Very insightful column from Ron Elving, of National Public Radio’s “Watching Washington” regarding a “dirty secret” about the House of Representatives and its Republican members. 

It now appears there have been three Mark Foley landmines waiting to explode beneath the feet of congressional Republicans.

The first was the aggressive behavior of the six-term veteran Foley, who resigned from Congress Sept. 29 when the raw nature of his interest in congressional pages became public. Foley actually shocked Washington, and that’s not easy to do in our time.

Bad as it was, that was just the first explosion.

The second came when people realized how much had been known about Foley’s attention to pages and pursuit of former pages. It seems that at a minimum, several members of Congress and its staff were aware of the problem.

This second explosion was more damaging than the first. It created the impression that the Republican leaders in the House were more concerned with political damage than with protecting the pages. Polls show most Americans now believe this.

As for the third landmine, it’s still lying un-detonated, just below the surface on Capitol Hill. And it has the potential to cause the most far-reaching damage of all.

This untouched landmine is the fact that quite a few of the people who are essential to running the House are gay, and many of them are keeping it a secret. This includes some members and many staff. And it most definitely includes Republicans.

In fact, because Hill gays who are Democrats are more likely to be out — having less to fear in terms of reprisal — the closeted gays are more likely as a rule to be Republican.

All this is ho-hum to many denizens of Washington. The presence of gays among the congressional members and staff is old news, if rarely discussed in public. In practical terms, most on the Hill have gotten over it, including many of the most conservative Republicans in both chambers.

But can the same be said for some of the Republican Party’s most ardent supporters? …

So as to not entirely pilfer the copyrighted material, I’ll ask that you read the rest of Elving’s article by clicking here.

My prediction is that, eventually, there will be a major clash within the Republican Party between the wing of that party more concerned about social conservativism, and the wing of the party – one might call them the Libertarians – more concerned with economic and foreign policy conservativism.

Especially for my readers outside the US who find that American poiltics leaves them scratching their heads, I’ll share these further observations:

It is extremely popular within US punditry (read: mainstream media) to play up the “great divide” between the Blue States and Red States, Democrats and Republicans, Conservatives and Liberals.  But the reality is much different: The vast majority of Americans are fairly close together on most issues.

• Socially, most Americans generally favor a “live and let live” approach, not liking the idea of discrimination while also being a bit uncomfortable with radical breaks from the past such as giving gay people the right to marry in the exact same way straight people do.
• Morally, most Americans agree that things such as abortion are not desireable and would like to see the number of abortions minimized, while being wary of excessive government control over personal decisions.
• Economically, most Americans would like to see a balanced budget, meetings the needs of today while ensuring financial security for future generations.  Most Americans favor some safety net for those who are down on their luck, but also believe that individuals “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps” is what made the country great.
• Internationally, most Americans are fearful about the uncertainty of this age of international terrorism and want to take preventative measures, but are concerned about their governement having overreaching powers that limit personal freedoms, as well as not wanting to be involved in military conflicts in other countries.

The challenge we have as a populace is in breaking out of this “either/or”, “us/them”, “blue/red” dichotomy and insisting that our elected officials (and those running for office) begin to speak to the vast center of our population rather than pandering to the extremities.

The University of Michigan has an interesting article on their website showing conventional and more accurate ways to look at this supposed political dichotomy:

The (con tiguous 48) states of the country are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate (George W. Bush) or the Democratic candidate (John F. Kerry) respectively in the 2004 Presidential election.  The map gives the superficial impression that the “red states” dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones.  This is misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations, whereas most of the blue states have large ones.

If this is corrected for by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population, we see more of a balance.  However, there is in fact still more red than blue on this map, even after allowing for population sizes. Of course, we know that nationwide the percentages of voters voting for either candidate were almost identical, so what is going on here?

The answer seems to be that the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are a lot of counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican. One possible way to allow for this, suggested by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University, is to use not just two colors on the map, red and blue, but instead to use red, blue, and shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters. Here is what the normal map looks like if you do this:

And the cartogram, showing that only a rather small area is taken up by true red counties, the rest being mostly shades of purple with patches of blue in the urban areas.

Gosh, and to think that two posts ago I was talking about the spoof of movie posters.