Bio
I was born in Ohio in 1953. We moved around because my parents did not get along. We kids spent one year in an institutional home near Pittsburgh. My dad took us to Oregon when I was in high school, accepting a job offer there to get me away from the drug culture and radical politics found in the Cleveland area. Despite my uneven high school record, I was accepted at Portland State in Oregon, later transferring to Columbia University in NYC from on the advice of a professor. Politics were nauseating at the time, '74, and I was undergoing a radical shift in my political orientation. I worked in a freight forwarder's office, then in a college library and studied Art History in New York. There, at age twenty, I married my boyfriend from Ohio. He left New York after a year back to Ohio and was caught by God while there. Eventually, so was I, caught by God. The encounter was so transforming that I left college with my degree uncompleted. We moved to a small town in Ohio, raised and home schooled five sons and a daughter.
I made good use of my local library and later found that what I was is known by the term "autodidact". Raising children allowed leisure for reading and my tastes in that were eclectic, but tended to history, often through biography, and literature. Twenty-five years after leaving New York, I went back to C.U. and finished my degree over a summer. I taught high school for three years, also homeschooling my dyslexic youngest for two of those years. Currently, I teach Freshman Composition as adjunct faculty at Lakeland Community College in Willoughby, Ohio. This is much easier than either high school or home schooling; I am finding my way into the working world. I also pleasurably pursue a master's degree in American History and Government at Ashland University through their summer program.
By no right nor reason have I an excuse for writing about or even thinking in any serious way about politics and world events. I always have, since I was a girl. Happily, this is America and I may.
Comments
A few responses to a great post
I wonder about the comparability of congressional and presidential approval ratings. Historically, the former are pretty stable and generally low, residing in the 20s to 40s (even after 9/11, barely hitting 50, according to this graph), while presidential ratings are more mercurial. And that seems to track my intuition: people are more informed about what the President is doing (although that's not saying much), and typically have negative associations with Congress.
As far as foreign policy: I think things really are as bad as they poll. Our foreign policy is pretty rudderless right now. While the President has taken bold actions, he hasn't left a map (or used one, as far as I can tell). His foreign policy looks very ad hoc, reacting to the most recent problem, rather than being principled such that those principles tell us what we're doing and why, and what our next step is (he has articulated many principles, of course, but none of them are usable. They're all constrained to the particular situation of Iraq. To wit: we're not going to use pre-emption on any other country. We're just not going to, and I seriously doubt it was ever intended for any other situation)
Re: the economy: the broad measures look good, but they're all aggregate figures, and it's cold comfort to someone in a precarious economic position that, overall, her losses are being "balanced out" by massive gains by other people or other classes. Economic data useful for getting a feel for people on the ground will have to articulate those differences, rather than net them all out in an undifferentiated "state of the economy."
My intuition is that the econ precariousness that many seem to feel (that's AFAIK and IIRC, mind you) may just be a new structural feature of our more globalized and competitive international economy. I think that'll be the ground of future economic policy making, rather than a specter of what may be.
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