22 January 2002

Political Ramblings

It is a pleasure on the internet to run across those rare examples of critical reading skills. The penultimate paragraph in this post from Jim Henley is a case in point. That point about Carter's character seemed to be missed by a fair number of people (in the rush to comment?).

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I'll give the New York Times credit for being consistent on the issue of campaign finance reform. Damn near every scandal, be it political or criminal, real or imagined, is an excuse to beat the editorial drum of "campaign finance reform" (which is better described as "Political Speech Regulation"). This is the sort of editorial I would have dismissed with a one-line zinger in the old weblog. They make it so easy, because they're just obsessed with restricting political speech for some reason (now if they proposed a word limit on NY Times editorials during election campaigns, I might have to give it some serious thought).

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DeWayne Wickham thinks that black voters can help the Dems take back the South, but his column isn't nearly as thoughtful as this one. Wickham's penultimate (is that my word tonight or what?) paragraph is correct in suggesting that the Dems must find candidates who appeal to blacks and to whites (preferably, moderate black candidates -- except, as John Miller notes, gerrymandered "safe" racial districts are engineered in such a way as to discourage such moderation). The weakness of Wickham's piece is that he doesn't deal with the fact that the black vote is largely tapped, and votes with more solidarity than any other group, for Democrats. Indeed, the real problem is one of black disaffection -- if blacks ever desert the Democratic Party (either in turnout, or by splitting their vote into something more competitive than the usual 90%+ percentage that goes for the Democratic candidate), the Dems are finished in the South. Indeed, I see three blocs in play that, were they to swing Republican in any significant way, could spell a classic realignment (in the Burnham sense): Catholics (where Republicans made inroads in the last election, and whom Karl Rove is courting vigorously), Hispanics (an emerging block that tends Democratic but is immature and could still swing either way), and Blacks. Political scientists who study parties and elections should be watching these groups carefully, because they're where the action is (or could be).

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Liberals like Richard Cohen are funny when they go populist on taxes. Heaven forbid, if a tax cut is ever proposed, they bitch and moan that the government can't afford it. But if Enron manages to escape paying taxes (dubiously, but apparently legally), Cohen is quick to point out they're spending your money. But if they escaped paying taxes legally, it's NOT the government's money (and it's certainly not my money!) -- it's Enron's money, no matter how unfair that seems. And it's certainly not "an updated form of feudalism."

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Two paragraphs in Thomas Bray's column today caught my eye (overall, I agree with Bray):

There is, of course, an easy way to cut down on tourism through the national parks--raising the fee. It costs only $20 to enter Yellowstone by car and $15 by snowmobile. It costs a lot more than that for most people just to get to Yellowstone. Raising the price might lead many people to take their snowmobiles somewhere else, including miles of snowmobile trails in national forests and private land in surrounding areas. It might also help fund much-needed restoration and maintenance work in the parks.

But the environmental groups who yell the loudest about human intrusions in the parks seldom suggest such a thing. To do so might confirm suspicions of elitism: that they are trying to conserve the wilderness for upper-middle-class types who can afford the price of entry--and cross-country ski lessons. Instead, they prefer to do so in the name of dubious theories about ecosystems, bison that never used to winter in Yellowstone, and elk herds that have already grown to unmanageable proportions.

This may be where my backpacker-conservationist tendencies get the best of me, but I absolutely abhor the notion of raising prices to control access to "public" parks. Sure, that's a nice economic solution, but sort of defeats the idea of public parks. Either let's have private parks, or let's have public parks, but let's NOT milk the taxpayers for public parks, and then charge fees that might discourage some (thereby defeating much of the argument for public places). So I've always consistently been opposed to those sorts of fees given the existence of the public park system.

While I'm rambling: conservatives all too often dismiss the impact of humans on some fragile ecosystems as "dubious" -- mostly conservatives who have never bothered to go to the backcountry and observe the results of overutilization. In some instances, permitting and restrictions are necessary to protect public lands, and in the current system, I don't have a problem with that (though greens often do go overboard, as Bray points out).

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I am amazed at those who continue to defend Steven Ambrose's plagiarism. Mark Lewis is not one of those people:

Mr. Ambrose's plagiarism is not limited to a few sentences. He borrows copiously from some sources, then footnotes the passages and cites the source in his books' endnotes. But that's not good enough, as generations of college freshmen have learned. Foot- or endnotes tell readers where the information came from, but the writing is assumed to be the author's own work. Even if Mr. Ambrose acted without malice, he presented others' words as his own. That is plagiarism.

Lewis's broader argument is that we should not indict "popular" histories along with Ambrose, which is true. But secondhanders like Ambrose get no sympathy here.

[Posted @ 10:26 PM CST]