Platform vs. Reality

I read this over at Tranterrestial Musings the other day —

I noticed that Rep. James Oberstar (he who would have us overregulate the fledgling space passenger business, perhaps fatally) will be taking over the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I wondered if he was planning to take another run at that, now that he’s in the majority, instead of minority.

Now that I have Internet access again, I see that Jeff Foust already indicates that he just might have such plans.

I figured it was typical fallout from the GOP loss in the midterm elections, but I found it interesting when juxtaposed with this story from the Wall Street Journal today —

In January last year, Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, spoke to a newspaper here and cleared up the mystery. He said that he had purchased land in Culberson and Hudspeth counties, 25 miles north of this tiny West Texas town east of El Paso. Mr. Bezos’s purpose: to build a launch pad for his fledgling commercial space venture, Blue Origin LLC, which will offer suborbital trips to space. Mr. Bezos is “clearly a man ahead of his time,” says Mr. Stasny.

When one reads of how so many technological titans support the Democratic Party and the MAL, one can help but experience at least a little bit of anticipatory shadenfruede.

In another sense, it’s another example of how the Democratic Party’s platform is inherently unstable, in that it sounds nice to those who don’t think deeply about it but is rather different once has been run over by it.