Speaker Ryan

The Beltway media has found its new obsession. The implosion of the House Republican conference that began with John Boehner's announcement that he was stepping down as Speaker went thermonuclear when Kevin McCarthy, his presumed successor, bowed out of the race. The internecine war within the House GOP has become a full-fledged crisis that laid bare a years-long descent into blind governmental obstruction that included hundreds of Senate filibusters, a government shutdown, and more than fifty fruitless attempts to repeal Obamacare. 

While the media has, until now, been wary of pointing a finger solely at the GOP (the preferred "both sides do it" trope is so ingrained at this point, you wonder whether it's taught in J school), journalists are slowly coming around to the idea that it is not President Obama's failure to invite Republicans to the White House for drinks that is to blame for Washington dysfunction, but rather, the nihilistic streak infecting the House Republican caucus. Their timing could not be worse - the country will hit its borrowing limit in less than a month and the government is running on a continuing budget resolution that expires in two. 

Of course, as is the media's wont, the focus is on process and personalities - can Paul Ryan be cajoled into accepting this thankless job? Did McCarthy bow out because of rumors circulating in the right-wing blogosphere? Might Newt Gingrich return to save the day? (not making this one up). This plays to the preferred narrative that has turned politics into some combination of soap opera and professional wrestling, and it surely fills hours on cable news and column inches in newspapers, but lost in this is the fact that paying the country's bills and passing a budget that funds everything from the FBI to food safety, is the bare minimum of what any Congress should be able to do. It is the equivalent of waking up and brushing your teeth in the morning. 

That the Beltway media characterizes raising the debt ceiling and passing a budget as burdens, not requirements of government is embarrassing. Instead of shaming Republicans for failing to achieve even this minimum threshold for governing, journalists view these issues through a purely political lens that simply considers how John Boehner might ease Paul Ryan's ascension to Speaker by getting these pesky pieces of business out of the way. And if the media wants to focus on Ryan's viability, it would be great if they spent a bit more time picking through his radical policies like privatizing Medicare and transferring trillions in tax dollars to the wealthy and what it would say about the Republican party if their public face supported such extreme positions than whether or not he is BFFs with his own caucus.

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy 

Stuff Happens

After nine people were murdered in yet another mass shooting, Jeb Bush shrugged it off - "stuff happens" he said - and when that "stuff" happens, apparently, the last thing you do is try to figure out how to make sure less of it happens in the future. Bush's offensive remarks were also exposed as foolish - he mentioned that if a child dies in a pool, the inclination may be to require that fences be built around them, but that might not be the best idea - ignoring the fact that the state of Florida passed such a law when he was Governor. 

Of course, this was just the latest in a series of foot-in-mouth moments for Jeb. Whether it was his four day fumble over whether the country should have invaded Iraq, his loose use of the term "anchor babies" (clarified the next day to claim he was speaking of Asian-Americans?!), or his suggestion that his brother "kept us safe" (well sure, if you ignore the whole 9/11 thing), it is a good thing Jeb has a Greek chorus of journalists swooping in to defend him or put "context" around his musings:

The media's focus on Trump's rise and Hillary's email has papered over two simple facts - (1) Jeb Bush is not a very good candidate and (2) the more Republican primary voters hear and see him, the less they like him. Bush's polling has sagged the longer this campaign has gone and just dropped to 4% in the latest national Pew poll. Bush has also fallen well back of the contenders in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire but it was not until this past week that the idea Bush is in trouble seeped into the mainstream media with a piece in The Washington Post, even though his swoon has been going on for weeks. 

And it may be that the conventional wisdom is true - that a $120 million war chest can be deployed to pump up Bush's flagging campaign, but the lay of the land does not look promising - Bush is a poor fit for Iowa and its social/religious conservative voters, who have handed people like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum their caucus votes and New Hampshire has been exquisitely anti-Bush since 1992, when Pat Buchanan took 37% of the vote against President George H.W. Bush and then in 2000 when John McCain thumped then-Governor George W. Bush by 17 points. The March 1st "SEC Primary" is steeped in more southern states unfriendly to Bush (he's behind Rubio and Trump in his adopted home state of Florida) and by then, the jig may be up.

No one is more surprised than me. After all, I had Bush as the 2016 GOP nominee way back in October 2011, more than a year before Obama crushed Romney. But what I, and I think many in the media missed is how hard right the GOP primary electorate has become. Most polls show the support of three candidates with no prior political experience totaling close to if not more than 50% of the vote. While pundits like to trot out Romney's struggles in 2012 as a potential caution against writing off Bush, Romney never sank so low in the polls and never lost sight of the front-runner even as that seat was rotating among lightweights like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. 

No, Bush has gotten a pass for so long simply because of his last name and the media's expectation that history will repeat itself - that Republicans "fall in line" at the end of the day and go for the name brand. But what if this time is different? After all, stuff happens.

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The Fall of the Nats

Three years ago, the Washington Nationals burst into prominence with a young team full of potential and an old-school manager full of swagger. The team, coming off years of sub-.500 records, broke out, winning a league-high 98 games with a pitching rotation loaded with young arms and burgeoning everyday talent. The team suffered a crushing Game 5 loss in the National League Division Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, but most baseball people assumed it was a question of when, not if, the team would make it to the World Series. The team had a "window" when their young stars would still be under manageable contracts and Davey Johnson was a proven winner with a World Series ring and a no-fucks-to-give attitude that had him proudly proclaiming "world series or bust" when spring training opened the following February.

Flash forward to the depressing final days of the 2015 season and the question of a trip to the World Series is just the opposite - no longer a matter of when, but if. The team was passed by the Mets and will not even make the playoffs this year. How did we get here and what should the team do in order to contend in 2016 and beyond? The 2015 campaign began with sky high expectations. The Max Scherzer signing appeared to solidify one of, if not the deepest rotations in baseball. Bryce Harper was ready to fulfill his potential, and younger players like Anthony Rendon and Ian Desmond were expected to continue playing at an all-star level. 

While it is fair to apportion some of the blame on factors outside anyone's control, injuries crushed the team from top to bottom - Denard Span, Rendon, Ryan Zimmerman, Jayson Werth, Doug Fister, and Stephen Strasburg all missed significant playing time - every team has to deal with injuries during the season and the team was still in first place at the All-Star break. No, the problem was not simply injuries, there were greater factors at work:

• Trading For Papelbon: It is no coincidence that the Mets flew past the Nats around the trading deadline. While the Amazin's picked up utility players, relief pitching, and Yeonis Cespedes (admittedly, I don't think anyone expected him to do what he has done), the Nats sole move was taking on Papelbon's $13 million contract and demoting Drew Storen, who was having the best season of his career, to a setup role. Having questioned Storen's ability once before in signing Rafael Soriano before the 2013 season, it should not have been surprising that Storen imploded when the front office questioned his talent again. Sadly, Storen's old running mate, Tyler Clippard (who the Nats foolishly traded in the off-season) was available, but instead of bringing back a quality set-up man (a team need who landed with the Mets instead) and restoring some good clubhouse karma, Mike Rizzo brought in a cancer who has done nothing to help the team contend.
• Matt Williams: Handing the keys to a Ferrari to a 16-year old is probably unwise unless the car is simply going in a straight line slowly, but let him out on the highway and bad things will happen. So it has been with Matt Williams. As long as he was not called upon to make difficult decisions, he was fine, but he was woefully out managed in the NLDS by Bruce Bochy and his poor handling of this year's pitching staff has been well documented. Simply put, he is out of his league, not experienced enough as a manager to make the types of choices a more seasoned skipper would make. Too bad we had one of those, but he was run out of town because he was too nice to players or something. 
• Mike Rizzo: I hate to diss Rizzo, who I have written about favorably in the past, but for all the credit he gets for building a contender (and rightly so), he deserves scorn for more recent decisions, be it the aforementioned Soriano deal, trading away Clippard, failing to resign either Ian Desmond or Jordan Zimmermann (more on them later), or the head scratching signing of Scherzer when the team could have used that $210 million in other ways and to fill other needs, Rizzo's track record of late has not been good. The Papelbon trade is the kind of karmic kick in the balls anyone could have seen coming a mile away. 
• The Lerners: For billionaires, the Lerner family has a frustrating penchant for being cheap and profligate without explanation. I will never understand why it was unwise to give Clippard $8 million for one year when he was the linchpin of the bullpen but ok to give Scherzer $210 million when he was past the age of 30 and a player (Zimmermann) two years younger and home grown, could have been re-signed for less money. 
• Dissing Home Grown Talent: It sends an incredibly poor message when you spend big to bring in free agent talent but let home grown talent, particularly home grown talent that has been with the team for so long, walk out the door, as is likely to happen in the off-season when Desmond and Zimmermann will become free agents. This is a particularly unsettling trend as players like Strasburg, Harper, and Rendon become free agents in the next few years. 

So, what to do? 

• Stephen Strasburg: Speaking of Strasburg … It is hard to know if the team has messed with his head between the innings limits, pitching to contact, and expectations, or if he simply is a diamond in need of additional polishing, but he is a free agent after next season and the team needs to figure out if they want to fish or cut bait (and get some decent pieces back for him in a trade). 
• Get A Manager That Knows What The Fuck He Is Doing: Williams is only signed through next season, so eat what's left on his contract and get a manager in here that does not need on-the-job training.
• Show Some Love To Your Own Players: Pull out the checkbook and resign Zimmermann and make a more concerted effort to show the players you have drafted or traded for early in their careers that being a part of the franchise means something. 
• Make Trades: That said, dumping Werth on an AL team who could use his bat and have him DH part time and floating Gonzalez, who is still affordable at $9 million a year but clearly has maxed out his potential, makes sense. The Scherzer contract is going to be an albatross, might as well lighten the load in places where we can to free up money for other priorities. 
• Drew Storen: The relationship with Storen is probably beyond repair at this point, but the fact is, he is still only 28 years old and was having an outstanding season until Papelbon was foolishly added to the bullpen. While baseball is a business, Storen is way too talented to give up on. 

This shit matters because the Mets, Cubs, and Pirates are all loaded with young talent, the Dodgers basically print money, and the Cardinals and Giants are only two of the best run franchises in all of Major League Baseball who between them have won four world series in the last 10 years. If the Nats don't take steps to improve, their window may have already closed. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

The Campaign About Nothing

Russell: What's the show about?

George: Nothing.

Russell: Then why am I watching it?

George: Because it's on TV. [1]

A quarter century after Seinfeld parodied itself, the Republican candidates for President have taken that iconic program to its logical conclusion - a reductio ad absurdum exercise in banality aided and abetted by a willing press corps more interested in acting performances, manufactured slap fights, and triviality than the important business of deciding who should be our nation's leader.

This bizarre incentive structure encourages over-the-top behavior to garner media attention. As was noted on (of all places) The McLaughlin Group, many of the questions posed in the second GOP debate were modeled on (of all things) The Real Housewives franchise, where one "housewife" says something mean about another "housewife" and then the latter is asked to comment on what the former said. Essentially, Jake Tapper acted as that smarmy kid in school who walks up to someone and says "you won't believe the shit so and so said about you" and then steps away to watch the fight.  

Further, because so much of the "reporting" that goes on these days focuses on the horse race aspect of the primary (that is, on polls, not policy), it is no wonder that a guy like Donald Trump spends most of what passes for his stump speeches patting himself on the back for leading in those polls. Polls = popularity = attention by the chattering class = more popularity = higher polls in a virtuous cycle that redounds to the benefit of whoever is riding the crest of that wave.

While the media has done its best to ridicule and mock Trump, demand policy prescriptions from him, and otherwise attempt to pierce his balloon, the dirty little secret they are reluctant to admit is that his popularity, along with that of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and even Ted Cruz, reflects the true mainstream of Republican orthodoxy. The longer this goes on, the conventional wisdom inside the Beltway that the "adults in the room" - the Jeb Bushes or John Kasichs - will bubble to the surface once Republican primary voters get their wits about them, looks more and more foolish. 

Perhaps this is because the idea that policies matter is no longer applicable in a party that does not live in the (to borrow from a W-era apparatchik) "reality-based world." When a large portion of your party does not believe the President is a Christian or that the deficit has gone down on his watch not up, objective "truth" no longer matters. That insiders are stunned at Trump's rise is amusing if only because he espouses little more than the greatest hits from Fox News in the age of Obama - anchor babies, illegal immigration, repealing Obamacare, a weak foreign policy - while putting some New York attitude behind it. 

And even if policies did matter, the media is doing a lousy job reporting about them. Do not get me wrong, it is not like they provide no coverage of policy pronouncements, it is just that the proportion of that coverage is a fraction of the ink and airtime used on the latest dust-up or Trump insult. Examples abound, but to take just two, consider Jeb Bush's tax policy. It was announced about 2 weeks ago to almost no fanfare even though an analysis of it indicated that more than 53% of the benefits of his policy would benefit the top 1% of income earners. [2] What coverage was provided focused mainly on his willingness to scrap the so-called "carried interest" loophole, an idea championed by Democrats for years and recently supported by Donald Trump. Bush got a lot of credit in the media for including this idea, but the reality is that the loophole's closure would bring in less than $20 billion a year to the Treasury - less than 1% of the overall "cost" of Bush's plan - and his other giveaways to the wealthy would more than make up for this loss. In other words, Bush got credit for taking a penny away from the rich and no criticism for giving them a dollar in return. 

Similarly, Carly Fiorina was roundly praised for her performance at the second GOP debate. She was declared the winner because she seemed in control of the room and fluent in both foreign and domestic policy. Of course, a riff about the Sixth Fleet and increasing troops in Western Europe sounded impressive, and she spoke with great passion (but little accuracy) about Planned Parenthood, but within a day, four (!) falsehoods or misstatements she uttered in a scant 15 seconds were flagged. [3] Those errors, which once upon a time would have mattered - flat out lies used to mean something - were brushed aside because she was being judged not on the probity of what she said, but what it did for her, wait for it, poll numbers. She was, to use the media's preferred buzzword this cycle, "authentic," even if she was lying through her teeth.

In Matt Bai's outstanding book All The Truth Is Out he argues that the tabloidization of national media coverage began in 1988, when Gary Hart's campaign was taken down amid rumors of an extramarital affair and peaked during Bill Clinton's time in office. Since then, while sex still sells, caricaturing candidates has proven equally effective in belittling them - Al Gore was a phony, John Kerry was an effete flip-flopper, Mitt Romney, a soulless corporate takeover artist (ok, that last one was true) - while excusing the press from doing its job of questioning the ideas, not the motivations or personalities, of those they cover. If Jeb Bush's idea to privatize Medicare, Mike Huckabee's suggestion that the rule of law can be ignored, or Lindsey Graham's call for tens of thousands of troops in Iraq get a <shoulder shrug emoji> from the press because they are too busy dissecting Donald Trump's latest insult, why should they be surprised that candidates traffic in invective, the populace is so ill informed, and we blankly stare at the freak show on television?

That candidates are going to respond to the best ways to get attention is unsurprising - after all, they are politicians trying to get elected, but the media has abdicated its role as fact checker in favor of becoming carnival barkers because their incentive structure is no longer built on objectivity, but rather, on ratings, clicks, and page views.  

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END NOTES

1. The Pitch, Season 4, Episode 3.

2. On this, he has outdone his brother, who "only" handed over 40% of the benefits of his tax cuts to the 1%. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/15/9326453/jeb-bush-tax-plan-distribution

3. http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/watch-carly-fiorina-make-4-bogus-claims-in-15-seconds-529726531954

Fuzzy Math II

Back in 2000, our country's financial picture was about as good as it could get. The budget was in surplus, unemployment was low, and the national debt was on pace to be paid off entirely by 2013. Al Gore and George W. Bush had very different ideas about what to do with this good fortune. Gore wanted to protect the surplus, reserve money for Social Security and continue paying down the national debt. Bush claimed the American people were entitled to a "refund" and called for massive tax cuts. Gore was mocked as a green-eye-shade fiscal scold and ridiculed for his idea to segregate the Social Security surplus in a "lockbox" that would no longer be tapped to pay for regular government business. Bush was largely given a pass by the media and those that raised a tepid concern were tsk tsked as engaging in "fuzzy math." 

Bush's tax cuts, along with two wars and a prescription drug benefit were all put on the government's credit card, increasing both the debt and annual budget deficit while the economic collapse in 2008 exploded both to levels never seen before. It has taken all of President Obama's time in office to bring the deficit under control, but the debt continues to increase because the interest on it accumulates faster than we can pay it down and the budget is still in deficit, requiring us to continue borrowing, just at a lower amount. 

Once Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2011, the term "offset" came into vogue. The idea behind the offset is that any new spending, no matter how insignificant, should be "offset" by a cut somewhere else in the budget so as not to increase either the deficit or debt. Of course, this is laughable coming from a party that spent trillions on tax cuts and wars while their own man was in the White House, but even small bore initiatives that most people agree would provide a significant return on investment - things like infrastructure spending, universal pre-kindergarten, and two years of free community college - go nowhere.

So it is interesting to see how little coverage Jeb Bus's tax policy, announced last week, has garnered. Here is a plan that by his own economist's admission would add $1.2 trillion over 10 years and, is estimated by economist's not being paid by the Bush campaign to cost $3.4 trillion over ten years. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those benefits will accrue to the wealthiest Americans while offering crumbs for the rest of us. If this all sounds familiar, it should. This was tried in 1981 under Ronald Reagan and again in 2001 and 2003 by George W. Bush. It did not work either time. And not only did it not work, but each time, our deficit and debt soared.

You would think this type of fiscal irresponsibility would cause howls from the deficit reduction crowd on Capitol Hill. That the Republicans who think a $66 billion investment over 10 years (that's $6.6 billion a year, or less than what was spent in one month in Iraq) so every child can attend pre-kindergarten and $60 billion over 10 years so all young people could attend two years of community college free of charge are just a profligate waste of money are silent about a tax cut plan that would add trillions to our debt. In fact, even using Bush's economist's own numbers, we could pay for 100 years of pre-k and community college for the ten year cost of Bush's giveaway to the richest Americans who already own so much of our nation's wealth.

While there has been some media coverage along the margins, like many things in politics, the problem is in the proportionality of that coverage. Sure, some dork at Vox.com did a deep dive to discover, spoiler alert, that the rich would make out really well under Bush's plan, but the Beltway media is hurtling itself at Bush's feet because he wants to eliminate the so-called "carried interest" loophole without mentioning that would only generate $1.8 billion a year, or less than 1% of the yearly cost of his overall plan. 

Unfortunately, we have seen this movie before. The media, which claims it wants substantive policy discussion, will totally ignore the Bush tax plan (it received no coverage on the Sunday talk shows and what coverage it may get in the next few days will pale in comparison to anything Donald Trump tweets or the results of the latest poll) and, in the increasingly unlikely event Bush gets the nomination, will devolve into a "one side claims this, the other side claims that" neutrality that will ignore the reality of prior experiments in massive tax cuts for the wealthy. If the old axiom is "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me," who do we blame if we are fooled a third time?

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What Ifs Of Presidential History

If you are like me and find history fascinating, you have undoubtedly thought about how history would be different if something did or did not happen. "Alternate history" has become a burgeoning genre that speculates about everything from what would have happened if the South won the Civil War to how John F. Kennedy would have led our country had he escaped an assassin's bullet in Dallas. 

Although picking historical events to play the "what if" game are endless, speculating about Presidential events is particularly interesting because of the singular role that office plays in influencing our country. So, consider how history would have changed if the following things turned out differently:

George Washington And Presidential Third Terms. As our nation marked 20 years of independence and was still getting accustomed to a Constitution that had been ratified just eight years earlier, George Washington opted against running for a third term as President. There was no legal prohibition at the time (that would not occur until 1951) but by stepping aside, Washington sent a clear message that Presidents should not be monarchs - an unwritten rule that would be followed for more than 130 years. 

Had Washington run again, he almost certainly would have been re-elected (he won re-election in 1792 by unanimous acclaim in the Electoral College), and, potentially, died in office, which would have put the question of Presidential succession foursquare in the body politic 40+ years before it would actually happen (William Henry Harrison died in office in 1841) and also opened the way for two-term presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt (not technically elected twice, but more on that later) to consider another term in office, creating their own ripples in our historical pond.

How Was That Play, Mrs. Lincoln? There is no greater "what if" to ponder than what would have happened had President and Mrs. Lincoln taken a pass on going to Ford's Theater on the evening of April 14th, 1865. Lincoln's death and succession by Vice President Andrew Johnson just days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House forever changed our nation. Johnson's tone deaf politics and general incompetence ensured that the transition to Reconstruction was unwieldy and his term of office is notable largely for the fact that he barely escaped conviction and removal from office in the U.S. Senate after being impeached by the House of Representatives. 

There are two other "what ifs" surrounding Lincoln - first, how history would have changed had he not replaced his first-term Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, with Johnson and second, what would have happened had the three-headed plot of assassination on the night of April 14th - of Lincoln, Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward  - been totally successful. Seward was not in the line of succession regardless, so the United States would have welcomed President Lafayette Foster, the President Pro-Tempore of the Senate, who would have served for about six months before a new election was held. At that point, who knows what would have happened.

Tilden Wins In 1876. 124 years before hanging chads decided the 2000 election (more on that later), Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden ran a neck-and-neck race for the Presidency that was essentially decided in a back room deal whereby Hayes promised to remove troops from the South, effectively ending the Reconstruction Era and heralding almost 80 years of Jim Crow segregation. Let that one soak in.

McKinley Dodges A Bullet: Just six months into his second term as President, William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, could not have been more different than the deceased leader. Whereas McKinley was largely a tool of corporate interests, Roosevelt aggressively went after corporate trusts, protected hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Had McKinley survived the assassin's bullet, Roosevelt's hard charging style and trust-busting ways may have never seen the light of day. Of course, Roosevelt's place on McKinley's ticket in 1900 was also a quirk of history. McKinley's first-term Vice President, Garret Hobart, with whom McKinley was quite close, died in office in late 1899. 

TR Wins A Third Term: Since he ascended to the Presidency due to McKinley's assassination, Roosevelt technically could have honored Washington's "no three term" pledge and run for re-election in 1908 because he had only been elected President once (in 1904); however, Roosevelt opted against this move, hand picking William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War, to succeed him. 

Taft won the 1908 election but disappointed Roosevelt, leading the former President to make another run for the White House in 1912. When his own party snubbed him, Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate, receiving more votes than Taft, but losing badly to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. However, Taft and Roosevelt combined to receive a million more votes than Wilson (a huge amount when you consider that only 15 million total votes were cast), suggesting that had Republicans simply handed the nomination to their former standard bearer, he would have been returned to office. Roosevelt's deep militarism likely would have led our country into World War I much earlier, and, potentially, made that bloody war shorter. 

FDR Does Not Make It To His Inauguration: As the country spiraled down into the depths of the Great Depression and two short weeks before the eagerly anticipated inauguration of President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, an assassin narrowly missed altering the course of history. Just after delivering a speech in Miami, Roosevelt and others were fired upon by an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara. Zangara, standing a mere five feet tall, stood on a wobbly chair and took aim; however, he missed Roosevelt, but struck several others, including the Mayor of Chicago, who was mortally wounded. 

It is an open question whether Vice President-Elect John Nance Garner would have become President, but regardless of whether Nance or someone else ascended to the Presidency, neither the New Deal as we know it nor the regulatory state that arose in the wake of the Supreme Court's decisions upholding key elements of the New Deal would have happened. Wow. 

FDR Takes A Bow In 1940. There's that whole "third term" thing again. FDR, breaking with unofficial precedent, ran for a third term in 1940, largely due to his view that his leadership was needed to contend with the uncertainty of World War II and the nation's ongoing recovery from the Great Depression. FDR did not win the Democratic nomination without a fight, other candidates, including his own Vice President and Secretary of State, as well as a U.S. Senator threw their hats into the ring. Had FDR not been nominated, the Democrats would have contended with affable Republican Wendell Willkie, who ended up losing to FDR by 10 percentage points. 

Roosevelt's third term was particularly eventful what with the Pearl Harbor attack, D-Day invasion and development of the atomic bomb. How history would have been altered if a President Garner, Hull, or Willkie was sitting in the Oval Office during these consequential years is impossible to fathom.

President Henry Wallace. While campaigning for an unprecedented fourth term, FDR sent word to the convention nominating him that he would not oppose the removal of his liberal Vice President, Henry Wallace, from the ticket. The convention obliged, tapping obscure Missouri Senator Harry Truman to replace him. Roosevelt's death in April 1945 elevated Truman to the White House. 

While serving the remainder of FDR's term, Truman made the call to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and create the Marshall Plan. Whether Wallace would have made these same decisions is unknown, but they are not small things. The option of dropping a bomb that would kill 75,000 civilians in an instant versus invading Japan with a force of more than one million troops or funding the reconstruction of Europe at enormous cost to American taxpayers were enormously consequential.

One place where Wallace's more liberal politics would have unquestionably been felt is in the selection of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Truman picked a crony, Fred Vinson, whose death in 1953 led to the nomination of Earl Warren and the ushering in of the most progressive period in the Court's history. Had a President Wallace appointed someone else, it is possible Warren never gets to be Chief Justice and the entire civil rights era looks much different. 

JFK, Not LBJ. Had Kennedy never visited Texas or survived the assassination attempt that took his life, LBJ's place in history would have largely been erased. From the Vietnam War to the creation of Medicare and the passing of things like the Voting Rights Act, this is one of the great "what ifs" of history. It is widely assumed Kennedy would not have escalated our involvement in Vietnam, but at the same time, the civil rights laws passed after his death occurred largely because of LBJ's indomitable spirit and unsurpassed legislative skills. Would Kennedy have lobbied as aggressively for their passage? We will never know. 

Tragedy at the Washington Hilton. When John Hinckley tried to murder President Ronald Reagan on March 30th, 1981, he easily could have changed the face of modern American history. In fact, Hinckley came within an inch or two of accomplishing his twisted mission. As others have chronicled, had the caliber of the bullet been greater (Hinckley used a .22), lodged an inch or two higher in the President's chest (Reagan was in shock when arrived at the hospital and lost a considerable amount of blood during surgery), or his arrival at the hospital been delayed by just a few minutes, Reagan may not have survived, elevating George H.W. Bush to the Presidency less than three months into Reagan's initial term of office. The what ifs of that are dizzying, but it is entirely possible the world never hears of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. 

Florida. Just utter this word to any Democrat and no more needs to be said. No war in Iraq. No budget busting tax cuts for the wealthy. No use of terrorism as a cudgel against political opponents. Maybe even no 9/11. Not only had the Clinton Administration broken up a terrorist plot timed for New Year's 2000, but a Gore Administration likely would have retained many of the people who had warned (to no avail) the incoming Bushies about the threat Bin Laden posed. Different ballot, different judges, more careful voting by retired Jewish grandparents in Palm Beach County (Gore won the county 62/35 but Pat Buchanan's 3,411 votes tripled his haul in any other county in the state - no small thing considering Bush "won" by 537 votes), no Ralph Nader, or per-curium-this-decision-has-no-precedential-value opinion of the Supreme Court and our nation looks so much different today.

So that was fun. What are some of your "what if" scenarios?

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy 

Things I Love - Important Artifacts

What happens inside a relationship between two people? How does it begin? How does it end? What happens in between? How do two strangers create their own intimate world of inside jokes, of objects that take on special meaning, of places and things that can create a "twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone" (thank you, Matt Weiner)? For centuries, writers have tried to answer these questions, to articulate the often inarticulable - how does love bloom and why does it wither and die. Stories are written as tragedy, as farce, and many other things, but for my money, creating a faux art catalogue of lots that, through their descriptions (and depictions), tell the story of how two people came together and what split them apart, is as ingenious a way as I can think of to explain this unique human experience.

Leanne Shapton's Important Artifacts is a book I love.

Our couple, Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, meet cute, as we discover in the book's earliest pages, at a Halloween party where he, a photojournalist, dresses as Harry Houdini and she, a food critic for the New York Times, goes as Lizzie Borden (Lots 1003-1007, which include the party invitation and a photo of the couple, among other things). From the get-go, they are a hipster couple made in Brooklyn heaven who buy each other used books (Lots 1217, 1272), write love letters on stationary (Lot 1070), and revel in the bric-a-brac of vintage hand mixers (Lot 1192), martini glasses (Lot 1193) and framed postcards (Lots 1023, 1191). They also do very human things - fret over outfits (Lot 1012 is a set of six Polaroids Doolan took of possible Thanksgiving outfits), receive cautious optimism about their burgeoning romance from friends and family (Lot 1150, a note from Doolan's sister to her that includes the following "I really like him - I think he's a good guy for you."), and create their own leitmotif - the salt and pepper shaker collection that dots the book's pages (Lots 1119 (matching dachshunds), 1281 (various pairs the couple pilfered from restaurants)) and the elaborately drawn Valentine's Day menus that Doolan creates (Lots 1138, 1187, 1292).  

But more than just mix CDs (Lots 1022 (a Christmas theme from Butterbitty (Doolan) to Hittymitty (Morris), 1044 (a Valentine's Day mix including songs from George Harrison, John Lennon, and some non-Beatles), 1100 (a six CD set!)) and internal doubt (Lots 1047 (including a note Doolan makes to herself to apologize to Morris), 1103 (including a note Morris makes to himself about her bad temper), we see the small graces - the Tiffany key ring that held the apartment key Doolan gave to Morris when they moved in together (Lot 1189), a favorite cardigan sweater they both adored (Lot 1142), and Doolan's first expression of love (taking the title of the book "Kinds of Love" and adding the letter "I" at the beginning, striking the letter "s" and adding the word "you" at the end so the title reads "I Kind of Love You." (Lot 1049)). And littered throughout are photos of the pair embracing, hugging, and eyeing each other dreamily. Doolan and Morris carry on precisely the type of relationship many of us can relate to - by turns tender and romantic as each reveals themselves to the other, fusty and petty as small grudges turn into bigger issues, and with the familiar comfort that only results when two people truly know one another. 

Of course, because the book's conceit (not to mention the "note" from Morris to Doolan that serves as a prologue wherein he expresses regret about their relationship ending) is that the two are no longer together, the whimsy and headiness of falling in love and the cementing of that bond curdles as we learn of outbursts and raised voices (Lot 1247), lack of communication (Lot 1248), a semi-destroyed white noise machine (Lot 1306), a pregnancy test (Lot 1305), a months-long solo trip abroad (Lot 1311) a note from mother Doolan to her daughter about her and Morris "taking a break" (Lot 1321), and Morris's post-break-up attempt at friendship (Lot 1325). 

Important Artifacts is like peering into a couple's diary or snooping around their home with convenient explainers attached to their personal belongings so you have the backstory of how each item got there and its meaning in the context of the couple's relationship. But what makes the book so memorable and wonderful is Shapton's keen eye for how two people grapple with the most basic (and powerful) of human emotions - love, loss, jealousy, anger, hope, fear, desire, and lust - as they pinball around the challenges we all wrestle with - our insecurities, job frustrations, desire for more of this or less of that and doing so by creating two totally believable characters who you immediately invest in. 

Important Artifacts is a book for romantics as well as cynics, for those in, and who have lost, at love. It is my favorite book of the last 10 years and one I hope you too will enjoy. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

Things I Love - Richard Nixon

At the height of the Watergate scandal, aides close to President Richard Nixon feared he had become so unglued from reality that direction was given to ignore orders from the President in the event he sought the deployment of nuclear weapons. While the Middle East was burning from the ravages of the Yom Kippur War, the President could not take a call from the Prime Minister of Great Britain because he was drunk. White House logs dutifully recorded the many after-midnight calls Nixon made to aides and supporters, railing against the injustices being heaped upon him and musing about his own political future. A man who detested people was the most powerful person on the planet for more than six years.

No wonder I love President Nixon.

That might surprise those who follow me on Twitter or read this blog. After all, how could a Yellow Dog Democrat have such an affinity for a Republican President? Like many politicians, Nixon contained contradictions, they were just bigger and more sharply drawn than others. He was an anti-semite whose closest aide was Jewish, loathed the "Eastern Establishment" but worked at a white-shoe Wall Street law firm, pandered to blue collar America but signed into law the Clean Water Act, established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and installed price controls to tame inflation. Of course, he also invaded Laos and Cambodia (without telling anyone), dropped more tonnage on Vietnam than the Allies dumped on Germany in World War II, used the IRS to go after his political enemies, and directed burglaries to discredit his critics. We basically had Lord Voldemort running our country.

And it is in those contradictions that I find Nixon's story so compelling. The hard scrabble upbringing, the near cuckolding he experienced in courting his future wife Pat (he literally chauffeured her around on at least one date with another guy), the meteoric rise that led him to the Vice Presidency at the tender age of 40 and the political obituary people were ready to write about him after successively losing the White House to John Kennedy in 1960 and the California Governor's race to Pat Brown two years later. Nixon's pathological need for love and validation was balanced against an equally strong no-fucks-to-give attitude where race baiting, playing to people's fears, and score settling were second nature.

In the balance, he may or may not have extended the Vietnam War to help him win the Presidency and then jettisoned negotiations only to cut a deal years later when it was politically expedient to do so, was the first American President to visit China, signed an arms reduction agreement with the Soviet Union, and fostered a coup in Argentina. This was not a man unafraid to wield power, but his out-of-control behavior was ultimately his undoing. Paranoid and untrusting, the Watergate break-in was an unnecessary effort to malign a party (and a candidate) in the process of imploding. Nixon's 49-state romp that November underscored the superfluousness of his cronies' illegal behavior, but the man could not help himself. And when he got caught, instead of owning up to his actions (and possibly eliding impeachment), he dug in his heels, destroyed evidence, and brought the country to the brink of a Constitutional crisis before finally standing down. 

More than forty years after his resignation, Nixon's influence on national politics is greater than ever. While Reagan is credited with heralding in the modern conservative revolution, Nixon is now understood as a sort of John the Baptist, mobilizing disaffected Democrats who were not keen on the party's liberal drift into the Republican fold (these same people would later be deemed "Reagan Democrats"), cultivating the "Silent Majority" of, primarily, white, middle-class Americans to rail against the freedoms of the 1960s and turn patriotism into a wedge issue to be wielded against those who burned the flag and opposed the Vietnam War. Reagan would appropriate this strategy to great effect, arguing that Democrats had diminished our nation's power and then using that urge to wash away the stain of Vietnam by building up our military against the Soviets and "invading" Grenada. 

Nixon also seeded the federal bureaucracy with conservative lawyers like Robert Bork and William Rehnquist who would play an outsized role in molding our jurisprudence, gave voice to the "unitary executive" theory of foreign policy that would not come into full bloom until the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, and made groundbreaking decisions about how we interacted with the other major powers in the world. Like Bill Clinton, a man who would seek Nixon's counsel when he ascended to the Presidency, our 37th President was blessed with enormous political skills and enormous personal failings. And like Clinton, historians will ponder the "what if" of Nixon for decades to come.

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

Things I Love - The Warriors

Walter Hill's 1979 movie The Warriors is a snapshot of New York City when subway cars were covered in graffiti and people did not wander Central Park after dark. Thirty-six years after its release, this iconic work is a reminder that the modern-day NYC, of gentrifying neighborhoods from Hell's Kitchen to the Gowanus Canal and a Manhattan that is a tourist's wet dream, was not so long ago, the poster child for urban decay. As the blinkered lights of the Coney Island Wonder Wheel flicker to attention, a graffiti-riddled MTA train comes into view, and the credits roll over an eerie, synth-heavy instrumental, moviegoers are transported back to that gritty chapter in the Big Apple's illustrious history.

The Warriors is a movie I love.

The plot is very simple. While a truce is being honored, delegates from the city's top hundred gangs attend a summit in Pelham Park called by the largest gang, the Gramercy Riffs, and their charismatic leader, Cyrus. The one condition is that no one bring weapons. The Warriors, an outfit out of Coney Island, make the lengthy trip only to have one of their own fingered as Cyrus's killer when the man is shot during his speech preaching a vision of a single unified gang running all of New York City. In the ensuing mayhem, The Warriors' leader Cleon is beaten to death and the remaining members must "bop their way" back to Coney Island with every gang in the city gunning for their heads. 

The long trip from the Bronx back to Coney Island is naturally filled with peril, as various gangs come close to, but can never quite snuff out the scrappy Warriors, who, when they are not squabbling amongst themselves are dodging the bat-wielding Furies, the Orphans, an off-the-track crew that did not even get an invitation to the big get-together, and the Lizzies, a group of femme fatales, among others. Along the way, one Warrior is killed while scuffling with a police officer on a subway platform and another is arrested after he gets too physical with an undercover cop. By the time dawn breaks and the Warriors confront Cyrus's real killer, Luther, the head of the Rogues, on the sand of Coney Island, the Gramercy Riffs have sussed out what is what and proceed to destroy the perpetrators as the strains of Joe Walsh's In The City signal the movie's end. 

There are many things that make The Warriors so timeless. When Shaq bellowed "CAN YOU DIG IT" at post-NBA Championship parade rallies, he was repeating Cyrus's most famous line of dialogue. If one of your friends ever clinked empty bottles together and started shouting "COME OUT AND PLAAAAAY" he too was quoting from the movie. But more than that, The Warriors captured the energy and vibe of New York in that time and place. While the look and feel of the movie can feel a little stilted now (some of the exteriors were clearly shot on a soundstage and not the streets of the Big Apple) it neatly captured that punk rock/Studio 54 duality of New York in the late 1970s. The Orphans leader looks like a Ramones reject and more than one gang featured in the opening montage sports satin or sequin jackets. Meanwhile, a roller skating crew rumbles with the Warriors in a men's room and the Furies pinstriped costumes are a clear nod to the then-resurgent New York Yankees, just coming off back-to-back World Series victories. 

There are also subtle grace notes - the ability of a group to overcome adversity when they work together, a forward leaning view of multiculturalism (The Warriors gang has black members, white members, and Hispanic members), and the idea that justice eventually prevails - mixed in with moments of poignancy - Swan and the crew looking worse for the wear as a group of revelers look at them in revulsion, Fox getting hurled into the path of an oncoming train, and poor Rembrandt feeling all aw shucks awkward around the aggressive women of the Lizzies. There are few "adults" in The Warriors, the most prominent being the unseen DJ whose between song banter acts as a sort of rolling commentary on where the gang is and who just narrowly missed "wasting" them. 

This is a movie not just about alienated teens in an urban hellscape but also about the chaos in our country during that turbulent time. Just four years earlier, New York had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and two years later had experienced a night of looting unseen before or since when the city experienced a total blackout. With our economy stalled and hostages under the Ayatollah's thumb, the idea that a gang could take over a city may have still been farfetched, but the idea that America was a nation in steep decline was not. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

Things I Love - Fat Elvis

When Elvis Presley died at the age of 42, he was an obese, drug addicted lounge act who had not been relevant musically for almost a decade. Blessed with a rich baritone voice and a cocky swagger, Presley had captured the public's imagination way back in 1956 and for the next two decades generated a level of fame that earned him the sobriquet "King of Rock n Roll." But his ignominious death in 1977, slumped over the toilet, his colon so impacted from years of prescription drug abuse he could no longer properly move his bowels, was simply the exclamation point on a lengthy downward spiral. Presley's escapades included a spur-of-the-moment jaunt from Memphis to Washington, D.C. to jawbone President Nixon about the dangers of drugs (irony) and his weird fixations on karate, the occult, and racquetball were of a piece with his vampiric lifestyle, sleeping all day, up all night, shooting out television sets and stumbling around in a sedative-fueled haze until showtime.

No wonder I love Fat Elvis.

The Skinny Elvis/Fat Elvis comparison probably predates the U.S. Postal Service's decision to let people vote on which "version" of the late singer would adorn a 29 cent stamp back in 1993, but the singer's girth is a useful marker for his career. Presley's meteoric rise through songs like "Jailhouse Rock" and appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show lasted just a few years before a stint in the U.S. Army and years of successively treacly Hollywood movies made Elvis appear dated as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and others heralded the musical revolution of the 1960s. Elvis shimmied into a black leather suit for a 1968 comeback special, but the singer's music was no match for the ever evolving psychedelic sound and his waistline continued to expand as he ensconced himself in Las Vegas for weeks at a time, consuming ever greater quantities of uppers to perform and downers to rest. As the years went on, his sequined jumpsuits and meandering stage announcements turned this once shining light of entertainment into a laughingstock.

But like the Grateful Dead's dark 84 sound, I find Fat Elvis irresistible precisely because of the messiness of his final years. In a time before celebrities publicly acknowledged their addictions and sought treatment for them, Presley lived in a hermetically sealed bubble of sycophants and yes men who did his bidding when he wanted to ride roller coasters all night or comp his "Memphis Mafia" with a fleet of Mercedes Benz. He also had compliant doctors who wore out their prescription pads helping the King navigate his day-to-day life and a paid staff that funneled him boxes of popsicles and stacks of bacon without comment or criticism. That one human being could live a lifestyle this out of control, this hedonistic, and this reckless is truly amazing. 

But in all this sloth, there is a pathos to Elvis's music as he neared his demise. The mournful tone in "My Way," "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and "Pieces of My Life" shows off the rare interpretative skill Presley had with other people's lyrics. This is a man who may have been diminished physically, spent psychologically, and dead creatively, but was able to muster an emotional peak that feels more impressive knowing how little time he had left on this Earth. It is unsurprising that the last songs Elvis is known to have sung, just hours before his death, were gospel hymnals, a port in the storm for his tumultuous life (and the only recordings for which he ever won a Grammy award). For even as he was burdened with a level of celebrity few could comprehend, inside him was a quiet boy from Tupelo, Mississippi yearning for salvation. 

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