Once when I had been brought up short by lurid graffiti freshly scratched on a new bathhouse on Cape Hatteras, an old, sand-blasted woman came up behind me, looked for a minute, shook her head and sighed, “How kin people be so mean?”

As Congress cut food stamps and debated extending unemployment insurance, I found myself shaking my head, repeating that mantra.

Did every last one of those heartless, shrugging, ditto-fountainheads read Ayn Rand?  Did no one read Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree to them as children?  Is it too much to hope that a less mean book might become the formative meta-text for the next generation’s ideology?

I admit I have never read a smidgen of the Harry Potter books. I would have been a hopeless Muggle in the Hogwarts School. But the Potter oeuvre must have more heart than any Paul-Ryan-Ayn-Rand-Paul combo.

Other than the Bible, which has been covered, what books would you suggest to would-be politicos for a more compassionate ideology?

Kate Clinton is a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. With a career spanning almost thirty years, Kate Clinton has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and eight presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime, scoundrel time and economic down times. Visit her at www.KateClinton.com