The Rural White Rump (the tail that wags the dog)

I got an email from John Kerry today telling me (among other things) that Democratic senatorial candidate Mark Udall of Colorado is being accused by robocalls of supporting human cloning.  Now, if a robot called me and told me that a local politician was for human cloning, my instinct would be to dismiss it as false, or at least insupportable. I mean, who goes on the record as being for human cloning?

Here's my question.  Regardless of who created the robocall, what made them think it would work?

Here's my answer.  They played the robocall to a sample of their target audience, and upon questioning, found that it made that sample question Mark Udall's morals. Presumably, it also made some of them question the morals of the people who created the message.  But on balance, the net effect was to harm Mark Udall's reputation, and that's a victory.

Here's my next question: Who are these people that are willing to believe that Mark Udall supports human cloning? 

They would have to want to believe it. Only willing participants in the suspension of disbelief will enjoy the show. It's much more exciting than all this "blah, blah, blah," about the economy, and all you have to do to join it is want to believe there's something fundamentally evil to fight out there. One party is telling you the opposition is Godless.  The other party is telling you the parties have policy differences.  (It's left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which is which.)  To a certain degree I'm being unfair to Republicans. Don't lump them all together. A large minority of them really hate what's happening to the party. They're the fiscal conservatives: deregulators and supply-siders; Libertarians who want to win an election (and therefore become Republicans). The problem is that fiscal conservatism isn't enough to win you an election, so they formed a coalition with social conservatives. 

Question number three: How does a group of fiscal conservatives attract another big voting bloc to a coalition?

There may have been other alternatives, but this group decided that the social conservatives were their target. My guess is that social conservatives are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. They're ready to take things on faith. By definition, they're already afraid of the other. I disagree with fiscal conservatives, yet recognize that some of their arguments have merit. For social conservatives, I struggle to to overcome my contempt. These are the people who cherry-pick The Bible (especially the Old Testament, but Paul's letters contain some real doozies, too) for quotations that support their own prejudices.

So the fiscal conservatives adopted the social conservative plank and started winning more elections. The thing is, there are more social conservatives in this country than there are fiscal conservatives, numerically speaking.  So now the social conservatives are the party majority, and a character like Sarah Palin is a Power. The first time she suggested that a candidate for POTUS was friends with a domestic terrorist, she should have been laughed off stage. That is not policy. The suggestion is ludicrous.

I took the title of this posting from something I heard David Frum say on The Colbert Report. He predicted that as the Republican party strays further and further off-topic, it will lose more and more of its serious members. Many Republicans agree that it's silly to suggest that Barack Obama has anything to do with terrorism. They will be thinking that they don't want to be publicly associated with a party that makes such spurious claims.  Eventually, only the base will remain, that "base" now being the social conservatives who turned out in their millions to prevent gay marriage in 2004. The rural, white rump.

  

Here's my last question:  How do the Republicans get the genie back in the bottle?

The problem is: for every highly educated, right-minded Republican candidate, there's going to be three uneducated populist firebrands like Sarah Palin competing in the primaries, because it's easier to be a firebrand than it is to develop policy.  And the social conservatives are in the driver's seat now.

My Kids aged 3 and 5

These are my kids.  Aren't they cute?

Externalities Save You Money

You don't want to know this. Gasoline is artificially cheap in the American economy.  That's because the cost to clean up after burning it is not built into the price of the product.   

That's called a negative externality.

We allow this negative externality to go uncompensated for many reasons.  Here are two big ones.

First, It's hard to calculate the cost of cleaning it up.  How much would you charge me if I asked you to remove a kilogram of carbon from the atmosphere?  After I paid you, how would you do it?  I'm going to blog later about carbon offsets, but for now let me just say that there's no "clean up the atmosphere" market. If we were required to clean up after our cars, an industry devoted to removing greenhouse gasses would be created.  If I were a Luddite, I would go to the yellow pages. Otherwise, I would search the web and find a company that I could pay to clean up my mess.  

The practical solution would be to build the cost of cleanup into the price of the gas in the form of an excise tax, which the government could use to fund clean up efforts.

Second, people don't really notice the accumulation of these toxins. Five minutes after you get blasted in the face from bus exhaust, you can't even smell it any more. Imagine a world where the by-product of internal combustion was foul-smelling sludge. How long would we allow cars to leave this detritus on driving surfaces before we demanded that cars clean up after themselves?

More on this subject later...