THE NATIONAL ELECTION
Anyone who studies politics, given a few minutes to ponder, can tell you that there are two types of voter. One kind are people who follow the sport closely and elect candidates based on their policies. They favor candidates who favor their own political philosophy. A second kind, elect candidates based on their personality, favoring candidates they “like”, often without studying what the person deeply believes. But the majority of people have a set of favored political beliefs and vote based on those beliefs, unless the candidate who shares those beliefs comes across as arrogant, obsessed, unintelligent or worse, deceitful. Then this majority joins with the personality voters. In the last election, which should have been a bellwether election for conservatives, the Republicans learned that in most districts they need to reach the majority of people in the middle with likable candidates. If they run on views that the public does not believe, they usually lose.
THE EXTREMES ON BOTH SIDES
The far left of the Democratic Party and the right of the Republican party are the catalysts for change. I know that most of us favor the middle and see the extremes as unreasonable. But I believe that the famous playwright and political activist, George Bernard Shaw was on to something when he pointed out, “The reasonable man adapts his life to the world around him. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
THE MIDDLE GROUND
Those who are not on the extreme edge of both parties, are the ones who will select the policies of what some see as the extremes and modify them and gather support for them and put them into legislation that can pass. This assures there is always movement in the country; slow, one degree at a time rather than lurches. Quantum sudden shifts are almost always reversed because they are too disruptive to our lives.
THE FIFTEEN ROUNDS OF VOTING FOR SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE
It astounds me that so many who advocate for compromise found the rough and tumble give and take of the recent speaker election a bad thing. The give and take of this process is exactly what all politics looked like back when we actually found a way to mold strong opinions into something that we could agree with. Progress often pushes us out of our comfort zone.
THE AWAKENING TO THE MEDIA
I listened to an NPR reporter this morning who was interviewing a black Baptist minister in Atlanta. The subject was the police brutalizing of a black motorist. The minister’s disgust at what had happened was palatable and justified. I couldn’t agree with his political philosophy of universal victimhood but his concerns about the national media invading Atlanta and stirring the pot in an already volatile situation mirrored the emotions of a lot of conservatives who see the media turning every problem into a crisis. Feeding fear and anger to improve media ratings has become a terrible danger to our nation. Let’s see who in the media figures this out first.
BONUS: If you recently became WOKE, welcome. Most of us have been AWAKE all along.