Post Thanksgiving Musings on the Political Opinions of Families

    Just got back from visiting my family for the Thanksgiving break and one of the interesting things about these kinds of family get togethers is how politics always seem to come up and always causes a minor disturbance.  I could use this as an opportunity to call out my family members but instead I think I'll discuss some of the issues that came up and try to dissect them in a proactive manner.  One of the big things to occur last week was the shelling of a South Korean village by North Korea.  This is a situation that appears to have very few good solutions surrounded by bad ones.  As long as China and Russia support Kim Jong Il, it will be difficult to affect any kind of change in the region, whether or not we want to use military options.  There's no way we would launch a military strike for fear of riling up either of the aforementioned countries and there's really nothing left to take from North Korea unless China and Russia decide to stop supporting the regime financially.  I'm of the opinion that neither country will stop supporting North Korea because it would mean the collapse of the state and hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding both countries.  So unfortunately, the kind of choices available to the US are limited, and mostly uninspired.

    Another issue that came up would have to be views on HCA.  A lot of people don't know what's in it.  That's a fact.  Most of these same people dislike the law because they don't know what's in it.  A not totally unreasonable belief.  The problem with this is that many of these same individuals haven't done any research to actually improve their knowledge on the subject.  There's no guarantee that increased knowledge would lead towards increased support, though some earlier polls did show this.  I find it bothersome that people would choose to not inform themselves of an issue and then hold negative views about an issue because they don't know anything about it.  Considering the amount of information that is at our disposal at any time of the day, it is an irresponsible action to not know something and then refuse to do any kind of research on the issue despite professing support or distaste for it.  I don't know how quantum mechanics, works does that mean that I should be able to criticize it all I want without having to first do research on the subject?  Should I blame scientists for not doing a better job of explaining it to me?

    Another pair of comments that have come up that really bothered me were ones that dealt with the promises of presidents and the matter of single issue voters.  The latter bothers me because I consider it to be very short sighted and frankly counter intuitive.  There are issues that are more important to some voters than others.  Sometimes those issues outweigh all others and there's nothing wrong with any of that.  Voters should vote their interests.  Think about the number of times people will vote to simply block a specific candidate.  That's a single issue vote right there, the single issue being that it is not the other guy.  Another problem I have with this critique of the American voter is that I question how prevalent it really is.  Sure, there are a number of people who won't vote for a candidate that is pro-choice (and vice-versa).  But it is often the case that they agree with the candidate on other issues as well, just to a lesser degree.  I find it very unlikely that pro-life voters would vote for a pro-socialism, pro-gay rights, pro-drug legalization, and anti-war candidate who also happened to be pro-life; no matter how highly they might rank abortion as their defining issue.  

    The other issue, the one dealing with how presidential and congressional candidates will win just because they say the things that will get them elected.  My key problem with this is that by the reasoning, they would prefer the candidate to promise to do the things that we hate and are exceptionally unpopular.  There's nothing wrong with a politician conforming his views to popular opinion, don't we want to our politicians to craft policies that reflect our desires?  This kind of opinion is also an extension of the paradox that polling creates.  On one hand, if asked, almost all people would say that politicians should govern with respect to the wishes of the electorate.  At the same time, almost everyone would say that politicians should not govern based strictly on opinion polls.  So here we have a situation in which people would hold the view that politicians should agree with the American people and at the same time, enact policies that the American people would disagree with.  By this reasoning, Obamacare was a resounding success, large portions of the American public agreed that there needed to be health care reform, and roughly half (depends on the poll you use and how you want to interpret it) of the population disagreed with enacting Obamacare.

    To prevent the above paragraph from being a strawman argument, most of these people who hold the view that I dislike maintain that politicians make a bunch of promises and then don't follow through with them.  This is a legitimate complaint, unfortunately it's one that would preclude voting for any and all candidates.  I'm fairly certain that only Polk has kept all of his campaign promises in the history of the republic.  (Promised to establish an independent treasury system, reduce tariffs, acquire Oregon, California, and New Mexico.)  Politicians make a number of promises to voters because that is how they get them to vote for them, candidates need platforms and platforms are a series of promises.  Voters won't vote for candidates without getting an idea of how they would govern and platforms are the key way of providing that idea.  Politicians will then prioritize their platform and try to enact it going from what they think is most important to that which they think is least important.  Unfortunately, there are a number of other candidates that make promises to other voters that will attempt to thwart the promises made by the first candidate.  Should the voters in the first candidate's district punish him/her because a different candidate made promises to their constituents that counteracted the first candidate?  If a candidate makes a number of promises and then fails to fulfill them, there's nothing wrong with voting them out.  But one should never believe that candidates will do anything but make promises that they think will get them elected.  This isn't meant to be a cynical take on politics or elections.  Candidates should promise to enact policies.  Those policies should conform to the desires of the electorate.  And not all of those promises will be able to be fulfilled due to the constraints of the system in which we live.  Nothing about any of that is wrong.