Birthday Odds and Ends

They Say It's My Birthday. I was 54 years old today--54 born in 54. As always, I'm mostly happy to be alive and in decent health. I've got a great family, a job I love, and I'm living in a beautiful part of the world. Altogether life is good.

Blasts From the Past. Two of my undergraduate mentors Lew and Sandy Hinchman retired from their teaching jobs last week. They arrived at St. Lawrence University my senior year and pointed me in the direction of Hegel and Frankfurt School Marxism and helping me set my sails for a degree in political theory. They were unbelievably generous to me and gave me a lot of good advice that I wasn't able to take when I was in grad school. But I have tried to follow their examples and have done my best to be as generous to my students as they were to me.

I also heard from Tom McNeilus, a teacher in Virginia who grew up on my street in Waverly, NY. He was a really nice kid when we were growing up and he still seems like a really nice guy at the age of 54. Fifty-four!!!

Collapse of the Republicans? I talked with a conservative guy today who seemed convinced that the Democrats could finish off the Republican Party once and for all if they nominated Hillary Clinton this year. What he sees is that Hillary has a strong appeal to the white working-class conservatives and Reagan Democrats who the Republicans need to be competitive.

I'm not sure about this. After all, I know a lot of Democrats who say they'll vote for McCain if Hillary is nominated.

But the Republicans are on very thin ice. The GOP almost extinct in New England and have lost their base in the Northern suburbs. They're not competitive in the coastal areas on the Pacific and even less competitive with African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and Jewish voters. Republican safe areas in the South (Virginia, North Carolina), Southwest, and Mountain States have become battlegrounds and the party is having trouble attracting viable candidates and raising money. My right-wing friend thinks that the GOP would fall through the ice and drown if they were deserted by Reagan Democrats.

My own thought is that an Obama win would cause something like a Republican collapse because it would signal a general refusal of the public to continue listening to the right. Having supported Hillary's candidacy up to last week, I still see an Obama win as really shifting the balance to the left in American politics.