Naunihal Singh noted in a Twitter today that Barack Obama uses a
University of Chicago behavioral economist, Austin Goolsbee, and I thought, wow, that runs against the Democratic
grain. This got me thinking that McCain enrages the Radio Right by refusing Republic orthodoxy.
In this way, these guys have
more in common with one another than they do with their respective
parties. In fact, I wonder if we could argue, at the limit, that there is a two party system but
it's no longer Democrat and Republican. It's now heterodoxy versus
orthodoxy. This would join McCain and Obama, distinguishing their new
"party" from the one that contains the likes of Romney and Clinton.
If the
world is a churning mass of possibility, surely the last person we want
in the White House is someone who votes, who thinks, party line.
Surely, the world is too complicated for that...and that politician.
This has to be one of the signatures of the good politician. Isn't there a prima facie case here?
References
Will, George. 2007. The Democrat Economists. The Washington Post. October 3, 2007. here.