Halloween Comes Early for Hillary

Hillary Clinton, she of the perfect campaign, saw her first chunk of armor-plating come off in last night's Democratic debate. I only saw bits and pieces, but it was pretty clear that she was playing defense most of the evening, and was not comfortable in the position given her perceived entitlement to the nomination. It's unclear whether her less than stellar performance presents a serious opening for her long-suffering challengers to mount a serious challenge to her frontrunner status. You can't accuse them of not trying last night, particularly John Edwards and Chris Dodd.

Clearly, Hillary's biggest faux paus of the evening came on the topic of issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, which she tried to dodge, deflect, and split hairs over in typical Clintonian style, but was unable to get away with. Granted, Hillary's in a tough position on this issue since her state's Governor is the one pushing for driver's licenses for illegal immigration, a position that Hillary (and every other Democrat running for President) knows is way out of the mainstream. She handled it as well as she could without actually giving a real answer, but that lack of yes or no answer feeds right into the narrative of flip-flopping that slayed Kerry in 2004 AND of untrustworthiness that hamstrung her husband's Presidency. And Hillary clearly did not take suffer her dissenters lightly judging by the discomforting "how did I lose control of this thing" look on her face in the final moments of the debate.

With that said, Team Clinton added to their problems after the debate by lashing out at moderator Tim Russert for being "unfair". If Hillary can't handle the kid gloves of Tim Russert, how is she possibly gonna contend with the brass knuckles of the Republican slime machine when it starts oozing its bile by the gallon throughout 2008? While I can't say I've been thoroughly impressed with the political instincts of Clinton's rivals up to this point, the last 24 hours have proven that Hillary's only selling point--a political savvy purported to outmatch anyone else on the planet--is not quite as polished as we were led to believe.

More than ever, I believe a Hillary Clinton candidacy would be an unmitigated across-the-ballot calamity for the Democratic Party next year, potentially making 2004 look like the good old days. While she hadn't necessarily won me over in the past few weeks, I had been growing slightly more comfortable with the prospect of her heading the ticket simply based on the apparent inevitability of it. After last night, seeing how quickly things fell apart as soon as a drop of her blood got in the water (and worse yet the lack of that magical Clintonian "damage control" the day after), I'm hoping I'm not alone in refusing to accept her coronation and giving a very close look at her worthy-if-not-mind-blowing challengers for the nomination.

Missing Paul for Five Years

Special thanks to Sara for the link to the tribute to the late, great Paul Wellstone who died many years before his time five years ago this weekend. Back on October 25, 2002, I was bursting with excitement about the coming midterm elections only 10 days away. I had become overjoyed that Paul Wellstone was defying conventional wisdom by pulling ahead of challenger Norm Coleman in recent polls, even after voting against the Iraq war resolution, a vote that the Coleman camp expected to ruin him politically. In the week before his death, Wellstone enjoyed leads between six and nine points in major polls after months of deadlocked poll numbers between him and Coleman.

The day that will forever live in infamy was cold and gloomy, but there was no aura of doom in the air as I took off for lunch break that Friday at noon. I talked on the phone with a friend in my apartment right until the lunch hour approached its end. The story had already unfolded, but I was missing it as a result of talking on the phone. It was when I got back into my car and turned the radio on when I heard the devastating news that my political hero had perished, hitting me like a hammer when the radio announcer concluded the report with "Senator Paul Wellstone, dead at 58". I returned to a subdued newspaper office where everybody else had also heard the news. Ironically, I was scheduled to spend the following day riding around in a single-engine plane flown by a local pilot, but obviously opted out of covering that given the state of affairs. I headed back to the hometown early that day, and attended a vigil at the local union hall that evening.

We all know what happened in the next 10 days, with the election night results in Minnesota and nationwide serving as salt on the open wounds of Wellstone fans. Paul Wellstone was a great Senator and a great man taken from us long before he should have. My only solace is that his worldview on both the war in Iraq and the course of domestic policy is slowly being vindicated five years later.

Top Five World Series of My Lifetime

On nonelection years, I'm forced to find other things to occupy my mind in the fall. Postseason baseball frequently fits the bill, and I'm sitting here watching Game 3 of the 2007 World Series on a Saturday evening remembering some of the classic World Series I watched as a boy. The last several World Series have been dreary affairs, with few cliffhanger games or come-from-behind moments. The odds are against such affairs occurring with regularity, but it has happened with impressive regularity over the years. Here are the five favorite World Series of my lifetime in descending order.....

#5--2001 (Arizona Diamondbacks vs. New York Yankees). The NY Yankees dominated postseason baseball for several years, winning three World Series in five years and becoming the team everybody loved to hate due to their enormous payroll, slimeball owner, and flukish ability to deliver success when it was needed most. The Arizona Diamondbacks had a solid team in 2001 and outplayed the Yankees night after night, yet managed to surrender a run or two at the end of several games and allowed the Yankees to sneak in with a win. Thankfully, Arizona would seize the moment in Game 7, getting to seemingly indestructible closer Mariano Rivera and coming from behind to win.

#4--1985 (Kansas City Royals vs. St. Louis Cardinals). Not too often do we see a World Series pitting two teams from Missouri against each other, but the small-market underdogs delivered an exciting seven-game series where the smug and flamboyant mid-1980's St. Louis Cardinals busted out of the gate with a 2-0 lead, leaving Kansas City with little room for error. The underdog Royals were the classic Davids facing off against the Goliath Cardinals, a classic "villain" team commandeered by the irksome manager Whitey Herzog and a couple of equally annoying players (Joaquin Andujar, John Tudor). Most of the games were memorable and suspenseful, and the good-guy Royals headed by small-scale heroes as Charlie Leibrandt and Bret Saberhagen, emerged victorious after Game 7.

#3--1987 (Minnesota Twins vs. St. Louis Cardinals). I'm a little biased here as the Minnesota Twins are my team, but there's no denying this was a great World Series. Nobody gave the lowly Twins a chance against the mighty Cardinals, a team that was a close variation on the villainous runner-up team from the 1985 Series, and still managed by the noxious Whitey Herzog. And after the Cardinals won all three games in their home stadium, it looked like the Series was theirs to lose when they returned to Minnesota for Game 6. The Twins came from behind in Game 6 with a memorable grand slam by Kent Hrbek and would head into Game 7 with ace Frank Viola pitching. It was another great game but the Twins would emerge victorious with their first World Series title.

#2--1986 (New York Mets vs. Boston Red Sox). A great Series despite its heartbreaking death spiral into unimaginable disappointment in Game 6, the cocky and larger-than-life New York Mets ended up stealing victory from the jaws of defeat by stellar means. The "100-year curse" allegedly afflicting the Red Sox since they traded Babe Ruth in 1919 reared its ugly head. A young Roger Clemens had pitched a near-flawless Game 6 and was taken out so the Boston closer (whose name escapes me) could get the save. The Red Sox were ahead by three and managed two outs against the Mets in the bottom of the ninth when all hell broke loose. The Mets scored six back-to-back hits but were still poised to win the World Series when a routine ground ball rolled between the legs of injured first baseman Bill Buckner, cementing the Mets rally and sending the Series to a Game 7, where they would go onto win. Love it or hate it (I hated it), it was one of the most stunning moments in the history of professional sports.

#1--1991 (Minnesota Twins vs. Atlanta Braves). Often cited as the best World Series not only of my lifetime, but of all time, two teams that had risen from the basement of their respective divisions the previous season strung together underdog teams that went the distance in 1991. The Twins won two at home, the Braves won three at home, and the Twins would return to Minnesota allegedly dispirited for Game 6. Nearly every game ended with extreme and intense drama. Kirby Puckett would knock an 11th-inning homerun out of the park to end Game 6, leading into a Game 7 that will go down as one of the all-time best pitcher's duals between the Twins' Jack Morris and the Braves' John Smoltz, tied 0-0 at the end of the 9th inning. A highlight of Game 7 was the wry fielder's fakeout employed by Twins infielders Chuck Knoblauch and Greg Gagne to trick Braves' baserunner Lonnie Smith into believing he was being tagged out on a double-play ball. It was perhaps the greatest piece of baseball theatre I've ever seen, and paved the way for the Twins to score the single run they needed to win the World Series in the 10th inning.

Honorable Mentions--the 1988 World Series (Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Oakland A's), if for no other reason than the uber-dramatic game-ending homerun in Game 1, where injured Dodgers' hitter Kirk Gibson limped up to the plate with no more than one good swing in him and pounded out a homerun that would help the Dodgers score a come-from-behind win and suck the oxygen out of the heavily favored A's, ultimately beating them four games to one. The other HM goes to the 1993 World Series (Philadelphia Phillies vs. Toronto Blue Jays), where the scruffy blue-collar Phillies looked poised to win in Game 7, until long-haired relief pitcher Mitch Williams surrendered several runs, including the game-winning homerun by Toronto hitter Joe Carter. It's a safe bet that the vast majority of viewers were pulling for the flamboyant Phillies team that year, but even in defeat, it stands out as an epic Series.

I'm a fairweather friend when it comes to baseball. Unless I care who wins, I have a hard time getting excited about it. Furthermore, the number of games that qualify as exciting just aren't that many. Still, there's no greater game in the world when one of those exciting games breaks out....and postseason baseball delivers them in disproportionate numbers to the regular season. The 2007 World Series is shaping up to be a dud, but this game has proven time and time again that we never know what to expect from the next inning let alone the next game. I'll be eager to see how it all plays out in the next game(s).

White Male Vote Still Determines Election Winners

David Paul Kuhn wrote a fascinating piece last week for the Politico detailing the devastating erosion of white males who vote Democrat in Presidential elections. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6183.html

His analysis was very in-depth and didn't spiral into the kind of stereotyping that so many of these profiles do. As part of this demographic, I can at least vaguely connect to the narrative he spells out that is proving so frustrating to the white male, particularly he of the working-class variety. I don't dispute the omnipresent rule of thumb of modern academia that white males are a privileged group who tend to have less of a journey on the road to success than do other demographics of Americans, but just as Republican tax cuts always fail to "trickle down" the economic ladder, "white privilege" has a funny way of passing right on by the working class as well. Visit mostly white blue-collar towns virtually anywhere in small-town America, ravaged by everything from endless factory closings to rampant methamphetamine abuse, and you'll have a hard time convincing the male residents of their "privilege".

And having grown up in a working-class home that struggled through several years of bruising economic woes, I found myself getting a little hot under the collar when subjected to incessant lecture of "white male privilege" in various college courses I took. As I stated earlier, I maintained a nuanced understanding of the overall debate, but at the same time resented the fact that a class full of brash middle-class college students would walk away from these courses believing that Bubba from the trailer park working at the factory has more opportunities for success than middle-class women of color or other groups allegedly under the white male's bootheel.

And regrettably, the evidence suggests that that mindset is sticking. Throughout "limousine liberal" circles that are becoming a growing presence in the Democratic Party, the idea that illegal immigration could be taking away jobs from Americans is not only roundly ridiculed, but patently dismissed. "It's simply not happening", in the eyes of any number of diarists on the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post who very clearly haven't been within 500 miles of a blue-collar jobsite in Middle America in the last 20 years. Ditto for foisting the cost of expanding children's health care on smokers, a disproportionately white working-class male pastime. Even though the strongest advocates for the program are urbane middle-class liberals, they see no moral dilemma at all with forcing the hardscrabble working stiffs across the tracks from them to single-handedly finance it.

These are simply two contemporary examples that validate in my mind that the electoral dynamic outlined in Kuhn's article is likely to continue. The "culture war" which I largely scoffed at in 2004 is real....and white males feel that they are on the receiving end. And the more that people falling behind are told that they're privileged, the less receptive they'll be to anything else being said by that individual or group. Herein lies the problem for Democrats. I don't fully understand where it has come from and find it wildly overblown, but in several regions of the country (ahem, the South), the white male vote can best be described as a cauldron of rage when referring to their thoughts towards the Democratic Party. The level of vitriol I see from the keyboards of white Southern males on virtually any political topic is breathtaking. Part of this is a result of clever Republican divide-and-conquer tactics dating back to Nixon's Southern strategy, but there's an underlying ethic in place here where Southern white males view the modern constituency of the Democratic party as its cultural enemy....and vice versa. I would've laughed this off myself four years ago, but Kuhn's insights solidified some of the thoughts I've been pondering on this subject in recent months where the Democrats got it horribly wrong on illegal immigration.

Without question, the white male demographic of Americans who have abandoned allegiance to the Democratic Party in the largest number in the past two generations would be considerably better off returning back to their Democratic roots, but I simply don't see it happening as the divide in the party continues to grow. Hillary Clinton's numbers among white males are likely to make John Kerry's 36% from 2004 look good, assuming she's the nominee as now appears increasingly likely. The Democratic Party line will probably continue to boast its commitment to enacting "comprehensive immigration reform" after the 2008 election, brushing off valid concerns about working-class wage suppression every step of the way. The Democrats do have the trade issue on their side, but I'm skeptical that Hillary plans to be any more bearish about free trade agreements than her husband ended up being even after insisting he would clean them up to be more worker-friendly during the 1992 campaign. The 1994 NAFTA vote was the single biggest blow to the Democratic Party with white male voters at least since the civil rights movement.....and if Democrats choose to return down the road of trade trick plays again, the permanent exodus of the white male working-class is imminent.

However, we're told by all the talking heads who will listen that not only are the economic concerns of white working-class males irrelevant, but that they are soon to be insignificant in national elections as well due to growing minority populations. The Latino vote, a full 7% of the electorate in 2004 and still unlikely to hit 9% in 2008, is the future of the American electorate...and the candidate who wins them over goes to the White House. Perhaps that will be the case.....two generations into the future. But with every slap across the face of white working class males by core Democratic constituencies deeming them insignificant both politically and economically, the less likely they will be to vote Democratic. White males register high voter turnouts, a full seven points higher than their share of the population at large. If the Democratic Party's share of their vote continues to erode at the rate that it has in the past 25 years, there will be no influx of immigrants large enough to put the Dems into power in the next 25 years. Sadly, I fear the wheels are in motion to accomplish just that....and it doesn't have to be.