Friday Baseball Post

I really don't have much this week.  I don't know why there are so many perfect games all of a sudden.  I don't have much to say about the ump who missed the call.  I'll criticize Bud Selig when he overreacts and changes the rules as part of a knee-jerk reaction to the latest controversy, but I can't really do that yet, since he hasn't done it yet. 

On the Giants front, I'm obviously glad Posey is up.  I don't care much that Burrell replaces Bowker on the bench.  They still need a couple more hitters.

Ken Griffey was great, but I'm glad he didn't reach Mays in HRs -- and he's obviously not in the mix for Greatest CF ever (it's one of Mays, Mantle, Cobb, or Speaker, depending on how one measures it, plus some stuff about fielding we don't know).  He was great, though.

I think this is where I apologize for a really lame Friday Baseball Post.  Sorry! 

I will say that I miss rainouts.  I mean, if you're planning to go to a game, it obviously is a good thing that the modern fields drain so well and all, but I always liked that about baseball -- sometimes, it just rained, and then you got double-headers, and spot starts, and other oddities.  Yes, I know, we still get some rainouts, but they're mostly gone, and I miss them.

I'll try to come up with something actually interesting next week, OK?

Scandal!

Ezra Klein returns from China to find a puzzling kerfuffle over the Sestak thing, and asks:

So what's going on?  Are people just pretending to be offended?

Short answer: yes, people are just pretending to be offended.  That's what's going on.

See a related post from Conor Friedersdorf.

Longer answer: the US has a disconnect between a political system based on parties, bargaining, deal-making, logrolling, and, more broadly, (self-) interested people and groups finding ways to work things out with each other, and a political culture that has quite a bit of disdain for all those things.  See, for example, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the dozens of movies and TV shows that have followed, all built around the idea that parties are bad, interest groups are bad, cutting deals is bad, and the only hope for democracy are radically independent people with pure motives who alone have access to what constitutes good policy.  Thanks to that disconnect, there are always plenty of perfectly ordinary things that pols do in the perfectly ordinary course of their jobs that can easily be sold to many reporters as corrupt.

Insulting the Framers in Wasilla

Perhaps I'm just in a cranky mood today, but...

We all know that Sarah Palin loves the words "common sense."  And "conservative."  She's recently adopted another one, a favorite of Tea Partiers: "Constitutional."  Alas, she's also taken to combining them: things she likes are now "Common Sense Constitutional Conservative."  Hmmm...make that "Commonsense Constitutional Conservative," as in the candidate she's supporting for the GOP nomination over incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski.

You know what, though?  I won't get into whether conservative ideas are common sense, or Commonsense, or not.  But I'm certain that the Constitution of the United States of America is not common sense.  It's a sophisticated document, based on a complex and subtle theory of politics.  It was drafted by brilliant men, who relied not on common sense but on serious study of politics, history, and philosophy.  Chief among them was James Madison.  Madison was a practical man, and certainly had practical political experience, having served in the Continental Congress and the Virginia General Assembly.  But he did not believe that the sorts of things that he learned from practical experience were enough when he took it upon himself to organize the Constitutional Convention and to prepare a draft plan for a new government.  So Madison made a study of it.  Bandwith being somewhat limited in those days, what Madison did was ask his good friend Tom (who happened to be in France on government business) to scour the bookshops of Paris for books about...here's Adrienne Koch (quoted in William Lee Miller's wonderful The Business of May Next):

Madison specifically requested Jefferson to purchase for him "Treatises on the ancient and modern Federal Republics, on the law of Nations, and the History, natural and political, of the new World," adding to these subjects "such of the Greek and Roman authors, where they will be got very cheap, as are worth having, and are not on the common list of school classics...Jefferson's thoughtful provision of books for Madison, including some thirty-seven volumes of the coveted Encyclopedie methodique, which Madison called "a complete scientific library," treatises on morality, and histories of European countries, surely made Madison the most cosmopolitan statesman never to have quit American shores.

The Constitution was, in large part, the product of what Madison learned from studying the books that Jefferson sent him (as well as, presumably, those Greeks and Romans he already knew from the "common school list").  It's a serious insult to Madison, and to the rest of the framers of the Constitution, to belittle their efforts by referring to it as nothing but applied common sense. 

The Sage of Wasilla isn't going to take my advice to cut it out, but I think I'll start referring to her as  "Madison-insulting," to go with whatever other names she should be called.  Framer-belittling?  Hmmm...if you have a good one, drop a comment below and I'll adopt it.

Two notes, one serious.  In my opinion, that Jefferson happened to be off in Paris when the serious work of writing the Constitution needed to be done is one of the most amazingly lucky things in American history...really, in the history of democracy.  Second, don't miss the Madison-insulting former governor's explanation (follow the link above) about how she's really not feuding with Murkowski.  Classic Palin.  By the way, my guess is that at this point her endorsement is going to be worth a lot more in South Carolina and Nevada and other places that don't know her so well, but I guess we'll see what happens.

Housekeeping

Thank yous are in order...

First, to Ezra Klein.  Not just for myself -- but of course, I thank him for the opportunity -- but if it's not too presumptuous I want to thank him for his general support of political scientists.  Obviously, I have a strong bias here, but I think that collectively we have a lot to add to the conversations about politics and policy, and too often relations between reporters and academics are awful.  Ezra really has done an enormous amount to change that.  Which leads me to a second thank you, to Greg Marx, for his kind words as he documented what Ezra and others have done.  And of course it's two-way, so I need to add a thank you to the folks at The Monkey Cage for their support of political science blogging, myself included.  And while I'm at it, I can't thank Andrew Sullivan too much for his kind support for Plain Blog.  And thanks to everyone else who has linked to my stuff, and answered my questions about blogging. 

Meanwhile, those who followed my guest-posting this week over at Ezra's may have noted a bit of a Senate rules thing going one (and if you missed it, cruise over there to learn about my reform proposal, featuring Superbill!  But if you really want a filibuster expert, you want Greg Koger.  His book is out, and he's participating in a chat this Sunday over at FDL Book Salon...which I mention not just because filibuster obsessives should read the book and enjoy the chat, but also because I'm hosting the chat (I get to ask the first question).  Not sure whether I can selfishly ask him about Superbill!, though.  At any rate, I'm reading the book right now, and so posting might be a bit spotty through Sunday...not sure, but probably below normal levels.  By Monday, however, things should be back to normal around here.   

Griffith Shoulda Gramm'ed It

Polls have closed on another primary day...and yup,we have a second defeated Member of the House and a second defeated party-switcher, with Parker Griffith getting clobbered in the GOP primary in AL-5.  

Anyway, in my post earlier today, I referred to some successful party-switchers, but one of them comes with a story that I should have told. Time to make up for that.

At this point, I'm not sure that everyone knows who Phil Gramm is. He was a Republican presidential candidate in 1996, and was thought to be a serious contender in a fairly wide-open field, although in the event he flopped miserably. He was a Republican Senator from Texas (1985-2002), and before that a Member of the House...but not always as a Republican. Nope. He was first elected as an old-fashioned Southern Democrat in 1978.

Despite caucusing with the Democrats, Gramm was a key supporter of Ronald Reagan's early, and successful, agenda -- in fact, the Reagan spending-slashing budget was the Gramm-Latta budget. Moreover, Majority Leader Jim Wright had supported a seat for Gramm on the Budget Committee, and believed that Gramm had broken his word about eventually supporting the committee's product -- and had gone beyond that by meeting secretly with Reagan OMB directer David Stockman to plot strategy, using the Democrats' plans against them. As a result, Gramm was kicked off the Budget Committee when the Democrats met after the 1982 elections.

Gramm's response was dramatic: he resigned from Congress, switched parties, and ran as a Republican in the special election caused by his resignation. And, unlike Arlen Specter and (apparently) Parker Griffith, he won, and he never lost an election in Texas.

I can't say I'm a big Phil Gramm fan...I always found his "juss' folks" manner annoying. But I have to say that if you're going to switch parties, he really did it the right way.

(I'm basically going on my memory for this, supplemented with wikipedia, but if I recall correctly my version of it derives mainly from this Ross Baker article).

Would Griffith have survived if he had resigned and forced a special election? I have no idea. Gramm's situation was obviously different...he had just been re-elected, he had a clear provocation for jumping (even if he had in turn provoked the Democrats), and he had been re-elected twice in his district already, while Griffith is still in his first term. And of course Gramm had actually don't more to endear himself to Republicans than just walking across the aisle. Still, I have to think that it would have been seen as courageous, and it would have been easier for Griffith to sell himself as someone putting principle over party and career, as opposed to someone putting self-preservation above all. Note that in general elections I'll always say that such things don't really matter much, but primaries are different...without the party label to differentiate candidates, all sorts of things can turn out to be important.  Also, I don't know what the rules are in Alabama; I don't know whether a special election would have been a single election for all comers, or if there would be a "normal" election with primaries and a general.  If the former, Republicans would have had a strong incentive to rally behind a single candidate (to avoid losing the seat altogether). 

It could be that Griffith was just a fluke winner, and was destined to lose no matter what he did.  I don't know...I think his best bet would have been to try to win re-election as a Dem, and his second-best option would have been the Gramm route, a resignation and a special election.  Granted, it's easy to say that now.  What I am sure about is that I'd like to see the next party-switcher give Gramm'ing it a try.  Although after the last few weeks, I suspect that party switchers are going to be a bit more scarce than they once were.

Election Day

Various primaries, nothing too big today.  I will say one thing, though.  Politicians are incredibly risk-averse, and not especially systematic in their research.  If  party-switching Rep. Parker Griffith loses his primary for renomination in Alabama today, on top of Arlen Specter's failed party-switching gambit...well, I suspect that it really will become a factor when the next pol thinks about switching.  Never mind that Richard Shelby has been thoroughly successful as a party-switcher in the very same state, or that all sorts of party-switching success stories are available.  Pols are likely. if they even know ancient stories about Phil Gramm, or Ben Campbell, or Ronald Reagan, to dismiss them: that was then, but nowadays look what happened to Specter and Griffith!  On the other hand, if Griffith wins, then there's only the one point, and everyone knows it takes two points to make a trend.

So I'll be paying some attention to what happens in AL-5, because that obscure race really may have some affect on the future. 

Not Really a Monday Movies Post

I saw Invictus back when it was new...I don't have much to say about it as a politics movie.  It was fine, but it didn't really give me anything to think about.  Seth Masket just saw it, and as usual I think his take is worth reading.

What I totally missed when I first saw the movie, and then again until just this last week, is the Reagan connection.  It's a doozy...in Kings Row, the movie that made Ronald Reagan a star, the story is that Reagan's legs were amputated unnecessarily by a sadistic doctor.  Reagan doesn't know that, but his best friend and brand-new Vienna-certified shrink, Bob Cummings, has learned the horrible truth, or at least Cummings thinks that it's horrible, and he's afraid that when Reagan learns the truth it will destroy him.  You know where I'm going next; here's Garry Wills (emphasis is his):

The film's climax brings together all that is best and worst in it...Cummings, his cherubic features chalkily made up to suggest long nights with his books, feels he might soften the blow by reciting Henley's "Invictus" to the suffering man.  Parker Tyler calls this "the poetry cure for the castration complex."

Wood and Howe shrewdly use the cut-up space of the loft given them by Menzies.  Cummings is at the foot of the bed, reciting as if to win an elocution contest.  [Ann] Sheridan [Reagan's character's girlfriend] flutters, momentarily, between the friends, trying to prevent the confrontation with reality; then she sinks down beside Reagan -- we see her across his profile as he sits and absorbs the truth.  There is a long pause in which it is Reagan's job not to react, to build suspense.  The he breaks the tension with a return of the old Drake McHugh laughter, withheld since he hit rock bottom.  The easy Reagan laughter, returning, leads to some brave new lines: "That's a hot one, isn't it?  Where did [Doctor] Gordon think I lived, in my legs?"  There is more, but by this time we are not paying much attention to the words, since Erich Korngold's title theme returns to the soundtrack like the Life Force, building behind Reagan's words until (the nerve of it is breathtaking) a heavenly choir actually bursts into the blessedly indistinguishable words of Henley's poem -- I say blessedly because, if you do listen with care, you find that Korngold, who fancied himself an opera composer, has set the last two lines of Henley's poem (which even Cummings spared us) this way: "I am the mast-ER OF my fate, I am the CAP-tuh-unh of my-ee soul." Reagan did not have to act much -- just pout, then laugh.  And even the fact that Cummings could not act does not matter finally.  The scene works because the scene is Korngold's...

Since the pasty-faced Cummings does not fit the swashbuckler description at all, Reagan's defiant laughter at the end identifies him finally with the heroic theme; he is the Captain Blood of his own soul.  He does not have to steal the picture from Cummings.  Korngold stole it for him.  (Wills, Reagan's America, 209).

Well, to be fair, I think Reagan actually nails the scene.  Cummings is terrified that he's screwing everything up, and Reagan plays it just right...both courageous enough to demand the truth, but clearly frightened about whatever this mystery truth, that obviously scares Cummings and Sheridan, might be.  That's the acting part.  The rest (outside of, as Wills points out, the music) is a trick Reagan used more than once of withholding his easy grin and then, finally, returning it to us.  And Cummings is pretty awful, I think it's fair to say.  At any rate, while Reagan was obviously proud of the "Where's the rest of me?" scene, I'd say (and I think Wills is saying) that it's the "Invictus" scene that's the important one for him.

(Robert Cummings: you have to be a real Reagan junkie to think of Kings Row for him, no?  I'd guess that most people think of Dial M for Murder, where he can't really keep up with Ray Milland, but then again that's a tough league.  I'm too young to remember him as a sitcom star and I really don't remember a lot of his later guest spots -- he showed up on plenty of shows in the 1960s and 1970s.  I guess for the right age cohort he's a sitcom guy  Mainly, though, for me, he'll always be the guy who taught Eric Von Zipper how to give himself the finger).

So, whatever it's importance in the politics of South Africa, I think Invictus is better thought of as the poem that made Ronald Reagan a real-life Hollywood star, on the way to the presidency.