Misplaced blame: Michaud’s supporters wrongly scapegoat Cutler

Kicking the can: Closed minds ask to close borders: remedying Ebola paranoia

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.

Kicking the can: Embracing the right to human dignity

Lately, Bowdoin has been full of events that point to one question. What do freedom of speech and critical inquiry mean on our campus, particularly in relation to each other?
Undiscussed is a student group that has brought speakers with opposing viewpoints on abortion to campus to spark conversation and thought.
Much of the campus recently participated in Yellow Shirt Day, an annual event inspired by a protest of an anti-gay marriage speaker who visited Bowdoin in 2005.
Last year, two student group advisors were booted from their positions for failing to sign a non-discrimination agreement that they felt ran contrary to their faith.
In an inappropriate letter to the editor, a trustee condescendingly chastised a student for his pro-Palestine views and accused him of not understanding the First Amendment. As a campus, we tend to be very progressive and are often loudly proud of that fact. But we also had all seen the Offer of the College innumerable times prior to signing the matriculation book and began our first years at Bowdoin ready to gain a standard for the criticism of our work and views.
Can Bowdoin have a specific viewpoint and still claim to be an institution of critical inquiry, or does the College’s adoption of an idea preclude it from fairly weighing different viewpoints?
First, let us dispense with the idea that this is a First Amendment debate. It’s not. The First Amendment prevents the government from restricting freedom of speech, not private institutions like Bowdoin. However, Bowdoin does exhort the importance of free speech and states that it is the “cornerstone of intellectual life” at the College. Thus, it is our own standards, not those of the government, to which we must hold ourselves.
In the Faculty Handbook, immediately after the lionization of free speech, there is a passage that in some interpretations may serve to limit it.
In it, the College affirms its responsibility to protect its community from discrimination and intimidation, and says that “[E]very student and faculty member at Bowdoin must maintain toward every other student and faculty member an unqualified respect for those rights that transcend differences of race, sex, or any other distinctions irrelevant to human dignity.”
Now, first, let me say that that is a fantastic sentence. Were I in a lazier mood, I would leave the discussion right there because there is absolutely nothing that can follow the message and construction of that phrase, which came from a book with possibly the dullest title ever.
It is easy to dismiss a person whose ideas, routines, preferences or culture do not fit into your ideal. But differing opinions and the experiences that shape them can challenge our own opinions and experiences, and we should not shy away from that.
Learning about a different view might add nuance to our own opinions, even if they are changed very little or not at all. It seems that if we are serious about our inquiries and our desire to sharpen our minds and our arguments, we must not ignore our critics.
Perhaps the most cherished idea at Bowdoin—and indeed in the entire American experiment—is that human beings are equal at their core. This does not mean that differences in characteristics that lead to success do not exist. Clearly, some people are better equipped to succeed in today’s world than others. Others get lucky.
But we are all afforded an equal measure of human dignity, and a right that is given to one of us should not be withheld from another. We have tried to build a society on that idea, and we will continue to progress with that principle squarely in our sights.
Bowdoin has consistently affirmed its commitment to the common good and its unequivocal stance on political equality, and it has no obligation to give a platform to speakers with views contrary to that mission.
If a certain political statement cannot be made without “unqualified respect for those rights that transcend…distinctions irrelevant to human dignity,” then it has no place in a pluralistic society or an intellectual tradition like Bowdoin’s, and we do not need to give it the time of day.
Even keeping in mind, that we should constantly be engaging in self-criticism and questioning whether or not our views are correct, there are certain things that we can take as given. Human dignity is one of those things.
If an argument does not begin under the assumption that humans must have political equality, there is no reason for Bowdoin to provide a purveyor of that argument with a soapbox.
While Bowdoin should not be in the business of rejecting an argument’s conclusion, it can and should be in the business of rejecting premises that deny human dignity.
All too often, the first people to complain that their freedom of speech is being trampled are the ones with arguments that relegate an entire subsection of humanity to a second-class position. Along with freedom of speech comes a marketplace of ideas. Time and space are valuable, and we should not expend such scarce resources giving a platform to valueless positions.
Bowdoin, as both a buyer and seller in that marketplace, has no obligation to use its resources to further arguments that are contrary to its pluralistic worldview. If you are losing in the marketplace of ideas, you should perhaps re-evaluate your position.

Kicking the can

Misplaced blame: Michaud’s supporters wrongly scapegoat Cutler

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

November 13, 2014

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.

Comments are permanently closed.