This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
It must be springtime. The weather is finally getting warmer, baseball season is almost here and Paul Ryan is presenting a budget proposal which, despite his assurances that it is innovative and reflects new thinking, is little more than a right-wing economic program seeking to balance the budget by cutting expenditures for poor people while doing little or nothing to ask wealthier Americans to do their share.
Over the next 20 months, the campaign for Senate in Kentucky will undoubtedly become very nasty as Judd will seek to expose McConnell as a right-winger who has spent most of the last decade working for interests that are distinctly not those of the people of Kentucky. McConnell, in turn, will try to overstate the extent to which Judd is an outsider and a creature of the liberal Hollywood elite. The campaign due to Judd's celebrity and McConnell's position will become a national campaign with very high stakes.
The most intriguing question facing the Yankees is not which of their veterans can come back or who they can acquire to help their chances this year, but what the next decade will look like for the Yankees. Only Cano, Gardner and perhaps Sabathia, are both young and good enough to be around and contributing in five years. The prospects who are expected to arrive in the next few years are solid but unspectacular. Accordingly, the Yankees need to build a team based on some good prospects, a contingent of aging and, due to contracts, largely unmovable veterans, and, of course, the ability to outspend everybody. This last point alone will not be enough to build a winner.
The WBC is far from perfect, with occasionally uneven play and many of the game's best players deciding to concentrate on spring training rather than the tournament, but it is also a lot of fun for many people and an opportunity to highlight one of baseball's biggest accomplishments in recent years. Selig has gotten a lot of things wrong, but should be recognized for getting this one right.
During the last several years the American people have become increasingly familiar with this kind of government blackmail, where the politicians tell us that if they cannot make a deal, one kind of fiscal calamity or another will hit the country. Congress seems to no longer debate spending or propose budgets, but rather they lurch from one spending related crisis to another, each with more dire consequences. Debt ceilings, defaults and sequesters have replaced rational, or even irrational, discourse about how to raise and spend that revenue.
In the last few weeks, the buzz about the internal battles inside the Republican Party has been growing. The Roveites hate the Libertarians, the Libertarians hate the mainstream Republicans, the mainstream Republicans hate the Tea Partiers and everybody hates President Obama. It feels more like a Tom Lehrer song than the plight of a serious political party facing a serious struggle.
The basic problem with this cliche, like many cliches, is that it has no meaning. On one level, it states the obvious, that the Yankees would like to win the World Series every year. This, however, is true of most teams. Moreover, while the Yankees remain the most successful team in baseball history, winning the World Series every year, or even most years is simply not a realistic goal. The team has won one World Series in the last decade and even going back to its most successful recent period, has won only five of the last 17 championships. This is, of course, an extraordinary run of success, unless the platitude of winning every year is taken seriously. This cliche also suggests that other teams either only occasionally set out to win, or that when they do win, it is do to some kind of coincidence. However, in recent years teams like the St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants and even the Boston Red Sox have managed more championships than the Yankees. Fans and management of those teams would probably not agree that those were the result of luck or anything of that nature.
The two Republican speeches in response to President Obama's speech were more interesting, because they offered a preview of some of the divisions and debates that will inform Republican Party politics between now and the 2016 election. The lasting image from Marco Rubio's speech will likely be one of him awkwardly reaching for a bottle of water to slake his suddenly devastating thirst, but the speech was also an attempt to present Rubio as the new face of the Republican Party. Rubio's speech was characterized by the same tired, and unsuccessful, attacks on the president that the Republicans have been making since Obama became president. Rubio's speech was not meant to present a new Republican philosophy, but a new Republican face and backstory. Rubio's appeal is that he is comfortably in the new far right Republican mainstream while coming from humble immigrant origins, and that as a Cuban American he can help the Republican Party win more support from a diverse Latino population. In this respect, Rubio has Mitt Romney's politics, but without Romney's wealth and upper class affect.
Are we in the post PED era yet? The steroid era is frequently referred to in the past tense, but that may be a triumph of hope over reality. The Biogenesis PED story has linked big stars like Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun to PED use. Nothing has yet been proven, but this is not the first time Rodriguez or Braun have been linked to PED use. Rodriguez is an aging star who, despite an enormous contract, is unlikely to be an important on-the-field presence again. In this respect, Rodriguez's association with Biogenesis is the least damaging for the MLB. More troubling are reports that Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez, a 27-year-old rising star, and Mariners catcher-DH, Jesus Montero, a player who many see as having a bright future in the game, also had ties to Biogenesis. This suggests that a new generation of players are dabbling in PEDs and that the problem is not going away soon.
Some of the most exciting young players in the game are also playing in California now. Mike Trout's rookie year was extraordinary, the most impressive debut by a young player in a very long time. Buster Posey, the catcher for the Giants won an MVP award in a season where most Giants fans would have settled for simply a solid return to catching. Posey and Trout could well be the two faces of baseball for the next decade. The only young players on the east coast who are similarly exciting, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg, are playing not in Boston or New York but in Washington.
Should Clinton run, it would mean that it is possible that the Democrats, for the first time since the early 1950s will occupy the White House for 12 or more years in a row. This is part of the reason so many Democrats are excited about a potential Clinton bid for the White House. There is another reason, which should have particular resonance for Clinton, why she should consider running. If Clinton runs, she will be uniquely positioned to deal a potentially devastating blow, above and beyond a simple electoral defeat, to the Republican Party in its current extremist and intolerant iteration.
In the aftermath of the election, the notion that the Republican Party was facing what might delicately be called an uphill demographic battle was frequently raised. This was made evident by the age and ethnicity demographics in the U.S., and by President Obama's decisive victory in his bid for reelection. Since the election, the Republican Party's demographic problem has manifested itself in another significant way. Because of their narrow demographic and ideological base, the Republican Party and its leadership, inside and outside of congress, has proven itself to be increasingly out of touch with the citizenry it seeks to govern.
The current system allows voters to list up to ten players on their ballot. Players listed on 75 percent or more of the ballots win election to the Hall of Fame. Those who do not make 75 percent, but who get more than 5 percent, are kept on the ballot for another year, and can remain on the ballot for up to 15 years. Players who receive less than 5 percent of the vote are dropped from the ballot for good, although they can become eligible for the veteran's committee special ballot after several more years. One major problem with this system is that once it gets backlogged, as it is now, it is very hard to change that. In the next few years, due to this back log, there will be more than ten very strong candidates on the ballot, forcing voters to make tough choices. More significantly, this may also lead to mid-range candidates being dropped from the ballot after only one appearance. This is what happened to Kenny Lofton this year.
A goal for progressives should be to dislodge these debates around the electoral college and the filibuster from their partisan and temporary foundations and make them into broader discussions about American democracy and its future. In that discussion many different things should be considered in addition to the filibuster and the electoral college, including the role of money in politics, how legislative districts are drawn and limiting restrictions local officials can put on voting. The need for structural reforms in our system is substantial. Filibusters and the electoral college are just the beginning, but they may open the door to more ideas and perhaps even action.
The real reason these men, including my father, became Cardinals fans is simply because of Stan Musial. Musial, who died over the weekend at the age of 92, had not uncoiled his famous swing in a meaningful baseball game in just short of half a century. During that time a legend grew around Stan Musial. Of all the great World War II era stars, Musial was the decent one who rarely sought attention but lived his life honorably, was polite, pleasant and respectful and never had any contact with even the whiff of scandal. Musial's personal story reinforced this. He was a Polish-American who grew up in a coal mining town, was a natural athlete who worked hard to make it in baseball, spent his entire career with one team and was married to the same woman for more than 70 years. Gradually, other stories leaked out. Turns out that in 1947 Musial had without fanfare made it clear that he, as the leader of the reigning World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, had no problem with African American players and expected his teammates to act the same way. Baseball history might have been very different if Musial had given in to the racist pressure coming from some corners of that team. The legend of Stan Musial helps explain why of the thousands of men who have played professional baseball, only one was known as "The Man."
Although there are several different dynamics surrounding the coming fight over the president's proposals, one significant way this is being framed is as a fight between the Obama White House and the NRA. The NRA is an extremely powerful interest group in Washington, but like many interest groups it's power depends heavily on keeping a low profile and maintaining relatively strong popular support, or more accurately, drawing only limited opposition. Accordingly, the NRA is much better positioned for a behind the scenes strategy where policy decisions are made at congressional committee hearings and various regulatory agencies than a legislative fight involving the media and mobilized citizens groups.
The combinations of expansion, prioritizing power and patience and, yes steroids, creates problems for how sluggers are compared across eras and, of course, for the Hall of Fame as well, but this problems is exacerbated by a voting system that is unwieldy and flawed. This year no players were elected to the Hall of Fame. The merits of that decision can be debated, but the impact it will have on future elections will be clear. In short, by 2014, there will be so many deserving players on the ballot that it is likely that a player with numbers that were good enough for the Hall of Fame a generation ago, and perhaps no demonstrated link to steroids, will be dropped from the ballot after one or two appearances after next year. Next year there will be five 8000/140 players on the ballot as well as a number of other standouts like Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Tim Raines.
It is no surprise that a team that has won two of the last three World Series has a good farm system, but the discrepancy between how the system, and indeed the franchise, is perceived, and what it actually is remains significant. Posey and Sandoval are hardly unknown. The former was handily elected NL MVP and has ended both of his full seasons in the big leagues by catching the last strike of the World Series. He is one of the faces of the Giants and is poised to become one of the game's most visible and marketable stars Sandoval, for his part, has a colorful nickname, and was the MVP of the World Series last year. Belt, however, despite an equally colorful nickname remains virtually unknown outside of San Francisco. While Posey is generally known as a star player, Sandoval is still at least as well-known for his weight as for his hitting while Belt is probably still seen as a disappointment to many fans because like many players who derive much of their value from drawing walks, he is under-appreciated.
Although it is probably good news that congress and President Obama managed to start the New Year by avoiding going over the fiscal cliff, it is hard not to get a sense that, now that we have avoided that, we can go back to the steady decline that has characterized our economy in recent years. Moreover, while avoiding the fiscal cliff is evidence that our elected officials are not completely unable to work together or govern, there is still reason to believe that congress is not capable of governing the country in a serious way or of addressing any of the myriad problems facing the U.S.
President Obama's promise to "use whatever power this office holds," to ensure that horrific shootings like this do not occur again, is the right promise to make. The question the President asked -- "Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?" -- is the right question to ask. Obama's ability to follow through on this promise will be a test of his moral and political leadership. Passing meaningful gun safety laws will require the courage to take on powerful entrenched interests and to speak truth to NRA power, but it will also require deft political maneuvering to push national legislation through a congress in which one house is controlled by the Republicans and where Senate Republicans have enough votes to stop a cloture vote on key legislation.