In this video, Anderson Cooper addresses Obama's change of opinion on gay marriage. According to the clip, when Obama was running for a state senate election in Chicago, he indicated to his voters that he supported gay marriage. Years later when running for U.S. Senate, Obama announced that he was against gay marriage. Cooper asks his two guests on the show whether they think that this change of opinion was brought about by political motives, and both give answers that sound as if they were taken from a page from Buchanan and Tullock's piece on the median voter theorem. The first guest (6:04) notes that Obama was working with two different collections of voters: first, Chicago, which is a city that is "very progressive," and later, all of Illinois, which includes a wider and less overall progressive collection of opinions. The first guest explains that once Obama realized this shift in voter pools, he strategically announced his change of opinion of gay marriage. The second guest (7:05) agrees that Obama's declaration of his disapproval of gay marriage was a strategic one, but doubts that Obama used good strategy. The second guest thinks that Obama is misinterpreting the distribution of voters. According to the second guest, Americans are becoming more accepting of gay marriage than Obama has realized, and Obama is thus "falling behind the curve." This language used by both guests indicates that they think that Obama is considering the distributions of his voters and reacting to them in a strategic way.
The ideas of the second guest make me wonder if there can be a possible justification of political flip-flopping. In class, we hesitated to say (and some of us refused to say) that it is morally acceptable for a candidate to say that he supports Policy X when he sees that most of his voters support Policy X, and then immediately support policy ~X as soon as he wins the election. However, what if the distribution of voters during the election shows that most people support Policy X, then a gradual shift in general opinion shows that most people support Policy ~x a few years into the winning candidate's term? If the distribution of attitudes of voters can in fact change as drastically as Cooper's second guest seems to think, maybe it is justifiable for a candidate to change his opinions along with those of his people, or maybe not. The question then becomes: is it more important for a candidate to stand by his original opinion of the constitutionality of a certain issue, or for a candidate to match and serve the changing preferences of the people?
No comments:
Post a Comment