I struggled to understand the relationship between James Carville and Mary Matalin until I realized it was a racket and they couldn’t lose no matter who won American elections. But I know there is a certain affinity that political organizers feel for each other, even if they are on opposite sides. I think I know exactly how Beth Cox feels. She’s a warrior, and she just lost her war. When that happened to me in 2004, I started this blog and spent every day working to stop the Bush administration and the Republican Party. Maybe Ms. Cox will now do something similar. I hope not, because she seems like the kind of person you want fighting on your side and not against you.
At the same time, I wonder if we could really communicate with each other. Could she convince me to change my mind about anything? Could I convince her that her worries are overblown and that our president isn’t going to make the country worse? What would happen if Ms. Cox was removed from her contact with the Glenn Beck show and other right-wing pundits? She seems to see through a lot of their rhetoric and correctly identifies the Tea Party and “legitimate rape Republicans” as a problem. But that didn’t prevent her from being taken in by the “unskewed polls” malarkey.
What would I tell Ms. Cox if I had the chance to speak with her? I’d tell her that most Democrats value traditional marriage but that they recognize that some people have perfectly natural same-sex attractions and that they are happiest living in a secure and committed relationship that is respected by society. And they are just as capable or incapable of being good parents as straight couples are.
I’d tell her that the people of Colorado don’t wants drugs and dependency, but they recognize that prosecuting people for smoking pot is a misallocation of resources. Our last three presidents smoked pot and then did nothing while ordinary folks went to jail for committing the same crime. That’s hypocrisy. Decriminalizing marijuana makes sense because we don’t want to define our kids as criminals for doing the same things most of us did in college. We didn’t end Prohibition because we suddenly discovered that alcoholism isn’t a problem. We ended it because everyone kept drinking and all we got out of the deal was gang violence.
I’d tell her that the reason so many new people are on food stamps is because Wall Street created a housing bubble that burst and destroyed millions of jobs and wiped out the wealth of millions of people. I’d tell her that the president has signed reforms that make it harder for the lenders to dupe people into taking out loans they can’t afford or to lend to people with bad credit or to sell risky debt as secure debt. I’d tell her that the Republican Party stood in the way of those reforms every step of the way.
I’d tell her that you can be pro-life and oppose abortion without criminalizing it or doing harm to the quality of care that women receive from their doctors.
I’d tell her that I predicted that President Bush would start a war with Iraq and that it would not go well. I’d tell her that I predicted that his tax cuts would blow an enormous hole in the country’s finances. I’d tell her that I knew that Bush’s Supreme Court nominations would destroy any campaign finance regulations and open the door to billionaire donors like Sheldon Adelson and Mike Bloomberg to buy whole candidacies, whether they be on the left or the right.
Most of all, I’d tell her that the president isn’t going to do anything that will hurt her family or her community or her way of life. She doesn’t need to worry so much. Things are going to be okay.
But, if she can’t get over worrying, I’d tell her that Hurricane Sandy isn’t going to be an isolated event. Our weather is going to continue to get more violent and unpredictable because there is more energy moving around in our atmosphere due to higher temperatures. Global warming is real and climate change is going to be costly and dangerous. If she wants to dedicate her time to something, getting her party to understand the risks of carbon emissions would be a great way to go.
