Okay, it's in a different context, but it's almost like the candidates took this message to heart in their campaigns. Sort of.
As an aside, the World War Two female dress uniform was oddly about the last good looking one that the Army issued. Odd.
Right now, I'd give Mary Throne the winning odds to become Wyoming's next governor but for;
- Social issues; and
- Retained Democratic baggage from the Clinton and Obama years.
I'd have not said that a few weeks ago, but given the poor Republican performance so far on the public lands, which alienates sportsmen, and on economics, which would tend to alienate anyone listening, and Thrones demonstrated ability to stand apart and make sense on these matters, I think she would pull ahead and win.
And she still might.
But in order to do that, she has to overcome both of the factors set out above.
The second item is a matter of distinguishing herself from the Clintons and President Obama. None of the recent Democratic challengers have been able to do that. Just being a Democrat tends to taint them in that regard, and beyond that they generally will not dis-embrace the recent Democratic Presidents. The last Democrat to really do that was Freudenthal who made sort of a grumpy comment while he was in about not endorsing anyone, but then came around and did. It wouldn't hurt, and indeed it would help, a Wyoming Democrat to say something like; "you know, at the end of the day you vote for the person. That's why I didn't vote for Obama and that's why it's okay for a Republican to criticize Trump. After all, President Theodore Roosevelt said . . . ."
Well, anyhow.
The first one depends on what her positions are, and frankly I don't know what they are. Probably not to many of us do know what they are. Which means she has the chance to mold her views to fit the views of Wyoming's electorate. That still doesn't mean, however, that she will be able to satisfy everyone. She won't.
But right now, at any rate, nobody actually knows what her views actually are. And for that matter, determining what everyone else's views are is tough, as nobody is talking about them much. Freiss might be an exception, and Galetos a bit, as they've both put out campaign material clearly stating that they are pro life and Freiss has a long record of being just that.
Okay, so what are the Social Issues?
Well, there are a lot of them, but the ones in current discussion around the US are the following:
- Abortion
- Euthenasia
- Same Sex Marriage
- Immigration.
- Gun Control.
Let's start with number 5 as we can dispose of it pretty early.
Remington poster advertising the Remington 08, a semi automatic rifle introduced in 1908.
Unless a candidate is insane, in Wyoming they're going to come out for the Second Amendment and against gun control. End of debate here. Indeed, this is so well established that some of the candidates have added this to their campaign material, which is a lot like walking into a bar, ordering a beer, and then standing up to proclaim your opposition to Prohibition. I mean, why bother. Probably simply mentioning that you are for the Second Amendment in a clear and convincing manner is good enough. If you can find a photograph of yourself with an antelope you took recently, or better yet if you can find a photograph of yourself with an AR15, put it up. You've done all you need to.
Or maybe not.
I've found this year that some individuals that I know that are really strong supporters of the Second Amendment are open about not being "single issue voters" this time around. Indeed, I know at least two dedicated shooters who are open about there being no earthly way that they will vote for Harriet Hageman due to her position on public lands. One of them is open about going for Mary Throne and leaning towards Cheney's Republican opponent. One got into a pretty heated debate with a local candidate who is openly backing Hageman to the extent that he's pretty declared that he won't support people who are supporting Hageman.
That debates like this are occurring, and that people are saying "I support the Second Amendment but I'm going for the Democrat because of the Republican positions on public lands" should be a really clear warning for the GOP.
Really clear.
Indeed, this opens a door for Throne like no other. If I were her, I'd go right to a range with a hunting rifle, put in for a grizzly bear license, and take a short hog hunting vacation to Texas.
Just saying.
Before I move on, I'll note that there is surprisingly a tiny current, maybe (maybe it's larger, actually) that flows the other way here as well, although in a qualified way.
Just after I wrote the above, a lawsuit was filed in Uinta County, over the School District's decision there to allow teachers in some circumstances to carry firearms.
Frankly, I'm for this move although I'll grant its a controversial one. A couple of districts have now voted to allow this and some are pondering it. They all propose to allow teachers with training to carry.
But some thoughtful people are opposed to this for a variety of reasons and in Uinta County a lawsuit has been filed by some in that category who claim that the School District violated the Administrative Procedures Act in its recent decision there.
As nobody really is all that excited about issues pertaining to the APA, that move is a tactical one by a party that feels the issue wasn't given a full airing.
I'm not going to go into the issue of the APA here and I'm not even going to really ponder it, but I will say that even though Wyoming is solidly Second Amendment, the margins of that aren't as solid as sometimes thought. Various attempts to expand carry here, which are already extremely broad, generally haven't worked.
Which isn't to say that the state isn't solidly Second Amendment. It is.
Okay, let's move on to the other issues.
Even in the Soviet Union, which was founded on a philosophy which had declared that all wives were to be held in common and which was an early backer of abortion, the official ideology came to celebrate the role of women as mothers.
Let's start with abortion, an issue that could make and break support for Throne, and any other candidate, with some voters.
Unlike gun control, there definitely remains candidates for which this is a make or break issue. I'm frankly one of them. For voters who regard the termination of human life by voluntary act as an immoral or unethical thing to do, no matter what a candidates other positions are, this is one they can't simply set aside. How can they? If you believe that a human being is a human being from the point of conception, or if you even just take the position that human beings shouldn't be killed by other human beings under normal circumstances and you aren't sure when life begins, you can't vote for somebody who is okay with abortion. It's impossible.
On this issue, so far we only know that Freiss is definitely pro life. There are, therefore, probably a lot of GOP voters right now hoping that somebody else really comes out pro life as well. Galeotos has noted that he is pro life, and given his background, we might guess (but right now can't be certain) that he's Greek Orthodox, in which case he'd be a member of a Christian faith that is pro life. Freiss is, as he's some sort of Evangelical Protestant, although not all of them are pro life. He is.
Throne is a mystery on this issue right now and she's really campaigning on the economy. Her website notes that shes' an active Presbyterian, but given the current wide splits in the Presbyterian faith, we can't really tell what that means. Traditionally, Presbyterians were very conservative Protestants, but in recent years the Presbyterians have split wide apart and have widely varying opinions on all sorts of things. So that doesn't tell us much.
The fact that she's completely silent on this issue might or might tell us much. She's getting pretty open about her opinions, which is a good thing.
For that matter, we really don't know much about the other candidates in this are either. Rod Miller, running against Cheney, has material on his website that would suggest he's a member of the Republican camp that is liberal on social issues and is likely more to the left on this than Throne or anyone else. For voters who would vote for him over Cheney on public land issues, and they definitely exist, this will be the stopping point for some. Cheney may already be in the "hold your nose and vote" category for some.
At any rate, Throne has an opportunity here if she's savvy. Not matter what she thinks in the privacy of her home, if she's smart, she'll come out at least as pro life as Galeotos. She'd be wise to come out as pro life. Democrats, all five of them, are going to vote for her no matter what. Her task is to attract republicans.
Euthanasia, the current trend to off the old, basically, is a similar issue. No Wyoming voter who has any brains will say they are for this under any circumstance, and we can presume no serious candidate will.
Okay, lets move on to stuff that nobody is going to talk about in this election at all, and let's start with Same Sex Marriage and other stuff in this area.
The White House in the colors of the LBGT movement. President Obama had entered office supporting the traditional role of marriage and then came around to this view right about the time that Obergefell was decided. Perhaps he really changed his view or perhaps he was being cowardly here or there. More than any single thing he did in his presidency, his taking this act guarantees animosity towards Democrats in various parts of the country that will last for generations, as it anticipates a national acceptance of a court decision that is unlikely to ever be fully accepted.
What, you may be thinking, didn't the Supreme Court decide all that, so it's over.
Well, the U.S. Supreme Court did decide that same gender marriage was a Constitutional right. It's also decided in the past that only states had the right to define who could and could not marry, so it clearly is capable of changing its mind.
For that matter, it's decided in the past that separate but equal was okay, until it decided that it wasn't. It decided that very much regulation of business was outside the powers of the US until it decided, during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, that wasn't true. It decided in Roe v. Wade that abortion was a constitutional right up to a certain point, and its' widely believed, and with good reason, that it'd be pretty unlikely to draw that same line today.
The point of all of that is that eh Court can change its mind. And its particularly prone to changing its mind when its decisions are legally weak and barely supported. And when it gets out in front of what it perceives to be evolving social change, it tends to spark a counter reaction among Americans who can't stand to have a Court determine for them what it fairly clearly something that should be in the legislatures, not in the Courts.
And there's a long history in the United States of the American population refusing to accept a Supreme Court result in those instances in which there's a large percentage of people who do not agree with it.
Indeed, in spite of the the Court's reputation to the contrary, in reality the court's "pioneering" decisions tend to follow, not lead, public opinion. By the time the Court successfully takes on a controversial social issue, so to speak, it's probably reached the point of critical mass and the Court is simply pushing it easily off the top of the hill, or just accelerating its descent. It's quite unlikely to actually be pushing an issue up, and over, a hill so to speak.
There are a lot of examples of this. But take, for example, cases such as Brown v. the Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia. They are important, but they were decided in 1954 and 1967 respectively. By 1954 the military was integrated and integration was the rule in most of the United States. By 1967 the thought of inter racial marriages being illegal was shocking to most Americans. and there's a whole host of similar decisions.
And then there's decisions like Dred Scott or Roe v. Wade which simply aren't accepted by a large number of individuals and which involved issues that were in hot debate at the time. Decisions of that type nearly always involve the winning party saying "see, we told you so" and then taking the decision and running with it beyond what was originally sued for or argued for as policy. And the opposing side, cheated of its place at the ballot box, fights back after an initial period of shock. Obergefell v. Hodges is in that category. The victors have already changed their argument from being one that they just wanted what others had (misunderstanding the underpinning nature of marriage) and have gone on to demand and expect full acceptance. The other side which argues that this does not comport with nature and the nature of marriage will fight back.
Normally the fight in this situation takes years and years, decades even. Abortion provides a good example as the argument has been going on since 1973 but over that time the forces that are opposed to it have captured the views of the majority of Americans. If allowed to go to the ballot today, most states would certainly restrict abortion. It's highly likely that the majority of of the justices on the Supreme Court, although only barely, would side with any changes in Roe now. But this has involved a forty year debate.
Chances are high that Obergefell will also involve a long debate, but not necessarily inevitable. Obergefell, far more than any United States Supreme Court decision since Roe, was a blatant judicial coup. It has sparked a deep reaction that has gone far deeper than Roe ever did, which is surprising as Roe involved issues of life and death, and really motivated a large section of the country's citizenry into animosity against the Court and indeed against American culture at the current time and that's sparking a counter reaction. Even in the Court that's occurred as the pathetic Anthony Kennedy pouted in Masterpiece Cake Shop that, basically, the people whose argument he accepted had lied to him and he didn't mean for things to go that far. Limiting opinions by the Court aren't that uncommon, but one like Kennedy just authored is pretty unusual and would suggest that the decision may be hanging by a frayed thread.
It's hard to bring an issue back up that's just been decided, but it does happen. It's happened in the recent example of firearms cases. And one of the reasons that it usually doesn't occur is that people step back and respect the decision even if they don't like it. Here, they might not, and as the current President came into office actually stating that Obergefell needed to be reversed, and as he's already had a demonstrated track record of actually acting on controversial promises, it's not impossible that something would be done to spark the decision. If it went back with a replacement for Kennedy, I don't think it would hold.
Which doesn't mean that it will be an issue in this election, but it's smoldering there. At least one candidate running for a county office flat out wanted his county to challenge an anticipatory decision by a local Federal District Court Judge. As a somewhat similar example, there are lots of municipalities around the country that have been flat out repeatedly violating District of Columbia v. Heller as they disagree with it, even if a majority of Americans do. This issue if far from over, it's just begun.
It won't be an issue in the Wyoming election, but any candidate running should be prepared to respond to question in a cogent fashion. And if that response is a happy declaration to the effect of "gosh, aren't we glad that President Obama declared June to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Month" is the wrong answer, whatever else that answer might.
And that brings up another topic. While same gender marriage is unlikely to be a major issue in the election, it's likely that on a local level various issues associated with this very small minority may be.
Indeed, following Obergefell a hopelessly naive Wyoming legislator who is a lesbian had the idea of sponsoring a bill in the Wyoming legislature to wipe out gender specific language in Wyoming statutes, including those on marriage. So this is indeed very close to this topic. She went densely to a meeting in norther Wyoming on the topic of the bill and was met with universal hostility from the unhappy audience, returning to her home shocked. She shouldn't have been. There's no real support for Obergefell here and those who assume that a Supreme Court decision equals global acceptance are deluded in the extreme. And that is why people who want to avoid wrecking debates on other topics should wholly avoid interjecting it in. But it does keep coming up, as in city counsel resolutions that have no impact, but which express an opinion.
Well let's go not nervously to immigration then.
Inspecting a box car for illegal immigrants, 1940.
While same sex issues are likely not to come into the election directly, except maybe as blazing meteors that come in and destroy a campaign by way of a comment here and there, immigration will come up.
As Wyoming is an oilfield state, and as oilfields are places of blue collar labor, Wyoming, during boom periods, has a lot of immigrant labor and frankly a lot of illegal immigrant labor. I have had cases in which it was rather obvious that some of the witnesses were illegal immigrants and one in which that was a central issue in terms of its impact on Wyoming Workers Compensation. Anyone who lives here and thinks they don't run into illegal immigrants on a weekly basis is kidding themselves. For that matter, because the last boom was long running, we have the classic confused situations that supposedly exist only elsewhere. I have had, for example, a witness testify in a case once who had been brought into the country so young and under such confused circumstances he literally had no idea on whether or not he was a citizen of the United States.
So this issue will be in the campaign.
This is a type of issue where an answer can almost never really help a candidate but it can totally wipe out a campaign. Here too, people need to be really careful and thoughtful on their answers. I"ll assume, perhaps unfairly, that some candidates on the hard right are going to have an absolute shut the door view, but at the same time I have to note that the Republicans have been complicit in creating the situation we currently have. Additionally, Hageman is from a farm/ranch family and the agriculture sector in Wyoming has employed a lot of immigrant labor and is still complaining about current restrictions on it. This may be trickier as an issue that it seems, although I suspect everyone will come out with "we need fair reforms" and leave it at that. Some of the right will go further. This is an issue, I'd note, that Throne needs to be extremely careful with as, once again, it can loose her votes but not really gain her any.
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