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Monday, March 31, 2008
Bush booed at Braves opener: Appropriate?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
During the ESPN broadcast of President Bush’s throwing the first pitch at the Sunday night’s Braves opener at the new Washington, D.C., Nationals stadium, it sounded like there were quite a few boos.
Was it appropriate to give the president a Bronx cheer?
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Take your mugger to dinner?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NPR reports that 31-year-old New York social worker Julio Diaz, mugged at knifepoint, felt sorry for the robber and offered him his coat, then took him to dinner. After the meal, Diaz told the mugger he would need his wallet back to pay the check. The robber gave the wallet back and Diaz in turn let him keep $20, in exchange for turning over the knife.
“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world,” said Diaz.
What to make of this story?
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Clinton suffers ‘campaign bubble’ syndrome
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you’ve been around politics long enough, you know that something very strange happens to people working in a tough political campaign. And that “something” may help explain what’s happening —- or not happening —- in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Working very long hours side by side with fellow believers in the cause, otherwise sane people can begin to lose a sense of perspective. An “us against the world” psychology begins to take hold, and over time their counterparts in the opposing campaign —- people who in most respects are very much like themselves —- come to seem the very embodiment of evil.
For those caught up in the struggle, the outside world falls away to the point that their entire lives and being are wrapped up in the campaign. And things that can seem small and insignificant to an outsider tend to get blown out of proportion by people living inside that little world.
If you pay any attention at all to politics, you’ve seen examples for yourself. When you see a campaign spokesman —- for example, James Carville —- overreact to some minor insult or misstatement by the other side, it’s easy to dismiss the outrage as calculated spin. But often, that’s not what’s happening. It is instead an expression of very real emotion, generated by living too long in the surreal bubble that a campaign often becomes.
I’ve seen that dynamic develop even in state legislative races, occasionally leading to petty violence between campaigns. But as the stakes get higher, so do the emotions and resentment, peaking in races for the biggest prize of all, the White House.
In part, that’s because the people working incredibly long hours for John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton aren’t just trying to get their candidates elected. They also know that their own dreams and futures are intimately tied to their candidate’s fate. They know that if their champion goes to the White House, they go to the White House too. They know if they lose, they will be frozen out of influence, respect, power —- all those things they hope to acquire.
Candidates know that too. They know better than anyone that they aren’t alone on the ballot, that their success or failure means the success or failure of a lot of other people who have invested in them very heavily. If they decide to leave a race, they make that decision not just for themselves, but for all the people who believed in them and worked so hard for them.
In addition, everybody with whom the candidate interacts on a daily basis shares the same little campaign bubble. They all drank the Kool-Aid, and they all liked the Kool-Aid. So nobody on the team wants to be the first to suggest that it might be over, that all that hard work and those long days have gone for naught.
Most of the time, the system saves them that trouble, because come Election Day, the voters render their verdict and that’s that. But presidential nominating races are different. In the primary system, there is almost always another Election Day down the road that might offer cause for hope, and the candidates themselves, not the voters, are forced to decide when to end it.
For several weeks now, even before the Ohio and Texas primaries, it had become clear that Clinton could not win the Democratic nomination, and nothing since then has changed that fact. Yet, surrounded by people who look to her for hope and inspiration, Clinton cannot bring herself to admit it.
Instead, she insists that the process continue, on the grounds that the people are sovereign and must be allowed to have their say. Then, switching gears, she also argues that once the people have had their say, the superdelegates have the right to overturn the people’s verdict in her favor.
Within the bubble in which she and her advisers live, that convoluted argument makes sense, because it is the only argument that allows them to continue. But most of those outside that bubble can see the argument for what it is, a fantasy born of breathing the fumes of the campaign bus too long.
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Free Tibet? Not so much
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Florida syndicated columnist Charley Reese argues that Americans encouraging Tibetans to fight China for independence “will only get people killed needlessly.”
Writes Reese, “If you are not willing to make your way to the Tibetan plateau and face Chinese guns and prisons, then you certainly should not sit around some coffee shop and urge Tibetans to do so. Tibet is a strategic area of China, and the Chinese government is not going to give it up or grant it independence or even autonomy. To paraphrase a famous outlaw, it is enough that we know that China will do what it has to do.”
What’s your take?
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