Tom Tancredo II

Just when we thought the U.S. House of Representatives had lost its craziest immigrant-hater with the impending retirement of Tom Tancredo, it seems someone else wants to step up to fill the position. Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, Pa. who was one of the first and most extreme to try to crack down on immigrants* at the local level, is planning a run for Congress. I feel personally insulted by this because he's running in Pennsylvania's 11th District, where I lived from age 9 to 18 (and where my parents still live). So while the incumbent is a pretty center-of-the-party Democrat (and therefore unimpressive by my progressive sensibilities) who has held the seat as long as I've been alive, given his opposition I'm prepared to go out on a limb and endorse Paul Kanjorski in the race for PA-11.

*Yes, immigrants-period, not just "illegal immigrants."

Obama Is A Pot Head!

Ampersand points out that in the past, Barack Obama expressed support for decriminalizing marijuana. He and his commenters lament that while decriminalization is both eminently reasonable and widely supported by the public, it's also a political non-starter.

I think one reason for is what most voters do with information about candidates' stands. Contrary to the assumptions of all the makers of the "who should you vote for" quizes, people don't have a set of policy preferences and then pick a candidate they think will support those policies. Instead, people look at politicians' issue positions as indicators of their character. They ask what kind of person would have taken that stand?

This kind of character analysis is not unreasonable. Candidates' explicit policy plans never survive first contact with Congress, and there are always unexpected events that the candidate can't have offered a plan for. So we should be paying attention to the kind of judgment candidates exercise, and the core values and dispositions that drive them. To stick with the Obama example, I find his early stumbling on the question of "clean coal" plants much more informative than the promises of X% renewable energy by 20-whatever in the policy paper ghostwritten by his environment advisor.

The problem lies in the mental templates people use to transform a policy stand into an inference about character. The primary template that most Americans have for "the kind of person who would advocate legalizing marijuana" is "irresponsible hippie" -- especially if the person is, as in the case of Obama, already seen as young and liberal. So a voter could easily think (subconsciously or not) "I happen to agree on the merits with legalizing marijuana, and I trust that in my case it's for good, responsible reasons. But the most likely reason that Obama's advocating it is that he's a dirty hippie, and despite our fortuitous coalition on the marijuana issue, I don't want a hippie to be the leader of the free world."

Huckabee Learns A Fact

I miss the old Mike Huckabee. Back when he was hopelessly languishing at 2% of the polls, he had the freedom to occasionally say something sensible -- like that immigrants are not, in fact, the devil incarnate. But now that it looks like he has a realistic shot at the nomination, he feels like he has to pander to the nativists. His latest salvo is a plan to completely cut off all immigration from countries that harbor terrorists. Perhaps Huckabee would like to go personally tell the Christian refugees from the Middle East that they have to go home, because the same Islamist policies that lead to oppressing the Christian minority also lead to getting in bed with terrorist groups.

I do, however, have to give him a bit of credit. In his first flailing attempt at establishing his nativist cred, Huckabee tried to justify his position with a delusion about a wave of fictional Pakistani undocumented immigrants. But this time around, he's pointing out that all of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally (hence, by his logic, the need to cut off all immigration from certain countries). This is not just an actual fact, but a fact that many Americans are either unaware of or ignore. (Perhaps he's raised enough money now that he can afford to hire people to brief him on issues.)