I Guess Being a Poli-Sci Professor Doesn’t Require Much Interest in Local Politics
It’s been a while since I read anything from Daniel Drezner and, from the looks of this post, it may be a long while before I do so again. See, he has a problem he felt was worth sharing witht he rest us us. Drezner, as a resident of Massachusetts, has been exposed to the cruel barrage of electoral politics, and finds it simply horrid! Why, politicians actually campaign, by making phone calls, and having other people make phone calls!
Oh, the utter indignity that he shold suffer so Drezner’s suffering. Oh, the terribly inhumanity he’d has to face for a couple whole months!
But that’s not the worst of it. No, what has offended Drezner most is that the candidates are just terrible. Well, okay, he’s heard they’re terrible. No, that’s not right either. He’s actually seen for himself that one of them is terrible. The other one, well, we’ll get to him in a minute. Here’s his assessment of the candidate he has seen.
Democrat Martha Coakley has a prosecutor’s complex that would make Javert seeem like a bleeding-heart liberal. She is a God-awful politician so out of touch with reality that she accused Red Sox hero extraordinaire Curt Schilling of being a Yankee fan (Schilling’s blog response is here). Based on the ads I’ve seen, her campaign has also been, by far, the nastier of the two.
You may not agree with that assessment, but you have to at least give Drezner a cookie crumb for doing the basic reading on Coakley. He actually listened to what Coakley said, and considered her record based on more than one account. It would be better had he done a little bit more than the bare minimum, but I can’t blame him too much. He lives in Massachusetts, where there hasn’t been a competitive race for this particular Senate seat in his lifetime. He’s accustomed to being able to coast in to the polling place to vote for whichever snooty patrician happens to be running on the Democratic ticket. Thinking has not been all that necessary.
That doesn’t excuse the laziness of the next paragraph.
This leaves Republican Scott Brown, who based on this vacuous Boston Globe op-ed, is an empty shirt with no actual policy content whatsoever. He was in favor of health care reform before he was against it. He can’t stand the run-up in government debt, and wants to cut taxes across the board to take care of the problem — cause that makes perfect economic sense. The one thing he is unequivocally for is waterboarding suspected terrorists.
So, his entire opinion of Scott Brown is based one self-written op-ed piece? Brown has made approximately a bazillion speeches around the state. He’s had actual news articles written about the “policy content” of his campaign. But Drezner, who is a professor of political science, can’t be bothered to spend a few minutes to find any of those things?
Let me repeat that. Drezner is a professor of political science and he couldn’t be buggered to do even a minimal level of research about one of the candidates before he ruled the man “an empty shirt”. I bet had one of his students turned in this blog post as a short paper, Drezner would have sent it back so soaked in red pen ink that it would have looked like a Tarantino movie murder victim. He doesn’t get to slide. If he’s going to say that Scott Brown stinks as a candidate, he’s doing to have to do better than one op-ed and petulant snark about how hard it is to actually have to think before casting a vote. He’s a voter who actually teaches other people about our amazing and resilient political system and is paid to write about politics for a pretty prestigious magazine. I expect more from him and so should his friends and neighbors. If he surrenders to apathy, he’s setting a wretched example for the rest of us, who have only our sense of civic duty to energize us.
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Category: Political Pontifications
