random thoughts, part 1: baseball, disenfranchisement

it's really tough for me to comprehend, as the baseball playoffs start, that i'm not going to see manny donning a red #24 and hitting cleanup for the red sox ever again. my personal history with baseball is a weird one. when my family moved to boston, i was 6, and looking for a hobby. i settled on baseball cards, and adopted the red sox as my baseball champions. i really loved baseball as a kid, especially because my dad would often score tickets to baseball games (i didn't go to a basketball game until I was in college, and I barely remember the one football game I attended.) I went through a lull in my fandom from about age 8-16, mostly because I wasn't in Little League, and additionally because of the baseball strike. My love for baseball was brought back by 3 seminal Red Sox: Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, and Manny Ramirez. Nomar, a brilliant but brooding hitter, took business negotiations from the front office personally and was sent packing in 2004. Pedro helped deliver the first Red Sox championship in 86 years before cashing in on one last paycheck (sorry Mets fans), but Manny stuck it out until this year. From a fan's perspective, Manny was always a joy to watch. We loved his goofy personality (including ridiculous handshakes individualized for each of his teammates, my favorite being his 'gunslinger' handshake with Millar) that served as a perfect counterpoint to how locked-in he always was at the plate. I'll never see anything in baseball as great as the 1-2 punch of Manny and Ortiz: Ortiz with his ability to just muscle anything over the fence, and Manny, the hitting savant par excellence.

But the other reason I loved Manny is that he recognized baseball for what it is: a game. He loved baseball, worked hard at it, and was great, but his life didn't end on the field and he said as much. Sportswriters hated this about him, and always got on his case about not being the kind of 'gritty, dirt-dog, hustler' types that they always love. Here's a hint about why writers hate Manny and love David Eckstein. The gritty dirt-dogs? They're always white. Guys who 'play the game the right way'? Always white. Guys like Manny, whose combination of athletic ability and work ethic make his at-bats look easy? They're lazy (and they're usually black or hispanic). These are the same guys who think that the great era of basketball was in the 80s, because everyone was slower, and Larry Bird was amazing. Anyways, I'll miss you, Manny, and if the Sox go down in the playoffs, I'll be rooting for the Dodgers, no doubt. Well, actually, maybe not. I'll probably root for the Cubs, with their 100 year drought, or for the Phillies (because I'm getting slightly worried about the psyche of Philadelphia sports fans). But I'll watch the Dodgers, and when Manny hits a bomb, watches it for 3 seconds too long, jogs around the bases, and does a 14-move handshake with a bewildered and slightly annoyed Jeff Kent, I'll cheer.

By the way, the Sports Guy wrote an awesome article about Manny, so if you're a sports fan, read it.

And in other thoughts, voter disenfranchisement! I went to rolling stone to read an awesomely vicious takedown of John McCain's seemingly spotless biography (I loved it, but if you like McCain, you'll hate it, and maybe hate me) and ended up reading a 23 page report on voter disenfranchisement in Ohio in 2004. In an example of everyone's tendency to revise history in order to make it more palatable, I had completely forgotten about how overwhelmingly exit polls had favored Kerry and how incomprehensible it was that the polls were off by as much as they were (John Zogby called the explanation for the discrepancy, that democrats had participated more in exit polling than Republicans, "preposterous.") Well this piece painstakingly reconstructs all of the separate voter intimidation, voter exclusion, and plain old fradulent tactics conducted in Ohio, at the behest of the GOP. Upon reading this, I immediately thought 3 things:

1. It's really sad that voter disenfranchisement may be my number one fear about why Obama might not win on November 4th. After all, we've already seen examples of voter intimidation in Michigan, and I certainly don't feel confident that the type of organized intimidation orchestrated in the last 2 elections is going to either suddenly cease or be overcome in this election.
2. There's a really interesting article in the Times that talks about George W. Bush, and how his likeability may very well increase when he is a former president, as his personality shifts to the forefront and his policy decisions fade into the background (the article notes similar transformations for Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter). But I think its important that we not forget that beneath his charm, and even beneath his "aw shucks, I'm not that smart" populist sensibilities was someone not afraid to break the rules to win, and certainly not hesitant to expand executive power to push his agenda forward, even if it included trampling basic rights of American citizens to privacy, habeas corpus, etc. If anything, I think in the future, I'll look back on President Bush as a genius for hoodwinking everyone into believing he was too dumb to be sinister. And this brings me to my most important point:
3. Potential voters need to recognize the GOP they are voting for. Republicans at this point (no matter what talking points they parrot) are not the party of small government and self-reliance. They're the party of lobbyists, fat cats, and influence that say that if you can't win by the rules, make sure you've got enough money and power to change the rules, and make sure of it by buying off all the people who've got the money and enforce the rules. It's a smart plan, honestly, but its vile, and lets not pretend that it has anything to do with the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. This is a party that guts the financial security of Middle America by preying on their hatred of gays, immigrants, and abortion so they can give kickback to the billionaires that illegally finance their re-election campaigns.
   

More soapboxing after the VP debate. The Times had tons of weird, non-political stuff, and I plan to talk about it. For now, enjoy Homer Simpson's attempts to vote!