As primary voting results come in and the Yankee game takes various breaks for rain and trying to get Josh Beckett out of the game gracefully, I keep hearing various pundits debating the meaning of the results. Is it anger at incumbents, is it disgust with the debt, or both? The consensus seems to be that The People object to “business as usual” and are worried about government debt.

I have no idea if this is right or wrong, but if it is correct, what I find kind of quizzical about the whole thing is that pro economists can’t agree about the meaning of the debt, how much is a good amount, how much is too much, to what degree is it really dangerous, and if it is dangerous, when it will become dangerous. And yet, The People seem to have come to their own conclusions about this.

This is our right, of course, to think for ourselves, but we also have an obligation to think in a nuanced way. You can do a lot of damage chasing solutions to problems you don’t fully understand.

Parenthetically, some talking head on CNN just said that Barack Obama won in 2008 because all of the energy was on the left, but tonight it’s all coming from the right. Dude, Sestak just upset Spector in Pennsy. Why is Kentucky’s embrace of a Tea Person signify more than Pennsylvania’s rejection of a faux-Democrat?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 9:23 pm and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.