Reflections of a stormy petrel

One of the ways in which Americans, or at least Republicans, simply do not seem to live on the same planet as the rest of us, is shown by the fury with which the whole Republican party has attacked Joe Biden for saying that paying tax - sorry: for the rich to pay more tax - could be regarded as patriotic. The poor man has not said one thing - not his celebrated plagiarism of Neil Kinnock, not his bizarre opinions on Iran or Iraq, not his fourteen great and small proven misstatements in the vice-presidential debate alone - on which bloggerdom and campaign alike have fallen with half the ferocity, the repeated outrage, the pretend irony and real fury with which they have handled what should be a statement of the obvious. Of course paying tax is patriotic; just as hiding your profits in Third World holes with no taxation is unpatriotic and anti-national. Of course paying tax is patriotic; it is one of the basic duties of any citizen, one of the bonds that bind citizen and country, citizen and state, and entitle the citizen to make demands of the state and be heard. Of course paying tax is patriotic: it pays for the army that defends you, the police force that protects you, the courts that enforce your rights and the bureaucracy that records them (as well as, in countries that have one, the health service that defends your health). Of course paying tax is patriotic; can you conceive of a patriot - I am not speaking to the Americans, for evidently they can - can you conceive of a patriot who would want his government to be feeble, penniless, incapable of performing its basic duties?

The Republicans have made this one of the core elements of their message. When Sarah Palin directly attacked Obama for his closer relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers (surely a powerful enough message in itself), she bathetically capped it with a reminder that "these are the people who think that paying more tax is patriotic". As if, you know, asking people to pay more tax were not only on the same level as being acquainted with bomb-throwers, but actually explained and justified it. And if you think that this is only Palin, you have not been following the conservative blogosphere.

In any other country in the world this would be suicide: even in sister English-speaking countries such as Britain or Australia, which share American attitudes to some degree, this continuous hammering at the patriotism of not paying more tax would expose the party to the answer that their only patriotism resides evidently in their wallet, that they stop being patriotic the moment they have to pay a penny extra for it. Such an answer would be popular and probably reach the majority; it would rouse both hilarity and contempt. Yet, in America, the immensely clever and far-sighted McCain campaign, that has not put a foot wrong yet, clearly expects this to be a successful point, and that hilarity and contempt will only flow the other way.

This is one of those moments where I feel helpless before American attitudes. No matter how much I work at it, I simply do not understand them. I do not know whether the McCain campaign has calculated correctly, and whether the majority of Americans will react negatively to Biden's point - which was about the richer part of the community anyway - and positively to Republican mockery; or whether the reaction will be as it is in most other nations, that from time to time it may be necessary to raise tax, and that if it really is necessary, then it is patriotic to pay it (and in any case profoundly unpatriotic to set up fake trust funds in the Cayman Islands or the like). But I would say that the reaction to this will tell us a lot.

I have been thinking. I am increasingly convinced that, by choosing John McCain as presidential candidate, the Republican rank and file showed much greater wisdom than their leaders and their opinion makers. They picked the only candidate who stands a chance against the Dem-of-the-day - I do not mean Hillary or Barack; I mean anyone whom the Democrats could have chosen. Let us face it, in the circumstances of 2008, the Democrats really could have run the yellow dog of the old joke, and got it to the White House.( Read more... )