...the weapon of choice

The two main threads of this blog don't intersect all that often, but it's fun when they do. Watching a recent Daily Show clip, I was treated to a host of Fox News personalities telling me about how liberals want to give Washington more power, to nationalize the banks, to take away your freedoms, and so forth. And it got me thinking about Scott Podsednik. I will explain this.

Scott Podsednik is a lousy MLB player. His career OPS+ is 88 (it's like IQ, "average" is 100), his defense is iffy, and he's been pretty injury-prone for the last few years. Needless to say, he's currently employed by the Kansas City Royals. His strengths are as follows: he plays hard, he steals bases (though not at an impressively high rate, and not as many as he could if he would, like, draw a walk once in a while), and he puts the ball in play, whether by swinging at the first pitch or sac bunting his teammates over to second. None of this is useful enough to outweigh his comically low OBP, nor his complete inability to hit for power. But it is, I will freely admit, fun to watch.
Sac bunts are exciting. Hit-and-runs are exciting. Shit, I'm a Sox fan, I watched Jacoby Ellsbury steal home once. And it was awesome. But it was also really fucking stupid. The point of baseball, after all, is pretty simple. Score more runs than the other guy, and you go home happy. Anything that helps you score more runs is good. Turns out, when you run the numbers, that the best way to do that is to have a bunch of players who walk a lot and hit for power. It's not as exciting, I'll admit, as the old "swing at everything and steal any base not nailed down" method, but it works pretty well.
So when sabermetricians go after Ozzie Guillen for bunting all the time, or the Royals for signing players who can steal every base but first, it's not because they hate the little stuff, or don't have any interest in exciting baseball. It's because they want their teams to win, and they understand that drawing walks is more conducive to winning than not drawing walks.

And here's where the politics angle comes in. Fox News was declaring that liberals want to expand government power, as though it were just for kicks, an end unto itself. And it's not true. While I will admit that my heart goes all aflutter anytime I hear that OSHA has written a new regulation, or that corporate tax rates went up by .1%, the main reason that I support government intervention or expanded powers is that it works. I live in a commonwealth, and I expect the government of that commonwealth to do whatever it can to improve the lives of its citizens. If the facts showed that minimal government involvement was the best way to do that, then that's fantastic. But they don't.
Liberals want to expand the role of government in American life when said expansion makes Americans' lives better. Thus, more oversight of coal mine safety: good. Subsidies to help poor people buy health insurance: good. Executive authority to assassinate American citizens by fiat: bad. See how simple this is?

I seem to recall reading in stories that the ability to figure out what works and then do that was one to be admired. It even seemed to correlate with the term "can-do American spirit" a lot. Someone will have to explain to me someday why this skill applies to neither America's government nor its national pastime.

When everything's gone wrong somehow...

I've had a little while now to process that the guy with the truck is about to be the junior senator from Massachusetts, but I've been preparing myself for it for about two weeks. Mostly with scotch. So let's start where we must, and then go on to the "what now?"

Martha Coakley, her campaign staff, the Massachusetts Dems, the national party... they're all to blame for basically the worst campaign I have ever seen in my life. And I voted for Shannon O'Brien in 2002, which should give you a good idea of my threshold there. To decide (as one friend put it) "Hmmm... we're running an establishment Democrat in an era of economic turmoil. I know! Let's run as though the election were merely a formality! After all, it worked for President Hillary Clinton..." is bad enough. To then double down upon that stupidity by delaying debates, mocking the very idea of old-style hustings, and (GODDAMN it I can't believe this matters but it does) implying that one of the most beloved sports figures in the state roots for the Yankees? The English language fails me in attempting to describe the awfulness. If ever a candidate deserved to lose, and lose humiliatingly, it was our otherwise competent AG.
Of course, here's where we come to one of the best phrases Molly Ivins (and man, oh man, could we use her around these days) ever used. There's an old leftist concept of heightening contradictions. The idea, basically, is to let the center-left parties swing, and let the rightists run things for a while, and everyone will see how awful it is and come running to the left. Political problems aside, Ivins's response was always to imagine the mother of a soldier, or an uninsured cancer victim, saying "not with my child's life." Because the problem with giving up on the "left-wing" of the two legit parties is that the right-wing one gets to be in charge, and they will get people killed. Martha Coakley deserved to lose. But that does not mean that we all deserved to suffer the consequences of her failure.

So what will those consequences be? Well, that seems as good a series as any to actually get this blog on a roll. I'll cover a bunch of aspects of the fallout over the next week or two, and with any luck it'll be enough of an impetus to really make me a blogger.

The Telling Anecdote

A big thing in political reporting is what's known as the "telling anecdote." This is basically a form of politics-as-fractals, the idea of a single moment or story that perfectly encapsulates a given candidate or issue. Mike Dukakis in the tank, George Allen's "macaca" slip, these are both decent examples. John Kerry's "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" is even a better one. The best one I can think of is the Bush Administration's (man, I'm glad they're gone...) response to Katrina. Incompetence, arrogance, willful unpreparedness, and callous disregard for the damage caused to real people by bad policy, all wrapped up in a flooded American city? The perfect shorthand for 8 years of Dubya. (I'll cover McCain's in tomorrow's election remembrance.)

Anyway, there was a lovely one today from Orrin Hatch, longtime holder of the coveted "Most Hypocritical Member of the Senate" crown. He was giving an interview to a conservative news service, and in talking about healthcare, he voiced his fears that the passage of a reform bill could destroy the two-party system. Since the Dems are pushing for socialized medicine (I pause here for a wistful "oh, if only..."), then once we've got it, "...almost everybody's going to say all we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party." This, he implied, was the major rationale behind healthcare reform.
Now, a couple things. Firstly, even if the Dems were inclined to go for the "if you don't vote for us, your children will die of easily curable diseases" route, the moment they got healthcare reform passed, they'd promptly start tripping over their own feet, because such are the Democrats. Secondly (this deserves a line break)...

...I'm not sure it's ever occurred to Orrin Hatch that there might be non-electoral reasons to support healthcare reform. Are there political points to be scored by giving people cheap healthcare? Sure, of course. I'm not sure the Democratic Party is smart enough to capitalize upon such a thing, but it's foolish to suggest that there's no possible political motive involved. However, the US spends a sixth(!) of its GDP on healthcare, and we have 50 million people uninsured or underinsured. Americans who do have insurance regularly lose it for such horrifying offenses as changing jobs or going to a dermatologist five years prior to developing cancer. The status quo is horrifying, and one of the basic tasks of government is to solve problems such as this.
But I don't think Orrin knows that. I'm not sure he can wrap his head around the idea of doing something because it's a necessary and worthwhile policy decision, rather than an electoral winner. The only reason that Democrats and progressives could possibly want to provide cheaper health insurance is to bribe low-income voters, thus gaining their votes in a sinister plot to win legislative majorities that will pass mandatory gay-marriage laws.

So why is this a telling anecdote? Because it reveals a party in its basic philosophy. The Republican Party, when it looks at legislation or policymaking, doesn't see the forging of a social contract and the building of a commonwealth. It sees patronage and electioneering.

Have the Democrats Learned Branding?

While granting credit to the GOP in anything grates a bit, one area in which they've always handed the Dems their asses has been bumper-sticker sloganeering. It's not exactly an important skill in governance, but when it comes to campaigning, it's a hell of an advantage. It's better for advertising (bumper stickers and pins, of course, but also 30-second TV spots), it's better for getting media coverage (anything more than five words, and reporters' eyes start to glaze over), and it plays into one of their key lines of attack against the Democrats. The overly wordy, wonkish egghead liberal is one of the old standbys of Republican campaigns, and we don't exactly do a wonderful job of ducking it. And, America being what it is, in a contest between the nerd and the regular dude, the nerd's not going to win too many rounds.

So how do we deal? Well, we could go the Republican route, and base our entire platform on a small set of reactionary concepts which run no more than three syllables apiece ("guns good," "taxes bad," "gays icky," etc.) Or, we could just sell our actual ideas more simply. Not that this is easy. There's only so much to be done as far as explaining the intricacies of healthcare reform. But finding a way to sum up shouldn't be hard. I think this is one realm in which Obama's years as a professor come in handy. Summing up complex ideas and helping others understand them is pretty basic to the teaching profession, and the best teachers do this amazingly well.
It seems like the Dems may be getting the memo on this one. There's evidently talk in the House of rebranding the public option as "Medicare Part E" ("E for Everyone," puke, but cheesy can occasionally work out). This is exactly the sort of simplification that can work. It's not dumbing anything down, it's not assuming the electorate is too busy or too stupid to listen to a three-minute explanation, it's just a shorthand. Everyone has some idea of what Medicare is, they know it's government-run (well, most of them do, anyway), they know it's cheap, and they know it's reliable. Most of us know at least one person who's on Medicare, and can ask them what they think of it. And most importantly, it's exactly like the ideal public option, a government-provided, easily-accessed form of health insurance. Toss in the fact that Medicare is overwhelmingly popular, so much so in fact that defending it has been cited by Republicans as a rationale for opposing the reform effort, and you've got a hell of a way to sell a public option.

As for broader campaign slogans, the President brought one out over the weekend that I'm hoping shows up on a million bumpers and lapels all through 2010. Giving a speech at a Dem fundraiser, he praised the concept of a strong, loyal opposition, but pointed out that we don't really have that, we just have a heckling section. Or, as he put it: "...when, you know, I'm busy and Nancy [Pelosi]'s busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else's mess, we don't want somebody sitting back saying, 'You're not holding the mop the right way.' Why don't you grab a mop?" "Grab a mop" is a hell of a slogan. Three words (ah!) and it's quietly devastating. It doesn't say to anyone, "Hey, you're idiots for voting GOP," it doesn't start a long debate, and it only hints at the fact that the mess is their fault. It just thumps them for being useless.
The GOP's been branding itself as the "party of ideas" for a few decades now, but it's spent a good half-century or more as the party of hard work and good old American can-do pull-yourself-up spirit. Even more importantly, they've gotten a great deal of mileage out of portraying Democrats and their social welfare programs as just being designed to help people who are lazy, drugged-up, or otherwise undeserving. If the Dems can turn this around a bit, make themselves over as the party that's working hard to fix the country while the GOP just sits in Washington flinging mud, they can do score some serious points. Here's hoping we see a lot more mops at rallies and campaign stops over the coming year.

You can't avoid it, might as well enjoy it...

The ballgame's been over for an hour or so (Red Sox win, 6-1, on Jon Lester's 7 strong and Victor Martinez's ongoing and much-appreciated campaign for a contract extension), and so my local brewhouse has the CBS Evening News on while they try to find the next sporting event to put up on the plasmas. Of course, as I said to my friendly bartender upon signing my bill, keeping the news on all night would be a hell of a way to boost sales.

It was, though, an enlightening reminder of why I don't bother with the network news anymore (beyond having a funky work/class schedule that doesn't really allow it). Giant headlines, of the "GROWING CONTROVERSY!!!" variety, all having to do with the president's highly questionable decision to videotape a speech for broadcast to schoolchildren. The lone non-pundit they speak to on the subject? A dude in a diner somewhere in Florida, wearing an "Operation Iraqi Freedom" t-shirt (odds that this fellow has actually been within 4,000 miles of Iraq: 1 in eleventy billion), declaiming that he's worried, because he doesn't want his kid "becoming a little community organizer."

Three things in response to this.

1.) Why the fuck not? In the wide realm of careers open to your child, "person who goes to low-income communities and urges them to take advantage of the democratic process" is hardly the worst. Off the top of my head, I can think of seven or eight hundred that are probably less appealing or morally defensible. I know, I know, Rudy 9/11 had that brilliant little quip at last year's RNC, and what wondrous political rhetoric it was, but all the same, can't we agree that actively fearing that your child will grow up to have an interest in the well-being of others is the slightest bit worrisome?

2.) The President of the United States has taped a speech about the importance of education, which can be shown to students in America's public schools. Let me clarify this a bit further. The President of the United States, who earned his high public office by working his ass off through high school, Columbia University, and Harvard Law, with no legacy or inheritance to fall back upon, is taking time out from jumpstarting the economy, managing two wars, and running the federal government to tell children that it's important to stay in school and commit to their education. And people are freaking out.
To listen to right-wing rhetoric on this, you'd think the man was encouraging these children to slaughter their parents, have sex on the broken corpses, abort the fetuses that result from said sex, and then sign up for the Marxist Homo-Muslim Ganja Brigades, all before using their ACORN contacts to vote sixty times apiece in the 2012 election. (Which I almost wish he were, because it'd be an actual fucking platform, but we'll get to that in the next point.)

3.) What has the White House response been to this? Since it's education-based, let's do this SAT-style:

Which of the following has been the overarching message from the White House regarding the "controversy" over President Obama's speech to schoolchildren?

A. "Dammit, you caught us. We totally were planning to brainwash your kids. We had the whole thing planned out, right down to the swirly background and the Pink Floyd soundtrack. And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling wingnuts."
B. "Are y'all out of your fucking minds? The President wants to tell kids to stay in school, and in your special little heads, that translates as Stalinist mind-control? Go sit in the corner. No, I'm serious, go sit in the corner until you're ready to act like grown-ups."
C. "Clearly we didn't imagine that there would be any controversy over this message, but we want to make sure that everyone knows that watching the speech is entirely voluntary, and that there will be no messages of a political nature in the speech."

If you didn't know it was C, you've been asleep since November.

Um. Puke.

The Washington Post op-ed page is the high temple of the Village's cult of Broderist centrism, whose members subscribe to the following commandments:

1. Thou shalt never question the motives of White House sources.
2. All who question the wisdom of preventive war are "unserious."
3. Democrats are the source of all partisanship.

With that in mind, behold these lovely nuggets of awful from some of their prime players.

Anne Applebaum asks on Slate, "Will foreigners accept a black American president?" Not that she's concerned about having a black guy be her president, of course. How awful of anyone to suggest such a thing. She's merely concerned that our allies, who aren't nearly so enlightened (last week, she saw a black man walking down the street at night, and didn't summon the police or anything!) might not take him seriously. Sure, he's chief executive of the United States of America, able to summon a dozen aircraft carriers and a flight of Minuteman missiles down on anyone who annoys him, but what would really be important is that he's all swarthy and such.

Robert Samuelson worries that Obama won't be able to govern, since he's just another doctrinaire liberal who hates free trade, profitability, and presumably puppies. Not like that proud centrist John McCain, who voted against his own party 17% of the time, according to (insert eye-roll) The Politico. Wow, 17%! He's a maverick. He doesn't play your partisan games. He stood on principle once, maybe even twice, when the political winds were solidly at his back.

Speaking of McCain, I saved the best for last. As part of their proud centrist heritage, WaPo hired Michael Gerson a few years back. Gerson is qualified to have a national column by his previous job as a Bush speechwriter. Which makes this bit just totally surprising:

"The personal miracle of McCain's presidential run is even more extraordinary. It is obvious -- and therefore often unstated -- that the journey from a 4-by-6-foot Viet Cong cell to the 36-by-29-foot Oval Office would be unprecedented. It would be as though George Washington were captured by the British, who snapped his legs in a torture cell; or Ulysses Grant were nearly starved to death at Andersonville Prison; or Dwight Eisenhower had been interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo in a German stalag. All three, I imagine, would have been honorable, defiant and arrogant enough to survive. But McCain has proved it."

Yes, that's right, folks. Not only is John McCain a supercool centrist who will lead us to a land of joy and wonder, but he's braver and tougher than Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower combined. That is one tough motherfucker, yeah? But it's not all about his massive, hairy balls. No, he's also a uniter:

"...McCain's election as president would, in its own way, be historic -- finally and fully honoring the lessons of heroism that came out of America's conflicted experience of Vietnam."

Far be it from me to suggest that perhaps the wounds of Vietnam would be much closer to scabbed over if right-wing hacks like Gerson hadn't made entire careers out of blaming everyone with a (D) next to their name for surrendering to Ho Chi Minh and destroying our national soul in the process. Not to mention that we'd have had a goddamn Vietnam veteran in the Oval Office by now had it not been for the schmuck who's currently defiling the place.

And now Maureen Dowd is using her column at the Times to declare her desperate fear that those awful anti-Hillary people might well go after Michelle Obama. Thank goodness prominent women in politics have defenders like MoDo, ever vigilant against any hint of media misogyny.

Oh, right, I have a blog...

So I've been doing my damnedest to stay out of blogging entirely during primary season, if for no other reason than there's no way to do so without spontaneously devolving into either a sexist or a racist, and I have no intention of becoming either. Just to give an example of how scared I was of this: I actually had a blog handed to me with a built-in audience, and I abandoned it.

If you actually bought that that's the reason I gave up posting over on MNP, then clearly you're just wandering by. I stopped because I'm fundamentally lazy. Admittedly, I had a damn fine setup there: pre-made audience, receptive bunch to a far-left wacko with an overdeveloped vocabulary. And somehow I never felt like I was saying anything remotely useful. The entire blogosphere has never really been much more than preaching to the choir, and I just felt entirely useless every time I blogged. Articulate hyperlinked kvetching is still ultimately just kvetching. (By the way, I find it hilarious that Blogger is cool with the spelling on "kvetching" but not on "hyperlinked.") And that's what I was doing. Summarizing Frontline, or rephrasing Glennzilla, or something similarly useless.

I really can rationalize, can't I? Goddamn. Simple fact is that I couldn't deal with the regular upkeep of a serious blog. This one is much more my speed. Update whenever I like, and the only readers are people who know me and hear this shit well before it's posted, in a deep, scholarly baritone. Much easier way to go.

So what's my call on the primaries right now? How about three sentences?
1. I voted for Obama in the MA primary, and have contributed monetarily to his campaign.
2. Were Clinton the nominee, I'd vote for her in a heartbeat, donate if I've got the cash, and would seriously consider working for her in a swing state.
3. I think the numbers are distinctly in Obama's favor, and the sooner the nominating process is done, the better.

I think that about covers it. So on to more relevant matters.

The Sox are in first! After an entire month! No, wait, that always happens. Then they fold right around my birthday. Yeah, that's right. Two World Series wins in four years and I still don't trust the bastards. Old wounds take their time, they do. Still, things look good. Neither the offense nor the pitching is really clicking yet, and they've got a nice lead. I think this bodes well, especially with the way the Yankees' pitching has been throwing fits. As long as the Rays realize they're not quite ready yet, the Sox look pretty good to repeat at least their division title.

That ought to do it for tonight, I think. More tomorrow. Or whenever, since there aren't any readers of this bloody thing anyway.

Thoughts while trying to distract myself from the fact that my beloved Red Sox have whittled away their lead in the East to 2.5 games...

The flap that's erupted over the MoveOn ad in the NYT has been a lovely object lesson in the difference between liberal and conservative politics. The ad in question, while ill-advised and dumbly headlined, was certainly no worse than even the tamer GOP ads of recent years. So why the massive hoopla? For one thing, the Republicans are simply better at exploiting this sort of thing. Any party that can turn a few illicit blow jobs into the second impeachment of a sitting President has quite the talent for turning a tiny mistake into a party-destroying fiasco.
The other aspect is that liberals, for the most part, don't support this sort of tactic. When your aim in politics is the betterment of the state, rather than simply seizing power, there's a tendency to dislike slash-and-burn tactics. Not that there haven't been ruthless liberals (LBJ comes swiftly to mind), but that ruthlessness tends to involve backroom deals rather than public character assassination. The point being that anytime a liberal group or politician goes in for smear tactics or shrill attack ads, they not only open themselves up to attack from their opponents for playing dirty pool, but they alienate their own base, which lacks the stomach for this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, the right eats it up. I'm reminded, actually, of an essay on Russian politics I just read. Yury Luzhkov, the popular mayor of Moscow, was attacked by a Kremlin-affiliated journalist who accused him of, among other things, murder. The accusations were, of course, false, but the very fact that the Kremlin could get away with making blatantly slanderous attacks on Luzhkov proved that the Kremlin was the stronger of the two. As such, they could be trusted to be powerful leaders.
There's a similar dynamic at work on the right in America. Whether the mud they fling at Democrats has any relation to reality is beside the point. The point is that they can get away with it, which makes them powerful. More importantly, it makes the Dems look weak, since we inevitably take the high road for just long enough for the slander to stick and bite us soundly on the ass.
Now's normally the point where I'd suggest a concrete solution. Can't think of much beyond floating the idea that every Democrat should memorize the line "That's the sort of pathetic attempt at character assassination that has no place in a legitimate political campaign. If my opponent has the werewithal to make those accusations to my face, I'll gladly answer them. Otherwise, let's continue to chat about why my healthcare plan will actually provide everyone with healthcare." And perhaps, just perhaps, leave the childish name-calling bullshit to the Republicans.

Hurrah, another blog...

With not enough on my plate this fall, it seems as good a time as any to start forcing myself to write again. I've always lacked even the slightest bit of discipline when it comes to academics or money, but I seem quite able to buckle down when the task at hand is frivolous. So blog writing it is. I'm not quite sure where this one's going to wind up going, although it's a pretty good bet that the bulk of its content will deal with either politics or baseball, with an occasional foray into history or film. Which would make it completely different from at least 2% of all other blogs.

At the very least, the burden of shouting into the rain will fall onto my fingers, rather than my throat. The savings on herbal tea and lozenges (not to mention earplugs for my girlfriend) will, I imagine, be substantial. Tomorrow, actual posting on something vaguely relevant. For now, sleep.