For whom the road tolls

This weekend, I received a surprise when my parents, lifelong Republicans, announced they were planning to vote for Ohio's Democratic candidate for governor, Ted Strickland. Why? Besides the fact that Republican candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell was generally too conservative for them -- as a friend once put it, he's a "God conservative," while my family and I are "economic conservatives" -- one big issue was playing on their minds. Blackwell wants to lease the Ohio Turnpike to a foreign consortium, Macquarie-Cintra. You Hoosiers might have heard of it.\nBack here in Indiana, a poll by WISH-TV (reported Monday by The Associated Press) showed that not only were respondents against Gov. Mitch Daniels' leasing out the Indiana Toll Road to the same consortium by a margin of 55 percent to 39 percent, but a plurality of Republicans opposed the measure, 50 percent to 46 percent. On Sunday, in response to another result from the poll -- the fact that 57 percent of interviewees regarded Daniels as a "fair" or "poor" governor -- Indiana GOP spokeswoman Jennifer Hallowell was quoted by the AP as saying: "Real leadership requires tough and sometimes unpopular decisions."\nThis is true in some circumstances. The great crises that threatened and continue to threaten our country's survival -- the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War and, I'd argue, the war on terror -- could not be met by a government that bases its decisions on the day-to-day whims of public opinion. And then there are those occasions when the government has upheld our basic political ideals in the face of hostile majorities -- as in 1957, when Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas' Little Rock Central High to enforce the desegregation of public schools. But, in the Daniels' case, let's make something perfectly clear: We're talking about a friggin' toll road!\nIf this came down to a key point of Republican ideological principle, I could understand the willingness to push ahead despite public opinion. But, first, this assumes the GOP is ideologically coherent, which it is not. (Neither are the Democrats.) And second, if we apply the stereotype that Republicans are champions of free-market economics, we find that this runs in opposition to the basic tenets of how a market economy works. Like schools and national defense, roads have been regarded as a public good that is necessary for facilitating commerce. Adam Smith himself wrote: "The tolls for the maintenance of a high road cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons." Thus, I am at a loss as to why this concept is being touted despite what could be a severe political cost.\nLeading up to this year's national elections, a Democratic theme has been the arrogance of Republican authorities in power. The idea that the Democrats represent a serious alternative to this is laughable, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. The strategy of "base-rallying" might discourage parties from reaching out across the aisle, but I can tell you one thing: If Republican officials aren't even listening to Republican voters, they're screwed.