Opinion: In today’s pages: presidential politics, medical marijuana, teen drinkers
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Interrupting your breakfast-table routine with sexual-orientation politics, the editorial board applauds the results of a new Zogby poll showing that more than 60% of registered voters would support an openly gay candidate:
Romantic as it may be, the notion that anyone can grow up to be president long has served as a metaphor for the openness and fairness of American society. It is thus remarkable, and reassuring, that nearly two-thirds of respondents in the poll expressed a willingness to discard one of the oldest and most pervasive prejudices when they enter the voting booth.
Admit it -- there was a time when you, too, dreamed of being president, only to come to the grim realization that the pay isn’t commensurate with the work.
The board also praises the guidelines that California Attorney General Jerry Brown recently released to help police distinguish legitimate dispensers of medical marijuana from criminals trying to take advantage of the state’s permissive policies. And as much as it likes Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe, it urges him not to try to lift the country’s constitutional limit on presidential terms.
On the op-ed side, columnist Tim Rutten notes how abortion and the Catholic Church’s stance regarding pro-life candidates are reasserting themselves in the conservative wing of the chattering class. (Hey, Tim, you missed one.) UC Riverside Professor Robert Nash Parker blasts the college presidents who’ve called for more flexibility on the legal drinking age. (He probably didn’t care much for our editorial on the topic, either.) (Take the poll!) Finally, NPR web guru Dick Meyer tries to drive a stake through the conventional wisdom that America is a cultural-war battleground. Wait, what about all those book sales? From Meyer’s perspective, the culture war story line is just that: a story.
Poll after poll, focus group after focus group show that the vast majority of Americans -- the Silent Majority, perhaps? -- are pragmatic, independent and un-partisan in their basic views. They are eclectic: ‘liberal’ on some matters, ‘conservative’ on others. They are not slaves to that hobgoblin of small minds, consistency.
Hmm. Sounds like ‘post partisanship.’ But maybe that’s just a story line, too.