Blogging about political things taxes my brain. Forrest Gump was pretty slow too, but he knew some things. “I’m not a smart man… but I know what love is.” Some of the smartest people don’t know what love is.
So I was listening to Sen Biden’s speech a little bit on NPR last week, and feeling a lot more sympathy for the Dems because they care about the unfortunate people: people who are worried about paying for the gas to heat up their homes in the winter, who are worried about paying for their basic necessities because the cost of living keeps going up but not their wages. Yeah, what about those people!? What do Republicans have to say about them? But wait. What about people like my parents who do pretty well, but are taxed like crazy and pay 1000s of dollars each year in tolls to drive on the roads that get them to work where they make money to pay taxes to support people Democrats call the disadvantaged? WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan wrote a great article that sums up the differences between the Republican and Democratic parties here (August 28, 2008, WSJ Opinion Journal). Here is the part I’m referring to specifically:
“Michelle Obama’s speech was solid, but not a home run. First impression: She is so beautiful. Beautifully dressed, beautifully groomed, confident, smiling, a compelling person. But her speech seemed to me more the speech of a candidate, and not a candidate’s spouse. It was full of problems and issues. I continue to be of the Denis Thatcher School of Political Spouses: Let the candidate do the seriousness of the issues, you do the excellence of the candidate. This is old fashioned but nonetheless I think still applicable. It has made Laura Bush (with a few forays into relatively anodyne policy questions) the most popular First Lady in modern American political history. Another problem with the Michelle speech. In order to paint both her professional life and her husband’s, and in order to communicate what she feels is his singular compassion, she had to paint an America that is darker, sadder, grimmer, than most Americans experience their country to be. And this of course is an incomplete picture, an incorrectly weighted picture. Sadness and struggle are part of life, but so are guts and verve and achievement and success and hardiness and…triumph. Democrats always get this wrong. Republicans get it wrong too, but in a different way.
Democrats in the end speak most of, and seem to hold the most sympathy for, the beset-upon single mother without medical coverage for her children, and the soldier back from the war who needs more help with post-traumatic stress disorder. They express the most sympathy for the needy, the yearning, the marginalized and unwell. For those, in short, who need more help from the government, meaning from the government’s treasury, meaning the money got from taxpayers.
Who happen, also, to be a generally beset-upon group.
Democrats show little expressed sympathy for those who work to make the money the government taxes to help the beset-upon mother and the soldier and the kids. They express little sympathy for the middle-aged woman who owns a small dry cleaner and employs six people and is, actually, day to day, stressed and depressed from the burden of state, local and federal taxes, and regulations, and lawsuits, and meetings with the accountant, and complaints as to insufficient or incorrect efforts to meet guidelines regarding various employee/employer rules and regulations. At Republican conventions they express sympathy for this woman, as they do for those who are entrepreneurial, who start businesses and create jobs and build things. Republicans have, that is, sympathy for taxpayers. But they don’t dwell all that much, or show much expressed sympathy for, the sick mother with the uninsured kids, and the soldier with the shot nerves.
Neither party ever gets it quite right, the balance between the taxed and the needy, the suffering of one sort and the suffering of another. You might say that in this both parties are equally cold and equally warm, only to two different classes of citizens.”
But here is what bothers me about Obama and Democrats and really anyone that looks to the government for answers: how do you know the difference between someone who has had bad stuff happen to them, and someone who has made dumb choices? Because those people should be getting different responses from the government. Someone who is truly destitute because her husband died and he was the breadwinner and she has children to feed should have help that is different than someone who overextended themselves because they had to have a nice house, a nice car, a cell phone with the unlimited text messaging plan, cable or satellite tv, and nice vacations, or some sort of combination of those things. Is there a distinction there for Barack Obama? Does he care? What has he done to encourage people to live well within their means so then can live truly independent and empowered lives? Does he want to educate people? Just a quick glance at his website issues (under economy, fiscal, and poverty) shows me he doesn’t want to, he just wants to take care of them. He has lot of ideas to address the issue, but they are all top down, not bottom up. They won’t help people change their behavior, or empower people to live better by teaching them and encouraging discipline. The government, for Obama, is the answer. But the government is never enough.
