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."

And Now for Something Completely Different

What to make of Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin?

The Democrats have helpfully given me their opinion. Everyone from Chuck Schumer to Rahm Emanuel to an Obama spokesman have attacked Palin’s lack of experience – a potentially risky strategy for the party whose ticket topper was sworn in as Senator, bought supplies for his Senate office, and on the way back from Staples announced his Presidential candidacy.

And I caught a little bit of conservative talk radio on the way home yesterday and Sean Hannity was talking as if Governor Palin was the reincarnated combination of Ronald Reagan, Annie Oakley, and the Statue of Liberty.

So you need an unbiased, objective opinion, and that’s what I’m here to offer. Well, maybe not objective, and certainly not unbiased – but unlike the folks above, it’s at least honest.*

* I mean, really, doesn’t it get embarrassing being a partisan sometimes? Every Democrat in America has been loudly proclaiming for months that Obama’s lack of experience doesn’t matter, and now they will all take to the airwaves and cocktail parties and blogosphere assailing Palin’s inexperience. And every Republican in America has been loudly proclaiming for months that Obama’s lack of experience is a terrible risk, and now they will all take to the airwaves and cocktail parties and blogosphere proclaiming that the PTA Presidency is excellent experience for the American Presidency. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering.

Anyway, back to my opinion. I’ve given it some thought, and can state with certitude and authority that the selection of Governor Palin as nominee for Vice-President of the United States is the most brilliant stroke of American political genius in the 21st century…or the stupidest freakin’ thing a major political party has ever done. It’s definitely one of those things.

Unlike professional politicians, whose opinions shift hourly depending on circumstances, I have long held that experience in the White House is of dubious value. Some of our greatest Presidents have had scant political experience, and some of our weakest were (to borrow David Brooks’ phrase) Resume Gods. Because of that, predicting a President’s success or failure is fool’s work – so this piece will focus strictly on whether or not it was a smart political move.

The Case Against
I’m not sure if you’ve heard this, but John McCain is old. How old? Lou Gehrig won the MVP the year he was born. Winston Churchill was still four years away from becoming Prime Minister. When a young Brett Favre won his first Super Bowl, McCain already qualified for senior tickets at the movies. If McCain serves two terms, he’ll celebrate his 80th birthday in the White House. These are not Jay Leno jokes – these are actual facts. The dude’s old.

So I always assumed that he absolutely must choose as his running mate a person that Americans believe is White House-ready. And Governor Palin’s resume is not reassuring on that count.

Further, it makes it harder for McCain to hit Obama too hard on the experience front – which is clearly McCain’s biggest strength. It’s as if the Lone Ranger threw away his Silver Bullet.

The Case For
Now it gets interesting.

First of all, her inexperience is mitigated by Obama’s own inexperience. Obama has been in the Senate two years longer than Palin was Governor, but the Governorship is executive experience, and Obama has spent nearly his entire Senate "career" running for President. Only one of them has ever run anything of any size, and it’s Palin.

Second, her biography is compelling. A son going to Iraq on September 11? Another with Down’s Syndrome? A husband who is a champion snow machine racer? (I don’t know what that is exactly, but I’m almost certain it’s more manly than spin class). Her own skyrocketing rise from City Council to the Governorship to the Vice-Presidency? It’s exciting stuff, and will engage a voting public who may have Obama/McCain fatigue and is already bored by Joe Biden.

Third, she’s a woman. It’s a bold play for the millions of Hillary voters who haven’t warmed to Obama and guarantees that the Republican ticket, if victorious, will be nearly as historic as the Democratic ticket.

Fourth, her socially conservative views, to judge from early accounts, will help McCain with the conservative wing of his party, where he is weakest.

Fifth, she’ll be hard to attack. Let’s face it – you go after the mother of five whose son is in Iraq the way you might go after a Dick Cheney, and the voters will not approve. The Democrats need to be as careful with Palin as Republicans have been with Obama.

And sixth, it reminds everyone that John McCain is a maverick. Much of the Obama strategy depends on linking McCain with Bush, which always struck me as a stretch. McCain’s personal biography, his long-documented history of working with Democrats, his party’s own ambivalence towards him, and his bitter Bush battles in 2000, all argue against a McCain Administration being the second coming of Dubya. An unconventional pick like Sarah Palin reminds everyone that McCain is not the product of focus groups or Rove-like puppeteers.

Presence & Gaffes
Voters and pundits often underestimate how important physical presence is in national candidates. Most are tall, reasonably attractive, have good voices. Unlike our Senators and Governors, we have to actually live with these people for years. I have long felt that Hillary Clinton’s national ambitions were doomed in part because of a grating public speaking voice.

Palin looks like Tina Fey with good posture (that’s a compliment). And she impressed me in her appearance with McCain yesterday – she delivered her speech with a pleasant and natural speaking voice. This can go a long way.

So, in conclusion, she can be an impressive wild card that tips a close election, especially if she can draw in only a fraction of the Hillary votes.

But if she has a terrible gaffe – says the Iranians are Sunni, for example, or confuses the Federal Reserve with the Treasury Department – or if McCain has a health scare – this will be an election-losing choice.

This election keeps getting better, don't it?

Good Night Everybody!!

I was born in the 60’s, raised in the 70’s, educated in the 80’s, married in the 90’s, and find myself staggering toward early middle-age here in the 2000’s. So you’d think I’ve seen my share of divorce.

But I haven’t. None of my closest twenty friends, including my entire college crowd, have cut the marital bonds. None of my siblings, or my wife’s siblings, or their spouse’s siblings, have torn asunder what God joined together. All of the couples in my friendly neighborhood are on their first marriage. To the best of my knowledge the parents of all of these people have stayed together till death do they part. I am surprisingly innocent of the pains of divorce.

Maybe that’s why the breakup of Mike and the Mad Dog hit me so hard.

For my buddies and I, Mike and the Mad Dog, aka Mike Francesa and Chris Russo, have played a surprisingly large role in our lives. As drive-time hosts on the first and still-largest sports radio station in the country, they have done as much as anyone, maybe more than everyone, to define – nay, to create sports talk radio.

And what have they created, exactly? I would describe the M&MD formula as follows:

4 parts Knowledge
Whatever else you might say about Mike & Chris, they know their stuff. Francesa can reel off the starting offensive line for the 1971 Cowboys, and tell you which college those lineman came from. Russo can remember detailed pitch sequences from a late September game in 1997. They have huge gaps to be sure, as my hockey-loving friends will attest; and they are often wrong, particularly when they try to turn their knowledge to analysis. But I’d be reluctant to take them on in Sports Jeopardy.

1 part Smugness
If Mike got one of those colleges wrong – said, perhaps, that guard John Niland went to Iona instead of Iowa, he would dismiss the caller who phoned in to correct him with a lofty condescension worthy of a Renaissance noble speaking to the boy who cleaned his slop bucket.

Mike’s greatest smugness was about the Yankees. One of his best lines was about the Mets as they prepared to meet his beloved Yankees in the World Series: Congratulations to the Mets. Now they play the Varsity.

2 parts Genuine Anger
Check out this tirade from Russo to get an idea how he earned his nickname.

1 part Feigned Anger
One of my personal favorite Mad Dog moments: late September, 1998, the Yankees magical season. Shane Spencer comes up from the minors and hits a bunch of home runs. The whole town, even Yankee haters, loves the kid. He looks like he came straight out of an old movie, the country kid who finally gets out of the minors and has success in the biggest spotlight of all.

And one Saturday morning, Mad Dog goes off on him. The thrust of his spittle-flecked argument was that Spencer was a phony, since he claimed that Mickey Mantle was a hero of his.

“Mickey Mantle!?” sputtered Mad Dog. “Mickey Mantle?!?! Shane Spencer grew up in North Carolina in the 1970’s!!! You’re gonna tell me his favorite player was someone from Oklahoma who played in New York in the 50’s!!!!!!!!!!! What a phoney!!!!”

A pause, then what sounded like a slight chuckle as he muttered, “Back on the FAN.” Enraged Yankee fans called in for the next two hours, defending Spencer’s honor. Great stuff.

2 parts Completely Random Non-Sports Content, Delivered in Same Manner as Sports Content
Russo on how Thanksgiving has become an overlooked holiday: "Bottom line, Mike... come the morning of the parade, Santa Claus is officially in the mix. Here’s Mink with the flash."

And on a more serious topic, Francesa sometime after 9/11 discussing the need to capture Osama Bin Laden: “It's simple, Dog, you have to go after the quarterback.”

1 part Possibly Apocryphal but Utterly Plausible Non-Sports (but with a thin sports connection) Content Delivered in Same Manner as Sports Content
Mike and the Mad Dog are discussing Pope John Paul II’s cancellation of a Mass that was to be given at Yankee Stadium on account of rain: “I gotta tell ya, Mikey, that’s a bad job by the Pope.”

My friends and I use this line more than all the lines from Caddyshack put together, and we don't even know if it was actually said. But we choose to believe it is.

5 parts Love of Sports
Many sportswriters, like Ian O’Connor and George Vecsey, write as if they hate professional sports. Maybe they spent too much time in locker rooms waiting for wealthy arrogant and stupid jocks to give them the time of day and now that they have columns can exact their revenge.

Many other sportswriters, like most of the profile writers Sports Illustrated has hired through the years, write about their subjects as if they are some combination of King Arthur, Hercules, and Mozart. Maybe those same wealthy arrogant and stupid jocks were told by their agents to be really nice to the guy from SI.

But Mike and the Mad Dog are sports fans. They are knowledgeable and passionate, they get angry and excited, they root. In the age of the internet, particularly sports blogging, we are now used to this. The Sports Guy, a professed Mike and the Mad Dog fan, has perfected the art. But Mike and Chris were pioneers in the field – at least, they did it better early than anyone else.


1 part Schadenfreude
Nothing better than the Mad Dog the day after a big Yankee loss.

5 parts Great Interviews
Radio’s greatest strength is its intimacy – it’s you alone in the car with the host(s) and the guest. As I wrote back in a piece on Imus, it bothered me that none of the coverage of the Imus scandal last year even mentioned that the Imus show was one of the only mediums outside NPR that allowed authors of actual books – serious books! – to speak at length about their work.

Don Imus was mentor to Mike and the Mad Dog, and his success very much enabled the FAN to become the powerhouse that it is. And they learned from him. One of the greatest interviews I’ve ever heard – one where I sat in my parked car in front of my house for a half hour – was Mike and the Mad Dog with Bill Parcells on the occasion of Lawrence Taylor’s retirement.

Many of the best Mike and the Mad Dog stories focus on the Dog – but Mike was the better interviewer, and Mike was the guy who got the guests, I think. He was more respected among the sports elite than the Dog was, perhaps, or maybe just a better reporter.


Now What?
If my friends and I are the children of this divorce, we’re in nearly unanimous agreement that we got stuck with the lesser parent. Mad Dog gave us our joy, and he heads off to satellite radio leaving us with the smug one. But Mad Dog may struggle on a national show.

One friend of mine, a professional sportscaster himself, noted how truly local the show is. On a local show, especially when the locality is New York, you could do a whole week’s worth of shows on Joba Chamberlain’s pitch counts, Jose Reyes’ on-field demeanor, or Michael Strahan’s hold-out.

A national broadcast will force him to increase the breadth of his topics, especially into areas he is weak. He is surely the accredited Heisman Trophy voter who watches the fewest college football games, which will hurt him in many parts of the country.

And Mike? He’s just not funny. All of the catchphrases, all the antic moments, all the truly classic lines of the show came from the Angry Puppy. (Even my wife, as apathetic towards sports as any person alive, will throw out the ocassional "Fair point, Mikey.") So yeah, I’ll tune in occasionally, and I’ll hope he finds his partner with whom he can bond in the same way.

But I need to accept that they aren’t getting back together, and life will never be the same.

Fixing Softball

Some sports, like swimming and golfing and nearly all track and field events, feature an athlete competing against himself. You put up the best score or time possible and hope it is good enough to be the best.

But in many other sports, like boxing and tennis and nearly all team sports, you compete against another team or athlete, and react to their actions. In those cases, the entertainment value rests largely on the maintenance of a balance of power.

For example, baseball has been played professionally for over a century, and generally speaking balance has been maintained between run prevention (pitching and fielding) and run creation (hitting and running). Pitchers have occasionally gotten the upper hand (like in the 60’s) and hitters have occasionally gotten the upper hand (recently), but the sport tends to do little tweaks like lowering the mound or cracking down on steroids when these things get out of hand.

In Stephen Jay Gould’s book Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, he shows how, even as .400 hitters have disappeared from baseball, the league batting average has remained an almost constant .272. That is balance.

So, too, in football. As defensive players get bigger and stronger and more lethal, and as defensive schemes get more complicated, the NFL makes little tweaks to the rules to keep the offense up to speed. (And yes, in both baseball and football, the rules-makers tend to, if anything, give an edge to the scorers, as that’s what people like to see).

And some times, the balance is threatened by advances in equipment. The ability of male tennis players to crush 150 mile per hour serves with larger racquets forced the governing bodies to tweak their rules to allow for longer volleys.

This is a rather longwinded way of saying that in some sports the balance has been lost, making the game boring, saddled with odd rules to address the balance problem, or both. Welcome to Women’s Softball.

The Hurler’s Dominance

This is the part of the article where I intended to present you with statistics demonstrating how pitchers utterly and completely dominate softball, and then attempt some sort of explanation as to why this is so. So I began googling around for statistics and found a piece by Rob Neyer, a baseball writer at whose altar I worship. So I will liberally quote from his piece, The Softer They Come: Why is it So Hard to Hit a Softball:

Ted Williams was fond of saying that the toughest thing in sports is hitting a round ball with a round bat. Williams was right, just not as precise as he could have been. The toughest thing in sports is to hit a round ball with a round bat when the round ball is thrown underhand from 40 feet away...In the 2000 Olympics, the gold-medal-winning U.S. softball team allowed only seven runs and 24 hits in 10 games.

This year, Team USA won again and was even more dominant. In nine games, the Americans allowed one run and 18 hits... But it's usually not just Team USA's opponents who struggle to score. In 2000, in their six games against China, Japan, and Australia—arguably the Americans' toughest competition—the U.S. team scored only six runs...Though the Americans did much better this time around with 51 runs in nine games, when great players face off, softball is clearly a pitcher's game. In this year's Olympics, there were 19 games that didn't include weak sisters Greece and Italy. In those games, an average of 3.8 runs were scored per seven innings.

Why is it so hard to hit a softball? Distance, time, and uncertainty. In international competition, the pitcher's plate (or "rubber," as baseball fans know it) is only 43 feet from home plate. What's more, thanks to liberal rules, softball pitchers release the ball from even closer than that, slightly less than 40 feet—about 20 feet closer than a baseball pitcher. Top softball pitchers like Jennie Finch can throw roughly 70 miles per hour, the equivalent of a low-90s fastball thrown from 60 feet away. There are, of course, many hundreds of human beings who can hit a low-90s fastball. But most of them play professional baseball, and nearly all of them are men. And anyway, fast-pitch pitchers don't just throw fastballs. They keep the batters guessing with rise balls, drop balls, curves, and in-shoots. Pitchers with speed and a varied repertoire—like current U.S. Olympians Finch, Lisa Fernandez, and Cat Osterman—make life almost impossible for even the best hitters.

In softball, there are no famous hitters, only famous pitchers.


I couldn’t say it better myself.

The FixLuckily, I’m here to offer my free advice. The powers that be in softball have come up with one fix, a silly one, to address its problems. Realizing that low-scoring games could go on for weeks and weeks as overmatched hitters helplessly flail at lightning fast rise balls, they actually begin extra innings with a runner on second. Yes, you read that right: as the players take the field to begin a half inning, there’s a guy (well, a gal actually) at second. This is an abomination.

There’s a much easier fix, and I offer it now in all its elegant simplity: move the mound back.

Sadly, my advice comes too late: softball is not returning as an Olympic event. For the fascinating backstory, click here.

Other Stories in the Volunteer Commissioner series:

Note: This is part of the Volunteer Commissioner series, in which I graciously fix problems in various sports. The others posts in the series are:
Fixing Softball (Women's softball)
The Loser's Out Manifesto (Pick-up basketball)
The Beautiful Game's Flaw (soccer)
The Slowest Game (lacrosse). 
Swimming is Boring (Swimming)
The Winter Classic (Baseball)

You’re welcome. Unfortunately, swimming is unfixable.]

Swimming is Boring

I’m trying to get into this Michael Phelps thing. I really am. But I just can’t shake the fact that swimming is kind of, well, boring.

Here’s what I see when I watch a swim meet: a bunch of guys who look exactly alike (long, lean, hairless and white), all doing exactly the same thing, all at roughly the same speed. Then one of the guys, who NBC helpfully informs me is Phelps (because really, how else would I know?) touches the wall a little ahead of all the other guys. Rinse and repeat.

It has so few of the elements that makes watching sports fun. There has never been, in the entire history of swimming, a great play. There is very rarely (the freestyle relay an exception) a dramatic comeback. A swimmer never has to adjust to anything unexpected, the way most athletes have to adjust to an opponents’ play, or a golfer has to adjust to wind or a shot he’s never seen before. You can't fall in a pool, so swimming doesn't have heartbreaking moments like the Olympic skier or gymnast, whose dreams come crashing down because of a momentary lack of concentration.

It has none of the eye-popping 'how do they do that?' wonder of gymnastics or diving. It's just, you know, the breaststroke. I can do that. Not that fast, to be sure, or that graceful. And nobody wants to see me in a Speedo. But it's not as unimaginable as 3 somersaults, 2 corkscrews and a tuck off a 20 meter platform without making a splash.

Even the speed doesn’t dazzle, like the 100 yard dash. If my 8 year old daughter was running alongside the pool she can probably take all those guys, what with the water slowing them down and all.

And I’m pretty sure that swimming isn’t one of those sports that, if I only understood the complexities and subtleties and strategies and tactics better, I’d truly appreciate. For example, I don’t like NASCAR. All I see is a bunch of cars festooned with ads driving in circles. But I know that NASCAR fans are seeing much more. They understand the strategies, tactics, and differing styles that are being employed throughout the race, and are therefore enjoying it far more than I could.

But I don’t think that’s really true of swimming. You push off, swim fast, turn, push again, get to the other side. Did I miss anything? I guess you have to pace yourself a bit, but it’s only one to two hundred meters – you can pretty much let it all hang out, can’t you?

Don’t get me wrong. I respect the greatness of Phelps’ accomplishment. It has everything you associate with true athleticism: speed, strength, grace, skill, commitment, desire.

And I admire the fact that Phelps is the sole architect of his greatness. Many American football fans think Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback ever. But if he hadn’t been given the greatest offensive coach ever, the greatest wide receiver ever, one of the greatest receiving backs ever, and oh by the way, a consistently great defense, he might have had Bert Jones’ career. Phelps doesn’t rely on teammates, systems, equipment, or coaches. It is the human body against one of Nature’s elements.

So, I will be rooting hard for Michael Phelps to win his 7th Gold tonight, and his 8th tomorrow night. And I’ll probably even watch it.

But I’ll thank all of the Gods on Mount Olympus that it will only take a few minutes of my time. Then I’ll put on the Mets game.

Update: I watched a lot of swimming last night. I saw Torres win the Silver, get her medal, and rush back to the pool to win another Silver in the Relay. Then I watched the American men win the 4X100 medley relay, Phelps' 8th gold. It was awesome. The sport itself is still boring - it requires the contextual personal drama of stories like Phelps' and Torres' - but I did thoroughly enjoy it.