But for any serious person interested in real solutions, the debates proved largely to be empty, save for one issue. I thought that on the issue of abortion, Obama made a lucid argument including one of reaching for common ground between the two camps. He put the issue where it lies, on the choice of a woman. McCain seemed to attack Obama than make a lucid argument on why he opposed abortion. I also appreciated Obama for not digging into McCain’s record of supporting abortion before he realized that he needed to court the Christian Right. If anything, McCain’s negativity was in sharp relief today. And ugly it was.
But on issue after issue, the debates have largely been shallow, even on issues that seem hardly worth debating. For example, Obama is now in favor of offshore drilling after rejecting it initially. Analysts largely agree that offshore drilling would barely impact gas prices. Both candidates appear to be more certain than any intelligent man could be under similar circumstances. People know that this is theater, that questions will be asked, well rehearsed answers will be given, answers that never touch the core of the problem. They don’t even begin to question the questions. It sometimes seems that we’re all party to this charade, that no one can stand up and call this emperor naked. I can only hope that Obama will not indulge in some of these plans.
McCain continued his shocking irresponsibility when asked about Sarah Palin. He called her a “role model to women and reformers all over America”. I was initially shocked that the Republican base was so enthralled with her. Even after an official report found her guilty of abusing power, she announced that the report vindicated her. Was there no person in the Republican camp with a sense of shame, I wondered ? Had partisanship reached such heights that we could not even look at someone like Sarah Palin and be afraid of her possible presidency ? Happily, I found that a few are denouncing her candidacy. Christopher Buckley, the son of the famous, erudite conservative, William Buckley, in an article titled “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama” writes: “And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?”. He also writes about an op-ed piece by a conservative colleague of his at National Review Online, Kathleen Parker, who said that “Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that”. David Brooks, the conservative columnist for NY Times called her a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”. Christopher Hitchens, a liberal turned war hawk/conservative and a columnist at the progressive weekly, The Nation, known for his scathing and well-argued pieces, wrote:
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
I’m glad to see that there is still some semblance of sense amongst the conservative base, that all is not lost.
In many places where communists have come to power, they have chosen to wipe out the educated class in the name of the proletariat. I’m aware of this happening at least in China and in Cambodia. This has also happened under the right wing governments in South America, I believe. The Republican Party, personified in the form of Sarah Palin, has rejected the educated, the erudite in increasingly loud voices. This seems a dangerous trend to me, a rejection of those people who are most capable of making this country as great as the Republicans claim it to be. David Brooks writes about the same trend in a column in NYT. He writes:
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
…
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
It is the glorification of this attitude, culminating in the ascent of Sarah Palin as a VP nominee, that makes me worried. The coming years are not going to be easy, with global warming, vanishing topsoil, diminishing water supplies and other major resource constraints. When that time comes, xenophobia will increase as will a desire for homogenity. And the very attitudes being cultivated by the Republican Party are a step in that direction.
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