Speaking broadly, there are two ways for presidents to err. They can do stupid things, like invade Iraq. They can also dither until it's too late to act, as when we failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. It might seem that the liberal party should be more susceptible to errors of commission while conservatives frown and fret until it's too late to do what needs doing. In our country, however, it's the Dems who are apt to worry and analyze, worry some more and reanalyze, while the Republicans sprint pell-mell across the stupid line.
I think I prefer the Dems partly because I am myself more of a ditherer. Medicine's Hippocratic oath--"First, do no harm"--seems like a fallible but generally useful guide, including in statecraft. It also seems to me like a conservative axiom, but don't tell that to all the cock-sure, spittle-specked hard asses in the Republican party who complain about the Current Occupant being "weak." What they mean by "weak" looks to me like what the first President Bush was fond of calling "prudent." I never voted for him but I think prudence in a president is highly desirable.
Although the "gender gap" gets more attention, the urban-rural divide drives the dysfunction of American politics. The above map shows the outcome, by congressional district, of the 2012 presidential election. If a district was carried by Romney, it's colored red; and, if by Obama, it's blue. From fly-over height, it looks like a romp for Romney, right? But congressional districts all have about the same population, so in rural parts they cover huge areas, whereas in cities they are barely more than pinpricks on this map. Now look at four states: Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado. These were perhaps the four most hotly contested "battlegrounds," and, though all are almost entirely red, Obama carried each one. How? By cleaning Romney's clock in Denver, Cleveland, Miami, and in the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C. Romney actually won more congressional districts than Obama did (273-262). Since Obama was clobbered in rural districts from sea to shining sea, but won the national popular vote by about five million, you can see what happened in the mostly urban districts that he did win. Where I live, in Minnesota's fifth congressional district, which encompasses all of Minneapolis and some of its inner-ring suburbs, Obama beat Romney by 74 to 25 percent. The fifth district has a border with the sixth, which is much larger in area and was carried by Romney, 57-42.
Put aside presidential politics for a minute and just consider what this means for the Congress, where 435 House members curry favor only with the voters of their own district, whom they face every 24 months. It's a pot meant for brewing up a huge batch of boiling nothing, unless you count the wildly gesticulating cooks.
Since the consequences are so poisonous, it's worth asking why Americans tend to flock together with politically like-minded people. I think there's a self-selecting principle at work. In other words, it's not that something about living in a big city makes you prefer the Democrats. Rather, the characteristics that cause people to choose to live in a big city are the same characteristics that cause them to vote for the Democrats. The comedian Lenny Bruce had a routine about distinguishing "Jewish things" from non-Jewish--
Kool-Aid is goyish. All Drake's cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish, and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes--goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish--very Jewish cake. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.
--and, in the same way, one can tick off "Democratic things." Starbucks. Art-house theatres. Mass transit. Ethnic restaurants with flamboyant waiters. You have to be in a city to partake. Republicans like the Olive Garden.
I don't know what's going on in the NFL, but, as long as we're talking about comic routines, here's George Carlin on the differences between football and baseball. He probably wouldn't be surprised about which one appears to be preferred by wife beathers.
You can read reviews of the Replacements Midway Stadium show here and here and here and all over. I haven't looked hard but I'm guessing it would be hard to find a pan. They played, according to my wife, 31 songs, and were on stage for (I think) just over 100 minutes. You can do the math and conclude, correctly, that there was hardly any banter. Nevertheless, Jon Bream, in his Star Tribune review, manages to bungle the attribution of one crack: it was Stinson, not Westerberg, who said, "You paid, so we came." An intentionally undercutting remark, since most of the rest of us were there out of love.
The Current blog has the set list, which included something from every album and a few covers. It was, I suspect, weighted more heavily toward their early career than most prognosticators would have guesssed, and they ripped through it. Highlights? I love almost everything about "Let it Be," starting with the title, and am pretty sure I had never heard before at a live show "Androgynous." Everyone in the crowd (except possibly Westerberg) seemed to know every word, which will probably not be the case if it is retained at some of their upcoming tour stops. That was fabulous, but better yet was the finale: the sad, savage "Unsatisfied." Had they played "Sixteen Blue," I would have been reduced to the same state of gurgling stupidity I remember observing in my Beatles-crazed babysitters.
Slim Dunlap, who took Bob Stinson's place in 1987, was the subject of a call-out from Westerberg, almost the only bit of talk from the front center of the stage. Dunlap, the "replacement Replacement," suffered a devastating stroke in February, 2012, and he is according to Westerberg back in the hospital now. The night before, I went to a preshow party at the Parkway Theatre, a few blocks from my house, expecting a raucous celebration that turned out to be, as much as anything, a not very polished Dunlap tribute/benefit, with a raffle, auction, and short set of Slim songs from a band made of Curtis A & friends. I remember the bidding from the audience for one item, a vinyl "Tim" I believe. "Fifty dollars!" "A hundred!" "One twenty and a bag of weed!"
A good friend of mine can say truly that he only ever saw Slim Dunlap at music venues and Rich Acres golf course, in Richfield. It was adjacent to the airport, just east of Cedar Avenue and south of the Crosstown, not very bucolic, a "dog track" now displaced by a City of Richfield public works facility and maybe part of the expanding airport, too. Slim was not a part of the golf demographic and he wore at the course the same thing he wore everywhere, jeans and a flannel shirt (sleeves rolled up on account of the season and the activity). My friend talked to him a little about music and golf and he seemed as decent and sweet as everyone says he is.
Everyone knows the CW about the midterm elections this November: the Republicans will ride a wave of anti-Obama sentiment to win a majority in the Senate while increasing their existing majority in the U.S. House. All they have to do is keep the focus on the despised "Obamacare" and the Dems are sunk.
If you are depressed by the prospect, here is a tune you can whistle in the dark. Polling data from gubernatorial races around the country indicate that several of the Affordable Care Act's most fanatical opponents--sitting Republican governors who blocked the provision allowing for Medicaid expansion in their states--are in deep electoral doodoo. Two of them, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas (Kansas!), are almost certain to lose. Paul LePage, of Maine, has also consistently trailed in the polls, and Nathan Deal of Georgia and Scott Walker of Wisconsin are ahead in their races by statistically equivocal margins. Meanwhile, Republican governors who allowed the Medicaid expansion in their states--Susanna Martinez (New Mexico), Rick Snyder (Michigan), John Kasich (Ohio)--appear poised to win re-election.
The author, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, doesn't think the data prove that Obamacare has attained wide acceptance. Rather, opposition to the Medicaid expansion is a stand-in for devotion to hard-line conservative orthodoxy, which is even less popular than the President. Brownback's problem, for example, is not that he hates Obamacare; it's that he slashed taxes without giving a thought to arithmetic, with the result that Kansas's budget is even redder than its voters.
Perhaps, despite all we hear about our "broken politics," it's still the case that people prefer what works to what doesn't, and that, to some degree anyway, election results reflect this prejudice. Republicans aren't running against Social Security today even though the whole idea behind it is anathema to them. (It's a gigantic wealth redistribution program run by the federal government.) In the long run, good policies are good politics.