The View from Right Field

Are Things Really the Worst Ever?

In an editorial yesterday about the events in Los Angeles and elsewhere entitled “MAGA morphs into Make America Cruel Again,” the Chicago Tribune “wondered how on God’s green earth this country can hold it together for three-and-a-half more years of this level of presidential overreach, this amount of hatred and division.”  My response is simple: Does the Tribune remember the 1960s?  Consider just 1968.  Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April.  The ensuing riots all over the country make what is happening in LA look minor.  You can still see the effects of those riots in parts of Chicago today. 

Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.  Then came the Democratic convention in Chicago.  I assume the Tribune remembers that.

What Is a Church’s Mission or Vision?

Our church has started something it describes as a “visioning and strategic planning process,” whatever that means.  It seems to me the purpose/mission/vision of our church, or any church, is to preach sermons, sing hymns, and teach Sunday School.  The rest is politics.  I’m not an expert on the Bible, but I don’t think Jesus told us what social programs, or other policies, work versus which ones don’t, in terms of accomplishing their purpose.

Too many people, especially politicians, think you solve a problem by spending money on it (whether social programs, defense, or anything else).  They never get to the question of what the actual results of the program are.  If the purpose is good, the policy must be good, and you don’t need to look at anything else.

I could be wrong, but I’m afraid too much of the discussion on what our church’s vision (or mission) should be is going to be about what I call politics – and, for me, church is not a place I want to talk politics. 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Was Wrong. We Can Have Our Own Facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”¹  Except that is not true anymore.  Both sides in politics, and probably other things, do have their own facts today.  Fox vs. CNN/MSNBC.  The New York Times vs. The Wall Street Journal editorial page.  People watching/reading one silo of information vs. people watching/reading another.  People really do have different facts today, which means you can see why their opinions differ – because their facts are different.

And what may be even worse is that most of the people watching/reading in different silos don’t even understand that people watching/reading in other silos see things differently.  They still think there is only one set of facts and that everything else is just misinformation or disinformation.² 

Why Did Polls Get It Wrong Again – Or Did They?

In talking about how well the polls did in the recent US election, John Burn-Murdoch, in a recent article in the Financial Times, said that we all “need to accept that polls deal in fuzzy numbers, not hard numbers.”¹   Which is exactly right, and also not the way too much of the media reports on polls during campaigns. 

While news reports will, almost automatically, recite that the margin of error of this poll or that is 3%, they then immediately go on to talk about candidate A gaining because they are now ahead by two points instead of just one, or that candidate B has slipped from a tie to losing by two points.  None of which, as Mr. Burn-Murdoch says in his article, makes any sense since the margin of error is bigger than any of those numbers. 

Here’s Why We Can’t Elect the President by Popular Vote

I have a one-word response to those who say that we should get rid of the Electoral College and elect presidents by popular vote: California. As of Sunday morning after the election, California had only reported 76% of its votes.  That is ridiculous.  Fortunately, with the Electoral College, it doesn’t matter.  California is going Democratic, so it doesn’t matter if 76% of its votes are counted or 100%.  But, if we elected presidents by popular vote, it would matter. 

In 2016 ,Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin went up and up as the days and weeks passed after Election Day.  Much of this was because California was finally counting its votes.  The same thing happened with Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, but with the Electoral College, it didn’t matter.

“Leaders are not mere politicians and this is why”

The following letter appeared in the Letters section of the Financial Times today (April 5)¹:

“Janan Ganesh concludes his column on the difficulties of getting Europe to spend more on defence (Opinion, March 27) with a quote attributed to what he calls ‘another European leader, in another era, in another context’. I believe he was referring to Jean-Claude Juncker, the then prime minister of Luxembourg, who quipped: ‘We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.’

“If you want to be good at this kind of job, you have to be willing to lose it”

Paul Ryan said this in 2011 when he was trying to reform entitlement spending.  Ultimately, he couldn’t get it done, though he tried and he didn’t let the possibility of losing his job stop him from trying.  He did get significant tax reforms passed in 2017, maybe not as many as he would have liked, but a lot more than anybody else had accomplished in a long time or has accomplished since.  In 2018, then-House Speaker Ryan decided to retire.  Perhaps he felt he couldn’t “be good at this kind of job” anymore. I don’t know.  In any case, he was good at it while he was there.

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough people in the Republican Party like this anymore.  Instead, they are voting against aid to Ukraine, which would help our national security, too, and voting for silly motions to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security because they don’t like President Biden’s border policies.  It doesn’t matter whether they are doing this because they are scared of Donald Trump or because they think they would lose a primary to the people who tend to vote in primaries.  If they are more worried about losing their job than they are about being good at it, then maybe they should find a new job, which they could be good at.

Addressing Republican Isolationism, 1947-Style

On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University outlining a plan for aid to Europe, a plan that would become known as the Marshall Plan.  The next month, House Speaker Joe Martin appointed a special 19-member select committee, headed by Representative Christian Herter of Massachusetts, to go to Europe and report back on the situation there.  Among the members of the committee was a young Republican congressman from California.

Just before the committee left for Europe, the young congressman received a letter from a half dozen of his strongest supporters back home in California reminding him of the election coming up in just over a year and how important it was to elect a Republican administration.  The letter urged him not come back supporting “a dangerously unworkable and profoundly inflationary foreign policy” of aid to Europe.

James Buckley, RIP

I know I said I would not be posting for a while, but I had to note the passing of James L. Buckley yesterday.  Jim Buckley, the brother of the more famous William F. Buckley, Jr., was the first candidate I ever contributed to (other than time and effort to a certain former President when he was running).  It was 1970.  The New York Senate race looked like it was going to be a race between a liberal Democrat and a liberal Republican running on the Republican and Liberal Party tickets.  Running on a slogan of “Isn't it About Time We Had a Senator,” Jim Buckley won the three-way race with 39% of the vote.  He was a great senator, and I am proud he was our first contribution.

You can find more about him in The Wall Street Journal here and The New York Times here. 

“US Politics Is a Road Paved in Gold for Consultants”

This is a letter to the editor published in the Financial Times on August 23.  The letter was slightly edited, mostly for the better, except in one case: At the end of the first sentence, instead of “the ignorant”, I would have preferred “those who sound ignorant to them” (or something like that).  Such wording much better reflects my point – and, I think, the point Edward Luce was making in his column.

“I agree with Edward Luce that there is ‘electoral gold’ for the right in the contempt America’s cultural elites show towards the ignorant.  (‘The truth that set Cheney free’, Opinion, August 18)  However, one should not ignore the regular gold.  There is money in electoral outrage, for both candidates and perhaps especially their consultants.