Archive for May, 2009
Thursday Open Thread
What’s on your mind this Thursday?
Something fun for Broadway fans: Addams Family premieres in Chicago this fall before heading to New York
Our friend Paul knows absolutely everything about Broadway and can recite every single word of every song that comes on during Showtunes night at Sidetrack (he also grew a beard recently that makes him look like Michael Gross from Family Ties, or maybe Michael Gross from Tremors, especially if you imagine him running from giant Beetlejuiced sandworms, which happens more in the Tremors series than it ever did to the Keaton family, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your fondness for all things Baxter Birney…sha na na na). This is technically completely unrelated to politics, but interesting because the other day some people here were discussing Broadway shows, so we thought we’d mention what Paul told us: they’ve made a musical of The Addams Family, and Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth will be starring in it this fall here in Chicago where it is first premiered before heading on to Broadway in New York.
Addams Family will hold court in the theater once home to Wicked, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theater right off State Street (that great street).
Back in the late 90s, we saw Neuwirth in the revival of Chicago with Ann Reinking and Joel Grey, and then later saw Lane in The Producers with Matthew Broderick (and look forward to seeing Lane at Sidetrack while he’s performing here, just as we saw Tim Curry and David Hyde Pierce there all the time when they were in town for Spamalot, and see Jesse Metcalf every time he passes through Chicago doing whatever he does now that he’s no longer the gardener on Desperate Housewives).
It’s going to be incredible to see Neuwirth as Morticia with Lane, we assume, as Gomez (though he’d also make a good Uncle Fester).
And for Cousin It?
With that hair, none other than Rod Blagojevich, with our own Lisa Madigan as little Wednesday Addams (since now that she’s decided not to run for Attorney General and Governor Quinn is blocking her run for his job, she’s not going to have much to do after 2010 when she and Alexi Giannoulias cancel each other out and Roland Burris defeats them both in the Democrats’ primary and retains his Senate seat).
Israel News Roundup
Dear HillBuzz,
My name is Laura Rosen Cohen and I’m a Toronto-based writer with a particular interest in the Middle East, politics, and history. I thought I would help you out here at HillBuzz by contributing some thoughts about issues facing Israel, and by extension the Jewish world today. I’m still trying to think of a great name for these round-ups, and would love to hear from you if you find these items interesting or helpful, or your suggestions for a column name.
Arutz7 is, in my opinion, one of the better sources of news from Israel in English. It’s written from a nationalist-Zionist point of view and contains a lot of stories from Israel that mainstream media outlets miss. For English news from Israel I also tend to read Yediot Aharonot (squishy left), Ha’aretz (extreme anti-Zionist left), and The Jerusalem Post (center left, with some conservative columnists). So here’s some food for thought regarding Israel from today’s electronic press:
- This story just made my day. It seems there is an emergency meeting now between Palestinian smugglers and their Egyptian and Bedouin helpers trying to figure out how to improve damaged tunnel lines. I guess the IDF’s actions there were pretty successful. Kudos to the IDF (Israeli Defense Force).
- This item is about Dr. Utopia throwing the American Jewish community a bone. American Jews continue to blindly support the current president, continuing their ancient tradition of Democratic voting patterns despite mounting evidence that Dr. Utopia will be the worst president (in terms of defending the West) since Jimmy Carter.
- One Reason Why There Won’t Be Peace in the Middle East for Many Generations. Little attention is paid to the constant, frenzied indoctrination of Palestinian children against Jews and Israel. As long as this behavior and “education” is tolerated by the West, there will never be peace.
- Or, as Canadian pundit George Jonas puts it, “Peace won’t come from Microbama’s release of Oslo 3.1. The software “land for peace” has a fatal glitch. It may produce land for Palestinians; it produces no peace for Israelis.” Jonas is well worth the read.
I look forward to this becoming a new feature for HillBuzz and would appreciate any feedback from your readers on a good column name as well as if this information is helpful to them as we all monitor the effects of Dr. Utopia’s Hope and Change on Israel.
Laura Rosen Cohen,
Toronto, Canada
More proof that Trillion Dollars in Spending rushed through Congress was completely wasted: the CTA claims it is out of money again
But, first you need to think back to February and that Trillion Dollars in Spending the Obama/Pelosi/Reid administration jammed through Congress, without anyone — not a SINGLE PERSON of either party — actually reading that bill before ONE TRILLION DOLLARS was spent.
Shameful.
The Chicago Transit Authority is like your no-good, do-nothing, always-in-a-jam brother. It cries wolf so much, it’s ridiculous. Service cuts are repeatedly threatened because the agency claims it has no money. Massive construction projects the last few years apparently depleted all of its finances, and now the agency claims it will have to stop performing routine maintenance on trains and stations because, where public safety and health is concerned, it’s much better, obviously, to just stop repairing moving trains and elevated stations and just HOPE FOR THE BEST.
Today, we wonder why the CTA didn’t get all of its maintenance needs covered by that Trillion Dollars the current president forced Congress to spend. The CTA’s buses and trains are vital to the economy of the third largest city in the nation. When the CTA is disrupted, people can’t get to work…people not working hurts the economy.
So, helping the CTA means helping the economy, stimulating it, which was supposedly the point of that Trillion Dollars the White House demanded Congress spend.
So, why on Earth didn’t the CTA get the money it needed from Illinois’ share of that “stimulus”. Just like the levees in Louisiana, Iowa, and Missouri, the CTA was not factored properly into the vast sums Congress wasted because it is not a pork barrel pet project of anyone’s.
As much as we railed against that Trillion in wasteful spending, we wholeheartedly backed spending billions on strengthening levees, improving existing public transportation in cities like Chicago, and using that federal money to not only create jobs but prevent situations where people lose jobs they have now because they’re cut off from their access to transportation.
Harry Reid famously ensured $8 billion of that Trillion in spending was allocated to a fantastical, insane, flying magnet train between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, one of the biggest boondoggles we’ve ever heard of.
The CTA says it’s short $155 million and, thus, needs to stop making needed repairs because it can’t afford any more spending on its infrastructure.
Instead of flying trains in the desert no one will ride for decades, if ever, why not spend the money on keeping public transportation running in cities like Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and other places it is depended on by people who can’t work without those buses and trains?
Every day, more stories like this come out that should make you scratch your head in disbelief at just how foolish Congress was in February for allowing the new president to dump so much of our national treasure into the drain, while the CTA in Chicago and other agencies like it still claim their own budgets are so drained they need to stop making repairs, and endangering their riders, because while the government was out spending trillions it couldn’t be bothered to fund things that actually mattered.
Is the CIA committed to replacing Nancy Pelosi with Steny Hoyer as Speaker?
Could this man be the next Speaker of the House, replacing Nancy Pelosi, because the CIA has had absolutely enough of her?
Just something to think about as every day more information comes out proving Pelosi has been lying since 2003 regarding what she knew about enhanced interrogation techniques used against terrorists in the War on Terror.
Today, we heard three separate people around town saying they believe the CIA wants Pelosi out. Normally when people talk about the CIA plotting and scheming this or that, we wonder how tightly their tinfoil hats are screwed on, but there’s something really interesting with this.
The CIA is staffed with career agents who have done unimaginable things in this country’s best interest for decades, regardless of who’s in the White House or who’s the current Congressional leadership. Politicians are fleeting, the Agency is forever.
The Obama/Pelosi/Reid leadership in Washington seems just too naive, delusional, and dangerous for the CIA to NOT plot and scheme against Pelosi at the very least. We wish we had more faith in Nevada voters to oust Reid next year, but we certainly don’t believe San Francisco voters will give Pelosi the boot. The CIA knows that too…so the only way to get rid of Pelosi is to completely expose her for the lying fraud that she is. Hamstrung that way, she’ll be removed as Speaker and the much more sensible Steny Hoyer will take her place (as sensible as anyone in Congress currently is).
This is all tangential to something else we’ve been thinking about lately: why is Dick Cheney speaking to the media so much about how out of touch with reality the current administration is? Cheney never spoke this much to the press as Vice President. He’s wealthy beyond belief, owns a massive amount of land, could be doing just about anything he wants, so why is he suddenly so chatty? We believe he still receives daily intelligence and security briefings and it sure seems like whatever is in those reports scares the Hell out of the man.
We do not believe the current administration takes the threats against America seriously enough. Every day, it feels like we get a little less safe, and more and more keeps slipping through the cracks, en route to another 9/11. It reminds us of someone who fell off a ladder once when they weren’t paying attention to what they were doing, and they learned a lesson for a while, but as more and more time went by without another accident, that person is starting to fall back into old habits, taking foolish risks, and believing another fall from the ladder won’t happen again. That person is stone cold WRONG.
And it sure feels like Cheney’s sitting back in a secure and undisclosed location seeing America slide back into complacency, every day inching us closer to vulnerability for a new attack, and as an American he’s speaking up about it.
Add this to the mysteriously ongoing drip drip drip of bad news for Pelosi, and we get the impression people who know how dangerous the world really is are seeking to mitigate the damage being done by Dr. Utopia and his Feel Good Hope Change Band in Washington.
All of this is speculative, of course, but it just feels like there’s so much more going on than at first meets the eye.
If he's smart, he'll pick Ann Claire Williams for the Supreme Court
We still feel Ann Claire Williams is the person to watch for the Supreme Court nomination expected to come soon. In articles like this, where people speculate as to who’s going to be selected for the Court, file Williams under “other people being considered”, and under the radar to boot.
Now, Janet Napolitano is being put out there as a potential SCOTUS nominee…without anyone mentioning the obvious problem her confirmation hearing would surely have (this would be the same problem Charlie Crist, Rahm Emanuel, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, or Liberace would have should any of them be nominated for the Supreme Court (added, quite obviously, to the other irksome fact that last one must contend with, being 20 years in the grave and all).
We repeat our belief that Judge Sotomayer does not have the professionalism or legal acumen to be on the court — the mere fact that she’s been consistently called a potential SCOTUS nominee is the greatest compliment this rude, crass, and belligerent jurist will ever receive in her life. Kagan and Wood are also, likewise, constantly mentioned as possible SCOTUS nominees, but both have serious problems with their records and various statements they’ve made through the years. Both would thrill the Left, but with the 2010 elections coming, not to mention re-election in 2012, the Left is not who Dr. Utopia needs to thrill. Neither Kagan nor Wood would do anything to make moderates believe Dr. Utopia was the right person elected in 2008…and that would have consequences in 2010.
Jennifer Granholm is an interesting question mark, because nationally she’s long been beloved by moderate Democrats. If she hadn’t been born in Canada and immigrated to the US, she would have been Kerry’s 2004 VP pick for sure. But, she’s finishing her governorship in Michigan with immense resentment there. Would removing her from the Governor’s mansion and putting her on The Court help Democrats in that state…and ensure the Dems keep Michigan blue in 4 years? Maybe. Granholm would be on the Court for many years, but we think she has more chance to be the second or third pick for the Court in this current administration (to replace either Ginsburg or Kennedy).
We believe Ann Claire Williams will be Souter’s replacement. Today, we spent a lot of time in the Hyde Park area of Chicago working on a project and out of the blue we ran into someone who actually knows Williams, and talked about her chances to be on The Court. “It’s very, very good…and the media’s not even talking about her. She knows the President very well and more importantly knows Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod very well.”
So, we still think the media’s looking to the left when the White House will end up picking a centrist, rational, excellent jurist like Williams.
What’s REALLY interesting are the rumors that Dr. Utopia will not select a woman but will instead select a Hispanic man, knowing full well women won’t organize effectively enough to demand gender equality on the Court. Women, unlike the black community, do not come together to support one another, and forever allow abortion to be the wedge that allows men to keep them out of the highest levels of our government.
Go ahead and be all crazy about this in comments, but it’s true. If women got together and voted as a bloc the way the black community did in 2008, that 51% majority women enjoy would be a true force to reckon with. As it is, women aren’t respected by the current White House because they are so easily divided along social, religious, economic, cultural, you-name-it lines, so why put another woman on The Court when at worst this oversight might get you a nasty column or two from Camille Paglia or Maureen Dowd, but that’s about it?
What works against Williams is the fact that Dr. Utopia does not need to lift a finger for the black community ever again. We were on the Southside of Chicago today, and his face is painted on murals all over that part of the city, but most especially on the schools there. Giant murals of him all over the schools, in all sorts of poses, in what truly reminds us of the murals of Saddam Hussein that were all over Tikrit in Iraq. There is no pressure at all to add another black Justice to the Court, and politics will factor heavily into the selection process.
Rewarding Hispanics for their 2008 support with the “historic first Hispanic SCOTUS Justice” is something Dr. Utopia seemingly wants to do.
But, we do sincerely hope Williams is the surprise (to everyone but us) pick because she’s just head and shoulders above the rest of those on the “short list”, and would make an excellent replacement for Souter for the next 30 years or so. If Dr. Utopia gets a second term, expect those picks from 2012-2016 to be as radically Leftist as possible.
But with elections coming up that could guarantee a place next to Carter and Bush Sr. in the one-term hall of fame, we just don’t see a Leftist appointment when that sort of a risk just wouldn’t pay off.
But Williams, on the other hand, would be a smart, smart choice…of an even SMARTER and wonderfully qualified respected jurist.
Wednesday Open Thread
What’s on your mind today?
It’s going to be a busy day for us, with the Special Olympics Bowling for the Champs event later in the evening, but Drudge Report has a lot of things that we’re going to spend today thinking about.
So many stories on that Trillion Dollars of Spending that’s being wasted, misappropriated, and flushed down the drain just like we have been warning was going to happen…and it’s STILL going to take until the end of summer for a full picture to emerge on the true scope of mismangement when it comes to all those billions the current administration dumped into the hands of political cronies.
The MSM will resist reporting any of this as much as possible, but the fact that it’s already starting to trickle out reassures us that by the end of August, Americans will see just how wasteful this administration has been.
It’s also interesting to see Nancy Pelosi squirm in the hot seat for lying about what she knew in regards to the enhanced interrogration techniques used on terrorists. She clearly lied, but will she suffer any consequences for it? We doubt that, as no Republican has ever mounted a serious threat to her re-election in San Francisco. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they did?
What's Hillary Clinton Doing Today? May 12th, 2009
Meetings with David Millibrand, Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom
Go, Hillary, Go!
Still can't believe this is true, but wow, we love Donald Trump
Donald Trump has been one of the biggest surprises in our lives the last year or so.
He still makes hideously ugly buildings (see: Trump Tower, Chicago) and is a complete and total slimeball in the real estate market by and large (see: people angry with Trump Tower, Chicago), but the man calls it like he sees it and gives to both parties what’s coming to them.
During the Democrats’ primaries, he backed Hillary Clinton, just like we did. In the general election, he backed John McCain, just like we did.
And, today, he’s saying the same thing we are saying up and down Halsted to everyone in Boystown who will listen: you have no right to be upset with Carrie Prejean’s answer to the “gay marriage Perez Hilton question” when it is THE EXACT SAME ANSWER THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES HAS REPEATEDLY GIVEN.
In Boystown, people assembled in bars like Sidetrack’s to exocriate Prejean — part of that is because gay men, when their Graces/fairy princesses/devoted female sidekicks aren’t around, enjoy attacking women because most of them spend the majority of their time in all-male surroundings where this is what passes as humor. Women don’t understand that this isn’t coming from a place of hate so much as it’s just us-vs-them cattiness, and a badge of honor in a way because gay men “don’t have to deal with” women as much as straight men do. And all that stuff the Graces/sidekicks share with their gay male best friends gets repeated at Sidetrack’s, only as punchlines to, “you will never guess what that crazy bitch did now…puh-LEASE.” Oh, snap.
So, Prejean is the latest in a long line of women who are savaged in the gay community, going back to Anita Bryant and beyond. Some, like Bryant, invited these attacks by attacking the LGBTQ community outright. Others, like Prejean, unintentionally ingnited firestorms by speaking their minds.
But, wow, Trump hit the nail on the head today by calling Dr. Utopia and his followers out: there is nothing Prejean said that Dr. Utopia hasn’t said, or that he personally doesn’t believe. Remember, as we said in an earlier post tangential to this one, Dr. Utopia never did a damn thing for the LGBTQ community and does not intend to either.
If Prejean and Dr. Utopia are lined up side by side, which one really matters in the big scheme of things? A young woman who finds herself in a firestorm currently, but whom few will remember a year from now…or the man behind the Resolute Desk who has always been anything BUT resolute in his commitment to LGBTQ rights?
We’ve got 3 more years of Dr. Utopia’s nonsense.
And we are glad Donald Trump’s out there calling Democrats out on their hypocrisy.
Strange how we never appreciated Trump for this kind of stuff before, but 2008 made very strange, lasting bedfellows indeed.
Anecdotal Democrat vs. Republican Differences, #5,632
Here’s something we want you to file under “anecdotal experiences we have had in the last year” with the caveat that, before you go all nuts in comments over what we say, we emphasize this is OUR experience and things WE have noticed. It is not scientific data, but it’s the experience of the lot of us being lifelong Dems who never dealt with Republicans until June 8th, 2008 and who, almost a year later, are still noticing and trying to understand the very real cultural differences between Democrat and Republican groups of people.
Whenever there’s a truly glaring example of this, we share it with you, as patterns emerge that sometimes amaze us.
Moments ago, something like that happened that we think nails a lot of these differences for us.
Some of us just got out of a meeting to organize volunteers and fundraising efforts for many programs that are being whalluped here in Chicago by the concerted push to channel all available private dollars into Mayor Daley’s Olympics bid. Essentially, this is like Pharoah ordering all the grain, treasure, and energy of Egypt to build his treasure city, while the meek and lowly go to sleep with empty bellies and wakeup without doctors because there’s no largesse left in wealthy households to assist them anymore, with all the might of the two kingdoms focused on raising obelisks and building pyramids for Day Mayor.
The people running the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Historical Society, etc. are living in dream worlds and have no appreciation for the danger they are in. Chicago doesn’t even have the Olympics (yet), and already fundraisers we know who support the nonprofit big league in Chicago are having trouble meeting their goals, what with the recession already limiting the donor pool, and that’s before you add Da Mayor’s pressure to give large checks to the Olympics bid committee. When we officially land those games in October, all Hell will break loose — and the people who will get hit the hardest are small theater companies (LGBTQ in particular, as all those Boystown dollars tend to flow to whatever’s most fabulous, and there ain’t no bigger party than the Olympics, and ain’t no better way to dig deep into Boystown’s pockets than having the diving or gymnastics teams do a round of appearances in their best-fitting unifors to inspire great Olympics spirit down Halsted way), dance companies, community health centers, and services for the homeless and elderly.
These are all, typically, Democrat-causes, so a meeting today to brainstorm strategies to meet the challenges we know are coming was 100% Democrat in makeup (similar to the way the USO volunteering we do is 99% Republican, with HillBuzz being the only Democrats taking part).
Now, here’s the part that some of you will go nuts about, but we are only relating our anecdotal experience that’s consistent with everything we’ve observed watching both Republican and Democrat groups operate. It’s fascinating to us on many levels.
For starters, Democrat-groups decide by consensus with identity politics factoring into everything, with an obsessive compulsion for “diversity” in everything. When these committees are assembled, there is a token LGBTQ person (that’s us), a Jewish person, a Hispanic person, someone who is physically disabled, someone who is a senior citizen, someone who is black, and someone who represents the homeless. Women aren’t specifically recruited as a group, because aside from the LGBTQ person, they typically fill out the other members above (lesbians are rarely the LGBTQ token; that role is left to gay men more often than not; we’ve yet to see a bisexual, transgender or questioning rep at anything).
Meetings rarely accomplish much of anything, and take far longer than they need to, because at the root the meetings are really about self-validation and the chance to pontificate on personal, individual pet causes and not to actually address whatever matter is at hand. As males (despite being the token gays), we have to always walk a tight line between trying to keep the meeting focused and professional and being accused of monopolizing the meeting or not letting someone have their personal soapbox.
All of this is fascinating because, prior to working with McCain/Palin and the Chicago Young Republicans, we never realized Democrats’ meetings are like this. Because this is how meetings were always conducted in Democrat circles, we assumed it was the norm. Agendas are just suggestions, and some of the people coming to the meeting must be excited for days that people will be assembled and they will be at a table where they will be more or less forced to listen to their personal stories for three hours.
Go ahead and be nuts about this in comments, but we’ve found the people who are most subject to doing this are those to whom English is a second-language and/or those who were born or raised in another country. There seems to be a strong, burning, uncontrollable need for these people to speak at every possibility just so they validate themselves as being part of the group. Today, the meeting we attended lasted 30 minutes longer than it should have because of one woman named Inez, originally from Guatemala (which she told us repeatedly), who made a point to comment on absolutely everything the other people said, if only to repeat when someone else said and affirm that she agreed with it. She provided the accented instant recap to what other people were talking about just seconds before.
And it just really struck us how indulgent Democrats are for this sort of thing, but how rare that is in Republican groups. The only exception to this, that we have seen, is a guy here in Chicago named Luka who is Republican and charges himself with making meetings drag on for sometimes an hour more than they need to, because Luka needs validation constantly, and enjoys hearing himself speak. Luka, we note, was born and raised in Poland and also has a thick accent. Even if he doesn’t know anything about the topic being addressed, Luka will chime in, using the last words someone said to launch into a story about growing up in Warsaw and encountering something that is not at all like what we were talking about. It’s tough because Luka is a great guy, but he just talks too damn much (we seriously have considered getting him a little hourglass that he should turn over after he speaks, and he should wait the 10 or 15 minutes until the sand runs out before he can enlighten the room again).
But, as we said, Luka is the only Republican we’ve encountered who does this. That’s anecdotal, because we’re sure in comments people will insist they personally know all sorts of Republicans who do this, but we’ve only met Luka.
Meanwhile, in our Democrat world, we have rooms full of Lukas that turn the meeting into mornings we would have rather spent herding cats.
What we walk away with is an appreciation for basic cultural differences between Democrats and Republicans that we never realized existed before.
Democrats, in our experience, get involved in something because, on some level at least, they want to feel validated and feel important. We put ourselves in this category, because getting involved in causes coincided with many of us coming out and being rejected by families and friends. Taking part in Democrat-led volunteerism has always been a safe place for us to be welcomed, appreciated, and, actually, elevated to celebrated token status. ”This is Robby and Sebastian, and they are gay, isn’t that wonderful? This is Jorge and Xander, and they are part of the LGBTQ community and we are so glad to have them here to represent their community’s special and distinct views.”
When we go to Republican meetings for things like the USO or Special Olympics, we’re just Robby, Sebastian, Jorge, Xander, or whomever, and the special community ambassador nonsense is typically left off. Instead, Republicans tend to emphasis what we DO, in terms of jobs or skill set, whereas Dem groups focus on our sexuality and minority status.
In some ways, it feels like Dem groups need to prove how open minded and accepting they are at all times. When Sebastian was dating David, David’s mother Louella insisted on proving to everyone in Richmond Heights, Ohio how open-minded and progressive she was, so she’d literally introduce Sebastian and David to people at the mall or in her neighborhood by saying, “Oh, you remember my homosexual son David, don’t you? Well, this is his homosexual lover Sebastian and they are in a committed monogamous relationship, isn’t that wonderful? I am very supportive of them both.”
No she wasn’t.
And David, unfortunately, ended up not being any more monogamous than his mother (a twice-divorced and publicly-shamed adulteress who, apparently, taught him everything he knows).
Louella’s insistence on cold, clinical terminology was all at once both PC in the extreme and her way of masking something she really did have problems with, but it just wouldn’t do for her to jeopardize her liberal cred by ever copping to.
Louella was obviously an extreme in just about every sense of the word, but Dem groups at large do this, while we have not seen Republicans do it. Maybe they do, but they just call each other up before an event they know we’ll be at and tell everyone to cool it (and, if so, we wonder why they can’t tell Luka to put a sock in it, if they are going to the trouble of round robins).
Republican meetings we go to aren’t 3 hours long, generally, and it seems like the people who attend them have other places to be and things to do. At Democrat meetings, they last forever, with between 30 minutes to an hour that could have been trimmed if an agenda was stuck to and the recollections of life growing up in other countries or other cultures were kept to a minimum and we stuck to the mattters at hand.
Now, we love stories about other places as much as anyone and on a nice day we’d love nothing more than to spend the whole afternoon sitting in the sun having a picnic talking about our feelings and validating everyone else’s feelings, but we also appreciate the flip side to how Republicans we know do things.
We share all this because we are in a very unique and unexpected position these days, attending both Dem and Republican events, seeing the definite cultural differences between the two.
Maybe you have seen things like this too. If not, watch the next time you are at a cross-the-aisle or bipartisan event and see if you can pick up differences in tone, expecations, organization, and work product.
We think, ultimately, people who trend Democrat do so from a place of culture and emotion, and never really think about it. They just go where they feel they belong, regardless of whatever the party is doing policy-wise. ”I’m a Democrat!”, people say, ourselves included, because that’s where we always felt welcomed and validated.
People who are Republican might be so repulsed by the kumbaya stuff that one of the reasons they are Republican is that they don’t want to hear the stories about you growing up or listen to you recap what other people said (Inez, we say, looking at you, with love but also an equal measure of exasperation).
Just something to think about based on our our anecdotal experiences.
As always, we’d love your take on this too, because we do see implications going forward for how bipartisan efforts and cross-aisle outreach could be better conducted in the future, understanding the motivators for people who identify one way or the other (without yet taking a stab at what independents feel about any of this).
