Sports and Politics

Those fine endeavors share a number of traits.  One, money generally ruins or at least perverts both of them.  Two, you keep score.  Three, the worst part of each is speculation and hype.

I thought of the third one in response to the preseason hype around the Miami Heat AND the breathless speculation about the November midterms.

The preseason Heat hype is pro basketball at it's worst.  The trio of James, Wade and Bosh may indeed one day win a championship, but until they do all the hype is worthless.  I love the coming out/pep rally teams hold when they sign a new player, and the wall to wall coverage of practices and the video of players walking into a gym.  The fog machines, the stupid dancing and preening, all before a game has been played.  Stupid fans fall for the bread and circuses when they should only celebrate two things: wins and effort.

In sports there is no need for hype or pregame shows.  You can talk all you want but at the end of the game there will be an indisputable winner and loser (except is soccer/football, which needs to eliminate the tie since you play games to win).

One last thing on the Heat; will someone explain to me the fascination with Chris Bosh?  He's a very good player and I hear he has a good sense of humor.  But he's not that good.  He was a good player on a decent team in Toronto, but he's not Dwight Howard.  Or, for that matter Pau Gasol and Al Horford or a bunch of other big men.   Rather than third amigo I imagine Bosh as more of a third wheel.  

And just as I am not handing the Heat the 2011 NBA championship - not sure they are better than last year's finalists in the Lakers and Celtics - I also urge folks to resist the hype around the Republicans in the upcoming midterms.

But like with sports, the 24-hour news cycle demands speculation until game time/election night.

The Dems will certainly lose ground in November, as parties in power do in midterms.  In the Senate the retirements of Byron Dorgan and Evan "Worthless" or "This Job is Hard So I Quit" Bayh make defending those seats difficult, but Harry Reid will still be majority leader on November 3rd.

Best of all, Nancy Pelosi will still be Speaker of the House.  There is no way the Rs can flip that many seats.  

To me it was always a long shot. The Democrats defending swing seats, folks like Piriello, Space, Boccieri, Teague, etc. are smart and know what they are doing AND how to run in those districts.  

I was incredibly impressed by Rep. Boccieri's speech at the recent LCV Victory Fundraiser.  He's been taking tough votes for two years now, including voting for the climate bill even though Ohio gets 80 percent of their energy from coal, but best of all knows how to frame those votes and defend his beliefs.  The D caucus is full of stars like that, representatives who know what they're doing and will get reelected.

I spent about an hour on Monday phone banking Greek-American voters in Tom Piriello's district with the Greek-American Progressive Network.  Out of 16 voters contacted, 13 were voting for Piriello, a PIRG alum, 2 were undecided and only one was voting against him.  Obviously Greek-Americans are not representative of the body politic at large (many consider us superior to none-Greeks, for instance) but that's a great ratio.

I will take a stab at predicting the outcomes of all the swing races this week, so stay tuned.

But I hate the hype about the tea baggers.  Then again, the hype will likely help the Dems in November.  I think the nomination of crazies like Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Angell, and others will help drive an uptick in Democratic enthusiasm, or more precisely turn out, on November 2nd.

As election day draws closer it will become clearer and clearer to liberals that we need to turn out to turn back the tea baggers and the Dukies (like Rand Paul) and save the republic.  

Finally, I also have to point out that the President continues to draw big crowds on the campaign trail.  As another PIRG alum, Chuck Todd, pointed out this week the Beltway crowd may think Obama is damaged goods but the public does not.  Obama drew more than 25,000 voters to a rally in Wisconsin and a huge crowd in Maryland, too.

There is still lots of work to do, and thanks to the Reagan Memorial known as the Supreme Court outside groups are spending millions helping Rs, but look for the Ds to do better than expected, and more importantly look for Reid and Pelosi to keep their current jobs.  

In other words, don't believe the hype.

Give It Up For Harry Reid

Got to give it up for Harry Reid.  Holding all 60 Democrats - from Landrieu to Lincoln to Ben Nelson to Specter - on a cloture vote was HUGE, and reminiscent of LBJ's work passing civil rights bills in the late 50s and early 60s.  At least 3 of those Senators continue to voice opposition to an expanded role for government in health care.  Ironic on a number of levels, since all Senators receive excellent, government-run health care, and at least Nelson and Specter qualify for government-run Medicare.  


Nicholas Kristoff recently described how successful Medicare is:  . . . there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. 


But it's not Kristoff's column that prompted me to blog about Harry Reid.  Instead, it was a piece on NPR about Orson Welles.  


Welles became famous when on Halloween his radio play of 'War of the Worlds' convinced some people that our planet (the number ONE planet in our solar system) was actually under attack from aliens from outer space.   


I hadn't really thought about that incident much,  but did today in that it reminded me that we have always had some really stupid people in America. It may be too harsh to declare folks fooled by that radio play stupid, and for all I know the percentage of people fooled was probably very small.  


The WOTWs panic made me think that people now are much smarter, or at least more sophisticated, and that type of thing could never happen now. Then again, lots of people think Obama is a fascist and will give the country to the Muslims, etc.


So while we've always had stupid and unsophisticated people in America, I think one difference is back then that crowd was isolated and shunned. Today, they flock to Tea Bag Rallies and wait in line to buy Sarah Palin's book.  From time to time someone like Father Coughlin or the John Birch Society would become prominent, but they always lost. The New Deal and then the Great Society programs were passed by Congress and shaped American life over their opposition.


That crowd still loses, at least lost in 2006 and 2008 (and 1992, 1996 and got the fewest votes in 2000).  But with the explosion of media - cable television, the 24-hour news cycle, the internet (even blogs) - that crowd is not shunned, it's celebrated or at least used to fill up space and time on the air.  


Finally, I think the mainstream media used to actively shun racists, people who did not believe in evolution, etc. and exercised editorial authority by excluding crack pots.  But now the media is less interested in reporting hard truths or science, and instead feels that it's job is to report both sides even if one side is wrong or just plain nuts.  I wonder if activists who compare Obama to Hitler or want to  keep the government out of Medicare would have made it on the air 20 or 30 years ago.  


[To be fair to the mainstream media, very few allowed the birth certificate nut jobs any air time, for instance.]


It's a perfect storm of the 24-hour news cycle, the current version of inclusive American democracy, and Andy Warhol:  no matter how fringy or crazy or wrong, EVERY point of view gets it's 15 minutes of fame.


So kudos to Harry Reid for getting 60 votes to end the debate on health care despite the cacophony that passes for our democracy these days.