A G K Y R A

“Alaska is a small state,” or so I hear from people who haven’t bothered to look into it. But Barack Obama, by contrast, has run a big national political campaign. Let’s compare the state of Alaska to Barack Obama’s campaign:

Alaska has 15,000 employees and an annual budget of $9.7 billion. If it were a business, that would put it at #271 on the Fortune 500 ahead of some companies you may have heard of:

• Starbucks ($9.4 billion)
• OfficeMax ($9 billion)
• Campbell Soup
• eBay
• Nordstrom
• Dole Foods
• Yahoo
• McGraw-Hill
• NCR
• Harley-Davidson
• Foot Locker
• Barnes & Noble
• and a couple hundred more of the 500 biggest companies in America

If the CEO of Starbucks were running, do you think people would say, “Oh, but he’s the CEO of a small company“?

What about Barack Obama’s experience?

His campaign has raised, all told, an amount approaching $700 million over two years, which includes the primary campaign. Obama’s campaign is therefore about 40% smaller than Anchorage, Alaska — the city — which reported revenues of $515 million last year (that link opens a big PDF of financial statements, so don’t click it unless you’re genuinely interested).

How has it become common knowledge, then, that Palin doesn’t have enough “experience,” when it simply is a fact that she has more experience in city and state government (though not federal) — and much more important experience — than Barack Obama!

When people say that she lacks “experience,” I think what they really mean is she lacks knowledge. She didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, if you recall. To that, let me reply with a story about Henry Ford from Napoleon Hill’s old book Think and Grow Rich:

An educated man is not, necessarily, one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. … During the world war, a Chicago newspaper published certain editorials in which, among other statements, Henry Ford was called “an ignorant pacifist.” Mr. Ford objected to the statements, and brought suit against the paper for libeling him. When the suit was tried in the Courts, the attorneys for the paper pleaded justification, and placed Mr. Ford, himself, on the witness stand, for the purpose of proving to the jury that he was ignorant. The attorneys asked Mr. Ford a great variety of questions, all of them intended to prove, by his own evidence, that, while, he might possess considerable specialized knowledge pertaining to the manufacture of automobiles, he was, in the main, ignorant.

Mr. Ford was plied with such questions as the following: “Who was Benedict Arnold?” and “How many soldiers did the British send over to America to put down the Rebellion of 1776?” In answer to the last question, Mr. Ford replied, “I do not know the exact number of the soldiers the British sent over, but I have heard that it was a considerably larger number than ever went back.”

Finally, Mr. Ford became tired of this line of questioning, and in reply to a particularly offensive question, he leaned over, pointed his finger at the lawyer who had asked the question, and said, “If I should really want to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any of the other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer any question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts.”

… Any man is educated who knows where to get knowledge when he needs it, and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.

Palin has more and better quality experience than Barack Obama — and he’s campaigning to be President! If McCain doesn’t drop dead in the first two months, she’ll have vastly more experience than Barack Obama does now. There is also no question that she has enough general and specialized knowledge to do the job of Vice President. But I grant you this: if McCain-Palin are elected and if McCain drops dead immediately and if everyone else in the executive branch suddenly dies of bubonic plague so that she’s running the whole show all by herself, with no one to advise her, then yes, she might not have enough experience or knowledge right now to handle that situation with aplomb.

That’s a lot of ifs. And, should it turn out that the sky really is falling, you have bigger problems than whom to vote for tomorrow. Setting that thought aside, let’s also set aside the silly question about Palin’s experience.

One of the first questions Gwen Ifill asked Joe Biden and Sarah Palin at the 2008 Vice Presidential Debate last night was about the polarization between parties in Washington. It’s not just Washington that has been polarized, it’s ordinary Americans too. I’ve been on the streets of Manhattan trying to gather support for the McCain-Palin ticket, and while lots of people like ‘em, the ones who don’t genuinely hate them and hate anyone who supports them — including me. I’ve been yelled at, cursed at, called filthy names, and seen people who otherwise appear to be decent respectable folks turn into hideous venom-spitting monsters right before my eyes. I have no doubt that some Obama supporters have experienced the same thing from McCain partisans, though I wish I could believe otherwise.

What is behind the polarization? The void left by religion in our culture is being filled with political programs and promises, or politics-as-religion, to borrow a phrase I heard my wife use the other day. That’s a big story, and I’ll save it for when I get back to more theological writing after the election is over.

But lobbying is the other big cause. And I don’t just mean registered lobbyists representing big bad corporations. I mean you, as a voter, lobbying government to give you goodies. Isn’t that what you’re doing when you ask the candidates to help you out? If voters weren’t lobbying, we wouldn’t have any touching anecdotes for campaign rallies and debates! Whose health care proposal will help me and others most? Whose energy plan will lower my bills? Whose tax plan will benefit me? Whose education ideas will meet my and my children’s needs?

If Americans accept that all the ideas being tossed around by the candidates are legitimate for consideration, that they should even be on the table for us to consider, then they will have brought American federalism to an end, for all important purposes. The states will more and more be creatures of the federal government. If not legally or constitutionally, at least financially. The federal government is more and more where the money and the power will be concentrated, and that means the spoils for whoever controls the federal government will get bigger and bigger, leading to corruption, wasteful oversight and investigation motivated either by partisan acrimony or the need to forestall it, and less productivity.

Democrats are at the vanguard of raising the federal umbrella over every area of American life. More money and more responsibility for our health, safety, and economic prosperity, means more power and more control over us in those same areas. You can’t be responsible for someone if you can’t control them.

When all that money and power gets concentrated in one place, the most ambitious and greedy people will swarm to it like ants to honey. When the spoils get big enough, people will resort to all kinds of corrupt and evil things to get what they covet: true no less in government than in Agatha Christie stories.

The big spoils lead to more corporate lobbying, more extravagant promises by candidates, more Utopian expectations of their government by a naive electorate, more disappointment when those expectations don’t materialize, and a nagging sense that somebody else must be getting all the good stuff I’m not getting. Enter the blame game: corporations, CEOs, Wall Street, Dick Cheney, the religious right, the wealthiest. The next decade, new candidates set the table and ladle out the stew of disappointment, envy, and suspicion all over again.

That’s why Americans are so polarized. The stakes could hardly be higher. If McCain wins, some liberals say they’re moving to Canada (they always say that, and they never do). If Obama wins, I just might move away!

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Our federal system of government was well conceived. Consider these two facts: smaller communities tend to be more homogeneous, and an individual voter has more power in local elections. If we concentrated power in state and local government, rather than at the federal level, these two facts have four important ramifications:

1. You yourself, individually, would have more political power at the ballot box and influence over your elected officials. A representative in the U.S. House has nearly one million constituents. A state legislator has far fewer.
2. Since political power would be distributed rather than concentrated, it would be harder for corporations or special interest groups — whoever it is that you’re afraid of — to get their way. They would have to expend a lot more resources in far-flung efforts, only to get less results than they do now, when the wealthiest is, in reality, Congress.
3. There would be less polarization and strife simply because smaller groups are more homogeneous, and tend to share values. That’s why there are such things as red states and blue states!
4. If you didn’t like the way things were going in your state or county, you wouldn’t have to move to Canada. You could move to the state or county next door. How much easier would that be!

If Americans are going to come together as Americans, then we’ll have to go back to an earlier way of thinking about our federal government, the way the Constitution was originally intended. If Americans are going to be united, the government that envelopes all of us — the federal government — can’t be asked to do more than what we all agree that it should do. And that amounts to only those things that the private sector and state and local governments cannot or will not do: interstate commerce, national defense, and diplomacy.

Until we agree to restrict the federal government to the lowest common denominator — the way it was envisioned — we’re going to be divided against each other as a nation. But there’s no reason blue states or blue cities can’t implement the programs for themselves that they want so badly from the federal government. If the people who keep demanding the federal government do more would just relax maybe all of us could.