The Dish

A reader responds to this post:

I can go through periods when I think that life isn’t worth living. But I don’t have the will to enact a suicide. For when I think of those in my life who would be affected, it makes those thoughts moot. Life is sometimes not worth living for myself, but it is always worth living for others. I have a cat who depends on me; I have family and friends who love me; colleagues and clients with whom I am trustworthy and dependable; how could I break that love and defile that trust? I can handle my own black thoughts, but I couldn’t handle imposing them on others in such a way. My connections tether me to this world. I stay for them, when I can’t for myself. Suicide isn’t painless.

Another:

My wife tried to commit suicide once, by injecting herself with her diabetic husband’s insulin (that was her second husband, I was her third).  She had three children very young (her first was born when she was 19, the third four years later), which ruined her life financially, and she felt she was an unfit mother.  The incident happened long before we got together and when she told me about it all I could do was hold her. I too have suffered from depression and the occasional suicidal thoughts, so even though I’ve never actually attempted suicide, I understood what she was going through enough so that I could sympathize with her.

To feel like you’re inadequate, that you’re incapable of handling all the things life throws at you, unable to cope with the inevitable sadness that comes to any of us, is a common thought among suicidal people.

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, the rich and poor alike feel the same thing. Some of us, myself included, feel like we’re nothing more than a burden to the people who love us, whether that means emotionally or financially, and don’t want others to have to exert any more energy on our behalf.

I can speak for myself, and I can speak for my late wife (who died several years ago, not from suicide), that what we want mostly is to feel wanted: we don’t always want to be cheered up, we would like people to tell us from time to time that they like us, to recognize that we are just sad sometimes and we’d like them to respect the fact that we have the right to feel sad.  My wife and I were very happy for the five years we were together in great part because we shared that feeling of inadequacy and clung to it as a means of mutual support.  In losing her, I still have the memory of that, and that keeps me going despite the many difficulties I’ve had since she left us.

She would be angry with me if I were to take my own life, and some days that’s all I need.

Update from a reader:

By chance I’ve been to three funerals in the last month: the first a relative, the second an acquaintance, and the last a coworker who committed suicide. There were many bittersweet moments at the the first two – smiles, stories, even a few laughs and you got the impression everyone left feeling better than they did going in.

The last funeral was shocking in comparison. Despite a wonderful service and communion, it was the grimmest affair imaginable. No smiles, no stories – just crying relatives and friends staring at their shoes. Shame, guilt and misery everywhere. You could see it suffocating all the decent, hurting people left cleaning up the mess.

Suicide definitely leaves something behind.

Krugman claims that Obamacare “is going to work, it’s going to be extremely popular, and it’s going to wreak havoc with conservative ideology.” Ezra, on the other hand, bets that “stories about various problems in the implementation of Obamacare will be a net negative for Democrats in 2014, and after that, the program will cease to matter much politically at all – even as it works pretty well, and the coverage it offers is pretty popular”:

The key thing to remember about how people will experience Obamacare is that most people won’t experience it at all, and those who do experience it will never, ever experience a program named “Obamacare.”

If the law works, then a decade from now, about 25 million people will be insured through Obamacare. About half of them will be insured through Medicaid. The other half will be insured through state insurance marketplaces with names like “Covered California” and “Health Access CT.” They’ll get this insurance because their minister will mention it to them or because their community health clinic will sign them up. Few of these people are likely to connect their coverage to that Obamacare thing they heard about a lot back in 2010.

Beutler counters:

If the implementation fails, then it will be a disaster for Democrats for obvious reasons.

But let’s say it goes pretty well. In the White House’s mind, that means about 7 million people in exchanges, about one-third of whom will be young voters. It also means a few million more on Medicaid. That’s not very many people compared to all the folks whose insurance benefits won’t change at all. But it’s still a lot of people! Moreover, not all of these people are going to be partisan Democratic voters, and they almost certainly won’t be people who reliably vote in midterm elections. But they will come into this new benefit in an election year and suddenly be confronted with the fact that one party wants to rescind it, and quickly.

That’s why I think Republicans will dial back the repeal efforts, or maybe even change their campaign strategy more broadly. If they don’t, though, a modest but substantial number of people who might have otherwise sat out November will have a very good reason to vote.

Responding to critics, Sean Trende writes that his thesis “has never been, as some have suggested, that the GOP should ‘double down’ on white voters while writing off non-whites”:

Far from encouraging the GOP to select a particular path, the series simply lays out multiple options for the GOP. Each of them contemplates some improvement with at least one minority group, as well as some shift of the GOP agenda. The best scenario, described in part three, actually involves modest outreach to all groups, majority and minority alike.

From his conclusion:

Whites have become more prosperous over the past 50 years, and income still correlates with Republican voting habits (for Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites and, to a lesser extent, African Americans).

Moreover, Democrats’ decision to embrace policies aimed at their “coalition of the ascendant” cannot be viewed in a vacuum. A case in point is Arizona, a state where Mitt Romney ran about as well as George W. Bush, despite a less favorable national environment. The Hispanic vote there has grown and, given a state GOP that stands as a poster child for how not to attract Hispanic voters, has moved sharply toward Democrats. But the Democrats’ stance on immigration isn’t particularly popular among whites, and whites, especially whites without college degrees, have shifted toward Republicans, resulting in no net change.

The bottom line is that political scientists have been reasonably successful at predicting elections based on a few basic factors. None of them, to my knowledge, includes a demographic variable. If the only relevant demographic change were the growth in the non-white vote, we’d expect these models to take on a pro-Republican bias over time, as a pro-Democratic variable that the models fail to account takes on increased salience.

Nate Cohn goes another round:

Yes, the GOP is making gains with whites and there are missing white voters. But no, the GOP can’t count on current trends or a pool of missing white voters to hand them the presidency. To win, they’ll need to boost turnout, make heretofore unrealized gains among whites in the non-Southern, “blue wall” battleground states, and, yes, they really could use some gains among Hispanics—especially in Florida. If the economic fundamentals are consistent with another competitive presidential election, Republicans might need to make some painful changes to broaden their appeal by so much.