Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Connie Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.  She recently wrote a column explaining why she’s a liberal.  This is what I would say to her about her column:

Dear Ms. Schultz,
I usually don’t bother reading your columns, because I feel confident that I won’t agree with you anyway.  For this reason, and as strange as this might seem, I must thank you for writing with such clarity for so long that I feel I know where you’re coming from on just about everything. I’m not trying to be cute!  I really mean this as a compliment.

With this unusually interesting and important election nearly at hand, however, I saw the headline of your column and was persuaded to give it a go.  I’m glad I did.  I used to be called a liberal, but without changing my views one bit, I am now considered an extreme right-winger. This phenomenon has always fascinated me.

For this reason I was tempted to read your recent column explaining why you are a liberal.  It was thoughtful and thought-provoking.  I have a lot to say about is and hope you don’t mind my reproducing your words for clarity in explaining myself.

To say I'm proud to be a liberal is a little like saying I'm proud to have teeth.

Both are essential parts of who I am, but I tend to take them for granted.

It's not that I mindlessly trot through life without giving them a thought. Our teeth, after all, need daily tending and regular checkups, and so do our values. Neglect is corrosive. But they're also such a part of us that we count on them to work even when we're not thinking about them.

As the momentum of the presidential election surges, so do partisan attacks from both sides. Lately, my in box fills rapidly whenever I write about race or Sarah Palin, and attacks predictably take aim at my appearance and my politics. Occasionally, someone creatively combines the two by calling me a liberal who's long in the tooth.

Clever.

Now, no woman enjoys being insulted for the face God gave her, but I also understand that this sort of discourse comes with the territory. Sometimes, people are funny when they don't mean to be. Lately, the Birkenstock line keeps popping up - as in, "You probably wear Birkenstocks, too." Pretty silly. Have you ever worn a pair of those things? Lighter than air, folks.

Calling me a liberal, and thinking that's an insult, indicates a real misunderstanding of what makes my heart go pitter-pat. Every time someone says, "You're nothing but a liberal," I want to say, "Why, thank you."

Like so many Americans who came from less-than-idyllic beginnings, being a liberal is, for me, an act of gratitude for who and what made me possible. My whole life is a product of this country's faith and generosity.

Most people don’t continue drinking milk  from the same carton when it’s gone sour.  Nor do they continue to drink milk as adults, particularly if the beloved drink of their childhood wreaks havoc with their digestion and cholesterol.  To drink it anyway simply because they owe their strong bones to drinking it when they were children isn’t really a good reason, because it condemns them to poor health.  When the Democratic Party stopped being what had come to be called “liberal” and became more and more “leftist,” I felt, as many other Democrats did, that the Party had left me.   I owe everything to this wonderful country, but I owe nothing to the Democratic Party, which I served as I was serving my country for nearly a quarter century on Capitol Hill.  I was chief of staff to a member of the House who had the strongest labor union constituency of any district in the United States, and even as some of the union leaders in the 1980s saw how the Democratic Party was moving away from the principles that had attracted them to it in the first place, they would tell me that they would stick with the Party nevertheless, because it wasn’t right to “leave without the girl who brought’em to the dance.”

I am reminded of a conversation a few years ago with an editor who was increasingly frustrated with my topics and scolded me for failing to understand who I am.

"You are not the working class," he said, waving his finger at me. "You are an intellectual."

I shrugged and informed him that, if it's true that I'm an intellectual - and there are plenty who would make the contrary argument - then I'm an intellectual from the working class.

"We have smart people, too," I said.

The thing that divides so many Americans is not ability, but opportunity. And when it comes to big chances, no one has benefited more than people like me. 

Sure someone has:  Obama is the most obvious example.  I don’t mean to insult the junior senator from Illinois, for he certainly has the gift of “presentation”; he would be fine reading news on Channel 3.  But, honestly, I have never seen a guy with less talent become the standard-bearer for a major American political party.  Just as the Swastika on Charles Manson’s forehead warns that his statements should be taken with a grain of salt, everything Sen. Obama has done in his past tells us the same thing.  In fact, I have never seen a candidate advertise so clearly before election day that he will be even worse than Jimmy Carter. 

You wrote, “The thing that divides so many Americans is not ability, but opportunity.” Well.  That is not to say that we have more ability than opportunity, is it?  After all, there seems to be a lot more incompetence at the top these days.  I would say in Congress and in the news media.  You would say in the White House.  Such complaints tend to prove there’s more opportunity than ability.  It is still an axiom that there’s plenty of room at the top.  And a visit to McDonald’s seems to indicate there’s plenty of room at the bottom as well. Affirmative action created opportunities for people without ability.   You might bridle at that remark, for I acknowledge the purpose of affirmative action was to create opportunity for people with ability who had no opportunity because of adverse prejudice, but the success of Obama indicates we no longer need affirmative action for Americans of African descent, and the success of millions of women shows we no longer need affirmative action for females.  Continuing with the liberal agenda in that case promotes reverse discrimination.  As an outspoken so-called feminist, you might think that’s a good thing, and if you do, then that’s enough reason for you to continue to support the affirmative action policy that many people think has outlived its usefulness. 

We were launched from the blue-collar world with little help beyond big dreams, low-interest college loans and a family legacy of wearing out someone else's low expectations. For so many of us, that was help enough.

Gloria Steinem was right: The personal is political. I can list all kinds of reasons for embracing the liberal agenda, starting with the civil rights movement. But if I am honest, I have to admit that my political values began at the cradle, and you can't get more personal than that. 

Of course your political values began at the cradle.  When I was in college with the two mediocrities  who would become President Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich and President Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, our political-science texts detailed how children usually affiliate by default with the political party preferred by their mothers.  But my political philosophy was somehow fixed by age six, and I have kept it as the parties have realigned through the years.  My grandfather worked as an upholsterer for GM in Detroit, and we wasted a lot of money over the years driving lousy GM cars in the name of loyalty.  We were loyal to GM with our hard work and hard-earned money, but GM wasn’t loyal to us because, despite good-quality work by my grandfather and others on the assembly line, they still could not turn out a car that would get us from point A to point B without stranding us by the side of the road too often to count. 

A little tolerance is good.  Too much is a disaster.  Tolerance by definition means allowing bad things to exist.  Taking medicine is the proper dosage is good.  Overdosing is bad, because our bodies don’t have unlimited tolerance for poisons.  The liberal agenda was a good thing, but some of us didn’t know when to quit, and we became slaves to detrimental intellectual addictions.

Is it possible for us to be so loyal to the United States that we would fight for her even though she is wrong?  Yes it is.  But the default position of the liberal agenda today is that the United States is assumed to be wrong from the get go.  That’s not only wrong, it’s suicidal.

This is the problem with big-government liberals.  All the people I knew in Washington were doing their jobs with pride, sincerely thinking that they were doing the country good.  They also, quite naturally, thought they were in a position to “know better” than the average man on the street.  But the end result of all this is that the well-intended effort to serve our needs does more harm than good in the vast majority of cases because that is the nature of large centralized institutions.

The civil rights movement began with the anti-slavery roots of the Republican Party.   People forget that Dr. King was a Republican.  The Democrats were the party of segregation.  Parties do change, not to say that the Republicans are the party of slavery, as you might secretly wish to allege in your more puckish moods, but that no one would call Democrats the party of slavery.  Well, as least as black slavery goes, although I guess the case could be made that the liberal agenda did more to destroy black families and strengthen the status of Americans of African descent as members of a permanent underclass.  This made them slaves to government tyranny.

Comes now the first affirmative-action candidate, for nothing in Senator Obama’s background even suggests that he wasn’t gaming the system all along.  By identifying with his father’s side he’s able to play the race card and boost himself beyond what even the Peter Principle would allow.  I don’t agree with many of your views, Ms. Schultz, but I would feel more comfortable voting for you for president than for Senator Obama.  I care not what color the Senator is; culture is more important than color.  If I say he has no accomplishments, I’m called a racist.  No one who supports Senator Obama has been able to articulate any cogent statement why he should be president, other than “He’s not George Bush.”  Unfortunately, that’s good enough for some people and is one of the three reasons Obama shows so well in the polls, the other two being racism (with the respondents afraid of being called racists) and shallowness (with the respondents somehow not being able to distinguish between the Democrat and the Republican except by superficial stylistic clues).

I am a liberal because my father's union wages and benefits kept his family out of poverty and me in health care after I was diagnosed with severe asthma.

If your father had had the same wages and benefits without being a member of a union, as is much more possible today, would you still be a liberal?

I am a liberal because Medicare kept my grandmother alive long after she was diagnosed with a disease that eventually would kill her.

One of the reasons I’m a conservative is my experience with Medicare, which has kept my mother alive after she was diagnosed with diseases that eventually would kill her “within six months” ten years ago. She’s not dead yet, and Medicare no longer pays for some of the care she needs. And the paperwork is a nightmare.  It boosts the cost of care Medicare will not pay for by a factor of three.  If you think I’m not grateful for having my mother around because the paperwork is a hassle, you would be wrong, but at the moment I just don’t know how to explain things in a way that doesn’t make me look like a jerk.  Besides, like many of your liberal colleagues, my mother is still voting for the Democratic ticket because of FDR.   This year she wanted to vote for John Edwards because he was the “handsomest” of the candidates.

I am a liberal because of laws that insist that women like me get equal pay for a job equally well done.

Those same laws have me sitting at home writing this letter because there are too many women who will work for less than men.  Heck, apparently I was fired from the last job I had on Capitol Hill so that my boss could eventually hire his mistress!  There are some things that even a lawyer won’t do.  Besides, why hire a man when you can hire a woman for less and avoid the lawsuits?  I happen to have seen how the market does a better job of allocating resources and value than any bureaucrat, but the liberal agenda does not stop with equal pay for equal work.  If a lady plumber comes to my house tomorrow to install my new faucet, I’ll gladly pay her the $500 I’d pay a male plumber (to the extent that one can be “glad” to pay $500 to have a faucet installed in the first place).  But the liberal agenda, as you called it, goes beyond equal pay for equal work to the concept of equal pay for comparable work.  That would suppress self-regulating market forces and impose through bureaucratic fiat the same pay for opinion columnists and over-the-road truckers, say.  Or perhaps for senators and opinion columnists.  That might help you out at home.  I just think that’s silly at best and damaging to the economy at worst.

How can I turn my back on all of that? It just wouldn't be right to finally reach my little patch of the mountaintop and then immediately surround myself with a wall to keep everyone else out. I got mine, you folks are on your own, just doesn't cut it where I come from.

Who among conservatives says anything so shallow? You would not be turning your back on any of that, in my view.  The liberal principles of JFK, for example, are no longer embraced by the Democratic Party.  The Party platform would move us toward the European-style socialism.  There’s no persuasive evidence anywhere that socialism would be a good thing for the United States.  At least I haven’t seen any, and it’s not for lack of looking.  (I do try to be fair and keep an open mind.)

By the way, the people who make rude personal attacks on you are not necessarily conservatives, just jerks.  I remember when you were a guest on Whad'Ya Know? and host Michael Feldman told all of us out here in radioland how cute (“hot”?) you were.  Your readers should be civil in their discourse, of course.  I cringed and seethed with anger, though, when on national radio you took it upon yourself to apologize to the American people for the people of Ohio, who voted stupidly to give the nation George Bush in 2004.  In a similar vein, I must tell you that I cannot vote for Senator Obama after he went to Germany to make a campaign speech in which he apologized to the German people for America.  That was traitorous. If anyone should be apologizing, it should be the Germans to us and to the rest of the world.  Maybe they’ve apologized enough by now, but we should not have to apologize for Europeans’ wanting our soldiers to die first for whatever liberty they still permit themselves.

Besides, I love this country. How can I do this for a living and not love America? I'm full of opinions and I'm paid to publicize them, and I don't spend a second worrying that the government will throw me into prison for doing so. In this country, you can say what you want and live to tell the tale. What a liberal notion.

You are right about that.  In no other country is that possible.  That’s why I’m skeptical of any attempt to incrementally un-tether the country from her founding principles and remake her in the image of other countries with their confiscatory taxation feeding oppressively large government bureaucracies.
 

So, if I think about it, I'd have to say that, yes, I'm proud to be a liberal.

I’m not convinced.

The teeth are good, too.

Don’t forget to floss.  The Obama administration might try to make it a federal offense not to, particularly if the taxpayers will be paying for your dental care.