Recently, new acquaintances mistook me for Republican (not sure why). A few even-minded conservatives have appreciated my writing, too, such as this comment posted to my Crosscut piece on ACORN:
Ms Albers,Thank you for putting together this informative and detailed piece of journalism. For years, our society has strayed from the ethical path, choosing a more 'pragmatic' method of making decisions. ACORN is just one marker on the travelogue, one flag pinned to the map, that tells us where we have been and on what course we still proceed. Values in societies are scarcely different from physical objects; their velocity and direction do not change unless affected by some external force. In this case, the convergence of economic crises, high stakes in the theater of international relations and a presidential election have provided us with opportunities to revisit some of our basic values as a nation and place ethics at the center of our public life. We can take our outrage at abuses in our elections, inside of government and with private sector dysfunction and channel it into a discussion about how to reset the underlying values that must exist in order for the United States to retain its greatness.
- Bryan Myrick
Myrick, it turns out, keeps a conservative blog, where he authors posts objecting to the Obama campaign's call to take Nov. 4 off work, pointing out a Russian military exercise while the rest of the nation turned its eyes toward Wall Street, and reminding his readers of Sen. John McCain's finer side. This last post features a video of McCain delivering hilarious stand-up (great writing, and McCain exhibits a graceful self-effacement). This isn't the McCain we saw in the debates.
My hope for the ACORN piece was that it would speak sense to readers across political divisions, giving no quarter to McCain's red herring about ACORN's alleged threat to the fabric of our democracy, but neither issuing a free pass to the group in question nor liberal bloggers and reporters who leapt to its defense. This was hard for me to do since I had to tamp down residual feelings I had, left over from my activist days, about betraying the Movement.
Previously on Crosscut, I wrote about an e-mail fracas at North Seattle Community College that to me exemplified the often hilarious failings of political correctness as much as it demonstrated why we were inclined to reform our public behavior in the first place. It was picked up by Free Republic. My piece on Shawn Hornbeck on Blogcritics was re-posted on "The Blog for the Right." With both of these pieces, again, I wanted to explore hot-button issues without denying their complexity, which too many writers these days do.
What does it mean that I'm attracting a (small) conservative following? That I should vote for McCain?
I hope it means that a reasonable argument has cross-partisan appeal. That's Crosscut's approach, after all. We call it "solutionist."
And for the record, I'm voting Obama.
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