THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
OPINIONS THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2004 · PAGE 15
ELLEN HUNTER
The economics of electability Great speculative episodes are the most ridiculous of recurring phenomena in modern history. One of the first was Tulipmania, when 17th-century speculators in Holland drove the price of a single flower bulb to 3,000 florins, the equivalent of $50,000 today. Unable to sustain overvaluation, the market crashed, tulip prices plummeted, and investors went belly up. According to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.” Yet here we are again in the midst of a great speculative episode, the Democratic primaries. And thus far Democratic investors and the speculative media have grossly overvalued Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) chances in November. Consistent with Galbraith’s account in “A Brief History of Financial Euphoria,” the first two stages of speculation, Euphoria and Overvaluation, have occurred. Only the Crash — the Election Day realization that John Kerry cannot defeat George W. Bush — remains if Galbraith’s formula is correct and applicable. But the speculation phase of the frontloaded Democratic primaries is now dying down. Neither the media, shocked by Wisconsin’s results, nor anti-Bush Democrats can ignore the early misalignment of Kerry with electability, for the race may be changing course. If Democrats send Kerry’s challenger to battle in November, realizing that Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has the best chance of overthrowing President Bush, this will be more than a primary result; it will be a milestone for human history. For the first time, investors will gently deflate a speculative bubble before it pops. Consider the progression and end to the primaries in light of Galbraith’s stages of speculation. Stage One: Euphoria. John Kerry’s value, his perceived electability, boomed from Iowa to Nevada. The media deemed Kerry electable after surprising victories in Iowa
and New Hampshire (38 and 39 percent), and he has won 18 of 20 primaries on a wave of electability. Kerry has commanded over 70 percent of voters mainly seeking a candidate who “can beat George W. Bush in November.” Since Iowa, euphoric Democrats have hyped Kerry’s ability to defeat Bush. Stage Two: Overvaluation. Bandwagon investors, antiBush Democrats in this case, artificially inflated our sense of the frontrunner’s chances come November. Galbraith cautions that overvaluation occurs when investors predict future value on the basis of other investors’ present actions. More and more Democrats have invested in Kerry’s electability, and as a result, Kerry
Speculative episodes all have a similar result. appears electable. Kerry’s true chance of defeating Bush is unchanged by this speculation. Anti-Bush Democrats will throw their support behind the eventual nominee, but, by definition, swing voters swing. The preferred candidate of independents and conservatives, not of the mass of Democrats investing in Kerry’s electability, is most electable. Undeniably, Kerry does have some appeal with swing voters. He gets high marks for being a veteran and for having experience. The media and Democratic speculators justify equating Kerry with electability using these facts. But these considerations cloud our understanding of what lies beneath the data, truer indicators of a candidate’s odds come November. This is where things get really crazy. Throw out the
Democrats who say electability is most important, and John Kerry might not even be the front-runner in the Democratic primaries. According to MSNBC’s exit polls, Kerry would have lost to Senator John Edwards in Tennessee (31 to 34 percent) without voters whose top priority is electability. Edwards would still have won South Carolina by a slightly larger margin. Both Edwards and General Wesley Clark would have defeated Kerry in Oklahoma (32 to 32 to 19 percent). In New Hampshire, Kerry and Howard Dean would have tied at 29 percent. Kerry would have won several states with tremendously lower margins: Delaware (with 35 instead of 50 percent), Missouri (with 39 instead of 51 percent), Arizona (with 32 instead of 43 percent), and Virginia (with 42 instead of 52 percent). Most importantly, Edwards is slaughtering Kerry among independents, Republicans and conservative Democrats. While closed primaries do not offer precise measures, Edwards carried a large part of the 30 percent of independents and 10 percent of Republicans in Wisconsin’s open primary. To this point, foolishly euphoric investors, using each other and the media’s determination of electability, have made Kerry the frontrunner, while the truest indicators suggest that John Edwards is most capable of defeating President Bush. Stage Three: The Crash. Thankfully, the wave of speculation around John Kerry is dying before he can ride it all the way to the nomination. Thanks to Edwards’ strong showing in Wisconsin, Democrats and the media must second-guess the false association of John Kerry with electability and may actually select John Edwards, the candidate with the best chance of beating Bush. If they do, the Democratic party will avoid the fate of speculators throughout history. Ellen Hunter ’04 is a political science concentrator.
STEPHEN BEALE
The gay marriage myth The nationwide campaign to extend marriage to homosexuals cannot escape a fundamental paradox: activists are now agitating to be included in the very institution that they have been attacking for decades. The 1972 Gay Rights Platform, for example, called for the “repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit.” Likewise, in the early 1990s attorney Paula Ettelbrick chastised fellow activists who had become enamored of same-sex marriage, reminding them that marriage “has long been the focus of radical feminist revulsion.” Even the prominently pro-marriage Andrew Sullivan confessed that the “truth is, homosexuals are not entirely normal; and to flatten their varied and complicated lives into a single, moralistic model is to miss what is essential and exhilarating about their otherness.” The statistical evidence reinforces these statements. The case of Vermont, which recently passed a civil unions law, is especially instructive. Last month, USA Today reported that civil unions have a “limited appeal” to homosexual couples, only half of which have entered into civil unions. In America, marriage both denotes a system of legal benefits and refers to a particular form of social organization that bears the stamp of approval from the state. It is the desire for this latter privilege that drives the crusade for gay marriage. Again, the example of Vermont is revealing. A psychologist at the University of Vermont who conducted a study of civil unions found that only 20 percent of the civil union couples surveyed were motivated by “legal reasons.” The issue of gay marriage is therefore part of a broader agenda that involves far more than just mere tolerance. It is an agenda that strives for unconditional acceptance on the part of all who might harbor homophobia — the military, the Boy Scouts and churches that receive federal funds. It is an agenda that may very well end in the destruction of the traditional family and the dissolution of marriage as a meaningful institution in American society. These sexual revolutionaries have wrapped their case for gay marriage in the rhetoric of rights and responsi-
bilities. Andrew Sullivan is the foremost advocate of the “conservative” case for gay marriage, which focuses on responsibility. Sullivan argues that gay marriage merits the support of “those conservatives who deplore promiscuity among some homosexuals.” This claim, however, does not address the argument that the success of marriage depends in large part upon the ways in which the male and female genders complement each other. Again, the evidence favors the conservative case against gay marriage. According to a report released by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, male homosexual unions in Sweden are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages. The corresponding statistic for female same-sex marriages is 170 percent. The same pattern has repeated itself in Vermont: nearly 40 percent of the civil union homosexual couples have had a previous heterosexual marriage. Even if marriage did foster responsibility among homosexuals, that alone
An institution in jeopardy. would not justify extending marital rights to them, for responsibility is only one dimension of the web of social and personal connections embodied in marriage. In contrast to this distinctly libertarian perspective, social liberals have presented gay marriage as one of the constituent rights of citizenship. Yet complex social arrangements cannot always be reduced to simple legal formulas. The Goodridge decision in Massachusetts provides one possible legal approach — an application of the idea of equal protection of the laws. This phrase first appeared in the 14th Amendment as essentially a restatement of the basic concept of citizenship: equality before the law. The framers of the amendment merely intended to ensure that the fundamental rights of citizenship were applied to newly-free slaves in the South. Contemporary laws relating to marriage already satisfy the requirement of equal protection: Everyone has a right to marry someone else of the opposite sex. Thus, the issue of gay marriage revolves around the definition
of marriage — not the rights of citizenship. The argument of the liberals is therefore not with the law; it is with tradition, for the law merely recognizes a pre-existing social reality. The traditional definition of marriage is as follows: Marriage is the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of begetting and raising children. Marriages that do not have children still count as marriages because they retain the procreative potential. While liberals counter that the definition of marriage is constantly changing, this is not really true. The biblical concept of marriage has governed Western societies for millennia. And although the Romans and the Greeks experimented with forms of homosexuality, these relationships were never equivalent to marriage. The institution of the marriage has been the one social constant that has survived the fall of the Roman Empire, barbarian invasions, the disorder of feudalism and tumult of modern social and political revolutions. The family precedes the nation-state, democracy, rights and citizenship. It is the first institution of civil society and therefore something not to be trifled with. Until the left offers its own definition of marriage, social conservatives have secured the moral and intellectual high ground in the culture war. Even if radical liberals do formulate an alternative definition, the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate why their definition should prevail over centuries of tradition. As it now stands, the casual conception of marriage as a contract between two adults — suggested by the liberals and libertarians — is even more arbitrary than the current definition. It would not withstand further expansion of marriage. The cumulative effect would be to eventually define marriage out of existence. As marriage encompasses increasingly diverse sexual relationships, it depreciates in value and its appeal declines. Indeed, every time social norms regarding sexuality have been relaxed in the past century, the family has suffered. That is ultimately why gay marriage is so dangerous. Stephen Beale ’04 is a classics and history concentrator.