Below is a comment I emailed to Paul Krugman about his column($) in today's New York Times, "Seeking Willie Horton". I have sent several before, but he only posts the ones he responds to, and mine have never seen the light of day.
I enjoy your columns, but today I thought you were shooting from the hip a bit. Is it the Republican base, or the leaders, who you were aiming at? Certainly your comments don't apply to George W. Bush. Dreadful as he is, one has to admit he is genuinely inclusive when it comes to his administration (to a fault when it comes to Gonzales). But then I've thought for a long time that Bush isn't really a Republican, although not for that reason. As for Dukakis, he ran a dreadful campaign, was programmed at all times, and he never fought back, when he was asked what he would do if his wife was raped and murdered, or about the Willie Horton ads. He could have pointed out that most governors-including Reagan-give furloughs to prisoners. As for Reagan, I don't think he we was a racist and certainly not homophobic, at least on a personal level. True, he did pander, but I think one of the big reasons for all the "Reagan Democrats" was because of all the "political correctness" in the Democratic Party. And I'm afraid that this will be coming back full blast if Hillary is elected.
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To elaborate on my last sentence: One big reason I won't vote for Hillary is that she has an agenda, spoken or not, to take us back to the 1970's, with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and all the rest. Look what happened when Bill got elected: gays in the military, there has to be a female Attorney General, not to mention the health care fiasco and her channeling of Eleanor Roosevelt. Hillary, I knew Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was a friend of mine. (well not really) And believe me, you're no Eleanor Roosevelt.
I lived through the Seventies, and I don't want to have to relive them. "Political correctness" still thrives in academe, which is one reason I'm glad to be out of there. The main organization for academic mathematicians, the American Mathematical Society (AMS), is in step with the colleges and universities on this issue. In the 1970's they decided not to hold their annual meeting in a state that had not ratified the ERA -there went Chicago- and in 1995 they moved the annual meeting out of Denver because Colorado had passed some anti-gay rights legislation, not withstanding the fact that Denver had passed some pro-gay rights legislation.
Lest you think I was an old fuddy-duddy back then, I should mention that in the late Sixties and early Seventies I was the parliamentarian for the "Mathematicians Action Group", which did plenty of rabble rousing at AMS annual and summer meetings.
If I were more mischievous, I would send a letter to the AMS Notices pointing out the following: There is a classical theorem in Number Theory called the "Chinese Remainder Theorem." I always thought it was titled that way because they didn't know which Chinese mathematician had proved it. It turns out that the name of the person is known, but hey (and here I jest) he's Chinese, and who could pronounce the name anyway? The height of political incorrectness! I suspect that such a letter would really get the "politically correct" crowd going.
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Krugman's response in his blog (8/27/07):
Paul Krugman: I thought I was quite clear: the leadership doesn’t care about race, but uses it to win elections; it’s the base that cares. Bush seems quite open-minded on this, if on nothing else (although I do like the story about how he effusively praised Mel Martinez for his victory, and the Senator he was addressing gently said, “I’m Menendez — he’s Martinez”.) Anyway, Bush wants to dismantle the New Deal; he only uses people who want to dismantle Brown v. Board of Education.
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