First Date Questions

I don’t know when it happened, but it has become customary for young couples to treat their first dates like psychiatric intake interviews.

You don’t have to be Miss Manners to find this appalling.

Writing the New York Times “Modern Love” column today Sara Eckel recounted how she was taken aback when a man asked her on their first date how long it had been since her last relationship.

She describes her reaction: “I looked at the table, cupping my hand around my beer. I had always hated this question. It seemed so brazenly evaluative — an employment counselor inquiring about a gap in your résumé, a dental hygienist asking how often you flossed.”

Eckel is right to hate a question that has, by her account, become a staple of first dates. While I do like her analogies, the question sounds to me like something a therapist would ask.

There are many reasons to hate the question. On first dates two people should try to get to know each other, slowly.

Intrusive personal questions have no place in a conversation between people who have just met. Even for Eckel, who was out with a man she knew well from work, the question is out of place.

A first date is not a quiz. It is bad conversational form to cast the interaction in question/answer form. No one likes to be put on the spot and no one likes to be quizzed about past relationships.

If you want to have a great date, engage the other person in a conversation. I am sure that you can do it without asking probing questions.

Asking a woman about her relationship history feels to me slightly strange.

If a woman has had a series of relationships that have not led to marriage, this assumes that she chooses men badly or that there is something wrong about her.

Nowadays, it is considered slightly embarrassing for a woman not to have experienced a number of relationships. In the past, a woman who had had several relationships would have been considered less desirable, perhaps because she would have been considered to be fickle.

If you are out on a first date and you want to learn something more personal than the person’s opinion about the weather, try offering some personal information about yourself.

That invites your date to share information with you. Of course, you should do so gradually and discretely. It’s better to start out with your pets and your family before getting to your sexual preferences.

If you get too personal too soon, your date will probably not reciprocate. If so, walk it back and change the discussion to a more neutral topic.

In truth, this is what happened to Eckel. Her suitor had, gallantly, but perhaps too eagerly, shared all manner of personal information with her.

He had been open about his loneliness, his divorce, his career anxiety. He had, as the saying goes, put out.

Eckel, it seems, had not reciprocated. It may well be that she was following an instinct. The therapy culture notwithstanding, most women do not feel comfortable around a man who makes himself emotionally vulnerable. They try to get him to shut it down. 

As she tells the story, Eckel's date divulged some personal information. Apparently, she did not reciprocate. The man drew the right conclusion and gallantly changed the subject, as he should have done.

While it is poor etiquette to ask a woman on a first date why she isn’t married or if she has ever been married, that does not mean that, culturally speaking, we ought not to address the question.

Why are there so many unmarried thirtysomething women in America, or better, in New York today?

Eckel hints at one reason when she explains that she felt that in wanting to be married she was betraying feminism.

For decades now feminists have been peddling the idea that it is better for women to defer marriage in favor of career.

Given the source, one should not be surprised to learn that this has worked out badly for many, many women.

In truth, it is easier to build a life together than to merge too well-formed lives. Of course, younger women have a larger selection of men and more power in choosing an appropriate husband.

Only the influence of feminism would have convinced them to sacrifice this power for a cause.

I suspect that many young women took themselves out of the marriage derby because they learned that wanting a husband, and thus, wanting to be a wife, was a betrayal of feminism.

While one side of the culture is telling women to postpone marriage, another side is stigmatizing those who are unmarried in their thirties. The culture is telling unmarried women that their singlehood means that they are flawed and that they need to resolve their problems in therapy.

In Eckel’s words: “Like single women everywhere, I had bought into the idea that the problem must be me, that there was some essential flaw — arrogance, low self-esteem, fear of commitment — that needed to be fixed. I needed to be fixed.”

Eckel was convinced that expiating her sins would put her on the road to matrimony.

Since she could not herself afford therapy, so she decided to do it on the cheap. As a writer who often interviewed therapists and self-help gurus, she asked many of them for advice. And she took their advice.

She explains: “I also talked to a lot of self-help authors. There was the Tough-Love Married Lady who declared the key to finding a soul mate was to grow up, quit whining and do something about your hair. There was the Magical Soul-Mate Finder who prescribed keeping a journal, long hikes, candle-lighted bubble baths and other hocus-pocus. And there was The Man — i.e., a moderately cute guy who wrote a book — who gave insider tips on how to hook up with him, which involved not being critical and having long hair.”

Self-help authors may or may not be therapists. They are more likely to provide advice than to help a woman to find out what is wrong with her.

When Eckel let her hair grow and improved her appearance that did not mean that there was something wrong with her. It meant that her appearance had been sending the wrong message to the men she met.

Up to a point, the advice was helpful. Eckel writes: “My efforts yielded many friends and filled my calendar with fulfilling activities. I went on Internet dates, speed dates and blind dates. I had great hair and a confident smile. But I was still alone. And in the dark of Saturday night, I still asked myself, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

Eckel wants us to believe that nothing about her self-improvement efforts contributed to her finding a husband. I am not so sure.

I agree that her success had nothing to do with working on her “issues,” but, a woman who undergoes a makeover is not really resolving her issues. She is presenting a more agreeable face to the world.

By Eckel’s account, the world was more than happy to embrace the new Her.

Eckel prefers to give the credit to true love. All that she needed, she explains, was to find the right man, a man who would love her unconditionally, flaws and all.

While I wish her all the best, and agree that it is good for people who are in love to believe that they love each other for reasons that have nothing to do with superficial appearances, I also believe that Eckel is being slightly naïve about all this.

After all, a woman who does not want to or cannot have children, as seems to be the case here, would do well to follow Eckel’s example and fall in love with a man who is divorced.

In the Matter of Troy Davis

Last Wednesday convicted murderer Troy Davis was executed in Georgia. In the days preceding the execution the case became a cause celebre for those who oppose the death penalty.

Since most people, myself included, do not have the time or the expertise to study the case files, we are prey to the presentation offered us by the media.

Even when the media does its job, there are always going to be a few brain dead celebrities who will exploit the situation to enhance their fame.

Alec Baldwin had this to say to the parents of the Mark MacPhail, the man who was murdered by Troy Davis: “Wonder if the McPhail [sic] family will seek death penalty for US leaders who killed thousands of US soldiers and countless innocent Iraqis."

The next time you are wondering about the coarsening of public discourse in America, the absence of civility, and the crass vulgarity of people who aren’t even smart enough to know that they should keep their mouths shut… think of Alec Baldwin.

Even when the media do a fair job of covering the story, they are obliged to report the information that is being provided by activists who are creating their own narrative in order to advance their own agenda.

Apparently, a similar phenomenon has manifested itself in Great Britain. This morning Toby Harndon commented in the London Telegraph: “The sheer emotionalism and partisanship of much of the coverage of the case in Britain was an embarrassment. On virtually no other subject could you find facts presented so selectively, conclusions so sweeping and reasoning so simplistic.”

Harndon offers an excellent account of the facts of the Toby Davis case. If you are interested in seeing whether Davis received every possible judicial protection, his article is worth reading.

Notably, Harndon himself opposes the death penalty. In providing the facts of the case he allows us to see through the fog of storytelling and to arrive at a well-informed opinion.

Mitt Romney and the 11th Commandment

Even if he was not its author, Ronald Reagan is often credited with the Republicans' 11^th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.”

Newt Gingrich had it in mind when he offered the following riposte to John Harris during the first Republican presidential debate: “I for one, and I hope all of my friends up here, going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other to protect Barack Obama who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team, whoever the nominee is, we are all for defeating Barack Obama."

As soon as Governor Rick Perry entered the race, the 11^th Commandment became a dead letter. It was open season on the guy from Texas.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann have led the charge. It hasn’t been the proverbial circular firing squad, because all the fire has been aimed at Rick Perry.

Perry has not held up well under the barrage. His performance has gotten worse from one debate to the next.

Perhaps in time he will regain traction, but for now his candidacy seems to have stalled out.

For those who believe that criticism makes us stronger, the truth is, standing before a firing squad or being pummeled by a gang does not make you stronger.

First, it makes you defensive. Then, it throws you off your game.

In the last debate Perry looked hesitant and unprepared; he got tangled up in his prepared remarks; he looked weak.

Clearly, Perry is an inexperienced debater. He is also a skilled orator; he delivers a much better speech than the other candidates.

More importantly, Rick Perry is running on a record. Few candidates would not be happy to defend Perry’s record in Texas. Who would not want to run on a record of producing jobs in a stagnant economy?

Better yet, Perry has succeeded in Texas by taking on important vested interests: trial lawyers, labor unions, environmentalists, and government bureaucrats.

  

If Perry is the nominee, each of these groups will attack him with everything they have. For now they don’t have to; Republicans are doing it for them.

If they can’t have Barack Obama these groups would be much more comfortable with a President Romney. The last thing they want is to see Texas policies take over the federal government.

While Gingrich was right that the media wants to see Republicans bloodying other Republicans, it is also true that the media would much prefer Mitt Romney to Rick Perry.

And many Republicans are so desperate to avoid four more years of Obama that they will happily take anyone they think can win.

If today’s polls are worth something, Romney seems to be the most electable.

Speaking of electability, Perry’s policies on illegal immigration—the ones that caused him the most grief at the last debate-- are very appealing to a large group of voters whose support will be decisive in this and forthcoming elections.

One wonders whether the Republican candidates, in their unseemly lust to bring down Perry, were thinking past the candidate debates.

Perry is not a perfect conservative. He is, after all, a retail politician, one who knows how to govern a large state and how to get things done.

His problem now is not so much his ideas, which have been defended cogently by a myriad of op-ed writers, but his inability to explain them cogently in debate.

By now, conservative pundits are aghast. Most of them would have supported Rick Perry, but, after watching the last three debates many of them are developing a case of trichotillomania.

Today, many of them sound like they would rather see Perry get out of the race, the better to open the door to the man they really, really want to see up on the stage confronting Barack Obama. That would be a favorite of mine: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

No one makes a better case for conservative governing principles than Chris Christie. No one is a tougher or stronger debater. No one does better in Town Hall meetings.

Many Republicans are salivating at the chance to see Christie take Barack Obama apart.

At last report, Christie is reconsidering his Shermanesque rejection of a 2012 run for the White House, so the pundit class might very well get its wish.

But they are making a very risky bet. If Christie maintains his resolve, they will be facing the choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. That is, the status quo vs. the status quo.

Or, maybe not.

Of course, Romney has his own problems with conservative Republicans. Yesterday, Dick Armey, declared that Romney would not be acceptable to the Tea Party.

And then, two liberal columnists MichaelTomasky and Nate Silver wrote that they were not going to count Rick Perry out.

Tomasky wrote: “Perry will study his briefing books and refrain from accusing, however accurately, his core constituents of heartlessness. But Romney can’t undo his evil socialistic Massachusetts history. The Redstate blogger wrote: ‘I don’t care if Perry is soft on immigration and tried to mandate a vaccination through executive order. Romney is the father of socialized medicine in America!’”

While Republicans are in despair over Rick Perry, a liberal like Tomasky offers a cogent view of Romney’s flaws: “… my case hinges … on the plainly observable fact that Mitt Romney is a really uninteresting and unappealing human being…. Who can possibly really like Romney? He’s like your boss, or the regional supervisor who comes by the office a few times a year. You tolerate him and suck up to him, but the experience is completely phony and awkward. I don’t know him and might have him wrong, but I’d just bet you a dollar that he doesn’t have many real friends. He has partners and associates and a swarm of acolytes who suck up to him because he’s rich. But he comes across as wooden, insincere (in a harmless rather than malevolent way), and totally emotionally unavailable.”

Tomasky does not much like Rick Perry, but I credit him with offering an honest appraisal of what is wrong with Mitt Romney.

More than a few Republican voters consider Romney to be an opportunistic phony. And more than a few will begin to think that attacking Rick Perry as brutally as he has is a serious character flaw, a failure to be a loyal member of the Republican party.

At the New York Times Nate Silver is also more optimistic about Perry’s prospects, largely because of the Republican antipathy to Mitt Romney. While Intrade numbers are trending more strongly toward Romney, Silver joins Tomasky in wanting to place his bet on Perry.

In his words: “But given the lack of appreciable momentum for any of the other candidates — and that all of them had been polling in the single digits — Mr. Perry will probably get a second and perhaps even a third look before one of them has the chance to emerge as the consensus alternative to Mr. Romney. In the parlance of the bond rating agencies, it is appropriate to put Mr. Perry’s campaign on a ‘negative outlook,’ but it is a little early for a full downgrade.”

The Most Overrated Writer in America

I hope that it’s more than an in joke among people who are serious about writing.

Have you noticed how badly Tom Friedman writes? As a prose stylist, Friedman is a gift to the gods of embarrassment.

Best of the Web columnist James Taranto has dubbed Friedman the Worst Writer in the English Language. Link here.

Surely, Friedman is the most overrated writer (and thinker) in English.

I am not ready to call him the “worst” anything. I fear that in order to be the worst you have to know what you are doing.

I recall an incident that occurred when I was a freshman in college. For reasons that no one understood the school decided that all the incoming freshmen should take an aptitude test. No one knew why. It counted for nothing.

I’m not sure why no one else thought of this, but one of my dorm mates was inspired to get all the answers wrong. That’s right. He decided to fill in the wrong boxes. 

And he succeeded. It is statistically impossible to get all the answers wrong. And yet, this young man got a zero on the test. He did the impossible.

Of course, the only way you can get all the answers wrong is to know all the right answers and then to choose, willfully, to answer otherwise.

Such was the case of this man. He was called into the testing office where the woman who was running the test burst into tears… because he had ruined her curve.

I am not sure what a Freudian would say about ruined curves, but ever since then I have hesitated to call anyone the worst at anything.

As I see it, calling Tom Friedman the worst gives him too much credit. I am inclined to think that he has just run out of ideas and is phoning it in.

All of this to explain why I have given up on reading Tom Friedman.

Over at the Gawker site, Hamilton Nolan continues to read Freidman. I assume that he does it so that the rest of us don’t have to.

Last Sunday, Nolan reports, Friedman regaled us with another of his Deep Thought pieces. (And yes, I am suggesting that Friedman gets his ideas in an underground parking garage.)

Clearly, the piece was designed to save the world and to gin up sales of Friedman’s latest book, That Used To Be Us.

Nolan’s attention, however, was arrested at the sight of an utterly appalling metaphor. Friedman declared that we are: “… at this crucial hinge in our history.”

You can see Friedman contemplating the sentence and deciding that “turning point” has been overused. So he decided to exercise all his brilliance and invent a new metaphor: “crucial hinge.”

As metaphors go, it is very bad indeed.

Nolan explains: “There's a reason that people tend to refer to ‘a turning point in our history:’ because that phrase is intelligible. A reader is able to deduce, from that phrase, what the writer means. Whereas from the phrase ‘this crucial hinge in our history,’ a reader is only able to deduce that the writer has gotten trapped in the woods with nothing but a thesaurus and a bottle of ether.”

A hinge in our history is simple gibberish. The editors at the New York Times should know better.

As if that were not bad enough, Friedman also came up with this: “And real conservatives would understand that the Tea Party has become the Tea Kettle Party. It is people in real distress about our predicament letting off steam by trying to indiscriminately cut everywhere. But steam without an engine - without a strategic plan for American greatness based on spending cuts, tax reform and investments in tomorrow - will take us nowhere.”

Nolan nails this one: “Did you see that? The rarely-spotted-in-the-wild Triple Nonsensical Metaphor Transition? Tea Party to Tea Kettle to Letting Off Steam to Steam Without an Engine, all in the space of three sentences. But will this Steamless Engine become an Engine of our Economy leading to Economy of Motion which will send America In Motion like a Wide Receiver to Receive the Message that It Ain't All About Messaging, It's About the Brass Tacks?”

And that’s without even mentioning the split infinitive in the very poorly written second sentence. The italics are mine. The sentence also includes a mixed metaphor: cutting indiscriminately while letting off steam.

I doubt that too many political consultants could get away with such hack work. How does it happened that someone who is held in high esteem can write so badly and think so poorly?

Given the crises that the world is facing today, it seems slightly petty to belabor the appalling writing of Tom Friedman. And yet, in time of trouble, we do not just seek out political leadership. We all seek out intellectual leadership. We seek out people who can help us to understand the issues and to formulate our opinion.

If a significant number of serious Americans is looking to Tom Friedman for intellectual leadership—he is clearly trying to provide it—we are in a lot more trouble than we think.

Rush Limbaugh Takes on Elizabeth Warren

The state of liberal thought being what it is, the leftosphere is agog over Elizabeth Warren’s vigorous, impassioned response to the charge that Democrats might be practicing class warfare.

Her points have refuted many times by now, but, no one does it quite like Rush Limbaugh. So, here’s a transcript of his comments on Elizabeth Warren. Happily enough he includes a clip of Warren’s original remarks.

It all makes you think that the left’s much vaunted monopoly on brilliance is a mirage. Who knew?

New Paths to Mental Health

Depending on your preference “mental health” is either a metaphor or a contradiction in terms. Let’s be nice and call it a metaphor.

If you accept, as most philosophers do, that the mind and the brain are not the same thing you will also agree that it makes no sense to say that the mind is healthy or sick.

It’s nice to know that an entire field of supposedly scientific endeavor is directing its efforts toward curing a metaphor.

The mental health field has been divided between those who want to treat the mind and those who want to treat the brain. Some, of course, want to treat both.

In the old days therapists believed that ideas would cure. Some believed that repressed ideas were causing psychological symptoms. Thus, they imagined that treatment should consist in finding and expressing these repressed ideas.

It sounded good on paper. In reality, it did not live up to its promise.

Since mind-based treatments did not work psychiatry chose to treat the brain. More specifically, it set out to modify brain chemistry.

At the least you can measure brain chemistry. If the mind, as many suspect, is really a metaphysical entity, we cannot observe or measure it.

When we do scientific research on the brain we are really not touching the mind.

So psychiatry concocted a pharmacopeia, the better to treat every manner of emotional distress. The pills and potions made people less depressed and less anxious. Some psychiatrists even believed that medication could change your personality, to the point of making you a different person.

Unfortunately, psychopharmacology did not cure psychiatrists of their own grandiosity.

Evidence suggests that the new medications worked better than the old insights. Some have suggested that it was all a placebo effect, but someone who has been suffering from lifelong depression is not going to care very much whether his new era of good feelings was produced by a pill or a trick.

People believe in pills; they believe in biochemistry. They are more apt to feel better taking a pill than learning that they have an Oedipus complex.

Treatments that aim at curing the mind and treatments that want to recalibrate brain chemistry have one thing in common. They oversimplify what a human being is really about.

To my mind the most interesting new discoveries in the mental health field are not about mind or body. They address the way personal habits and socialization contribute to your emotional well-being.

One group feels a bit like a different way to manipulate brain chemistry. Yet, they do it with  personal habits, not pills.

Developing good personal habits requires work. It also requires that you reorganize your daily routines.

These habits run a gamut, from the aerobic exercise that is now considered to be an effective treatment for depression, to the yoga that notably helps to calm anxiety and stress, to a healthy and balanced diet.

I think we should also be heartened to see psychiatry and psychology showing a greater understanding to the importance of socialization as treatment. Many of what are called mental illnesses are caused by defective socialization.

All therapists recognize that good relationships contribute mightily to mental health, but they have seemed to believe that if you overcome your narcissism or feel better about yourself you will automatically have better relationships.

The truth is, if you have bad manners and treat people disrespectfully you will not have good relationships for very long. It doesn't even matter whether your bad behavior is intentional or unintentional.

Rudeness is not a disease. It is not a function of brain chemistry. Often it derives from not knowing any better or from finding yourself in a radically different social environment.

Therapists should know that you cannot improve your manners and conduct by plumbing the depths of your narcissism. You need to sit down with a stack of books by Miss Manners, learn the rules of good behavior, and then, practice them rigorously.

If you do, your relationships will improve markedly. The point should not even be debatable.

I don’t want to emphasize ethics today. I want to underscore the mental health benefits that accrue to those who fill their lives with routines and rituals.

I emphasize the point for several reasons.

First, therapy has made such a fetish of spontaneity and enthusiasm that it has blurred the line between obsessional symptoms and good habits. .

Second, therapy and its culture have encouraged people to avoid anything that smacks of conformity, the better to make each of a day’s decisions an occasion for creative thought.

Third, Confucian thinking emphasizes the importance of ritual and routines, and most people do not really understand the full import of this idea.

It’s easy enough to pay lip service to Confucius. And it’s easy enough to say that we all understand what he was saying, but it is far more difficult to live your life in a consistently ordered, routinized, ritualized fashion.

Recently, researchers at Tel Aviv University demonstrated that Confucius was right: “They concluded that ritualistic behavior in both humans and animals developed as a way to induce calm and manage stress caused by unpredictability and uncontrollability — heightening our belief that we are in control of a situation that is otherwise out of our hands.”

Ritualized behaviors, behaviors that are repetitive and predictable, help us to control certain kinds of anxiety and stress.

Ask yourself whether you have a daily routine, whether you wake up at roughly the same time every day, whether you have a daily wake-up ritual, whether you have roughly the same breakfast every day, and whether you organize your family life around regular family dinners.

Repetitive behaviors provide a sense of security and continuity. They provide more security and continuity that does a mental exercise that pretends to show that you have always been the same person.

Admittedly, it runs completely counter to our most cherished beliefs to imagine that eating Cheerios every morning can make a greater contribution to your feeling of being a coherent Self than can your own well-crafted life story.

Still, eating Cheerios is probably more conducive to selfsameness than is introspection.

By now, everyone should know that family dinners are one of the most important factors contributing to children’s emotional well-being.

They are cheaper than therapy and are much more effective.

More than that, research shows that rituals and routines give us a feeling of self-control.

Assuming that we all know that self-control is a good thing, and that intemperate expression is not a good thing, this research tells us that you cannot gain self-control through insight into why you are out of control.

The basketball player at the free-throw line or the golfer lining up a putt go through specific ritualized behaviors whose purpose is to focus their mind, reduce stress and gain a sense of control over the situation.

A basketball player might bounce the ball six times before taking his free-throw. In so doing is taking effective control of himself and his situation.

If you have such habits, relish them. Even if the habit seems to be as useless as a golfer’s practice swings, it is not compulsive or obsessive. It is a constructive way to reduce stress and confront a challenge. 

Michael Bloomberg's New York

Being an inhabitant of the nation’s largest city I pay especially close attention to its condition.

If we are to believe Joel Kotkin, New York City is in decline. When Kotkin looked at the results of the recent election in New York’s 9^th Congressional district he concluded that they reflected the failure of the Bloomberg administration to improve life for the middle class.

For some time now we have all known that New York is divided between the rich and the rest. When 40,000 people pay 50% of the taxes, you are dealing with an extraordinary level of income inequality.

This means that the excessively high taxes that wealthy New Yorkers are paying have not diminished income inequality.

Kotkin explains that Mayor Bloomberg has run a blue state administration. He has taxed the rich while bloating the bureaucracy and overpaying unionized workers.

In Kotkin’s words: “For a decade, the Bloomberg paradigm has held the city together: Wall Street riches fund an expanding bureaucracy that promotes social liberalism and nanny-state green politics. Indeed, Wall Street’s fortune — guaranteed by federal bailouts and monetary policy under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — has been the key to the mayor’s largely self-funded political success. Under Bloomberg, Wall Street’s profits allowed city expenditures to grow40% faster than the rate of inflation. Bloomberg was also able to buy political peace by bestowing raises two to three times the rate of inflation on the city’s unionized workers.”

Kotkin continues that the party is just about over: “Now this calculus is falling apart. Layoffs are mounting on Wall Street, while bonuses — the red meat that fuels everything from high-end condos to expensive boutiques and restaurants — are expected to drop 30% from last year.”

When you live by one industry, you run the risk of seeing that industry have a bad year or move out of town.

Kotkin concludes that as a laboratory for liberal and progressive governance, Michael Bloomberg’s New York counts as a failure: “Ultimately, the basic truth is this: Bloomberg’s luxury city has failed most of its citizens. Despite its self-celebrated “progressive” image, New York has the most unequal distribution of income in the nation. The bulk of the job growth has not been on Wall Street, where employment has declined over the decade, but in hospitality and restaurants, which pay salaries 60% below the city average. In fact, restaurants are now the largest single private employers in Manhattan, with more people serving tables than trading equities.  As the New York Post quipped: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere — as a waiter.”

So an extraordinarily successful businessman and entrepreneur, a Democrat turned RINO, helped lead New York City on a slow motion decline.

And now we are being told that we should vote for a businessman who has limited experience in government and whose government leadership was marked by blue state policies.

It’s worth some thought.