Romney and Obama: Dueling Bostonians

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Walter Russell Mead

10/7/12

 

The current political campaign has always looked like a close contest that may remain undecided until the closing days and even hours of the race, but it’s also interesting as a window into the state of American politics. Possibly because I’m so old myself that this is the fourteenth such campaign I remember (when I was seven years old I watched my parents get over their loyalty to Adlai Stevenson to support Kennedy in 1960), I’m increasingly struck by the long term continuities in our politics — and unimpressed by panicky cries about how polarized we are. Also, I’m struck by the way that the language we use to describe our politics often makes politics harder to understand.

 

The labels we mostly use in American politics have their limits. Words like “liberal” and “conservative” are so broad and poorly defined that they tell us more about tribal affiliation than about actual beliefs. What do Bill Kristol and Ron Paul have in common other than a hope that Barack Obama won’t be elected for a second term? What binds Hillary Clinton together with Code Pink? How did ‘liberal’ come to mean staunch defender of the status quo (Pelosi, Reid) and ‘conservative’ mean wild eyed, radical innovator and axe-swinger (Gingrich, Rand Paul)?

 

(Snip)

 

Romney and Obama share a propensity to meddle in the lives of the poor in the effort to uplift them. President Obama would take away their bologna, their Twinkies and their gas guzzlers—not to mention their guns and their right to whop their kids as they see fit; Romney would force them to jump through hoops for their welfare checks and their food stamps. Neither man would have left Huck Finn’s father alone; both would try to figure out how the government could improve him. One might want to put him in the hoosegow for public drunkenness and the other for child neglect, but both would think that Mr. Finn needed his conduct more thoroughly supervised by the powers that be. Neither man would want him to have access to cheap tobacco in any form, and both would tax his alcohol in the hope of persuading him to take less of it. The state, led by the wise, must push the unworthy masses up the mountain toward higher ground.

 

(Snip)