Mitt Romney’s aide Eric Fehrnstrom repeated Richard Nixon’s advice to run hard to the right in the primaries and steer back to the center for the general election. The Republican conservatives and the news media acted as if this was some sort of apostasy. Fehrnstrom’s one mistake was using a metaphor which could be visualized:the Etch-A-Sketch.
My sense is that Romney is already starting his pivot to the center because he realizes that the Tea Party is a spent force. America is not a Right Wing country despite Rush Limbaugh’s protestations. The business wing of the Republican Party see an epic defeat in their future, borne on the wings of all the talk about returning women’s rights to the 1950′s, invading Iran and impeaching moderate and liberal judges. Read more…
If Sarah Palin was on a Jihad to get her ex-brother law Trooper Michael Wooten fired, my guess is that the Republican advance man who came up with the brilliant idea of the hockey puck drop at a Philidelphia Flyers game tonight is next on the hit list.
It’s hard to blame Sarah Palin for her booing on the ice in Philadelphia this evening. It’s almost a truism of politics that if you send a pol to a sporting event, he’s going to get booed. Politicians, as a class, aren’t all that popular, and it’s what sports fans do. According to legend, Eagles fans once booed Santa Claus. Still, not a great moment.
The golfer Tommy Bolt died yesterday. Some say he had the sweetest swing in golf, but his temper was so bad that he could hardly get through a round without throwing all his clubs away.
There was the time he tossed a driver into a canal in Miami, for example, and it sank so deeply a diver could not retrieve it. And the time he asked for a club recommendation during a particularly frustrating round, and his caddie suggested a 2-iron, a much-too-powerful club for the lie, because it was the only iron left in the bag.
Bolt later said that much of his ranting and club-throwing had been meant to entertain crowds, who had come to expect it. “It thrills crowds to see a guy suffer,” he told Golf Digest in 2002. “That’s why I threw clubs so often. They love to see golf get the better of someone.”
I’m a proud Professor today. Yesterday, my student Rebecca Soni won the Gold Medal in the Women’s 200 Meter Breaststroke. Two days earlier she won the Silver in the 100 Meter Breaststroke. BTW-She’s a great well prepared student, who asks good questions in class.
Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city’s largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent father to deliver a sharp message to African-American men, saying, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.”
“Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Mr. Obama said, to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”
This is a man who not only aspires to return moral leadership to our Presidency, he’s willing to teach the hard lessons of responsibility and distinguish between rights and privileges. He is saying things to the African-American Community that no white politician would be willing to say, and which I have not heard from the lips of Jay Z or Kobe Bryant either.
And in return, the Black community is raising him up as a role model that some say has been missing in the community. In Louisiana the number of new African-Americans registering to vote has both overwhelmed the registrars and scared the white Republican Secretary of State who controls the voting rolls.
Democratic officials said the Louisiana drive, which was called Voting is Power, had produced 74,000 applications by the time it concluded last week. Registrars in the four main parishes where the drive operated report numbers closer to 50,000, but there is no breakdown of how many were submitted to other parishes.
Registrars have reported that as many as a third of the applications cannot be entered into the system, and many of the rest require more information. The state Republican Party called the operation “the Dems’ phony registration drive.”
Democrats say the burden is on the registrars to double-check and verify application information.
Though Louisiana Republicans may try the old Jim Crow tricks of keeping people from voting, I think this is just the start of a massive voter registration drive, aided by the Obama Campaign’s grassroots Vote For Change campaign. As The Times points out, the demographics of the registered electorate have not represented the population.
Nationally, 39 percent of eligible blacks and 46 percent of eligible Latinos are not registered to vote, compared with 29 percent of eligible whites, according to a 2006 study by Project Vote, a nonpartisan group that promotes voting in low-income and minority communities.
I was going to write a post about all of the stupid new reality shows ABC is advertising on the NBA Finals game. With titles like “I Survived a Japanese Game Show” or “Wipeout”–I was going to call the post “The Theater of Humiliation”, Bruce Springsteen’s trenchant description of reality TV. But with 4 minutes left in the 4th quarter, I’m afraid the Laker’s performance deserves that title. Kobe may provide a miracle, but its not looking good. I can only look forward to three games on our home court. Just as I writing this a miracle may be happening. Four point game with one minute to go.
Big Brown, with two legs of the Triple Crown in hand ran without steroids for the first time today and lost badly.
Michael Iavarone, a co-president of International Equine Acquisitions Holdings, which is one of the owners of Big Brown, acknowledged that the accomplishments of his colt had been questioned by some critics because of the injections of Winstrol, the same anabolic steroid that the sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for in 1988, causing him to be stripped of his gold medal in the Seoul Olympics.
“But Rick has said, and we have believed all along, that Big Brown is phenomenally talented and has not needed any performance-enhancing drugs,” Iavarone said in discussing the decision to not use steroids since April.
Steroids for horses are banned in a lot of states, and should certainly be banned everywhere. After today’s race, they probably will.
I started reading Chip Brown’s magnificent profile of Tiger Woods this morning and as I finished the first paragraph, I thought to myself of how in the 1950′s the only black men allowed at the country club outside of Cleveland my father belonged to were the caddies. And then it occurred to me that maybe Tiger Woods prepared the psychological path for Barack Obama’s presidency. Here’s how the article starts.
It’s hard to remember now the special frenzy at the beginning, when all the dreams that were projected onto Tiger Woods seemed part of his genius for the game. It was as if there were no divide between the things he could do and the fantasies he could elicit. He was a confluence of races with a sovereign smile and a killer name, and he arrived as if he had been born not just to win golf tournaments and out-earn everyone except Oprah on the Forbes list of highest-paid celebrities, but also to redeem the racist history of his sport and cure a thousand other ills as well. Over the top with pride, his father, Earl, was quoted calling him “the Chosen One” and prophesying that Tiger would “do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”
It is of course hard to sustain a frenzy, but as Tiger has proven, with discipline all things are possible. Its hard to describe why Tiger’s role in golf was so different from say Jackie Robinson’s role in baseball, but when you realize that Augusta National, where the Masters is played didn’t have a Black member until 1991, you get the point.
Earl Wood’s paternal pride may have been “over the top”, but if America elects Barack Obama President, it will definitely change the course of humanity. And for that we may all have to thank Tiger Woods for blazing some sort of strange trail through the American psyche.
Ten years from now the historians of marketing will look back at last week as the time that Interactive Advertising came of age. CBS Sports put all of the games of March Madness on the Web for free with targeted ads. The Web spots were more valuable than the TV spots.
The network made $4.83 in advertising for each of its 4.8 million online viewers and $4.12 for each of its 132 million television viewers, according to data from CBS and TNS, a research firm.
I went out on a limb three years ago saying this was going to happen, but it feels good to know that I wasn’t just dreaming.
