Editorials

There are people who can’t tell the difference between red wine and white wine if they close their eyes. Some can’t tell a pansy from a petunia. If you ask some others (perhaps mostly men) to get a blue towel off a shelf, they won’t be able to decide which is the green one and which is the blue one—and they certainly can’t distinguish between chartreuse and turquoise. Many people think Debussy and Mantovani sound pretty much alike. Half the world, perhaps, would say confidently that Andrea Bocelli is as good as Placido Domingo. And they’d be wrong. 

I myself confuse whole genres of post-1965 pop music, and often can’t tell one band from another. All movie stars from about 1985 on look alike to me. But I’m not proud of it. 

Having a virtual tin ear seems to be viewed as a mark of distinction in some political circles, however. There are those—many of them in Northern California or New York City—who have been so coddled by living in areas represented overwhelmingly by liberal Democrats that they imagine Democrats and Republicans to be almost alike. Such tone-deaf individuals should be sentenced to six months in Indiana or rural Michigan or even Arkansas if they really think they can’t tell the two major parties apart. 

It would be an eye-opening trip. And they should take Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzales along with them for the experience.  

I went to bed last night fully expecting to lambast poor old Ralph today for his transparently stupid (yes, and egotistical too) crusade to become the Harold Stassen of the left, but I made the mistake of taking my new Nation to bed with me. If anyone wants to see Nader well and truly skewered, they should check out Katha Pollitt’s column on him in that magazine: a virtuoso performance by a true artist that I can’t hope to compete with.  

So I’ll just concentrate on Matt Gonzalez, who’s so obscure he’s beneath Katha’s radar. Last week a friend sent me an opus which Gonzalez had crafted which purported to expose the real Barack Obama. The bottom line: “The principal conclusion I draw about ‘change’ and Barack Obama is that Obama needs to change his voting habits and stop pandering to win votes. If he does this he might someday make a decent candidate who could earn my support.” Well, whoop-de-do.  

This just in: Winning votes is what government’s all about. This includes winning votes in primaries, general elections and in legislatures. If a bolt of lightning struck down all other candidates and Ralph Nader was only one left standing and became president, it wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference if he couldn’t win votes in the Senate and Congress for his oh-so-pure political positions. But of course he’d have Matt Gonzalez’s vote. 

The reason Matt Gonzalez is not mayor of San Francisco today is that he wasn’t willing to do what it took to earn enough votes. And rather than facing this reality and trying again, he took his marbles and went home. Like Achilles in the Trojan War, he preferred to sulk in his tent rather than enter the fray by running again. And now he’s back on the field, but in a sham battle where he’s guaranteed to lose everything but his political virginity. 

His “arguments” against Obama, which he disingenuously suckered BeyondChron.org into publishing the day before announcing his own candidacy, are thin at best, based on characterizing this or that Obama vote as “wrong” without giving the whole background. They’re like the arguments a lawyer might make in court where his job is to represent one and only one side in a contest.  

In the real world outside a courtroom everything’s not black or white (even Barack Obama). Shades of grey (or brown) are much more prevalent. The only Gonzalez charge which had a bit of traction with me was Obama’s reported support of the smarmy and odious Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, but I bet there’s more to the story even there. 

And that’s really not the point. We’ve all learned since 2000, if we didn’t know it before, that a determined Republican president embodying all the horrifying Republican ideological baggage can wreak havoc which even the most venal of Democrats never dreamed of. For all the mistakes that the Clintons and their New Democrat cohorts made, they didn’t concoct the Patriot Act. They didn’t imprison thousands of people at Guantanamo without habeas corpus. They’ve generally defended abortion rights, and mostly supported some sort of affirmative action. Most of them are now going for some kind of government-sponsored health care, even if it’s too little too late. 

Are they all we’d like them to be? No, of course not. But saying that you can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans, or that it won’t make any difference if John McCain is the next president instead of Clinton or Obama, is just plain silly. The laws of probability haven’t been repealed—it’s highly and demonstrably probable that another Republican president will make things even worse than they already are. 

There are at least three kinds of voters, and maybe more. People are supposed to vote for the person they think could do the job best, and many do this. Others, a bit more sophisticated, vote for the person who could do a good or at least adequate job, AND has a chance of winning.  

As I used to tell programmers who worked for me, the best is the enemy of the good. If you hold out for perfection, you’ll never finish any job. Often second-best is better. 

The worst kind of voter is the one who regards voting as a sacramental act or a form of self-expression. They devote all of their energy to trying to figure out which candidate represents the real “me.” Each vote is a new and intriguing experiment for these people.  

Such experiments are like dropping a brick and wondering whether or not it will float away in the air. Guess what—much of the time when you drop a brick it will land on your foot, and until the law of gravity is repealed it will always go down, not up.  

If too many people vote for Republicans, things are bound to get worse. If enough of them vote for a Democrat, things just might get a bit better.