The Other Side is Unreasonable

I posted before about how Al Gore says Republicans are "assaulting reason." But it's clear that it's not only the left that criticizes its opponents as "unreasonable." Bryan Caplan, a George Mason economics professor, has written "The Myth of the Rational Voter," in which part of his thesis is that voters are too dumb/uninformed to choose limited government/free market policies. I agree with his choice of policies, but I'm not convinced that the opponents are dumb. They may very well just want a different kind of society than I do.

Why is Corporate Money in Politics?

From Bloomberg:

After years of lopsided political giving to Republicans, American businesses are quickly rushing to support the new party in power. The top 25 corporate political action committees all gave more to Republicans than Democrats for the November 2006 elections. Afterward, 17 of them switched sides.

Why do we allow corporations to give money to political causes? We don't let them vote. If the company bosses want to give their own money, that's fine, but permitting direct contributions from corporations themselves provides for such a transparent buying of influence and favorable policies that it undermines the whole political system.

How Can Politicians Be So Clueless?

It was painful reading about Joe Biden trying to ingratiate himself to some South Carolina Republicans by saying:

Delaware ... was a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

So, Biden was joking about how Delaware was just as pro-slavery as the South, and would have liked to fight with them during the Civil War. This is getting close to Trent Lott territory, here. Not quite there, but close

What the Democrats Should Do

Thomas Edsall writes the follwing in the NY Times:

To stay in the fight, Democratic leaders will have to acknowledge political realities affirmed by the electorate in 1994 and 2006. Many Democratic constituencies — organized labor, minority advocacy organizations, reproductive-and sexual-rights proponents — are reliving battles of a decade or more ago, not the more subtle disputes of today.

I think this is a key point. As an example, some civil rights group seem to treat the affirmative action debate as if it were of the same importance as the desegregation debate. But it's not. Segregation was a pretty clear issue: it was evil and racist. By contrast, affirmative action is a very close call, something which I think people on both sides of the debate should acknowledge. In my view, the Democrats would do much better if they toned down their rhetoric on some of these issues (the Republicans, too, of course, but the article was about the Democrats, so that's what I focused on).