Various thoughts prompted by reading the paper this morning and other news
items from this week…
- The latest poll in the Chicago Tribune bodes ill for Alan Keyes
or the Illinois Republican Party. That Barack Obama leads him 65% to 24% is
less suprising (or troubling, depending upon your party loyalties) than these
items
- Self-proclaimed conservatives favor Obama 49% to 40%
- Only 28% of those polled favored more restrictions on abortion, and 42% of
them favored Obama
- 96% of the African-Americans in the poll favored Obama
- 55% indicated that Keyes’s lack of prior residence is a strike against him
Perhaps most damaging, though, is that nearly three in ten indicated that the
selection of Keyes reflected badly on the Republican leadership and made them
less likely to back the party’s candidates. The Tribune write-up makes an
interesting point that, given the heavy likelihood of a Democratic victory in
Illinois this November, the Keyes candidacy has become a bit of an experiment
to see how conservative the GOP can go. The party leadership needs to
recognize that the tarnish has resulted from corruption, not ideology; the
state Republicans that still maintain respect (Topinka, Edgar, Thompson) are
all fairly moderate.
The he said-she said between the John Kerry campaign and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is getting out
of hand. No doubt there’s a lot of gray area and fuzzy recollections, warped
by ambitions on both sides, but the documentation (inaccurate as it is in some
places) seems to favor Kerry’s account. But really, there’s no doubt that
Kerry turned his boat around to fish a Special Forces soldier out of a river
during some sort of activity in a war zone. Whether that "activity" was heavy
or light fire is irrelevant, that sort of effort in combat is deserving of
a commendation. Whether fellow soldiers like what the man did after leaving
the service is beside the point.
The campaigns and supporters of both presidential candidates have lobbed
"flip-flopping" charges against each other recently. Why is changing one’s
mind seen as such a terrible thing? Certainly, to view with disdain the
altering of one’s a stance on an issue based on little more than changes in
the political climate (e.g. Dubya on importation of prescription drugs)
probably has merit. But changing a stance because new information has come
to light (e.g. Kerry’s view of the Iraq war since his initial vote to authorize
it) is the kind of consideration that should be encouraged, not
derided. Science works that way, why not apply it to other areas of life?
