The Dish

A moment of sincere and deep thanks to my guest-bloggers this past week. Aaron insisted I stay off the web for the week, and, amazingly, I did, so reading the week’s Dish today in one sitting was a great pleasure. Thanks: Liz, Bruce, Stephen and Eric. Enough diversity for a crackling debate at times, but not too much for incoherence. It’s not easy jumping into my smelly sneakers but Eric said it best. And don’t forget their blogs and books. Visit Eric, Liz, and Stephen, and don’t forget to check out Bruce’s forthcoming book on race. Meanwhile, I’ll be back blogging – and at a slightly mellower pace than usual. I used to take all of August off to detox from bloggery. But now the blog is all growed up, I’m just going to post at a more seasonal pace until September comes around. Of course, like most of my blog resolutions, I’ll probably break that one as well. But it’s good to be back, and to have entrusted the Dish to such capable and fun hands.

Well, folks, it’s been a blast. This was my first time going into the blogosphere without an editor, and I definitely jumped into the deep end of the pool by sharing such a prestigious site with three very smart and talented writers. I’d like to think the various thoughts I wrote down from off the top of my head were worth your time.

To Andrew: I can’t thank you enough for giving me this opportunity, and I hope I did good job taking care of your brand for a week.

To Bruce, Stephen and Liz: You’re all great people, and I hope to meet you in person some time.

To anyone who enjoyed my posts: I hope to see you over at TPM, where I normally write. It’s been fun.

On a side note, the guest writers here seem to fall prey to what I can only call Opening Act Syndrome. You the readers show up here for Andrew, so anyone else is bound to be a letdown. And while a lot of the feedback we got was positive, engaging us on the issues we were posting about and definitely expanding my own horizons, there was also a certain level of hate mail.

Just check out this one:

I’d have to say that the three guest-bloggers, as skilled and intelligent as they might be, are not meant for this venue. I don’t go to AndrewSullivan.com to see three people yelling their three contradictory opinions at each other. I go to AndrewSullivan.com to see one man yelling his own three contradictory opinions at himself, and that’s what’s great about it.

A single guest-blogger, or simply a break in the blog entirely, would be more accessible.

So what rude person wrote that letter? It was none other than I, in December of 2004, thinking then that the guest-writers were a waste of my time and mental energy. If you’d told me then that three years later I’d be guest-blogging here myself, would I have written that letter? I might have, because I wouldn’t have believed you.

I haven’t complained about the mail for a simple reason: I really deserved it!

So one day, you too might become a guest-writer for Andrew Sullivan. Take that as both an inspirational and a cautionary tale.

My thanks to Andrew for letting me guest blog this last week. It was fun and challenging, especially with my three superb fellow guest bloggers to keep me on my toes. My thanks thus to Bruce, Eric, and Liz too.

I hope you’ll stop by ProfessorBainbridge.com from time to time. Also, if I can sneak in a last plug, check out my aStore for my books and recommendations, and my author page at SSRN.com for my articles and monographs.

Well, Eric, as a Catholic, I obviously have to (and do) disagree with you.  And point out that it appears that all but 6% of the country would disagree with your premise.  While simultaneously recognizing that my husband also thinks that a core belief of mine and, apparently, 91% of the American population, is erroneous.

In any event, I don’t think there’s too much further that we can take the present debate, both due to us not being in charge of Andrew’s site for more than another few hours, and due to a fundamental disagreement over whether there is a God or not– which makes it a little hard to assess the level of crazy that may be involved as between 9/11 conspiracy theory and creationist theory.

But, it has been fun!

www.lizmair.com

Liz:

People believe a lot of nutty things, and they make a lot of important decisions on the basis of them.  For my money, belief that George Bush was in some way responsible for 9/11 is no less crazy than belief that God created the world in something in the range of 150 hours.

Being the disgruntled atheist I am, I have to point out that George W. Bush definitely exists, and 9/11 definitely happened. So even if some nuts are making an irrational and stupid connection between two facts, there’s still some factual basis.

This "God" character, and the alleged marvelous actions attributed to him, on the other hand…

Eric, I hope you’re saying that South Carolina, on the Republican side, is "unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant"– and not that South Carolina Republicans still long for the days of racial segregation or somesuch!  Not that the former is a compliment, but from what I gather from friends who have actually lived in South Carolina (unlike me), the latter would be quite inaccurate as a representation of the majority of SC Republicans these days…

www.lizmair.com

I hear what you’re saying, Eric.  But I still think your worry is a bit excessive.  People believe a lot of nutty things, and they make a lot of important decisions on the basis of them.  For my money, belief that George Bush was in some way responsible for 9/11 is no less crazy than belief that God created the world in something in the range of 150 hours.  But we have to contend with politically active people believing both those things, and making decisions as to who they want leading the country on the basis (in part at least) of both those beliefs.

For my money, I’m much more bothered by the fact that 13% of those on deck at Ames thought it was a good idea to back someone who thinks that threatening to bomb major religious sites passes for good counter-terrorism strategy– because unlike a would-be president’s views on creation/evolution, his or her views on how to handle the US’ defense are extremely important given the powers of the Commander-in-Chief.  Likewise, I’m much more concerned that as of June, 1% of Democrats nationwide (the same percentage of Republicans who backed Tancredo at that same point) supported Dennis Kucinich, who says on his website "We cannot hope to end terrorism by killing terrorists. Hatred feeds on violence and killing," and intimates that scrapping the WTO would do much to stop terrorism.

www.lizmair.com 

I have nothing to say about the Ames straw poll, so this will be my last post. I assume Andrew will be back tomorrow with fresh insights. Readers who have been less than enthused with my discussions of tax reform, gay marriage and other topics will no longer have to suffer.

So I will end my temporary duty with a shameless act of self-promotion. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have a new book coming out in January called Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. It’s a political history of the race problem in America that emphasizes the role of the Democratic Party as the party of slavery before the war, the party of Jim Crow after the war, and the party of the segregationist "Solid South" throughout most of the 20th century.

The book arose from an idea for a column I had a year or two back. I assumed that someone had written a book or a good academic journal article on the Democratic Party’s sordid history on the race issue before the 1960s. To my surprise, none existed. So I began researching the topic in a casual manner and discovered a lot of interesting stuff. Eventually I decided that there was a book that needed to be written on this topic.

One hope I have is that this book will encourage Republicans to reach out to the black community and for blacks to be receptive should they come calling. They both need each other, whether they realize it or not. Blacks are ill-served by being virtual captives of the Democrats because they just take the black vote for granted, just as Republicans did in the post-Civil War period. And Republicans are going to badly need black votes to compensate for the loss of Hispanic votes resulting from their embrace of anti-immigrant policies.

I don’t like the immigrant-bashing of people like Tom Tancredo, but I thought it was interesting that he was the only Republican to speak at the NAACP’s candidate forum on July 12. Moreover, he got a decent reception, which confirms my observation that blacks are sympathetic to the anti-immigrant message. This is hardly surprising. Blacks have always viewed immigrants as competitors whether they were the Irish of the 19th century or the Hispanics of today. Furthermore, since the Hispanic population is larger and growing faster, I think that Democrats will tend to favor them over blacks in the future.

I believe that this will make African Americans receptive to Republican outreach. I also think that the losses Republicans are going to suffer next year are going to make them desperate to find new votes somewhere. I think they may find useful ammunition in my book when that day comes.

There’s a great deal more I could say, but I don’t want to preempt myself. The history is really quite interesting and there are a lot of colorful characters in the book like "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, a racist Democrat from South Carolina who once threatened to stick a pitchfork into Grover Cleveland for some reason or another. Regardless of what one thinks about the current stance of the two major parties on the race issue, the history is what it is and deserves to be better known. I hope people will find it of interest.

South Carolina actually makes a lot of sense as an early primary on the Democratic side, as about half of the primary electorate is black. Since black voters are the Dems’ bread and butter, having a primary with such an enormous minority presence is a good contest through which to go.

On the other hand, Stephen, every last one of your critiques hold true on the Republican side. Just look at Rudy Giuliani state campaign chairman.

Then again, I suppose stuff like that is exactly why the state makes sense for today’s Republican Party.

Hey Stephen, while I’ve never been to Iowa (’cause I’m just not that into corn and hogs), I have been up to New Hampshire a couple of times and I like it a lot.  So far as I am concerned, unless New Hampshire has really transformed into a state where 90% of the population thinks that Carol Shea-Porter is the best ever member of Congress, and so long as it remains a state that in its political persuasions nominally still adheres to the "Live Free Or Die" motto, I’m cool with them having a major role in selecting the presidential nominees.

In any event, California’s going to have a big say in 2008 the way it looks right now…  and that is also a good thing from where I sit.