Democratic Primary Day

Once again I am on the road for work on an election day without an absentee ballot. In November 2004, I watched Bush trounce Kerry while sitting in a dismal Marriot Courtyard in Dallas Texas. It was a truly miserable experience sitting depressed and lonely in a hotel room watching the color red spread across the entire surface area of the US map, with blue only nibbling at the periphery. Today is the Massachusetts Democratic Primary and I am in Washington DC, once again watching from the sidelines. I haven’t followed the governor’s race that closely, but as an avid talk-radio listener and a sometimes blog-reader, I probably devote more attention to local politics than most of the people in my mostly-apolitical demographic. If I was at home, I would have watched the debates, but I wasn’t unfortunately.

The three democratic candidates are Tom Reilly, the current Massachusetts Attorney General, and two businessmen: Duval Patrick, a liberal, and Chris Gabrielli, a moderate. I am undecided between Gabrielli and Patrick.

Reilly is the clear-cut loser in the group in my opinion. He really brings nothing to the table and has made enormous blunders. Right before the primary race started heating up, he got involved in a scandal where he impeded a drunk driving case because he was friends with the teenage perpetrator’s father. When the race got underway, he chose a running mate, Linda St. Clair, who qualifications were slim and who was also a tax deadbeat. (This seems to be a chronic problem with Massachusetts politicians.) Reilly’s platform seems to be “I am the only candidate who is not a millionaire”, and “the other candidates wont disclose their tax returns”.

Patrick is an articulate, charismatic guy whose main political strategy seems to be to produce a warm and fuzzy feeling in the electorate. He talks about the “politics of hope” a lot and his campaign motto is “Together we can”. I purposely left the period out of the quotation marks because there is no period or ellipsis or any other punctuation mark on Deval’s bumper sticker. It is up to the reader to supply the rest of the sentence. Many conservative talk show hosts have obliged by coming up with sentences such as “Together we can gouge the taxpayer.” Gabrielli, I don’t know much about, other than that he is rich and has spent a zillion dollars on advertisements. Since I watch little TV other than sports, I am completely immune from the advertising effect. He has appeared on a few talk radio shows and has not impressed me. I listened to him once on the Paul Sullivan show and he made bumbling attempts at humor for five minutes. I grew tired of him almost instantly.

Perhaps it is for the best that I cannot vote today. I can only classify my present state of mind as politically confused, and I am not terribly informed on the candidates. The candidates themselves have made very little effort to inform me. Patrick is definitely an appealing personality, but he does have some “moonbat” qualities (to use a trendy word) which will scare off many moderates, myself included. He is for giving in-state tuition rates and drivers licenses to illegal aliens. I guess I have absorbed enough illegal-alien rhetoric from conservative talk radio that this kind of thing bothers me. I have learned the futility of voting on cultural issues. “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” by Thomas Frank convinced me of that. Tom Frank illustrated the principle of red-state lower and middle class workers voting for laissez-faire Republicans because of abortion, religion, and gay marriage. I don’t want to fall into the Liberal version of this trap by voting against an appealing candidate such as Patrick just because he is for illegal aliens getting driver’s licenses. Gabrielli, even the conservatives have to admit, is a rational, moderate candidate. His campaign has been unimpressive in my opinion. His most successful political advertisement is one in which he demonstrates that he is “one of us” by bringing out his own trash barrels. But he doesn’t make me nervous on social issues.

My Dad is pro-Patrick because Deval is the only candidate who has not made the unequivocal promise to roll back the state income tax from 5.8% to 5%, a referendum that was approved by the voters a few years back. My Dad’s main political issue is that he is anti-tax-cut. He loves to ridicule Bush and any other politician who promises or implements tax cuts. I guess this is because he is in the education business and tax cuts have a direct effect on the ability to run a school. His ideology on this subject has produced a sort-of reactionary effect on me over the years. I am no big fan of taxes, and I am skeptical about their application. For example, I find proposition 2 ½ (the law that only allows property taxes to increase by 2.5% in a given year) a good thing in theory. When I hear about schools having economic troubles the first thing that comes into my mind is that there must be some out-of-control program which is eating up all the money, and that we should curb the abuses. My Dad’s first idea is that we should allocate any amount of tax money so that all programs can be funded. I guess this is the difference between a conservative and a gung-ho Democrat. On the other hand, I recognize that a tax rollback to 5% is far more significant to the rich than the poor or middle class, even if the target of the rhetoric is traditionally the non-rich. The tax cut would only put $200 back in the pockets of the average middle class person and would probably screw us in other ways. The progressive income tax, after all, is one of the principle tools of wealth redistribution that we have. Thus, it appears, I have overcome my repulsion to my Dad’s anti-tax-cut ideology, and have come to the conclusion that Patrick’s view on taxes is correct.

Electability is another important issue, and maybe the most important issue when it comes to primaries. Is there a large group of Moderates out there who would consider voting for Gabrielli but would automatically rule out Patrick as too Liberal? Is race an issue? Does the fact that Patrick has the same skin color as Tiger Woods help him or hurt him? Is there a percentage of the population that would never vote for someone with dark skin? There is so much complexity involved with voting in the two-party system, and so little of it has to do with the merits of the candidates, alas. I sympathize with Ralph Nader’s belief that the two-party system is a terrible system, and that we need to vote exclusively on our beliefs. However, I recognize that the two-party system is here to say and there is a “primary cleavage” which separates the two parties, while all other issues are fluid and irrelevant. (I picked up that phrase while attending a PoliSci lecture at my 10th college reunion).

I suppose I would vote for Patrick today if I went to the polls. He may be slightly less electable, but he is also an appealing figure, whereas Gabrielli is a Moderate rich dude without much charisma. In a race with few ideas on the table – nary a concrete idea has been brought to the table by any Democratic candidate – this type of personality-based calculus is the best we have to go on. I have more thoughts on the governor’s race but I will wait for the primary dust to settle first.