RALEIGH – I spent part of a very wet Wednesday, Flag Day, pondering just how many different ways I am manifestly unsuited to run for public office.
Not exactly the typical pastime of a normal person, I grant you. But given what I do for a living – research, think about, write about, and speak about political issues, and supervise others engaged in the same enterprise – the question inevitably comes up on occasion. In this particular instance, what prompted my ruminations were two sequential events: reading a welcome note from someone who knows me from television, and reading an unwelcome story in USA Today, a newspaper often mistaken for television.
Because most of my correspondence comes in one of three flavors – critical, very critical, or insanely, disturbingly critical – it’s always a joy to read something appreciative (I know people are just more likely to write when they are angered than when they are satisfied, but still…) The General Assembly in Raleigh is “out of control on spending,” the viewer wrote me. “What bothers me is that they spend all this money on the schools and our children still can’t read.” Yes, it bothers me, too.
“I think you should run for governor,” she then stated. “I don’t care what party. I would vote for you.” By my count, then, my unannounced gubernatorial candidacy has now attracted a solid two votes – both from 70-ish women who watch me on television. Only one of those is my mother.
Despite this unmistakable momentum, I found myself entertaining reservations about the idea. For one thing, an obvious disadvantage of running for governor is that if you win you have to, well, be governor. Though Gov. Easley seems intent on disproving this, it is my understanding that doing the job means hanging around with state lawmakers, public officials, and reporters a lot. I do that already, only now I have an excuse not to continuing doing it past 5:30pm or so.
The more fundamental problem, however, is that it is hard to imagine how someone like me could actually get elected. Legislators seeking higher office often get told by their political consultants to expect to defend dozens or hundreds of controversial votes that might be hard to explain in a 30-second ad or 10-second sound bite. But by my count, I have written something like 2,300 published articles in my career thus far – including nearly 20 years as a syndicated columnist, about the same as a freelance writer for magazines, and five years as an online columnist writing four to five pieces a week. Add to that three books and well over 1,000 appearances on talk shows, TV and radio, many of them recorded for all posterity, and you have the makings of a perfect political storm.
It’s not that I don’t stand behind everything I’ve written or said (more or less, there was that unfortunate business some years ago about Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace being a great film). But you can’t make serious arguments about public policy without saying things that could be taken out of context to sound downright shocking.
An example came to mind when I ran across an article about a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prohibit flag burning and how North Carolina’s own Sen. Richard Burr might be a deciding vote. Whenever this issue comes up, I feel compelled to make the obvious point that supporters are unconscionably attempting to limit their fellow Americans’ freedom of political expression as well as their property rights. If you burn a flag you own to protest something, I can properly consider you a nincompoop and ignore your silly protest. If you burn a flag I own, on the other hand, you are still a nincompoop but a thief and vandal to boot.
So if I’m opposed to the flag-burning amendment, does that mean I approve of flag-burning? Of course not. I’m personally opposed to all sorts of behavior that, in a free society, should not be illegal. I suspect it would be rather difficult to explain all this in a campaign setting, though. Add in my beef with the Pledge of Allegiance – why are we swearing allegiance to a flag and country, rather than to our constitution and founding principles? – and you see why the endeavor is doomed.
But thanks anyway, Ma’am.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.
p.s. Future anti-Hood attack ad text:
Even John Hood wouldn’t vote for John Hood! “I am manifestly unsuited to run for public office,” he confessed in June 2006. Then he admitted something really shocking: “…I don’t stand behind everything I’ve written or said…” How can the voters of this fair [state, city, satrapy, etc.] put their trust in such a man?