Closed minds ask to close borders: remedying Ebola paranoia

Kicking the can: Examining Lattegate: Why political pissing matches must end

Last week, a scandal broke in Washington. A major instance of inappropriate interaction between the Executive Branch and the Armed Forces surfaced, shocking Americans from Berkeley to Bangor. The incident, which involved players from enlisted men all the way to the top of the chain of command was the latest in a series of controversies that have shrouded the federal government in a cloud of shame.
What was that scandal, you ask? The Commander-in-Chief made an unconscionable display of disrespect towards our men and women in uniform. What specifically? Now that you make me say it…he forgot to take his cup of coffee out of his hand to salute while disembarking Marine One.
The reasonable observer sees this picture: a Commander-in-Chief who had just recently started bombing a radical organization that has made a nasty habit of beheading journalists, steps off his helicopter wondering when the Ebola virus would hit America. He distractedly bungles a custom that’s been around for a tenth of our nation’s history by failing to transfer the beverage that, if I were him, would be keeping me alive, to his other hand. Whoops. Then he gets back to the business of blowing up people who have stated that they not only want to destroy the United States but have also begun a rapid conquest of Iraq and Syria.
But in today’s polarized and caustic political environment, such a silly mistake is taken by an extreme and unfortunately large fringe as further evidence for why the President—elected twice by the American people and grateful beneficiary of the American dream—is a traitor and uses the American flag as a Kleenex.
What in any sane political climate would garner a couple laughs and a shout-out on late-night television attracted attention from multiple cable news networks and (allegedly) serious political figures like Sarah Palin and Karl Rove.
It seems to be the era of cheap shots, where the mean-spirited personal attack is more valuable than the substantive political debate. Many Americans seem to truly believe that this President’s mundane actions are threatening their way of life, and have resorted to the basest of rhetorical tactics to assert their points.
In targeting mistakes like a bungled salute or resorting to name-calling—like Fox’s in-house quack Keith Ablow did this summer when he called Michelle Obama fat on national television and went on to assert that she “dislikes America”—the extreme element of the debate appeals to the worst side of people and introduces controversy where none belongs.
When the debate is consumed by irrelevant bits and pieces, the marketplace of ideas ceases to function and is replaced by a rhetorical cage fight. In the blogosphere, all too often a Hot Air writer will call the President a socialist and then someone at the Daily Kos will fire back that, well, Michele Bachmann is an utter psychopath. Pundits at Fox and MSNBC ridicule one another and compete to see who can accuse the other of hating freedom more. Instead of analyzing the policies proposed by each side, the political process is reduced to a pissing contest on the national scale.
Distractions like lattegate (apparently, it was actually a chai, enraging Karl Rove, who apparently can’t say chai without visible discomfort) degrade the national political discussion and lead citizens and media elites to waste time slinging mud instead of learning how the person for whom they cast a vote will work for them and for the nation.
Focusing on such silly things and calling each other names fuels the discontent that many Americans feel towards our political system and trivializes the political process.
We shouldn’t focus on which cup was in whose hand while they did what. Clearly, we should focus on the contents of that cup.
I, for one, am disgusted that it was not coffee.

Kicking the can: Misplaced blame: Michaud’s supporters wrongly scapegoat Cutler

During the 2014 election season in Maine, one of the most oft-repeated messages from the Maine Democratic Party was that Eliot Cutler, an independent candidate in the state’s gubernatorial race, was only siphoning liberal votes away from Representative Mike Michaud, the Democratic candidate.
That position seemed to be validated on November 4, at least in the minds of many die-hard Democrats: Michaud lost his race in a blue(ish) state against a Republican rival who, just as in 2010, won with less than 50 percent of the vote.
Unfortunately, this excuse for electoral failure does not stand up to examination, and Democrats should instead look inward to explain just how Maine got stuck with another four years under Governor Paul LePage.
First, let’s think about the pure results. Somehow, incredibly, one of the least popular governors in the United States was re-elected with more than a ten percentage point improvement over his 2010 performance.
In 2010, LePage received 38 percent of the vote and won by under two points, defeating Cutler. In 2014, with an underwater approval rating, LePage received over 48 percent of the vote, topping Michaud by five points and falling just shy of a majority in the three-way race. Not only failing to defeat such a vulnerable candidate, but also seeing him win by a wider margin than before is simply embarrassing.
This campaign cycle, the most common question I was asked was “How could you support Eliot Cutler when he’s just taking votes away from Mike Michaud? Do you want LePage to win?”
My answer? Easily—because he wasn’t, and because Michaud couldn’t have won even with Cutler out of the race. Polls asked Cutler supporters who they would vote for in a head-to-head race between Michaud and LePage, and the results varied greatly.
Even the most Michaud-friendly poll I found showed just over a 2:1 advantage for Michaud among Cutler’s supporters, far less than would have been required for Michaud to seal the deal. In fact, if all of Cutler’s voters had gone to the polls without his name on the ballot, about 80 percent would have had to cast their ballots for Michaud to make up for his 30,000-vote deficit.
The fact is that in this most recent campaign, Michaud wasn’t the best candidate for the job. Given that a significant part of his campaign was dedicated to telling Cutler supporters to vote for him because Cutler couldn’t win, I’m not entirely convinced that Michaud thought Michaud was the best candidate for the job.
Unfortunately, the biggest blunder of the entire campaign came before it even started: when Eliot Cutler declined to run as a Democrat. Clearly, he had reasons for not doing so: namely, he’s not a Democrat, and did not want to be beholden in any way to the Democratic Party while in the Blaine House.
However, it’s fairly clear that if he ran as a Democrat, he would now be the governor-elect of Maine. Pollsters consistently found that in a Cutler-LePage race, Cutler would steamroll LePage.
That miscalculation, whether intentional or not, cost him the governorship and cost the people of Maine a governor who wouldn’t punctuate his political attacks with rape jokes.Michaud is an incredibly run-of-the-mill Democrat who sought office in a state that tends to be unreceptive to that type of candidate.
He’s a nice guy; he has populist positions; he’s socially liberal, and he wants to increase the minimum wage. Boring. He brought very little to the table that signaled an active improvement in policy.
Maine seemed to be full of people who really wanted Cutler, perhaps convinced by his property tax plan or his ideas for the economic rejuvenation of Maine’s mill towns or his unwavering support of reproductive rights.
But they ended up supporting Michaud because they believed the Democratic narrative that Cutler, running outside the two-party system, couldn’t win.
Looking at Maine’s electoral history, it is clear what brand of leader Mainers usually elect. Successful and remembered Maine politicians tend to be those that can reach out to both sides of an argument, develop real ideas and work across party lines to reach a mutually agreeable conclusion. Leaders like former senators George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe, Angus King and Susan Collins come to mind. It is a pity that we will not now be able to add Eliot Cutler to that list.

Kicking the can

Closed minds ask to close borders: remedying Ebola paranoia

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

October 30, 2014

A couple weeks ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal issued an executive order directing state officials to monitor travel between West Africa and his state, while also prohibiting recent travelers from leading a normal life—like not being able to visit grocery stores. The federal government has not done enough to “prevent the entry of the Ebola virus disease into the United States of America,” Jindal asserted while warning of a potential “public health emergency” stemming from the virus’ ability to spread from one infected person to many others. Governors in other states, including Chris Christie in New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo in New York, followed suit with draconian executive actions targeting Ebola. Here in Maine, the state is prepared to go to court to force a nurse—who has tested negative for the virus—to be quarantined.

People in Louisiana, Maine and around the nation are irrationally paranoid about this disease. The quarantine orders are sure to ignite more controversy, more fear and inspire more states to treat the one Ebola-related death and two transmissions within the United States as a state of emergency. Given that some in the conservative media have taken to calling Obama “President Ebola,” I am tempted to think that the orders and other elite calls for strict containment are purely cynical and cheap political stunts.

Let’s pretend that, contrary to all expert opinion I’ve heard, Ebola is more than a negligible threat to the United States and that something must be done about it beyond the capabilities of our existing public health institutions. If so, Jindal’s actions and insinuations—coupled with the rants of other far-right politicians and pundits—fit perfectly with the conservative narrative as of late. Got a problem? Seal the border.

Tea Party-style populists who claim to support a free market invariably leave their convictions at the border. Too few jobs? Seal the border and keep manufacturing here. Illegal drugs being imported? Seal the border and shoot everyone heading north in a speedboat near San Diego. Refugee children from Central America seeking a peaceful existence? Seal the border and send them right back to their parents. Working in Washington this summer, one of the more unbelievable calls I received was from an individual worried about little immigrant children bringing Ebola across the border as part of an intricate ISIS plot. The caller demanded that the government immediately act to seal the border. He said that no elected official in Washington would receive his vote unless they immediately grabbed a gun and went down to defend the border. Sealing the border, the narrative goes, keeps America America—to hell with everything else.

The problem here is that sealing the border is incompatible with a globalized society and an international market economy. In such a world, border closures are rarely a good way to deal with anything—even a scary disease with a slim chance of exposure. Closing borders inhibits the exchange of goods and ideas, leading to lower output. Closing borders promotes xenophobia and encourages a jingoistic dislike of people and cultures. Closing borders furthers an us-versus-them mentality that degrades cooperation, reduces trade and closes off opportunities for our own people and for human beings around the world. America is what it is today in large part because of its interaction with the rest of the world, not in spite of it. I, alongside other more liberally inclined commentators, never tire of reiterating that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants and that most of our border-crazy counterparts badly need a history lesson.

Nigeria recently solved its Ebola problem. It did not do so by closing its borders. It did so by quickly identifying the sources of the disease and quarantining infected patients. It did so by smartly tracking how the disease entered the country and identifying who could have caught it. Nigeria does not have nearly as advanced a public health infrastructure as the United States, and it has managed to solve its own Ebola crisis. It did not need to resort to absurd, isolationist measures to remove the disease from its country.

We live in an open society. Admitting outsiders and foreign goods has never destroyed America. In fact, in almost all cases, it has enriched our country. We are a nation that imports goods from many countries, then sends a crate of our own products back. We bring students, workers and refugees from all corners of the world, and then our own children go abroad to learn and contribute in other parts of the globe. Panic-driven isolationism will never solve our nation’s problems. Instead, we must share information, goods and services with as many people and nations as possible to gain a deep understanding of the problems facing us. Then—inside our borders and out—we will prevail.

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