This Isn't My Post

A few days ago, I read a post on the CapitaL eLs blog asking whether Ron Paul would get "zapped by the WOD third rail". I thought it was a great question, because I think that in today's culture political candidates face a very real problem with tough issues. A complex answer doesn't make a good sound bite, and a thirty-second sound bite pulled from a three minute answer is likely to be misleading and perhaps damaging to the overall cause. So what's a candidate to do?

That's the issue I was expecting the post to confront, and it did--briefly. But the bulk of the post was about the wisdom and ethics of the war on drugs itself, and that seemed out of place to me. If we were going to discuss the possibility that a political candidate in the United States could honestly discuss the real complexities of the issue and perhaps venture to point out--even tentatively--that the war on drugs isn't really working, then the last thing we needed was to allow any distractors in that discussion that might evoke emotional responses just like the ones that made this such a touchy issue for politicians.

At least, that was my take. The author of the original post suggested (fairly, I think), that I'd mentally written an entirely different post by the same name. He said he'd be interested in reading it, and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that he was right, and that I'd mentally constructed an entire post based on what I THOUGHT a post with his title would say, or should say. So here it is:

Ladies and gentlemen, we've got problems. We've got a monster national debt, a huge percentage of home loans are in foreclosure, our prisons are overflowing, quite a few foreign governments...um...well...hate our guts, we're engaged in a war that most Americans don't support. News flash: No one is going to fix that in four years. If we elect a guy who says he's going to, he's a liar--and we've seen how well that works out. If we elect a guy who tells the truth...oh, but that couldn't happen, could it?

I don't think it could. And here's why. It's very easy to yell, "Be tough on crime!" and that's a concept that people can easily take hold of and nod in agreement--maybe even applaud. That's four words. The truth is that our prisons are overflowing, and building more is a serious economic investment. The truth is that for some classes of crimes, prison does more to increase the rate of recidivism than it does to prevent crime. The truth is that our justice system has been increasingly shown to have convicted, imprisoned and even killed innocent men over the past few decades--and the only reason it goes back only that far is that we don't have the evidence or incentive necessary to look at the rest. I've only just begun...and yet I've far exceeded the amount of time a candidate has to make an effective point. He's tough on crime or he's not. Period. There's no space in an election year to say, "Not all crime is created equal, and neither are all criminals." There's no leeway to ask hard questions like, "Do we spend millions of dollars building new prisons, or do we let people out LONG before the end of their sentences?" TOUGH ON CRIME: Yes or No.

The War on Drugs is definitely one of those issues--complex, multi-faceted, troublesome. There's no easy answer. If a candidate says there is, he is either a liar or a fool. And yet, if a candidate says there isn't, we won't hear the rest of his message and we won't elect him. That seems to limit us to only two possibilities: elect a liar or elect a fool.