American Elephants

I don’t believe it. President Obama assured us (angrily) today that he did too have a mandate from the voters, and they want his tax plan with a big tax increase on the rich and the Republicans just better get with the program. Republicans, said Mitch McConnell, have a mandate not to raise taxes.

Hispanic voters oppose amnesty, favor amnesty, vote for Democrats because Romney opposed the Dream act, are Catholic and conservative, are Catholic but not conservative, and have very high unemployment, but favor the Obama administration which has caused so much unemployment. As I said, I don’t believe it.

I believe a very high percentage of the electorate are low-information voters. By that term, I refer only to people who don’t pay much attention to politics. I do not insinuate that they are uneducated, unintelligent, or anything beyond the fact that they just don’t pay attention to politics until an election comes along, and don’t know much about the participants.

I have heard it said many times that there are large numbers of people who do not make up their minds as to how to vote until they get into the voting booth. I have listened to ardent Obama supporters who clearly have no idea what he stands for, and endured diatribes from Lefties who are happy to enumerate all the reasons that right-wingers are despicable, none of which are true.

As far as that goes, high-information voters don’t necessarily agree on much of anything either. Interviews with American college kids indicate a vast unfamiliarity with the Constitution, the Declaration (and the difference between the two) current events, history, and what each of the major political parties stand for.

Republicans, in general, are absolutely opposed to Big Government, but what precisely is meant by Big Government? And what is wrong with being big? Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man: a new history of the Great Depression, says Americans have forgotten the disaster of big government.

Do Americans suddenly like tax increases and bigger government? Or did they simply forget what happens when you raise taxes and make government larger?…

The conventional wisdom before election night was that ballot initiatives were separate. Voters may not mind voting for a man or woman who might permit higher taxes down the road. But the same citizens, we told ourselves, would hesitate to vote yes when confronted directly with the prospect of a precise rate increase on the page before them. …

My own analysis is that this is a sea change, though not quite the kind Democrats will advertise. It has been a long time since Californians exploded with rage over property taxes and since the economy struggled under the egregious interventions of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. Voters don’t really recall the 1970s, or what a mess price controls and strange tax regimes yielded.

So they aren’t really aware of the strong possibility that the new mandate for tax increases and bigger government is likely to yield similar economic challenges. It looks as if we have to repeat history if we are going to remember it.