Merli Column: Looking out for number one

I’m not sure why designer clothes always seem to place their labels on the outside. Prestige, I suppose, for the clothier and buyer. A pity we can’t say the same thing about all those labels of the verbal
kind we throw around. Still, I guess they do serve a purpose, especially for the laziest among us.

One reincarnated label coming from the right is that old chestnut “socialism” as it applies on several fronts, while “corporate greed” and “party of no” seem to be well-worn phrases used by the left.
Meanwhile, moderates (remember them?) are to be found somewhere near the center of the bickering — in some squeeze-space that seems a bit too narrow to even breathe. (Independents seem to
swing both ways, as is their ilk.)

Take “Cash for Clunkers.” It’s wildly successful. It’s a government nightmare. Take your pick. Apart from the obvious — that the unexpected success of the vehicle program does a number of useful things
like getting people back in car showrooms, giving local car dealers in Prince William something to smile about and taking a few hundred thousand gas guzzlers off our roads — we should also note the
initial start-up funds were a mere $1 billion. These days $1 billion is a bad lunch on Connecticut Avenue!

Yet with predictable precision (often taking direct cues from Fox Cable News) members of Congress back home for the August recess are getting shouted down on the hugely successful clunkers
concept and on health care. Add “higher taxes” and “socialism” to the lexicon and that’s all a lot of folks need to stay angry without knowing why. (Some people are happiest when they’re ticked off at
something. Makes them feel alive, I guess.)

Yet last fall when the Bush (and then Obama) administration’s proposed bailout provided unprecedented federal funding for those naughty, greedy banks and other financial problem children on Wall
Street, you could have heard a pin drop more clearly than charges of “socialism” or “government intervention.”

Yet this is hardly a one-sided problem (which is regrettable, frankly, because it would have made my argument far easier to make). While conservatives are desperately trying to paint liberals into that
proverbial corner of “tax-and-spend,” some liberals have a tendency to use ethnicity as a weapon against the right, sometimes unfairly. When MSNBC talk host Rachel Maddow the other night gleefully
pointed out that, according to John McCain, the GOP nationally does not enjoy the support of many Hispanics (and he should know), she immediately cut to another clip of McCain stating that he will not
support the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To Maddow’s (and likely many of her viewers’) way of thinking, McCain’s comments and subsequent actions were in near-comical conflict. In reality, however, she was really comparing apples and
oranges. Supporting all races and ethnic groups, in general, does not require us to automatically support a cause or judicial appointee based solely (or even largely) on ethnicity. To make such seemingly
logical “connect the dots” assumptions (Maddow’s own phrase) is a frequent stance taken by some liberals that no less than Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Colin Powell and others have decried to varying
degrees (as has Sotomayor herself, despite that fact she was an obviously successful result of affirmative action).

So barely seven months since Inauguration Day, the tiresome and often bitter polarization of “them vs. us” that marked the presidential campaign is back with a vengeance — exacerbated by high
unemployment, the health care debate and now a less-than-subtle reach for more white voters (and only whites, it seems) by some Republicans (notably MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan) trying to capitalize on
the fears which inevitably result from a troubled economy.

Not to be outdone, last November’s election did not crown the liberals in the crowd as “king of the world” as some of them might believe. And all those liberal groups who have expressed bitter resentment
in recent weeks at somehow not being at the very top of Obama’s priority list on Day One (or even Day 100) should grow up and join the real world. The real label that may apply to more of us than we
may realize — whether for liberal, conservative, moderate, independent, or a combination, thereof — may simply be “self-possessed.”

John Merli has been a Prince William County resident since 1984, and a Potomac News columnist since 1985. E-mail him at j.merli@comcast.net.