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LTE: Who has your best interests at heart?

"Everyone has their key issues "
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There is one very negative aspect of watching the World Series live during an election year: the preponderance of political ads. 

Does anybody seriously believe any of these ads?  From either side?  It's almost laughable to watch these hit jobs. 

Those on the conservative side depict our country as being some sort of dystopian world created by progressives, while those on the progressive side warn of a coming dystopian world if we elect conservatives. Fuzzy black and white unflattering images of the "bad guys" and colorful, happy images of the "good guys."

Do the people making these ads really believe Americans are that dumb? Maybe we are. Maybe they're right. I mean, they spend millions on research to determine just what buttons to push. It's depressing and confounding. 

I remember growing up as a kid, my dad was a Democrat, and my mom was a Republican. Neither of them defined themselves as one or the other and they frequently voted for someone outside their party. They always told us that we should vote for the person that we think is the smartest and had our best interests at heart. That's how I started my voting. 

I first registered as a Republican, but I never voted down the party line; I always chose the person I believed was right for the job. By the mid-1990s with the advent of Fox News and the religious right's takeover of the Republican party, I changed my affiliation to Independent, where I've been ever since.  Even as an Independent I still voted for the person I felt was right, voting for McCain in 2008 over Obama because I thought he deserved it and was the most qualified and had the public's interest at heart (although his choice in running mates was questionable).  

Everyone has their key issues and my key issue these days is climate change.  Since it's been my key issue, and since Republicans continue to drag their feet on the topic, I have been mostly voting for Democratic politicians, hoping that this critical issue of our time will finally be addressed.  Believe it or not, there are Republicans out there who have studied the science and want to aggressively address climate change, unfortunately, they end up getting voted out in their primaries now because climate change is not part of the conservative agenda yet (see Bob Inglis and Carlos Curbelo).  It will be, eventually.  The conservative pollster, Frank Luntz, showed in 2019 that 75% of Republicans under 40 supported a tax on carbon.  It reminded me of a line I read in a book this month:

"Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even," from "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber & David Wengrow.

Michael Clinton