Wednesday, November 6, 2002
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Wednesday, November 6, 2002 |
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The perils of before-the-fact predictions By CAL BEVERLY I don't know how last night's election results turned out. You can say that in the newspaper business without necessarily being stupid. I'm writing this on Monday, but you are reading it on Wednesday, and oh the perspective advantage you have on me. So this is prediction meant to be read after the fact. What happened? Here's what I'm guessing. The wheelchair was too much to overcome in the U.S. Senate race. Chambliss never seemed to zero in on Max's most vulnerable area his votes that tracked Ted Kennedy's and Hillary Clinton's positions more often than they tracked our man Zell's. Max got less liberal the closer election day got, but look for that to change dramatically after today. Max will continue to vote outside the path of mainstream Georgia voters and to track more closely the ultra-liberal leftists ruling the Atlanta Constitution editorial board. But he's fooled a lot of people for a long time, using that wheelchair as his shield. If I'm wrong, and Saxby got lucky, then I'll celebrate with a main dish of crow flambeau. King Roy's rule continues, with the added bonus of not catching so much flak from the state school superintendent's office. With Fayette's Kathy Cox winning her race, "cooperation" (or more accurately, "compliance") with Roi Roy will be the theme for the next four years. Speaking of crow, I predicted within the past year that Cox's statewide race was "quixotic." Turns out her trusty steed was not named "Rocinante," but "Republican," and that was sufficient. It's instructive that she, a Republican, received the endorsement of the normally Democrat-loving Georgia Education Association, a group allied with the teachers-union-promoting NEA. It's that cold day arrived when the GAE embraces a Republican. And how about the blitz of political ads on TV? They got to be unwatchable. So distorted, on both sides. If you base your vote on TV ads, you are a liability to democracy. My late colleague Dave Hamrick once brought me up short when I suggested how terrible it was that the voter turnout was so low. "There are people so dumb, so uninformed, that they should not vote," Dave said. "Our country is better off if they never vote again." That seemed heretical to me at the time, but I've found myself edging closer to that opinion myself. If you don't know what's going on, if you don't know one senatorial candidate from another stay home; don't vote. Thomas Jefferson's implicit argument he famously counseled that people must educate themselves about their freedoms is that voter stupidity can kill a democratic republic. If you think that a lot of folks are not stupid, just look at how much milage the Democrats get out of the old "tax cuts for the rich" theme. For some reason, many people urged on by Democrats believe that it's unfair to let hard-working people keep more of the money they worked hard to earn. These unfortunates believe that it's "unfair" that people who paid little or no taxes should receive little or no tax relief. Here's a hot flash: Tax relief is for people who pay taxes. People who did not pay taxes have no right to expect that they should get back money they never paid in the first place. How that simple point gets lost in all the tax-cut rhetoric continues to baffle me. At some point, you just have to come to the conclusion that a lot of people are just stupid, and that Democrats take cynical advantage of that unfortunate fact with their stick-it-to-the-rich attacks. Here's another hot flash: To Democrats, anybody with a household income of over $50,000 is "rich." Why? Because it's that group that pays most of the personal income taxes collected in this country. And it's that group that gets relief in a Republican tax plan. Here's another hot flash: If you earn more money and pay more taxes, you get more dollars back in a tax relief plan than if you earn fewer dollars and pay fewer dollars in taxes. Is that such a hard concept to understand? And where is the "unfairness" in that? Democrats never explain WHY something is unfair. All they have to do for the non-taxpaying masses is holler "Unfair!" and the GOP runs for cover. There are a few political certainties these days: Democrats will continue to bleat about unfairness, and Republican "leaders" will continue their persistent penchant to quit the battlefield, standing for little and falling for most everything. No crystal ball is needed for that prediction.
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