Charley Steiner Gets Traded To Melrose Place

Well, not quite, but the erstwhile Yankee radio man and SportsCenter anchor is off to Chavez Ravine, where he’ll replace Ross Porter and share a booth with Rick Monday for Dodger broadcasts; they will alternate with Vin Scully, who works alone. From MLB’s report:

Steiner, a New York native, said the first game he heard on a big Zenith radio at the age of 6 had Scully calling the Brooklyn Dodgers from Ebbets Field.


Link via Bookworm, who speculates that beat reporter Suzyn Waldman may take Steiner’s place in the booth; I’m fairly certain she’d be the first woman to broadcast games on a regular basis for a New York baseball team.

San Pedro de Flushing?

The Daily News claims that the Mets have offered Pedro Martinez a three-year deal worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $37-39 million (about $12-13 million per year), and are contemplating a fourth year guaranteed. While I’m not a fan of the overall strategy of committing more money to expensive stars in their thirties, Pedro is at least a sufficiently high-quality starter – a rare enough thing these days – that it would not be a terrible move, although adding a fourth year guaranteed, with Pedro’s health and durability concerns, would be a Very Bad Idea. That fourth year is only worth it if you are – unlike the Mets – willing to risk writing off an extra season of salary to get over the top in the short run.
Anyway, amidst all the gnashing of teeth about Pedro’s decline, a little perspective is in order:

W L ERA G GS CG IP H HR BB K
13 10 3.70 33 33 4 216.2 189 19 70 222
19 7 2.89 33 33 2 233.2 188 26 67 251
16 9 3.90 33 33 1 217 193 26 61 227

That’s Pedro in 1996, 1998, and 2004; as you can see, Pedro’s performance this season wasn’t greatly out of line with seasons he had in his mid-20s. Yes, we’ll never see the Pedro of 1999-2000 again (in our lifetimes, we may never see any pitcher that dominating again), and yes, he’s lost some gas off his fastball, but the numbers say there’s still plenty of gas in Pedro’s tank if he can stay healthy.

Self-Evident Idiocy

One last spleen-venting legal case for the day:

A California teacher who teaches his fifth-grade students with the aid of primary source documents like the Declaration of Independence has been ordered by school administrators to stop using such artifacts of American history because the material contains references to God.


I heard about this one during the significant amount of time I spent stuck in traffic on I-95 over the holiday weekend, while flipping past Sean Hannity�s radio show. Not considering that the most reliable source and more than a little skeptical, I decided to check it out and, lo and behold, The Smoking Gun had the documentation, including the teacher�s complaint.
Politically, this is an example of Democrats needing to better police their fringes. I can�t imagine that the mainstream of that party is really opposed to the Declaration of Independence or shares such absolutist hostility to religion, but the cumulative effect of stories like this, fairly or unfairly, pushes a lot of otherwise undecided people into the Republican camp. It�s hard to get anyone to trust their children to people who think the ideas of people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are unfit for public schools.

Anti-Military Academics 1, Common Sense 0

Meanwhile, in a ruling I missed, the 3rd Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals handed down an outrageous opinion striking down the Solomon Amendment, which withholds federal funds from schools banning the military from appearing on campus. See here and here. (Academia, generally anti-military to begin with, frequently tries to ban groups like the ROTC or JAG recruiters on ideological grounds, the most fashionable recent pretext being protest of the military�s �Don�t Ask, Don�t Tell� policy.)
UPDATE: As you can probably tell, I feel very strongly about the issue of my taxpayer dollars going to institutions that ban our military from campus and have written in support of the Solomon Amendment in the past. This is a decision that politicians, from President Bush on down, need to condemn and the Supreme Court needs to reverse. It should not stand.

Mary Jane’s Last Dance?

Dahlia Lithwick has a snarky look at the Supreme Court’s oral arguments concerning California�s medical marijuana law, asking �should the court’s staunchest conservatives get away with being for states’ rights only when the state in question isn’t California?
I�m sympathetic to the medical marijuana law in question, defended in this case by Randy Barnett, and, in fact, would support a good deal of reform of American drug laws. Yet Lithwick�s accusations of hypocrisy would be a lot more convincing if the Court had not, on the very same day, (correctly) declined to hear a case challenging the Massachusetts Supreme Court�s (egregious) �gay marriage� ruling, presumably on federalism grounds.
Also, in a broader sense, this is an annoying form of argument. One gets the sense here that Lithwick doesn�t really believe in federalism, but supports using it as a justification for drug legalization at the state level. Isn�t that line of reasoning just as hypocritical as that which she prematurely accuses the Supreme Court of following?

BASEBALL/Alibi Ike

For reasons that are unclear to me, I got a free sample issue in the mail of “At The Yard,” a magazine following the minor leagues. What caught my attention was an article on how Dwight Eisenhower apparently told reporters in 1945 that he had played minor league ball under an assumed name (“Wilson”) in 1909 when he was 19. Grantland Rice reported that Ike played center field in the Central Kansas League (presumably a fairly low-level minor league), batting .288, scoring 43 runs and stealing 20 bases in a season of a little over 200 at bats. (Here’s what little else I could find on this online).
(A side note: am I the only one who thinks Grover Alexander, a Nebraskan who was three years older than the Kansan Eisenhower also entered pro ball in 1909, bore a striking resemblance to Ike?)
Anyway, as the article (not available online, so far as I can tell) points out, Eisenhower abruptly stopped talking about his pro baseball career after that, and with good reason: he played football and baseball at West Point, which he entered in 1911, and to do so he would have had to sign an NCAA eligibility card stating that he had not played professional sports – and if he signed that card falsely, it would be a violation of West Point’s honor code, something Ike would not want to admit to once he was embarked on a career in politics. In today’s atmosphere, of course, it’s unlikely he would have gotten away with this without someone digging this up.
But if there’s some enterprising SABR type out there who would like to dig up the old minor league box scores, this sounds like a fun project to look into.

Tragedy Strikes Estrada

A lot of conservatives were frustrated when Miguel Estrada, one of the best and brightest of Bush’s judicial nominees, withdrew his nomination to the DC Circuit. Some have speculated that he may still be nominated to the Supreme Court.
Perhaps, at some point, he will. But Andrew McCarthy noted in The Corner yesterday that Estrada’s wife died on Sunday. I don’t know if she was his age (early 40s) or if they had kids, but the man will clearly have other priorities right now than the judiciary. Apparently, her death was sudden and unexpected. (Link via Bashman). For now, our prayers should be with him and his family.

Boggs and Who?

Wade Boggs leads the new nominees on the Hall of Fame ballot, but while a few of the other new candidates, like Darryl Strawberry, Chili Davis and Willie McGee put together pieces of a Hall of Fame case, nobody else new is a serious candidate, whereas Boggs should and will skate in with little or no debate. I think my favorite Wade Boggs fact is in 1987 when he somehow must have sensed that the ball was livelier, and he announced in spring training that he was going to try to his more home runs. As it turned out, homers were up around the league, and Boggs hit 24 of them (up from a career high of 8; he would hit double figures only once more, with 11 in 1994).
Anyway, there’s the usual lively debate about who else goes in; you can go here for a link-filled roundup of my past writings on the returning candidates, and why the only ones I would support are Bert Blyleven, Goose Gossage and Ryne Sandberg (although I may return at some point for a closer look at Sandberg and Alan Trammell).

Getting Tolerance Wrong

This Nicholas Kristof column in last Wednesday’s NY Times, denouncing the “Left Behind” series of novels popular among evangeical Christians, rather perfectly captures a misunderstanding of religious tolerance that is found too often on the Left, and one I’ve dealt with before. Here’s Kristof:

The “Left Behind” series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world’s Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: “Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching.”
Gosh, what an uplifting scene!
If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.


[snip]

I accept that [the authors] are sincere. (They base their conclusions on John 3.) But I’ve sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they’re just applying God’s word.
. . . [I]f I praise the good work of evangelicals – like their superb relief efforts in Darfur – I’ll also condemn what I perceive as bigotry.


See, here’s the problem. Kristof isn’t just asking the authors of these books to allow for people of other faiths to practice their own faiths in peace; he’s demanding that the authors change what they themselves actually believe to be the Word of God. That’s not a plea for religious tolerance; it is, in fact, religious intolerance, as Kristof is saying that the beliefs of these Christians are so offensive to him that they must be branded as “bigotry” and driven from public expression.
Let me put this another way to explain why the comparison to radical Muslims is so offensive. I have no problem with people who believe that God is going to send me to Hell for being a Catholic. They believe their thing, and I believe mine. I have a major problem with people who think that they, rather than God Himself, should send me there. It is right and proper and necessary to denounce religious extremists who are unable to accept the peaceable coexistence of people of different religions, who call for earthly violence and political opression against those of different faiths. But to demand that people give up the tenet of their faith – a central one in many faiths – that says that they are following the one and only path to salvation, that’s what Stephen Carter has referred to as demanding that people treat “God as a hobby” rather than taking faith seriously. While it may in some circumstances be rude to say it, I wouldn’t want to live in a country where people could not feel free to profess that theirs is the only true faith; such a country would be one in which no one really believed in anything at all.
The “Left Behind” guys aren’t asking that anyone be harmed in the here and now; they are content to wait for Jesus to take care of that. By failing to distinguish between the two, Kristof shows that he still views religious beliefs as something that can be bent to the needs of human society rather than the other way around. Which is to say, not religion at all.

Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce

Ah, the media food chain in action. As noted here and here, late Tuesday night, I banged out a quick email to Instapundit, with the following thought, in response to an item he posted about a statement by Vaclav Havel on the situation in Ukraine:

Is there any way to get Havel to come out of retirement to succeed Kofi Annan as head of the UN, please? I mean, if ever there were a guy with the guts and moral clarity to insist that the UN live up to its ideals, it’s Havel.

Instapundit quoted me by name on this, crediting me with the (admittedly somewhat fanciful) idea, with the further comment:

The more I think about it, the more I like the Havel-for-S.G. idea.


Approving links to Glenn Reynolds’ post followed from people at, among other things, the National Review, Weekly Standard and Reason Magazine. Fast forward to yesterday morning, and Reynolds had an op-ed piece on the Wall Street Journal editorial page (subscription only; it ran in the middle of the bottom of the page) promoting the idea:

Things have gotten bad enough that some are calling for Mr. Annan’s resignation, amid talk of former Czech President Vaclav Havel as successor. (“Havel for Secretary General” bumper stickers are on the Web.)


OK, so it’s not quite the same as getting published in the WSJ myself, but it took less than a week to get my suggestion onto one of the nation’s most influential op-ed pages. I’ll take that.

Age and Established Win Shares

One of my major projects of late has been plugging the 2004 Win Shares data from the Hardball Times into a series of spreadsheets to (1) analyze the usefulness of my Established Win Shares Levels figures from earlier this year and (2) run similar EWSL numbers for 2005. EWSL is explained here; in a nutshell, it’s an application to Win Shares of Established Performance Levels, which take a weighted measurement of a player’s accomplishments in a given category over the prior three years. I ran an EWSL analysis of each team starting here, listing 23 players (13 non-pitchers and 10 pitchers).
As I’ve said before, EWSL is just a compilation of the past, not a projection of the future, although past performance is always a useful thing to have in projecting a ballplayer’s future. Anyway, one issue with EWSL, especially on a team level, is that it tends to overrate older players and underrate younger ones by relying on established track records.
That, we already knew. But by how much? I had used a number of adjustments to deal with this issue, and I’ll return to those later, but first I wanted to take a look at how the unadjusted EWSL fared as a predictor. So I broke down by age each of the 678 players I had listed to compare their unadjusted EWSL entering 2004 to their 2004 Win Shares, and grouped the results by age. The Average EWSL and Average 2004 Win Shares columns are rounded off; the % column shows the total 2004 Win Shares for that age group (un-rounded) divided by the total EWSL (also un-rounded), with 1.00 meaning the group matched its EWSL, numbers above 1.00 showing an increase and below 1.00 showing a decrease. I grouped the 20-21 and over-40 groups because they were so small (20 was just Edwin Jackson, who never did get a shot in 2004).

Age # Avg EWSL Avg 2004 WS +/- %
20-21 6 3 7 +4 2.77
22 13 4 11 +7 3.15
23 11 6 10 +4 1.61
24 26 6 10 +4 1.76
25 39 6 10 +4 1.64
26 70 7 8 +1 1.22
27 60 8 9 +1 1.19
28 60 9 11 +2 1.26
29 49 9 8 -1 0.89
30 62 10 10 0 0.96
31 51 9 8 -1 0.89
32 53 10 9 -1 0.91
33 41 10 7 -3 0.71
34 34 8 7 -1 0.87
35 21 14 7 -7 0.52
36 26 10 9 -1 0.84
37 19 11 9 -2 0.81
38 17 9 8 -1 0.86
39 11 13 11 -2 0.84
40+ 9 11 11 0 1.00

Although the overall aging pattern is hardly a surprise, I was struck by how vividly the pattern came out even over a relatively small sample size. (The breakdowns of numbers of players by age is interesting in its own right). The 40+ crowd, of course, was dominated by Clemens and Randy Johnson, which is what throws that off. Since Established Performance Levels acts as something of a multiplier of inexperience, it’s not surprising to see the average player doubling or tripling his past track record at a very young age, when many in the group are rookies, and that time-lag may also contribute to why the break point for decline starts at 29 rather than 28. I was also struck by the overall stability of the numbers, as there was relatively little variance in the 2004 quality of production over age groups, although of course the mid-30s crowd did underperform the mid-20s crowd even though the mid-20s contingent included a much larger number of marginal players who won’t last past 30.
The wipeout of the 35-year-olds was especially gruesome, and can be attributed partly to having a small sample and the highest starting point in the range. But there were more than just a few disasters in that group: Tim Salmon (down from 18 to 2), Bret Boone (29 to 9), Shigetoshi Hasegawa (10 to 3), John Olerud (20 to 10 – the Mariners had way too many of these guys), Mike Mussina (18 to 10), Paul Quantrill (10 to 6), Pat Hentgen (6 to 0), Fernando Vina (12 to 1), Sammy Sosa (27 to 14), and most egregiously of all, Hideo Nomo (15 to -6).
Anyway, there’s more work still to be done, but clearly to be useful as a predictive tool EWSL needs to be adjusted for age in some fashion.

11/28/04 Links

*Patterico has a tremendous idea: Senate Republicans should introduce a non-binding resolution of support for each of the filibustered judicial nominees, so as to put on the record the fact that they would be confirmed if granted a floor vote. Would the Democrats filibuster this as well, so as to prevent the public from finding this out? (Link via Bashman).
*If you liked my marginal vote analyses, Patrick Ruffini has a map that captures a lot of the same type of stuff in graphic form. I take it that some of the swing towards the Democrats in Montana may have been aided by the victory of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate there.
*Speaking of cool charts, check out this piece with its charts of blog activity during the campaign.
*This “Email of the Day” to Andrew Sullivan pretty well captures the Democrats’ image problems.
*Two more from Ruffini, who’s on a roll: first, this:

President Bush carried 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them “exurban” communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.
The counties with the most population loss (from people picking up and leaving) voted for Kerry 68.6% to 30.4%.


Mmmmm, 2010 census. And Ruffini also has a link to this must-read analysis over at Kos’ place:

A top Kerry staffer (one of five who had been with Kerry from the very start of his primary campaign and who claimed he talked with Kerry almost daily on the phone) told me: “To be blunt, this is a fat-cat top-down campaign. The campaign staff doesn’t really get grassroots.” Those were his exact words (I wrote them down because I was startled he would admit this–I haven’t told ANYONE this quote because I didn’t want it to get into GOP hands prior to the election). He did think a grassroots strategy was crucial, but he may have been among the very few Kerry staffers there at the time to think that way; he and one other staffer were pushing to get me hired and create a real grassroots strategy. He called me daily with updates. On the fourth day, he apologized that Mary Beth Cahill was concerned I could be a “Republican mole.” He told her I had been a volunteer with the Dean campaign and that he trusted me based on our phone conversations, but that didn’t prove anything to her. She couldn’t imagine hiring someone who lived in California that she’d never met. Instead, she hired a former Emily’s List staffer with experience sending direct mail to big donors, whom Mary Beth had worked with previously.


This, of course, echoes many of the things the GOP side was saying before the election. Did McCain-Feingold actually succeed in hamstringing Kerry? Then again, the turnout and exit poll numbers do suggest that Kerry’s side didn’t do so badly in turning out the Democratic base and swinging Nader voters; where they lost was in high GOP turnout and, perhaps most of all, the defection of something like 10% of the people who voted for Gore in 2000. You win them back with the message and the candidate, not by digging deeper at the roots. Plus, the Republicans have an advantage: new GOP voters tend to stay put in their homes with their children, whereas the Democrats’ newly registered voters are often transients – college students, new immigrants – and even if you can still find them four years later, they may start to lean more Republican as they set some roots down, which means the Dems need to reinvent the wheel every four years with their register-young-voters push.

That’s Incredible!

Took the kids to see The Incredibles yesterday, and it was, in fact, as tremendous a movie as advertised, a thrill-a-minute action flick with more than enough adult emotional depth to make it more than your typical action movie. Actually, in a number of ways the movie reminded me of the recently released Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, since the movies shared many settings and plot devices, but while Sky Captain, was a very enjoyable ride, it was the added emotional depth that makes The Incredibles by far the superior movie.

Kendall Gets Beaned

What’s interesting about the A’s apparently acquiring Jason Kendall for Mark Redman and Arthur Rhodes is not the Pirates’ end of the deal, which involves getting some face-saving pitching help while getting out from under Kendall’s oversized contract, but rather the A’s being willing to take on salary to get a catcher (replacing the departing Damian Miller) who gets on base. For all the notoriety of the A’s OBP obsession, the team had in recent years been losing ground in that department. Kendall helps turn around that trend (which had gotten a bit better this season).
Good deal for Oakland, in spite of Kendall’s cost, age and lack of power.

Havel-Mania Update

With Instapundit in full dog-with-a-bone mode on my idea of Vaclav Havel for UN Secretary General – which, I admit, is more wishful thinking than anything – Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard picks up the idea, while A Fistful of Euros notes that Havel’s eclectic and sometimes dyspeptic worldview isn’t entirely a conservative’s dream. Well, yeah. But a good man unafraid to speak the truth would be such a vast improvement at the UN that it’s worth it.

Radke on the Block

I wonder whether it would be worthwhile for the Mets to take a look at Brad Radke, although it sounds like his asking price is fairly steep. (Then again, I loved this line: “Radke has said he wants only a two-year deal, but Simon [his agent] said that wouldn’t necessarily be the length he proposes.” Yeah, the agent will have a lot of credibility on that score.)
On the plus side, Radke’s an extreme fly ball pitcher who would profit from pitching at Shea in front of Mike Cameron. And I’m less concerned about signing a free agent pitcher in his 30s as opposed to hitters, given (1) that you need a lot of innings on a pitching staff, so there’s less sense that old guys are blocking the development of youngsters, and (2) age is less of a straight-line predictor of career path for pitchers (pitchers in their 20s are a crapshoot anyway). On the other hand, the Mets do need to keep cash free to develop the everyday lineup, and Radke is a guy who gives up a lot of hits.

BASKETBALL: Simmons on Artest & Co.

Bill Simmons, unsurprisingly, has one of the most insightful columns on the whole Pistons-Pacers brawl. Lots of good stuff there – read the whole thing. I liked his suggestion that David Stern should punish Pistons fans by suspending beer sales at The Palace for 60 days, as well as his defense of Jermaine O’Neal and his suggestion that Artest would probably end up on the Knicks, stepping into the shoes vacated by the departure of Latrell Sprewell. This amused me:

Adam Carolla had an interesting take on this incident: Imagine being the guy at the game who was first attacked by Artest? You’ve been watching these guys for two hours, you’re pretty buzzed, you’re loving the seats … and then this fight breaks out, and it’s riveting as hell, and then suddenly Artest gets nailed by the cup and he’s coming right at you. As Carolla said, it would be like watching “Captain Hook” in the movies for two hours, then Captain Hook comes right out of the movie screen and attacks you. Would you have blamed that first guy for soiling himself?


But Bill fails to answer the deep philosophical question: how did this entire thing manage to come off without Rasheed Wallace doing something crazy?
UPDATE: Of course, we Knick fans feel that Artest returning to NY would actually be poetic justice, recalling that he was the man the Knicks passed up to draft . . . Frederic “French Toast” Weis.

The UN’s Abu Ghraib – and Havel for the UN!

Captain Ed notes a UN scandal larger and worse than Abu Ghraib, as there have been more than 150 charges of rape, prostitution, pedophilia and other sexual abuses by UN peacekeepers in the Congo against innocent refugees. Of course, as with the Oil-for-Food scam, stories that reflect badly on the UN get only a fraction of the attention devoted to stories that reflect badly on the Bush Administration, even if the story itself is considerably worse. And that imbalance in the worldwide press has tangible bad effects on the credibility of the US as opposed to the credibility of the UN, which by any right ought to be close to zero at this stage.
Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds, who’s been doing great work pulling together the latest from the Ukraine, likes my suggestion that Vaclav Havel should replace Kofi Annan as head of the UN.
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg calls my suggestion of Havel “a great, wonderful, humane, inspired idea.” Now, if only I can figure a way to get traffic to the blog out of this . . .
SECOND UPDATE: Matt Welch, who knows a lot more about Havel than I do from his years in what was then Czechoslovakia, is also supportive: “I think it’s a capital idea, and would likely bring a gust of support behind the growing “Community of Democracies” reform initiative.”

The Tragedy of Multiple Viewpoints

I had to laugh at this exchange on CNN�s Sunday Late Edition between Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) and Wolf Blitzer:

SANCHEZ: �I believe that we made mistakes. The media certainly is not in our hands any longer, and, in particular, radio talk shows where that is completely in the opposition’s hands, and they use it effectively against us.
BLITZER: But, Loretta, when you say the media — when you say the media is not in your hands, are you saying that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN are hostile to Democrats?
SANCHEZ: No, that’s not what I said. I’m saying that — if you would let me finish — that the majority of people are now receiving a lot of their information out of radio. And the radio isn’t in the hands of the Democrats anymore.
Many years ago, the Republicans made a very effective play. They sat down. They made a strategy. They decided they were going to put big thinktanks around, that they were going to fund them. They decided that they would buy radio, that they would use that to talk to people. And people drive in their cars, they’re listening to the radio all the time. They’re getting a lot of information that way.
You know, networks are losing — you know, they’re getting less and less viewership.


The transcript doesn�t quite do justice to how depressed Sanchez sounded when she said �the media is not in our hands any longer.� But the interview did make me want to learn more about this sinister, so-called �radio� device and how the government can curb its pernicious influence.
Seriously, though, isn�t it overstating the case – and more than a little rude to Al Franken, who was on the very same panel � for a Democrat to say that radio is �completely in the opposition�s hands.� Comments like these would also seem to belie Sanchez�s claims.

Rivera for Guillen

I have to say the Angels got the better end of the deal that sent Jose Guillen to the Washington Nationals for Juan Rivera and prospect Macier Izturis (younger brother of Cesar Izturis). I don’t know much about Izturis, but Guillen and Rivera are both the same general type of player – relatively free-swinging right-handed sluggers with a good arm – but Rivera is two years younger, makes a fraction of the money, and doesn’t come with Guillen’s clubhouse headaches. And Rivera finished with a flourish last year; in his first extended action as an everyday player, he batted .358/.526/418 after the All-Star Break. Given that Guillen himself has only been a productive regular for two seasons, I’d rather have Rivera even before you factor in the money, let alone when you toss in a 24-year-old shortstop who batted .338 in AAA last year.

A Little Perspective for Kevin Drum

Drum notes a program at Santa Clara University to give preferential treatment to male students and huffs:

I’m hopeful that the principled folks over at National Review will condemn this practice. And please: not just a desultory acknowledgment or two to prove you care. I expect a stream of outraged posts and crosstalk at least equal to the recent torrents about Arlen Specter, the lack of conservatives among humanities faculties, and the shocking tolerance of liberalism at the University of Chicago.
I’m counting on you, Cornerites. The eyes of the blogosphere are on you.


Well, if Drum wants us conservatives to say that preferences for less-qualified male students in university admissions are bad, he can relax; obviously, this kind of discrimination is not justified. But, in the Kleiman style, he wants instead to paint conservatives as hypocrites for not dropping what they are doing and writing what Drum tells us to write.
But he can’t be serious; this is one isolated and possibly unique feature of one not terribly prominent university. To say that it is deserving of the same attention as the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee – a matter that affects the court system and legal reform issues as a whole – is unserious at best and disingenuous at worst. Even to compare this to conservatives’ principled opposition to racial preferences misses the fact that the latter are pervasive, perhaps universal, in higher education admissions. That doesn’t make one more or less wrong than the other, but it certainly suggests why the emphasis falls naturally on the more prevalent program. A little perspective would go a long way.

Defeat in Ukraine

Looks like the reform-minded, pro-Western challenger, Viktor Yushchenko, has been defeated by Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine’s presidential election, in a victory for Yanukovich ally Vladimir Putin, who obviously wants Ukraine bound more tightly to Russia. The usual cries of voter fraud are being raised, although at this distance it’s never easy to tell if they are valid or not.

Pavano With Caution

Nobody doubts that Carl Pavano is a talented pitcher, but I’ve been hearing people talk about Pavano as if he was a potential substitute for Pedro Martinez in Boston or Javier Vazquez or Kevin Brown in New York. Hold on there, people. Pavano may be just coming into his own, or he may be just coming off a career year. Either way, I don’t see a #1 starter.
First off, there’s his lack of a track record; Pavano’s thrown 100 innings in a season 5 times, and 2004 is the first time he’s been better than a league-average pitcher. Then there’s the core of the problem: strikeouts. 28-year-old pitchers who don’t get a lot of strikeouts do not, in general, become stars. And look at Pavano’s K per 9 innings the last four years: 7.59, 6.09, 5.96, 5.63. Certainly not forward progress.
This is not to say that Pavano is doomed as an effective pitcher, or even that it’s impossible that he will follow the footsteps of Kevin Brown and Mike Scott and similar pitchers who bucked the trend of history by becoming big strikeout pitchers in their 30s. After all, he had a fine year in 2004 by slicing his walks to less than 2 per 9 innings and avoiding the home run ball, both critical skills. But the odds on the latter are not strong. Consider the ten men identified by Baseball-Reference.com as the most-similar pitchers to Pavano through age 28:

Oil Can Boyd (980)
Dustin Hermanson (973)
Charles Nagy (970)
Luis Leal (969)
Bill Wegman (969)
Art Mahaffey (969)
Todd Stottlemyre (966)
Jim Lonborg (966)
Aaron Sele (962)
Frank Castillo (960)


As you can see, the similarity scores are fairly high – and these guys averaged 41 career wins after age 28. Nagy and Wegman both had their best years at 29, and Stottlemyre had a big strikeout year at 30, but not one of these guys was really on his way up entering his thirties.
I’d put Pavano on the level with Jon Lieber and Brad Radke, both similar pitchers in some ways, although Radke in particular is homer-prone. But Pedro Martinez, who’s four years older and with a lot of mileage on his arm, still struck out 9.41 men per 9 innings in 2004 with only a slightly higher walk rate than Pavano. There’s no comparison.

BASKETBALL: Out of Control Weekend

Daniel Drezner puts the Pistons-Pacers brawl in perspective, noting that it pales in comparison to European soccer hooliganism. Which is fine, but that doesn�t mean it isn�t inexcusable, as was the ugly South Carolina brawl yesterday in Lou Holtz�s final game.
I�m not sure if I agree with Mannix (Chris, that is) that Ron Artest should be kicked out of the NBA for good, but a suspension for the rest of the season may be in order, in light of his repeated involvement in this kind of thing. And I do think the NBA has a major league-wide cultural problem, the roots of which I would blame on its addiction to ever younger, unschooled players. Back when most NBA players had three or four years of college and relative maturity behind them, things like this seemed a lot less common.
Of course, sports-related riots aren�t anything new. Remember the �Nickel Beer Night� fiasco?
Anyway, it was an ugly fighting weekend, with even President Bush and the Secret Service involved in a scrum down in Chile.
UPDATE: I stand corrected. Though I�ve always liked the sound of �Nickel Beer Night�, it appears that the ill-fated promotion of June 4, 1974 was actually �10-Cent Beer Night.� I guess I failed to account for inflation.

Benson!

I can’t say I’m ecstatic about seeing Kris Benson in a Mets uniform for another three years, but re-signing him was clearly a necessity once the team let Al Leiter go. The real proof in the pudding on the acquisitions of Benson and Victor Zambrano will come next year (although the costs will take longer to weigh as we watch the development of Scott Kazmir and the other prospects in the deals). Benson should, if healthy, be at least about a league-average pitcher, which isn’t nothing.
Of course, yet again, all of this is just window dressing if Mets management still thinks that the club’s problems can be rectified by the elderly and expensive likes of Sammy Sosa.

Links 11/19/04

*Real subtle, that Zarqawi:

In video shot by an embedded CNN cameraman, soldiers walked through an imposing building with concrete columns and with a large sign in Arabic on the wall reading “Al Qaida Organization” and “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”
Inside the building, U.S. soldiers found documents, old computers, notebooks, photographs and copies of the Quran.


*Jay G has an amusingly profanity-laden tirade (you were warned!) about critics of Hardee’s new super-fatburger.
*While what he did may well have been wrong, I’m loath to sit in judgment of the Marine who shot what appears to be a wounded and non-threatening sniper in Fallujah. I believe very, very strongly that a man who wears the uniform is entitled to the benefit of every doubt. But Dale Franks explains why sometimes soldiers have to be punished for reasons that have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with discipline.
*David Frum lays out options for blockading Iran and has some helpful history of the words “Palestine” and “Philistine”.
*NZ Bear reminds us that we still need a loyal opposition.
*Kevin Drum notes that the exit polls always overestimate support for the Democrats.
*What are these “morals” you speak of?
*Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post on the centrality of corruption to Arafatistan. Jeff Jacoby, of course, had the definitive Arafat post-mortem:

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg.


*How the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign made better use of email than the Democrats.

Friday Roundup 11/19/04

*The Tigers sign Troy Percival for 2 years, $12 million. Yes, it’s just a 2-year deal, but that’s elite closer money, and Percival’s just not worth it anymore.
*Thank you Mike Cameron? Baseball Prospectus’ latest stab at team defensive stats (subscription only) lists the Mets as #4 in the majors for 2004.
*How did I miss this one when it happened? From September, Mike’s Baseball Rants has some fun with John Kruk calling Chone Figgins – Chone Figgins – “the most valuable player in the game today.”

�Semper Fi�

Though it is a subscription-only “featured” article, Thursday�s Wall Street Journal editorial offers a clear-eyed perspective of recent events in Fallujah, in proper perspective. It is worth excerpting heavily:

Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world’s worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?�Never mind that the pictures don’t come close to telling us about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the soldier after days of combat�
When not disemboweling Iraqi women�killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?
Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their comrades, their mission and their country.
In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in Marine history–with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin Reservoir. We’d know the names of these military units, and of many of the soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent, Kevin Sites. We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.


The incident in question should be investigated fully at some later date, but in the meantime we should be deeply grateful to the Marines – whose death toll has apparently since risen – for moving mountains yet again, under the most difficult of circumstances. Semper fi, indeed.
UPDATE: I�ve never been in the military, but this sounds like sensible advice to me.

The Democrats’ Dilemma – Part II: Personnel

Part II of a three-part series on what the Democrats need to do from here; Part I, on Communications, is here, and Part III, on Policy, will follow.
1. Governors and State Legislatures
Obviously, the Democrats need to start by rebuilding their hold on governorships, which they lost in the mid-1990s. Republicans presently hold the governor’s mansions in the nation’s four largest states – California, Texas, New York, and Florida, although New York may be due to swing back their way when Eliot Spitzer runs in 2006, with George Pataki probably wisely choosing not to run again. Republicans have also captured several natural Democratic strongholds – Massachusetts (which hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Dukakis), Maryland, Hawaii, even Vermont. The near-abandonment of the South has left the Dems in a serious bind there as well, although the cyclical nature of governorships, particularly due to the lure of corruption in state government, means that they take one from time to time.
As far as developing presidential candidates, I’ll get to that later when I’m handicapping the 2008 race, but they are just at the wrong part of the cycle, with few governors in office long enough and one of their biggest media stars (Jennifer Granholm in Michigan) ineligible to run because she’s Canadian-born. It didn’t help when Gray Davis was humbled by the California voters, Jim McGreevey stepped down amidst a multitude of scandals, Roy Barnes lost in Georgia, and even smaller-time governors like Gary Locke felt the need to quit and go home. The process of building up governors to run for president or Senate means having someone be successful and popular enough to get re-elected. Even Granholm may face a tough re-election battle in Michigan.
The picture at the state legislature level is much stronger, as the Dems gained a lot of seats this year in seveal states, both red and blue. If they can consolidate those gains, it will be particularly important when another round of redistricting arises after the 2010 census, which seems likely to send still more congressional seats and electoral votes out of the blue states and into the red states.
2. Carville for DNC Chair
I take it he doesn’t want the job, and there seem to be too many other people focused on their own self-interest (and on stopping the Hillary juggernaut) for anyone to persuade him, but much as I loathe James Carville, he’s exactly what the Democrats need in a party chair – he’s a regular-guy type, knows the South, doesn’t fall into the trap of believing his own BS, and understands how you craft a message to win elections. You can always have a McAuliffe type as your #2 to work the fundraising – Mercer Reynolds, for example, raised vast sums of money for Bush this year and I’d never even heard of the guy until last week. The party chair winds up on TV a lot, and Carville is good with TV.
More thoughts on the DNC/consultant side: The Dems badly need a new batch of consultants who have cut their teeth in states outside the Northeast and West Coast. They need to permanently banish Bob Shrum and his grim populist message from the party – not just from presidential races, because half the problem is that all their presidential candidates have been groomed from the start by Shrum. Ditto for humorless types like Tad Devine and Chris Lehane who don’t know when to stop spinning. On the other hand, Donna Brazile is one of the more sensible types and an expert on turnout among African-Americans, and needs to get a larger role. And as with accepting the loss of Shrum’s good record with Senate campaigns, the party needs to cut bait with Terry McAuliffe even if it means losing some of his golden fundraising touch; the guy is a disaster in every other way (McAuliffe was one of the fools whose obsession with Bush’s National Guard record led to so many bad decisions this year, from Rathergate to the overdone stress on Kerry’s combat record), and his fundraising skills are partly offset by the scandals he engenders.
3. More Chuck Schumer
In developing presidential candidates, the Democrats need to present the face of moderation, bring along people who have the personal touch. Congressional leadership is a different game. That’s why, if it was my party, I’d have wanted Schumer rather than the soft-spoken Harry Reid to head the Senate Democrats. Schumer will never be president; as a liberal Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn with an accent to match, he’s too NY to be president in the way that Phil Gramm was too Texas and, frankly, Kerry was too Massachusetts (truth be told, in an ordinary year Kerry would never have won the nomination). But Schumer brings to bear a number of advantages that would make him ideal as a party leader in Congress. He’s insanely hard-working. He’s exceptionally PR savvy; I’ve noted before his habit of doing a press conference on a consumer-protection issue every Sunday, guaranteeing him a block of time on the Sunday evening local news once a week to the point that the local networks know they can give their consumer reporters the night off. He’s actually relatively sane on national security and law enforcement issues. He’s tough as nails. And, unlike guys like Daschle and Gephardt, Schumer doesn’t talk down to people and doesn’t sound like he’s reading made-up focus-grouped talking points he doesn’t believe in.
4. Say Goodbye To Hollywood
Hollywood stars tend to lean very far to the Left, and tend to spout off their political opinions without being asked and whether they know anything about the subject or not. The Democratic Party can’t change this fact. They also give a lot of money to Democrats. The Dems shouldn’t want to change this fact. But what the party can and should do is stop being star-struck and just stop making public appearances with Hollywood types. It’s one of the tendencies that makes so many people identify the Democrats with the values-free zone that is Hollywood and with unserious dilettante leftism. Take their money? Sure. But don’t telegraph to the American people that you take Ben Affleck’s opinions seriously.
Of all the celebs who worked with the Kerry campaign and supporting 527s this year, only two seemed like they might help: Bruce Springsteen, because he’s a fairly serious guy with an older fan base including a lot of blue-collar types (although as I noted some time ago, Bruce’s fans tend by the nature of his music to be more conservative), and Puff the Magic Diddy, because he would help get young urban African-Americans registered to vote. It’s not clear even that these two were any help, although it may be that Bruce’s appearances in Wisconsin were part of the major Kerry operation that delivered the state by a hair.
5. No More Moore
For many of the same reasons, the Democrats need to walk away from Michael Moore. Yes, his movies and books are beloved by a segment of the Democratic base. But having Moore appear in public with Democratic candidates like Wesley Clark and appear at the Democratic Convention (they couldn’t really stop him from appearing at the GOP convention) led to far too close a public association with a shameless and deeply dishonest huckster. And worse yet is allowing Moore’s favorite hobby-horses to become Democratic talking points and ad campaigns.
Don’t like that advice? Think the GOP has people it should distance itself from? Well, to some extent yes – but as a matter of practical electoral politics, the Democrats lost. They are the ones who disregard such advice at their peril.
6. No More Sharpton
In the current political environment, racial division helps the Democrats. The 2000 NAACP James Byrd ad, promising that a Bush Administration would set off a wave of lynchings, was highly effective. The Bush camp was probably politically wise to give no reason for this election to be racially polarized, even to the point of compromising its principles by signalling to the Supreme Court in the Michigan affirmative action case that it would not attack racial preferences.
More astonishingly, Republicans even held their fire when Al Sharpton, the David Duke of the Democratic party, spoke at the convention in prime time; if there had been a similar speech at the GOP convention, you would have heard nothing else for months. But don’t think voters didn’t notice: as I noted before, Bush won white voters by a 17-point margin, and while Sharpton may not have been much of a factor in that, the Democrats simply have to suck up the short-term cost of annoying Sharpton if they want, in the long term, to win back the confidence of non-Jewish white voters and stem erosion of voters from two groups Sharpton has targeted with particular bile: Jews and Asian-Americans.

Objectivity, the Foreign Press and the Missing European Center

Jim Geraghty, back from vacationing in Italy (and still in need of a new title), has some interesting thoughts on the international press. He starts by surveying various options for someone in Europe looking for more objective coverage of the U.S. This caught my eye:

The International edition of USA Today: Making the domestic version of that newspaper look like �War and Peace.� Three paragraphs and then we punt. I can�t complain about their news coverage skewing one way or another because there was rarely enough to form an opinion about. I do love the sports section, though.


Here at home, I�m a fan of USA Today, because I feel like its aspirations to be a national paper and its famous brevity combine to make it one of America�s more objective publications. USA Today is generally scorned by readers of more hefty papers like The New York Times, but, unlike that paper, it really is a pretty good bellwether for the country. (Of course, brevity does not guarantee objectivity. Down here in DC, commuters are treated to the free Washington Post Express paper, which manages to cram an incredible amount of spin into just a few brief paragraphs every day.)
In fact, I�ve long wondered: what it is the most objective news source in the country?

Continue reading Objectivity, the Foreign Press and the Missing European Center

M V Vlad

If you look at the Win Shares numbers from the Hardball Times, you can see that the AL MVP race was, for all intents and purposes, a dead heat between the top five candidates, each of whom was worth approximately 10 wins to his team:

Player Win Shares
Gary Sheffield 31
Alex Rodriguez 30
Hideki Matsui 30
Miguel Tejada 30
Vladimir Guerrero 29

In a race like that, the more intangible factors – that Guerrero’s team was unusually dependent on him (unlike the big Yankee sluggers, who could feed off each other) and that he closed with a bang to push the Angels over the top in the AL West in September, are good reason to give Guerrero the benefit of the doubt. Specifically, in 12 September-October games against Oakland and Texas, Guerrero scored 13 runs, drove in 14, hit 8 home runs, and batted .478/1.087/.547. Interestingly, the “Win Shares Above Average” figures – comparing each player to an average player with similar playing time – give a slightly different picture:

Player WSAA
Gary Sheffield 15
Johan Santana 15
Alex Rodriguez 12
Hideki Matsui 12
Miguel Tejada 12
Vladimir Guerrero 12
David Ortiz 12
Manny Ramirez 11
Travis Hafner 11
Erubiel Durazo 10

This would seem to support breaking Sheffield away from the pack a bit, especially since I’m not sure that WSAA is a valid basis for a straight-line comparison of a starting pitcher to an everyday player. It’s still close enough that I’d give Guerrero the benefit of the doubt, though. I’m particularly suspicious that WSAA seems to favor players with little or no defensive value. For what it’s worth, the Baseball Prospectus (subscription only) rates Guerrero #1 in the AL by a fairly decisive margin by its “VORP” (Value Over Replacement Level) rating for position players:

Player VORP
Vladimir Guerrero 93.2
Melvin Mora 79.3
Ichiro Suzuki 79.2
Miguel Tejada 79.1
Travis Hafner 74.1
David Ortiz 73.1
Carlos Guillen 71.3
Manny Ramirez 70.0

I’m not sure I understand VORP, one of BP’s famously intricate measurements, well enough to figure out (1) why Vlad takes such a leap forward by its calculations or (2) why all the Yankees take such a beating (the big three all clock in below 65, with Matsui down around 55). One thing Guerrero did very well this year was slash his usually high number of caught stealings (3 in 18 attempts, compared to an average of 13 in 37 attempts the prior four years); he also grounded into 19 DPs, down a bit on a per-at-bat level from prior years, by cutting his ground ball/fly ball ratio to a career low. These are little things, but the caught stealings in particular had been a quiet drag on Guerrero’s production in the past, and Mike Scioscia should get some credit if he’s the one who convinced Guerrero to run less.
Another random note: Guerrero’s patience at the plate did not fall off as dramatically as it might have appeared; his intentional walks dropped to 14 from an average of 25 a year his last four years in Montreal, but his rate of unintentional walks/at bats was 6.2%, as compared to 7.5% those prior four years.

Closing the Chapter

Sad but encouraging news yesterday, as the Mets let Al Leiter go after a desultory attempt to re-sign him on the cheap. Leiter will be remembered well by Mets fans not only for quality pitching but also for being an all-around gritty, emotional guy who took his job seriously, bonded with the fans and was always accessible to the media. No game he pitched was bigger or better than the utterly dominating 2-hit shutout he threw at the Reds in a 1-game playoff for the Wild Card in 1999.
On the other hand, the team needs a new direction, and tossing overboard a 39-year-old who’s been known to meddle in the GM’s business is a must. Leiter was still very effective this season, but his durability is questionable – he’s thrown less than 190 innings three of the last four years – and he’s playing an unsustainable game by nibbling around the corners, walking more batters and striking out fewer:

Year BB/9 K/9 K/BB
2000 3.29 8.65 2.63
2001 2.21 6.82 3.09
2002 3.04 7.58 2.49
2003 4.68 6.92 1.48
2004 5.03 6.06 1.21

It’s to Leiter’s credit that he’s managed the guile and guts to stay effective against such an evident pattern of declining ability, but he can’t keep it up much longer. Let the Yankees have him back.

Games of State

President Bush just introduced Condoleeza Rice as the new Secretary of State.
One question: Rice�s former deputy Stephen Hadley is taking over as the new National Security Advisor. Since one of the main jobs of that position is to coordinate between the often-contentious State and Defense Departments, won�t it be hard for Hadley to take sides against his former boss? While the conventional wisdom is that Rice replacing Powell will move the Bush Administration�s foreign policy to the right, I�m wondering if the interaction between Bush, Rice and Hadley will move the balance of power in Washington towards Foggy Bottom. Which may actually be a good thing, assuming � and it is a big assumption – that that Department has the President�s best interests in mind.
On the other hand, Rumsfeld might increasingly run rings around those two less experienced figures. We shall see.
More thoughts on all of this here, here and here.

France�s Nuanced Diplomacy

Speaking from formerly German-occupied territory, Jacques Chirac is again lecturing Tony Blair on the wisdom of taking sides against the United States in Iraq:

Britain gave its support but I did not see anything in return. I�m not sure it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favours systematically.


He sputters on:

It is like that nice guy in America � what�s his name again? � who spoke about �old Europe�. It has no sense. It�s a lack of culture to imagine that. Imagining that there can be division between the British and French vision of Europe is as absurd as imagining that we are building Europe against the United States. [Emphasis added]

Yes, who could imagine that? If I was going to make up snooty, hypocritical and overly sensitive things for Chirac to be saying I don�t think I could do a better job. Hopefully, the British retain the good sense to remember why they�ve been suspicious of the French since the dawn of Western Civilization. And remind me: what exactly has France gained by working tirelessly to fray European relations with the United States?
(That is, except for stories like this and hearings like this.)
UPDATE: Despite the ever-infuriating Chirac, it is good to hear that the Bush Administration is still working with France. After all, we still have shared interests with that country and European thought, in general, is larger than just one man, regardless of the size of his ego.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Australian Arthur Chrenkoff has a nice history lesson about why Poland is increasingly siding with the U.S. over France.

Exiting The Democrats

You have to take the national exit polls with a grain of salt, but it appears that this poll weights out to the correct result, and if so, a few things jump off the page:
1. Bush won white voters 58-41. He won white males by 25 points and white women by 11. Now, I know white people aren’t exactly a cohesive group, and that there’s something vaguely distasteful, even, about speaking of a “white vote”. But if you’re not even competitive with a demographic that constitutes 77% of the electorate, you got problems. Similarly, 81% of the electorate consists of Christians, and while the poll doesn’t combine Protestant and Catholic, if my (rusty) algebra is correct, Christians voted for Bush by a margin of 57-42. At the cross-section of the two majority groups, 61% of the electorate is white Christians, and they broke 63-36 for Bush. Again, you can’t afford to lose by that kind of margin with a majority voting bloc.
2. 49% of voters trusted Bush and not Kerry to fight terrorism, and those voters broke for Bush 97-3, such a decisive margin as to suggest that this issue was a deal-breaker for nearly half of all voters. In short, all else aside, Kerry was about 99% defeated just by the lack of voter trust in him as a war leader. This is supported by the fact that voters who trusted both candidates on terrorism broke for Kerry 75-24, while voters who trusted both candidates on the economy broke for Bush 61-38.

New Year, Same MVP

I can remember, back in the 1980s, when there used to be exciting and interesting arguments over the NL MVP Award – arguments about Gary Carter and Dale Murphy and Mike Schmidt and Pedro Guerrero and Andre Dawson and Ozzie Smith . . . these days, it’s just the same old thing every year – Bonds, Bonds, Bonds. There really wasn’t a way to deny him the award this season, not with an OBP over .600.

Blog ‘Em and Leave ‘Em

Jon Weisman has a great piece up on the longetivity and replaceability of baseball bloggers in light of the departures of Brian Gunn and Edward Cossette and the death of Doug Pappas. (Link via Pinto). Two thoughts:
1. At least bloggers go away when (and sometimes before) they run out of things to say; by contrast, professional sportswriting is chock full of people who repeat themselves endlessly and have lost the love of what they do, but keep going paycheck to paycheck.
2. My own focus on a variety of topics is what keeps me going here, in my fifth year doing this; I can always put down baseball for politics, politics for baseball, or go write about law or pop culture or just anything. It’s liberating and helps alleviate the need to say something fresh about the same topic every day.

The Democrats’ Dilemma – Part I: Communications

Since everyone and his brother is giving advice to Democrats, I might as well put in my own two cents as to the features of the Democratic Party that (1) might, possibly, be subject to change and (2) could help the Democrats in the long run if they were changed. I realize a lot of this will read as a criticism of Democratic candidates, but these really are some of the things I’ve found frustrating about Democratic campaigns, and I suspect that they are also things that turn off voters who are open to persuasion by Democrats; take this for what it’s worth. I’ll break down my analysis into three parts: Communications, Personnel, and Policy. Let’s start with the Communications issue:
1. Obfuscation is a defensive tactic, not a strategy:
Republicans from the mid-1960s down through today have tried to brand Democratic candidates as “liberals,” as a way of summarizing attacks on a broad range of positions on crime, defense, taxes, spending, social issues, etc. GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein became particularly well-known for this tactic, which can be very effective. There are basically four ways to respond to this tactic: (a) defend liberal positions on the merits; (b) pretend that the positions are not really liberal; (c) nominate candidates who do not take liberal positions; or (d) be evasive about the candidate’s positions.
Following the spectacular failure of (a) in the 1984 presidential election (when Mondale openly advocated raising taxes, among other positions) and (b) in the 1988 presidential election (when Dukakis proclaimed “competence, not ideology” was at issue), the Democrats have had to choose between (c) and (d). While Bill Clinton had sporadic success with (c) (notably on crime and trade issues), the party’s presidential and Senate candidates, at least – Clinton included – have increasingly leaned towards (d).
John Kerry is perhaps the pinnacle of this strategy, a man who got burned by the liberal label in his unsuccessful 1972 House race, and has spent the rest of his career dodging the label. He does so in two ways. One is to salt his record with votes that he can use to defend himself against charges of liberalism – which would be a convincing strategy if he actually took consistent positions on those issues, rather than a vote here or there, usually accompanied by his other tactic, weaselly disclaimers that leave you guessing as to where he actually stands. I dealt with this issue here and here. As I’ve noted, the Republicans have a time-tested counterattack when a Democrat does things like this to avoid taking clear and identifiable positions: call him a flip-flopper.
With each of the last three Democratic presidential candidates there has been endless speculation as to what they believe on a whole battery of issues, and while Clinton was able to eke out victories with this tactic, politicians without his unusual talents have had a much rougher go.
Now, let me make one thing clear: all politicians fudge, straddle, and flip-flop from time to time to create confusion in the public mind as to where they stand on issues. This is a useful tactic for a candidate who does not want to offend potential supporters on a particular issue, and I’m not suggesting that Democrats should avoid it altogether. But here we come to the Democrats’ weakness: mistaking a useful tactic for a strategy. You can obfuscate some of your positions so as to emphasize others, and you can obfuscate on small issues so as to emphasize big ones. But once voters start to catch on to the idea that you are playing hide-the-ball on multiple major major issues, you are toast. The place of the Iraq War in the War on Terror was the most central issue at stake in this year’s campaign, and nobody but maybe John Kerry himself believed that he had a single, clear and coherent position on the issue. That may have been, under the circumstances, a necessary compromise to keep his base from splitting in half, but it was death in Kerry’s efforts to broaden his appeal beyond Bush-haters to people who wanted a leader they could depend on to know where he stands. And the problem hasn’t been limited to presidential candidates either, as red-state Senate Democrats like Tom Daschle and Mary Landrieu have struggled to balance their moderate images at home with their fealty to liberal causes in Washington.
If the Dems are going to try to become a majority party, they need candidates who will get out there and lead on issues rather than fudging and trying to be all things to all people. It will require courage, discipline, avoidance of panic at temporary setbacks and the willingness to suffer bad press and risk losing some elections. Of course, this presupposes that their positions are actually capable of attracting popular support. But if the Democratic party has lost faith that its ideas can attract popular support, then this entire conversation is pointless. Isn’t it worth a try?
2. Biography is not a substitute for policy:
This is a second and related example of the Democrats taking a tried-and-true campaign tactic and trying to pass it off as a strategy, and another one in which Kerry represents a nadir. Again, all candidates use their biography when possible to shore up both the strong and weak points in their images. But what we’ve seen increasingly from Democrats is efforts to use biography as a shield to cover the candidate’s policy positions. Get asked about gun control? Don’t talk about the issue – go hunting! Get asked about war? Talk about your service record!
Leave aside for now the debate over whether the tendency to do this is just a feature of recent Democratic candidates and consultants or whether it’s driven by the party’s devotion to identity politics. As a practical matter, there are two problems with this approach. First, voters aren’t stupid; a dove with medals is still a dove, and a hunter who favors gun control is still in favor of gun control. Second, nobody has enough biography to cover every issue, and the need to have something personal to say on issue after issue is one of the roots of the exaggerations and resume-padding that got Gore and Kerry into so much trouble. Look at Bush and Cheney for a comparison: Bush’s bio story is well-known, but he rarely tries to connect it to a particular policy debate, and Cheney only reluctantly talks about himself at all despite having a genuinely impressive up-by-the-bootstraps story.
3. Forget Vietnam:
This goes with the issue above – voters just keep on rejecting combat veterans who aren’t right on policy. And I won’t rehash the whole Kerry Vietnam story here. But it goes deeper: the constant references to Afghanistan and then Iraq as “quagmires,” Ted Kennedy calling Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam” – don’t Democratic politicians and their allies in the media realize how sick Americans are of hearing about Vietnam, and how dated their worldview sounds? If there’s one rhetorical crutch the Dems need to drop, it’s Vietnam.
4. Voters want to be spoken to as adults:
This one is mostly a matter of speaking style, although it’s also an issue of substance: too many Democratic politicians (prime offenders include Gore, Gephardt and Hillary Clinton) talk to audiences like they are five years old. With the exception of Lamar Alexander I can’t think of a Republican who does this. Again, Cheney is a good model to imitate on this point (not that anyone has to go to his extreme) – you can tell when he gives a speech that he’s talking to you exactly as he would speak to a room full of senior advisers. That’s respect, and even if voters don’t put it into words, we appreciate it.
5. Don’t believe what you read in the papers:
The Kerry campaign spent much of the year reacting to newspaper headlines and stories on broadcast networks. On a few occasions, they got burned by believing that anything reported there would be backed up by evidence and widely digested and believed. In fact, a lot of the rage on the Left at the notion of ignorant voters is an inability to comprehend that some people out there don’t watch 60 Minutes and don’t believe everything they read in the NY Times. Much as Democrats may wish to deny the idea of liberal media bias, eventually they have to accept that they can’t just sit back and expect that the media will do their jobs for them and still produce a credible product.
6. Explain programs in terms of incentives:
Government programs are complicated; that’s just the way they are. When Democrats propose changes to programs or new programs, they often wind up choosing one of three ways to talk about them: either they oversimplify and just tell us what they intend the program to accomplish without explaining how it will work, or they talk up how much more money they will spend, or they start reeling off complex, wonkish details that put everyone to sleep.
In fact, one reason that I suspect that domestic policy was the dog that didn’t bark in this campaign was that John Kerry was never able to explain any of his policy proposals in a way that allowed people to understand them and compare them to President Bush’s.
Democrats should look at how Bush explains his proposals and take a lesson. With programs like private Social Security accounts and Health Savings Accounts, what Bush focuses on is how the incentives in the program work in favor of the citizen. People instinctively understand, for example, that a shift to private ownership of funds will give them more control. Of course, one might argue that plans to, for example, impose direct or indirect price controls on medical drugs can not be explained in terms of incentives without revealing their fundamental flaws.
7. People don’t like being called bigots:
The same-sex marriage flap is only the most recent manifestation of the tendency of pundits, bloggers, entertainers and the like on the Left – and to some extent politicians as well, notably John Kerry in his speech against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 – to refer to their opponents as driven solely by “bigotry and ignorance.” This position is especially sharp with regard to same-sex marriage, since the pro-same-sex-marriage argument depends on the idea that there is no rational basis grounded in anything but irrational bigotry for anyone to want to treat traditional opposite-sex marriage any differently from same-sex unions. The problem, of course, is that – even leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the debate for the moment – people tend to get defensive when their lifelong beliefs, especially their deeply-held religious beliefs, are branded as irrational superstition and bigotry. It’s not a strategy for winning hearts, minds, or votes, as the overwhelming rejection of same-sex marriage at the polls even in liberal Oregon showed.
8. Bloggers and pundits matter too:
On some of these points, notably the last one, I’m thinking as much about liberal bloggers, newspaper columnists, TV and radio personalities, and the like as I am about Democratic politicians. But one thing conservatives and Republicans have learned, sometimes to our grief, is that people look at the Right as a single entity, and tend to have trouble remembering what arguments they heard from President Bush and which ones they heard from Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson.
Put another way: for a lot of people, their most regular exposure to liberal ideas comes from the New York Times editorial page, or from Atrios, or from The Daily Show, or from CBS News. If those organs constantly blare the same theme – Bush is a liar and a draft dodger! – people will identify it with the voice of the Left. That doesn’t mean people should feel totally inhibited, especially on blogs, but if commentators on the Left think that the recent spate of “Jesusland” bashing, especially from the Times columnists, has no impact on the public’s view of Democrats, they are sadly mistaken. And, bloggers: remember, you may not have a huge audience, but your readers include people in Democratic Party circles, both in Washington and at the grass roots, as well as people in the media. You do have an influence on the debate, and don’t think that you can push anger and bile all day and pound the table for agendas that are not likely to fly with voters, and then wonder why the candidates you support can’t convincingly portray themselves as level-headed moderates, or why your party has a bad reputation on religious issues when you sneer constantly at people of faith. You want to shape opinion? You got it. Use it wisely.

Who The Hell is James Wolcott?

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair magazine refers to Glenn Reynolds as “[a] racist-t-shirt wearing professor of Creationism at Wayback University”. (Reynolds fires back here). I confess that I don’t have much of an idea who Wolcott is, other than this quickie tongue-in-cheek bio on his site and my generally dim view of the low journalistic standards of his magazine’s political hit jobs in the last several years. But you could hardly ask for a more extreme example of East Coast snobbery than to have a “columnist on media and pop culture” dismissing a guy like Reynolds as a know-nothing flat-earther. I mean, I’m certainly no worshipper of credentials as the sole basis for valuing a man’s opinions, but Wolcott appears to fancy himself to be, by definition, Reynolds’ intellectual superior simply because Wolcott is published in a glossy New York magazine and Reynolds lives in Tennessee, ignoring the fact that Reynolds is – in addition to his prolific internet profile – a respected and extensively published tenured law professor with a degree from Yale Law School and some depth of expertise on a staggering array of subjects. What is sadder is that I suspect that that self-image is reinforced by nearly everyone Wolcott knows.
I wouldn’t want to overgeneralize, but it’s not hard to see from extended observation that there are, at a minimum, more than a few people in the media world who think precisely the way Wolcott does: that a man who has succeeded in getting paid to be a full-time journalist must have more brains and sophistication than the people who have carved out careers in other endeavors, no matter how much more educated or accomplished those people are. And, of course, that attitude is precisely how journalists often wind up making hilarious errors when they try to cover specialized areas like the law, the military, etc., where a little bit of consultation with people who actually do the stuff for a living could have set them straight.