Leonard Gray / L’Observateur / June 3, 2000

As Barry Goldwater put it in 1964, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. For that, he was labeled a “kook” and virtually shut out of thepresidential election by Lyndon Johnson, who was still riding the coattails of the late JFK and preparing to plunge us headlong into Vietnam.

Nowadays, Goldwater is an “elder statesman,” which is what politicians become if they can stay out of prison long enough.

Extremism, though, is something which should still bother most people.

I’ve always been concerned about people complaining about some group’s political “agenda.” I’ve actually seen very few of these agendas and Iwonder if they really exist outside the imagination of their opponents.

The closest thing I’ve ever seen are the official platforms adopted by the national political party conventions, which are always hotly debated up to the last moment. Doesn’t sound like hard and fast principles to me – morelike political expediency.

Yet, in an election year especially, one will still hear people complaining about the “liberal agenda” or the “ultra-religious-right agenda” or the “gay agenda” or the “International Communist Conspiracy.” Why, recently,I heard someone label Bill Clinton as both a Nazi and a Communist, never mind that they’re extremist labels on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

I also heard a Republican congressman refer to a poll which indicated many New Yorker men feel Hillary Clinton reminds them of their first wives – like that’s somehow a bad thing. Guess he was referring to thenumber of politicians who dump first wives for so-called “trophy” wives in later years.

What continues to amaze me is the number of people who feel people are sitting on the political “fence,” like a person is totally on one side or totally on the other. In fact, a political philosophical spectrum could becompared to a football field. A few people are hanging around the endzones, some with armbands, but most are clustered around midfield.

Most people, I find, have some conservative viewpoints and some liberal viewpoints. One does not necessarily invalidate the other. A person can beboth an opponent of capital punishment and push for the right to bear arms. One could be a fiscal conservative who also supports a woman’sright to choose abortion. One can support gay rights and also be aRepublican.

In my checkered political experience, I started out as a registered Democrat. This was at a time when, if you voted in Louisiana, youpractically HAD to be a Democrat. This was never mind the fact that I waspretty much conservative at that stage in my life.

Then Richard Nixon happened and that spurred me away from conservatism until I flirted with working for Dave Treen and abruptly switched to being a registered Republican for awhile. For many years now, though, I’ve beena registered independent. I tell people I get to laugh at all sides.For I’m not altogether on “their” side, because I’ve found very few people on “my” side.

Leonard Gray is a reporter for L’Observateur

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