Special Interests, My Ass

I caught Digby today via Making Light and this reminded me of an old rant I used to rehearse in the deep silence of the night: "Democrats are the party of special interests."

If you've been around for more than a few years, you've almost certainly heard this. You might even have said it in some form or another; I know I have.

Then one day I actually tried to analyze this. What "special" interests are They talking about? (And which They actually benefits from this?)

So I sat down and listed the major groups that the Democratic Party tends to draw voters from, which they clearly court, and who have significantly effective lobbying groups pushing agendas associated with these groups:

• black folks
• women (well, pro-choice women and women who want to be able to have a job without sexual harassment)
• unionized blue-collar workers
• gay folks
• environmentalists

Not surprisingly, many of these groups are also those who are demonized or rhetorically coded as Bad by Replublicans. (In the case of women, it's only Some Women -- they have to use subdivide-and-conquer tactics since they do want women to vote for them.) But how "special" are these special interests?

Aside: as near as I can tell, whenever a Republican uses "special", they mean "something I don't like or which I fear will cut into my social or economic position". This is why expansions of equal protection laws (to include, say, women or gay people) are usually met with cries of "special rights". It's to the everlasting shame of the Democratic party that they haven't hit right back with "it's equal rights, you shitheads". "Special" rights are things like "whites only" or "no women allowed" or "sure, go ahead, fag-bash, we don't care".

So let's see:

• Women are around 51% of the population and 54% of the voters.
• African Americans are 11% of the population, 11% of the voters.
• Unionized workers: these represent 20% of all workers at this point.
• Gay people: depending on how you count, this group is something like 3-10% of the population, with recent research tending toward the 3-5% range.
• Environmentalists: surveys show that a strong majority of Americans rate the preservation of the environment (including clean drinking water and clean air) as a value they agree with. (The numbers on this are all over the place since it's so dependent on how the questions are asked, but numbers in the 70-80% range regularly show up.)

(These statistics are from CNN's coverage of the 2004 Presidential election and The Census Bureau.)

Each of these groups is fairly large. Women are the majority in the population in the U.S. (by a bit), and are a significant majority of voters. Well over 90% of black voters vote Democratic, so in a nearly 50-50 national race they represent 20% of the votes that Democrats get. Even gay voters, as small a group as they are, are potentially a bigger group than "the Jewish vote" (2%), which seems to not get characterized as a Special Interest (because Republicans have been seeking Jewish voters for years via slavish support for Israel).

These aren't "special interests" -- they're constituencies.

What could be more of a "special" interest than oil company CEOs, anyway?

First Rant

So here's a good rant for my first post. It's a bit rambling, but hey, it's my blog.

Today it was 60 degrees (Fahrenheit) in NYC, and 30 degrees (also Fahrenheit) in Boston. This is pretty non-standard, given that Boston and NYC are not very far away from each other (especially in latitude). This got me thinking about all the people who are confused about global warming, and who say stuff like "but it's cold here, so there can't be global warming": the whole point is, it's global warming, not necessarily local warming. Some places might be cooler, while the globe as a whole heats up. Especially places like New England, and Old England (and Northern Europe in general) if the Gulf Stream shuts down due to salinity changes in the Atlantic.

I was thinking about the ignornace of people who don't realize how fragile the Arctic is, especially vis-a-vis global warming. This isn't just because the Arctic ecosystems are balanced on the head of a pin (although a lot of them seem to be), or that animals dependent on year-round ice are basically going to be SOL within a few years. It's also because the Arctic is on a steep part of the climate vs. temperature graph. A small amount of temperature change pushes the geographical climate border (permafrost, tundra, whatever) a long distance.

It's like a very shallow beach: a little change in ocean level (e.g. from high to low) exposes (or covers, when the tide comes back in) a lot of beach.

Another piece of this is that even if the climate vs. temperature graph isn't as steep as we fear, we're still talking about a basic phase change: water melting. The most obvious thing that's going to really get people's attention (though I do wonder if it'll make Alaskans vote out Ted Stevens) is that permafrost is going to melt -- and buildings are going to start falling down because of it. It doesn't take much change in the average temperature to push you over the edge of a phase change if you were right at the transition point.

Serendipity handed me this topic as well: I ran across (on slashdot and boingboing) links to this article about research into viruses that push humans toward obesity. In the article they say

"The prevalence of obesity has doubled in adults in the United States in the last 30 years and has tripled in children," the study noted.

-- and while I don't want to pick on them (this is a quote out of context), it triggered the ranting instinct in me. A lot of people look at "the prevalence of obesity has doubled" and think that some actual number (like people's weight) has doubled. That's absurd. What has doubled is the number of people whose weight is now above the threshold for obesity. If ten million people were just below the threshold for obesity ten years ago and now they're just above, then it looks like ten million people just became obese. But in real terms, those ten million people may have just gained a pound or two.

What really happened is that the statistical distribution of human body-weight in the sample (e.g. the US population) shifted higher. It doesn't take much to push a lot of people over the threshold. The same way that it won't take much rise in sea level to overwhelm lots of coastal areas. (Especially since it's not really averages we're worrying about -- it's the extremes, like storm surges.) None of this is to say that Americans aren't getting fatter; they surely are. But it's not like the per-capita mass of Americans has gone up by a factor of two. But whenever you have thresholds (or a high tide line) a small change can have a big effect.

This is just another reason I think that people shouldn't be allowed to graduate from high school unless they can read graphs.