Eric The Blue

Priceless

My most loyal reader, also the loveliest, says she is tired of the political posts, and that it is time to "move on."  Okay, darling, but--this is just too rich not to mention. 

I can't help highlighting the richest portion.  Appearing August 10 on Face the Nation, Karl Rove took up the question of whom Obama was likely to choose for a running mate, and said, in part (follow the link and watch the video):

I think he's going to make an intensely political choice, not a governing choice. He's going to view this through the prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to say, he's going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He's not going to be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president....  With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he's been a governor for three years, he's been able but undistinguished.  I don't think people could really name a big, important thing that he's done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America.

He's only been governor of Virginia for three years! 

Craven

Where does Eric the Blue get off calling McCain a "lout"?  Well, I think he is a lout, but perhaps my diction could have been better.  He's craven and unfit to govern.

As a senator McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts for the same reasons the Democrats did; now, as a candidate for president, he wants to make those tax cuts that he opposed permanent.  As a senator McCain co-sponsored with Ted Kennedy The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007; now, as a candidate for president, he's against his own bill.  When McCain ran for president the first time, in 2000, he referred to Falwell, Robertson and that ilk as "agents of intolerance"; now, as a candidate for president in 2008, he is making a concerted effort to suck up to those dolts.  As a senator McCain supported the single greatest foreign policy blunder of recent American history, the invasion of Iraq, but the former conductor of the Straight Talk Express now has little to say about the judgment he exhibited on that defining occasion.  As a senator McCain railed against lobbyists in the manner of an Old Testament prophet; now, as a candidate for president, he has hired them to run his campaign.  That McCain would do or say anything to advance his chances of winning the presidency is confirmed by his choice of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska for the past twenty months, as his running mate.  He puts himself forward as a stand-up guy.  What a joke.  Every time his judgment is questioned he reminds us that he once was a POW.

Craven.  Unfit to govern.

Palin & the horse race

I admit to being obsessed with the "presidential horse race."  McCain is a lout, the modern Republican party a train wreck, and there is really no question about who, on the merits, should win the White House.  Therefore the only question is whether the better man with the better policies wins.

The selection of Sarah Palin may shed considerable light on that question.  I have only the public polls to go by, and they indicate a close contest that, to the degree there is movement, is moving toward McCain.  I trust, however, that McCain has access to more sophisticated analyses.  If he thought he was in good position to win, he would have run off tackle with someone like Tom Ridge.  Sarah Palin suggests that the McCain campaign has concluded that it is in a bad position and that, for their guy to prevail, something has to change.  Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska for the last twenty months, and before that the mayor of a town of 9,000, and before that a member of the city council in the same  town, and before that a sports reporter for a TV station in Anchorage, is a long pass that wouldn't be thrown in a real close game.

George Packer argues persuasively that 2008 is a replay of 1980, only with the two parties having switched sides.  According to this view, the electorate wants to dump the party in power, but harbors some doubts about the other team's nominee.  If Obama is not able to allay those doubts, the election will be close.  But if, at the convention and in the remaining part of the campaign, including preeminently the debates, Obama stands up, looks credible, and gives as good as he gets, he could win in something resembling a landslide.

Anyway it is pretty to think so.

PCFMA (putting country first my ass)

Of course there is only one way to make sense of McCain's choice for vice president.  It is a naked, one-hundred-percent political calculation.  No one can say with a straight face that Sarah Palin is ready to be president.  She's been governor of Alaska for less than two years and has no experience in national or international affairs.

She was selected because of what she brings to the Republican ticket: youth, a nice bio, an attractive family, and a couple of X chromosomes.  McCain has proven that he's not serious about "putting country first."  There isn't anything he wouldn't do to advance his electoral chances. 

Actually, it isn't clear that the selection of Sarah Palin is a good advertisement for McCain's political judgment, either.  It is so transparently a play for female votes that it insults the intelligence of females.  The idea is that the operating principle of Hillary Clinton voters must be nothing more than: a woman, any woman, no matter what, a woman.  Republicans have been frequent critics of identity politics, and it is not by a long shot their least appealing trait.  Now their candidate for president has exhibited that, in his estimation, the tendency of women to vote for women is a sufficient reason for selecting a woman as candidate for vice president of the United States.

The Power Line philosophers are, naturally, confused.  One, Paul Mirengoff, writes: "I'm very disappointed that John McCain would put someone as inexperienced and lacking in foreign policy and national security background as Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency."  Fellow traveller Hinderaker, attempting to buck himself up, considers the possibility that she might actually help McCain.  But the blog buddies aren't on the same page.  Mirengoff's point has nothing to do with electoral considerations.  He's disappointed--his word--that electoral considerations trumped the national interest. 

Which they plainly did.  Which is why, as an electoral strategy, the governor of Alaska is a mistake.  I'm imagining one of those baritone voices at the conclusion of an advertising hit job:  John McCain.  Wrong on the politics.  Worse on the merits.

I explain the downside to owning all those houses

I am one of those guys who has only one house, but I don't begrudge John McCain the four, or half dozen, or however many his staff finds out he owns on account of having married the USC cheerleader and beer distributorship heiress after divorcing wife #1.  Pro move, Senator!  But, speaking very slowly so that a class warrior can follow the logic, could you explain again why it follows that the self-made Barack Obama is an "elitist"?

And, while you are in explanatory mode, enlighten me on another matter.  Affirmative action is bad, right?  In our country, you should advance only as far as your own merit and initiative take you.  But how many houses would you own if that rule applied to Mrs. McCain?  (I'm assuming you still would have married her if she had landed where her merit dropped her.)  Explain how the principle underlying your opposition to affirmative action might apply to other issues--to a consideration, say, of the estate tax (you call it the "death tax").  You want to abolish it, but if the rate were higher, would not Mrs. McCain have enjoyed more of a chance to show how far she could go on her own merit and initiative? 

Hopper

My wife and I have on our living room wall a print of Hopper's Nighthawks.  When I wrote about it here, I noted that I first saw the picture on the cover of an anthology of American literature, and that it put me in mind of some Hemingway stories--"The Killers" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."  I've been looking at a lot of Hoppers lately and would add to the list "Hills Like White Elephants."  In that story two characters, identified only as "the American and the girl with him," stop at a Spanish train station where, over drinks and against the backdrop of a symbolic landscape, the man tries to persuade the woman to have an abortion. 

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."  

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. 

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in." 

The girl did not say anything. 

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time.  They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural." 

 "Then what will we do afterward?" 

 "We'll be fine afterward.  Just like we were before. . . .  I know we will.  You don't have to be afraid.  I've known lots of people that have done it." 

"So have I," said the girl.  "And afterward they were all so happy."

To get an idea of how slippery this onslaught is, try it without the adverbs.  "It's a simple operation, Jig.  It's not an operation at all.  It's to let the air in.   It's not anything." Later, in response to the inevitable question about whether he loves her, the man replies:  "I love you now."  What a difference one too many words makes.  In the context, "now" sounds like a threat.  All his modifiers betray low character.  In "A Clean, Well-LIghted Place" one of the waiters, the sensitive one, observes to himself that "some lived in it but never felt it," the "it" being "a nothing that he knew too well."  It's the woman who feels it in this story. 

The connection to Hopper, I think, is the sensation of being alone when you are with someone else.  If you had to put into words why Nighthawks has such a desolating effect, isn't that some large part of it?  Here is Hopper's Summer Evening.  And Second Story Sunlight.  And Office At Night.  And Two on the Aisle. In his work only women are up to introspection.  See Hotel Room,  Summer Interior,  Morning Sun. 

"Hills Like White Elephants" is almost entirely in dialogue, but there are two paragraphs of description, and it is them I was thinking of when I said the conversation takes place against a symbolic landscape.  The story opens:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white.  On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.  Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. 

And then at one point the girl gets up from the table and takes a short walk.

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station.  Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro.  Far away, beyond the river, were mountains.  The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

Only one of the two might have been the subject of a Hopper painting. 

   

Literary anecdote

Speaking of literary scholars--and I think on the whole world wide web no one is getting in my way--there is an anecdote about George Lyman Kittredge that I will enjoy telling.

Kittredge taught the English language, Renaissance English literature, and Chaucer at Harvard for more than 40 years, ending in 1936.  If Nobel prizes were awarded for literary criticism, he probably would have won two, for he was both the foremost Shakespeare scholar and the foremost Chaucer scholar of his time.  His one-volume edition of Shakespeare's complete works, published in 1936, was for years the gold standard in the field, and you will see references to Kittredge's Shakespeare in the textual notes to all good modern editions.  With regard to Chaucer, it was Kittredge who first proposed a "marriage group" in the Canterbury Tales.  The pilgrims, Kittredge argued, do not just tell stories; they tell stories that are meant as answers to, or commentaries upon, the tales of other pilgrims; and the great topic of these related stories, introduced by the Wife of Bath and taken up in turn by the Clerk and the Merchant before receiving final treatment in the tale of the Franklin, is marriage. 

It was for Kittredge to make this case and for the rest of the scholarly world to wonder why no one else had ever thought of it.  One of the happy conditions of modern life is that anyone with access to the internet can commune with the mind of George Lyman Kittredge.

Oh, yes--the anecdote.  Shakespeare of course is a colossus and whole careers are devoted to the study of obscure byways, some of them I think invented so as to have something new to say, in his world.  A huge, fundamental problem is the matter of the words that Shakespeare actually wrote, since the earliest editions are patched together from various unreliable sources, including playhouse prompt books and the memory of actors and spectators.  Kittredge, in comprehensive fashion, solved this problem better than it had ever before been solved--a monumental achievement that might have been the work of a lifetime, but Kittredge also made the single greatest contribution in the history of Chaucer studies.  Yet he never took a Ph.D.  When asked once why not, he is supposed to have replied: "Who would examine me?"

Moral laboratory

I see that over the weekend John McCain had the fortitude to tell an audience of evangelical Christians at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church that he (McCain) thinks that the human rights of the unborn should begin at the moment of conception.  I presume then that he would permit no exceptions to a comprehensive prohibition of all abortions.  A rape victim, for example, must not be allowed to abort the fetus.  That would amount to killing a person who was guilty only of having a criminal for a father. 

I like the thought experiment featuring the culture-of-life spouting Republican who happens to be at a fertility clinic when a fire breaks out.  He can save a thousand frozen embryos or a 3-year-old.  What to do?  Only a "values voter" doesn't know for sure.

Notes on wine

The English literary critic and scholar George Saintsbury also was a wine connoisseur whose most famous work is probably not A Primer of French Literature or History of Elizabethan Literature or A Short History of English Literature or A History of English Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day--all worthy--but, rather, Notes on a Cellar-Book, about loving wine.  My frequent scribblings on the reading arts seem to have attracted little attention among my hordes of readers, but I too am a fan of the fermented grape, and you might be interested in my gathered-up wisdom on the subject.

Wine comes in two colors, red and white.  I prefer red, and would go so far as to say that, presented with a choice between a white wine and a chilled Budweiser, you should opt for the Bud.

Within the category of the reds, there are those that cost more, and those that cost less, than ten dollars for a liter and a half.  You might as well go with the cheap ones, which, compared to the numerous more dear varieties, taste about the same and have identical effects.  If it is a testimonial you are looking for, I can recommend, without reservation, the products of the Carlo Rossi vineyards, which are available in a very attractively shaped 1.5-liter bottle.

 

Karl Rove does more math

Now comes Karl Rove to tell us which states to watch in the presidential campaign! 

To win, Mr. Obama needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama's Electoral College math very difficult. And if Mr. McCain can limit GOP losses to one or two small states from those won by the GOP in 2004, he'll be America's 44th president. (Wall Street Journal, August 14)

Even when attempting to state the obvious, Rove can't get it straight.  There is no logical connection between the two parts of the first sentence.  To win, Obama doesn't need either Virginia or Colorado.  Just Ohio would do.  Also, by my math, which is admittedly not The Math, Colorado plus "another small state" would not be enough to get Obama to 270. 

I think all the talk about Michigan can be accounted for simply: McCain has no other prospects.  It's strange--well, not really--that Rove talks about Obama losing to Clinton among Ohio Democrats but doesn't mention that McCain lost to Romney among Michigan Republicans.  It would be just too dispiriting for Republicans if they were to admit that McCain's best and probably only chance is to win a large subset of the states Bush carried in 2004--say, all of them but Iowa and New Mexico.  Rove says as much in his last sentence. 

You don't know your own creed

I tell people that it's on account of being conservative in the dictionary sense of the word that I prefer the Democrats.  Capital punishment is a case in point.  Legal, state-sponsored executions of people convicted of premeditated murder by a jury of their peers should be anathema to proponents of limited government.  But, given the opportunity, American conservatives would stand in line to throw the switch, kick out the post, or inject the poison.  When the execution is performed by a firing squad, there is a tradition of putting a blank in the weapon of one of the executioners, so that no one knows for sure that he shot and killed another person--a wholly superfluous measure that, for many Americans who identify themselves as "cultural conservatives," would take some of the fun out of it.

In 2004, I learn at Salon, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in Texas after his conviction on charges of intentionally setting a fire that killed his three children, a two-year-old and twins aged one.  At trial, a local fire marshal testified that the house fire was arson, and that an accelerant had been strategically placed to foil any attempted rescue.  Prosecutors argued that the motive was to kill the kids and called as witnesses neighbors who said Willingham, who got outside before the fire began to rage, expressed concern for the safety of his car.  The jury was persuaded.

But the Innocence Project commissioned a report that concluded, two years after Willingham's execution, that the fire was not a case of arson.  The Project's panel, which consisted of some of the country's top arson investigators, also found that Ernest Ray Willis, another Texan sentenced to death for a similar crime, had not set a fire that killed two women in 1986.  After living for seventeen years on death row, Willis was freed by the order of a federal judge in 2004--the same year Willingham was put to death.  The Texas Forensic Science Commission is now investigating whether forensic scientists are guilty of misconduct in the cases.  Their forensic interpretations, according to the Project's panel, were scientifically invalid.  The Texas commission will study whether their testimony was consistent with the state of knowledge at the time of the trials and, if it was, whether new developments in the field should later have prompted them to question the testimony they had given. 

The details of these sorry stories are an embarrassment to American conservatives despite the fact that they are in line with conservative precepts about the fallibility of human beings and the folly of expecting perfection or certitude in human affairs.  "Muddle through without breaking too much crockery," exhorts George Will. Edmund Burke would approve.  Yet Will and virtually all other "conservative-minded" Americans support capital punishment.  Yet if capital punishment is not abolished, and justice continues to be administered by fallible human beings, it is inevitable that innocent people will be put to death.  Does not executing innocent people qualify as breaking crockery?

Crockery

"Swift and sweeping changes are almost always calamitous consequences of calamities--often of wars, sometimes of people determined to 'remake the world.'  Wise voters--polls might be telling us there are more of them than Obama imagines--hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery."  Thus concludes George Will in a recent column, and I regard with sympathy the suggestion that the Hippocratic oath might well be applied to other fields of human endeavor besides the practice of medicine.  But Will's comments are aimed at Barack Obama, his soaring eloquence and alleged messianic complex.  Did not Will vote for The Current Occupant?  He's wasting his time talking about Obama's talk.  How about a column on what Bush has done?  Does Will regard with favor America's mission to "remake" the modern MIddle East by invading Iraq and imposing democracy at the point of a gun?  What about the big tax giveaways wed to big spending and--surprise!--the ballooning federal deficit?

The phrase about broken crockery is too quaint to describe the consequences of Team Bush's reckless incompetence. 

Polls, reporters, math, and the presidential horse race

Over at Science Blogs, Mike the Mad Biologist complains bitterly about innumeracy among political reporters.  Which reminded me of a recent breathless report on NPR concerning the dramatic tightening of the presidential race: McCain Draws Even!  It seems the same polling organization that two months ago found Obama to be leading McCain by 48-40 percent now shows the Democrat's lead to have narrowed to 46-43.  Thus a long interview with the director of the polling organization, who held forth on the various factors that had allowed McCain to surge to his current 3-point deficit--a margin, we were told, that is "inside the poll's margin of error, thereby indicating a possible dead heat." 

Apparently the reporter felt no need to question whether, if the poll indeed has a margin of error greater than 3 percent, the whole premise of the story might be mistaken.  Is it possible that Obama was and is ahead by, say, 47 to 41 percent?  And that in the earlier poll this difference registered 48-40 and in the most recent one at 46-43?  If 46-43 means the race could be a dead heat, does it not also indicate that it could be something else?  Mike's complaint is to the point:  if the race were tied, there is, practically speaking, no chance that virtually every poll would indicate Obama is ahead by a small (or medium) smidgen.  Or, to put it differently, the fact that no poll shows McCain ahead disproves the reporter's suggestion that the race might be a dead heat.

It appears the race has tightened.  But that is not the same as "Presidential Race Draws Even."

I'm a worrier, but it is too early to worry too much, and, anyway, some of these news stories probably reveal less about the state of the presidential horse race than they do about the state of the reporter's mathematical education.

Powerline: McCain takes charge

It's time to drop in again on the Powerline philosophers.  The Russians are making war in Georgia and, as Bush enjoys the Olympics and Obama vacations in Hawaii, we are all to be grateful that John McCain is at the wheel.  Alas McCain, scurrying to get up some talking points on Georgia, regurgitated in public parts of the Wiki article on the small former Soviet republic on the other side of the Caucasus.  How dare the Political Insider at CQ point up that, called upon to say something about Georgia, McCain and his people seem to have had no better idea than to look it up on Wikipedia!

I don't link to Powerline, but for those who are interested in other instances of McCain at the controls, try this, and this.  There isn't always enough time to gather up the wisdom of Wiki.

The beat goes on

I devoted a recent post to Jane Mayer's new book with the long, descriptive subtitle: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.  Now comes Ron Suskind to report, in his new book, that the Bush White House directed the CIA to forge a document in order to boost its case for war.  Revelations of duplicity, lawlessness, and incompetence among the Bushies continue apace.  Thomas Powers, author of the forthcoming The Military Error: Baghdad and Beyond in America's War of Choice, recently wrote, poignantly but without media fanfare, of the education of one Alex Rossmiller, an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Office of Iraq Analysis.  In his memoir Still Broken, Rossmiller describes a scene he witnessed in Iraq. Our forces were "processing" prisoners captured during an operation.  A US Army officer explained the drill, the last step of which was shipping them all off to "Abu G."  Powers takes up a summary of Rossmiller's account:

Off to Abu Ghraib prison?  At that point Rossmiller began to understand that all his care as an intelligence analyst to separate the good guys from the bad guys was academic.  The debrief was a barrage of shouted accusations.  What Rossmiller saw among the detainees was confusion, fear, despair, anger, humiliation, and tears.  It gradually became apparent that one of the detainees, shouted at repeatedly, was a retarded deaf mute.  His brothers tried to explain this but were loudly accused of being insurgents. . . .  It was a simple question of paperwork.  Two affidavits were enough to put a detainee in prison--one saying he was armed, a second saying he resisted detention.  "They get an initial three-month stay," the [Army officer] explained, "and the debriefers there figure out what happens after that."  Rossmiller got the point.  There were no good guys.  "Anybody who's picked up gets sent to prison."

We are sometimes told by Republicans that government is not up to performing the simplest tasks, but they must not actually believe it.  Else they wouldn't have been cheering on Team Bush as it undertook a war of choice in the heart of the Middle East.

Birthday thoughts on Shakespeare

I turned fifty today.  Few enjoy that jolt from decade to decade.  Anyway, that is what John Berryman says in his essay "Shakespeare at Thirty," in which he imagines the dramatist taking stock of his life and career on the morning of his thirtieth, "a day in latter April long ago--about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday."  Shakespeare instructors could probably skip the obligatory opening lecture on the historical and intellectual background in Elizabethan England and just assign their students to read this idiosyncratic but brilliant essay.

One thing Berryman impresses upon you is that his subject was something of a late bloomer.  At the end of the essay, he notes that, as Shakespeare began his fourth decade of life, his rivals among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth--Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe and Kyd--were all either retired or dead.  Had Shakespeare died at the same age as Marlowe, he probably would not rate as the greatest English dramatist of the period, and our culture would be considerably poorer.  But he survived for another twenty-two years, and so "on to his wilderness of dramatic literature, or garden, or palace, to be created in the six years coming--Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, King John, comedies of the Dream, the Merchant, the Shrew, Merry Wives, Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Caesar."  Berryman leaves it to his reader to know that the six years after those six years were the ones in which he created Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

There has been a lot of interesting speculation about the possibility that something in his biography touched off this extraordinary period of activity.  In the end, we just don't know, but it certainly seems, given what we do know about the order in which the plays were created, that the disgust and nihilism of, say, Troilus and Lear, give way to something like resignation in The Tempest, which was written when he was past forty-five.  It is tempting to make something out of the most famous speeches in Macbeth and The Tempest, respectively--the ones commencing "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" and "Our revels now are ended."  The general outlook is the same, but the later one lacks the savagery.  I think the savagery of the period 1600-1606 can hardly be overstated.  Of Lear, so astute a critic as Dr. Johnson raised questions about its propriety as art.  The imagery is drawn from the animal world--most famously, perhaps, "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods/They kill us for their sport"--causing Lionel Trilling to observe that the intention is to impress upon the audience a vision of the world descended into bestiality.  The scene in which Gloucester is blinded is exceedingly difficult to watch--but that is what Shakespeare demands.  At the end, he seems deliberately to raise the expectation that Cordelia will be spared, only to smash it.  Again, Trilling pointed out that everything about the play, including the double plot, seems calculated to overwhelm the audience with a nihilistic vision:  it is not enough that one despairing old man should limp across the earth forsaken and impaired, there must be two.

It is natural to wonder about the man behind these creations.  Nevertheless one regrets some of the effects.  The sonnets, especially, have been combed for biographical droppings, and the conclusions tend to be sensational and unpersuasive.  The biographical record that does exist delineates, vaguely, a practical man of affairs.  His profession was the theatre and, working very hard, he made a good living at it. What interests me about the sonnets is not the personal story they are alleged to tell but, rather, given that Shakespeare wrote them, how uneven they are in quality.  Even some that are unfailingly anthologized strike me as weak--in the twenty-ninth, for instance, commencing "When in disgrace," is it not implausible that the recollection of his love should so easily raise the speaker from despair, so much so that he "sings hymns at heaven's gate"?  How did he manage to put her from his mind long enough to get so low?  It seems conventional and juvenile, and many others are just boring.  But then there are a scattered few, such as this one, that are part of why I love Shakespeare.  And, in a different mood, this one. Today, listening to pop songs during a car trip, I thought of this one while this song played on the radio.  So I began stewing about Shakespeare, but now I'm done.

An independent voice for Minnesota?

Fifteen years ago, Norm Coleman, Chameleon-Minnesota, was one of 20 million government lawyers with political ambitions.  Norm wanted in particular to be mayor of St. Paul, which requires that one be a DFLer, and in 1993 he achieved his goal.  Once in the mayor's office, however, his eye lit upon the governorship, and within the DFL party his way was blocked by the ambitious offspring of men named Freeman, Humphrey, and Mondale.  The satisfaction of his own ambition required a new political affiliation and--voila!--he achieved one.  It's easy as calling a press conference.  In his new party, the only thing between Norm and the endorsement for governor was a lunatic named Quist--scoffers referred to his supporters as "Quistians"--and even a lot of Republicans comprehended that Quist was crazy.  But Norm lost the general election to Jesse Ventura.

Probably Norm would have run for governor again, but Cheneybush intervened to grease the track leading to US Senate.  Paul Wellstone, the incumbent Democrat, was killed in a plane crash ten days before the election, and, after the electorally disastrous memorial service, Norm slipped past Walter Mondale and into the Senate.  It was 2002, the Bush administration was laying plans to make war in Iraq, and Norm stressed that he would do his part to enable the administration's recklessness.  And he did, until the war went bad, and his own re-election loomed.  He is now an "independent voice for Minnesota."

His opponent in his re-election bid is Al Franken, and so far Norm seems to be ahead.  Franken has been dogged by the circulation of a few of his less funny satiric compositions, and also by his accountant's confusion about tax laws governing income earned in different states.  Norm has been running some TV spots that have attracted attention.  In the ads, white guys at the bowling alley praise Norm and grouse about Franken's deficiencies.  They do not mention the Iraq war, but give Norm credit for bringing professional hockey to St. Paul back when he was mayor. Franken's brand of humor is not for them.  It doesn't seem to be the sort of men's bowling league that I know about.

I've heard that membership in bowling leagues is down, and the bowlers I know don't have to be persuaded to vote Republican, but the ads are sociologically suggestive. There are no women in them, and to me there is at least a whiff of resentment.  The bowlers agree that they are as qualified to be a senator as Al Franken.  Maybe their wives would set them straight.  But the idea seems to be that put-upon white guys who bowl and hunt and like hockey are a happy hunting ground for Norm.  I think it's an odd fit.  Everything Norm's ever done in the public part of his life can be explained by just two concepts:  personal ambition and political calculation.  The guys in the men's bowling league are on the receiving end of the latest calculations.