The Nevada Senate race is sizing-up to be the tightest and the most volatile for the upcoming November mid-term elections. The latest Real Clear Politics poll has Harry Reid at 44 % and Sharron Angle at 43 %. 13 % are undecided, and remain on the side-line, watching a recent ruckus between Tea Party-backers and Reid supporters break-out at a Thursday forum.
The intensity of this scrap in Nevada is symbolic of a vaster ideological engagement that is an echoing cannon-blast across the ramparts of our nation. Harry Reid is a champion of health care reform, and is slamming Angle on his most recent campaign ad, released on Friday. In 2003 Angle voted against a bill (SB183) that required insurance companies to cover colonoscopies, which can detect cancer.
The narrator of the ad says: “Sharron Angle’s against making insurance companies cover colon cancer tests, mammograms or anything else. That’s not just extreme, it’s dangerous.”
“They just passed the latest one. Everything they want to throw at us is covered under ‘autism’ so that’s a mandate that you have to pay for. How about maternity leave? I’m not going to have any more babies but I sure get to pay for it on my insurance. Those are the kinds of things we want to get rid of.”
Sharron Angle must be the most extreme of the extremist Tea Party candidates. Sharron is like General Sherman marching through the south and burning to the ground everything in sight. She wants to jettison the Department of Education, privatize Medicare, privatize Social Security, do away with the EPA, abolish the Department of Energy, leave the United Nations and end the IRS tax codes.
It’s most disturbing to me that 43 % of Nevadans sincerely support Sharron Angle. In an effort to comprehend her popularity (this phenomenon probably seeps its way across America), the best reason that I could come up with for this, is her persistent metaphor that she (and The Tea Party) resembles our Forefathers, the radical patriots who dumped some chests of tea in Boston Harbor to show the British just who was the boss.
When Harry Reid labeled her too conservative, she pulled out her Jack-of-Hearts, the cloak of her patriotic past protecting her unbelievable beliefs. “I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And, truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings…you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.”
Sharron Angles probably hasn’t glanced at an American History textbook in five decades. George Washington wasn’t a conservative, he was a Federalist, and knew that if the central government wasn’t strong, it would fail in short order. And Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were hardly social or fiscal conservatives, Sharron? Actually, Jefferson was awkward with a buck and Franklin was a profligate during his days in France as our ambassador.
The Constitution itself is rife with conflict, and the disputes and interpretations are fully charged in the Federalist Papers. James Madison preferred a more limited stance for the central government and Alexander Hamilton took the position that the government must be stronger, especially with regards to its banking system, if it wants to survive.
But nowhere can we find any ‘Spirit of 1776-Patriot Ghosts’ with the types of Nihilistic (slash and burn) and Anarchistic positions of Sharron Angle. She envisions a Perfect Democracy without any central government whatsoever. Yea, somehow the ‘free market’ will just police itself, global warming will go away, and tranquil moms can just stay home and do some cooking and fun housecleaning, just like Betsy Ross use to do (and maybe some red, white and blue flag-sewing too!) back in the day.
