Republicans

The Republicans:

I missed the debate last night, having just finished a thirteen-hour ride through the searing heat of August; but it sounds like it was interesting. This morning people are talking about lines of vulnerability for Rep. Bachmann and Mr. Romney.

Rep. Bachmann

Rep. Bachmann's problem is analogous to John F. Kennedy's problem when he ran as the first serious Catholic candidate, except that it's more serious. Let's watch the video, and I'll explain what I mean.

Bachmann gave a great answer, both in substance and in terms of how she managed the tone of her response. Any doctrine that you choose to guide your life must be interpreted. As we have often discussed here, submission is a very important part of marriage -- not for wives, but at times for each of the partners. It entails a deep respect and willful service, of choosing to put your own interests aside and serve the interests of the other for a time.

I prefer the medieval framing of this concept to the Biblical or Islamic ones: the medieval framing is informed by ideas of fealty, which better reflect that this is a two-way relationship of willful service and support. The medieval ethic of service between man and woman also better shows that it is sometimes the man and sometimes the woman who needs service or support!

Rep. Bachmann conveys that this issue is really about respect, and then offers some examples of things that she and her husband have been able to achieve together using this principle. Anyone who is not impressed by those accomplishments isn't taking the time to think through and appreciate the amount of work and sacrifice entailed.

Nevertheless, she's got a serious problem here. The question is really one that will dog Romney as well, which boils down to: 'You have some unusual religious beliefs. How can we vote for someone who believes differently than we do?'

The reason Bachmann's problem is worse than Kennedy's was is that she explicitly said that this religious principle of submission had guided her in public life. The Kennedy response -- that private religious principles would be kept out of public life -- is therefore not available to her.

What she has to convince people to believe is that her private religious principles will redound to the benefit of the nation. That's going to be a harder sell to people who do not share those principles.

For Americans, this principle of willful submission is one of the hardest to accept. I think it would be hard to name a principle that ran more directly counter to the current of our popular culture. Very few will take the time to do the soul searching necessary to find the great wisdom embedded in it.

Mr. Romney

Romney's problem is clear even if you take the kindest possible reading of his remarks that "Corporations are people, my friend." Even granting every argument made by his defender, there remain two critical points that Romney obviously does not get.

1) This extremely weak recovery has actually been very good for corporations: corporate profits are at an all time high. It is the small business sector, normally organized as single-proprietorships or partnerships, that has not recovered. Pay for corporate employees is flat these last few decades, adjusted for inflation, which means that all that profitability is not helping the employee any more than it is helping the small business. It is helping those who collect dividends. So, you are telling me that some people are doing very well in this economy, which I already knew: people like Mitt Romney are doing very well.

Romney's political problem is that he is seen as a symbol of northeastern corporatism, that wing of the Republican party that cannot be trusted by the common man. He has done nothing to help himself with voters who are not already corporate executives with this remark.

2) Telling me that 'corporations are people' is no different than telling me that 'governments are people.' Well, yes, indeed in some sense they are: but it makes no difference if my complaint is that the government is profiting unfairly by using its power to extract wealth from what has become a subject population.

That is the substance of the Left's critique against corporations -- and indeed it is also the non-Left, TEA Party populist critique against both corporations and government. The populist complaint is that the rich and powerful use their alliance with government to do so by having unreasonable barriers to entry raised for small businesses.

Both the Left and the TEA Party agree on this problem: what they disagree about is the solution. The Left believes in increased regulation by government, which is odd since "increased regulation" is exactly the mechanism that raises the aforementioned unfair barriers; the TEA Party believes in slashing regulation, so that I can easily and cheaply go out and start a business if I want.

We can debate which approach is the right one, or if there may be occasions for each approach. The problem, though, enjoys broad agreement across the ideological spectrum. It is only among a very narrow band of voters that the pro-corporate argument will fly.

Real Issues

As Allah notes, apparently there was time to ask about submission in marriage, but not about entitlement reform. I would like to see the Republicans -- and any Democratic challengers to President Obama -- speak to this issue more than any other. Entitlements and government pensions are the big rocks we need to figure out how to move.