Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Looking Back
Looking back through the archives of this Blog, I found that my first post was dated September 1, 2004. Here is a copy of part of what I wrote at the time:
I am pessimistic these days. It appears that the voting public is more interested in dramatic lies told by the candidates or their surrogates about each other than in the important issues that are going to be settled by the coming election. The public is titillated at accounts that "perhaps" John Kerry told a few lies to get his medals and his purple hearts. The public would be equally titillated at an account of how George W. Bush really spent his time in Alabama while supposedly serving in the National Guard. The truth or falsity of such assertions are completely irrelevant to the qualifications of either man to be the President. They have nothing to do with the policies that either man would probably follow if he is elected (or reelected) in November. Nevertheless, these stories crowd out the more important issues that are to be settled next November, such as:
- Who will replace John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, and William Rehnquist when they retire from the Supreme Court?
- Will advances in stem cell research occur in the United States or, perhaps, in Korea?
- Will the Republican plan to "privatize" and effectively eliminate Social Security proceed?
- How quickly will the United States regain its good name after the bungle we've created in Iraq?
Now, ten years later, we know who replaced Stevens, O'Connor, and Rehnquist on the Supreme Court. We now have Scalia, Roberts, and Alito. As a practicing pessimist, I groan that they are worse than the justices they replace as well as being a lot younger. They'll be around for a long time.
We also know that stem cell research is getting off to a slow start in California.
Social Security is still under attack but so far it hasn't been privatized.
We are still bungling in Iraq. We propose to bungle in Syria as well. We've learned nothing from Iraq or Afghanistan.
I discard pessimism. I believe that a Democrat will be elected President in 2016. I think that voters in many states will come to realize that they can not trust their legislators to draw fair election district boundaries but will always skew them to favor the party in power in the legislature at the time when boundaries are redrawn and that some non-partisan scheme will be set in place to draw boundaries in the future. It may be that a President will not have a cooperative Congress until the election of 2022.
Wait for my next "looking back" blog ten years from now.
