One of our regulars sent this from out of town (I'm not identifying him for now on account of his being out of town):
Brad,
We're up in New Hampshire visiting my mother. Thought you'd be interested to hear what I have observed -- in four days of driving around the small towns of NH, I've yet to see a yard sign for McCain. But I've seen at least ten for Ron Paul. No Obama's either.
And I don't know if you've ever been up here but it's a somewhat unsettling experience to go into Wal-Mart and buy $99.75 worth of stuff and pay ZERO sales tax. And on top of that, NH has no income tax either. How do they manage to survive without taxing everything? (yes, higher property taxes but with much less government also). If it weren't for the snow, I think my wife and I would consider retiring here. I hate snow almost as much as I hate taxes.
This message reminds me of something I meant to pass on from my recent trip to Memphis, which is the polar opposite of New Hampshire when it comes to sales taxes.
The first day we were there, I was driving to the new home of one of my wife's kinfolks -- way out past Collierville, I believe, to the very limits of suburban development, which if you know Memphis means way out East -- and traversing all that sprawl caused me to work up a powerful thirst. So we stopped at a new Kroger (right across from a new Starbucks, of course), and I got a bottled water, and a diet Pepsi for my youngest daughter.
It got my attention when the total was exactly $3.00, so after I fed the three ones into the self-checkout apparatus, I looked at my receipt: Yep, 22 cents of it was sales tax. (See the receipt below.)
The reason Tennessee has such outrageous sales tax rates is that the state has no income tax, and none on the horizon (when ex-Gov. Don Sundquist tried to get one enacted, he had his head handed to him). We do have an income tax, but we are hard on Tennessee's heels when it comes to sales tax. If Richland County manages to pass the penny for local transportation needs, we won't be far behind.
The reason, in our case, is the severe restrictions placed by the state on local governments' ability to raise revenue through other means, combined with South Carolina's utter failure to come to grips with road construction needs at the state level. In the Volunteer State, local governments have wheel taxes and the like to fund roads and other transport needs and wants. (Also, local governments build and maintain far more of Tennessee's roads; the state of South Carolina reserves to itself the right to mismanage most of our roads.) Or at least they did back when I lived there. If someone has more up-to-date info, it will be welcome.
Over the weekend I found myself in Greenville, and I rode by a house adorned with several Ron Paul for President posters, and I thought, "Somebody hasn't heard the news..."
Apparently, that somebody is me. I discovered today in the course of reading The Economist that Ron Paul is still running for president!
This immediately brings several things to mind:
everybody else's except McCain, Obama and Clinton) from my list at left?
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LONESOME? Want to make a boatload of new friends, fast? I have a simple, surefire method.
Step 1: Start a blog. You can do this in minutes, and for free, at a number of sites on the Web.
Step 2: Post something on your blog with “Ron Paul” in the headline.
Caveat: Make it something nice, or all those new people who come rushing to you will be something other than “friends.”
As you may have heard, there is a whole alternative universe full of people who spend large amounts of time Googling their one and only, and eagerly reading anything they find. Many are political first-timers, either because they’re quite young or because they gave up on mainstream candidates long ago. They are the reason why Dr. Paul has raised great gobs of money, despite his support in polls tending toward the single digits.
This does not discourage or deter the libertarian’s following, but one thing does sort of cheese them off: What they perceive as a general lack of respect from the MSM, a.k.a. “mainstream media.” In stories about who might win this or that primary, their guy’s name doesn’t even come up.
Last week on my blog (where I really must stop engaging in the cheap, traffic-boosting ploy of putting “Ron Paul” into random headlines), in the midst of a discussion among Paulistas, “Alex” earnestly asked me, “Brad — what do you think of the main media’s a) coverage and b) depiction of Ron Paul? Fair in both respects or less so?”
A two-parter, as we might say in the MSM. My response got one encouraging comment, which is all I need to provoke me to reproduce it here. It went like this:
I’d say, on both counts, it’s about par.
On the whole, there is a shameful tendency of news media to try to oversimplify the race. The press, and the TV cowboys, like politics to be like sports, which means everything is couched in terms of winning, losing and whether the coach called the right play, and there are never, ever more than two teams on the field at a given time.
This means anointing two people in each race as the “front-runners,” and giving everybody else short shrift. This, of course, is appalling, especially when the most qualified candidates don’t make the short list, and that’s at least as often the case as not.
Look at the Democrats. It was decreed via the great colonial beast’s collective “mind” that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were it. Never mind that the experience and qualifications for the two of them combined fell short of that of Joe Biden or Bill Richardson — or Chris Dodd, if you’re hard-up.... This is not to say either Hillary or Obama is a bad candidate, mind you; there’s something to be said for
sheer electoral appeal. Hillary’s got the Clinton fan club in her pocket, and Obama’s got that certain something called “charisma.” I’m just saying it’s ridiculous that Biden and Richardson have never been given a chance.
On the Republican side, the MSM have been confused. They’ve wanted in the worst way to have Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney be the anointed twosome, or maybe Fred Thompson. But the facts that John McCain is more experienced than any of them, and that Mike Huckabee actually has qualities that appeal to key portions of the base (unlike any of the chosen ones) have led to what you’ll sometimes see the MSM refer to as “confusion” or “a muddle.” And the MSM don’t like confusion. They like clarity, and polarization,
and a good fight. Giuliani’s a scrapper (and just loaded with personal idiosyncracies that make great copy); and Romney can have a knock-down dragout just with himself.
In light of these factors, Dr. Paul is far down the list of people who are likely to get major respect. As I say, the MSM like it simple. If they can’t keep the number down to two, then they assign simple, stock-character roles to other players. Dr. Paul has been assigned the role of Quirky Outsider Without a Prayer, a role filled with some gusto on the Democratic side by Dennis Kucinich.
Except that Dr. Paul is even more of an outsider. Dennis the Menace, after all, is a sort of double-distilled version of a liberal Democrat. Dr. Paul is not seen by any of the major players as any kind of a Republican.
While the MSM as a whole have the attention span of a goldfish — they find endless fascination in the
serial misbehavior of well-built young women with substance-abuse problems — the guys on the political beat can be like the sports guys. That is, they can have long memories, especially for electoral trivia.
To political writers, Ron Paul is the 1988 Libertarian Party nominee for president, and he’ll never outgrow that role. To some extent, he doesn’t seem to want to outgrow that role. He’s the same guy, believing and espousing the same things. To his followers, this consistency, this adherence to principle, is admirable in the extreme. To the press, it makes him a dependable eccentric.
Dr. Paul’s one hope to get Serious Attention lies in his other role, that of This Year’s Internet Phenom. You’ll remember that role was filled by another physician, Howard Dean, in 2004. Unfortunately for Dr. Paul, the role lacks the freshness that it had when Dr. Dean created it. For a moment there four years ago, the MSM thought it was on the cusp of a genuine Paradigm Shift, where a guy with a passionate cyber-following and impressive fund-raising capabilities would actually sweep aside the front-runners and win it all. But that didn’t happen, and the MSM is uninclined to get swept up in such enthusiasm a second time.
I don’t know if any of that helped, but I did what I could to answer the question. Now, back to the front-runners...
Since I couldn't make it to the Ron Paul event, I asked the correspondent who originally brought it to my attention to tell us about it:
Dear Brad,
Thanks for the reply. I know it was a busy day,
with Bush and several candidates visiting at the
same time. The Rally was a great success. The West
Columbia Riverwalk amphitheater provided a
charming, intimate setting for Dr Paul to share
his message of peace, prosperity and liberty to
several hundred supporters. Folks came from as far
away as Chattanooga and Atlanta to hear him speak
and have the opportunity to meet him in person.
I tried to get the campaign to schedule an
interview with your editorial board while he was
in town. Perhaps next visit? In the meantime, I
hope you will be including him in your series this
week on Republican candidates. I was disappointed
to see no mention today about his historic
fundraising on Monday. At 4.2 million, I believe
it was the largest Republican primary donations in
a 24-hour period ever! Surely that's more
newsworthy than Obama running a new ad, isn't it?
Dr Paul truly is a viable contender, contrary to
what the MSM would like everyone to believe. As a
ten-term congressman, he is extremely
knowledgeable about the destructive issues facing
America. People from all walks like his message
and feel hopeful that we can turn things around
and restore this country to its former greatness
... if they can just hear it. Please allow your
readers to make up their own minds with equal
exposure of all the candidates, not just the
anointed RudyMcRomneyson.Sincerely,
Jackie
Thanks for the report. Here's a hint, though: When an editor gives you access to get your message out, you're probably better off spending your words on that purpose, rather than wasting them complaining. But the complaints serve a purpose; they give me a setting for correcting several widely-held misconceptions:
As for what I do control in my own little bailiwick -- I'll have you note that with this second post, Ron Paul has received more coverage on this blog in the past couple of weeks than any "candidate" other than Steve Colbert. (Or maybe I should say, he's tied with the Hillary/Obama combo of these two posts.) And Mr. Colbert got the coverage he got for the same reason certain non-news events dominate what we laughingly call "TV news" -- I had video of it.
"NEVER? Whaddaya mean, 'never?'"
Seems like I'll stoop to anything to get you to click on a blog post, doesn't it? Sorry about the headline. Tacky. I would never encourage you to hate anyone.
But my point was to share with you the results of this Zogby poll, which found that half the electorate says it would never vote for Hillary Clinton. She has the highest negatives, and Mike Huckabee and Bill Richardson have the lowest, going by that standard. (You may have already read about this, as it came out Saturday, but I'm just now getting around to checking the e-mail account the release came to). An excerpt from the report:
While she is winning wide support in nationwide samples among Democrats in the race for their party’s presidential nomination, half of likely voters nationwide said they would never vote for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.
The online survey of 9,718 likely voters nationwide showed that 50% said Clinton would never get their presidential vote. This is up from 46% who said they could never vote for Clinton in a Zogby International telephone survey conducted in early March. Older voters are most resistant to Clinton – 59% of those age 65 and older said they would never vote for the New York senator, but she is much more acceptable to younger voters: 42% of those age 18–29 said they would never vote for Clinton for President.
At the other end of the scale, Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrats Bill Richardson and Barack Obama faired best, as they were least objectionable to likely voters. Richardson was forever objectionable as President to 34%, while 35% said they could never vote for Huckabee and 37% said they would never cast a presidential ballot for Obama, the survey showed....
Here's the full list:
Whom would you NEVER vote for for President of the U.S.?
%
Clinton (D)
50%
Kucinich (D)
49%
Gravel (D)
47%
Paul (R)
47%
Brownback (R)
47%
Tancredo (R)
46%
McCain (R)
45%
Hunter (R)
44%
Giuliani (R)
43%
Romney (R)
42%
Edwards (D)
42%
Thompson (R)
41%
Dodd (D)
41%
Biden (D)
40%
Obama (D)
37%
Huckabee (R)
35%
Richardson (D)
34%
Not sure
4%
I got to thinking about it just now, and wondered for the first time which, of all the candidates, would I be least likely to choose at this point? Here's how I would rank them personally:
- Gravel -- I'm 99.44 percent sure I would never vote for this guy.
- Paul -- 97.1 %
- Kucinich -- 97.05 %
- Tancredo -- 95 %
- Hunter -- 94 %
- Edwards -- 90%
- Dodd -- 51%
- Thompson -- 50%
- Richardson -- 40%
- Clinton -- 35%
- Romney -- 30%
- Giuliani -- 25%
- Brownback -- 20%
- Obama -- 15%
- Biden -- 14%
- Huckabee -- 13%
- McCain -- 5%
Mind you, that's just off the top of my head, based on what I know now, without any of my editorial board colleagues setting me straight on any of the calls. And I'll admit I cheated on one -- I can't even picture "Hunter," much left summon up any relevant impressions, so I just sort of buried him in the pack toward the "less likely" end, hoping no one would notice.
How about you?
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