Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

A conservative professor of politics at the University of Virginia has written a column in Sunday’s Washington Post asking the question: Why are liberals so condescending?

In the setup, he writes, “Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.”

Later on, he adds, “This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.”

Rather than posting a comment on the Post’s Website to point out how the professor has it so wrong, let’s take his argument apart here.

First of all, he starts out with an obvious bit of false spin, just like the conservative commentators on TV he seems to try to defend.

“…even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives.”

On the wane? President Barack Obama’s personal popularity is the same as Ronald Reagan’s after one year in office, and the Democrats still have a majority in both houses of Congress. Just because TV pundits are saying the Democrats may lose a few seats in the mid-term election in 2010 doesn’t mean their fortunes are totally “on the wane.”

In fact, it has been pointed out over and over again that the Republican Party is all but dead, except among white males mostly in the South. Just because one Republican won a Congressional race in Massachusetts doesn’t mean the Republicans are about to take back the country tomorrow. The election is still 10 months away. Anything can happen and probably will.

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What about the press and politicians?

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

As the 2010 election season gears up around the country and in the state, as a trained and credentialed public opinion researcher as well as a journalist who has covered public opinion research for about 30 years, I am always looking to see what the data shows versus what political candidates and the media are spending time talking about.

Economic development is always the number one issue to the press in Alabama and politicians running for office here, a fact that is left over from the post-Civil War industrialization as our society moved away from an agricultural society to a manufacturing society. Of course in the years following the Civil War, we called the businessmen who came South “Yankee carpet-baggers,” but over the years, their reputations became less sullied as they provided jobs for an increasing number of citizens, many of whom moved off the farms to the cities.

And in these economic times, when the nation and the state are still suffering from the results of the Bush recession that started in 2007 even though we didn’t find out about it from the media until January 2008, the economy is still the number one concern of voters, according to the Gallup Poll and other research.

Twenty-nine percent of the American public name the economy in general as the number one problem facing the country. Second to that is health care, however. Twenty-six percent of the people say health care is the number one concern, while 15 percent name unemployment.

Other studies show a high correlation between issues being covered prominently by the media and issues identified by the public to be important.

While the environment only polls from one to three percent on the number one problem question, when asked about their personal worries on environmental problems facing the country at this time, the public overwhelming names polluted water as number one.

According to Gallup, a majority of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about four different environment problems involving water: 58 percent are concerned about pollution of drinking water, 53 percent worry about pollution of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, 52 percent express concern about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, and 51 percent worry “a great deal” about the maintenance of the nation’s supply of fresh water.

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From the economy to the environment, success depends on commitment…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Now that Alabama’s achieved the ultimate success by winning the national football championship, and everybody by now should be aware of coach Nick Saban’s famous mission statement about “excellence” that made it possible, don’t you wonder what it would take to translate that lesson into other aspects of life in this state and country?

How about our stumbling economy? Our bumbling political system? Our ineffective energy and environmental policies?

Tom Campbell

A Saban Hoodoo Wink?

Since there’s no good place available on the Web through Google to find a full text version of Saban’s mission statement for the Crimson Tide, and in case any of our readers who are not football fans missed it, I’ve grabbed it from here and retyped it to post below so anybody in the world can find it.

“Our mission statement here is to create an atmosphere and environment for everyone to be able to succeed, first of all as a person. We want players to be more successful in life because they were involved in our program, by the principles and values that we’re able to develop with them so that they can be successful relative to the character and attitude they have as a football player here at this institution.

“The second thing is we want to be successful as students. I always tell players in recruiting, there’s two things that we want you to do here, you’ve got two careers: one on the field, one off the field. The one off the field means you got to graduate from college. That’s the one that’s going to have the greatest impact on the quality of your life forever. We want to have a great academic support program. We want our players to succeed as students.

“The third is this. We want them to be the best football player they can be. We want every guy to reach their full potential as a football player, play together as a team, know how important it is to be a part of a team and fulfilling your role to that team.

“The last thing is to use all the resources this institution has to help everyone launch their career when they have represented this institution, when they leave this institution, so they can be the most successful in their life because of their association with this university and the people that have made this university great.”

Saban didn’t come up with this philosophy over night. In 2004, he wrote a book called How Good Do You Want to Be?

In the how-to memoir, Saban shares his winning philosophy for creating and inspiring success, revealing things that would help anybody succeed at work and in life. He says “excellence” doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from hard work, consistency, the drive to be the best and a passion for what you do.

Some of the insights include:

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

CRESTWOOD TAVERN — Someone asked me last night after about the third Southern Pecan Brown Ale if I had made any New Year’s resolutions for 2010, and if so, did I plan to write about them? Since I hadn’t given it even a whiff of a thought, I said no, “but maybe I’ll get around to it.”

I don’t get paid $1.2 million a year to write two newspaper columns a week like Maureen Dowd, so there’s nothing in my contract that forces me to write such a column promising New Year’s resolutions but instead reporting on hanging out with and defending the woman in charge of Homeland Security.

But when I woke up this morning and saw the thermometer stuck on 20 degrees, I cranked up the new Mr. Coffee and started surfing the Web to see if there were any good columns in news Webland reporting good ideas for the new year and the new decade. Somehow it came as no shock to find that the best ideas came not from a highly-paid career newspaper columnist, but from a rock star: Bono: Ten Ideas for the Next Ten Years.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been trying to tell people for the past 10 years that the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper is over. But you would be surprised at the places you can still go and get an argument about such things.

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Historically, Christmas is one of my least-favorite holidays. This year, however, I am trying to gin up some hope with a little Christmas cheer.

Why? Because I think we need the break, for one thing. There are a lot of poor people suffering immeasurably this year due to the Bush recession. Anything that would give them a break and a boost would be a good thing.

Then, if the so-called “Christmas spirit” could do anything to end the partisan hostilities left over from the trauma of the Bush years, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas indeed.

Lest this curmudgeonly, Scrooge-like attitude about Christmas come as a shock to the hordes of new readers here, let me do a little word riff to explain.

Let me just say that if I was like Elvis, that is to say richer and more popular than god, I would blast the TV set every time I hear some talking head go on and on about “the true meaning of Christmas,” or go after ratings by trying to start up another fight over the “attack on Christmas” by “liberals.”

I quit even checking in on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News a long time ago, in part because of his fake, cynical strategy of attracting conservative viewers by blatantly distorting the Supreme Court’s rulings upholding the separation of church and state about nativity scenes on public property.

One of my favorite film depictions of this divide in America comes in Charlie Wilson’s War. Remember when Tom Hanks suggests to his constituent from Texas that moving the nativity scene from the firehouse to the church down the street would be the best solution where everybody wins?

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