White Stripes – "The Hardest Button to Button" (2003)

I had opinions that didn’t matter

I had a brain that felt like pancake batter

Last month, I wrote about David Trone, the billionaire who set a record ten years ago for the most money ever spent in an unsuccessful primary election campaign for Congress.  This year, Trone shattered his previous record by spending almost twice as much in another losing effort to win his party’s nomination for a Congressional seat.

The line I used on social media as a tease for that post was “When will he ever learn?” – which some of you will recognize as a paraphrase of the refrain to the famous anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Perhaps that tease should have read “When will 2 or 3 lines learn?”  Because every time I write about politics, I end up wishing that I hadn’t.

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I didn’t write about Trone’s expensive defeats with politics in mind.  I didn’t discuss his political views in my post – they were irrelevant.  (Trone is a Democrat, but I would have written exactly the same piece had he been a Republican.)   

Big spender David Trone

I wrote about him because I suspect that a lot of politicians run for office primarily to satisfy their oversized egos – not only do they think they know better than you and I, but they also love the attention and the perks and the ass-kissing that elected officials get.  

I admit that I took some satisfaction from the fact that a filthy rich guy like Trone had spent a gazillion dollars running for Congress and failed.  And I figured that some of my readers might have the same reaction.  

The post was something of a cheap shot.  If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I was motivated to some degree by envy.  (Do I wish I was a billionaire like Trone?  YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS I DO!)  But it wasn’t like I was picking on someone who wasn’t my own size – Trone couldn’t care less about what 2 or 3 lines has to say about him.)

After I was finished talking about Trone, I went on to present the rather staggering numbers for total campaign spending in recent elections.  I found those numbers of interest because I’m old enough to remember when it was taken for granted that Republicans would outspend Democrats.  But it’s the Democrats who have the edge in campaign money – and it’s been that way for some time now. 

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Not writing about politics on 2 or 3 lines doesn’t mean I don’t care about politics.  I spend a fair amount of time reading and thinking about political issues, and I enjoy discussing politics with others – even if they don’t agree with my opinions.  

Talking politics with someone who agrees with all of your beliefs isn’t very satisfying – it’s nice to have someone tell you that you’re right and that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong, but you don’t learn anything from such a discussion.  

But you very well may learn something from a friendly debate with someone who doesn’t share your opinions.  At the least, the give-and-take of such an exchange forces you to articulate and defend those beliefs.  (Maybe you walk away from that discussion even more convinced that you are right – but maybe you realize that there are some holes in your arguments, and you adjust your views accordingly.)

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to have a friendly debate any more.  People no longer are able to agree to disagree on political issues.  When you have a different point of view from other people, they demonize you.  

If you and I have different opinions about a movie, or we like different kinds of music, we can still be friends – but if we voted for different Presidential candidates, your reaction is more likely to be “He’s an evil piece of sh*t!”

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It would be easy to attribute this sorry state of affairs to Donald Trump’s rise to prominence as a national political figure a decade ago.  People either love him or they hate him – very few are neutral on the man – and you can’t attribute the diametrically opposed feelings of the lovers and the haters to differences of opinion over whether we should raise taxes on the wealthy, or whether enforcement of our immigration laws should be more stringent, or what bathrooms transgender people should use. 

You might be familiar with the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which is used pejoratively by President Trump and his supporters to dismiss his opponents as irrational and unhinged.  But you may not know that the use of that pseudo-psychiatric phrase to describe those who have a visceral revulsion to a political figure predates Trump.  

The late Charles Krauthammer was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist.  In 2003, he coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to explain what he viewed as the hysterically negative reaction of some people to George W. Bush’s presidency – a reaction that transcended legitimate policy disagreements and spilled over into something that was pathological.  

Conservative David Horowitz later applied the term to Bush’s successor.  “Obama Derangement Syndrome” was the term he applied to what he viewed as the over-the-top comparisons of Obama to Stalin, David Koresh, Charles Manson, and Saddam Hussein.  He urged his fellow conservatives not to duplicate the “manias” of those on the left with regard to Bush.  “[Obama] is not exactly the anti-Christ,” Horowitz wrote, “although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.”

There are a lot of people who have “Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome” or “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Derangement Syndrome” as well.  God knows that there plenty of good reasons to take the position that neither one of them should be President, but it sure would be nice if the people who felt that way didn’t go postal every time their names came up.

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Given how many people have lost their cotton-pickin’ minds when it comes to politics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to receive some pretty unhinged comments on my Trone post.

One commenter somehow read my post as being pro-Trump.  God only knows where he got that interpretation from, but it certainly wasn’t from anything that I wrote.  (Perhaps he suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”?)

Another commenter couldn’t handle the truth about campaign expenditures.  Sorry, folks – but the facts are the facts.  (My numbers came from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan organization that aggregates and processes raw data directly from official government data and is widely considered to be a highly reliable source for tracking money in U.S. politics.)

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“The Hardest Button to Button” was released in 2003 on Elephant, the White Stripes’ fourth studio album.

The amazing music video for the song was directed by Michel Gondry, who is best known as the director of the 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Click here to watch it.

That music video was brilliantly parodied in a 2006 episode of The Simpsons.  Click here to watch that parody.

Click here to buy “The Hardest Button to Button” from Amazon.