Lincoln Mitchell

Blog

This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

The Politics of Passing Health Care →

The meaning of the approaching final vote on health care has changed since the halcyon early days of the Obama presidency when progressives experienced a hope and optimism unheard of in recent decades. The final vote on health care was supposed to be a cause for celebration as a progressive goal going back at least half a century was finally to be realized. It was supposed to be the most significant piece of progressive domestic legislation in many of our lifetimes. All of that changed late last year when Obama compromised away the public option and the expanded Medicare proposal. The last minute efforts to reinsert the public option felt more like death spasms for that possibility, rather than a serious chance of reinvigorating the bill.

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Sarah Palin's Canadian Health Care →

Sarah Palin's recent statement that, presumably during her childhood, she and her family used to cross the border from Alaska to take advantage of Canada's health care system is not really a gaffe or a verbal slipup, but offers an interesting insight into Palin. It is not exactly surprising, or even"ironic," to use Palin's words, that somebody who has made a name, and a great deal of money, for herself by linking health care reform to some kind of socialist bogeyman, used to take advantage of socialized medicine.

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The Sweet Background Music of Lou Piniella

Piniella is a baseball lifer who was a good, but not great player and a great, if controversial, manager, who has been associated with an impressive range of baseball moments and people. He played alongside Harvey Haddix a few years after his 12 inning perfect game loss, and Don Mattingly as he was becoming one of baseball’s top hitters. Piniella, who later earned a reputation for being a fiery and excitable manager himself, played for Billy Martin during his first three stints as Yankee manager. Sweet Lou made a cameo in one of the best baseball books ever written, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, and made a game saving, of often overlooked, play in the outfield preserving a Yankee victory in one of the most famous baseball games ever played, the one game playoff between the Yankees and Red Sox in 1978. He played for two expansion teams in the same year, including one that does not exist anymore, and two World Series winners.

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Democracy Isn't the Only System in Crisis Now

The broad turmoil which this will cause for the western democracies will be serious, but it should be seen in a broader context. The next few years will be tough for the world’s major democracies, but they may be worse for the world’s non-democratic regimes. Keeping non-democratic regimes running smoothly also requires resources, economic growth and stability. However, when these are not in place, it is often more difficult for authoritarian regimes to manage the consequences and the corresponding voter anger.

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What Progressives Can Learn from the Tea Partiers →

As a political phenomenon, the Tea Partiers are more colorful than mysterious. They are not really a new or post-party phenomenon, but are the latest incarnation of the populist conservative wing of the Republican Party, the political descendants of Richard Nixon's Silent Majority or the angry white men who catapulted Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party into control of the Congress in 1994. Tea Partiers will vote overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in November, or they will stay home. Very few will vote Democratic; and third party rumblings that have not yet died away, will do so in the next months.

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Pair Up in Threes-Baseball's Greatest Gangs of Three

The questions of how the core four of the New York Yankees compare to other groups of four players who played together for ten or more years, which was discussed here last week, raises the question of what was the greatest threesome of all time to have played together for ten or more years. There are four serious contenders for the best group of three players as well as one group, Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio and Bobby Doerr, who are not eligible because they all missed time due to military service.

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Still Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Iraq

Thus, at any given moment, the best option is to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, but because there are always such immediate and negative consequences for doing that, it is easy to postpone this decision. Another possible option would be to recognize that the effort in Iraq cannot realistically be achieved in a few more months or years and to prepare for a longer commitment in Iraq or as Ricks puts it “30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come.” This approach is also flawed because even a longer commitment would be far from a guarantee of success and because it is hard to imagine the American people supporting an essentially open-ended commitment in Iraq that could be measured in decades, not months, As Ricks’ analysis shows, perhaps inadvertently, while the decision in Iraq is not easy, it is clear.

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Has Rahm Emanuel Become a Liability for the White House? →

Ascribing Emanuel's failure to an inability to get his voice heard in the White House is far from the full story. At key moments, Emanuel's advice was loud, clear and wrong. Emanuel's position, in the end of 2009, that Obama needed to pass something on health care so that he could take credit for some success was wrong-headed and may well have been the moment when the presidency was most in danger of unraveling. Urging the White House to cut a deal with, of all people, Joe Lieberman so that they could get a bill was an extraordinary lapse of judgment, one that was not without serious consequences for the White House.

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The Core Four in Historical Context

It is very unusual for four players to play together for this long, but it is not unprecedented. There are two other groups of four players who played together for ten years who are comparable to the core four. In addition, two other groups of Yankees played together for nine years, but not ten. From 1930-1938, Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing were teammates winning five pennants and five World Series. From 1954-1962 Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Moose Skowron another group of four teammates won seven pennants and four World Series The core four played together from 1997-2003 and 2007-2009 winning six pennants and four World Series.

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Getting it Right in Iran and Ukraine

President Obama has certainly made foreign policy mistakes, but he has also set a different tone that, in the disparate cases of Iran and Ukraine, has been the right one. The administration has understood that one of the lessons of the last ten years is that democracy is about processes not electing leaders and that a fairly elected leader who is not enthusiastically pro-American is still a leader with whom we can and should work. Another lesson has been that from Iran to Venezuela, one of the best ways to shore up domestic support for an unpopular leader is to rhetorically attack that leader in Washington. By avoiding this very tempting pitfall, Obama has weakened Ahmadinejad more than any inspiring speeches about freedom ever could have. In Iran, Obama made a tough but right decision. In Ukraine the decision was a little easier, but in either case it should be recognized that the administration got it right.

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Can Obama Lead Again? →

Obama's presidency has been different. While all presidencies need to set the agenda on important pieces of legislation and respond to domestic and international events, Obama has not mastered this balance. This has contributed to both the administration's lack of real legislative success since the stimulus bill as well as the ongoing political problems confronting Obama and his party. Moreover, this situation has gotten worse, not better, as Obama's presidency has progressed.

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How Good Was Frank Thomas-Ranking Right Handed Hitters

A more interesting question about Thomas’s career is how he ranks among the greatest right handed hitters ever. There are some players who were right handed hitters who were more valuable because of the positions they played and their ability to contribute defensively such as Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt and Honus Wagner, but when looking at batting numbers only, there are fewer right handed hitters who were clearly better than Thomas. Thomas is one of only eight right handed hitters to have over 9,000 plate appearances and an OPS+ of 150 or better, and one of only four with 10,000 or more plate appearances and an OPS+ of 150 or better

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Not All Payroll Differences Are the Same

When the Yankees won the World Series last year there were predictable complaints that the Yankees had bought their World Series victory. Others argued that in baseball championships can’t be bought offering the fact that the Yankees had the highest payroll, by far, in baseball for several years running andhadn’t won in 2004-2008. It seems clear that, at least on some level, the Yankees bought the championship in 2009, just as the Phillies bought the championship in 2008 and the Red Sox did in 2007. All these teams invested money and ended up winning the World Series. The more accurate way to phrase it is that the Yankees paid more for their championship, have had the highest payroll for the last several years, by a significant margin, and that while high payrolls don’t guarantee championships, they certainly help a great deal.

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Is the Orange Revolution Over or Did It Never Happen

In other words, maybe the Orange Revolution never really happened at all. Obviously, the events on Kiev’s Maidan in late 2004 happened, leading to Yuschenko’s becoming president, but it is possible that in the excitement of the moment, too much was read into these events. The victory in December of 2004 by a former prime minister under Leonid Kuchma over Kuchma’s sitting prime minister may simply not have been the pivotal and revolutionary moment which it looked like at the time. Rather, it may have been another stage in Ukraine’s continuous path from Soviet republic to something else.

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On Health Care Smaller Might Be Better →

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts immediately jeopardized President Obama's health care bill and forced the White House to figure out a strategy for what to do about health care reform and the bill itself. At least for the moment, the strategy seems to be to put health care on the back burner while focusing more directly on job creation so that the administration can demonstrate its awareness of, and try to do something about, the ongoing impact of the economic crisis, particularly with regard to unemployment.

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What Obama Still Can Learn from Ronald Reagan →

The question this data raises is, so what? What is the value of Obama and his policies being more popular than his foes or his allies, particularly in a political system where Obama needs 60 Senate votes to accomplish anything? If Obama continues the strategic approach he used in his first year, including a willingness to bargain too early in the negotiating process, refusing to pressure Democrats in Congress -- particularly the Senate -- to support the party's position, and never going on the offensive against an aggressive Republican leadership, his popularity will not help him. However, popularity, particularly when it is bolstered by support for policies, can be an important asset to a president if it is used well.

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A Bad Week for China and the U.S.

This has been a very interesting week or so for U.S. China relations. During this time, internet censorship, the Dalai Lama, Iran, and arms sales to Taiwan have been at the center of the interaction between the two countries. It seems the relationship has come quite a distance since the fall when President Obama traveled to Asia and outlined the import of China to the U.S.

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Is Strategy Baseball's New Market Inefficiency?

Michael Lewis’s influential book Moneyball explained the concept of exploiting market inefficiencies in the context of building a baseball team. Exploiting market inefficiencies begins with avoiding paying for the skills or commodities that the market overvalues, while identifying and buying at a discount the skills or commodities that the market undervalues. The example throughout Moneyball was that on base percentage was a historically undervalued skill and players who walk a lot were not compensated in a way consistent with their value. This specific example no longer applies in baseball as many teams now understand the value of a player who can consistently get on base by drawing walks.

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Fame and the Hall of Fame

There is another issue which should be part of that discussion as well which is the question of the central definition and role of the Hall of Fame. According to theHall of Fame’s mission statement the Hall of Fame seeks to “Honor(ing), by enshrinement, those individuals who had exceptional careers, and recognizing others for their significant achievements.” This sounds pretty straightforward, but there is an implicit, if at first glance insignificant, conflict between this definition and the name of the institution. It is, after all, the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Excellence. This suggests that fame should also be an important consideration for considering election to the Hall of Fame. It is this notion of fame that often makes Hall of Fame voting more complicated. It seems pretty clear to many that, for example, Dwight Evans was a more valuable player than his longtime teammate Jim Rice, but the latter was certainly more famous which helps explain why Rice is in and Evans is out.

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Ukraine's Election and the Value of a Divided Electorate

Speculation about who will win the election, and how that person will govern, can overshadow the democratic advances Ukraine has made since the Orange Revolution of 2004, particularly when contrasted with Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the other two post-Soviet countries to have Color Revolutions in the last decade. All three Color Revolutions were, at the time they occurred, hailed as democratic advances, but Ukraine is the only one of the three countries that can accurately be said to have experienced greater democratization since those dramatic events. According to Freedom House, for example, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have the same level of democracy as they did before the Rose and Tulip Revolutions, while Ukraine has become more democratic that it was before the Orange Revolution.

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