David McElroy

I’ll be honest and tell you that I couldn’t care less about auto racing. The idea of spending my time watching a bunch of cars go around a track — much less caring which car finished first — is beyond my comprehension. I’m sure other people feel that way about sports I love, but car racing seems bizarre to me.

It’s hard to consider it a sport when the biggest key to strategy is to go as fast as you can and keep turning left. (The Onion had my all-time favorite satire of NASCAR.)

But news from the world of NASCAR caught my attention Friday when there was buzz that five drivers had declined an invitation to the White House to meet with Barack Obama. (One of them later said he actually will be there.) Not only can I not understand why this is news, but I can’t understand why all the other people who receive similar invitations don’t do the same thing.

Somewhere along the way in this country, we’ve started acting as though the president is a big deal and should be treated like royalty. If the apparatus of government were limited to the powers it should have, a peacetime president would have nearly as much power and appeal as the general manager of your local water purification plant. We need to quit treating presidents as though they hold an office worthy of automatic respect.

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Lack of honesty in communication bugs me, but it’s also something I understand very well. As a longtime political consultant, I’ve been guilty of saying things to the public to push emotional buttons at times.

So I’m not sure whether to be disgusted or feel professional admiration for the public relations people at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who are responsible for morphing government bureaucrats into our “federal family.”

According to the Palm Beach Post, FEMA has pretty much banished the word “government” from its news releases. In its place, you’ll find talk of the “federal family,” as though they’re going to take us on vacation when school gets out.

It’s definitely creepy and kooky, but there’s nothing mysterious about it. They’re not the Addams Family. They’re just politicians twisting the meaning of words.

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A lot of people I know who say they love liberty still vote for Republicans and seem to have faith that doing so will bring about individual freedom. Given the abundant evidence that this isn’t true, I can’t figure out why they keep doing it.

I was closely associated with Republican candidates for all of my professional political career and for most of my life before that. So if I were going to identify with one of the mainstream parties — at least in culture and history — it would be the Republicans.

But I’ve learned that Republicans are very good at rhetoric about freedom — and I used to write some of that rhetoric — but not so good at delivering the goods. They talk about liberty (especially the economic kind) but when push comes to shove, they’re just as bad about setting up new rules to force people to act in ways they approve of. This is very obvious to anyone who’s paying attention, so why do so many of my fellow liberty-loving friends keep heading down the path where they’re going to be given condescending nods at election time, but ignored when actual day-t0-day laws and regulations are being written?

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