Looking Back At Minnesota Governor's Races

Last week I profiled 20 years worth of Minnesota Senator's races. Gubernatorial races tend to be less exciting to those who don't live in a certain state, but there have still been some doozies in the recent past. Minnesota in particular has had some crazy ones, with four of the last five being memorable. Here are some highlights:

1990--This was the first gubernatorial race I remember. I was 13 years old and not fully tuned in since it wasn't a Presidential race, but the high drama of this particular race made it impossible to be ignored. Two-term incumbent Democrat Rudy Perpich, a colorful Iron Ranger (being colorful is a prerequisite to living on the Iron Range, I think) who defied traditional ideological characterization was seeking a third term and found himself holding onto a modest lead against conservative challenger Jon Grunseth, the Republican nominee who had beaten moderate Arne Carlson in the primary. From out of nowhere in the final couple weeks of the campaign, Grunseth found himself facing allegations of child molestation involving two teenage girls hanging out in the Grunseth family's backyard pool. With less than a week to go before the election, Grunseth adamantly denied the molestation charges but nonetheless dropped out of the race, elevating State Auditor Carlson to the GOP nomination. At that point, the election began to hinge around, of all things, abortion. Perpich was a pro-life Democrat while Carlson was a pro-choice Republican. Given the state's sinking economic condition, metro area voters who never fully connected with Perpich in the first place found Carlson an acceptable alternative to Perpich and to the more conservative Grunseth. As a consequence, Carlson's five-day campaign resulted in a win, with an unusual county map that was mostly blue outstate but red even in the heart of the metro area (Hennepin and Ramsey Counties). Arguably the two biggest upsets of November 6, 1990, were both in Minnesota, with Paul Wellstone and Arne Carlson narrowly prevailing over the incumbent Rudys (Boschwitz and Perpich).

1994--Far less drama this year. The drama that did occur all came in the endorsement process where the sincere but politically weak State Senator John Marty prevailed in a crowded Democratic endorsement and subsequent primary. On the GOP side, the hard-core pro-life activists that rejected the moderate Arne Carlson for Jon Grunseth four years later rejected Carlson once again this year, endorsing the hard-right Allen Quist and giving the incumbent Governor a black eye. Getting a black eye from the party helped Carlson's cause in the end though as he beat Quist handily in the September primary and then faced a weak campaign against the lightly funded DFL challenger Marty whose "no PAC money" campaign pledge almost completely shut him off the airwaves until the final week of the campaign. It was the first Minnesota gubernatorial race of my life where the outcome was predictable....a Carlson reelection landslide. Come election night, Carlson won by a 2-1 margin and carried 84 of Minnesota's 87 counties (Marty won only in northeastern Minnesota's St. Louis, Lake, and Carlton Counties) and, most impressively, managed to carry all three of Minnesota's biggest cities....St. Paul, Duluth, and even Minneapolis. Never again in my lifetime do I expect to see any Republican win in any of these cities. It was the only Republican landslide I've witnessed in Minnesota in the two decades I've been paying attention to political contests.

1998--The wackiness was back big-time in Minnesota in the 1998 race. St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman switched from a Democrat to a Republican specifically to run for this race and had little trouble getting the nomination. The Democratic side had its usual deluge of contenders, with Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman getting the party endorsement but Attorney General Skip Humphrey riding the coattails of his name to win the September primary despite his bleak and uninspiring performances in previous high-profile statewide races. Coyly and shrewdly smirking in the background was center-left Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura, the former pro wrestler who was Mayor of a Minneapolis suburb and had a local radio show that raised his profile in the state and helping him register in the low double-digits in the polls. Humphrey had small leads heading into October until the dynamic of the race was turned on its head by the televised debates. Humphrey and Coleman went after each other, predictably, while Ventura capably and intelligently answered all the questions and managed to seem like a witty breath of fresh air compared to the stuffy major party standard-bearers. Still, Ventura continued to have a hard time getting enough people to take him seriously even though his poll numbers were ascendant. The weekend before the election, Ventura's clever ads were filling the airwaves and I just sensed something in the air that suggested a Ventura victory had suddenly become a real possibility even though the polls still officially showed Humphrey and Coleman duking it out in the 35-40% range with Jesse in the low 20s. The rest, as they say, is history as Ventura "shocked the world" pulling in 37% of the vote, clearly at the expense of Humphrey whose numbers cratered to 28% on election night and whose victories were limited to the Iron Range and northwestern Minnesota farm counties that are not even in Minnesota media markets. Definitely one of those "only in Minnesota" elections, but the most priceless result of the night was seeing Coleman coming in THIRD place in St. Paul, the city for which he was the sitting mayor.

2002--Another unpredictable stunner of a race featuring two very hard-fought endorsement battles in both parties. All candidates agreed to abide by the endorsement this year rather than proceed to a primary, leaving the Republicans with House Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty and the Democrats with Senate Leader Roger Moe, two parties who both conspired in the legislature to punt the state's dire budget issues to the following year using one-time gimmicks as a way of simultaneously one-upping Governor Ventura and avoiding tougher budgetary decisions that would harm their own candidacies. A high-profile Independence Party candidacy from former southern Minnesota Democratic Congressman Tim Penny was extremely competitive throughout the summer and early fall, with Penny branding himself as the sensible centrist not as rigidly ideological and thus better positioned to handle budget issues than Moe or Pawlenty. For months, the polls were pretty evenly divided among the three candidates, with Penny narrowly leading in most. All the winning candidate was likely to need was 35%, and that's exactly what Democrat Moe was counting on, running a dreary and almost invisible campaign that ignored southern Minnesota and hoped to get to 35% simply with the DFL base of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and his own political base in northern Minnesota. The three-way deadlock finally budged a little in early October when Pawlenty's campaign was found guilty of illegally using campaign donations in its advertisements and a judge decreed the campaign could run no more TV ads, a decree that would have effectively ended his campaign. But the decree was overruled just in time for the candidate debates, where Pawlenty played the role of Ventura four years later, the charismatic guy sitting in between the uninspiring middle-aged stiffs Moe and Penny. Polling those last two weeks reflected the race's altered dynamics as Penny's support crumbled while Pawlenty's surged. Moe was static in the mid-30s, his campaign strategy of ekeing out 33.3% +1 having collapsed now that Penny was no longer competitive. Pawlenty apparently got a little more momentum from the Wellstone Memorial in those closing days of the campaign and, unlike the Senate race, the outcome here seemed certain, with the least responsible of the three candidates poised to take over the reins of state government amidst a then record $4 billion deficit. That outcome played out as expected on election night with Pawlenty winning 44% of the vote, a healthy eight-point margin over Moe, and Penny rolling in at a dismal 16%, pretty much forfeiting all of the suburban-based Ventura coalition of four years ago to Pawlenty.

2006--The narrative of the 2006 race was less complicated than the two previous races since this year's Independence Party candidate was not a major factor, even though he did ultimately swing the election. Tim Pawlenty enjoyed approval ratings right near the 50% range and most Republicans were comfortable that he'd have an easy reelection against the abrasive Attorney General and Democratic nominee Mike Hatch. But as the election neared, it was pretty clear that 2006 was going to be a strong Democratic year and Hatch was either tied or narrowly ahead of Pawlenty in the polls. Most Republicans remained confident that Pawlenty's charisma advantage would prevail while Hatch's mean streak would be publicly exposed before the election. Turns out they were right, at least on Hatch, as an embarrassing gaffe by Hatch's running mate over ethanol-based E-85 ultimately led Hatch to call an interrogating reporter a "Republican whore" over the phone....with only four days to go before the election. Meanwhile, a good number of left-leaning voters were seeing something they liked in eloquent Independence Party candidate Peter Hutchinson, and it's a good bet that a significant number of would-be Hatch voters ultimately defected to Hutchinson. Any other year than the 2006 Democratic landslide, Pawlenty would have had an easy re-election, but he still barely eked it out, beating Hatch by a mere 22,000 votes mostly on the strength of his numbers in the suburbs while Hatch's strength was mainly confined to Roger Moe's Minneapolis, St. Paul, and northern Minnesota coalition. Still, Hutchinson scored 6% of the vote, pulling in his best numbers in heavily Democratic urban precincts and almost assuredly costing Hatch the election.

2010 is poised to be another wild Minnesota gubernatorial race with more than a dozen candidates vying for the statehouse being vacated by Pawlenty. If recent history is any indication, it should be another wild ride. I don't anticipate 2010 to be a good year for Democrats, but Pawlenty's derelict stewardship of the state probably won't put the Republicans in much better standing. For that reason, I could envision a strong showing or even an outright victory for the Independence Party is they nominate another compelling candidate in the mold of Hutchinson.

Election Nostalgia

No matter how tuned out I am from politics during the summer months of nonelection years, there's nothing like October to get me back in the mood. Just as was with the case at this time in 2005, autumn's arrival has brought back election year nostalgia hot and heavy and I will spend the weekend reviewing my videotape of election night 2000, indisputably the most exciting U.S. election of all-time. I'm even a little excited about next Tuesday's limited election contests in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, not because I'm confident of my side's success, just because I'm jonesing to crunch some new election returns after an election-free 51 weeks.

Next year's midterms look like a shellacking in the making, particularly in the South where I expect nearly every Democrat outside of a majority-black district to be unseated. So rather than look forward, I prefer to look back, in this thread at previous Senate contests in my home state of Minnesota going back to the first one I remember in 1988.

1988--Two-term Republican incumbent Dave Durenberger was going for a third term against Democrat Skip Humphrey, son of the former Vice-President and the sitting Attorney General. Durenberger, a very moderate Republican and generally affable guy, had always been in good standing with Minnesota voters until a minor corruption scandal in the waning days of his final term. Even the Humphrey name, at that time still political royalty, wasn't enough, particularly with the usual blah campaign that the junior Humphrey ran. Durenberger ended up winning by a better-than-expected 15 points even as Dukakis was winning Minnesota by nine points. I was only in fifth grade at the time and wasn't paying particularly close attention to the details of the Senate race, but accepted it as a foregone conclusion in the final weeks of the race that Durenberger would handily win...which he did.

1990--Another "popular" Republican incumbent....but a much different outcome. Only a few months earlier, slimy two-term Republican Rudy Boschwitz was rated as the safest incumbent in the nation. The Democrats had difficulty finding a credible challenger and ended up selecting a flamboyantly liberal activist and college professor named Paul Wellstone, who Democrats privately feared would be so weak that he would hurt other Democrats down the ticket. But sometime around Labor Day, something happened. The penniless Wellstone campaign was starting to generate some buzz with its colorful candidate and his humorous and offbeat TV ads. Boschwitz was caught flat-footed and reacted with a panic, making a megagaffe a week before the election when it sent out a letter to Jewish supporters citing Wellstone as an "improper Jew" because he married a Christian woman. Meanwhile, the energy surrounding Wellstone was explosive and contagious. I was in seventh grade and barely tuned in, so it wasn't until the final couple of days of the campaign that I began to seriously entertain the idea that Wellstone could win....but he did exactly that, winning by three points (and victorious in 27 of Minnesota's 87 counties). It was not only the most exciting Minnesota Senate race of my lifetime, it was one of the biggest upsets in American political history.

1994--The retirement of scandal-plagued Republican Dave Durenberger, with an approval rating around 25%, left an open seat that should have produced a very viable pickup opportunity for Democrats, but it was 1994....the worst year for Democrats in at least a half century, and Minnesota was no exception. Making matters worse, the Democrats nominated a lousy candidate in Minneapolis legislator Ann Wynia, a cantankerous older lady who managed to be boring and bitchy at the same time, which is not an easy task. Thankfully for her, the Republican candidate, one-term suburban Congressman Rod Grams, was also quite weak and the race turned out to be entirely uninspiring. In traditional cycles, a race featuring two weak candidates would mean an advantage for Democrats, but in the GOP landslide of 1994, Grams pulled off a fairly decisive five-point win, holding Wynia down to nine county victories and becoming the most conservative Senator Minnesota has sent to Washington in my lifetime.

1996--Now this was more like it. Ever since his surprise defeat in 1990, former Senator Rudy Boschwitz had been salivating at the prospect of a rematch with Democrat Paul Wellstone. Wellstone's outspoken liberalism left him theoretically vulnerable, but thankfully the same piss-poor Boschwitz candidacy of 1990 returned in 1996 with cartoonish (literally) ads trashing Wellstone that seemed incredibly unserious. It became easier as the fall pressed on for Minnesotans to see Wellstone as the rational adult in this race, and Boschwitz compounded his problems with another ninth-inning gaffe, this time blindly accusing Wellstone of burning the American flag when he was younger without any evidence and looking like a complete ass when Wellstone unequivocally denied it. Come election day, Clinton's 20-point landslide reelection in Minnesota carried some coattails and probably helped inflate Wellstone's winning margin of nine points (scoring victories in 43 counties), but there was no way Wellstone was gonna lose this race.

2000--I had just finished college and was without a job, so I had plenty of time to obsess about this reasonably intriguing race, which featured a long list of Democrats vying to face off against imminently vulnerable one-term Republican incumbent Rod Grams. Thanks to his personal fortune buying up all kinds of TV ads, sitting State Auditor and 1982 Senate candidate Mark Dayton won the September primary. He only had about seven weeks to wage his general election campaign against Grams, but was a favorite the entire campaign, running up double-digit leads in the majority of polls against the staunchly conservative Grams, who had pushed forward policies that were unpopular by a variety of different demographic groups. Were it not for Grams' glaring weaknesses, Dayton's own campaign weaknesses would have been far more noticeable, but in the end Dayton prevailed fairly handily, winning by six points and scoring 38 county victories. Two factors contributed to a smaller-than-expected margin: Al Gore's weak two-point victory at the top of the ballot and a well-spoken Independence Party candidate named James Gibson who pulled in a better-than-expected 8% of the vote, mostly at Dayton's expense.

2002--It was arguably the marquee Senate race of the nation and Minnesota airwaves were saturated with ads already in March, a full eight months before the election. Paul Wellstone vs. Norm Coleman. And what a race it was shaping up to be, with Wellstone weaker than I expected through much of the campaign, tied in most polls and suffering from the nationwide surge in Republicanism in the months after 9/11. Still, Wellstone held strong and began to open up a modest lead by October. I had never been as excited (or nervous) about a Senate race as I had this one. Of course, that's when tragedy happened that infamous gloomy Friday 11 days before the election when Wellstone's plane crashed in the northern Minnesota wilderness. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale admirably stepped up to the plate to fill in for Wellstone, but the raucous memorial service turned off independents and killed the sympathy vote. I knew the next day that Coleman would probably benefit from the memorial service/political rally even though polls continued to show Mondale with a microscopic lead. As I feared, election night was a living hell as not only Coleman pulled off a two-point victory, but Republicans crushed Democrats all the way down the ballot. A total shellacking, particularly in the suburban counties, and at the time I had concerns we saw the first stage of a permanent realignment of Minnesota into the GOP column. Usually I stay up all night on election nights, but that night I crashed at about 2 a.m. in a deep funk.

2006--I knew unpopular one-term incumbent Mark Dayton made the right decision to retire from his seat and allow another candidate to be the Democratic Party's emissary, but I would have never realized in February 2005 when Dayton announced his retirement just how perfect that decision would be as it opened the door for Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar to be the Democratic candidate. Klobuchar was a very polished candidate, but her opponent also seemed to be a worthy adversary, at least at first. Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy's resume and political geography suggested an epic Old Minnesota vs. New Minnesota dogfight that, as a political scientist, gave me goose bumps to contemplate. But the race didn't play out at all like I expected. With the help of a strong Democratic tide nationally along with her own political skills, Klobuchar ran a pitch-perfect campaign while Kennedy too often looked like a bumbling fool. Never in my wildest dreams, however, could I have imagined the 21-point shellacking Klobuchar served to Kennedy in November 2006, winning 79 of Minnesota's 87 counties. It was the first genuine Democratic landslide in a statewide race that I got to observe, and it was a pleasure to witness.

2008--Here was a race that was always exciting to observe from a political scientist perspective but nonetheless one I had a hard time getting particularly excited about for one big reason. I simply couldn't imagine a scenario where comedian Al Franken could topple one-term incumbent Norm Coleman, as statistically weak as Coleman was. How could the stoic Scandinavians of Minnesotans ever take Franken seriously, I continued to ask myself. So imagine my surprise as summer passed by and Franken was in contention, thanks to two factors. First, Coleman was saturating the airwaves with some of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen and managed to make Franken look like the adult, which was no easy task. Second, an independent candidate with high name recognition was pulling in double-digit support from voters disgusted with both Franken and Coleman, but at least in theory seemed to be taking more from Coleman. We all know how the tick-tight race unfolded complete with the monthslong recount and an ultimate margin of victory for Franken of only a couple hundred votes. The outcome was favorable, and I'm starting to think Franken could end up being a pretty good Senator.

There is no Minnesota Senate race in 2010, which I'm grateful for given the political climate that looks to be coming. But there is a Governor's race next year. In my next post, I'll take a look back at the Minnesota gubernatorial contests of my lifetime.

The New TV Season....and a Bunch of Old TV Seasons

Any regular reader of this blog knows I'm a television aficianado and have been since I was a little boy. This past week was "premiere week" on network television, but I must saw there's little to get excited about this year. I'd rate it as the weakest fall season since 2000. I'm gonna watch the new show I've looked forward to most this weekend, ABC's "Flash Forward", give "The Forgotten" a fair hearing, and check out next week's "Trauma" on NBC which reportedly has some great pyrotechnics. But I just can't get excited about any of the long list of new medical dramas on the schedules this fall. Thankfully, things sound better for midseason with some promising new entries on tap along with returning favorites "24" and "Lost", both of which are likely (and mercifully) heading into their final seasons.


Even though I'm lukewarm about this fall's lineup, I continue to praise the medium of television for its relatively impressive body of work this past decade. This season may well turn out to be as ho-hum as it looks now, but it'll still be a far cry better than the bleak 1990s when endless clones of "Seinfeld" filled the airwaves and "Dateline" gobbled up four primetime hours per week. Granted, NBC's "Jay Leno Show" gimmick this season is a scary harbinger of what primetime TV MAY look like a few years down the road, but the difference between Jay Leno today and Dateline 10 years ago is that in the current primetime lineup not occupied by Jay Leno, NBC is making good television (even if I don't personally like all of the shows, they are quality productions). By contrast, in 1999, the hours not occupied by Dateline were by and large just as unimpressive as was Dateline.


I've been following primetime network television since before I started elementary school, so indulge me as I take a trip down memory lane and profile past seasons...


1981


Main Themes--NBC was as down and out as a network could get in the early 1980s and never worse than this season when they didn't have a single show in the top-25 (and this when there were only 75 shows on three networks). They lost tons of money on recent high-profile failures and after Carter pulled out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the network was on the verge of financial ruin, saved only by the revenue earned by their late-night lineup of Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Beyond NBC's woes, the very early 80s was one of those rare times when primetime TV was diverse, offering a wide breadth of genre TV without any specific genre owning the airwaves, although primetime soaps were really starting to catch fire. CBS ruled the world with ABC in a distant second.


Successful New Shows....The Fall Guy, Simon and Simon, Gimme a Break, Falcon Crest, Private Benjamin, Father Murphy


Flops....Mr. Merlin, The Phoenix, Chicago Story, and NBC's unsuccessful foray into primetime soaps, Flamingo Road........*a little before my time in terms of remembering much about these unsuccessful shows


Midseason Successes....Cagney and Lacey, T.J. Hooker




1982


Main Themes....the networks had a fair amount of success with their large batch of new series in 1982, and NBC was patient with a number of critically acclaimed but slow-starting series that would eventually pay off for them, although not so much this year, save for "The A-Team" which gave the network its first real hit in years when it premiered midseason. In terms of trends, the action show was in ascendancy, the success of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the box office spawned three unsuccessful small screen adventure series, and the primetime soaps were all really starting to catch fire. Again, CBS completely dominated the ratings race and ABC followed well behind but still light years ahead of hapless NBC.


Successful New Shows...Family Ties, Cheers, St. Elsewhere, Knight Rider, Remington Steele, Newhart, Matt Houston, Ripley's Believe it or Not!, Silver Spoons


Flops...The Powers of Matthew Star, Voyagers!, Tucker's Witch, Star of the Family, Gavilan, critically acclaimed but viewer ignored Square Pegs, and all three of the "Raiders" ripoffs including Tales of the Gold Monkey, Bring 'Em Back Alive, and especially The Quest, the first show of the season to be cancelled.


Midseason Successes....The A-Team, Mama's Family, and The Mississippi




1983


Main Themes--Moving into the year where I was really starting to dig TV, much of the new fall shows were poorly received, especially on NBC where all 10 new shows flopped. Fortunately for the networks, again especially NBC, many of their midseason replacements did prove successful and salvaged the season. With the escalating success of action shows like "The A-Team", "Magnum, P.I." and "The Fall Guy", the lineups of all three networks were being overrun by flamboyant crimefighters by midseason, and the majority of the hours not featuring car crashes and explosions were primetime soaps. The sitcom was becoming an endangered species on the primetime lineup. CBS owned the season again but was starting to become a little stale, while ABC was even more stale in a distant second, and NBC, while still coming in third, really started to find its footing late in the season.


Successful New Fall Shows were few--Hardcastle and McCormick, Webster, Hotel, Scarecrow and Mrs. King


Flops were far more common with some major howlers this year--Boone, Trauma Center, Whiz Kids, Emerald Point NAS, The Yellow Rose, Lottery, Jennifer Slept Here, Cutter to Houston, For Love and Honor, Just Our Luck, Mr. Smith (about a monkey with an IQ of 202), Manimal (about a detective that could turn into different kinds of animals), and the first to go, ABC's It's Not Easy, gone after four episodes.


Midseason Successes--Night Court, Riptide, TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes, Kate and Allie, Airwolf, Mike Hammer




1984


Main Themes--Crimefighters ruled the day with over-the-top and increasingly violent action shows occupying about 40% of the primetime lineup with the primetime soaps (Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing) at their peak of popularity. Most of the top-rated action shows got fat and lazy this year and began to hemorrhage viewers, but newcomer "Miami Vice" on NBC added new zest to the genre despite its slow start in the ratings stuck in a show-killing Friday night timeslot. Even more consequential was "The Cosby Show", also on NBC, which shot to near the top of the ratings list and helped usher in what would soon become a new era of sitcom dominance on network TV. These were two of many success stories among 1984's fall shows. Old and tired CBS found itself in a virtual tie with the insurgent NBC for first place this season, while a slate of programming mistakes pushed ABC to a distant third.


Successful New Shows--The Cosby Show, Miami Vice, Murder She Wrote, Hunter, Who's the Boss?, Highway to Heaven, Punky Brewster


Flops--Call to Glory, Jessie, It's Your Move!, Glitter, Partners in Crime, Hot Pursuit, Hawaiian Heat, Paper Dolls (proving the primetime soap audience had reached its saturation point), and the first of the year to be cancelled after two lame episodes, ABC's People Do the Craziest Things (a bloopers show scheduled up against The Cosby Show and Magnum, P.I.)


Midseason Successes--Moonlighting, Mr. Belvedere, Crazy Like a Fox




1985


Main Themes--This was my favorite TV season of all time. Not only did my all-time favorite series "MacGyver" make its debut, it was the last hurrah for the action show golden age, with nearly half of the primetime schedule occupied by flamboyant crimefighters, including the final throes of the lighthearted old guard ("Fall Guy", "Knight Rider") and the introduction of harder-edged newcomers ("The Equalizer", "Spenser: For Hire"). The genre got lazy the season before but had something of a creative renaissance this season, albeit too late to save most of the shows from plunging ratings. The primetime soaps also lost some steam this season. Gaining at their expense was the revived sitcom. Sitcoms were still small players on the 1985 schedule, but their fortunes (and ratings) were rising dramatically as the season advanced. NBC blew away the competition this year and were way out in front with a bullet. CBS fell to a distant second, and ABC pulled up the rear with another weak season.


Successful New Shows--MacGyver, The Golden Girls, Growing Pains, 227, The Equalizer, Spenser: For Hire, Amazing Stories, The Twilight Zone


Flops--The George Burns Comedy Week, Lime Street, Misfits of Science, Hell Town, Our Family Honor, the megaviolent Lady Blue, "Cosby" ripoff Charlie and Company, "Miami Vice" ripoffs Hollywood Beat and The Insiders, and the season's first to go, the angsty middle-aged soap opera Hometown, cancelled by CBS before the end of October.


Midseason Successes--Perfect Strangers, Valerie (later known as The Hogan Family), The Disney Sunday Movie, Stingray




1986


Main Themes--Action shows and primetime soaps were going down and sitcoms were moving up. Generally this was not a trend I welcomed even though there were some pretty good comedies on the air in the mid-to-late 80s. Another pretty impressive year in terms of generating new hit shows (or shows that would become big hits in subsequent seasons). NBC was again way out on top, with CBS a distant second, and ABC sinking to new depths in third. And although it was predictably in fourth place in its infancy, the Fox network was born by midseason.


Successful New Shows--L.A. Law, Designing Women, Matlock, ALF, Amen, Head of the Class, My Sister Sam, Crime Story, Sledge Hammer!


Flops--Kay O'Brien, The Wizard, Together We Stand, Easy Street, Jack and Mike, Downtown, Heart of the City, The Ellen Burstyn Show, the trainwreck Lucille Ball revival Life with Lucy, and the first to go by mid-October, the CBS urban sitcom Better Days


Midseason Successes--Married...with Children, 21 Jump Street, Houston Knights




1987


Main Themes--The networks weren't quite ready to give up on hourlong crime dramas and launched one final batch of new ones this fall, going against the grain of the insurgent sitcoms. While a few of them were modestly successful, sitcoms dominated the top of the ratings list even more this season while the bottom fell out on the primetime soaps. NBC dominated even more this year than the past two seasons while a cratering CBS barely bested a still-low ABC for second place. Fox was still new and untested and in a distant fourth.

Successful New Shows--Full House, A Different World, thirtysomething, My Two Dads, Wiseguy, Jake and the Fatman, Tour of Duty, Beauty and the Beast


Flops--Buck James, Dolly, J.J. Starbuck, The Law and Harry McGraw, Frank's Place, The Oldest Rookie, I Married Dora, Private Eye, Leg Work, and the biggest flop of the year, ABC's Once a Hero, cancelled after only three airings.


Midseason Successes--The Wonder Years, In the Heat of the Night, China Beach, Just the Ten of Us




1988


Main Themes--This season got off to a late start with the summer of 1988 writers' strike delaying the premieres of new shows by at least a month, but the networks held surprisingly strong when the new shows did premiere and avoided losing more viewers to cable as had been the case in the previous couple of seasons. Sitcoms had by this time gained serious traction and were about to consume the vast majority of the primetime schedule, with crime dramas waning and news shows sprouting their wings. This was the last TV season for many years to come that I look back on as generally impressive as TV was about to head into a long drought in terms of my preferred programming. NBC dominated, ABC finally found its footing and shot into a reasonable second-place, while the bottom fell out of CBS' aging lineup of dinosaur programs, ultimately sinking it even lower this year than ABC was in any of its mid-80s downer years. Fox was still a blip on the screen overall but starting to establish a few modest hits.


Successful New Shows--Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Empty Nest, Dear John, Unsolved Mysteries, Paradise, America's Most Wanted, Midnight Caller

Flops--Almost Grown, TV 101, Knightwatch, Annie McGuire, Something is Out There, Murphy's Law, Tattinger's, Raising Miranda, Baby Boom, and the horrific new Dick Van Dyke sitcom The Van Dyke Show, which was the first official cancellation.

Midseason Successes--Quantum Leap, Coach, Anything but Love, Father Dowling Mysteries, Cops

1989

Main Themes--The networks unleashed a widely panned batch of new series this year and a large number of them were early casualties. However, they were seen as redeeming themselves with a number of well-received midseason entries including "The Simpsons", "Twin Peaks", and over the summer, "Seinfeld". While several of these series were fresh and exciting, it was nonetheless discouraging to see the dwindling economics of network television and the inability to continue producing the action-packed hourlong series I was reared on. Furthermore, the sitcom wave continued at warp speed and even though the newer sitcom entries were largely pale imitators of existing sitcom hits, the comedy insurgency on network television was only getting started. This was the first TV season where I began to lose some hope for the medium's short-term and long-term prospects. NBC still won the season but was slipping some, ABC was a strong second, CBS a distant and desperate third, with Fox still last but trending upward.

Successful New Shows--Doogie Howser M.D., Life Goes On, The Young Riders, Major Dad, Family Matters, Rescue 911

Flops--Free Spirit, Homeroom, Sister Kate, The Famous Teddy Z, Chicken Soup, Wolf, Island Son, The Nutt House, Top of the Hill, Peaceable Kingdom, Hardball, Living Dolls, and the first to be cancelled, The People Next Door, a sitcom about a cartoonist whose animated figures came to life.

Midseason Successes--The Simpsons, Seinfeld, America's Funniest Home Videos, Wings, Twin Peaks

1990

Main Themes--A season hailed as fresh and innovative at the outset didn't turn out to be my cup of tea, nor the cup of tea of viewers for that matter as network TV audiences dipped dramatically downward this year, more so than any previous season. Sitcoms were taking over more and more hours of primetime, and the insipid new genre of "reality crime shows" was insurgent. Meanwhile, the crime drama/action show was fast becoming an endangered species with only a handful of the genre's 80's-era mainstays still on the air and few viable replacements for them. Despite some huge holes in their lineup, CBS came out of nowhere to shock the world with a revival and won a season that more or less turned out to be a three-way tie, with ABC narrowly behind, and a sinking NBC right behind them. Fox thought this was gonna be their year after some significant growth the previous year and some bold programming moves, but they actually stalled this season and remained a distant fourth.

Successful New Shows--The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Law and Order, America's Funniest People, Beverly Hills 90210, Evening Shade, Parker Lewis, Top Cops

Flops--Hull High, Lifestories, The Fanelli Boys, WIOU, Lenny, Over My Dead Body, Going Places, The Family Man, Babes, TV versions of Uncle Buck, Ferris Bueller, and Parenthood, the environmental police on E.A.R.T.H. Force (the first of the year to be cancelled), and one of TV's biggest howlers of all-time, Cop Rock, a crime drama/musical.

Midseason Successes--Dinosaurs, Northern Exposure, Blossom, Sisters

1991

Main Themes--It was the last chapter of a TV era with a long list of classic series entering their final seasons, including The Cosby Show, MacGyver, The Golden Girls, Night Court, Growing Pains, Who's the Boss?, and Perfect Strangers. For all intents and purposes, this was the last TV season for many years I had any genuine and overarching interest in as my old favorites went by the wayside while a new wave of lame sitcoms and even lamer reality crime shows (most ripoffs of Cops) cannibalized the airwaves, along with the ultimate spawn of Satan, the faux news series Dateline NBC which would bow midseason. It was also the last season I paid close attention to the network standings, with CBS having another strong year and finishing first place, a still-strong ABC in second, a fast-dying NBC in third, and a stagnant Fox finding little traction in last place. Strangely, even with only a few breakthrough hits, overall ratings for the networks actually saw a slight uptick this season.

Successful New Shows--Home Improvement, Step by Step, The Commish, Nurses, Reasonable Doubts, Homefront

Flops--Man of the People, Pacific Station, Eerie Indiana, The Adventures of Mark and Brian, Sibs, Good and Evil, The Royal Family, Teech, Pros and Cons, Drexell's Class, Princesses, Flesh 'N' Blood, The Torkelsons, an updated Carol Burnett Show, and the first of the year to be cancelled, the CBS crime drama Palace Guard.

Midseason Successes--Civil Wars, Room for Two

1992

Main Themes--A pretty dreary state of affairs and the least exciting new season of my lifetime up to that point. While the reality crime show wave was past its peak, a disgusting glut of tabloidy news shows were replacing them, and sitcom mediocrity reigned supreme. The few new action shows and crime dramas that saw the light of day were fairly uninspired and scheduled for timeslots set in quicksand. Thankfully I had the Presidential election of 1992 to fill my downtime hours because the fall TV schedule surely wasn't getting the job done.

Successful New Shows--Mad About You, Melrose Place, Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, Hearts Afire, Love and War, Picket Fences, Martin

Flops--Great Scott, Laurie Hill, The Hat Squad, Delta, The Heights, Camp Wilder, The Round Table, Frannie's Turn, Angel Street, Crossroads, Here and Now, the medieval-themed Covington Cross, and Fox's Woops!, a COMEDY about the few survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Seriously!

Midseason Successes--Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Walker, Texas Ranger, Eye to Eye with Connie Chung

1993

Main Themes--Another generally dreadful new season with only a few bright spots easily overshadowed by a relentless barrage of increasingly inane sitcoms and an even more merciless onslaught of tacky newsmagazines occupying key primetime hours previously available for crime dramas and action shows. Perhaps a slight better effort than the season before, however, and much more effective in the creation of new hit shows.

Successful New Shows--The X-Files, NYPD Blue, The Nanny, Grace Under Fire, Frasier, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, seaQuest DSV, Boy Meets World, Living Single, Dave's World, The John Larroquette Show

Flops--Daddy Dearest, Phenom, The Second Half, Thea, Joe's Life, Moon Over Miami, Missing Persons, The Sinbad Show, Against the Grain, The Paula Poundstone Show, Harts of the West, The Mommies, George, one-episode wonder South of Sunset, and the season's first well-deserved casualty, The Trouble with Larry, a howler (no pun intended) of a sitcom about a young man returning to his family after spending his childhood raised by wolves.

Midseason Successes--Homicide: Life on the Street, Diagnosis Murder, The Critic

1994


Main Themes--I'll give the networks a little more effort for trying this year and producing a fall schedule with more hourlong shows than sitcoms. Still, most weren't my speed and my personal disconnect with primetime TV continued. It wouldn't be until years later that I would discover Fox's "New York Undercover", which in retrospect would have been reason enough for me to get excited about this season had I been able to watch it at the time. Sitcoms hit a bit of a speed bump by this season, but the wretched primetime news shows were at or near their peak in terms of primetime hours they occupied.


Successful New Shows--ER, Friends, Chicago Hope, New York Undercover, Party of Five, Touched by an Angel, Due South, My So-Called Life


Flops--Earth 2, On Our Own, Fortune Hunter, Wild Oats, Blue Skies, Me and the Boys, The Boys Are Back, Daddy's Girl, Models Inc., McKenna, M.A.N.T.I.S., The Five Mrs. Buchanans, and the unimaginably awful Cosby Mysteries.


Midseason Succeses--Ellen, NewsRadio, Cybill, The Marshal

1995

Main Themes--Yet another crummy year with the same general trendlines as the year before with wave upon wave of "hip, urban sitcoms" emulating Friends and Seinfeld, ever-proliferating newsmagazines (Dateline in particular), and new hourlong shows that were typically X-Files wannabes. The one genuine bright spot was the uber-dark spook drama "American Gothic" on CBS, far and away the best new series of the fall. Of course, it was cancelled by January. But lack of success was a common theme here as there were VERY few breakthrough hits.


Successful New Shows--The Drew Carey Show, JAG, The Single Guy, Caroline in the City


Flops--Space: Above and Beyond, Can't Hurry Love, Hudson Street, John Grisham's The Client, Central Park West, Courthouse, Charlie Grace, The Monroes, New York News, The Home Court, critically acclaimed but viewer-ignored Murder One, and the Andrew Dice Clay family sitcom Bless This House.


Midseason Successes--Nash Bridges, Third Rock from the Sun, High Incident, Sliders




1996


Main Themes--A few signs of improvement here with the best batch of new shows in several years, but most of them slotted in Saturday night or some other kamikaze time slot. The fundamentals were still troubling though....endless lookalike sitcoms all set on the west side of Manhattan, and Dateline and 20/20 broadcast multiple nights a week. It wasn't yet to the point where the worst was behind us, but this was at least the first baby step in the right direction.


Successful New Shows--Everybody Loves Raymond, Spin City, The Pretender, Profiler, Promised Land, Suddenly Susan, Cosby, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Early Edition, Millennium


Flops--Ink, Mr. Rhodes, Something So Right, Townies, Dark Skies, Common Law, Relativity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, critically acclaimed but cancelled after two airings EZ Streets, and not to be outdone and cancelled after only one broadcast, the vulgar Public Morals. Also worthy of this list was just about every entry on the fledgling UPN and WB networks, with a specific dunce cap to Homeboys in Outer Space


Midseason Successes--King of the Hill, The Practice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Just Shoot Me!




1997


Main Themes--Not a bad season compared to where we had been. Granted most of my favorites never made it to a second season, but at least I was able to tune in my TV most nights of the week and find something watchable. For that matter, the fall schedule produced very few breakthrough hits of any kind. We weren't yet to the point where copycat sitcoms and Stone Phillips' mug on Dateline NBC exited stage door right as those shows continued to hijack the vast majority of primetime hours. The endurance of sitcom dominance in primetime TV, at this point a decade old, is nonetheless pretty impressive in the context of primetime trends, which usually run their course in about two or three years before audiences burn out and crave something different.


Successful New Shows--Ally McBeal, Dharma and Greg, The Wonderful World of Disney, Working


Flops--Jenny, Timecop, George and Leo, Brooklyn South, Hiller and Diller, Michael Hayes, Dellaventura, The Tony Danza Show, Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel, Nothing Sacred, Cracker, 413 Hope Street, Union Square, You Wish, Meego, The Gregory Hines Show, Players, C-16, Total Security


Midseason Successes--Dawson's Creek is about it




1998


Main Themes--Things descended back into the early-to-mid 90s funk with a weak batch of new shows saved from being the worst TV season of my lifetime almost exclusively by the hilariously dark short-lived Michael Madsen crime drama "Vengeance Unlimited". Overall, little progress in driving a stake through the heart of the sitcoms and newsmagazines and replacing them with intelligent dramas and action shows.


Successful New Shows--That 70s Show, The King of Queens, Will and Grace, Sports Night, The Hughleys, Jesse, Charmed


Flops--Holding the Baby, The Brian Benben Show, L.A. Doctors, Conrad Bloom, The Secret Lives of Men, Maggie Winters, Vengeance Unlimited, Two of a Kind, Brimstone, Fantasy Island, Wind on Water, and the horrific Buddy Faro.


Midseason Successes--The Family Guy, Becker, Providence, Futurama, Whose Line is it Anyway




1999


Main Themes--I said in the previous season that "Vengeance Unlimited" saved it from being the worst TV season of my lifetime. Unfortunately, there was no "Vengeance Unlimited" this season, and it WAS the worst TV season of my lifetime with few new shows that interested me, and the last hurrah of sitcom and newsmagazine dominance apparently wearing as thin with viewers, finally, as it was with me. Fortunately, better times were soon to come as TV was soon to get interesting again.


Successful New Shows--Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The West Wing, Third Watch, Law and Order: Special Victim's Unit, Judging Amy, Once and Again, Family Law


Flops--Snoops, The Ladies Man, The Mike O'Malley Show, Oh Grow Up, Work with Me, Action, Stark Raving Mad, Daddio, Now and Again, Harsh Realm, Ryan Caulfield: Year One, Cold Feet, and the sometimes amusing Freaks and Geeks


Midseason Successes--Malcolm in the Middle, My Wife and Kids, Titus, Norm, and over the summer of 2000, Survivor




2000


Main Themes--One final shitty season of mostly ho-hum new shows, but with a high-profile newcomer named "CSI" that, while overrated even in its prime, set the stage for a tectonic shift in network television. CSI made crime dramas, and ultimately action shows, cool again, and subsequent seasons in the decade ahead would bear that out. Even the less admirable trendlines, reality TV and game shows, the product of the successes of "Survivor" and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and the imitators they would soon spawn, were still by and large a welcome relief from a decade of tiresome sitcom and newsmagazine dominance. The beginning of this season was boring business as usual, but by season's end it was clear times were a-changin'...and for the better.


Successful New Shows--CSI, Yes Dear, Boston Public, Dark Angel, The District, Gilmore Girls


Flops--Tucker, Deadline, DAG, The Geena Davis Show, Bette, The Street, The Trouble with Normal, Madigan Men, Cursed, the sometimes impressive remake of The Fugitive, and the dreadful flop The Michael Richards Show.


Midseason Successes--Temptation Island, Fear Factor, The Weakest Link




2001


Main Themes--That was fast! Usually it's a slow process moving towards respectability after one has been down for so long, but after a decade of stinky TV lineups, the networks redeemed themselves with a strong batch of newcomers that included some high-profile new action shows, with "Alias" and "24" being the cream of the crop and the WB's "Smallville" also vastly exceeding expectations. Even some of the less successful new attempts like "UC Undercover" were impressive. The timing for the action show's comeback, however, was unfortunate as audiences recovering from the September 11 attacks probably weren't in the mood for the level of violence being broadcast. Still, plenty of new hits this year so the networks apparently got away with it. The best TV season in about 15 years.



Successful New Shows--24, Alias, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Crossing Jordan, The Guardian, Scrubs, According to Jim, Smallville, The Amazing Race, The Bernie Mac Show, The Agency


Flops--The Education of Max Bickford, What About Joan, Philly, Undeclared, Wolf Lake, Inside Schwartz, Thieves, Pasadena, The Ellen Show, Danny, Citizen Baines, the megaviolent but consistently entertaining UC Undercover, the howler of a Jason Alexander sitcom vehicle Bob Patterson


Midseason Successes--The Bachelor, The George Lopez Show, and over the summer, American Idol


2002

Main Themes--Not quite as good as the year before, but still an impressive batch of new shows that included an abundance of new crime dramas and action shows, most with at least a modest level of success that helped the last them full season ("Boomtown", "Fastlane", "John Doe"). Sitcoms were still a factor on the primetime schedule but about to plunge to levels not seen since their mid-80s nadir. Meanwhile, the merciful saturation of tabloidy newsmagazines was exiting stage left, replaced by often tacky reality shows, but at least several of them had impressive production values a la Survivor and The Amazing Race. And the once-mighty Who Wants to be a Millionaire franchise which ABC greedily exploited four nights a week at its 2000 peak, was now gone from primetime for keeps. Network TV continued to move in the right direction.

Successful New Shows--Without a Trace, American Dreams, CSI: Miami, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, Boomtown, Still Standing, Hack, Less than Perfect

Flops--Life with Bonnie, Presidio Med, Push Nevada, Good Morning Miami, That Was Then, Robbery Homicide Division, Firefly, In-Laws, Hidden Hills

Successful Midseason Shows--Joe Millionaire, Star Search


2003

Main Themes--Another decent season even though nearly all of my new favorites got cancelled before season's end, including Threat Matrix, The Handler, and Line of Fire. This was perhaps the peak of reality TV mania and they all seemed to outperform the season's slate of hourlong dramas and adventure shows, which was frustrating, but still better than seasons in decades past when most well-made shows never got a chance to get cancelled because they were never made in the first place. The networks were at least trying at this point, and had a number of hits, several of them worthy.

Successful New Shows--Cold Case, Two and a Half Men, NCIS, Arrested Development, Las Vegas, Joan of Arcadia, The OC, Hope and Faith

Flops--10-8, The Lyon's Den, Skin, I'm with Her, Whoopi, The Tracy Morgan Show, Karen Sisco, The Brotherhood of Poland New Hampshire, A Minute with Stan Hooper, Threat Matrix, Miss Match, Luis

Midseason Successes--Extreme Makeover, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The Apprentice


2004

Main Themes--With a couple of high profile exceptions that turned out to be the biggest hits of the year, I wasn't as impressed with this season's batch of new shows as I had been with recent seasons, but the general direction was still the right one with a diverse abundance of hourlong dramas and crimefighter shows, a diminished sitcom presence which helped keep the ones that were on the air from seeming stale, and a barrage of reality shows, most of which had at least a modicum of entertainment value and were acceptable insofar as their low budgets helped the networks afford to make quality shows in the slots not occupied by reality shows.

Successful New Shows--Lost, Desperate Housewives, Boston Legal, House, Wife Swap, CSI: New York, Veronica Mars

Flops--The Benefactor, Listen Up!, LAX, North Shore, Hawaii, Medical Investigation, Clubhouse, Life as We Know It, Complete Savages, Dr. Vegas, Quintuplets, Method and Red, Center of the Universe, Committed, and the post-Friends epic fail Joey

Midseason Successes--Grey's Anatomy, NUMB3Rs, Medium, The Office, American Dad


2005

Main Themes--This was the season of "Lost" imitators....some good ("Invasion"), some mediocre ("Threshold"). Still, better for a batch of new series to be imitators of "Lost" than "Friends" as was the case 10 years earlier. In general, another above-average crop of newcomers with none more compelling than the new Fox action thriller "Prison Break", which would have made this a fun TV season even if it was the only good show on the air. This was the fifth consecutive year where there were more good things to say about network TV than bad. I knew I was living on borrowed time before things go crummy again, but amazingly, TV has yet to plunge back to where it was 10 years ago qualitywise.

Successful New Shows--Prison Break, How I Met Your Mother, My Name is Earl, Criminal Minds, Bones, Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, Close to Home, Everybody Hates Chris

Flops--Out of Practice, Kitchen Confidential, Surface, Four Kings, Commander in Chief, Freddie, E-Ring, Apprentice: Martha Stewart, Hot Properties, Head Cases, Threshold, Inconceivable, and a remake of the 1974 cult favorite Night Stalker

Midseason Successes--The New Adventures of Old Christine, The Unit, Deal or No Deal


2006

Main Themes--While there was little that blew me away this year (or anybody else either it seems) it was nonetheless an above average crop of new shows, several of which were taken before their time ("Vanished", "Smith"). Part of the problem was that the networks spread themselves far too thin with serialized shows after the successes of shows like Lost and 24, but viewers were unwilling to commit to that many series that required mandatory weekly viewing. For a medium never known for being too ambitious, TV got that way in 2006. For my taste, not a bad problem to have, particularly compared to the laziness of TV in the 90s or the worrisome existing institution that is the nightly "Jay Leno Show".

Successful New Shows--Heroes, Brothers and Sisters, Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock, Ugly Betty, Jericho, Shark

Flops--Vanished, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Smith, Kidnapped, The Class, Help Me Help You, Standoff, The Nine, Justice, Six Degrees, Happy Hour

Successful Midseason Shows--Rules of Engagement, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?


2007

Main Themes--The season cut short right in the middle by the writer's strike. There were once again a fair number of shows worth checking out but only a couple that made the cut, with others that were dealt a blow by the writers' strike and likely lost the kind of momentum needed to survive into a second season (the vampire thriller "Moonlight" comes to mind). Given as many high-profile failures the previous TV season generated, and with a pending writer's strike to boot, I'm surprised the networks made as worthy of an effort as they did with this fall's new entries.

Successful New Shows--The Big Bang Theory, Samantha Who?, Private Practice, Life, Chuck, Pushing Daisies

Flops--Journeyman, Cavemen, Carpoolers, Cane, Kid Nation, Kitchen Nightmares, Bionic Woman, Big Shots, Nashville, Women's Murder Club, the very underrated New Orleans police action-drama K-Ville, and one of the biggest howlers of my lifetime, Viva Laughlin, cancelled after two episodes.

Midseason Successes--Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Eli Stone, Flashpoint


2008

Main Themes--The last year I'll profile. While there were still a few ambitious projects like Christian Slater's "My Own Worst Enemy" and the fantasy-adventure "Crusoe", most failed to live up to expectations in both my eyes and in the majority of viewers as most of the new shows were failures. NBC has to be given a hand for their efforts with as many big-budget action series on their lineup this year, but overall this struck me as the season where things started to trend the other direction and mediocrity would again be celebrated by viewers far more than ambition.

Successful New Shows--The Mentalist, Fringe, Gary Unmarried

Flops--Worst Week, My Own Worst Enemy, Life on Mars, Knight Rider, Kath and Kim, The Ex-List, Crusoe, Do Not Disturb, Opportunity Knocks

Midseason Successes--Castle, Dollhouse, Parks and Recreation


So there you have it. The last 28 primetime fall schedules and corresponding analysis. Hopefully it is as fun to read as it was for me to write.

Prediction: Not One Damn Thing Will Happen With Health Care This Year or Next

Despite their relentless right-on-the-cusp-of-a-deal rhetoric, I think hapless Congressional leaders of both parties, along with the Obama administration, are now at the point that they see the writing on the wall. There will be no health care reform in 2009 or in 2010. Obama's "public option" proposal, while highly imperfect, was the closest we were gonna come to a compromise position that would expand coverage to millions more people. And it's dead.

Now comes the big, sloppy trillion-dollar kiss to the insurance industry known as the "Baucus bill" that has rightfully enraged the left, given more ammunition to the obstructionist right, and given the Blue Dogs a brief window to winkingly "ponder, consider, and review" the latest proposal before they reject that as well. Any health care reform package that was capable of passage (I'm increasingly skeptical such an animal could ever exist in the modern political climate) would have to thread a perfect needle. If the Obama proposal fell short of that goal by several yards, the "centrist" Baucus plan falls short by several miles.

The absolute dealbreaker of the Baucus plan is the premise that uninsured middle-income households will be required to forfeit 13% of their income to receive a government-mandated insurance premium from the very health insurance barons whose bootheels Congress promised to take off the necks of Americans, not add more weight to. The unsustainable economics of the existing health insurance industry would not only fail to be reined in, but it would increase by millions the number of people being smacked around by them. To call this Baucus proposal a steaming pile of shit would be a grave insult to fecal matter, yet it's now being hailed as the last best hope for health care reform even as everybody is trash-talking it except the scaredy-pants Blue Dogs, most of whom never intended to vote for health care reform in the first place.

On the outside chance that it begins to look like any version of health care reform, and the Baucus bill in particular, is on the cusp of Senate passage, expect it to play out the same way the immigration reform bill did two years ago. Talk radio will whip up a frenzied audience to call their Congresspersons expressing their outrage....and every nervous Senator will ultimately fold and vote "no" no matter what they had been planning to vote only a couple of weeks earlier. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas might be voicing hollow support for health care reform in Senate subcommittees now, but whatever slim chance there was of her ultimately supporting it will vanish as soon as her telephone starts buzzing with ferocious opposition. Lincoln is the highest-profile fairweather friend on any version of health care reform, but there are at least a dozen like her in the Senate. And the immigration reform analogy is a political firecracker compared to the hydrogen bomb of government mandating thousands of dollars in yearly premiums from middle-income uninsured households to the coffers of insurance companies.

And I think at this point everybody in the process realizes it's a nonstarter. It's possible some of the 500+ amendments in the pipeline could make the bill less awful than it is now, but it's unlikely to matter at the end of the day. This is a Congress that equivocated last year at this time on TARP even as the economy was on the cusp of lapsing into an inevitable depression. If even that grim prospect was not enough to bring about consensus, they certainly won't be moved by the comparatively tepid prospect of providing health insurance to Joe Sixpack.

The next question becomes what the political fallout will be. Some argue that inaction makes the Democratic Party look incompetent and unable to govern, so therefore the worst thing that could happen would be for health care reform to die entirely. Others argue that foist a bad and unpopular reform bill on the public would incite rage upon so many people that passage would be a worst-case scenario for Democrats going into 2010. They're both right. Legislation this epic and controversial has no immediate upside for the party in power. If it passes, the Democrats are screwed. And if it doesn't pass, they're screwed.

It's very telling that large majorities of Americans believe Republicans are dealing in bad faith on health care reform, knowing that not a single Congressional Republican (including Olympia Snowe) has any intention of voting for health care reform legislation commandeered by the Democratic majority and President Obama....and that nothing that Obama and the Dems could do would get the GOP to play ball when the stated agenda even of "moderates" like Chuck Grassley is "killing health care reform". Yet even knowing this, and while still favoring a generic version of "health care reform" by overwhelming margins, American voters are telling pollsters with increasing frequency that they plan to vote Republican in the 2010 midterm elections.

Chalk it up to the schizophrenic and ultimately clueless nature of the American electorate. They'll be outraged if health care is reformed. They'll be outraged if it's not. They'll punish the party in power for passing the reform they claimed overwhelming support for last year. And they'll reward the party out of power for denying that reform. Things will continue to spiral out of control and make ultimate change that much more politically impossible for anybody in the future.

Welcome to Washington, Mr. Obama. What was that you were saying last year about entitlement reform? Think you can still make that happen even as Social Security and Medicare veer off a financial cliff?

A Painless Recession?

Any given day watching the evening news, perusing online news sites, or ruffling through the pages of your local newspaper (provided it hasn't shut down in your town yet), one would be hard-pressed to realize that we're in the midst of the worst economy and employment crisis since the Great Depression. Sure, there are plenty of reports on the trajectory of the stock market, the profits or losses of corporations, and cold numbers related to unemployment rates that have been trending sharply upward for the past year. But what we're seeing far less of, compared to past recessions in my lifetime, is tangible reporting on the human toll of our economic freefall.

In recessions past, I can recall a steady diet of heartbreaking personal stories connected to joblessness, the loss of homes, and the loss of livelihoods. In a nation with as many insensitive souls as this one, such stories are desperately needed to make real the human suffering that economic contraction produces. It becomes more difficult for a bunch of middle management stuffed shirts on the golf course to bemoan the shiftless proletariat and find an audience when the public sees what's really going on in devastated factory towns throughout Middle America.

So what accounts for the complete dearth of human interest stories about the recession's toll? Does it have something to do with the media being "in the tank for Obama" and trying not to create bad headlines for him? That might be part of it, but I think the bigger issue is apathy and laziness. I've long defended Old Media as a necessary dinosaur in the information age that is responsible for carrying the much-lauded pajama media of the blogosophere on its back, but regrettably, it appears that the Old Media is slumbering into the New Media's tabloid-esque vision of journalism.

Not even accounting for the endless nights of Michael Jackson being the lead story on the network news broadcasts, the quality of journalism in the last couple of years has been abysmal. With increased frequency, "news" has become an exercise is endlessly analyzing information that is readily available rather than doing the heavy lifting of investigative journalism. The current debate on health care is a classic example. For the few and far between stories relaying personal stories from either side of the issue, we hear 25 stories on the street fight in Washington and whether "Obama's message is getting through". In the past, journalists would have been more likely to interview individuals with hardships letting them know what the public option would mean to them.....or those living in states that have imposed a variation on universal health care (Massachusetts) or the public option (Tennessee) to warn us of potential unforeseen downsides of doing this wrong. But that would require more journalistic effort that another day of reporting on Congressman Joe Wilson.

Something like 20 states have unemployment rates of 10% or higher....yet all we ever hear about from the media is that the rate of 12.4% in California is up from 12.2% last month. Those percentages of unemployed involve tens of millions of actual people. It's about damn time we heard from some of them.

Quit Crying Racism, You Idiots!

Last year at this time, I vowed that the only way Obama could win the election was if John McCain chose to forfeit. For all intents and purposes, he did. Most Republican campaigns would have set the bait and invited the mindless wing of the opposition to shriek "RACISM!!!" based on one or more hard-hitting personal attack against the Democrats' African-American candidate for President.

Partially to his credit, McCain refused to stoop to this level of politics and never pulled the trigger against his black opponent in the way that the Tennessee Republican Party did to Harold Ford only two years earlier, effectively taking the wind out of Ford's campaign when the ploy worked and sent the media and many Democratic activists into full-on "you guys are racists!!!" mode. Republicans are wise enough to know that independent voters cringe when they see the race card played loudly and gratuitously, which is why I was very surprised they didn't set the trap last year with so the Presidency at the stake. Of course, the reason I only give McCain partial credit for restraint is because it would have been next to impossible for him to exploit the opposition's willingness to play the "whoa is me" victimhood card when his own trainwreck selection for Vice-President and her supporters couldn't quit whining about how the media meanies were picking on her because she was a girl.

But even with all that going for him, I was still very surprised Obama survived last year's election without an embarrassing fit of race-baiting victimhood outrage by far too many on the left who can't seem to control themselves from crying racism over every slight, real or perceived. But even though they resisted the urge last fall, I knew it wouldn't be long until the race-baiters on the left reared their heads yet again to pour cold water on the "postracial America" fantasy so many invoked following Obama's election.

Janeane Garofalo was the first to wrongly play the race card last spring after the first round of tea bag protests, motivated purely by the fact that President was a black man according to her. Most seemed to dismiss Garofalo's rant at the time, mostly because Obama was still popular and there was no reason to abide empty shrieks of racism, but now that his poll numbers are falling and the opposition has grown, the left is predictably undermining its intellectual integrity by responding with accusations of racism against everybody opposing Obama.

While there was partial grounds for the accusation when it came to the knuckle-draggers demanding Obama's video to students not be shown in the schools, the charge of "racism" still seemed unnecessarily combative. And now that they're on a roll, the left is extending the charges of racism to Southern Congressmen who heckle Obama during his speeches and those who attended this weekend's festival of kooks in Washington, D.C.

There are so many appropriate charges that can be made against Congressman Joe Wilson and the neanderthals in DC carrying signs saying "Bury ObamaCare With Kennedy". Increasingly shrill accusations of racism are not among them, and will quickly prove counterproductive. When the opposition proves itself to be as unhinged as Wilson and the 9-12ers, there is no need to go for the nuclear option and play the race card against them. It will only serve to make sympathetic figures out of Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck, whose actions the majority of Americans will see as unacceptable, but not racist.

Yet the left carries on crying racism, and will likely continue to do so the more frustrated they become with Obama's poll numbers, almost certain to keep sinking at least until the unemployment rate starts falling. And with each unjustified pointed-finger accusation, they're gonna find loud shouts of racism yield diminishing returns....for both their agenda, and for the President they're trying to defend.

The Only Way Health Care Reform Can Work

Once again, our federal government is wading into the murky swamp of health care reform, and once again appears destined to get lost in the swamp. As expected, neither side is willing to play it straight with us. The Democrats refuse to be honest about costs while Republicans offer nothing but obstructionism and insincere gimmicks such as "health savings accounts", which effectively amount to a mirage of health care coverage that lasts right up until the point where one gets sick and there's not enough money in the microscopic account to pay the medical bills. We're stuck in the untenable position where doing nothing is scarcely an option but every proposal on the table would almost certainly make the existing cost structure of health care policy even less sustainable.

The first thing we need to do is to admit that illegitimacy of three myths being advanced by supporters, and even some detractors, in the health care debate.....

Myth #1. "Unhealthy lifestyles" cost the health care system additional dollars. Of the three myths I'm listing here, this is the most commonly accepted by all even though the diametric opposite is true. The inverse, "healthy lifestyles", result in longer life expectancies....and longer life expectancies lead to higher health care costs. It's an inconvenient truth for politicians who are invested in the "healthy lifestyles save money" mirage as a pretext to justify herculean sin taxes against the "unhealthy", their preferred path-of-least-resistance revenue windfall to put money in their pockets today even though it will result in massively higher costs tomorrow. This pyramid scheme willfully fails to acknowledge that end-of-life costs constitute an ever-escalating percentage of overall health care costs....and that the older one lives, the higher their end-of-life costs run. The aforementioned hyperinflation of sin taxes against "unhealthy lifestyles" are ethically indefensible even without acknowledging that those who pay them run up health care costs lower than the "healthy" by double-digit percentages. Financially disincentivizing "unhealthy behavior" with sin taxes, despite its popularity with the arithmatically clueless, will only serve to accelerate the bankruptcy of the existing health care apparatus.

Myth #2. "Preventive health care" practices save money. Preventive health care is without question best medical practice, but in no way would it save money. The premise is that if more people receive extensive testing for conditions that may arise in the future, it will be cheaper to treat if it's detected early than if they later get sick and require more costly medical procedures. It sounds perfectly reasonable, but the only problem is that for every person testing positive for the condition they're being tested for, there are likely to be 99 others who test negative. The cost of testing 100 healthy people easily outweighs the cost of treating one sick person. Again, preventive care is wise medicine, but it's unwise from a cost-control perspective.

Myth #3. There will be no "death panels". The Republicans were politically shrewd to invoke the "death panel" language in the midst of a national health care debate because the rationing of costs will be the only way we can stop a national health care plan from going bankrupt in the course of 20 years. As disingenuous as it is to see these recently converted Medicare enthusiasts in the Republican Party stake out a position that effectively marries them to unlimited spending on every Medicare recipient who wants Cadillac end-of-life treatment, the GOP is clearly calling the Democrats' bluff here. Since the fastest-rising cost of health care is end-of-life care, it's a painful truth that the party in power when health care reform becomes reality will have to start telling seniors on Medicare "no" on expensive treatments and prescriptions designed to keep them alive another two months. It's common practice in Canada, Britain, and every other nation with national health care plans. And it would have to be common practice here or the cost curve for ObamaCare would quickly head off the same financial cliff that Medicare is now.

If I'm a senior, health care reform done right is all pain and no gain for me. While I generally respect seniors, the reality is that those over age 65 already enjoy a socialist utopia even though in an age of rising life expectancies and a swelling of their ranks, maintaining a socialist utopia for this demographic is the least financially possible. Something's gotta give, and for me it's an easy choice. With 47 million working age Americans uninsured and being denied basic medical coverage outside of catastrophic care in emergency rooms, seniors have some nerve to say their children and grandchildren should continue to be denied basic public health care coverage while their own public health care coverage should be limitless. As the Baby Boomers continue to retire in ever-rising numbers, expect a political realignment divided on generational lines fighting for limited public resources. If we think the debate is ugly now, it's gonna get far worse.

But getting back to the current health care debate, my preferred plan is of course the plan that is politically off the table....a single-payer plan with cost rations (i.e. death panels) much like every other civilized economy in the world with a far more efficient health care system than ours has. Absent that, the least terrible option that is on the table is Obama's "public option". His marketing of the public option as "paying for itself" is of course delusional. Several of the plan's critics are correct in their objections that private insurers would dump high-risk customers and thus force the sickest demographic of Americans onto the public plan, with exploding costs. Nonetheless, once established, the public option's inevitable cost-control failures would almost certainly trigger a further transition into the preferred single-payer plan I cited above. It'll be messy, and costs will go dramatically up before they go down despite Obama's irrational rhetoric to the contrary, but a generation from now we most likely would be in a position to "bend the cost curve downward".

Of course, the least terrible option of a public plan is very quickly headed off the table, and it looks like the "health reform" we will end up with is the most terrible option....a multitrillion dollar taxpayer subsidy to the existing insurance industry labyrinth that will allow their unsustainable health care cost structure to spiral even further out of control, only now using taxpayer money along with fast escalating customer premiums to do so. The best analogy to liken what this brand of "health care reform" would amount to is financial aid to private colleges. Tuition at private colleges rises at about four times the rate of inflation every year as a direct result of the majority of their students getting taxpayer-subsidized tuitions, with average tuition rates at more than $30,000 per year and with no end in sight. Similarly, if we think our health insurance premiums are high now, just wait until the insurance companies are assured to ever-rising taxpayer giveaways financing their operations.

Furthermore, I have a major ethical problem with the idea of mandating that currently uninsured Americans pay Big Insurance a premium for a "collective pool" that, given the youthful demographics of most of today's uninsured, will almost certainly be consumed by people older and wealthier than themselves. The health reform plan that passes is very likely to have this mandate, which amounts to yet another financial assault against lower-income Americans on top of the mountains of new "sin taxes" disproportionately clobbering them already.

I would almost prefer we limp along with our current broken health care system a few more years than to pass the "compromise" plan likely to be signed into law next month which would make the current system dramatically worse. If this passes, we'll have to revisit health care reform a few years from now anyway because of the explosive growth in costs that always comes when massive taxpayer subsidies to private companies allow them to operate outside the parameters of market forces. Regrettably, it'll almost certainly be too late before this country gets serious about controlling health care costs and moves past the aforementioned myths that contribute to the cost escalation. Bottom line.....somebody needs to start telling seniors "no" sometimes or the system will be brought to its knees. Nobody is willing to talk about that. But they have to.