just past Little Rock

We are on the way home; quite frankly I am enjoying my “no training” week.

One thing that I’ve noticed though: in days past, the most traffic that I’ve seen on my drives has been around Dallas and near Austin. On this trip, the worst of it is on the stretch of I-35 between Georgetown and Waco, especially around Temple! That part is new.

Some random thoughts:

Football: I just sped through Phil Simms’s book Sunday Morning Quaterback. I think this is an excellent book for the NFL fan! It gives some details that some might miss, and talks about how meaningless certain cliches are.

Politics: Here are some interesting reads:

Maureen Dowd: talks about how Hillary Clinton cashes in on nepotism while claiming “feminism”.

At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.

Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”

Everybody laughed, including Obama.

It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point.

Her Democratic rivals had meekly gone along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.

She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”

She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.

Obama’s one-liner evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. Getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism. [...]

Barbara Shelly: Contrary We Stand.

[...]
It certainly shall. Especially in these United States, where the single unifying trait of citizens may be our capacity to be contrary.

This speaks well of us, actually. We are not a people to be pushed around or herded. Let a particular person, party or movement get too comfortable in the catbird seat, and watch the backlash begin.

Karl Rove should have known better than to go on with his silly talk of a “permanent Republican majority.” This is the nation that rejected monarchy from the outset; we are not about to let any leader or political party get too high and mighty for very long.

The signs of contrariness are all around us. Only 26 percent of Americans surveyed in a recent Gallup Poll said they were satisfied with the direction in which the country was headed. More people currently prefer the Democratic Party than the GOP.

The notion of shrinking government is out of steam; more than half the people recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center think government should help the needy.

Atheists and other nonbelievers are on the rise, partly in protest of having religious doctrine forced into political debate and public policy. Of course, what was the basis of the evangelical clout displayed this decade if not a revolt against what people perceived as the dominance of secularism in the 1990s?

David Aikman, an author and journalist, took on the subject of atheism in a recent column in the magazine Christianity Today.

“Why a surge by atheists right now?” he asks. “One explanation could be ‘faith fatigue’ among skeptics and the hard-core Left, who ordinarily make up 15 percent of the American people … After six years of a famously evangelical White House, the secularists have recovered from their repudiation at the polls and have come out swinging.”

I would argue that “faith fatigue” has spread beyond the liberal intelligentsia. Not everybody is renouncing the deity, but plenty of folks in the middle are alarmed at attempts to downgrade evolution in science curriculums and restrict medical research on religious grounds.

“Another explanation is subtler,” Aikman wrote. “American evangelicals, we must admit, have not been immune to triumphal attitudes, arrogance, foolish public statements, and, sometimes, downright hypocrisy in personal behavior.”

Bingo.

Not to pick on evangelicals; what Aikman wrote holds true, sooner or later, for every group that drinks the intoxicating brew of power. [...]

Are Republicans Becoming More Populist? A very interesting Diary from the Daily Kos. I am not so sure that I agree with the author poblano, but the author throws out an interesting argument that I haven’t read before:

Pop quiz time. The following item appears on the website of which presidential candidate?

Energy independence has been on our “to do” list for over thirty years, my whole adult life. In 1973, in response to OPEC’s oil embargo against us, President Nixon established Project Independence, which promised independence in 1980. We could have been energy independent a generation ago! The truth is, we are so pathetically behind the curve right now that federal spending for energy research and development is only 40% of what it was in 1979. [...]The first thing I will do as President is send Congress my comprehensive plan for energy independence. I’ll use the bully pulpit to inform you about the plan and ask for your support. I’ll use the bully conference table to meet with members of Congress until I have the votes. The plan will get underway during my first term, and we will achieve energy independence by the end of my second term.

This candidate also says:

I want to provide our children what I call the “Weapons of Mass Instruction” – art and music – the secret, effective weapons that will help us to be competitive and creative. It is crucial that children flex both the left and right sides of the brain. We all know the cliché of thinking outside the box: I want our children to be so creative that they think outside the cardboard factory. Art and music are as important as math and science because the dreamers and visionaries among us take the rough straw of an idea and spin it into the gold of new businesses and jobs. It is as important to identify and encourage children with artistic talent as it is those with athletic ability. Our future economy depends on a creative generation.

We take for granted that our food is not only plentiful and diverse, but also inexpensive. [...] Part of the reason prices are low is that subsidies keep production at high levels, so keeping American farmers in business is not just good for them but for all of us. [...] We must continue subsidies because our farmers compete with highly subsidized farmers in Europe and Asia, and they face fixed costs (land, equipment, seed, supplies) whether or not they produce a crop. Subsidies insulate farmers from natural disasters like droughts, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, as well as from sudden spikes in the price of fuel, feed, and fertilizer.

I believe in free trade, but it has to be fair trade. We are losing jobs because of an unlevel, unfair trading arena that has to be fixed. Behind the statistics, there are real families and real lives and real pain. I’m running for President because I don’t want people who have worked loyally for a company for twenty or thirty years to walk in one morning and be handed a pink slip and be told, “I’m sorry, but everything you spent your life working for is no longer here.”

Who is this candidate? Mike Huckabee! I swear, I find much to like about this guy, if he were only, well, rational.

The Kos article goes on:

I think this quote (also from his website) tells you a lot about Mike Huckabee. He’s not the first religious Republican to come along and play the “family values” card. But what’s interesting is how he’s playing that card – he’s sort of dismissed the importance of the terrorist threat in the process. This is not a politically correct thing to do if you’re a Bushie Republican.

In certain ways, the politician that Huckabee resembles the most is William Jennings Bryan, who also mixed economic populism with extreme religiosity (Bryan was the guy who took the “God” side in the Scopes Monkey Trial).

Bryan was a Democrat, of course, and like Huckabee he came around at a time when his party was in a little bit of turmoil, eventually wrestling control away from Grover Cleveland and pro-business Bourbon Democrats. He was instrumental, in fact, in helping to formulate the Democratic party identity that still resonates to some extent today: the populist party, the working man’s party.

Say that Huckabee wins the nomination. I believe that we could see a similar re-orientation, where populism tended to be associated more with the Republican cause and the Democrats were considered more pro-business. What we’d have then is two parties that looked something like this:

1. The secular rationalist party, a.k.a. the Democrats, which would tend increasingly toward libertarianism.

2. The theocratic collectivist party, a.k.a. the Republicans, who would shift in the direction of economic populism while remaining extremely conservative on social issues. [...]

Poblano goes on to make some interesting conjectures. Check it out.