A few days ago, the blogger formerly known as Calpundit, at his new home with Washington Monthly, offered a fascinating discussion of Republicans. Unusually, the really interesting stuff is in the comments section. The actual post is quite brief, just a few sentences in which Calpundit notes that in the past month or two he has received a lot of emails "from people who are Republicans (or belong to Republican families) and report that they (or their families) are increasingly disgusted with George Bush." The commenters then chime in with about a hundred personal stories about disenchanted Republicans.

Of course one can't take this as a representative sample, since Washington Monthly attracts a predominantly liberal audience, and all the Republicans discussed there are thus ones who have made at least incidental contact with a liberal who reads. Still, it's an interesting look. I've heard similar stories from the Republicans I know, and even more second-hand stories through Karen, who knows many longtime staunch Republicans. It seems that among them are a great number who, without turning against their party, have turned against Bush.

In terms of policy, the sources of disgruntlement are widely varied. Some are social liberals who complain that Bush has turned over the party to religious conservatives, while others of nearly the opposite stripe complain about his liberal attitude toward immigration. Some from a military background complain that Bush has treated the armed forces with reckless disregard, and still others are fiscal conservatives who complain of reckless spending and disregard for a budgetary discipline. The common theme that unites them all is the perception that the Bush administration, aside from not standing up for the principles they hold most dear, is simply incompetent and deceitful. "The reason that the left calls Bush a liar is that he is a liar," one says.

These disgruntled Republicans are about evenly split between those who are ready to vote Democratic for the first time in decades and those who still can't bring them to support Kerry but are determined not to vote for Bush either.

What strikes me is that if this is indeed a real movement, there is a desire out there to vote for a Republican other than Bush. If, as it seems, these are not just perfunctory voters but Republicans who are active in party politics, I wonder how long it will be before some prominent Republican elected official will break the silence and say what everyone else is thinking: that it would be nice to see a Republican name on the ballot other than Bush's.

If and when someone breaks away, that person will be ostracized politically by the vindictive Bush administration anyway, so it seems there would be little more to lose by following up with a presidential run. Given that the convention rules make it next to impossible to contest the nomination at this late date, this would presumably take the form of a third-party independent candidacy.

I think there could be an awful lot of support for an ordinary Republican running against both Bush and Kerry. I don't mean an extremist within the party, whether it's a Christian conservative like Roy Moore or a libertarian like Ron Paul, or even a moderate Republican centrist (though a centrist Republican like Olympia Snowe would be an obvious choice for running mate). I mean an ordinary, traditional middle-of-the-road Republican.

The key ingredient here is the support of Republicans who are so fed up with Bush that they feel that winning with Bush is even worse than losing altogether. The primary argument against a third-party candidacy, as Democrats well know, is that it tends to divide the vote on one's own side and hand victory to the united candidacy on the other side. Any Republican supporting a third-party candidacy would face the very strong and logical argument that it would be handing the election to Kerry. And indeed, it probably would. But if there really are Republicans out there who are so disgusted with Bush that they would rather vote Democratic or sit out the election than support him, they've already conceded a willingness to hand the election to Kerry. With a non-Bush Republican on the ballot, they could at least do so while still feeling good about their vote.

And if the candidate is someone with a high-profile and sufficiently charismatic (ie, John McCain), they might even win.

Afterthoughts: (For those who say this sort of tangential discussion was their favorite part of the old Benzene.) One can enchant, but one cannot gruntle or gust. Or so I thought. In fact, one can gruntle. Merriam-Webster lists gruntle as a transitive verb meaning to put someone in a good mood, which is the opposite of what it sounds like (unless it's naughty...). Gust suggests a similar meaning. It's the same gust we find embedded in gusto and in the Latin phrase, popular on RMO, de gustibus non est disputandum: there's no disputing about tastes. So to be disgusted is to be given the opposite of what is to one's taste. Taste here, incidentally, is the sort of taste that suggests preference or decorum. It does not suggest the sensory action performed by buds on one's tongue, which shares the same word in English but not in other languages.

A similar phrase in French is chacun à son goût: to each according to his or her taste. There the taste is goût, which on first glance doesn't look much like gust, but here's a helpful hint about French spelling: A circumflex over a vowel (the symbol that looks like this: ^) almost always indicates that a consonant following the vowel has been dropped from an earlier form of the word, and that consonant is almost always an s. Thus, we have coût = cost, bête = beast, île = isle, maître = master, tâche = task, hôtel = hostel, etc.

12:59:08 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

"Innumeracy" is the unattractive name that some author gave to the numerical equivalent of illiteracy -- an inability of many people to do basic math, which puts them at a disadvantage in everyday society. (I read his book last year, and I found it less entertaining and more snobbish than I expected.)

About an hour ago, I got a phone call from a telemarketer at Wells Fargo, which is where I bank. In California, Wells Fargo is one of the most ubiquitous and least customer-friendly banks, and prominent among its less ubiquitous and more customer-friendly rivals is Washington Mutual. Getting my money out of Wells Fargo was something I had long meant to do but never gotten around to. After moving to Seattle, I discovered that here the situation is reversed. In Washington state, Wells Fargo is a much friendlier bank, and it is Washington Mutual that has the bad reputation. Customer-unfriendliness, I find, is correlated not to a particular corporation but rather to local market share.

Anyway, I let the telemarketer give her speech, as I sometimes do. What I was being offered today is an "insurance" package, whereby if I were to become involuntarily unemployed, disabled, or suchlike, Wells Fargo would allow me to postpone paying off any of my credit card debt, with no penalty. This protection is offered to me at a cost of 79 cents per $100 of balance per month.

Given that I've spent most of the past seven years being semi-voluntarily semi-unemployed, and that currently my bank balance is swooping perilously close to zero, this did not sound entirely uninteresting, so I was prepared to let her send the information package in the mail. I was told, however, that that would be impossible because receiving the information must be part of a complete experience of "trying out" all the benefits of this new plan. In other words, they won't mail me the information unless I sign up. But signing up is risk-free, I'm told, because there is a toll-free number and I can cancel at any time. Having once had a bad experience with a similarly "risk-free" plan (with MCI), I have no trust in them now. Rather than argue the point with the telemarketer, I simply made it clear that she could mail me whatever she likes, but I'm not signing up for anything over the phone, and that was the end of that.

About 20 minutes later, it occurred to me what the catch is here. It's the price. How much is 79 cents per $100 of balance per month? Let's forget about compound interest for now. From first grade we all remember that 12 x 8 = 96, so 80 cents per month is $9.60 per year. Subtract from that another 12 cents per year, for the one-cent different between 80 and 79, and you're paying $9.48 per year per $100 of balance. That's 9.5%

So the Wells Fargo deal for postponing my credit card debt is the equivalent of refinancing it at a 9.5% annual interest rate. That is, for the same price I could instead take out a loan for the total amount, pay off the credit card, and then pay 9.5% interest on the loan.

Now I don't know exactly what the market is for personal loans. I make it a habit never to spend money on expensive and unnecessary luxuries, and borrowing money usually falls into that category. But I do know that interest rates are at an all-time low, and money in a savings account pays practically nothing in interest. Mortgage interest rates are down around 4% and U.S. Treasury bonds are somewhere below that, so I can't imagine that 9.5% is much of a bargain for a personal loan.

Post-script: I just did the math, and with compound interest it's really 9.9%. But the point of this essay is that you should be able to figure this in your head without a calculator, so let's stick with the 9.5% estimate.

Post-postscript: It occurred to me later that I'm not really sure if the 79-cent monthly fee is charged during the time of involuntary unemployment, or if it's charged like an insurance premium while you're still employed (or both!). If it's the latter, then it might actually be a good deal for someone like me, but it's an even more egregious rip-off for a typical credit card customer carrying a monthly balance, who would thereby pay an additional 9.5% interest on top of the already high rate.

I wonder how carefully they target their marketing. If they've bothered to check, their records will show that I almost never carry a monthly balance. They'll also show that I have a history of falling for hidden fees. For more than a year I was paying an outrageous $20-per-month service charge, which was cleverly disguised so that on the monthly statement it looks like an ATM withdrawal. It's embarrassing to admit that I was stupid enough to fall for that for so long, but it's important to discuss such things. Corporations, like rapists, rely on the shame of their victims to make them keep quiet.

12:00:29 PM  [permalink]  comment []