fact that many other possible solutions to the problem of crime can be crafted.

One of the most frequently used routes on the path to shabby honesty is the straw man argument.  This fallacy consists of taking your opponent’s views and misrepresenting them slightly.  It is dishonest.  Use it only under the most extreme circumstances because it rarely works.

Oddly, voters don’t get terribly exercised over shabby honesty when they recognize it, passing it off with “Oh, that’s just politics-as-usual.”  We have frequently belittled voters in these pages but they still have the ability to sort out arrant trash in political discourse.  That’s why straw man arguments, if carried to ludicrous ends, will fail.  Slippery slope and false choice attacks are preferred, but only if they are limited to mild extensions of what the opponent really said.  For instance, if the foe has come out in favor of building a new waste treatment plant, you can attack him by calling him a supporter of pork and still be plausible.  If he tries to accuse you of wanting to poison the drinking water of small children, voters will gaze heavenward in disgust.

On the other side of the coin, never permit the tiniest error to mar your own printed or spoken statements.  We have been privileged to sit among some of the most ferocious political killers the world has ever known but none of them would allow the slightest falsehood to issue from their midst.  Within the generous confines of shabby honesty may be found a wealth of weasel words and logical extensions.  Never lie or misquote your opponent because that gives him a large stick with which to beat you about the head and shoulders.

With [a sufficient] quantity of fat in the fire, the media — The Great Mentioner — will elevate your race from “listless” to “heating up” or, better still, to “nasty”.  Even Undecideds will begin to take notice and choose up sides.  Do you think it is a pity that such tactics are necessary to gain press attention?  Wouldn’t it be better if campaigns were conducted on a loftier (or at least less sordid) plane?  Isn’t democracy ill-served when politicians pander so slavishly to that which is meanest in the human spirit?

The answer to all those questions is twofold:  Yes; and so what?

What line of work are you in, after all?  When you signed up to be a candidate, were you under the impression that it would be tea parties and ice cream sociables throughout?  Did not some small portion of your mind warn you that the going might get a little rough?  If it did, you probably thought that you had to be prepared to fend off attacks and never gave a thought to the possibility that you might have to launch them yourself.  My, my, my; what a dirty business politics is.  No wonder people hate it.

Give us a break!  We contend that attack tactics are not only justified by the terms of battle — they are a moral obligation as well.

Somewhere on your list of reasons for seeking office is the hint that you are better able to discharge the office’s duties than your opponent.  You are obliged to share that conviction with voters because to do otherwise would be a disservice to them.  Touting your own worthiness is one way of accomplishing this goal, but it works better if you juxtapose your virtues with the opponent’s failings.  The former method is too subtle and voters often miss subtlety.

We had a client once who was opposing another newcomer for an open seat.  The county was quietly investigating the opponent’s supporters for influence peddling and we were privy to all the details.  It looked like the investigation would not be completed until after the election and our candidate was running behind.  We urged him to reveal the investigation and attack the opponent — something he was morally reluctant to do.  We pointed out that her victory would place into high office a person who was likely in the pocket of unsavory people and that he had an ethical requirement to let voters know what was going on.  He refused.  When the woman was elected, she spent four years doing nothing for her constituents because the investigation resulted in jail terms for some of her supporters.  So tainted was she by their misdeeds that she served only one ineffective term.  The true victims of our client’s refusal to attack were the district’s constituents.

We have little patience with political hand-wringers and editorial bedwetters who weep over the sorry state of political discourse in contemporary America.  Candidates and consultants are held responsible by these misguided do-gooders, mainly because we are easy targets and no one wants to tell the truth — which is that voters demand negative politics.  We are not here to comfort fools with pious words about the sanctity of the process or the collective wisdom of voters.  Here are some unvarnished truths:

• American politics has always been negative and always will be.
• If politics were conducted with the dignity of a Paris art salon, voters would never do their duty.  We are reminded of the story of the farmer whose soft-hearted approach to training mules was known far and wide.  When a visitor asked for a demonstration, the farmer’s first act was to clobber the poor beast with a plank.  “I thought you believed that mules should be trained with kindness”, the shocked visitor said.  “Quite right”, responded the farmer, “But first, you have to get their attention.”  Nothing gets a voter’s attention like a verbal slugfest.
• Many people believe that negative politics is the cause of low voter turnout.  In fact, negative politics has kept turnout from falling to even lower levels.  Non-voters say they avoid discharging their civic obligation because of “dirty politics” and the presence of two evils on the ballot, but most of them are fibbing.
• The people who deplore negative campaigning are of two types.  The first is usually a newspaper writer who mistakenly believes that voters are just as fascinated with political issues as he is.  They are not.  75% of the American people are bored silly by the whole thing.  The second type is the doe-eyed reformer who believes that the Biblical injunction “Come, let us reason together” applies regardless of whether your opponent is a reasonable man with different views or a downright thug with no respect for people’s rights and privileges.
• Please don’t compare our politics with the saintly methods used elsewhere.  This is America, for heaven’s sake.  This is the place where two men would stand in the middle of a western street and play “fastdraw”, the object of which was to kill the opponent.  We tolerate a crime rate that is several orders of magnitude higher than any other nation having a working government.  Moderation is alien to our national character — we thrive on extremes and would rather select from Right and Wrong than learn about complicated policy alternatives.
• Politicians and their advisors will never change the attitudes of voters in this regard because we are required to appeal to voters on their terms, not ours. Politicians are no more responsible for the low estate of public debate than Delta Airlines is for cloudy skies.  Both have to operate in the area nature has assigned.
• Americans do grow weary of the constant bickering today, just as they wearied of it when Andrew Jackson was President.  But we are the most successful free nation in the history of the planet.  America has one of the oldest governments in the world, largely because we weed out the political Milquetoasts early in the process and fight each other with harsh words rather than bullets (false choice).
• Those who believe that we are going to hell in a handbasket because candidates behave in an ungentlemanly fashion, should get off their couch-crenilated keesters and run for office themselves.  Let them find out first-hand how easy it is to bore a voter and how infinitely preferable it is to arouse him instead.  If we are pursuing bad policies, it is not because the process is flawed, it is because voters frequently want to have their cake and eat it too.  To believe otherwise is worse than shooting the messenger — it’s shooting the piece of paper the message is written on.

Pant, pant, pant.

Politics does not demand of her practitioners that they shed their virtue as a price of entry.  If a politician behaves like a vicious, snarling beast it is not because he is a politician, but, rather, because he is a vicious, snarling beast and has always been one.  Mississippi’s late (and unlamented) Senator Bilbo was a racist tub-thumper without elected peer, not because politics forced him to, but because he was a genuinely despicable human being.

Here’s an old joke most of us have heard:

Q:    How can you tell when politicians are lying?
A:    Their lips are moving.

Here’s not-a-joke that most people don’t know:

Q:    Why do politicians lie?
A:    Because voters will not tolerate truth from politicians.

Bear with me as I take a somewhat roundabout way of demonstrating my point.

While it may not enjoy the status of a logical fallacy, it is, nevertheless, a case of faulty reasoning to assume that other people, most people or any people view the world as you do and share your goals and ambitions.  This was driven home to me in the late 1970’s when I offered a keypunch operator (those younger than 40 may have to look up this term) an opportunity for professional advancement.  Her response was that she had quit her previous job because they forced her to leave keypunching and do something else.  I realized that, simply because I was ambitious and regarded keypunching as the worst job on the entire planet, it did not follow that my employee saw things as I did.

Along the same line, during my 22-year career as a political consultant, I learned how to disassociate myself from reality and view the political world as most voters see it.

• It’s boring.  On rare occasions voters perceive that their personal hides may be at stake in the outcome of an election (1932 – Hoover v Roosevelt and 2008 are strong contenders) but our system of government is so successful that this level of fear is rare.
• It’s time-consuming.  Politics forces people to attend to matters that require something more than room-temperature IQ’s and compels them to spend precious time away from their childrens’ educations, professional advancement, domestic harmony and re-runs of The Survivor.  Most voters perceive this investment in Time as a fairly comprehensive waste of same.  I am known as a champion of this attitude and have frequently advised people that no election is as important as their child’s parent-teacher conference.  I agree with the sentiment expressed by the late Eugene McCarthy, “Being good at politics is like being good at football:  you have to be smart enough to do it well, and dumb enough to think it’s important”.
• It doesn’t matter.  The relative lack of participation in elections is evidence that most people simply aren’t interested and are sufficiently secure that they can afford to ignore it.  After all, when was the last time someone was executed for voting for the wrong person?  At the other extreme, they feel a sense of helplessness so profound that participation in elections seems, to them, an utter waste of time.  If asked to list what is personally important to most Americans, politics would probably rank below any professional sports venue, the martial woes of Brad Pitt and the threat of a new Wall-Mart in their community.

When a politician gussies himself up for an engagement with his particular polity, the primary rule in force is that American voters select AGAINST politicians.  Therefore, every  time he opens his mouth and allows a fixed opinion to fall out, he is providing some segment of the electorate with sufficient reason to vote for the other guy.  He can do nothing himself to retrieve the lost votes; the best he can hope for is that his opponent will utter something even more offensive and hand them back.  That’s why your average, disconnected voter perceives elections as the lesser of two evils.  The fact of the matter is that the only person with whom he is in 100% agreement is himself and he isn’t running.

I never attempted to tell my candidate clients what their opinion on various issues should be – that would be pointless and offensive.  Instead, I totted-up the “political cost” of any given position.  Most of them were local candidates and grappled with heart-stoppers like potholes, traffic congestion, property taxes, local crime, land use, education and scandal.  If my client pronounced herself fully in support of as much graft and scandal as possible, I could inform her that 100% of the electorate disagreed with her and would likely support our opponent.  (Nevertheless, I know of one candidate who was convicted of stealing from a church charity fund and still received 17% of the primary vote.)

Be patient a bit longer.  Public opinion polls frequently “kitchen test” issue positions to determine the electorates’ collective opinion.  Here is another truism of politics:  As the split among voters on a particular issue approaches 50 : 50, the usefulness of that issue diminishes proportionally because equal numbers of voters are alike attracted and disaffected by any given opinion.  Likewise, as the split approaches 0 : 100, its usefulness diminishes because only a knothead would advocate something that the vast majority of the electorate condemns.  The most useful issues split the electorate somewhere between 60 : 40 and 75 : 25 and astute candidates must be on the high end to succeed.

One more building block.  Political professionals use models of voter behavior much as economists model economic behavior.  The models are useless in any attempt to predict the vote of any individual voter, but they are quite useful in predicting the behavior of a mass of voters.  Like most social science models, they utilize absolutes; thus, the capitalist model in economics assumes perfect price knowledge for both buyers and sellers.  This does not exist in the real world, but its presence in the model serves to eliminate those annoying instances of individual idiocy (or wisdom) which render models less useful.  Part of the political model assumes that voters want everything that government can provide and wish to pay nothing for it.  This applies to all political matters, regardless of monetary cost.  Voters want perfect roads at no cost.  They want to maintain legal abortion without the unpleasant reality of abortion.  Murderers must be executed without anyone actually pulling the switch.  Welfare, the rescue of abducted children, drug abuse elimination and national health care must be achieved without dipping into any particular voter’s wallet.

The calculus of the matter works like this:  If politician A tells voter B that objective C cannot be achieved without a pound of flesh from taxpayer D (or B), then politician A is toast.  On the other hand, if politician X tells voters that objective Y can be achieved at a price of Z(ero), he will sail on to electoral victory.  This is a useful model – not a perfect description.  It is also a lie – one that voters respond to with votes.

Voters, collectively, will not tolerate truth from politicians.  Voters want to be told sweet, sweet lies.  Voters were gung-ho about kicking Saddam Hussein out of Iraq until they realized that American lives would have to be spent in the effort and, perhaps, for a considerable time going forward.  They like low interest rates when they borrow money but loathe them when they live on fixed incomes.  Americans want traffic safety but cannot abide traffic signal cameras that photograph them when they run one.  We want absolute security and absolute privacy; medications that are 100% guaranteed, gold-plated and copper-bottomed at a price of less than $1.00 per dozen;  a legal system that incarcerates all actual and potential felons without offending any of them or inconveniencing any of us.  We want to drive SUVs, pay less than $2.00 per gallon to gas them up and breathe pristine-pure air.  We want to increase spending on (take your pick) the military, education, social welfare, the environment, health care, senior citizens, young people, the middle class, the poor, everyone, without increasing taxes or reducing funds for any of the others.

As a mass, voters are idiots and politicians rightfully treat them as such.  They will not deal with you as adults until you reason and behave as adults.  Until then, the lies will continue because the market (spelled Y-O-U) demand them.

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale confronted incumbent Republican Ronald Reagan.  Mondale said that, if elected, he would raise taxes to counter the staggering deficits of Reagan.  He also said that Reagan would raise taxes but was not sufficiently honest to tell voters so during the campaign.  Mondale suffered the worst defeat of any Democratic candidate in history and Reagan raised taxes in his second administration.

American voters are suckers.  Politicians will continue to lie until you express (through actual ballots – not opinion polls)  a desire to behave rationally.  How we do it is detailed in part two of this essay.  It is ridiculously simple and cost-effective.

Everyone is talking about the undecided voter. As I write this, I’m watching a line graph on CNN track the impressions of “uncommitted Ohio voters.”

I’m pretty sure my father has already made this point, but I’ll reiterate: if you don’t know who you’re going to vote for by now, you don’t possess enough philosophical sophistication to justify participation in the democratic process.

I cite Family Guy to make my point: