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The Bush people want to semiprivatize Social Security, at a “transitional” expense to the taxpayers of however-many-trillion dollars? Well, a lot of people, including many in the Congress, are already drawing Social Security or about to start. If these proposed private accounts are going to be so great for future generations, how about some compensation for present generations? Or past generations—my mama would have loved to have had the government put her on to some hot stocks so she could have built up a nest egg she could have passed on to me. Say there are fifty million people in the sixty-three-and-older population. For one more trillion, we could toss us each twenty thousand dollars. And where would we get that money? Out of whichever pot those other trillions are supposed to come from.
    What I am saying is, surely those who urge the country further and further toward tax-free, Deuteronomy-based world dominion can, in some way, be put on the defensive.
    I would prefer, of course, a more constructive approach. I spoke recently with a man who was instrumental in creating the Republican Party in the South, pretty much from scratch (and abiding bad blood, of course) and high spirits. He was downright wistful. “It used to be a lot more fun,” he said, “before we got all these legislators.” I can't help suspecting that some Republicans are beginning to feel like teenagers acting wilder and wilder to keep up with bad-influence peers. They might appreciate it if the Democrats pushed back more effectively. What the country needs is a hardier strain of Democrats. The question is, more hybrid or more pure?
    People say the GOP got where it is today by going pure, starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964. But it went on from there to elect Nixon, and I don't remember anything too pure about him. Reagan? An apparition. Is the incumbent pure? A base of fat cats and Pentecostals seems kind of hodgepodgy to me.
    The Democrats, by making Howard Dean head of the Democratic National Committee, may be tending toward pure. But my Northern liberal friends give me the impression that pure, to them, means finding it unnatural not to have a president who is a Northern liberal. Even though we never have had one yet, at least since FDR. John Kennedy
appealed
toNorthern liberals—and I'd take him back now, because just as Bill Clinton evidently gathered from Kennedy that adultery in the White House is a presidential perk, Kennedy, if he were still around, would surely have gathered from Clinton that it's not. But as to policies, Kennedy was no Dennis Kucinich. I like Northern liberals, but believing that one should be nominated for president is like believing Harvard should play in the Orange Bowl.
    Kennedy was elected by a highly impure coalition of Northern liberals, Catholics, African Americans, labor, and the Solid South. What Democrats need now is some strange bedfellows. But we can't say so, because Republicans would make that sound kinky. Being liberal used to be sexy, in a favorable sense, but a big voting element today, overlapping all walks of life, is parents scared of what their kids might be getting into. And the Democrats still haven't lived down Monica and Madonna. That's probably why blue states watch
Desperate Housewives:
it's a cold shower.
    Howard Dean is a doctor, so presumably clean. And liberals trust his bona fides, so maybe he can go into red states like Nixon into China. It was Dean, of course, who spoke of reaching out to “guys with Confederate flags on their trucks.” He had a point there, but he didn't know how to put it. He needs some diversity training. He needs to watch
King of the Hill.
    Whereas
Desperate Housewives
is real actors playing cartoon characters,
King of the Hill
is cartoon characters acting like real people: real Texans, in fact, who have hangups, who don't communicate well, and who do look after one another. And, yes, Hank cares about propane, because it's his living, but he's not