fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
>
> You are misinterpreting the function of these little issues.
> Little issues don't "build up". Little issues tend to be signals to
> certain constituencies. For example, nobody has ever lost the vote due to
> rap music, but Clinton in 1992 signalled to many in the democratic party
> that he wouldn't be held hostage by the Civil Rights wing of the party by
> bashing rap star Queen Latifah. It's a low cost signal.
And the point of sending that low cost signal is to ... get more votes!
And if you send a lot of them, that adds up.
> Nobody will really
> care if you bash a rap musician. Same for the community investment
> act (I forget what this even is). I'd guess that few people
> are explicitely against it, and it's a cheap way to signal to
> political moderates that urban issues won't be forgotten by
> either Gore or Bush.
So do the political moderates care or not?!
> Consider a similar move for adaoption law. Unlike rap, adoption workers
> are considered experts in their field. They could bash you on the talk
> shows. A politician who goes for adoption law as an issue might get
> smeared as someone breaking up black families. How do you counter
> that? Well, you could argue that having any parents is better than no
> parents, but then you'd get into an emotional, difficult argument with
> people who think that children get unintentially hurt by different
> ethnicity parents, and that adoptions are moves by wealthy whites to steal
> kids from blacks in financial straits. Basically, like most family issues,
> it's messy and emotional issue that probably wouldn't yeild easy points
> for a politician.
Translation: Pre-public debate, the median voter wants a different
policy; post-public debate, the median voter will want the status quo?
That's an interesting story, but it's different from your earlier ones.
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"He was thinking that Prince Andrei was in error and did not see the
true light, and that he, Pierre, ought to come to his aid, to
enlighten and uplift him. But no sooner had he thought out what he
should say and how to say it than he foresaw that Prince Andrei,
with one word, a single argument, would discredit all his teachings,
and he was afraid to begin, afraid to expose to possible ridicule
what he cherished and held sacred."
Leo Tolstoy, *War and Peace*
