See No Evil

[Laughs] Well, not always. Politics is always a matter of choice.

What about the Democrats, though, they lean more toward the social welfare side of things, bigger government, with a few notable exceptions.

Well, you have to be careful about that too because the biggest spenders in the last 20 years have been Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, compared to Bill Clinton. But it's a matter of priorities. Is it going to be education and health care or is it going to be tax cuts for the rich and the military?

What do those two sets of priorities say about their political psychologies?

[Psychologist] Sylvan Tompkins speculated that when people move into adulthood, they are attracted to political ideologies whose emotional basis is consistent with the emotional script that they grew up with. That's a really general process, and you can see that in terms of the religions that people are attracted to as well as the political ideology--you know in Christianity, people will find in the Bible teachings that resonate with their particular emotional experience. Is it hellfire and damnation or is it the uplifting qualities that Jesus talked about? The attitudes that we found associated with these childhood punishment experiences were attitudes with a large symbolic component of power and toughness and retribution. You see that in Inhofe, who's talking about "Hey, these guys are guys with blood on their hands; they're not in there for traffic violations"--of course disregarding the Red Cross report that 70 to 90 percent of the people were picked up by mistake.

What does Bush's upbringing and conservativism tell you about the way he sees the world?