Barone Times Two

Michael Barone has written two articles within the past week which I think you'll find interesting and on the money. Barone is the senior political correspondent for the US News and World Report. He's a keen and pragmatic observer of the national political scene.

In Prioritizing our Problems, Barone writes about how politicians and pundits have it exactly backwards with regard to the relative importance and danger to the country of two major issues, Global Warming and Social Security. He points out that while we have very detailed actuarial information which allows us to predict with almost surgical certainty the date of the demise of Social Security, politicians have seized upon Global Warming as the critical problem of our age despite the highly speculative nature of the evidence regarding it.

"The politicians resist fixing Social Security because the short-term costs are well understood by voters and the long-term benefits, while clear to actuaries, are invisible to voters because no one is decrying them with religious intensity. The politicians sprint to address global warming because the short-term costs are unknown to voters and the long-term benefits, while unclear in the extreme to those who rely on science, are portrayed in apocalyptic terms by the prophet Al Gore. Democracy isn't perfect."

Meanwhile, Barone gives Republicans and Conservatives some reason to hope for better days ahead in his Wall Street Journal piece entitled the Realignment of America.

This is a fascinating analysis of demographic shifts (and Barone throws in some political commentary, as well). Its worth reading the whole thing but here are the concluding paragraphs:

"Twenty years ago political analysts grasped the implications of the vast movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, a tilting of the table on balance toward Republicans; but with California leaning heavily to Democrats, that paradigm seems obsolete. What's now in store is a shifting of political weight from a small Rust Belt which leans Democratic and from the much larger Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans but where significant immigrant populations lean to the Democrats. House seats and electoral votes will shift from New York, New Jersey and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada; within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley.

Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation's fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That's the kind of political change demographics makes over the years."