Author Archives: shumater

Coal-mine canary: Kentucky race may be 2020 preview

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Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/dec/10/left-in-a-hole-20181210/

OPINION
Coal-mine canary: Kentucky race may be 2020 preview

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | June 3, 2019

Consider, if you will, a leader who is unapologetic, unconventional and unleashed. Who is in office not because of, but in spite of, the political class, and cares little for its opinions.

A man whose opponents are reduced to sputtering fits of rage at the mere mention of his name. Who plays happily to his base, unperturbed by tepid approval ratings.

That, of course, describes Donald Trump, but it also describes the central player in the South’s hottest governor’s race in 2019–which could very well be the first canary in the coal mine telling us how Trump himself might fare in 2020.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is running for re-election after four turbulent years in Frankfort, in which he sparred with his fellow Republicans in the legislature, accused teachers of endangering students by leaving their classrooms to protest changes in their pensions, and lamented that Americans had become “soft” after school districts canceled classes during a subfreezing cold snap.

He has even endured the worst indignity that can befall a Kentucky politician–being booed lustily by the crowd on Derby Day.

In November, Bevin will face Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, the son of his predecessor, who over the past four years has made it his personal mission to sue Bevin–over pension reform, over higher education cuts and, most recently, over subpoenas issued to teachers who called in sick to protest at the Capitol.

A preview of both camps’ general election strategies was on full display on the night of May’s primary. Beshear called Bevin a bully and said the election would be about “right versus wrong.”

Bevin called Beshear a liberal and said the election would be about right versus left.
The governor is betting that a binary choice between himself and a “liberal” candidate will work to his advantage in Kentucky, just as Trump is painting his re-election as a binary choice between him and the “socialists” he says are running amok in the Democratic Party.

The question will be whether, when it comes time for voters to render a verdict, the pull of that binary choice will be stronger than the incumbents’ personal unpopularity (which is, arguably, how Trump became president in the first place.)

In a sense, Bevin was Trump before Trump was Trump. His came on the political scene in 2014 with a kamikaze mission to unseat U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell in a Republican primary with Tea Party support. In 2015, he won the GOP primary for governor by less than 100 votes after his two better-known rivals savaged each other. He won the general election by opposing same-sex marriage and tying his Democratic opponent to Barack Obama.

But as controversies have mounted, his fortunes have fallen. When Morning Consult looked at gubernatorial approval ratings in April, Bevin came in dead last, at just 33 percent and nearly 20 points under water.

Being tagged as America’s most unpopular governor is certainly no badge of honor when running for re-election, although Bevin, characteristically, insists he pays no attention to such things.

The governor’s job approval is about 10 points lower than Trump’s and, while the president retains strong support among Republicans, Bevin could only manage to win 52 percent in May’s GOP primary against three little-known opponents.

However, if the strategy of presenting a binary choice against a liberal is going to work anywhere, it should work in Kentucky, home to many rural, white, religious voters who propelled Trump to a whopping 40-point win in 2016.

Abortion is likely to be the key fault line in Bevin’s quest to paint Beshear as too liberal. Bevin opposes legal abortion; Beshear supports it and has refused to defend abortion restrictions passed by the legislature in court.
Bevin has also, not surprisingly, wrapped himself firmly in Trump’s aura. The president is featured prominently in his campaign ads and is expected to travel to the Bluegrass State this fall to campaign for him.

A Bevin victory, despite weak poll numbers and ceaseless controversy, would be a boon for the binary-choice strategy and a testament to Trump’s enduring popularity among his supporters.

A Bevin defeat could show the limits of trying to overcome marked unpopularity through ideological contrast. While that won’t have implications for 2020 in places such as Kentucky where Trump is popular, it could illustrate the limits of a contrast strategy in battleground states he needs to win.

No matter how Bevin versus Beshear 2019 turns out, it will be loud, expensive and mean–just the thing to get us ready for Trump versus Democrats 2020.

Rich Shumate, founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, where this article first appeared, is a former Arkansas resident.

On the defense: GOP facing battles in South

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Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/15/on-the-defense-20181015/

OPINION
On the defense: GOP facing battles in South

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | October 15, 2018

Less than a month away from the 2018 midterm election, Republicans in the South are finding themselves in a situation they haven’t faced in several election cycles. Namely, playing defense in U.S. House races.

Currently, at least 30 seats are either highly or potentially competitive across the 14 Southern states. And not one of those seats is now held by a Democrat.

Of course, this disparity is to be expected, given that Republicans hold 114 Southern House seats to just 40 for Democrats. With such a dominant majority, the GOP has more of the field to defend.

However, the fluid situation in 2018 stands in stark contrast to 2016, when Democrats managed to take away just two seats anywhere in the South, and in 2014, when Democrats suffered a net loss of three seats.

Democratic opportunities have opened up across the region, including a few isolated districts in states such as Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky and South Carolina, where President Donald Trump won massive victories in 2016. But the Democrats’ biggest hopes of trying to chip away at the Republicans’ Southern hegemony lie in suburban swing districts in the largest Southern states, including Florida, Texas, Virginia and North Carolina.

Of the 11 highly competitive districts, three are in Virginia and two each are in Florida, Texas and North Carolina. There are also two seats in metro Atlanta where Republicans are currently favored but Democrats are within striking distance.

Of the six Republican-held seats that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, the Republican candidate is currently ahead in just one, U.S. Rep. Will Hurd’s seat in west Texas. Those five seats are perhaps the most endangered. But Democrats also have a decent shot at seats in the Kentucky Bluegrass, metro Little Rock and the coalfields of southern West Virginia.

And in Texas, which has been a wasteland for Democrats for the better part of three decades, at least eight House seats are competitive in 2018.

What has made the difference for Democrats in this election cycle as opposed to 2014 and 2016? Part of the answer may be money.

According to Federal Election Commission reports, 16 Democratic House nominees have raised more than $1 million, led by Amy McGrath in Kentucky’s 6th District, who raised more than $3 million. Another nominee, Clarke Tucker in Arkansas’ 2nd District, is likely to break the million-dollar barrier before all is said and done.

Money does not, by itself, make a seat competitive. But anyone who has a million dollars to spend on a House race must be taken seriously, no matter the traditional partisan lean of the district.

Having to play defense in the South also has significant implications for Republican chances of keeping control of the House. The region has been the GOP’s big red wall, supplying nearly 60 percent of its House majority. So any erosion in that wall is an unwelcome development, particularly in an election where polls show Democrats with a lead in the generic congressional ballot.

Still, one should be careful not to overstate Democratic prospects in the South in 2018. If Democrats take half of the current seats that are toss-ups, and Republicans hold all the seats where they are now ahead, the net Democratic gain across the region would only be six seats.

However, given that Democrats only need to shift a net of 24 seats nationally to take control of the House, the loss of six seats in the GOP heartland could prove problematic. A blue wave in Texas or Virginia–the states where Democratic hopes are highest–could be catastrophic.

The one thing we can be sure of is that on election night, the political class will be paying more attention to the results of House races in the South than has been paid in quite some time.

Rich Shumate, a former Arkansas resident and a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University, is founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, a blog covering Southern politics.

Opposition to Medicaid expansion may be retreating

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Op-Ed in the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun
https://www.gainesville.com/opinion/20190722/rich-shumate-opposition-to-medicaid-expansion-may-be-retreating

Opinion
Opposition to Medicaid expansion may be retreating
By Rich Shumate | Special to The Sun | Posted Jul 22, 2019

After Obamacare made its way through Congress in 2009, triggering the Tea Party rebellion, Republican-controlled Southern statehouses became a redoubt of opposition to what critics saw as meddlesome socialist overreach.

Three years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration couldn’t force states to enact a key Obamacare provision — expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income residents — most Southern states took advantage of the decision and didn’t.

Today, nine of the 14 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid are in the South, leaving more than 2.3 million low-income Southerners who would qualify for Medicaid without health care coverage, according to researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But there are some signs that the blanket opposition to expanding Medicaid in the South may be retreating, albeit slightly and slowly.

Louisiana and Virginia expanded Medicaid after electing Democratic governors in 2017. In Arkansas and Kentucky, where expansion passed under Democratic governors, it has endured despite their replacement by more skeptical Republicans.
In Florida and Oklahoma, petition drives are underway to put expansion on the ballot in 2020, doing an end-run around recalcitrant GOP leaders. And in Mississippi, a Democrat is trying to use expansion as a wedge issue to end a 16-year Republican lock on the governor’s office.

In states with expanded Medicaid, low-income people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level — about $17,000 for an individual — can get coverage. In states without expansion, the income limit for a family of three is just under $9,000; single people are excluded entirely.

Most of the singles and families who are not eligible for traditional Medicaid don’t make enough money to get the tax credits they need to buy insurance on the Obamacare insurance exchanges. According to estimates from Kaiser, 92 percent of all Americans who fall into this coverage gap live in Southern states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, including about 450,000 in Florida.

The federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion; states must pick up the rest. Republican leaders who oppose the idea have balked at making a financial commitment to such an open-ended entitlement, which Congress could change at any time.

But that argument didn’t hold in Virginia after Democrats campaigning on expansion nearly took control of the legislature in 2017. When expansion came up for a vote, 18 House Republicans who survived that blue wave joined Democrats to pass it.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, who issued an executive order on his first day in office to expand Medicaid, is now running for re-election touting that decision; voters will give their verdict in October.

In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood is also making expanded Medicaid the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign this year, arguing that his state, with the nation’s highest poverty rate, is cutting off its nose to spite its face by refusing to extend coverage to people who would benefit from it.

In Arkansas and Kentucky, where Democratic governors managed to push through expansion in 2014, the Republicans who replaced them have left the programs essentially intact, although they have fiddled at the edges by imposing premiums and work requirements on recipients. (Federal judges have blocked those changes.)

In Florida and Oklahoma, supporters of expansion — including groups representing doctors, nurses and hospitals — are trying to put constitutional amendments expanding Medicaid coverage on the ballot in 2020.

Those ballot measures will be a key test of whether the public mood is more sympathetic to the idea of expansion than are the states’ conservative leaders, who have argued that the program is unaffordable and discourages people from seeking employment to secure health care.

However, the strategy of pursuing ballot initiatives is of limited use in the South because among states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, only Florida, Oklahoma and Mississippi allow the public to put measures on the ballot via petition. Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina do not.

In Florida, the ballot measure will also need to get approval from 60 percent of the voters to pass.

The question to be answered this year and next is whether the fiscal and philosophical arguments against expansion will hold against the argument that low-income Southerners — rural and urban, black and white — deserve health care coverage and will benefit from it, in spite of its association with Obamacare.

Rich Shumate, founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, is a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University. He was previously at the University of Florida.

Wall crumbling? Medicaid expansion gains in the South

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Op-Ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/jul/12/wall-crumbling-20190712/

OPINION
Wall crumbling? Medicaid expansion gains in South

By Rich Shumate | Special to the Democrat-Gazette | July 12, 2019

After Obamacare made its way through Congress in 2009, triggering the Tea Party rebellion, Republican-controlled Southern statehouses became a redoubt of opposition to what critics saw as meddlesome socialist overreach.

Three years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration couldn’t force states to enact a key Obamacare provision—expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income residents—most Southern states took advantage of the decision and didn’t.

Today, nine of the 14 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid are in the South, leaving more than 2.3 million low-income Southerners who would qualify for Medicaid without health care coverage, according to researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But there are some signs that the blanket opposition to expanding Medicaid in the South may be retreating, albeit slightly and slowly.

Louisiana and Virginia expanded Medicaid after electing Democratic governors in 2017. In Arkansas and Kentucky, where expansion passed under Democratic governors, it has endured despite their replacement by more skeptical Republicans.

In Florida and Oklahoma, petition drives are underway to put expansion on the ballot in 2020, doing an end-run around recalcitrant GOP leaders. And in Mississippi, a Democrat is trying to use expansion as a wedge issue to end a 16-year Republican lock on the governor’s office.

In states with expanded Medicaid, low-income people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level–about $17,000 for an individual–can get coverage. In states without expansion, the income limit for a family of three is just under $9,000; single people are excluded entirely.

Most of the singles and families who are not eligible for traditional Medicaid don’t make enough money to get the tax credits they need to buy insurance on the Obamacare insurance exchanges. According to estimates from Kaiser, 92 percent of all Americans who fall into this coverage gap live in Southern states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, including nearly 800,000 people in Texas, 450,000 in Florida, 275,000 in Georgia, and 225,000 in North Carolina.

The federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion; states must pick up the rest. Republican leaders who oppose the idea have balked at making a financial commitment to such an open-ended entitlement, which Congress could change at any time.

But that argument didn’t hold in Virginia after Democrats campaigning on expansion nearly took control of the legislature in 2017. When expansion came up for a vote, 18 House Republicans who survived that blue wave joined Democrats to pass it.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, who issued an executive order on his first day in office to expand Medicaid, is now running for re-election touting that decision; voters will give their verdict in October.

In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood is also making expanded Medicaid the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign this year, arguing that his state, with the nation’s highest poverty rate, is cutting off its nose to spite its face by refusing to extend coverage to people who would benefit from it.

In Arkansas and Kentucky, where Democratic governors managed to push through expansion in 2014, the Republicans who replaced them have left the programs essentially intact, although they have fiddled at the edges by imposing premiums and work requirements on recipients. (Federal judges have blocked those changes.)

Die-hard Obamacare opponents have not been able to scuttle the program in either state–even in Arkansas, where the program has to be reauthorized annually by a three-fourths majority in both houses of the legislature.

In Florida and Oklahoma, supporters of expansion–including groups representing doctors, nurses and hospitals–are trying to put constitutional amendments expanding Medicaid coverage on the ballot in 2020.
Those ballot measures will be a key test of whether the public mood is more sympathetic to the idea of expansion than are the states’ conservative leaders, who have argued that the program is unaffordable and discourages people from seeking employment to secure health care.

However, the strategy of pursuing ballot initiatives is of limited use in the South because among states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, only Florida, Oklahoma and Mississippi allow the public to put measures on the ballot via petition. Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina do not.

In Florida, the ballot measure will also need to get approval from 60 percent of the voters to pass.

The question to be answered this year and next is whether the fiscal and philosophical arguments against expansion will hold against the argument that low-income Southerners–rural and urban, black and white–deserve health-care coverage and will benefit from it, in spite of its association with Obamacare.

Rich Shumate is the founder and editor of ChickenFriedPolitics.com, where this article first appeared. He is a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University and a former Arkansas resident.

Let’s just not care what Europeans think about President Bush

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Viewpoint Column
By RICH SHUMATE
Creative Loafing Atlanta/June 2001

So the Europeans have their knickers all askew because they don’t care for our new president and his policies on missile defense, the death penalty and climate change.

All together now: Let’s just not give a damn. After eight years of having the American president’s lips firmly planted on European derrieres, this new state of affairs is refreshing. After all, should we really care that much about opinions from countries where men eat snails and women don’t shave their armpits?

And lectures from Spaniards and Italians on human rights? I think not.

The U.S.-European “alliance” goes something like this: We save their collective butts when they screw things up (World Wars I and II and the Balkans crisis, for instance) and keep the bad old Russians from their door. In return, they criticize everything we say and whine about everything we do.

European socialist politicians have been among the harshest critics of President Bush’s missile defense plan. But if (after we build and pay for it) some crazy despot threatens to lob a missile into one of their theme-park cities, you can bet they’ll want us to deploy it. And we will, because that’s what we do.

If modern civilization is indeed endangering the planet by causing the climate to warm (an unproved thesis that’s a column for another day), it will be American technological know-how that solves the problem. And we will be criticized by Europeans, even for saving the planet, because that’s what they do.

The good news is that we now have a leader who won’t back down in the face of European horror over American common sense. Bush, like any Texan worth his boots, isn’t interested in currying favor with the quiche-and-brie set.

On his recent tour of the Continent, he seemed to get along much better with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Perhaps he and Putin had a good laugh at the notion that the prime minister of Sweden thinks anyone cares about Swedish opinion on matters more weighty than meatballs.

Don’t get me wrong — I think we should be engaged in Europe. We’ve seen what can happen when we let Europeans handle their own affairs without adult supervision. And it’s a great place for us to vacation.

But despite its many charms, Europe is chock full of some mighty ungrateful people. Taking heed of their ungrateful chatter would only give it validity — and probably encourage even more.

Instead, we should just take Bush’s lead: Patiently listen to them whine, smile and then do what’s best for our own country.

Why is Atlanta’s downtown begging ban even controversial?

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Viewpoint Column
By RICH SHUMATE
Creative Loafing Atlanta/September 2003

We should all be stunned, chagrined and downright mortified by Atlanta City Councilman H. Lamar Willis’ proposal to ban begging downtown.

Not because of what Willis has set out to do. That’s way overdue and just plain common sense (which is, I’ll admit, a description one rarely gets to use in referring to the Atlanta City Council). Rather, what should shock and trouble us is that his proposal has ignited such controversy.

We’ve come a long way, baby — down a very wrong road of misguided and misdirected compassion. Why in the world would anybody with a lick of common sense object to this proposal? Why would anyone who cares about the quality of life in Atlanta, or the city’s economic future, think it is desirable to have unkempt vagrants panhandling on street corners?

Rather than answering such questions, critics of Willis’ approach instead change the subject. They warn, in ominous tones, that the ban could be challenged in court on free speech grounds.

Since when has the city of Atlanta been shy about plunging into quixotic legal adventures in pursuit of social policy? Granted, many of those fights have not been worth fighting. This one is. I say we give William Rehnquist and today’s Supremes the opportunity to weigh in on the constitutional right to beg and see if they come down on the side of common sense.

And while we’re at it, let’s cut through the politically correct crap we’ve used to cocoon the issue of “homelessness.” First of all, we ought to dispense with the word “homeless,” which is meant to convey the image of people who, all of a sudden and through no fault of their own, find themselves out on the streets. They must not be stigmatized, lest their self-esteem suffer.

Hogwash. Many, if not most, of these people are out on the streets because of their own bad life choices, primarily drug and alcohol abuse, and they are making a conscious decision to remain dazed and destitute. Yes, people are born into poverty or have it thrust upon them by misfortune. But staying there is a choice — one we should neither enable nor encourage by mollycoddling them.

A more appropriate term for these folks is “vagrant,” defined as an idle person without visible means of support. Yes, this carries a stigma. But some stigma might be a welcome tonic to motivate change.

OK, OK, I can already hear some of you out there picking up poison pens to inform me that a substantial portion of those living on the streets are not drunks or addicts but mentally ill people who can’t, or won’t, take care of themselves.

True enough. But these people are out on the streets today (rather than in institutions where they wouldn’t be a danger to themselves or a nuisance to the public) thanks to legal challenges brought by the same merry band of liberal do-gooders who now want to enshrine “homelessness” as a right.

If somebody is too mentally ill to take care of himself, what truly helps them more: confining them to a mental institution, where they’re at least warm, fed and medicated, or letting them roam free to eat out of Dumpsters, sleep on park benches and scream at pedestrians? The first choice is compassion; the second, merely a mirage.

It is absurd is that people who live, work or visit downtown must put up with the unpleasantries of rampant vagrancy because of someone else’s misguided political agenda. Here’s an idea — let the chickens go home to roost and turn every ACLU office in the country into a homeless shelter.

If Willis’ proposal passes, Atlanta is likely to rise higher on a list of the 20 “meanest” cities recently put out by the National Coalition for the Homeless. (We’re fifth, with a bullet.) The group’s criteria for “mean” includes not only restrictions on begging, but also laws banning defecation in public and bathing in public waters.

Funny, my copy of the Constitution seems to be missing the section where pooping on a city street is enshrined as a right. If this is “mean,” let us have more of it. And don’t dare suggest that we’re somehow lacking in compassion if we insist on basic rules of civilized behavior.

Our compassion should rest with the downtown resident who has scrimped and saved to buy a nice home — but is now afraid to invite guests over at night because of the gauntlet of derelicts outside, whacked out on God knows what.

Our compassion should rest with the struggling business owner putting in long hours and trying to build a future — who sees his customers intimidated and chased away by vagrants demanding money. Our compassion should rest with the conventioneer who comes to Atlanta to enjoy himself — and vows never to return after being accosted by a wild-eyed, un-medicated schizophrenic.

But compassion should not be used as an excuse to help people maintain a pathological lifestyle eating at the fabric of our city. That’s not compassion; it’s delusion. Banning panhandling would help all of us — including the homeless — by discouraging the pathology.

Shiite Republicans abandon the wisdom of Barry Goldwater

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Viewpoint Column
By RICH SHUMATE
Creative Loafing Atlanta/April 2003

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum was right.

Not when he equated sex between consenting gay adults with incest and polygamy, which was gratuitous prattle both vicious and silly. Not when he offered the bizarre explanation that he doesn’t have anything against gay people; he just wants to make them criminals if they have sex. (Gee, mighty big of you, Rick.)

Rather, the Pennsylvania Republican, in his recent notorious Associated Press interview, correctly forecast that if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Texas’ sodomy law in a pending case, legislators will find it harder to regulate private consensual sexual conduct behind closed doors.

But this is not, as Santorum suggested, a bad thing. It’s a good thing. More to the point, it’s a conservative thing.

Consider the following quote: “We do not seek to lead anyone’s life for him. We seek only to secure his rights and to guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed.”

Who uttered such unbridled common sense? No, not Hillary Clinton. Not Barney Frank. And certainly not Bill Bennett (although I suspect he has newfound appreciation for the sentiment after his recent gambling dust-up.)

The quote comes from the late Barry Goldwater, the father of modern American conservatism, in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention.

Santorum and other GOP social purists ignore the bedrock upon which Goldwater conservatism was built: keeping government the hell out of people’s private business. Regrettably, toward the end of Goldwater’s life, people of Santorum’s ilk were trying to strip his name from GOP headquarters in his home state of Arizona because he had the temerity to suggest gay people deserved to be treated as human beings.

“You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it,” Goldwater said in 1994, while campaigning for a federal law to ban job discrimination based on sexual identity.

Goldwater held a conservative conviction, common in his native West, that the Constitution champions the freedoms of individuals and protects people from government intrusion — that a man’s home is his castle, what he earns from an honest day’s work belongs to him and what goes on behind closed doors is his own damn business.

The political left thwarts this ideal when it uses confiscatory taxes and intrusive regulation to redistribute wealth in pursuit of a socialist utopia. Santorum and the social purists similarly frustrate true conservatism when they use criminal law to try to resurrect Victorian England.

Santorum’s single most offensive comment in his AP interview was that he disagreed with the idea “that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individual’s wants and passions.”

“There are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire,” he said. Uh, senator, those “consequences” are known as “freedom,” which conservatives are supposed to hold in great favor.

Of late, we’ve seen few better illustrations of the slippery slope of intruding into individual liberty than the revelations that Bennett, the former Cabinet secretary turned virtues czar, was feeding millions into slot machines.

To his credit, Bennett the high roller didn’t inveigh against gambling while he was in holy-roller mode. He didn’t believe gambling was wrong, so he didn’t condemn it. He was, in essence, fighting only for virtues conforming to his own behavior (which makes it a whole lot easier to be virtuous). But in the process, he showed how dictating virtue and morality, as the Shiite Republicans so love to do, is a highly subjective pursuit.

Indulging such subjective impulses creates the very tyranny our Constitution was written to prevent: minorities forced to bow before the capricious will of majorities. It also creates illogical double standards. For instance, can we really say legalized gambling is less damaging to our society than two men or two women having sex with each other in private? Let’s ask the children of a compulsive gambler who lost this week’s food money on a bad roll of the dice.

This is not to say religious groups, individuals or even government officials shouldn’t campaign against activities they think ought to be discouraged in America. We should not be a society free of values. But there is a world of difference between discouraging something and making it a crime, particularly when the behavior is between consenting adults and doesn’t harm anyone else.

Absent a compelling state interest, a conservative interpretation of the Constitution demands we allow maximum personal freedom, even if the majority finds that freedom offensive.

Santorum has the right to disapprove of homosexuality and opine against it, but how in the world is consensual sex between two gay Texans inside their home a threat to him or anybody else? If the police hadn’t barged in and arrested them, we wouldn’t even know about it.

Santorum and other busybody politicians who run around calling themselves conservatives, but actually advocate government intrusion into our personal freedoms, would do well to stop and ask themselves this question:

What would Barry do?

Pryor, Cotton adds usher in silly season in Arkansas Senate race

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com/January 2014
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

The good news for local television viewers in Arkansas is that after months of snippy attack ads, U.S. Senator Mark Pryor and his GOP challenger, U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, have finally started going positive in their Senate duel.

The bad news? Both campaigns have started with a couple of peculiar spots that say very little about either man — but much about how little regard their campaign managers seem to have for the intelligence of Arkansans.

Let’s start with Cotton. Just before Christmas, he aired an ad featuring a moving testimonial from, of all people, his mother.

Really? An endorsement from your mother? I would assume that even my momma, God rest her soul, would say nice things about me if someone pointed a television camera in her direction. But would that tell voters anything about my qualifications to be a U.S. senator? I doubt it.

Cotton’s mother seems like a perfectly delightful lady. But unless she’s endorsing Pryor, her views on the Senate race aren’t particularly illuminating, although I will concede the warm-and-fuzzy Yuletide ads were an improvement over the Pryor-bashing we all saw in previous months.

Not to be outdone in the banality department, Pryor went up with an ad in which he tells voters across the Natural State that the Bible is his “North Star.”

That seems a rather peculiar mixture of religion and astronomy. But it is what he says next that takes the ad straight over into strange: “The Bible teaches us no one has all the answers. Only God does. And neither political party is always right.”

I must have missed that day in Sunday school when we studied what Holy Scripture has to say about political parties. Then again, Senator Pryor is a Southern Baptist, and I’m not, so maybe something has simply been lost in translation.

But does the Bible really teach us that no one has all the answers? Actually, it usually teaches the opposite; namely, that the answers are to be found from the people within its covers, if one looks hard enough.  For God’s sake, a Southern Baptist ought to at least know that.

I suppose the senator’s political handlers thought this ad would burnish his Christian bona fides in a state where such things matter. But anyone who stops to think for a minute what he actually said, as opposed to the ad’s atmospherics, will realize how silly it is.

I’m sure Senator Pryor is a good Christian, and I’m sure Tom Cotton’s momma really loves him a whole, big bunch. Why the voters of Arkansas should care about either of those things, though, is a mystery.

Gentlemen, let us have substance!

Hillary Clinton’s coy routine about running for president isn’t fooling anybody

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By RICH SHUMATE
Chickenfriedpolitics.com/July 7, 2014
(Note: This piece, which originally ran on Chickenfriedpolitics.com, was also accepted as an Op-Ed submission by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

Among the least attractive characteristics of the Clintons (both she and he) is what may be charitably described as their chronic disingenuousness.

To wit, they resort to spin and subterfuge that’s too clever by half, even when the truth would do them no harm. The meaning of ‘is’ always seems to depend on what the meaning of ‘is’ is, at any given moment in time. Just like her Arkansas accent comes and goes.

Which brings us to Hillary’s recent magical mystery tour, replete with an orgy of copious, self-serving publicity that would make a Kardashian blush. The centerpiece of this effort has been her repeated insistence, that, by gosh, she just hasn’t decided yet if she’s going to run for president.

But of course she’s running for president. Would Bonnie and Clyde walk by a bank without at least attempting to rob it? Of course not.

If she’s not running for president, her recent behavior makes absolutely no sense.

She doesn’t need to make money by hawking a book. After all, she and Bill now have more dough than they or Chelsea could spend in five lifetimes, no matter how many houses (note the plural) they buy.

She certainly doesn’t need a book tour to bolster her celebrity. And it’s rather doubtful that she has any realistic ambition to win a Pulitzer prize with her weighty tome.

So that brings us to the inevitable conclusion that all of this is but a prelude to 2016.

The Ready for Hillary crowd might say, so what? Why should she telegraph her intentions now and become a target for the vast right-wing conspiracy? As Hillary might put it (with a hearty thump on the desk), at this point, what difference does it make?

Well, for one thing, her coy routine isn’t going to keep her from being fired upon by conservatives. They’ve never stopped. However, what it does do is remind many voters how allergic the Clintons are to candor.

So six months or a year from now, when Hillary finally admits that, well, by golly, she is going to run for president after all, many people will realize that, once again, they have been taken in by Clintonian double-speak.

Of course, that last statement presupposes that anyone in America actually believes that Hillary Clinton isn’t running for president. Perhaps that depends on what the meaning of ‘isn’t’ is.

Meanwhile, refusing to admit what voters already know just reminds them that, for the Clintons, the truth is always a movable feast.