The Last Clooney Update

In February 08 George Clooney was at the height of his powers. Michael Clayton was up for 6 Oscars, including Best Picture, he himself was nominated for Best Actor, and Time Magazine ran a cover story calling him "The Last Movie Star". If "last", that would logically imply that he was the 'biggest', not to mention the 'only.'

I wrote a post suggesting that, perhaps, he's not a movie star at all. He is a good actor who appeared in some very good movies, but has neither the track record of iconic movies (think Bogey in Casablanca, African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon) nor a succesful enough box office record to merit that kind of praise.

It's been rough sledding since then. Leatherheads and Burn After Reading, combined, did less than $100 million at the box office, and were critical flops as well.

And in Hollywood, they seem to finally be catching on. A story last week in the LA Times said, about Will Ferrell:

He's in danger of becoming the comedy equivalent of George Clooney, someone who enjoys a great deal of goodwill but who isn't actually a real movie star…

Deficit-Shmeficit

A Coffee Klatsch Conversation


What follows is an email conversation among The Coffee Klatsch, a group I introduced to y’all in the last post. The participants are Yours Truly (Keatang), Cormie, JShin, and Stod.

I’ve lightly edited the transcript. The flow is occasionally awkward because some emails crossed each other and are not a direct reply to the one above. Also, I pick up the thread somewhat mid-stream - it started out as a discussion about possibly doing some group blogging, which led to a discussion about what topic we'd discuss, which led to the incredibly exciting subject of the federal deficit, which led to a bit of a free-for-all...

I hope you enjoy.


Cormie
Heck, let's just avoid politics, we hacked that stuff to death over the years. How about we all watch the the Elvis Costello interview with the Police on You Tube and start with, why does Sting so obviously hate Stuart?

Where does Elvis C. fit into the pantheon of great pop musicians?

Why is Mel Gibson having an eighth child with a new girlfriend?

Why do "Buffalo Wings" confuse Californians?

Why do parents fart so freely around their children?

Rush Limbaugh and drug addiction? (now here might be where both sides could opine, and keep it funny).

So many topics, so little time.

Keatang
Here's a potential topic, though one that may get a little outside our comfort zone. Actually, no, we'd all end up sounding like idiots. But still, I'm curious...

I've always been a deficit-shmeficit guy. Meaning: when others are worrying their little heads about the size of the federal deficit, I always say, deficit-shmeficit. I don't base this on any sort of rational understanding of how the federal debt impacts the economy generally, but more because, in my life as a voter we've gone from Ross Perot's the-sky-is-falling alarmism to Bush & Gore debating how to spend the surplus to the Age of Obama in which, according to one thing I read, we will triple the size of the Bush deficit.

And that's assuming some fairly optimistic things about the economy over the next few years. And it assumes that the spending doesn't even get worse with Democrats in complete and total control (an assumption that, in my opinion, would require that you have the IQ of trout).

Suddenly I'm not so deficit-shmeficit. I'm more like, holy spit, by the end of Obama's second term we are going to be so broke that Joe Biden will be in the White House kitchen preparing grilled cheese and PB&Js for state dinners.

JShin, meanwhile, has brought up the deficit more than once through the Bush years as a source of worry. And I'm guessing now that it’s his guy in office, he's more like, deficit-shmeficit...

So: are me and JShin both total hypocrites, changing our mind to suit our politics? Or our respective volte-faces somewhat defensible (mine because a trillion dollar deficit is one thing and a 3 trillion dollar deficit is another...and Shin's because who cares what the deficit is if Obama gets everything else right).

Thoughts?

JShin
I'm more deficit-shmeficit than I used to be, truth be told, but not because of Obama or Bush, but more because I want to see some money flowing right friggin now, if you know what I'm saying. I also don't understand the economy for a minute. Christ, like you said, we went from an economy where we had a ridiculous surplus just a few years after we thought we'd never dig out, and then not much later we're looking at the worst financial crisis in almost a century. Seriously, what makes sense? The economy is Orwellian to me. Up is down. Profit is loss. Greed is good. All that kind of carp.

And again, I think it does often come down to the color of the uniform. What can Cheney say about Obama's handling of the deficit now? Sure, he can rip him a new one for not aggressively interrogating alleged terrorists because it's something different than the way he did it, but Cheney was definitely a deficit-shmeficit guy, so he's got to walk the tightrope there.

The Democrats will surely spend, but they got a good head start going with the last eight years. For a conservative administration, they threw the crap around like they were Democrats. Dang. I should have loved Bush, but I just couldn't.

Cormie
Politics is still a tough topic for me in the klatsch. Back in the year 2000 there were at least 3 topics that we didn't discuss in our emails; deficits (didn't have 'em), torture (didn't do that), and photographing body bags at airports (nothing to see).

To begin any political discussion without starting with the ill cast of Bush's shadow over our lives in the present tense, is a willful act of amnesia, self delusion, or an abstract gift to evil men who should be in jail. If our national dialogue is still dishonest enough to allow Cheney to take credit for Sept 12th onward, while disavowing equal stewardship of Sept 11th, our fears so primal that we cannot stomach a terrorist in a maximum security prison on US soil; then why have dialogue at all? I'm a trout and you're all eagles. We've got the sky to talk about, why dwell in the muck?

Shin
Whoa, throwing down the friggin gauntlet. Looks like we have our pot-stirrer. Our Jane Curtin. Well, allright, Corms, you incorrigible slut, actually I don't have a good rebuttal. Cheney makes me want to vomit, and I may have mentioned pity for Bush, but I also pity some people that I really really can't stand and have done hurt to me or my children. So it's not like I've forgiven the btard or something....

Keatang
Okay then, no politics…how about that new Green Day album?

Stod
That's political, isn't it? Or at least, they swear a lot on it. One of my son's teachers or a friend's parent objected to the album being played in public somewhere because of the language (shows you how clued in I am here). My son really, really liked their last album - probably one of the fundamental albums of his lifetime – but he said he doesn't really like what he's heard off the new one.

Anyway, we could debate profanity on music cds. Actually, I might as well confess: I rented a best of Britney Spears album from the library! I hope no one sees it on my desk, but I confess, I always liked the song "Oops I Did It Again" and figured ah, why not rip it. Now that I listen to it, though, maybe it's not as good as the first time I heard it while driving into Las Vegas.

Cormie
Green Day. Possibly the one discussion that would drive me to talk politics. Here's what this trout thinks.

To talk about deficit concerns is naval gazing. We spend freely to assuage our fears, on bombs and prisons and non-stop rendition flights, but we have pangs of concern when it's saving jobs, homes or health care. We can talk all we want, but we are never more than one attack away from falling off the fiscal wagon. We need to manage our fear, insist that our politicians not fear monger, and learn to live in the world--not exempt from it.

Also. Spending 'got worse' with Republicans in complete control. I think it's fair to assume that this trajectory would've continued under a Republican administration. (It's not like Arnold has done much to change the trajectory that got a democrat recalled).We spend because we fear. We Americans like to privatize wealth and keep risks social. This cognitive dissonance is something we seem to be comfortable with, at least until China stops buying our currency.

We're selfish--money to ourselves good, money to others bad. We may change our minds when the next swine flu becomes a true pandemic and the 'consumer choice' of health care becomes a social issue as we find ourselves surrounded by 30 million uninsured carriers.

I have more, but need to get back to work.

Swing away, Keatang. I'm throwing high and inside.
Cormie McTrout

Keatang
Sorry for the delay in response - I took a sick day today. Spent the morning watching West Wing re-runs. Now there was a noble Democratic President in action - if only those evil Republicans would get out of his way. (In this morning's episodes, President Bartlett was trying to broker a Mid-East peace agreement, but House Republicans wouldn't support it unless he supported a tax credit. Jerks. Can't they see he's trying to save the world?)

More importantly, sorry for the trout crack. I meant it as a throw-off and not to offend. Let me state it more soberly: I believe ANY political party with control of the House, Senate, and White House will spend in an irresponsible manner. When the majorities are strong and filibuster-proof, that is more so. When there is a crisis, that is even more so. And yes, when it is the Democratic Party, look out. So to say deficits and spending concerns is navel gazing seems going too far. Surely there is a point where massive, unsupportable spending becomes dangerous.

Then again - maybe not. The Second World War was pricey and the United States economy seemed to rebound nicely after that. Deficits-shmeficits.

The bigger issue is this: are we allowed, in any way, to criticize any policy of the Obama Administration? Or are you saying that we should all just agree he's better than Bush and bless everything he does?

Two other notes: my wife told me last night that Billie Joe Armstrong said he's going to start giving more thought to how his lyrics affect his kids as they get older. And Stod: I hope you realize we're publishing this whole conversation on my blog. Britney Spears, huh?

Shin
Whoops, didn't realize we were already in blog world. I'll try to hold out on all my little "friggin's" and "carps" from here on.

Like I said, I'm a biiiig fan of Obama, but don't find any problem in having problems with his problems. I like and don't like the fact that pundits are always applauding his political savvy, always making the other guy stick his foot in his mouth first, and thus Obama smelling, well, unlike a foot. Not that I don't like the pundits saying that, but it makes me wary of Obama as a Machiavellian genius, who may be up to grabbing the reins that Cheney made more accessible to an American president. And I think he's been, for lack of a better expression, a bit limp-wristed around some of the current gay issues, most particularly gays in the military

Stod
You sick, too? I have a monster cold...so much writing to do but it's tough today. Two thoughts keep seeming very far apart. And now I've discovered that the Dodgers are playing the Cubs at Wrigley on the tele this afternoon! On right now. How nice it would be to make myself a hot toddy and just watch a ballgame. WGN is really destructive to my home work habits.

Another song I hesitate to admit that I like is "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry. The video is a hoot. I guess I go for that pop vampy stuff from time to time.

I think the deficits or whatever you'd call them at this point are very definitely a concern for the future of this country. I feel like we're living in Britain during WWII, when the war basically destroyed their treasury and the Americans took a good grip of Winston's balls and told him that the British Empire was dead, long live the American Empire. Time to learn Mandarin!

Shin
I don't see why we can't go politics. We would need comments like Cormie’s “I'm a trout and you're eagles” one to liven up a boggy blog day. I found it offensive in the same way that I found some of Keatang’s “please stop poohpoohing on Bush” comments. They titillate, which is perky and bouncy, which is good for the audience.

I was and am a firm believer that what this country needed -- more than it needed Anita Ekberg or Sophia Loren -- was Obama in that seat instead of McCain or many others. I am constantly soothed by his language. I always felt like a foreigner (not in an American or anti-American or that kind of sense, just linguistically) listening to Bush and I always felt less secure, in just a scared human kind of way after hearing him speak. It seems that we were on the brink of disaster and Bush just hoped that the disaster would hold off until after the elections. I don't know that, it's purely conjecture, but he seemed so remote at the end of his era, that it made me want to scream.

I'm glad that Obama has called torture what it is and said we won't do it, I'm not so concerned about not seeing more torture photos, I'm dumfounded that he hasn't done more about things like gays in the military, I'm concerned about the deficit, I pray each day that the stimulus moves something in my direction, I feel like the world situation is as volatile as ever, but I'm glad he's up there representing me and my fellows.

I don't know jack about Green Day, and Britney Spears makes me want to turn and run.

Cormie
Navel gazing, or perhaps it’s analogous to the purchasing of indulgences in 1546. We behaved poorly for a number of years, spending on unnecessary war and turning a blind eye to the supplemental budget requests that made the hemorrhage of money, from public to private hands, so conveniently opaque. Perhaps now we sleep better spending a few precious moments wondering about the well being of our yet to be sired grandchildren. We must be good people if we worry about such things, mustn't we? Perhaps its analogous to acid rain and global warming, situations brought about by enormous aggregation of individual poor behavior--Hummers in the driveway, McMansions in the newly drained everglades.

It's navel gazing because the only action point to each of these three things solely resides in the personal. We can worry about the national deficit, but we will have no effect on it. All we can do is live within our proper sense of proportion and humility and render ourselves immune to the deficit's effects. The payoff is muted.

A frugal family who lives within their budget and sets aside the rainy day retirement money can expect to bear more than their fair share of the ARRA, subsidizing the fools and dreamers who bought NINJA loans to finance their dream vacations, subsidizing the loan professionals who fleeced the lambs then doubled down with default swap bets that the lambs would bleed, subsidizing stupidity.

But what options do we have? I'd rather place my money on the bet that will pay off with assimilated, educated Americans who drive ambulances, teach schools, and contribute to the subjunctive hope that is America, than spend my dollars building higher walls and deeper moats to keep the preterite masses at bay. I'm with Garrett Keizer, and wish to live in a world where disposable income does not require the blood of disposable people.

To me, Obama gets a pass for now. He's been handed the largest shit sandwich I've ever seen. Smaller men would be choking on it. I'll hold off on criticizing until he starts trying to serve up some of his own.

And yes, he's improvising. He doesn't know what to do. Tim Geitner has no clue. For that matter, why are bankers deciding how to fix the banks? It's like asking a surgeon how to fix a backache, "why, surgery of course!" Ask a chiropractor and no doubt a different answer would be offered. Quite frankly, I'd like to stop asking Yale and Harvard graduates their opinions on anything.

Don't worry about the trout. I liked the trout.

Keatang
Largest shit sandwich? Hardly. I’d put Washington, Lincoln, Johnson (Andrew), Hoover, FDR, and Nixon on the list of Presidents who got handed Carnegie Deli whoppers compared to Obama’s Subway footlong.

Three of those guys made it to the pantheon and three of them, well, not so much.

The three of them that made it to the pantheon may have also wished to live in a world that did not require the blood of disposable people, but it didn’t work out that way. FDR presided over a war that killed 50 million people around the world. Lincoln’s war killed 600,000 Americans. Washington, of course, was a peacetime President, but a wartime General with no Jeffersonian illusions about war and peace.

Obama’s a historic President at a historic time and I like the idea of debating if he’s making the right decisions. But I have no interest in playing the role of Roman centurion, shouting up to Obama “If you are the son of God, come down from the cross”. You want to give him a pass, we’ll give him a pass. After all (as he tells us in every press conference) it’s not his fault. (I have to add, though, that in all my Lincoln reading, I can’t recall Lincoln bringing up Buchanan at every turn…)

Next topic? Ah, but feel free to take last licks…

Shin
Just a quick rebuttal for Cormie, in spite of agreeing with your comments (FDR and Lincoln were dealing with Colossal Poo Whoppers. Corms mentioned the largest McTurdwich he'd "ever seen," so, in a sense, he is correct there, too.

Cormie
The tone-deaf nature of email has always made it a challenge, for me at least, to write politics. Perhaps I'm too shy about using the ASCII smiley face. My head was in deficits, not George bashing, and my opinion is that we are too easy on ourselves, too forgetful of how we got to where we are, and not willing to make hard choices about what needs to be given up when the belt needs be tightened.

Perhaps my last two years at an eco company have radicalized my vernacular and I'm more shrill than I realize. Perhaps it's why Malcolm Gladwell, the Sports Guy, and myself, all suggest staying away from politics.

As for shit sandwiches, I guess I could cast the net wider than my email's intent, my lifetime. When I look at a destabilized Pakistan, and the regional super-power Iraq, and the bellicose crackpot North Korea, I'd suggest that, if nukes were an ingredient in the sandwich, the closest sized shit sandwich was primitive (proto) man staring up at the K-T asteroid. And really, in regards to Obama, banks, Yale.....if our politics can't envision a world where our good fortune doesn't have a concomitant dedication to the health and well being of all peoples and planet, then to hell with both parties. We can find a better way, or else the burblings of a starving third world, choking on our fumes and learning to read in a madrassa, will find the way for us. :-)

The Coffee Klatsch

Way back in, oh, 1993 or so, my company, a San Francisco based magazine publisher, installed an email system. This brought a wonderful improvement to workplace communication – and a new way to gossip and b.s. with co-workers. It was the first truly valuable cyberslacking tool.

Soon, I and three other guys – Cormie, JShin & Stod - began an email conversation, one that that has continued to this day. Early on, we gave ourselves the not-particularly original name of The Coffee Klatsch, and it stuck. By the end of our collective time at this company, we were geographically scattered – to New York, Western Massachussets, San Francisco, and San Mateo, CA. Today, none of us work there. But the email conversation goes on.

(Like the Beatles, we had a fifth member in the early days – two of them, in fact. Snowman was the first, JPoth the second. A few guest players – Billy Prestons, if you will – joined in the occasional thread, but it was mostly the four of us.)

What did we talk about? Well, let’s see…

Baseball – Mets, Giants, and Red Sox; the usage and value of statistics; pre-season predictions; the morality of some kinds of cheating (steroids) vs. others (spitballs); and more

Football – Giants and 49ers mostly, with a bit of Raider love

Women – our co-workers, and in one memorable moment, Jennifer Aniston

Music – all over the board, from Townes Van Zandt to Steely Dan to Billy Joel to the San Jose Symphony

Fiction – a heavy emphasis on Cormac McCarthy, but with many many other authors from Thomas Pynchon to JK Rowling

History – a lot of Lincoln, a strong dose of John Adams, a dash of the Federal Road, and much more

Kids – we have 9 between us

Politics -

Ah, politics. The damn thing nearly cracked up over politics. Politics was always a core issue in the conversation, with our worldviews ranging from Far Left to Center Right. In the 90's, when the country's primary political argument was about the biological nature of that damned stain, we had a lot of fun with political conversation. But the Bush years brought a level of passion and acrimony to politics that hadn’t been seen in this country since the Vietnam War. And as our disagreements heightened over the overall Bush response to terrorism, well, things got tense, and we retreated to the sanctuary of sports and music.

But now it is the dawning of the Age of Obama, the man who promised us a post-partisan world. And I wondered if, perhaps, we could start talking politics again. So we started an email conversation that I thought I’d share with you.

But first, here are the four contributors (I wrote Stod's and my bio; JShin and Cormie wrote their own):

Keatang : Well, this is my blog, so maybe you know me already. Click here for a link to a post that I wrote on the anniversary of FreeTime which gives you an idea of who I am and what I write.

JShin: Cathy to Cormie's Patty, if you go back far enough to remember the Patty Duke Show, i.e., "one pair of matching bookends, different as night and day," ideologically fairly closely planted on the spectrum, but stylistically large lakes -- if not oceans -- apart. Good cop to Stod's crazy cop. I love these guys, but I also love to hate 'em, which I guess makes us good blog fodder.

Cormie: Born comfortable on the left coast, Cormie got angry in the mid 80s and never quite recovered. He left a middle middle finger dangling from a tree on the bank of the Yaquina river in the hopes that George W. Bush would someday take up rafting

Stod: Stod is a writer/editor with one foot firmly planted in the future (he writes about advanced technology from Silicon Valley) and one in the past (he does so in an office piled high with old newspapers). He believes Glenallen Hill is the most underrated outfielder of the 1990’s, and still blames Robbie Robertson for the breakup of The Band.

So anyway, in the next couple of day or so I’ll post the first Klatsch Convo on the exciting topic of: The Federal Deficit! Betcha can’t wait…

This Will Kill You

Some friends of mine have a new book out – and what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t shamelessly plug it?

Harvey Newquist (or as he’s known in print, HP) and Rich Maloof have just published This Will Kill You: A Guide to the Ways in Which We Go (MacMillan). Jim Shinnick, designer extraordinaire illustrated the book. I can’t improve upon the promotional copy:

No other book has ever peaked under the Grim Reaper's robe in such a straightforward and irreverent way. With a foreword by a physician at the Mayo Clinic , an afterword by a funeral director, lists of history’s most notable deaths, and a unique death rating system, everything you need to know about the ways in which we go are included in these pages.

I don’t know Mr. Maloof but can vouch for the wit and creativity of the other two. HP has published books on such diverse topics as space, the internet, guitar gods, and neurology. Jim is the finest designer I’ve worked with in twenty years of publishing (if you need good design work, check out his work here).

I suggested to them that they promote the book via an elaborate literary hoax – specifically, that they should fake their own deaths in ways featured in the book. But they don’t seem to be going for it.

Anyway, click here and get yourself a copy.

Update: I just bought my copy at Borders on Park and 57th and it was prominently featured in the 'Recent Releases' table as soon as you walk in.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Dave's - and all the other chains too

I wrote an article for the May 18th issue of Nation's Restaurant News.  I submitted it with the above title, but the editors changed it.  The rest of it is pretty much unchanged from what I submitted.

Anyway, click here if you're interested.  

This, That, and the Other

My last post was March 30th, which means for the first time since I started this thing in 2007 I've gone a whole month without posting. Sorry, but as Luther says to the parking garage attendant in 48 Hours, "I've been BUSY!!"*

* That line is not funny, creative, or even relevant to the plot; but the actor says it with such freaky vehemence it has become an oft-repeated crack among my friends.

Actually, I haven't been that much busier than usual, but I finally got talked into joining Facebook and Twitter and have wasted valuable time there that I should have spent in self-indulgent twaddle here.

I do have a piece coming out in the May 18th issue of Nation's Restaurant News, where I work in my non-FreeTime. I'll link to that in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, a few things I've been thinking about lately...

Divisional Mirrors

Has anybody else noticed that the AL East and the NL East are built exactly the same? Each division has:

• A New York team in a new stadium that buys up the most expensive free agents and crashes when the leaves turn (Mets and Yanks)
  
• A recently crowned World Champion from a city that was a big deal during the American Revolution (Phillies and Red Sox)
  
• An underpaid Florida team with lots of nice young talent and an apathetic fan base (Marlins and Rays)
  
• A crappy doormat team located near our nation’s capital (Nationals and Orioles)
  
• A team from a mid-size city that won multiple titles in the 90’s but has struggled recently (Braves and Blue Jays)
  

Okay, the last one is a bit of a reach, but the others are kind of interesting, no? Yeah, you're right, it's not that interesting. Let's try something else...

Cultural Observations: Towards a Theory of Snobbery

A few years back I read an article in the NY Times that got my attention. (I’ve googled and yahooed away for this thing but can’t find it) The basic idea was this: professional musicians are less snobby about music than music fans. Music fans get all hung up on genres and cool factors, whereas for musicians it’s all about the music. Supremely cool musicians are sometimes fans of supposedly square ones. Miles Davis dug Bing Crosby. Robbie Robertson and the Band saw genius in the perfectly crafted pop songs of Neil Diamond, whereas their own fans couldn’t see past the sequins and clunky lyrics (“I am a chair?”)

A friend of mine is a professional musician and I asked him if he agreed with this. Here is his response:

Musicians, at least the ones I know and work with, like stuff that is interesting regardless of niche. The folks I know in the Berkeley Symphony still rave about the Metallica collaboration a few years back, and the Zappa works in the 90s. My best gig two years back was playing with the Santa Rosa Symphony behind Beatlemania. The chills I got playing the car horn while 4 Beatle lookalikes sang Penny Lane in front of me. What a day.

One exception--none of us like gangsta rap. No artistry or musicality.

One surprise--classical musicians and jazz musicians will rave on and on about Primus

I see something similar in the restaurant business. Foodies are deeply snobby towards chain restaurants whereas actual culinary professionals are often impressed by the work of chains. They know, in a way that mere foodies never could, that rolling out a good-tasting, low-cost, consistent dish in hundreds or even thousands of locations takes impressive culinary ability.

More importantly, they focus on the food itself, and not the idea of what the food is supposed to represent.

Does this apply in other arts? I suspect so - critics and cinephiles may mock big-budget movies, but I wonder if people in the movie business understand that the talent of, say, James Cameron is rarer than the talent of Alexander Payne.

Literature is an exception. I suspect the museum arts like painting and sculpture are too, but am getting well outside my comfort level here.

I'm still working on this theory (hence the "Towards" in the title) but wanted to get the conversation started.

Reading Recommendations

• Portfolio magazine folded last week, two years and $100m after Conde Nast launched it. Portfolio had its moments, and one of those was this excellent piece by Michael Lewis about the end of Wall Street. It's worth printing out, getting a comfy seat, and reading.
• When Patrick O'Brian died a few years ago, devoted fans of his Aubrey/Maturin series (the basis for the Russell Crowe film Master and Commander) went into mourning. If you're one of those, I'd like to recommend James Nelson's "Revolution at Sea" trilogy. Yes, Nelson is a bit of a copycat, but he knows his seamanship, and since its the American revolution rather than the Napoleanic wars, it has the advantage of writing about people, places and battles I'm more aware of. O'Brian blurbed his first book, too.
• Also worth checking out is Christopher Buckley's blog on the Daily Beast. Buckley is the son of conservative icon William Buckley who shocked the conservative establishment with his endorsement of Obama. Anyway, his writing fills me with despair - I know I'll never be that good. But I read him anyway...

The Next Lines Flick

Like many males of my generation I have millions of movie lines in my head, many of them from flicks that starred SNL alumni. Animal House, Caddyshack, Fletch, Stripes, The Blues Brothers - my friends and I can spend hours together conversing in nothing but movie lines.

A handful of movies from the last decade have made it into this pantheon as well. The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, and pretty much the entire Will Ferrell catalogue.

There is a trailer out now for a movie called The Hangover.  The producers have either put every single funny moment in the trailer, or its going to be one of the funniest guy flicks ever made.

One reason to hope that the movie will live up to its trailer's promise: the trailer leaves open the mystery of what actually happened the night before. If the filmmakers deliver there, we may have a comedy classic on our hands.

March Madness: Heaven without the Stars

A while back I wrote a piece called Swimming is Boring in which I made the case that swimming was, well, boring. Sure, Michael Phelps was a huge star in the middle of an awesome accomplishment, but the actual sport – white guys swimming back and forth – was kind of boring.

Is it possible that the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is the opposite? The actual games are thrilling. Anybody who watched Nova-Pitt or Siena’s double overtime victory over Ohio State can attest to that. But the players – I’m sorry, scholar athletes – are, um, how do I put this? Let's just say you should enjoy them now, because if recent history is any guide, these guys won't be tearing up the NBA anytime soon.

This wasn’t always the case. For a long time the NCAA tournament was a showcase for future NBA legends, a place to see players on the verge of becoming the greatest athletes in the world.

MOP Tops

From 1955 to 1961 the winners of the Most Outstanding Player (MOP) of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament were:

1955: Bill Russell

1956: Hal Lear

1957: Wilt Chamberlain

1958: Elgin Baylor

1959: Jerry West

1960: Jerry Lucas

1961: Jerry Lucas

Pretty impressive, huh? Not only did all of them but Lear make the Hall of Fame, they were each honored in 1996 as being among the 50 Greatest Players in NBA history. Plus, while Jerry Lucas was winning MOPs the best player in college hoops was Oscar Robertson, who appeared in two Final Fours. That run was nearly equaled in 1979-1984:

1979: Magic Johnson

1980: Darrell Griffith

1981: Isiah Thomas

1982: James Worthy

1983: Hakeem Olajuwon

1984: Patrick Ewing

That's 5 more members of the NBA's 50 Greatest (and the 6th, Griffith, won NBA Rookie of the Year). That's not counting Indiana State's Larry Bird, who faced Magic Johnson in the 79 title game, or Clyde Drexler, Olajuwon's teammate at Houston. Oh, and the year Worthy won the MOP the title-winning shot was hit by his freshman teammate, kid named Jordan.

In the 30 years between 1955 and 1984, the MOP was won by a future Hall of Famer 15 times! (That's not counting 2-time MOP Bill Walton who won an NBA Finals MVP and was named to the NBA's Fifty Greatest - but isn't in the Hall of Fame).

Starless Nights at Today's Tourney

But don't look for today’s NBA superstars in a March Madness highlight film.

Lebron and Kobe are the monster stars of today’s NBA, but neither played college ball. Tim Duncan and Shaquille O’Neal had distinguished college careers, but neither played in a Final Four.

Chris Paul made it to one Sweet 16. Kevin Garnett and Dwight Howard skipped college. Steve Nash won a first round game with Santa Clara, then jumped to the NBA. Chris Bosh spent a year at Georgia Tech then turned pro. Dirk Nowitzki and Yao Ming came from abroad.

Of today's big stars, only Dwyane Wade played in the Final Four. But Kansas whipped his Marquette team by 33 in the Semis, so it wasn’t exactly a game for the ages.

As for the MOPs since 1984? Hoo boy. Glen Rice had a 15-year career, going to 3 All Star games. Carmelo Anthony has made two All Star teams and has a shot at a good career. But after that it's pretty grim. Mostly a bunch of guys who barely played in the NBA, much less starred.

Who Cares?
Does any of this matter? Probably not. The sport’s popularity continues to surge, for a bunch of reasons.

First of all, there is the power of the office pool. More than five million brackets were filled out on espn.com, including one by Barack Obama (I hope he’s better at his day job). Don't ever bet against a sport that has a huge gambling component.

Second, there is the built-in renewable fan base of the student populations of hundreds of Division I schools.

Third, great sporting events don't need future legends to be great. The Olympics prove that every four years, never more so than the Miracle on Ice team.

And finally, as someone who has been lucky enough to have gone to a Final Four/Championship weekend (North Carolina's 2005 title), I can tell you it is a very special event.

Still, something has been lost in the process. When casual fans like me think back to the 1998 NCAA title game (featuring Most Outstanding Player Jeff Shepard! And leading scorer Michael Doleac!), it won’t be with the same recollection of those great tournaments of the mid-80's.

The new one-and-done rule means that future Kobes and LeBrons have to play one season of college ball. So maybe we’ll get a glimpse of these undisciplined freshman on the way to NBA riches. But don't get your hopes up - even Magic and Bird didn't do their thing as freshmen.

Ah, who cares? Three of my Final Four teams are alive and if North Carolina takes the title I’ll win my office pool. Go Tar Heels!

Yanks & Rebs

What do Robert E. Lee and Derek Jeter have in common?


For a couple years now I’ve been wrestling with an important question - why do Yankee fans hate Alex Rodriguez so much?

It’s not because of the steroids. He was being booed at Yankee Stadium long before the steroids story broke. And admitted steroids users like Andy Pettitte and Jason Giambi have been welcomed back with open arms.

It’s not because he hasn’t won a championship. Don Mattingly never won a championship or even led his team to the playoffs, and is far more beloved than many players who did.

It’s not because he hasn’t performed up to expectations. He wins the MVP every other year.

It’s not because he doesn’t play hard.

It’s not because he’s a really bad guy. Yeah, he has some annoying personality traits, but he doesn’t carry loaded guns to nightclubs or watch dogs kill each other for fun. Besides, arrogant image-conscious super-jocks are the norm, not the exception.

Is it because he has played poorly in the post-season? Yeah, that’s part of it, certainly. But the Yankees as a team have been so thoroughly awful in the post-season since Mariano blew the save in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, it wouldn’t have much mattered if he played a bit better. (The Yankees led that pivotal game 2-0 till the 5th inning, thanks to a 2-run home run by…Alex Rodriguez).

It’s tempting to say it is some combination of all the above. That would be an easy explanation and it’s mostly true. But there is a bigger picture here – and I think I know what it is.

The real reason Yankee fans hate Alex Rodriguez so much is that…well, let me tell you a story about the Civil War.

The Lost Cause

The Confederate States of America was, for a “country” that existed all of four years, quite a patriotic place. The Confederates believed in themselves. They believed in their cause. And they absolutely believed they were going to win the Civil War. It’s 150 years later and some folks in the Deep South still wave Confederate flags and put “Hell No, We Ain’t Forgettin’” bumper stickers on the back of their pick-ups. All this for a nation that spent its entire abbreviated existence fighting a war it lost.

So you can imagine how they felt right after the war ended. They were angry and confused and needed to blame someone. One could argue that Robert E. Lee would receive some of the blame. It was Lee, after all, who advocated the strategy that lost the war.

Lee believed the South should engage the Union in massive set-piece battles. If they won enough of them, he reasoned, the North would lose their will to fight, European nations would recognize the Confederacy, and the South would win the war.

And it nearly worked. At Bull Run and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville the South showed they could whip the Yankees (the Union army kind; not the Bronx Bombers kind). War support in the Union wavered. European diplomats watched closely. But Lee, who was so gifted at getting the measure of his opponents on the field, underestimated the lanky bearded fellow in the White House. While Lee methodically ground down Northern war support with bullets and cannon balls, Abraham Lincoln built it back up with words, words, words. Union armies stayed on the field, Europe stayed on the sideline, and the South ultimately lost.

You can make a very good case that Lee should have followed the strategy that George Washington followed in the Revolutionary War. Washington knew he was outnumbered and outgunned. But he also knew that he didn’t have to win the war – he just had to avoid losing. So GW avoided set-piece battles at all costs, nipped at British ankles when he could, kept his armies in the field with minimal losses, and finally struck at Yorktown when absolutely everything was in his favor. Checkmate.

By contrast Lee, an aggressive and pugnacious general chose to fight one battle after another. And he lost. So he should get some of the blame, right? No way. Lee was the great hero of the South, the master of those early victories

Therefore, Jefferson Davis took the fall. He became a disgraced figure in the South in the years after the war. Not a single ounce of blame could fall upon the majestic silver-maned head of Robert E. Lee.

Yankee Doodle Dandy
What does any of this have to do with the booing Alex Rodriguez is treated to at Yankee Stadium?

Let me take you back to November 4, 2001, at approximately 11:38 PM EST. Mariano Rivera took the mound in the bottom of the 9th with a 2-1 lead in hand. Three more outs and the Yankees would win their 5th title in 6 years.

It was certain the Yankees were going to win that night, and it was starting to seem as if the Yankees were always going to win. Baseball would become like tennis in the Federer era – one great champion would win nearly every title.

But Mariano blew the save, of course and the Diamondbacks won. And the Angels won the next year and the Marlins the next. Then came the awful collapse against the Red Sox (2 more Mariano blown saves), then the 3 consecutive 1st round losses, and then finally missing the playoffs entirely in 2009.

Yankee fans are not happy about this. They were supposed to win all – or at least most – okay, some of the titles. But despite signing every monster free agent available, despite the gap between them and the 2nd highest paid team growing every year, they enter their 9th straight season without a title.

Who to blame? Well, one could argue that the likely candidates would be Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

How has Mariano done the last 8 years? In 2001 he became the first closer in baseball history to blow a Game 7, 9th inning save, the ultimate blown save. In the catastrophic 2004 ALCS collapse he blew not one, but two saves, both series-clinchers. Has he pitched well? Yes. Has been clutch? Ah, no.

As for Jeter, he reached his peak as a player in 1999 when he hit .349 with 24 homers and 102 RBIs. Or if you prefer sabermetric numbers an OBP/SLG/OPS of .438/.532/.970. Jeter dropped off in 2000 (.339/15/73 and .416/.481/.897) and again in 01 and 02. During the Yankees 8 year title drought Jeter has had only great offensive season (2006) and never hit again the way he did in 1999.

People are always telling me that you can’t measure Derek Jeter with statistics – you can only measure him by the little things he does to help his team win. I guess he hasn’t done quite as many little things the past eight years.

What you end up with is all this Yankee fan frustration and it has to go somewhere. But none of it can fall on the heads of Jeter and Rivera, or even Posada. Very little can fall on the heads of the lesser free agents the Yankees have collected this century. Ownership is essentially off the hook – the Boss has won too many titles and is too frail now to catch any heat. Management, in the form of Torre and Cashman, took some criticism, but they too have a bunch of titles they can claim some credit to.

And so all this rage falls on the head of one person – the guy who far and away has the best single season on the team every year. Alex Rodriguez is the Jefferson Davis of the New York Yankees.

And if you think this is a lot of words to expand on such a meaningless subject, let me just say I'm a Mets fan who remembers the 2000 World Series...and Hell No, We Ain't Forgettin'.

The Death of Rationalization

[A slightly different version of this piece appears in the February 16 edition of Nation's Restaurant News.]


In the 1983 film The Big Chill, Michael (Jeff Goldblum) and Sam (Tom Berenger) have the following exchange:

Sam: You're rationalizing.

Michael: Don’t knock rationalizations. I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.

Sam: Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex.

Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?


I thought of that exchange at lunchtime on January 5th while contemplating the menu board at Cosi. It was the first day back to work after the New Year, and I was on the classic New Year’s Resolution Diet. Five straight weeks of holiday feasting and I was tipping the scales at – well, it doesn’t matter exactly what I was tipping the scales at. Let’s just say that if you were a gambler who bet the Over, you won.

So on the first lunch day of the work year, I headed to Cosi on 56th Street in Manhattan for a salad. The salad would not only begin the process of creating a newer, slimmer me, it would also make me feel better about myself. After all, what could be a healthier life choice than a salad for lunch?

That’s when I saw the menu board.

You see, New York City has joined the list of U.S. municipalities that have enacted menu labeling laws, requiring chain restaurants with a certain number of units to post nutritional information. So I was now fully aware of how many calories each and every salad contained.

The Cosi Signature Salad for example, a tasty confection with mixed greens, fruit, nuts and gorgonzola was 611 calories. But, the menu helpfully informed me, I could “Lighten Up” – meaning, I could halve the cheese and swap out the sherry-shallot vinaigrette for the low-fat sherry-shallot vinaigrette, and that would lower my calorie count to 371. But not so fast - the warm artisan bread that comes with the salad is an additional 211 calories.

Now I’m the kind of guy that enjoys a good rationalization around food. I like to order the Cobb Salad, loaded with eggs, bacon, cheese, maybe a creamy dressing, and then say to my wife over dinner, “I’m hungry. I only had a salad for lunch.”

But menu labeling is putting the kibosh on that.

There are some interesting philosophical, political, and economic debates around menu labeling, and I’ve been following them with interest. Issues of freedom, personal choice, consumer protection and even culinary creativity all come into play. (Not to mention the fact that it probably doesn't work: years of nutritional labeling on consumer packaged goods have not made America any thinner).

More importantly, as a person who draws his paycheck from the restaurant industry, I’m nervous about any regulation that could put more pressure on restauranters, who are suffering dearly as people cut back on eating out.

But none of that concerned me as I stared at the menu. I wanted to have a salad with lettuce and fruit and an exotic dressing. I wanted my full serving of gorgonzola and my tasty artisan bread – and I wanted to feel that I had made a healthy choice. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Menu Police wanted to make darn sure that I knew exactly how many calories that was going to cost me (822). He was taking away my rationalizations. If the Cosi Signature Salad was 822 calories, I shudder to think what my precious Cobb Salad goes for.

So I lightened up, cut the caloric intake to 582. And felt a little bit guilty with each nibble of bread.

Oh, and at 4pm I was starving. I grabbed a bag of candy from the vending machine and scarfed it down with nary a glance at the label. It was delicious.

Sour Grapes

A couple of bitter, whiny Super Bowl observations from a Giants fan who still can't believe Plax shot himself...

The Greatest Ever?
Everyone from Roger Goodell to Peter King to NBC is rushing to call SB43 the "greatest ever". Really?

The greatest thing in sports is the upset. There's a reason every sports movie ever made - from Rocky to The Bad News Bears to Hoosiers - is about upsets. Even the movies that don't seem to be about upsets - think Bull Durham - are about the underdog struggling for some measure of respect.

We remember Broadway Joe's guarantee and Dwight Clark's catch and the Miracle Mets and the 04 Sox because they weren't supposed to win.

Last year, the Wild Card Giants beat the undefeated Patriots with a 4th quarter TD drive that included Manning-to-Tyree. This year, the heavily favored #1 seeded Steelers going for their 6th title beat the 9-7 Cardinals, one of the most legendarily inept franchises in professional sports history. Yesterday was the very opposite of an upset, whereas SB42 was the greatest upset since Al Michael asked us if we believe in miracles.

And while yesterday's finish was amazing, it wasn't much of a game before then, was it? The teams combined for 18 penalties and 162 penalty yards, both good for second most ever. And according to Boomer Esiason, the refs could have flagged the Cardinals on every play for holding.

Everybody just relax on this "greatest game ever" nonsense.


Steelers, Cards, Ravens, Eagles Share Something
Another Giants thought...Peter King did his year-end Fine Fifteen this morning and ranked the Giants 7th. Obviously Steelers and Cardinals are 1/2, and I get you have to go 3/4 for the Eagles/Ravens. Then he goes Titans 5th . Okay, defensible so far.

Then - the Patriots 6th. You know, the Patriots - who didn't make the playoffs. The Patriots - whose schedule was softer than Matt Lauer's Obama interview. The Patriots - who had 6 games against playoff teams this year and went 2-4. (One of those wins came against the Dolphins, who beat the Pats 38-13 earlier in the season; the other came against the Cardinals, in a game that was meaningless to Arizona).

Then the Giants 7th.

I know I know I know I know I know I know IT DOESN'T MATTER where Peter King ranks the Giants. I know I know. Believe me, I know.

Still, let me leave you with this fun fact. Two weeks ago the Eagles, Cardinals, Ravens, and Steelers all gathered for Championship weekend. What do those four teams all have in common?

All four of them lost to the Giants this season. Has this ever happened in NFL history? I'm too lazy to do the research (so much for your stubborn facts, Keatang!), but I strongly doubt it.

In fact, the Giants went 6-1 against playoff teams this year. And the only team they lost to was one they had already beaten (Eagles), and it was the week the Plax thing broke and it was a fairly meaningless game for the Giants. But I'm not bitter.

Pitchers and catchers report in 12 days.

"Billy Powell...On the Piano"

Billy Powell, the keyboardist for Lynyrd Skynyrd, died this week at the age of 56. That’s him, with the bird in hand.

Skynyrd has seen more tragedy than the Kennedy family. Ronnie Van Zandt and Steve Gaines died in rock and roll’s second most famous plane crash in 1977. Guitarist Allen Collins was paralyzed in a car accident in 1986 and was dead from complications four years later, at 38. Bassist Leon Wilkeson was found dead in his hotel room in 2001, age 49, from “natural causes”. Powell becomes the 5th member of the band* that won’t qualify for a senior discount at the movies. That’s a high mortality rate, even for a band that had 7 members in its standard lineup.

Lynyrd Skynyrd is the anti-Spinal Tap. Whereas Spinal Tap’s drummers die in large numbers, in Skynyrd everyone but the drummers die. Bob Burns and Artimus Pyle continue to march to their own beat.

* My definition of “the band” includes any one in the lineup for the 5 studio albums and 1 live album released between 1973 and 1977. The army of players that have joined the group since its reformation in 1987 do not qualify. In fact, with Powell’s death, only one original member is in the band that calls itself “Lynyrd Skynyrd”. Can we please stop this charade now?

I met Billy Powell once. It was the fall of 1981 and my friends and I went to see the Rossington Collins Band at the now-defunct North Stage Theater on Long Island. I grew up on the Island, and for some cultural reason I can’t explain, Long Island was a big fan base for Southern Rock* bands. The Allman Brothers famously did an annual New Year’s Eve concert at the Nassau Coliseum. Marshall Tucker’s last performance together was on the island. Even minor southern rock bands like .38 Special would sell out the Coliseum.

* Southern Rock as a term was always a bit of a misnomer. The three aforementioned bands, for example, are all quite different in their influences. The Allmans were very much a blues rock band, Marshall Tucker almost a straight country group, and .38 Special more an 80’s pop band. The Allmans had more in common with Eric Clapton than they did with Marshall Tucker and .38 Special was closer to Bon Jovi than Skynyrd. Bands like Creedence and the Eagles shared a lot of musical territory with so-called Southern Rock bands but came from California and avoided the tag. Another example of why musical labels are ultimately useless.

Where was I? Right, the North Stage theater, November 1981. My friends and I got there early and found ourselves in an alley next to the theater, ogling the tour bus. Suddenly, the stage doors opened and out walked…The Lynyrd Skynyrd Band! Sure, technically, it was the Rossington Collins Band but RCB was formed by the surviving members of Skynyrd and they were all there. Gary Rossington, Allen Collins, Billy Powell, Leon Wilkeson.

Remember, this is 1981. MTV had aired its first music video in August of that year but hadn’t made their cultural mark yet. It was 15 years before internet ubiquity, 20 before Wikipedia, and 25 before YouTube and concert sites like Wolfgang’s Vault. Even VCRs were rare, so concert movies like The Last Waltz and The Song Remains the Same could only be seen in rare midnight shows at select theaters.

So if you loved a rock band – and I loved Skynyrd – the only source of information was the albums. We would study the liner notes and stare at the pictures, filling in gaps with bits of information we picked up in Rolling Stone or the radio. Except for monster acts like the Beatles, the average music fan had seen very little video footage of their favorite acts.

And suddenly these people – these people whose pictures I had stared at for hours on end – were walking right by me! Right by me and into the diner next door!

What to do? We didn’t want to interrupt our heroes, but we also couldn’t let this moment pass. Luckily one of my friends, Brian Buchauer, had courage for the rest of us. He walked into the diner, up to the table, and introduced himself to the band. The four of us shook the hands of whichever band members were in reach. And the one who stood out the most was Billy Powell – for the simple reason that the same fingers that played the legendary piano piece on Freebird live – not to mention my all-time favorite piano solo on Skynyrd’s cover of J.J. Cale’s Call Me the Breeze – were covered with rings.

I’ve seen some famous people in my life. I was in a store with Julia Roberts. I rode an elevator with Pete Townsend. I had a 5-minute conversation with Joe DiMaggio. I even spent the weekend with Miss America (true story, but for another day). But that moment will remain my favorite brush with fame.

Brian Buchauer, rest his soul, was killed a few years later in a motorcycle accident. Fitting, perhaps, that I’ll always associate him with this band that has seen so much tragedy.


[hat tip to Brian's science fair partner Windex, who was with me in that diner 28 years ago (damn we're getting old!) and had some input on this piece.]

More blogs on Powell:

- this one, on Paste Magazine, contains links to some of BP's best solos
- from Ginger, who worked with BP

Most of the other blog posts are useless. Quick re-hash of the news accounts and an embedded YouTube video...

Greater Expectations

[This is a sort-of follow up to a piece I wrote last April called Great Expectations. I started it right after the inauguration but then got distracted by important stuff like Skynyrd pianists and the Super Bowl. I think it's still relevant, though not as relevant as it might have been Inauguration Week. ]


When Barack Obama took the oath of office he did so with the highest incoming approval ratings of any President, at 72%. In a distant second place, at 58%, was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

This is a remarkable thing. Eisenhower possessed, to put it mildly, a stronger resume. He had, you know, led the armies that defeated the greatest evil in the history of mankind (that's a defensible statement, ain't it?). Obama's greatest accomplishment, on the other hand, was the winning of a U.S. Presidential election. Which can't be that hard; after all, George W. Bush did it twice.

The psychology behind this is fascinating but not the subject of this post. I'm more interested in what he does with it. After all, the confidence the American people have placed in President Obama is both a blessing and a curse.

It's a blessing because it gives him enormous political capital, and plenty of room to make mistakes.

The media are so enthralled with him, he could personally chop the fingers off a suspected Al Qaeda operative in the Oval Office on live television, and the New York Times would merely express "slight misgivings". Hollywood is so star-struck he could direct a remake of Howard the Duck with Paris Hilton and Jean Claude Van Damme and he'd be applauded for his artistic integrity. Europe is so smitten he could - hmmm, what would be a terrible thing to a European? Europe is so smitten he could threaten to protect them from Russia with American missiles and they'd actually thank him for it.

But it's not just Hollywood, the media, and Europe. Those high approval ratings show that so much of the country is looking to President Obama to be our next Lincoln, our next FDR. The halo that would have been over Obama's head in normal circumstances has been amplified by the economic collapse. Americans believe we are in one of the great crises in our history and need a Great Man to see us through.

But these expectations are also a curse. As I wrote back in the earlier Great Expectations piece, supporters of Hillary Clinton and John McCain had fairly reasonable expectations for their candidates. But supporters of Barack Obama have wildly unreasonable expectations for their President.

I won't go into all the major problems we're all hoping he can solve - we've been down that road a lot. I'm just very interested to see how he uses these expectations as a political tool to accomplish his goals, while simultaneously trying to avoid the pitfalls of adulation.

It's my read on Obama that he is far more practical and pragmatic than his most idealistic followers. And it's also my read that a lot of Americans are going to cut him a lot of slack.


Policy issues aside, it'll be fascinating to watch him manage these expectations.

Inaugural Thoughts for Republicans

Back on Election Day I promised to write a piece called "10 (or so) Reasons that Conservatives Should Lie Back and Enjoy the Age of Obama - or at Least not Move to Australia." Well, it’s Inauguration Day, so it’s time to start this piece…

Why Australia? Well, obviously a conservative isn’t going to move to France, that promised land of Streisands and Baldwins, who are forever promising to leave America in the wake of a Republican victory. But Australia? They speak English, have excellent beer, raised the man who gave us Braveheart and Lethal Weapon, and supported the war in Iraq. It’s the anti-France!

But as wonderful as Australia may be, it's awfully far, and the whole winter in July/summer in December thing would be a big adjustment for us Americans. So I suggest Republicans stay here in America. And I'd like to offer, free of charge, some reasons why distressed Republicans should feel okay about the 2008 election.

1. The Republican Party needed a kick in the teeth. The control of the House, the Senate, and the White House led party leaders to a level of hubris and arrogance that was unacceptable. If, for example, Bush and Company had worked with Democrats on issues that even now Obama supports (like wiretapping), they would have had a far easier time of things. But they had come to believe they could do what they wanted when they wanted how they wanted. This election – not just the Presidential election but the overall ass-kicking the GOP received all over the country – was necessary for the long-term health of the party.

2. More than ever before – wait, that’s not true – more than in recent history, we need the support of our allies. For various reasons, Barack Obama is beloved in much of the world, and this is potentially good for the future success of American diplomacy. The popularity of Obama will provide cover to world leaders, particularly in Europe, who already want to provide more overt aid to America in the fight against radical Islam.

3. Barack Obama does not seem to suffer from the taint of ideology. Many Republicans feared during the election season that he was a radical in moderate’s clothing. And to be sure, his associations with the Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers suggested this was possible. But everything he’s done since his election suggests he’s the person that readers of Dreams of My Father thought he was – an extremely pragmatic man who is supremely capable of thinking objectively and with logic and reason about any individual subject.

4. The only people who seem genuinely unhappy with Obama’s appointments are the far left. This is an encouraging sign.

5. All economies – but the American economy in particular – run on confidence. I’m not quite sure why so many Americans have invested so much confidence in an unproven leader, but we have. That confidence is not enough – by a long shot – for an economic recovery. But it is a prerequisite for it.

6. I have always believed that any responsible person who receives daily intelligence briefings (and thus, knows how dangerous the world is) and is responsible for the safety of the American people, would recognize that there is some gray area between civil liberties and safety. There is not, as he stated in his inaugural address yesterday, "a false choice between our ideals and our safety". Rhetoric aside, Obama has proven me correct. His support of wiretapping, his flexibility on Iraq timetables, and his almost leisurely pace on the “closing” of Guantanamo Bay, suggests that the apocalyptic rants of people like Frank Rich are fine for the New York Times but is not a luxury the occupant of the Oval Office can afford.

7. A while back, Peggy Noonan wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal arguing that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy could be derailed by the quality of her voice. That sounds like a superficial argument, but it is not. Americans live with our President, and it’s important that we like them. Barack Obama, with his transcendent speaking voice and his preternatural calm, is an extraordinarily soothing and likable presence. It’ll be nice to have him around for four years or so.

8. While I'm nervous that most of the governing and banking classes suddenly think state control of business is a swell idea, Obama's economic appointments have definitely leaned more towards the free market thinking of Clintonism than the quasi-socialist claptrap of John Edwards and the editors of The Nation. So my guard is still up on his economic team, but I'm happy so far.

What's that, 8 reasons? That's good enough.

Sure, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical (click here for 7 in particular). Especially with Reid and Pelosi riding in positions of power. Think about those two long enough and any confidence that Obama inspires ebbs away faster than your 401k.

But this is a week for hope. God knows we need it.

Nobodies & Hot Streaks

A Couple of NFL Thoughts

Last year, as the Giants made their historic Super Bowl run (yes, I said historic; want to make something of it?), this site was pretty much taken over by my NFL ramblings. This year, not so much. But with the Super Bowl set, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you.

Nobodies Rule

In February of 07 I wrote a piece called Losers & Nobodies in which I argued…well, here’s what I said:

If you were the GM of an NFL team with a head coaching vacancy, which of the following should you hire:

a) A proven winner, like Super Bowl Champ Bill Cowher
b) A proven loser, like Cam Cameron
c) A complete nobody, like Jim Harbaugh’s brother.

If history is any guide, hire the nobody. If he’s not available, hire the loser.


As it turns out, FreeTime must be required reading in NFL front offices, because Nobodies were hired in huge numbers in the weeks after this was posted. John Harbaugh in Baltimore, Tony Sparano in Miami, Mike Smith in Atlanta, and Jim Zorn in Washington.

And it turned out splendidly for those teams. Harbaugh’s Ravens played in the AFC championship game, Sparano’s Dolphins had the greatest regular-season turnaround in the history of the sport, and they both lost out on Coach of the Year to Smith. (Zorn got off to a hot start then faded, but had his team in playoff contention in the extremely difficult NFC East).

And in two weeks, two Nobodies from the Hiring Class of 2007 will meet in the Super Bowl. Mike Tomlin and Ken Whisenhunt were both unknown entities to most NFL fans when hired two years ago.

More proof, as if we needed it, that history and facts are more valuable than conventional wisdom.

NFL GMs: there is no reason to throw money, power and private jets at the Bill Cowhers, Mike Shanahans, and Jon Grudens of the world. Get yourself a Nobody.

The Hot Team

A cherished myth of the NFL is that the hot team coming into the playoffs is the one to look out for. Peter King, in this morning's MMQB writes:

It's never been truer that the hottest teams, and the healthiest teams, are the ones with the best chance in January.

Oh my God, really, Peter? I love Peter King. I read MMQB religiously. He works hard, he talks to everyone in the NFL seemingly every waking moment, and he just seems like an amiable likable guy. But he does like that conventional wisdom nonsense.

How could anyone argue that the Arizona Cardinals were the hot team coming in? It was clearly Carolina, maybe the Eagles. The Cardinals were about the coldest team to ever enter the playoffs, and it had no impact on their knocking off 3 straight wins.

But conventional wisdom dies hard. It's more stubborn than facts.

The 2008 Johnny Bingo Awards

Yes, it’s time for the least-anticipated literary awards of the year – the Johnny Bingo Awards!

The nice thing about being judge and jury for an award nobody cares about is I can change the rules every year without protest. And I’m changing the rules again. Last year I gave out a bunch of different awards in different categories. And in the years before that I simply gave out one award. But this year I’m going to name five finalists and then pick a winner. (That’s my plan now anyway; it could change in a few paragraphs)

Luckily, no matter how ridiculous I make it, I can't make it sillier than the Nobel Prize in Literature, bestowed annually on obscurities and mediocrities, the only qualification being that the winner not be American.

This award too has only one criterion – for a book to be eligible, I had to have finished reading it in 2008. It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BC or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe. As long as I read the final paragraph before Dick Clark’s puppeteer walks him through the New Year’s Eve Countdown, it can be a winner.

But before we hand out this year’s awards, I’d like to say a few words about books I don’t read.

A Few Words About Books I Don’t Read
I don’t read books written by people who got famous doing something different. So you’ll see no sensitive novels by Ethan Hawke or counterfactual histories by Newt Gingrich. Kirstie Alley’s How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Confidence: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Star might be a literary masterpiece, but I’ll never know it.

I don’t read current events books. Perhaps I’ll expand this thesis in a larger post, but I don’t think current events lend themselves well to book form. First, not enough time has passed for perspective. And second, events have a way of overtaking the book. I tried to read George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate last year, and while parts of it were excellent, as I got to the last few hundred pages it was clear that the Iraq he was writing about was different than the one that existed by the time of my reading. So I stick to magazines and newspapers for the events of the day.

I don’t read memoirs, particularly memoirs by people who’ve led massively self-(and others) destructive lives, but who’ve now put all the pieces together and found wisdom. Somehow I’ll muddle through life without their wisdom.

I don’t read books by Mitch Albom.

Apparently I don’t read books by women. This isn’t a policy but it appears to be the truth. I didn’t read a single book written by a woman in 2008. I did better in 2007, thanks to Barbara Tuchman and J.K. Rowling. Considering how much I enjoy the works of those two women in particular, as well as the histories of Catherine Drinker Bowen and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I may have to correct that.

Which reminds me – I don’t read books that everybody else is reading. I’ve been a fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin since before she became a television star and I’ve read more Lincoln books than most, but I’ve kind of avoided Team of Rivals because everybody else is reading it. I will read it eventually, but long after the rest of the world has lost interest.

There are all kinds of exceptions to these “rules”. I’ll read Mark Bavaro’s new novel because one of the best presents I got this Christmas was an inscribed copy of it. I read Bill Bryson’s Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir because it was written by Bill Bryson.

I also read Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father*, which breaks most of my rules: it’s a memoir, it’s a current events book (sort of), it’s written by someone who doesn’t write books for a living, and it’s a book everybody was reading. But I was very interested to read a book written by a Presidential candidate long before he was one.

* a mini review: it started out fascinating and impressive, but became dreadfully boring and self-absorbed. Hopefully not a harbinger for his Presidency…

There is no exception to the Mitch Albom rule.

So, without further ado the five finalists are:

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1845
Daniel Walker Howe

We tend to think of the years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War as boring. Not as boring, perhaps, as the Era of Obscure Bearded Presidents (1872-1896), but still pretty boring.

Yeah, Andrew Jackson was a colorful guy, but everyone else seemed small by comparison – dwarfed by the shadow of the Founders (Adams and Jefferson died in 1824) and the specter of the Civil War (Lincoln, Lee and Grant walked the earth, but few knew who they were.).

Even the 2nd most famous guy of the period, John Quincy Adams, was the less famous son of a Founder who can’t even get a monument on the Mall.

But Howe – who has the great gift of weaving diplomatic, political, and economic history into a compelling whole – shows that the period was, as the sub-title says, transformational.

(For an excellent review on WHGW, go here.)

Duma Key
Stephen King
As I said earlier, I tend not to read things everybody else is reading. Thus, I’ve read very little John Grisham and Stephen King through the years.

But this year, in separate acts of airport desperation, I bought Grisham and King paperbacks. The Grisham book – The Brethren – was entertaining but nothing special; it was like one of Elmore Leonard’s lesser works, peopled with quirky Florida lowlifes. But Duma Key grabbed me by the collar and wouldn’t let go.

It’s odd that King is still considered a horror novelist. The Shawshank Redemption, based on a King novella, is by one measure the most popular movie ever made – and there is not a supernatural moment in it. The same is true of Stand By Me, based on a King short story. But I guess it’s hard to shake the image left by books/movies like Carrie, Cujo, and Pet Semetary.

Duma Key is about a middle-aged guy who – like King – was severely injured in an accident. While recovering he discovers he has untapped powers as a painter – well, for a description of the book go here. All I’ll say is that King’s genius stems in part from his storytelling, in part from his ability to tap into our fear – but mostly from his understanding of human emotion.

I realize I might be banned from the unofficial book snobs’ club, but what King is up to in his later years just might be called literature.

The Spies of Warsaw
Alan Furst
Speaking of popular fiction that borders on literature…

There are some authors who sell only a fraction of the books John Grisham sells, but whose fans are even more devoted. Furst’s novels, all set before or in the early years of World War II, has a devoted following and I number myself among them.

The books are formulaic – one or more Europeans, recognizing the impending calamity of war with Germany and presented an opportunity to do something about it, do something about it. Gauloises are smoked, cafes are visited, and Polish countesses slip into bed with French naval attachés.

But Furst’s novels prove that formulas executed with literary style and thorough historical research are as impressive as any higher-brow work.

Blue Latitudes: Sailing Boldly Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horowitz
I think of myself as a knowledgeable guy, historically speaking. But reading Blue Latitudes, I was shocked at how ignorant I was of the accomplishments of James Cook.

Most discoverers happen upon their discovery – the Hudson River, America – and, if they survive, tend to stay in that part of the world looking for more stuff or head home to enjoy their fame. But Cook travelled all over the world, to places untouched by Europeans, multiple times. New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, parts of Alaska. He circumnavigated the globe multiple times and covered 140 of the 180 degrees of the earth’s longitude.

But most people don’t know Captain Cook from Captain Hook. Tony Horowitz, former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of Confederates in the Attic, sets off to find out why. Part travelogue, part history, Horowitz re-traces Cook’s voyage, and interviews just about anybody he meets along the way in search of Cook’s story and his legacy.

Cook’s is a great story – and Horowitz is wonderful company for the telling of it.


Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
You know the old phrase, “the book was better”. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was a terrible Nicolas Cage movie, but this is an excellent novel, set on a small Greek island during the Second World War.

It’s kind of hard to describe, but check it out here.


And the winner is…hmmm….well I liked all of them, obviously. But none are books I’ll be talking about five years from now. I’ve already forgotten what The Spies of Warsaw is about (that’s the problem with formulaic fiction – no matter how good it’s executed, the details slip away).

Oh, I’ll give it to What Hath God Wrought. Congratulations, Mr. Howe. You must be proud.

The Demeanor Fallacy

Eric Mangini has had his ups and downs as head coach of the New York Jets.

His first season was all up. He took over a Jets team that was 4-12 the year before and coached them to a 10-6 record and a playoff berth. He became a New York folk hero, dubbed ManGenius by the tabloids. He even made a Sopranos cameo.

But season two was a downer as the Jets fell back to 4-12. And season three was a roller coaster ride. A shaky beginning, a terrific middle, and a horrible end.

And this morning the Jets took the New York Post’s advice (DUMP ‘EM) and fired their precocious head coach. The Times’ story on the firing echoed a theme I’ve heard a lot the past few weeks in the tabloids and on talk radio:

"Mangini has been criticized for a lack of emotion in his coaching style..Fullback Tony Richardson said he had never seen Mangini show frustration. He does not storm around the practice fields, spew invective or flip over water coolers."

In fact, this lack of emotion is the only criticism cited in the story, suggesting that if Mangini had expressed more emotion the Jets may have been more successful.

This is a logical fallacy. The syllogism goes something like this:

+ Coaches with placid sideline demeanors can’t win

+ Coach X has a placid sideline demeanor

+ Therefore, Coach X can’t win

But of course, the NFL is filled with stone-faced winners. Tom Landry had 20 straight winning seasons, five NFC titles, and two Super Bowl wins without ever changing expression. (His Hall of Fame bio’s first words are “noted for impassive sideline demeanor”.) Statuary is more expressive than Chuck Noll, who won four Super Bowls. And Bill Belichick, to quote Dorothy Parker’s quip about Katherine Hepburn, “runs the gamut of emotions from A to B”.

Meanwhile, the NFC’s version of the New York Jets – the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – featured a coach, Jon Gruden, who is so emphatic on the sidelines that his nickname is Chuckie, from the horror-movie doll. Gruden’s passion did not prevent the Bucs from collapsing in nearly identical fashion to the Jets.

The Torre Stare

We’ve been here before. Joe Torre took over as manager of the New York Yankees in 1996, and proceeded to go on the greatest run in recent baseball history. Four World Series championships, six AL crowns, and eleven straight playoff appearances. Except for walks to the mound, Torre spent the entire eleven years on the bench, arms crossed, staring out at the field. But in his final year – a year in which he once again made the playoffs, he was ripped in New York for not having enough fire.

Alas, having too much fire is also a crime. When Tom Coughlin was, experts all agreed, the worst coach in football, his biggest problem was sideline histrionics. When he won the Super Bowl those same experts agreed that he did so because he followed their advice, and got his demeanor to just the right temperature.

This doesn’t just apply to coaches. Eli Manning appears at all times to be in a medically-induced coma. In the early promising part of his career it was lauded as a plus. In the middle shaky part of his career it was derided as a minus. Now, with a Super Bowl ring and a #1 seed, it is once again a positive. Just wait, though – if the Giants lose to the Falcons in two weeks, the sports psychologists will change their minds again – stoicism will be renamed placidity, calmness will be reclassed as indifference. "Look how excited Matt Ryan is", they'll gush.

The Reason - and a Prediction

There is, I believe, a reason for this. Most football fans, myself included, don't know enough about the complex game of modern football to truly judge a coach on his merits. Very few fans are capable of dissecting the Jets' blitzing schemes or interior line play. I've never heard Pete from Passaic call the Fan to complain the Jets' don't disguise their run formations well enough, or suggest ways to exploit the weak-side linebacker in the Miami defense.

So in our ignorance we go overboard on the things we do understand. That is why clock management mistakes and 4th down decisions are overamplified by fans and media. Even the dumbest among us can form an opinion on these things.

And a coach's demeanor? In the absence of substantive criticism, which most of us are ill-equipped to make, it's an easy one to go after.

I try to stay away from predictions, but I’m going to sneak out on a limb here. Eric Mangini, who at age 40 has had winning seasons in two of his three seasons as head coach, will be hired somewhere else, maybe a struggling team that experienced failure under a fiery coach.

That team will be successful early in Mangini’s tenure. And fans will nod their head knowingly, saying, “It’s his sideline demeanor. He exudes calm, which is just what that team needed.”

Men Without Hats

Foul ball!

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the youngest elected President in United States history. As he went through the carefully orchestrated ceremony of the day, he did so hatless. Kennedy believed hats made him look old so he refused to be photographed in one. Considered the most glamorous and sophisticated man in the world, JFK’s bare head was a dagger to the hat industry, whose sales dropped precipitously and never recovered.

That’s how the story has always been told anyway. An entire book was even written about it (Hatless Jack: The Presidency, The Fedora, and the History of American Style). It turns out to be a myth, though, effectively skewered by Snopes.

Still, something happened. Men used to wear hats. Picture large crowds at, say, a baseball game from the first half of the 20th century and every guy’s got a fedora, a bowler, a derby – some kind of stylish headgear. The ubiquity of hats was perfectly captured in a scene from The Big Chill. William Hurt is watching an old black & white movie on TV when Jeff Goldblum asks what’s happening in the scene.

“I think the guy in the hat did something,” drawls a stoned Hurt.

Cut to the TV, showing dozens of 1930’s era guys wearing hats.

Then there was this exchange from Seinfeld*:

Elaine: You should have lived in the 20's and 30's. You know men wore hats all the time then.

George: What a bald paradise that must have been! Nobody knew!

* Seinfeld is to 21st century Americans what the Bible was to most of Western Civilization for thousands of years – the text that provides wise and relevant quotes on nearly every subject.

Government Bailout for Hat Industry?

I bring all this up because we’ve had some nasty weather in New York lately. Snow, sleet, howling wind, freezing rain. And as I walk the city streets I see men in suits coping with the weather in one of four ways:

- Baseball hat
- Wool cap
- Umbrella*
- Bare head

The first two look ridiculous with a suit. The third is overkill. And the fourth is too stupid to merit comment.

* There are, of course, two types of umbrellas. The tiny ones, which aren't much bigger than a hat. And the huge golf umbrellas. I have a message to those guys with the huge ones, the ones that are designed to cover Tiger Woods, his caddy, his golf bag, and the entire 14th green: Everybody hates you.

A handful of us, me included, were wearing wide-brimmed hats. Mine is a brown Indiana Jones-type thing. I get a lot of abuse for this hat, best summed up by my son as I returned from work one evening.

“You wear that in public?” he asked.

But it’s a wonderful thing. It keeps my head warm. The wide brim collects flakes and repels light rain. And in my opinion, it’s rather stylish. All I need now is for hats to come back in style so I can wear it with slightly less embarrassment than I do today.

And there is one man who has the power to bring it back. On January 20, 2009, the glamorous and sophisticated Barack Obama will take office. Will he go bareheaded, a la the mythical Jack Kennedy? Or will he don a snap-brim fedora, tilted at a rakish angle. If he does the latter, look for the comeback of the hat industry.

Now that’s change I can believe in.

No Glib Title Today

I haven’t written much about the economic crisis. As near as I can tell, the sharpest economic minds on earth have no earthly idea what is going on, how it happened, who gets the blame, what to do about it, or how it’s going to end. So what can an English major like me possibly add to the conversation?

Then again, the whole purpose of having a blog is to offer uninformed opinions nobody asked for.

Let’s go back for a moment to the Fall of 2001. The country was in a recession. The dot-com crash had started in March 2000, wiping out paper wealth in the trillions. Numerous corporate scandals, most notably Enron, had more Americans than usual thinking public companies were running elaborate shell games. And two planes flew into buildings in the financial center of planet Earth, killing thousands and paralyzing the global economy.

At the time I thought, we’re really in for it now.

But amazingly, we weren’t. The American economy shrugged off the triple body blows of Dot-Com, Enron, and 9/11 like they were love taps. By 2003, the recession had ended, and the American economy began adding jobs by hundreds of thousands per month and seeing its usual 2-3% growth rates. (The bad news for Bush is that nobody seemed to notice this astonishing success story because Iraq was in flames. Now, nobody is noticing the astonishing success story in Iraq because the economy is in flames.)

At the time I thought, wow, this economy can really take a punch. Or three.

So when this latest storm came along, I remained optimistic longer than most, because I had developed this profound belief in the resiliency of the U.S. economy. That’s not to say that I thought we were recession-proof. Only fools and madmen believe economies can completely insulate themselves from periods of recession. I just thought we’d have 2-3 quarters of negative growth and then whoever won the election in November would get credit for a recovery that was going to come anyway.

But now – who knows? The sharpest economic minds on earth still seem baffled, but there is general agreement that it’s going to get worse before it gets better – especially when the next two shoes drop (the credit card crisis and the effects of growing unemployment). I can only console myself that these guys have been so consistently wrong on just about everything else that they’ll be proven wrong again. And hope that, once again, the American economy will defy expectations and reveal its underlying strength.

To sum up, I’m just like the sharpest economic minds on earth. I have no earthly idea what is going on, how it happened, who gets the blame, what to do about it, or how it’s going to end

So for now, I'll console myself with this: the Mets just added two great arms to their bullpen. Bring on the Fightin' Phils!

Note: Instead of wasting your time here, you should read the work of someone who has a rare combination of deep knowledge, clarity of writing, and intellectual honesty. That guy would be Robert Samuelson at Newsweek. He’s my go-to guy on economic issues. Check out his archive here.

Couples in Canton

As I wrote recently…of the twelve NFL head coaches elected to the Hall of Fame during the Super Bowl era, ten coached a Hall of Fame quarterback and one coached a guy who should be in the Hall and may yet make it(Ken Stabler). Only Joe Gibbs went to Canton alone.

In yesterday’s Monday Morning Quarterback, Peter King identifies 7 head coaches who will be Hall candidates in the coming years. Five of them – you guessed it – coached present or future Hall of Famer quarterbacks:

Mike Shanahan (John Elway)
Bill Belichick (Tom Brady)
Dan Reeves (John Elway)
Mike Holmgren (Brett Favre)
Tony Dungy (Peyton Manning)

The sixth is Marty Schottenheimer. Schott doesn’t strike me as a Hall of Famer, but he is sixth all time in Wins (and may not be done). Still, it’s hard to imagine him making it without a Super Bowl appearance.

The seventh is Bill Parcells. Parcells coached a bunch of good quarterbacks – Simms*, Bledsoe, Testaverde – and of course, started the “legend” of Tony Romo. But none are in the Hall.

* Simms may have made the Hall if he didn’t get hurt in the 12th game of the 1990 season. Assuming the Giants still won the Super Bowl that year, Simms would have 2 Super Bowls and 200 TD passes (he finished with 199). That, and the fact that the media likes him personally may have been enough to push him in.

Parcells vs. Gibbs would make an interesting debate. If we assume the five guys above make the Hall and Schottenheimer doesn’t, Parcells and Gibbs would be the only two Super Bowl era coaches in the Hall – out of 17 – who didn’t have a HoF quarterback. In fact, the two coaches won 5 Super Bowls with 5 different quarterbacks – Theismann, Simms, Williams*, Hostetler, and Rypien.

* Both Simms and Williams had days that Hall of Famers can only dream about

But who is better? Gibbs has 3 Super Bowls to Parcells’ 2. But Parcells took four teams from the pits to the top (or neat-top), a remarkable record. And that’s not counting what’s going on in Miami right now.

I'm inclined to give the nod to Parcells, because I think there is no greater proof of coaching ability than turning losers into winners multiple times. But then, I'm a biased Giants fan.


P.S. I learned something fun doing this: Jimmy "How 'bout them Cowboys!" Johnson isn't in the Hall of Fame (but this Jimmy Johnson is). I'll have to do a reverse on this someday - see how many quarterbacks made it in without a Hall of Fame coach. But the overrated Troy Aikman is one of them.

Obama's Other Challenge

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece wondering why the McCain campaign never made a campaign issue out of the absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan has a piece called “At Least Bush Kept Us Safe”. (You may or not like Noonan’s world-view, but she is arguably the best writer in the punditocracy today. Its pure poetry compared to the snarling sledgehammer attacks of most columnists.)

It looks at the same issue, but more from a post-election standpoint – from the point of view of Bush’s Legacy, and the challenge laid at Obama’s feet.

And it made me think of the other dog that didn’t bark this election – the debate over civil liberties versus security. That debate, which was held in an extremely clumsy fashion in America during the middle Bush years, was almost completely off the table during the 2008 election.

More on this to come, but for now check out Noonan…

Happy Anniversaries

[This blog is usually impersonal, but today it’s all about me. Enjoy. Or skip it. Whatever.]

I celebrate two anniversaries today.

First, and infinitely more important, is my wedding anniversary. 17 years, baby. Couple of kids and a dog. There's even a white fence.

I don’t know if Tolstoy was right – that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It's one of those quotes that sound wise but upon closer examination doesn’t hold up. It’s natural for a novelist to subscribe to the time-honored literary notion that bourgeois happiness is boring. Unhappy families, after all, have much more interesting plots.

All I know is that ours is a happy family. Whether we’re happy in the same way as other happy families is unknowable. But I can share with you, free of charge, Keatang’s Keys to a Happy Marriage:

1. Marry someone who makes you laugh. Mrs. Keatang has a subtle, sneaky sense of humor that she doesn’t show to everyone. But after all these years, she still cracks me up.

2. Marry someone who shares your television tastes. This is an underrated component of the modern American happy marriage, even more important than a shared thermostat philosophy. The fact that we love the same shows – Dexter is our current favorite – means we spend our evenings together, rather than in separate rooms. (Except during the playoffs.)

3. Marry someone who keeps her head when times get tough. Thanks for last year, honey. You really came through.

I also recommend marrying a beauty.

But November 29 is not just my wedding anniversary. It is also, coincidentally, the one year anniversary of FreeTime.

A Look Back

A few weeks back, I saw an arresting definition of good writing: “Making what is completely obvious only to you completely obvious to everyone else. With words.”

That’s what I aspire to here, although I would change “words” to “words and facts”. As John Adams said (and I’ve quoted dozens of times), “Facts are stubborn things”, and I believe the most powerful facts come from history and statistics. If it’s just words, it might be bullshit. Ask any lawyer.

So here are some words and facts about the first year of FreeTime.

The Good Kind of Traffic
On the roads, traffic is a terrible thing (an issue I addressed in one of my weaker blog posts). In music, it’s a question of taste. But out here in the blogosphere, it is something to be sought after and cherished. So you might be interested in what kind of traffic we get here at FreeTime.

Short answer: it’s not the Van Wyck but it’s not a country road at 3AM either. Considering I don’t market this thing, don’t deploy the latest search optimization techniques, don’t post very often, don’t write about anything specific, and aren’t part of a large network of bloggers – I get a decent amount of traffic.

FreeTime gets a little over a hundred unique visitors each week, more when I post and less when I don’t, but it’s been remarkably stable over the last few months. I seem to have a steady group that checks in regularly, some of whom are people I know from my professional and personal lives, many of whom have stumbled upon the site and come back. At least a few international readers are on every week – and from all over, too – Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, South America, Australia.

All told, since I started measuring less than a year ago I’ve had a total of 8,400 unique visits and almost 11,000 page views. So that’s the story on traffic.

* All the data about traffic comes from SiteMeter. Anyone can click on the SiteMeter icon and see all the data yourself. I find it most interesting to click on "By Location" on the right-hand nav bar. That's where you see the most recent visitors and where they came from. Someone from Latvia was on earlier today...

Greatest Hits Package
I've written 87 pieces, some of them just throwaways but many are fully-written articles. For what it’s worth, these are the ten pieces that in my (not particularly) humble opinion hold up the best. (in reverse chronological order)

One of Us
Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, she made a quite a splashy entrance and a was a muse to the whole blogosphere. This piece looks at how Americans claim to want candidates who are just like us...but not really.

Dad vs. Robin

An attempt at a Dave Barry-type piece. And as Dave might say, I did not make this story up.

A Soldier's Reading List
Not sure how to characterize this one. But it grew out of of some volunteer work I do with an organization called Operation Paperback.

From Left to Right
The playwright David Mamet's conversion from liberal to conservative inspired this piece on what, exactly, it means to have a political ideology.

Monolingual Americans

Very few Americans speak foreign languages. And for good reason. This piece has been the 2nd most widely read piece, after....

The Last Movie Star

This piece on George Clooney was picked up by the influential blogger Jason Kottke and a few others, causing a huge spike in traffic. Since I wrote it Clooney has released two more bombs - and not the kind of bombs that will get Oscar love.

In Defense of Divisiveness

Do we really want our politicians to get along?

Barack Obama and the Activist's Dilemma

I wrote plenty about the President-elect this year. This was one.

Eli Vs. Phil

This wasn't necessarily a great piece - but was rendered great by Super Bowl XVII

The Dubious Value of Experience

Probably the piece I referenced the most this year - it's a look at how many of our best Presidents had little experience, and many of our worst had plenty.

The above selections are heavy on politics, and light on sports and music. I think that's because, reading through the old pieces, the sports stuff is pretty good but too time-sensitive (does anyone care anymore whether Goose Gossage deserved Cooperstown?) and the music pieces...well, they kinda sucked.

I thank those of you have come to the site - especially those that have gone out of your way to let me know you like it. I have great confidence my marriage will last till death do us part. Hopefully FreeTime will have a decent run, too.

A Sea Change Election?

Probably not

[I know. The day after the election I said I’d write a post titled “10 (or so) Reasons Conservatives Shouldn’t Move to Australia”. But as Luther said to the parking garage attendant in 48 Hours, “I Been Busy!” In the meantime, I’ll write this, yet another post demonstrating how people say all kinds of stupid things when they are unfamiliar with history…]


There has been much commentary these past few weeks about how the 2008 election may represent a political realignment – meaning, the Democrats have assembled a coalition of voters that could make for a sustainable majority. Among Democrats there is hopeful rejoicing while Republicans gnash their teeth and rent their garments*.

* to whom? Libertarians?

But we’ve been here before, haven’t we? In 2004, Bush won a relatively comfortable victory (at least compared to 2000) and a library’s worth of articles poured praise on Karl Rove, who had seemingly discovered the key to lasting Republican dominance: a passionate organized base. But only four years later, the Republicans are in disarray. So much for lasting Republican dominance.

In 1992 Bill Clinton supposedly changed the game. A sax-playing Southern baby boomer who could name all four Beatles beat an old Washington hand who’d fought in WWII, ending 12 straight years of Republicans in the White House. A new era had begun! But by the time a quite tainted but still-popular Clinton left office, the Republicans had taken the House, the Senate, the White House, and the majority of governorships. So much for new eras.

Even the Reagan Revolution wasn’t quite as revolutionary as it’s made to seem. Yes, he won a 49 state landslide in 1984. But remember, Nixon won by similar margins in 1972, and Reagan’s own Veep couldn’t win reelection 4 years after the Gipper left office. So much for revolutions.

True Game-Changers
Only 3 elections in American history have been truly game changing, in the sense that the victory represented a political realignment that was sustained for decades after. Two of them, Lincoln in 1860 and FDR in 1932, I talked about here.

The other – the first, in fact, was Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

Now that was a messy election. First of all, as brilliant as the Founders were, they hadn’t quite figured out all this electoral college stuff yet, so when Jefferson’s running mate Aaron Burr technically had as many electoral college votes as Jefferson, he made a play for the White House. It took a while to sort out, but Jefferson eventually took the oath and went on to create a sustainable majority that lasted for decades.

(VP Burr went on to shoot the former Treasury Secretary, attempt to crown himself emperor of Mexico, and get arrested for treason, all while in office. And people think Cheney is a pushy bastard.)

Jefferson’s Republicans (not the same as today’s) had so thoroughly destroyed its political competition, the Federalists, that his hand-picked successors (Madison and Monroe) took the White House for 16 more years, and by the time John Quincy Adams, the son of the last Federalist President, took office, even he was a Republican. The Federalist Party was dead.

That was a sea change election.

Is Obama’s Win Sustainable?

Have the Democrats won that kind of election? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

When analyzing whether an election has created genuine political realignment, you need to see if the conditions are easy to duplicate. It’s fair to say, I think, that two conditions existed in 2008 that will be nearly impossible to duplicate in future elections.

The first is Obama’s charismatic hold on the electorate. People went absolutely wild for this guy. Not for his ideas, not because of his experience – but something about him personally moved a big part of the electorate.

Can Joe Biden duplicate that in 2016? Hillary Clinton? If you’re thinking Al Gore, remember that while he may be the world’s most improbable movie star and the winner of the increasingly ridiculous Nobel Peace Prize, he’s already failed in the role of filling the shoes of a charismatic predecessor.

That kind of star power comes along very rarely. Reagan had it. Kennedy had it. Its a wonderful thing for a particular candidate to possess, but it is not a quality to build a sustainable majority on.

The second thing the Dems can’t duplicate is the stunning unpopularity of George W. Bush. John McCain may have been the Republican nominee for President, but Barack Obama made it very clear that he was running against some guy named Bush Cheney. Bush Cheney is not running again, together or alone, so that dog can’t hunt again.

So, what will it take for Barack Obama’s election to be the beginning of a great electoral run? Well, success. Obama’s campaign was built on personality and opposition, but it will have to govern with ideas and performance.

And all but the most partisan Republicans hope he succeeds.

Obama Magnus?

What Qualities do Great Presidents Share?



It's finally over. The end of what some have called the longest (certainly), most entertaining (arguably), and most historic (unlikely) Presidential campaign ever.

We’ve spent some of this campaign talking about policy. In fact, those who say that campaigns are all style and no substance these days should relax. We ask our candidates to spell out their policy plans in excruciating detail and they mostly comply. The only thing George Washington and his immediate successors gave the electorate was a grudging admission that they were, indeed, running.

But we spend more time talking about the leadership qualities and past experiences of the candidates, wondering and debating whether each has the necessary qualities to be what our age yearns for – a great leader.

It’s an interesting conversation. But very often we are mistaken about the qualities that are - and aren’t - reliable predictors of greatness.

Common Traits of Great Leaders

It’s not experience. As I wrote a while back, we’ve had great Presidents who lacked experience and weak Presidents who had piles of it.

It’s not the power to unify. The list of our most divisive Presidents is pretty much the same as the list of our greatest Presidents. In fact, with the exception of Washington every great and near-great President has seriously pissed off huge chunks of the electorate. (See here for detail.)

It’s not IQ. George Washington certainly wasn’t dumb, but among the six men usually accorded Founder status (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin), GW probably ranked last in intellectual firepower. FDR was famously said to have a first-rate temperament and a second-rate intellect. Lincoln, the 3rd member of the Trinity of Great Presidents, is widely regarded as a genius today – but few people in the 1860’s considered this roughly-educated frontier lawyer to be exceptionally or even marginally smart.

Of our great and near-great Presidents*, only Thomas Jefferson might legitimately be called an intellectual. So while we’d prefer to not have a dunce in the White House, the ability to read and understand Aristotle’s Politics in the original Greek – or even in translated English - is an unreliable predictor of greatness.

It’s not military prowess. Washington won a war and showed courage under fire and was a great President. Grant won a war and showed courage under fire and was a terrible President. Eisenhower won a war and showed courage under fire and was neither great nor terrible.

What about the power to communicate? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere…

Words, words, words…

Winston Churchill was arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century. I’m an admirer of Churchill but read a biography and you’ll be struck by how often he was awesomely, colossally wrong. The debacle of the Dardanelles was Churchill’s gift to the First World War (if you don’t know what I’m talking about rent Gallipoli. Or ask an Australian. Or click here.). During the Second World War, Churchill infuriated American war planners with his insistence on a peripheral strategy, resulting in the quagmire of Italy.

So what made him a great leader? Words. He was right about one big thing – the scale of the Nazi threat and the necessity of destroying it – and he used words to persuade the British people they must, and more importantly could, defeat Germany. This was not obvious to anyone in May 1940, after the fall of France and the escape from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force. The eloquence and force of his oratory is what gave England the courage to stand alone in 1940 and 41, until Japan invited America to the war.

Abraham Lincoln was arguably the greatest leader of the 19th century. I yield to no one in my admiration of Lincoln, but as Commander-in-Chief he got off to a very rough start. He changed generals after every battle and oversaw a war machine that was often corrupt (his first War Secretary resigned in disgrace). He had little to no control over George McClellan, his senior general in the early years of the war. So what’s so great about Lincoln?

Again, words. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln articulated for the nation the reason for war, indeed the reason for the existence of the United States. In his Second Inaugural, he spoke with great poetry about the reasons for the horrors of the previous 4 years. And in countless letters and speeches and meetings in between he used words to persuade the North that this cause was worth fighting for.

Words matter.

Obama’s Words

I bring all this up because Barack Obama's meteoric rise from state Senator to the White House was driven mostly by his oratory. Great oratory has several factors. The words themselves, of course, and for modern politicians those words are mostly written by others. But also the grace and power of the delivery.


Obama is at times a great orator, particularly when compared with the the shrill-voiced Hillary Clinton and the stilted speaking of John McCain. He certainly was last night. Further, it is clear that millions of Americans responded with fervor to his message.

This ability to connect with voters, to get the kind of fervent response we saw in this election, shows he may have the raw abilities to be a great leader.


Ah, but what if, unlike Lincoln and Churchill, he's wrong about the great issues of his day? What if his intellect and eloquence are harnessed to failed policies? If you're a fiscal conservative, you can't feel good about Obama's mission to raise corporate taxes and strengthen unions. If you're a national security conservative, you may feel queasy about Obama's plans to close Gitmo, leave Iraq, and chat up Ahmadinejad. If you're a cultural conservative, that crack about bitter Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion still sticks in your craw.


But relax. In a few days I'll publish my piece titled "10 (or so) Reasons that Conservatives Should Lie Back and Enjoy the Age of Obama - or at Least not Move to Australia."



* When I use the terms great and near-great, I’m not basing this on personal opinion. Numerous polls of historians have been done in recent years. For an overview of these polls, click here.

Ventured Guesses

It takes some combination of guts and foolishness to make predictions. The world moves so fast now that anyone who climbs out on the prognostication limb gets it sawed off right behind him.

You want proof? How about The Tampa Bay Rays, Sarah Palin, and Bear Stearns. Anybody see those 3 coming?

In an unpredictable world only fools make predictions.

However, some of us cowardly online pontificators like to venture a guess once in a while. And while it might be seeking credit a bit too early, a couple of my recent ventured guesses seem to be coming to fruition.

1. McCain Plays Security Card

Last week, I wondered why McCain hasn’t made terrorism more of an election issue – specifically, that he hasn’t claimed Republican credit for a total absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11.

I wrote:

"McCain’s image as a maverick has taken a hit these past few months, but anyone who has followed his career knows he can go wildly off-script at any moment. His campaign has clearly decided not to make this (9/11 and security) an issue, at least not a big one – but maybe he’ll try in the coming weeks, as desperation sets in."

Well, he tried. McCain made a speech in Tampa this week in which he said:

“Barack Obama has displayed some impressive qualities. But the question is whether this is a man who has what it takes to protect America from Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and other grave threats in the world. And he has given you no reason to answer in the affirmative.”

Obama immediately responded, repeating this line in a series of speeches:

"We will finally finish the fight and snuff out Al Qaeda and bin Laden, those who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11."

So as I predicted (or at least, wondered aloud….), September 11 is now part of the campaign.

[By the way, notice how McCain says the full "Osama bin Laden" and Obama just says "bin Laden". Think that's by accident?]

2. How ‘Bout Them Patriots

When Tom Brady went down, I wrote a piece about how Brady's injury gives us a chance to test a few theses - the first being "Can Belichick win without Brady?" I suggested he could:

"With Belichick coaching, Moss receiving, and the rest of that well-run machine that is the New England Patriots, I’m betting they are playing football this January."

New England fans like the Sports Guy, all of whom think Brady is much better than he actually is, thought the season was over. Well, the Patriots are 5-2 and tied for first place in the AFC East.

Okay, I'm done congratulating myself now. You can go back to what you were doing.

That's Not Funny

Quick question: can Jon Stewart survive an Obama Presidency? Indeed, is political humor in general in peril?

For whatever reason, comedians have barely laid a glove on Barack Obama during this eternal campaign.

It’s tempting to blame it all on liberal bias – except that the Clinton Era was a bountiful feast for political humorists. It’s not race – Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Marion Barry have all been ripe targets for political satirists. It’s not newness – the evisceration of Sarah Palin is proof you don’t have to be around long to be ridiculed. And it’s not lack of material – the audacity to run for President moments after taking the Senate oath combined with the swooning adulation of his fans suggest there is comic gold in Obama’s messianic stature.

[Obama himself has mined the comic possibilities here. In his Al Smith Dinner speech, he said, "Americans have a big choice to make, and if anybody feels like they don't know me by now, let me try to give you some answers. Who is Barack Obama? Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father Jorel to save the Planet Earth...If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility...Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome."]

But something – perhaps a little bit each of the above factors – has left the person of Barack Obama a humor-free zone. This is no big deal for the Lenos and Lettermen of the world – they’ll always have Paris (and Brangelina and Britney and so on). But Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, Keith Olbermann – their entire shows are built on the perceived follies of the Republican Party. When the Democrats run everything, what will these guys do? Supreme Court humor? Harry Reid material? Sarkozy schtick?

Sure, you can always count on some random Congressperson doing something he shouldn't do with someone he shouldn't know in some place he shouldn't be. But not every day. The Bush and Clinton Administrations have provided 16 years of consistent comic fodder - they were the gifts that kept giving.

I should point out that I’ve been wrong about Stewart before. I thought his show was in trouble when longtime producer Ben Karlin left, especially since he had lost so many of his best correspondents (Steve Carell, Steven Colbert, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms). But the show still delivers.

Besides, a few hours after Obama is sworn in*, the first Presidential hopefuls will arrive in Iowa and New Hampshire and the cycle will begin all over again…



* Yes, I’m aware he hasn’t actually won yet. But the premise of the piece is built on that assumption, so go with it…

The Dog That Didn't Bark

I appreciate that this election is based entirely on the premise that the United States of America has done absolutely nothing right these past 8 years.

George W. Bush gets most of the blame, but as Tom Cruise said in Top Gun, it’s a target-rich environment. Approval ratings for the Democrat-controlled Congress are even lower than Bush’s (some trick, that). The Secretaries of State and Defense have been humbled. The CIA and the FBI are considered bastions of incompetence. FEMA took a beating. The Treasury Department and the Fed recently joined the list of major offenders. Respect for the news media is at an all-time low. Wall Street shat the bed, with the help of millions of Americans who bought houses they couldn’t afford.

As Casey Stengel said of the 1962 Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

[I think this is why Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are the brightest stars of the political season. The only politicians the electorate can stomach are ones that haven’t done much of anything at all – they are blank slates for each side to imprint their hopes and dreams.]

But it got me wondering....why don't the Republicans ever talk about the one truly remarkable achievement of the past 8 years – the total absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil?

September 12, 2001
I work in Manhattan and was in town on September 11. From my office on 19th Street, you could for weeks after see the smoke billowing out of lower Manhattan. The newspapers were filled with reports of anthrax attacks via mail. It was a time of great confusion but there was one thing that nearly everyone in New York and perhaps the rest of the country could agree on: this would happen again.

Maybe not on the scale of 9/11, but surely September 11 was the dawning of a new age of terrorism on United States soil. Like Northern Ireland and Israel, terrorist attacks would become part of the fabric of our lives.

We would speculate what kind of attacks they would be. Not another hijacking – the passengers of Flight 93 made clear that the days of hijack victims waiting quietly for negotiations to set them free were over. The subways would be bombed, perhaps, or Yankee Stadium during the World Series. Maybe some smaller city, like Cincinnati or Memphis, to remind Americans we are all at risk.

But…nothing. At least not in the United States. Madrid was hit, and Bali. England twice. But things were quiet here.

When the 2004 election rolled around, Bush largely refrained from bragging on this, though he would occasionally hint at foiled plots. Democrats, meanwhile, made the words “Bush has made us less safe” part of their liturgy, on the theory that the war in Iraq served as the ultimate recruiting poster for Al Qaeda.

But still…nothing.

Surely this isn’t because Al Qaeda decided we’re not so bad, after all. And I don’t think it’s because they are pacing themselves – that may have been true for a few years but we’re now at 7 years and counting.

So maybe – I know this is crazy but go with me here for a moment – maybe it’s because we’re doing something right.

There are all sorts of theories as to why this is but most of them share a theme – that certain elements of American policy and the execution of that policy are actually working. Bush’s wars may have been disastrous for the U.S. but they weren’t so wonderful for Al Qaeda’s leadership either. And the FBI and CIA must be doing something right.

Which brings me back to my question: why has the Republican Party ignored this as an election issue – especially now that they are deep in the Grasping-at-Straws phase of the campaign?

Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood
Maybe they focus-tested it, and were left with the conclusion that Americans still regard the entire subject as the ultimate jinx. If McCain were to bring it up, he’d have to follow up with a knock-on-wood of epic proportions – we’d expect him to personally tap every tree in the Redwood Forest.

More likely, anything even remotely associated with the Bush Administration is toxic, to be avoided at all costs.

Still...McCain’s image as a maverick has taken a hit these past few months, but anyone who has followed his career knows he can go wildly off-script at any moment. His campaign has clearly decided not to make this an issue, at least not a big one – but maybe he’ll try in the coming weeks, as desperation sets in.

It won’t matter though – in the minds of most Americans, 9/11 was a lifetime ago. Debates over wiretapping and waterboarding are so 2006. The only calamity in lower Manhattan that concerns us now involve subprime mortgages and the Dow Jones index.

Of course, there is one thing that could change that. I'd just prefer not to say it out loud...

The GOP's Run

The Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.” I would add that those who cannot remember history are condemned to be baffled by current events.

Take the Presidential election. There is a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats these days. They are mystified – utterly mystified – that the Republican candidate for President is even remotely competitive in this race, despite the widespread belief that the Bush Presidency has been disastrous. They are like Jets fans who can’t understand why, even after Tom Brady got hurt and the Patriots went with some near-sighted high school kid at quarterback, they still lost. (I could probably push this metaphor with a Favre/Obama comparison, but I don’t want to lose my international readers…)

When asked to explain why this race remains competitive, most Democrats have theories that range from the inherent racism of America to the treachery of Republican party operatives. I don’t quite buy into either of these theories but that is a subject for another day.

I will, however, explain why the Obama coronation has been delayed.

If you’re a regular reader of FreeTime, you've guessed my theory will be historical and statistical in nature. It’s really quite simple: in Presidential politics, the United States is Republican.

I was born in 1966, and there have been 10 Presidential elections in my lifetime. The Republican party has dominated those elections, even more than people realize. Here are the stats:

+ Republicans are 7-3.

+ Two of the Republican victories were huge landslides – Nixon in ‘72 and Reagan in ‘84.

+ Two others were near landslides – Reagan in ‘80 and Bush 41 in ’88. In each of these elections the Republican candidate received more than 400 electoral college votes.

+ Democrats, meanwhile, are 3-7.

+ None of those wins were landslides, or near-landslides. The most electoral votes won by a Democrat in my lifetime is 379 (Clinton ’96).

+ In two of those wins – the Clinton elections – the Democrat failed to win 50% of the vote. In fact, if Ross Perot doesn’t win 18% of the vote in ’92, George H.W. Bush likely wins reelection.

+ And in only one of those wins – Jimmy Carter in 1976 – did a Democrat win 50% of the vote. In 1975 Republican Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, a catastrophe for the Republican party. Still, Democrat Jimmy Carter only barely managed to eke out 50.1% of the vote and a 297-240 electoral college vote.

To sum up: Republicans win every Presidential election, sometimes by wide margins, unless some fluke event (Perot, Watergate) tips it to the Democrats.

The Lesson of ‘32

Of course, things change. From 1860, when Lincoln became the first Republican President until 1932, when FDR took office, the White House was nearly the sole property of the Republican party. During that 72 year period, Grover Cleveland was the only Democrat who won a head to head election against a Republican*. 72 years! That's as long as John McCain has been alive!

How did this extraordinary electoral run end? Calamity struck Wall Street, Democrats took the White House, and held it for 7 of the next 9 elections.

Hmmm...what was it that Santayana guy said?

* A little detail here...Lincoln, a Republican, chose Andrew Johnson, a Border State War Democrat, as his VP in 1864, to prepare for the healing with the South. Upon Lincoln's assassination, Johnson became President. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran a 3rd party campaign against his former VP, William Taft, which lifted Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House. Wilson won reelection in 1916. Republicans won the other 12 elections. All of which makes Grover Cleveland's accomplishment one of the great electoral victories in American history.

Update (9/25): I've gotten a few emails about the 2000 election, in which Al Gore out-polled George Bush in the popular vote. The score was 50,999,897 (48.4%) to 50,445,002 (48.4%), but Bush won the electoral vote.

But here's the thing about 2000. Putting aside the Florida debacle and the Supreme Court, the election was essentially a tie. But it shouldn't have been. The Democrats had an outgoing popular President. The country was at peace and seemingly prosperous. The Democratic nominee had an impressive record of public service from the military to the Senate, and was unencumbered by his predecessor's scandal; in fact, he was arguably the most effective Veep in history. The Republican nominee was the formerly ne'er-do-well son of a former President who had only recently entered public office.

The Dems should have won easily, as easily as Reagan's Veep won in '88. Instead, they lost on a questionable call in the bottom of the 16th inning.

Controlled Experiments

TOM BRADY'S INJURY MAY ANSWER SOME INTERESTING QUESTIONS

When Tom Brady went down in the first quarter of the first game of the 2008 season, I had two immediate reactions.

The first was: “Shoot, there goes my fantasy football season.” Only 5 days earlier, I had used the #3 overall pick in the Murray Fantasy League on Brady, hoping he’d repeat his spectacular 2008 season (4800 yards, 50 TDs). So much for that plan.

But the second was, Hmm….this is as close as you can get to a controlled experiment to test two fascinating premises:

1. Is Bill Belichick a genius?
2. Can Randy Moss make any QB great?

Chickens & Eggs – Is Belichick a Genius?
Here’s your FreeTime fun fact of the day: there are 12 Super Bowl era head coaches in the NFL Hall of Fame. 10 of them had the good fortune of coaching at least one quarterback who is also in the Hall of Fame.

George Allen (Sonny Jurgenson)
Weeb Ewbank (John Unitas, Joe Namath)

Bud Grant (Fran Tarkenton)
Tom Landry (Roger Staubach)
Marv Levy (Jim Kelly)
Vince Lombardi (Bart Starr)
Chuck Noll (Terry Bradshaw)
Don Shula (John Unitas, Bob Griese, Dan Marino)
Hank Stram (Len Dawson)
Bill Walsh (Joe Montana)

The 11th, John Madden, had Kenny Stabler. During Madden’s coaching career Stabler made four Pro Bowls*, won an NFL MVP, and twice led the league in TD passes. Stabler is arguably the best NFL quarterback not in the Hall of Fame. He was certainly better than Namath and Griese.

The 12th is Joe Gibbs. Joe Gibbs won 3 Super Bowls with 3 different quarterbacks, none of whom were serious contenders for Canton. If you want to argue Joe Gibbs is the greatest coach of the modern era, you’ll get no argument here.

Bill Belichick is also Hall-bound, and like most of the others will be joined by his quarterback. But now we get to find out – can he succeed without Tom Brady?

Remember that this isn’t the first time Belichick lost his star quarterback. In the 2nd game of the 2001 season, Drew Bledsoe went down, and Belichick was forced to turn to his untested 6th round draft pick, Tom Brady. The rest is history.

Eggs & Chickens – Does the receiver make the quarterback?
Maybe it’s not the head coach who makes the quarterback successful, or vice-versa. Maybe, just maybe, the most important guy on the field is the superstar wide receiver.

Wide receivers don’t get much love. 32 quarterbacks and 17 running backs have won an MVP, as have one defensive tackle and one linebacker. Hell, even a kicker won one (Mark Moseley, who missed 3 XPs that year) . But no wide receiver has ever been considered most valuable. (Maybe that’s why so many of them are assholes.)

And yet, there is significant statistical evidence that great wide receivers turn otherwise mundane quarterbacks into very good quarterbacks, and very good quarterbacks into great ones. Head over to pro-football-reference.com and look at the numbers for Jeff Garcia, Daunte Culpepper, Donovan McNabb, Randall Cunningham and Tom Brady.

Notice anything? All of them had crazy-good seasons when they were throwing to guys named Terrell Owens and Randy Moss – and less than crazy-good seasons the rest of the time.

Donovan McNabb has been a solid NFL quarterback who has led his team to many playoff appearances and appeared in five Pro Bowls, But his 2004 season stands out. He posted, by far, his best numbers in TD passes, yardage, QB rating, and completion percentage. It was the only full season he spent with T.O.

Jeff Garcia had 3 full seasons with T.O. He averaged 3720 yards and 28 TDs (30+ in two of them), and went to three straight Pro Bowls. He has been a sub-par quarterback the rest of his career.

Culpepper had three 16-game seasons with Moss at wideout. He threw for over 30 TDs in two of them, and made the Pro Bowl all 3. Since 2004, their last season together, he has been injured and ineffective and is now out of football.

My favorite is Cunningham. In 1998 Randall Cunningham was 35 years old, his best years well behind him, when he suddenly had a career year. Eight years removed from his last Pro Bowl appearance, he threw for 34 TDs, led the league with a 106.0 QB rating, and received his first and only All-Pro selection. Naturally, he was throwing to Moss that year.

And then there is the strange case of Thomas Edward Brady. Tom Brady won 3 Super Bowls before Randy Moss ever got to Foxboro, so he didn’t need Moss to be a great quarterback. But he did need Moss to become a great passer – which some people think is an integral part of the quarterback position.

Prior to Moss’ lining up alongside him, Brady had been a very good passer, but not a great one. He led the league in yards one year and TD passes another (with an unimpressive league leading 28). He had a very good TD/INT rate, and kept his QB rating in the mid-80’s to low 90’s. He was over 60% every year in pass completion percentage.

But he had never thrown for 30 TDs (those guys above all threw for 30+ when throwing to Moss/TO). He had only one 4000 yard season. And while he made a few Pro Bowls, he never made All-Pro.

Then Moss signed with the Patriots, and Tom Brady re-wrote the record books. Anyone with an objective mind would have to think, hmmm, Moss made him much better.

Have Fun Storming the Cassel
How will Bill Belichick do with Matt Cassel at quarterback? How will Cassel do with Moss?

He’s not the ideal quarterback for our controlled experiment because we have no benchmark to compare his performance. I’d rather it be Brian Griese or Kerry Collins or some guy who has a track record. In other words, we have no idea how good/bad Cassel is, so it's difficult to determine what kind of impact Belichick/Moss are having on him.

But consider this: in his few fleeting moments on an NFL gridiron, he has played what amounts to a full game. And it was a pretty good game: 22 of 39 for 255 yards, 2 TDs and a pick.

With Belichick coaching, Moss receiving, and the rest of that well-run machine that is the New England Patriots, I’m betting they are playing football this January.

* A quick primer on the difference between Pro Bowl and All Pro. The Pro Bowl is like the All Star game - full rosters of 45 guys from each conference are selected. Starters, reserves - plus replacements for injured players. All total, over 100 players are "Pro Bowlers" every year. All Pro is a much higher honor. Each year, the Associated Press selects one guy at every position for their All Pro team. So, Tom Brady has been selected to four Pro Bowls, but was not selected All Pro until last year. Peyton Manning, a much better passer than Brady till last year, has gone to 8 Pro Bowls and was selected All Pro three times. Amazingly, in 2006, Manning led the league in TD passes and QB rating and was 2nd in yards, but didn't make All Pro.

She Shoots...She Scores!!

Back during the 2004 convention season I thought Republicans had one huge overlooked advantage over Democrats: celebrities.

No, not Hollywood celebrities. That peculiar crowd will always provide their dubious support for Democrats. I’m talking about political celebrities. And in 2004, the biggest political celebrities in America were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudolph Giuliani, both of whom were principal speakers at the GOP convention in New York.

The Democrats didn’t have that kind of star power. There were the Clintons, of course, but they’d been around a while and Democrats were concerned Bill’s rock-star status diminished their candidate. And there was a little-known freshman Senator from Illinois who made a splash with a stirring speech. But they simply couldn’t match the firepower of Rudy, Ah-nuld, and a still-popular President.

The Republicans got a 5% bounce from their convention, the Democrats a “negative bounce” of 2%, and Bush was reelected.

This year has been different. Every ounce of glamour, celebrity power, media fawning, and rock star status has been tied to the candidacy of that little-known Senator, now the world-famous Barack Obama. Until last night. Last night, a star was born.

Sarah Palin gave a speech that rivals some of the great convention speeches of my lifetime, such as Mario Cuomo in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2004.

Rhetorically, it was nothing special. On a printed page, it wouldn’t stand up against the best speeches of Obama, Clinton or even Bush – whose speech of September 20, 2001 earned its place in history.

But in terms of delivery and political effectiveness, she hit it out of the park. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say she slapped it into the net.

In her Wall Street Journal column yesterday, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan gave the following advice to Palin:

A voter laughing is half yours, and just received a line he can repeat next weekend over a beer at the barbecue or online at Starbucks. Here is a fact of American politics: If you make us laugh we spread your line for free.

Two of Palin's lines last night - "Lipstick" and "the difference between a community organizer and a small-town mayor" - are already being spread by voters for free..

Halftime
We shouldn’t get too carried away here. It might feel like we’re at the 2-minute warning of this Presidential election, but I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s halftime (I know, I’m mixing my sports metaphors…). In terms of time, yes, it’s very late in the game. But most voters have just begun to tune in, and the next two months will be a barrage of debates, advertising and news coverage. There’s a long way to go and the score is very close.

And Sarah Palin has not even begun to be tested on the national stage. Remember that Barack Obama had months to refine his message in Iowa and New Hampshire before the nation began to tune in to every syllable he uttered. Palin will have a big spotlight and an even bigger microphone in her face from day one, and it would be shocking if she doesn't blunder at some point.

Finally, it should be noted that the famous convention speeches of Cuomo and Obama were given in losing causes.

But as Brian Williams put it so very aptly moments after Palin’s speech ended last night, “Game on.”

One of Us

In 1824, John Quincy Adams faced Andrew Jackson in the Presidential election. They were nominally of the same party (it was a brief period of single-party dominance) but had little else in common.

Adams was the ultimate American elitist. The son of a President (a Founder, no less), he went to Harvard, spoke many languages, lived and traveled extensively in Europe, and was an accomplished American diplomat. He was classically educated and could quote Ovid as easily as I quote Seinfeld.

Jackson was anything but the American elitist. Born poor, orphaned by age 14, and sporadically educated, he was the true self-made man who made his fame on the field of battle. Thomas Jefferson, speaking of Jackson’s presidential ambitions, declared him to be “one of the most unfit men I know of for the place.”

Daniel Walker Howe, in his excellent history of early 19th century America What Hath God Wrought, writes that “no one liked Jackson for president except the voting public.”

And they liked him a lot – Jackson lost the election in 1824 despite winning the popular and electoral vote, and won decisively in 1828 and 1832. (He is the answer to a good trivia question: who is the only Presidential candidate besides FDR to win the popular vote in 3 elections?)

And they liked him, in part, because he was like them. Okay, he wasn’t really like them; he was a successful general, a born leader, tougher than any man alive, smarter than the intellectual elite realized, and one of the strongest personalities in the history of American politics. But he seemed like one of them. Like most voters, he was born poor, worked hard, endured sorrow, and had no use for proper spelling.

So began one of America’s great political traditions – the attempt by candidates seem like one of us, even when they are not.

One of the Boys
George W. Bush is the son of a President, grandson of a Senator, and attended the finest schools in New England. But he emphasizes his Crawford roots and likes to be photographed eating ribs and cutting brush.

John Kerry was educated in the finest schools in Europe and New England, and spent his childhood summers on a family estate in France. But he sought out photo ops in duck blinds and spoke of no part of his young life but his year in Vietnam.

Bill Clinton had a genuinely humble background that he emphasized in his candidacies, downplaying his spectacular academic career, which included a Rhodes scholarship and, like the other two, a Yale degree.

I could go on and on. Teddy Roosevelt the Rough Rider didn’t speak of Teddy Roosevelt the Park Avenue socialite. Lincoln bragged on his axe-swinging days but downplayed his successful law practice.

The best example may be William Henry Harrison. Tippecanoe* was from a prominent political family whose father was a signer of the Declaration and who had extensive public experience and great wealth. But when his opponents in the election of 1836 claimed he’d rather “sit in his log cabin and drink cider” he adopted the log cabin and cider bottles as his images, and won in a landslide.

* This was a great time for Presidential nicknames. Old Hickory (Jackson) was followed by The Little Magician (Van Buren), Tippecanoe (Harrison), His Accidency (Tyler), Young Hickory (Jackson’s protégé, Polk), and Old Rough and Ready (Zachary Taylor). Our era gives us Dubya, Bubba, and Poppy.

All of these politicians understood that voters don’t want to hear they are smarter and/or wealthier than us. So they pretend to be like us. When we catch them doing otherwise - windsurfing, say, or being confounded by a supermarket scanner, we punish them.

But of course, we know they aren’t really like us. Don't we?

Along Came Sarah
And into our lives strides Sarah Palin. There are no Ivy League or European colleges in her past. She has no illustrious ancestors – senators or admirals or ambassadors. She did not marry the heir to a vast fortune. She does not bring to the Vice Presidency, like Cheney or Biden (both of humble origins) an extensive and impressive career in public service. She has a son in the Army and a pregnant teenage daughter. Her husband’s in a union. Aside from her stunning election as Governor less than two years ago, she has led a life that is not dramatically different from most of the women on my block – except for, you know, the ice fishing and the mooseburgers.

And suddenly American voters are being asked…do we actually want someone that close to the Oval Office who is truly and genuinely just a slob like one of us?

We’ll never know of course. Regardless of who wins, there are too many other factors – particularly the guys at the head of the ticket – that will ultimately decide this election. But we’re all going to be in a lot of Sarah Palin conversations the next few weeks, and it’ll be interesting to see what people think.

Me? I’m just hoping we come up with a really good nickname for her. I’m pushing for the Holy Hand Grenade.

Update: George Will wrote a similarly-themed piece in Newsweek. We approached it differently, but used the same Harrison example. He included this bit, though, which I loved:

" Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, [spent] 14 years as a U.S. senator from Ohio. He was a conservative representing a state whose electorate included many farmers and blue-collar industrial workers, and opponents charged that he was out of touch with such ordinary people. In 1947 a reporter asked Mrs. Taft, 'Do you think of your husband as a common man?' Aghast, she replied: 'Oh, no, no! The senator is very uncommon. He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at the Harvard Law School. We wouldn't permit Ohio to be represented in the Senate by just a common man.' In 1950, Taft was re-elected in a landslide."