Baseball

Baseball, Cuba, Medicaid, Politics

Cuba

Posted on by christian

Isn’t it Time?

Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn recently made their second trip to Cuba. Carter also went in 2002. Both trips, undertaken as a private citizen (but no former president is really a private citizen), were designed to try and move U.S – Cuba relations in a more positive direction.

Predictably, Carter was immediately denounced as a “shill for Castro” and an apologist for the Cuba government. Such criticism seems to roll of the former president’s back like water off a duck and Carter’s report on the visit, posted at the Carter Center website, paints a much different picture of what he did and said in Havana. Here’s the concluding paragraph of his trip summary:

“Both privately and publicly I continued to call for the end of our economic blockade against the Cuban people, the lifting of all travel, trade, and financial restraints, the release of Alan Gross [a jailed U.S. contractor] and the Cuban Five [Cuban dissidents], an end to U.S. policy that Cuba promotes terrorism, for freedom of speech, assembly, and travel in Cuba, and the establishment of full relations between our two countries. At the airport, Raul [Castro, the Cuba president] told the press, ‘I agree with everything that President Carter said.'”

For 50 years the United States has had an embargo against Cuba. During the Bush Administration and for most of that 50 years, it has been extremely difficult, even illegal, to travel to Cuba. Trade has been strictly banned. The Obama Administration has relaxed the travel rules some, but the chance that the two countries might actually get on a path to more normal relations remains wrapped around the axle of south Florida politics. The Cuba-American community there, largely Republican voters, remains a potent political force and last I checked Florida still played an outsized role in presidential politics. For years the political facts of life in one state have largely dictated the nation’s policy toward Cuba.

Nevertheless, by almost any measure our Cuban policy has run its course, and not just because I’d like to buy an extremely expensive Cuba cigar in the United States. At one time, post-Bay of Pigs and post-Cuban missile crisis it was easy to make the argument that Fidel Castro’s island regime was settling in to become a genuine threat to U.S. and Latin American security. Cuba did meddle in revolutions in far away places, like Angola, but today there is much reason to acknowledge that the Cuba-Soviet relationship was never as seamless as we feared nor was Castro, the socialist revolutionary, as effective as we might have thought. Cuba’s economy struggles today and the embargo, rather than bringing down Castro, has hurt the Cuban people and given the regime its anti-American reason d’etre.

Here’s the analogy that works for me. We’ve had 50 years of deadlock and non-engagement with Cuba, a country 90 miles from our shores, while halfway around the world, thanks originally to Nixon and Kissinger, we have engaged the Chinese and, I would argue, slowly, but steadily, helped bring a measure of the free market and openness in that communist country. We may have gone too far. The Chinese now threaten our economic leadership in the world. At the same time, we engage Vietnam, a country in which we fought a long and bloody war, with trade and diplomacy. We have an unsteady, but absolutely necessary relationship with Putin, the old KGB chief, in Russia. But nothing of any substance with Cuba.

Idaho and other Pacific Northwest conservatives, guys like Sen. Mike Crapo and Gov. Butch Otter, have long pushed for more trade opportunities with Cuba, the Castro brothers notwithstanding. In February 2008, Crapo signed a bipartisan letter to the Bush Administration, asking for a rethinking of U.S. policy in light of the resignation of Fidel Castro.

“Our current policy deprives the United States of influence in Cuba,” Crapo wrote, “including the opportunity to promote principles that advance democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.  By restricting the ability of Americans to travel freely to Cuba, we limit contact and communication on the part of families, civil society, and government.  Likewise, by restricting the ability of our farmers, ranchers, and businesses to trade with Cuba, the United States has made itself irrelevant in Cuba’s growing economy, allowing Cuba to build economic partnerships elsewhere.”

Cuba presents a “Nixon goes to China” moment. Relaxing trade restrictions and putting the countries on a path to more normal relations, requires conservative, trade-oriented Republicans, like Crapo, to keep pushing.

In a 2005 report, the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute, labeled our country’s Cuba policy “four decades of failure.” CATO’s trade policy director Daniel Griswold wrote: “The most powerful force for change in Cuba will not be more sanctions, but more daily interaction with free people bearing dollars and new ideas.” Indeed.

World-class cigars aside, Cuba can’t have much to sell to us. They import most of their food and manufactured goods. By contrast, we have everything the Cubans need from automobiles to high rise resort hotels, from Idaho potatoes to Washington apples. Continuing sanctions is simply a huge missed opportunity.

Jimmy Carter left office in 1981 with a 34% approval rating. His tenure remains controversial, but his standing in the history books aside, Carter has quietly and effectively been a model “ex-president.” His selfless work in Africa to end disease, his election monitoring around the world and his advocacy for women continue to be impressive. As one of the few Americans to engage at the highest levels with Cuba’s political elite, with dissidents, artists and religious leaders, he deserves a fair hearing on Cuba.

Pure south Florida politics aside, when Jimmy Carter and Mike Crapo are on the same page about Cuba, everyone should be listening.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Say It Ain’t So

Posted on by christian

Where is Landis When We Need Him?

I’m not sure what to be more shocked about this morning: the breaking news that long-suffering Chicago Cubs fans may have to endure more ridicule or that the quietly inept Commissioner of Major League baseball has stepped in to bail out another of baseball’s loudly inept owners.

The story out of Chicago that the 1918 Cubs may have been the World Series throwing inspiration for the 1919 White Sox is, still and all, based on speculation. The Dodger meltdown is all too real. Old documents have turned up that suggest that White Sox players, pitcher Eddie Cicotte particularly, may have been inspired by the Cubs taking a dive against the Boston Red Sox in the 1918 series. Cicotte is hardly a character witness. He was banned from baseball for life by then-Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis for cavorting with gamblers and, very likely, conspiring to lose the 1919 series to the Cincinnati Reds.

Professional baseball realized it had a problem in the wake of the “Black Sox” scandal and turned to a crusty Chicago federal judge, Landis, to assume dictatorial powers over the game in the interest of restoring integrity to the national past time.

Landis was selected by the owners – baseball had millionaire owners then, too – but he operated more as a policeman than a hand maiden. With two major National League franchises – the Mets and the Dodgers – now operating under serious financial clouds and with Roger Clemens about to follow Barry Bonds into steroid never-never land, baseball could use a commissioner who was less dedicated to holding the coats of the game’s owners than in establishing fundamental standards of conduct that, Landis-like, really protect the integrity of the enterprise.

Gamblers once spread around money to try and fix the World Series and Judge Landis drew a sharp line in the infield dirt by declaring that gambling was off limits to anyone involved in the game. Just ask Pete Rose if that precedent is as good today as it was in 1920.

Today’s baseball gamblers are guys like Frank McCourt who ran one of the great brands in sports into the ditch after using enormously leveraged money to buy the Dodgers and Fred Wilpon, the Mets principle owner, who once counted Bernie Madoff as both close friend and financial advisor.

Given the continued drug cheating and financial incompetency in baseball, a real commissioner would lay down the law, not just try to pick up the pieces. The way to keep the modern day gamblers out of the game is not to let them in the first place and, when they screw up, quickly show them the door. Baseball ownership has always been a closed shop for too many guys operating on too much leveraged money who enjoy the vanity of owning the owner’s box. All their money, their messy divorces and their felonious financial advisors aside, the game still belongs to the fans in the seats.

A real commissioner would spend more time worrying about the best interest of the folks who buy the tickets rather than the interest of some rich guy who isn’t smart enough to make money on a baseball team in Los Angeles or New York.

Landis is remembered for banning the eight White Sox players in 1920 and altogether he banned more than twenty players for gambling, selling stolen cars and other sins that brought disrespect to the game. He also banned one owner – William B. Cox of the Philadelphia Phillies – for betting on his own team. Cox remains the only owner ever banned for life.

It’s time to send some more owners to the showers – permanently. Landis knew the score. He reportedly told players, “Don’t go to those owners if you get into trouble, come to me. I’m your friend. They’re no good.”

Spoken like a real commissioner.

 

Baseball, Politics

Mayor Annoyed

Posted on by christian

The Best Politician You Never Heard Of

If you’ve ever been to the ballpark in Baltimore – Oriole Park at Camden Yards – and loved it as I have, you have William Donald Schaefer to thank. Or maybe you’ve been able to wander around the gorgeous Inner Harbor in Baltimore and visit the stunning National Aquarium. All the work of Don Schaefer.

In one of the best political profiles ever written, Richard Ben Cramer, called Schaefer, who died on Monday at age 89, Mayor Annoyed. Annoyed because things didn’t happen fast enough in his city, annoyed because greedy developers (and NFL owners) refused to see things his way and annoyed because nitwit reporters tweaked him for his temper and his very old school ways.

He never quit working. Schaefer became legendary for driving around the city at all hours stopping his Buick to check on an abandoned building, talk to some guy on the street or pick up a pile of trash. The mayor, and later the governor, always had work to do.

For 15 years, Schaefer was the mayor of Baltimore and then spent two terms as governor and more time as Maryland’s controller. He never married. Politics was his mistress. He was a builder, a boss, a bully, a booster and, as the Baltimore Sun said in his stunningly interesting obituary, “the dominate figure in Maryland politics over the last half century.”

Don Schaefer was the model of the modern, big city mayor.

Schaefer, often referred to as the “Governor of Baltimore” after he moved to Annapolis, hated that the Baltimore Colts NFL team had left his beloved city. As governor, he was determined to do what it took to get a team back and to keep the Orioles in town. That included making peace with his legislative critics to ensure a $280 million stadium deal was approved. It was and Camden Yards is part of his monument.

As the Sun’s Michael Dresser wrote in his obit: “[Schaefer’s] style in dealing with legislators was cunningly flexible. With strong personalities he would pitch fits punctuated by profanity and obscene gestures before coming to a compromise. With others he played on their sympathies and made them feel so bad about hurting him that they went along.”

He detested Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, who Schaefer thought, correctly no doubt, was keeping an NFL team from returning to Baltimore. He had a long-running feud with his successor as governor, Parris Glendenning, once saying of the man who replaced him, also a Democrat, “I will not have any disparaging remarks about him except I hate him. That’s putting it mildly.” He was so independent he endorsed George H.W. Bush and once had dinner with Ronald Reagan and the next day blasted his policies.

America was once blessed with flamboyant, outspoken, get it done today mayors. Guys like James Michael Curley in Boston and Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia  in New York and Richard J. Daley in Chicago. Controversy stuck to them, ambition defined them and the little people loved them. Don Schaefer was cut of the same cloth. These guys built great cities.

I had the pleasure of observing Gov. Schaefer a few times during meetings of the National Governors Association in the late 1980’s. Let’s say he did not suffer fools well.

One night I got on the elevator in the Hyatt on Capitol Hill just as the governor was returning, all by himself, from the obligatory black tie dinner at the White House. How was the dinner, I asked, hoping for a little State Dining Room gossip.

Schaefer reached up, pulled on one end of his bow tie to loosen it and offered his assessment of an evening at the White House. “The food was pretty good, but otherwise it was a damn waste of time.” As the elevator stopped on his floor, he said, “good night, I got work to do.”

I remembered that ocassion while reading Cramer’s great 1984 Esquire magazine profile of Mayor Annoyed. Cramer describes Schaefer’s penchant for issuing “action memos” demanding that his staff immediately address some city problem. “Broken pavement at 1700 Carey for TWO MONTHS,” for example.

He once sent an action memo that read simply: “There is an abandoned car…but I’m not telling you where it is.” City crews, Cramer wrote, ran around for a week “like hungry gerbils” trying to find that car. “They must have towed five hundred cars.”

Like the man said, he had work to do. What a character.

 

Baseball, Mansfield, Politics

Trumped

Posted on by christian

A “Businessman” for President

The last time one of the two major parties nominated a real businessman for president was more than 70 years ago. It was 1940, the world was on the verge of another war and the Great Depression still lingered. The GOP turned to Wall Street for a candidate who lost in an Electoral College landslide. No business candidate, who hasn’t been elected to something, has won a major party nomination since.

If Donald Trump is really serious about winning the GOP nomination next year, he’ll need to overcome a lot of history. Business people don’t get nominated for president.

Politico reports today that Trump is serious. He’s been interviewing campaign staff and media consultants. (He needs a media consultant? This guy is living proof that the most dangerous place in America is the area between Donald Trump and a television camera.)

Even as Karl Rove, the last GOP operative to actually win a tough national election, disses Trump, the polls show that his wacky attention on the so called “birther” issue has gotten him attention if not serious credibility.

Trump also has to overcome, well, the sense that he’s just playing all this for the PR involved. And there are the jokes. On the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me that aired last weekend, one of the panelists made a crack about Trump’s famous hair style suggesting it was some kind of animal. David Letterman said, “The White House is saying Donald Trump has ‘zero percent chance’ of being elected. Isn’t that a little high?”

In politics, the old saying goes, it’s OK if they’re laughing with you, not so good if they’re laughing at you.

But back to Trump’s one potential strength as a serious candidate – his business credentials. If he really starts to gain traction we’ll hear a good deal more about whether he has really been a success, but let’s grant that he can make a plausible case for his leadership and business acumen. Does it help him? I’d argue no.

In 1940, Republicans were desperate to find a credible candidate to stop Franklin Roosevelt’s quest for an unprecedented third term in the White House. The leading GOP candidates in 1940 were two venerable U.S. Senators, Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft, and the 37-year old New York District Attorney, Thomas E. Dewey. None of these capable men really excited the party, which surprisingly turned instead to a Wall Street energy executive named Wendell Willkie.

Willkie was a first-time candidate having never run for anything. In his delightful book about Willkie’s dark horse nomination and campaign – Five Days in Philadelphia – Charles Peters quotes one of Willkie’s friends as saying: “He was a big, shambling, rumpled, overweight, carelessly dressed man, and he radiated a stunning combination of intellect and homely warmth.” In other words, not Donald Trump.

What Willkie lacked in political experience he made up for in personality and a personal style that was genuine. Up from humble beginnings in Indiana, Willkie became a lawyer and by 1940 had risen through the ranks to become the top guy at Commonwealth and Southern, one of the nation’s major utility holding companies. Democrats derisively dismissed Willkie’s personal story by characterizing him as “the barefoot boy from Wall Street.”

Willkie ran a more than credible campaign against Roosevelt, but with war underway in Europe the country was not ready to turn the White House over to an inexperienced utility executive, even a charming one. Willkie’s respected running mate was the great Oregon Sen. Charles McNary, but even McNary couldn’t help the ticket carry Oregon.

Considering the times, and even granting Willkie’s attractiveness, it’s hard to believe that in 1940 – or 2012 – that voters would elect a energy company CEO to run the country. Perhaps about as likely as electing a real estate developer turned reality television show host.

Trump’s best option would seem to be a third-party bid, ala Ross Perot. Perot parlayed his quirky straight talk into nearly 19% of the popular vote in 1992. Arguably, he made Bill Clinton president. Trump could also be a spoiler, but not a contender.

Generally speaking successful business people over estimate the value voters place on business success and they undervalue the soft skills – personality, humor, a genuine liking for people – that are essential to a successful candidate. Politics isn’t business and the skills for success in one field don’t always translate to the other.

Donald Trump can command a lot of attention, as he is currently doing, but he can’t, I suspect, stand the intense scrutiny he will get if he really becomes a candidate. The hair and wife jokes will continue and when next year rolls around, Republicans will do as they have since 1944. They’ll nominate a candidate with public sector skills and experience.

Wendell Willkie was the last serious “business candidate” to run for president. Donald Trump isn’t Wendell Willkie.

The real danger for Republicans may be that the Trump sideshow, currently fascinating the media, drains oxygen from the real GOP candidates who are trying to get organized. On the other hand, the candidates who could win the nomination may benefit from the contrast to Trump. None of them is a much divorced, windy, publicity addicted, weird haired, Manhattan real estate developer given to wearing pink neckties. No one has ever had that profile and been elected either.

 

Baseball, Mansfield, McClure, Politics

Wolves

Posted on by christian

Is There a Lesson Here?

For the first time ever the United States Congress is acting to legislatively remove a species from the protection of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). That action, contained in the big budget bill negotiated last week by the president and congressional leaders, has bipartisan support. Idaho’s Mike Simpson, a Republican, joined with Montana’s Jon Tester, a Democrat, to attach the wolf delisting provision to the budget bill.

The entire debate about wolves, dating all the way back to then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s speeches during the Clinton Administration, may be an object lesson in what happens when common sense packs up and leaves the room.

This has been about the most polarized policy/political issue in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming as we’ve seen in a long, long time. Few involved haven’t been tainted by the emotions, legal and political posturing and insistence on an “I win therefore you must lose” approach. What has been missing is one word – balance. Or maybe two words – common sense.

Ironically perhaps one of the more sensible voices in the overheated wolf debate has been that of now-retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wolf expert Carter Niemeier, an unapologetic wolf advocate, who has written a book about his experiences dealing with what he has called the polarizers at both ends of the debate.

Niemeier takes the sensible approach that wolves are here to stay, but they also need to be managed.

“A hunting season will take some of the pressure off wolves,” he told the Missoulian recently. “Sportsmen will be able to do what they think they can do about controlling numbers. The uniqueness will eventually wear off.”

“How many wolf pelts does anyone need to hang on their wall?” he asked.

Niemeier adds, “There are so many wolves now that poaching would never harm them. They are here to stay.”

Idaho Statesman environmental reporter Rocky Barker neatly summed up how national environmental groups mishandled, misread and ultimately misfired in their handling of the wolf issue.

“If you came up with a scenario to undercut the machinations of national environmental groups you couldn’t have done better than the real events. First, they won a lawsuit that they could not defend politically. Then they tried to get a do-over with a settlement that handed power to the very states they had been saying could not be trusted to manage wolves,” Barker wrote this week.

“Needless to say many of the people who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these groups because they love wolves are unhappy and some feel betrayed.”

With the Simpson-Tester rider sure to pass in the “must pass” budget bill, environmental leaders were left to complain that the legislative delisting undermines the scientific integrity of the ESA. But wolves have always been more about politics than science and the wolf advocates got beat playing both politics and public relations. In the end, if this mess opens the door to more congressional meddling with endangered species, the no compromise wolf advocates may have themselves to blame.

With Sen. Tester facing an extremely tough re-election next year and Rep. Simpson, as he frequently does, playing the common sense card at the very time Idaho legislators were passing a bill declaring a wolf emergency, it’s not surprising that these two wily politicians did what legislators do. They fixed a political and policy problem. Both had substantial motivation, especially Tester. His likely opponent in next year’s Montana senate race is Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg who has championed legislation to delist wolves everywhere in the lower 48.

Reasonable voices that might have long ago settled all this with compromise and common sense, as Carter Niemeier suggests, left this debate a long, long time ago. Not surprisingly the courts proved to be a singularly inappropriate place to hash out what had become a red hot, emotional and political issue.

I find myself hopelessly in the middle when it comes to wolves. I like the idea that wolves roam the Idaho backcountry as they once did. I also think their numbers should have been rigorously controlled at the state level much earlier. I also think no one really calculated whether the food supply a growing population would need could be readily available. As a result, I think the too large populations have caused significant damage to livestock and wildlife populations. I think ranchers need to be compensated for loses and hunters deserve thriving elk populations. I don’t think wolves, properly managed, present much threat to people.

As I said, I’m a squishy moderate. I see all the arguments.

It’s probably hopeless naive of me, but I wish a few folks early on could have found a sensible way to reintroduce, manage the populations, stay out of court, defuse the polarization and move on.

One way or another, I guess we now have.

A footnote:

While the legislative delisting of wolves is a first, it’s not the first, nor will it be the last, congressional intervention on ESA issues. In 1979, Congress acted to exempt the Tellico Dam project in Tennessee from provisions of the ESA. Much of the debate involved the cost-benefit of Tellico versus the survival of a tiny fish, the snail darter. For a time, the fish became a useful tool to stop the questionable dam and promoted amendments to the ESA, including the creation of a seven-member Cabinet level committee, dubbed the God Squad, with authority to exempt a federal agency from provisions of the Act.

Then-Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus chaired the first God Squad to assess whether the dam should be exempt from ESA requirements. The committee was unanimous in denying the exemption on economic rather than environmental grounds. Andrus said at the time, “I hate to see the snail darter get the credit for stopping a project that was ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place.”

But, with snail darters and wolves, Congress had the last word when legislation was approved not to delist the snail darter, but to exempt Tellico from the Act.

Ironically, then-Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker invoked wolves in his floor debate arguing for the exemption.

“Now seriously Mr. President,” Baker said, “the snail darter has become an unfortunate example of environmental extremism, and this kind of extremism, if rewarded and allowed to persist, will spell the doom to the environmental protection movement in this country more surely and more quickly than anything else.

“We who voted for the Endangered Species Act with the honest intentions of protecting such glories of nature as the wolf, the eagle, and other treasures have found that extremists with wholly different motives are using this noble act for meanly obstructive ends.”

Some debates just never end.

Andrus Center, Baseball, Mandela

Baseball in 1921

Posted on by christian

 Yankees, Giants and New York Baseball

The late, great Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti once said one of the important things he learned by working on the inside of baseball was “the enormous grip this game has on people…it goes way down deep.”

I learned that lesson all over again reading a wonderful new baseball book telling the story of how the game came to be defined in 1921 as a New York game – the Yankees and Giants faced off in the 1921 World Series – and how that spectacular rivalry helped the great game bounce back from the Black Sox Scandal of 1919.

As the Los Angeles Times said in a recent review of 1921 – The Yankees, the Giants and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, “1921 was a transitional one. The nation had only recently emerged from the horrors of World War I. Prohibition was in place, although that didn’t stop Ruth and company from indulging. And why not? Ruth was widely regarded as baseball’s savior for restoring the credibility and allure of the national pastime in the aftermath of the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. By 1921, he was the game’s pre-eminent superstar, acquiring an agent — the ubiquitous Christy Walsh — and igniting the first home-run boom.”

For a baseball junkie – and someone who loves history – 1921 is a great retreat into the formative days of the game so many of us enjoy today. And that is the value of a fine book like this – it connects my history (and yours, perhaps) to the game our fathers also loved.

My dad, a knowledgeable baseball fan, used to talk about the great Yankee teams of the 1920’s and 1930’s. No Yankee fan he, his admiration was for the franchise’s success and for the supporting cast around Ruth and Gehrig and later DiMaggio. He admired a Yankee outfielder by name of Bob Meusel, a guy with a lifetime .309 batting average, 156 career home runs and more than a thousand RBI’s. Meusel played only 11 seasons, all but one for the Yankees and often hit fifth in the line-up behind Ruth and Gehrig.

In 1921, Meusel hit .321, had 24 homers (Ruth hit a remarkable 59) and drove in 135 runs. Meusel and his brother Emil (nicknamed Irish), played against each other in the World Series that year. In 1921, these guys – and their substantial accomplishments – come alive and I can almost hear my dad, the baseball fan, weaving a story about the “old days” in baseball. A wonderful aspect of the game is that the history of baseball really allows us to appreciate an entirely different era.

Baseball in New York in 1921, with writers like Damon Runyon and Heywood Broun doing the daily reporting, was something special. (Runyon once wrote, “The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that’s how you bet.”) Ruth appropriately received a lot of newspaper ink, but so too did the managers of the Yankees – Miller Huggins – and the Giants – John McGraw.

After the Yankees came on late in the session to win the American League pennant, Runyon wrote of Huggins, who rarely received the credit he was due for the success of this heavy hitters and slick pitchers, “the little manager of the New York club, tramped across the yard in the wake of his men, his head bowed in characteristic attitude. In happiness or sorrow Huggins is ever something a picture of dejection. The crowd cheered him as his familiar Charley Chapin feet lugged his small body along, and Huggins had to keep doffing his cap.”

Good book about great characters and the American game in a very interesting time.

American Presidents, Baseball, Mansfield, Mark Twain, Obama, Politics

Trust

Posted on by christian

Coin of the Realm in Politics

Potentially one of the side benefits to come from the budget deal struck late Friday was the development of a modicum of trust among House Speaker Boehner, Senate Leader Reid and President Obama.

It is a testament to the generally awful state of partisanship in Washington these days that Obama and Boehner, according to several accounts, spent more personal time together over the last week than they have in all the time Obama has been in the White House. Something is wrong with that picture.

Trust, built upon a genuine personal relationship, is simply critical to getting anything done in politics. Without it you can’t make a deal, shake hands and know that the pact is secure.

Boehner told a television interviewer over the weekend that he and Obama now “understand each other better.”

“Throughout these meetings over the last four or five weeks we’ve been straight up with each other, and honest with each other,” the Ohio Republican said. “Certainly haven’t always agreed, but it was a good process.”

A Boehner aide said, probably sending shudders down the spine of Tea Partiers, that the GOP leader and the president “believe the other operates in good faith. I think they are friendly, but not quite good friends at this point. Maybe some day.”

It’s easy to dismiss the personal relationship factor in high stakes politics, but our history is full of examples were the personal touch, backed not by agreement always, but always reinforced with trust, has made progress possible.

The great Montana Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield insisted that Senate GOP leader Everett Dirksen get the lion’s share of the attention when the Senate debated civil rights legislation in the 1960’s. Even though Mansfield outranked him, the important meetings were held in Dirksen’s office and Mike gave way to Ev when it came time to talk to the press.

Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill couldn’t have been different politically, but they developed personal rapport and that led to trust. Obama and Boehner would do well to study that model.

By all accounts, Obama and Boehner love their golf. As the cherry blossoms come out in Washington pointing to the end of a gloomy winter, Obama ought to call up the Speaker, pick him up at the Capitol and find a place where the two of them – maybe with one key aide apiece – can play eighteen and finish with a couple of beers.

Progress is politics is made of such small, but meaningful gestures. Now is the time to build more trust. The next budget deal will be much more difficult.

Baseball, Giffords, Guest Post, Humanities, Politics, Polling

Survey Says

Posted on by christian

Don’t Know Much About…Us

I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to travel a fair amount – Europe several times, South America, Canada – and after every trip I’ve returned thinking its good to be home, but man we sure don’t know much about the rest of the world.

I remember a trip to Canada a few years ago and engaging in serious conversation with friendly Canadians who seemed to be up on everything happening in the USA from our politics to popular culture. By contrast, most Americans couldn’t find Saskatoon with a GPS device let alone name the Canadian Prime Minister – Stephen Harper – or that the national capitol is Ottawa, not Montreal or Toronto.

Now it turns out we don’t know much about ourselves, either. Newsweek has surveyed 1,000 Americans on the most basic details of our history, government and politics. We flunked. Badly.

The questions aren’t exactly PhD level, either, but are questions that are asked in the official U.S. citizenship test. Questions like: What happened at the Constitutional Convention? How could 65% of those surveyed not know that the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution at the Constitutional Convention?

Or, how about this. Fully 88% in the survey couldn’t name one person who authored the Federalist Papers. Hint: his wife’s name was Dolley, as in Madison. Maybe those 65% know her donuts and cakes better. And, don’t ask what the Federalist Papers were.

I’ve railed in this space in the past about America’s historical ignorance, but 29% not being able to name the current vice president or 73% not know why we “fought” the Cold War. This isn’t funny. It is worrying.

Newsweek blames several factors for American ignorance, including a generally complex political system that unlike Europe tends to spread control among local, state and federal governments. I guess this is confusing and there is much to keep track of, but that hardly seems an excuse for the fundamental lack of knowledge exposed in the survey.

The decentralized education system gets some blame. What we teach in Idaho they might not teach in Maryland. Some of the blame should go, I think, to those who have de-emphasized history, social studies and the humanities in favor of science and math. Kids need it all, in big doses.

And there is the income and media reality. A growing percentage of Americans are poor, not of the middle class. Poorer Americans have less access to information and knowledge. In Europe, where a larger share of the population lives in the middle, people are generally better educated and much more knowledgeable about their politics and government.

The mass media is both part of the problem and could offer a slice of the solution, but we mostly have a pure market driven media that features much more American Idol than Meet the Press. It is, after all, difficult to take politics seriously when so much of it is trivialized over the air and on the web.

The Newsweek analysis concludes, and maybe this is the good news, “the problem is ignorance, not stupidity.“ One expert who has studied this American ignorance says, “we suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.”

The real problem here isn’t knowing James Madison authored many of the Federalist Papers, it is not knowing enough – as the current budget debate in Washington, D.C. makes so clear – about our federal government and our political system. It’s impossible to assess, for example, what must be done to fix the budget if we have no idea how the government spends and taxes.

Survey after survey says Americans want Congress to cut the budget by reducing foreign aid and by stamping out that old standby waste, fraud and abuse. At the same time they say whatever you do don’t touch Social Security or Medicare where the real money gets spent. Too many politicians pander this ignorance and we get the endless debates we now witness in Congress.

Simple fact: Americans need information and real knowledge to make sense of their government and then they must care enough to act on the knowledge. Ignorance isn’t a strategy for a great country.

Baseball, Libraries, Organized Labor, Politics

The Union Way

Posted on by christian

SolidarityThe Great Battle

When the shipyard electrician Lech Walesa led the trade union movement in Poland in the 1980’s, he and his movement – Solidarity – were the toast of the West. The Polish Pope received him, Ronald Reagan praised him, the Nobel Committee awarded him. Imagine. Such tributes for a union movement and its leader that, not incidentally, brought down a Communist government.

When young people took to the streets of Cairo recently, commentators noted that Egypt lacks many of the institutions that contribute to a stable democratic society, including having no tradition of unions to represent workers, advocate for better working conditions and, by definition, create a middle class that works. Ironically, the very conservative National Review – usually no friend of unions in the United States – celebrates the impact of new “freedom” for trade unions in the Arab world.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and that state’s GOP majority hav yet to explain why ending collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, particularly teachers, helps improve classroom learning or delivery of public services in the land of the Packers. Same goes for Idaho’s leaders who have gone down the same path, ending collective bargaining for educators.

All this begs a question: Why do we believe a union movement that helps foster true democracy in eastern Europe or the Middle East somehow cuts against the American way here at home? The answer is pretty simply: politics.

You can date the demise of the Democratic Party in Idaho, for example, to the legislature’s passage, after years of trying, of right to work legislation in 1986. The Idaho AFL-CIO, never huge in numbers, had nonetheless traditionally been a force in the state’s politics helping fuel the rise of successful political careers for guys like Frank Church and Cecil Andrus. Right to work started the decline of labor involvement and effectiveness in the state’s politics that continues to this day.

While recent polling indicates that most Americans reject the kind of efforts aimed at organized public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, there is little doubt that organized labor has failed to find a message and articulate an appeal that begins to explain to millions of non-union American workers why unions are important in Warsaw, as well as in Madison and Boise.

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg may have identified one line of argument. He wrote recently: “Organized labor’s catastrophic decline has paralleled—and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated—an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality. In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation’s income. Now they’re getting close to half. The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980. The super-rich—the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth—have been the biggest winners of all.”

I’m not sure I understand all the reasons, but it also cannot be denied that while organized labor has lost membership year-by-year since the 1950’s, America’s basic manufacturing infrastructure has also declined at the same time and at a worrying pace. Sadly, I think, the kind of jobs that once employed blue collar guys who carried a lunch bucket to work are not nearly as important to the American economy as they once, and not that long ago, were.

The history of organized labor in America is in the main a story of building a sustainable middle class; jobs for moms and dads with wages that can support a family, pay a mortgage and save a few bucks to send the kids to college.

Have there been excesses during the up and down American labor story, of course. Violence was once a routine part of the unavoidable tensions between management and workers. But where unions remain a force today, as in the rehabilitation of Michigan’s automobile industry, hard headed negotiations – and big concessions – have replaced the sit down strikes that crippled the auto industry in the 1930’s.

The challenge to organized labor now, as it faces fresh assaults across the board, is to convince more Americans that banding together and advocating a position with your employer isn’t un-American, but actually a vital part of a sustainable democracy.

Andy Stern, one of the more forward-looking labor leaders in the country before his retirement, recently gave a fascinating interview to the Washington Post.

Here is one line from Stern’s interview that pretty well sums up the challenge organize labor faces: “We [organized labor] need an ideology based around working with employers to build skills in our workers, to train them for success. That message and approach can attract different people than the ‘we need to stand up for the working class!’ approach. That approach is about conflict, and a lot of people don’t want more conflict.”

True, but Americans do want good, middle class jobs. If a vital, constructive union movement is good enough for democratic Poland or for the democratic aspirations of Egypt, maybe it could work again here.

Andrus Center, Baseball

The Great Game

Posted on by christian

baseballMemories of Baseball

More than any other of the games that command the attention of the dedicated sports fan, baseball is a game of memory.

Memories of dads playing catch with kids, the mental image of walking up a ball park ramp for the first or the hundredth time and taking in the sight and smell of the green field, the endless records that record the history and detail of thousands of contests – all are a part of the individual recollections of so many hours spent in the magical spell of the great game.

No matter how long you play, watch, read about or reflect on baseball, you will never have it mastered. You can never exhaust the infinite prospect that you will find and enjoy something fresh and new.

Today, I know, I’ll find something fresh and new in the oldest and maybe the sweetest ballpark currently in use in the Cactus League, Phoenix Municipal Stadium. The home Oakland A’s entertain the boys of spring from Seattle this afternoon and for me it will be the unofficial start of another sweet season of memory. You can’t go to a ballpark without remembering. In a way, it may be the best part of baseball.

My baseball mentor, my dad, established this spring-time ritual of baseball memory. About this time every year he would start to recall: Mickey Cochrane, his favorite, the great A’s and Tigers catcher; Connie Mack, the manager who wore a suit and tie in the dugout; Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove, Dizzy and Daffy, and Mickey Owen’s tragically dropped third strike.

Memories.

Growing up in western Nebraska, I’m sure my dad never set foot in the old ballpark in Brooklyn, but it came home to him nevertheless in a hundred scratchy and distant radio broadcasts. He didn’t have to physically be there to know the place and I know the feeling.

I never saw the great Duke Snider play – he died a few days ago at 84 – but after reading the memories of his Dodger teammate, pitcher Ralph Branca, I can almost see him roaming center field in old and long gone Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Branca’s memories are the memories of a baseball fan.

As a general rule this Giants fan doesn’t waste much baseball admiration on a Dodger, but I make an exception for that old Brooklyn bunch – Campanella, Reese, Erskine, Hodges, Robinson and, of course, the Duke of Flatbush. They were something special. They live in our baseball memories.

Branca offered a warm and wonderful tribute to his old teammate over the weekend and it was all about memory.

“I still see Duke as a young man,” Branca wrote in the New York Times, “I see him out there in center field, racing past the ads for Van Heusen shirts and Gem razors, while executing a brilliant running catch. I see him at the plate, crushing Robin Roberts’s fastball and sending it soaring high over that crazy right-field wall at Ebbets Field. I see him rounding the bases. I see him smiling. I feel the joy of his sweet, happy soul.”

There may be no crying in baseball, but there is poetry in the memories. Great humor, too.

Greg Goossen, who also died recently, inspired a great deal of humor during his lackluster and memorable baseball career. In his too-short but very full life, the one-time catcher also promoted big-time boxing, did a stint as a private detective and served as Gene Hackman’s movie stand-in. Goossen, in what must be close to a record, if not a guaranteed laugh line, played for 37 different teams in the minor, Mexican and Major Leagues.

Goossen remarkably lead the team in hitting during the one season of the short-lived Seattle Pilots and told an interviewer he would have played his whole career in Seattle. Teammate Tommy Davis, himself well-traveled, piped up with, “You did!”

Goossen figured prominently in Jim Bouton’s baseball classic Ball Four where Bouton recounted that he and Goossen once played against each other in an International League game. Goossen was behind the plate when a hitter rolled a bunt back toward the pitcher. “First base, first base,” Goossen yelled. Ignoring those instructions the pitcher wheeled and threw to second with all runners safe.

Goossen, ticked that his simple directions had been ignored, moved back behind the plate while Bouton yelled from the opposing team dugout, “Goose, he had to consider the source.”

The Duke and the Goose, Branca and Bouton and all the rest will be there at Phoenix Muni today. That’s the way this game is played with balls and strikes, hits and ground outs…and memories. It’ll be great.