Today in 1968, ABC-TV premiered “The Archies,” created by the creator of the Monkees, Don Kirshner:
The number one single today in 1974 is a confession and correction:
Stevie Wonder had the number one album today in 1974, “Fulfillingness First Finale,” which wasn’t a finale at all:
Today in Great Britain in the first half of the 1960s was a day for oddities.
Today in 1960, a campaign began to ban the Ray Peterson song “Tell Laura I Love Her” (previously mentioned here) on the grounds that it was likely to inspire a “glorious death cult” among teens. (The song was about a love-smitten boy who decides to enter a car race to earn money to buy a wedding ring for her girlfriend. To sum up, that was his first and last race.)
The anti-“Tell Laura” campaign apparently was not based on improving traffic safety. We conclude this from the fact that three years later, Graham Nash of the Hollies leaned against a van door at 40 mph after a performance in Scotland to determine if the door was locked. Nash determined it wasn’t locked on the way to the pavement.
Britain’s number one song today in 1963, yeah, yeah, yeah:
Today in 1966, NBC-TV premiered a show about four Beatle-like musicians:
Britain’s number one song today in 1979:
Sept. 11, 2001 started out as a beautiful day, in Wisconsin, New York City and Washington, D.C.
I remember almost everything about the entire day. Sept. 11, 2001 is to my generation what Nov. 22, 1963 was to my parents and Dec. 7, 1941 was to my grandparents.
I had dropped off our oldest son, Michael, at Ripon Children’s Learning Center. As I was coming out, the mother of one of Michael’s group told me to find a good radio station; she had heard as she was getting out with her son that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I got in my car and turned it on in time to hear, seemingly live, a plane hit the WTC. But it wasn’t the first plane, it was the second plane hitting the other tower.
As you can imagine, my drive to Fond du Lac took unusually long that day. I tried to call Jannan, who was working at Ripon College, but she didn’t answer because she was in a meeting. I had been at Marian University as their PR director for just a couple months, so I didn’t know for sure who the media might want to talk to, but once I got there I found a couple professors and called KFIZ and WFDL in Fond du Lac and set up live interviews.
The entire day was like reading a novel, except that there was no novel to put down and no nightmare from which to wake up. A third plane hit the Pentagon? A fourth plane crashed somewhere else? The government was grounding every plane in the country and closing every airport?
I had a TV in my office, and later that morning I heard that one of the towers had collapsed. So as I was talking to Jannan on the phone, NBC showed a tower collapsing, and I assumed that was video of the first tower collapse. But it wasn’t; it was the second tower collapse, and that was the second time that replay-but-it’s-not thing had happened that day.
Marian’s president and my boss (a native of a Queens neighborhood who grew up with many firefighter and police officer families, and who by the way had a personality similar to Rudy Giuliani) had a brief discussion about whether or not to cancel afternoon or evening classes, but they decided (correctly) to hold classes as scheduled. The obvious reasons were (1) that we had more than 1,000 students on campus, and what were they going to do if they didn’t have classes, and (2) it was certainly more appropriate to have our professors leading a discussion over what had happened than anything else that could have been done.
I was at Marian until after 7 p.m. I’m sure Marian had a memorial service, but I don’t remember it. While I was in Fond du Lac, our church was having a memorial service with our new rector (who hadn’t officially started yet) and our interim priest. I was in a long line at a gas station, getting gas because the yellow low fuel light on my car was on, not because of panic over gas prices, although I recall that one Fond du Lac gas station had increased their prices that day to the ridiculous $2.299 per gallon. (I think my gas was around $1.50 a gallon that day.)
Two things I remember about that specific day: It was an absolutely spectacular day. But when the sun set, it seemed really, really dark, as if there was no light at all outside, from stars, streetlights or anything else.
For the next few days, since Michael was at the TV-watching age, we would watch the ongoing 9/11 coverage in our kitchen while Michael was watching the 1-year-old-appropriate stuff or videos in our living room. That Sunday, one of the people who was at church was Adrian Karsten of ESPN. He was supposed to be at a football game working for ESPN, of course, but there was no college football Saturday (though high school football was played that Friday night), and there was no NFL football Sunday. Our organist played “God Bless America” after Mass, and I recall Adrian clapping with tears down his face; I believe he knew some people who had died or been injured.
Later that day was Marian’s Heritage Festival of the Arts. We had record attendance since there was nothing going on, it was another beautiful day, and I’m guessing after five consecutive days of nonstop 9/11 coverage, people wanted to get out of their houses.
In the 19 years since then, a comment of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has stuck in my head. He was asked a year or so later whether the U.S. was more or less safe since 9/11, and I believe his answer was that we were more safe because we knew more than on Sept. 10, 2001. That and the fact that we haven’t been subject to another major terrorist attack since then is the good news.
Osama bin Laden (who I hope is enjoying Na’ar, Islam’s hell) and others in Al Qaeda apparently thought that the U.S. (despite the fact that citizens from more than 90 countries died on 9/11) would be intimidated by the 9/11 attacks and cower on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, allowing Al Qaeda to operate with impunity in the Middle East and elsewhere. (Bin Laden is no longer available for comment.) If you asked an American who paid even the slightest attention to world affairs where a terrorist attack would be most likely before 9/11, that American would have replied either “New York,” the world’s financial capital, or “Washington,” the center of the government that dominates the free world. A terrorist attack farther into the U.S., even in a much smaller area than New York or Washington, would have delivered a more chilling message, that nowhere in the U.S. was safe. Al Qaeda didn’t think to do that, or couldn’t do that. The rest of the Middle East also did not turn on the U.S. or on Israel (more so than already is the case with Israel), as bin Laden apparently expected.
The bad news is all of the other changes that have taken place that are not for the better. Bloomberg Businessweek asks:
So was it worth it? Has the money spent by the U.S. to protect itself from terrorism been a sound investment? If the benchmark is the absence of another attack on the American homeland, then the answer is indisputably yes. For the first few years after Sept. 11, there was political near-unanimity that this was all that mattered. In 2005, after the bombings of the London subway system, President Bush sought to reassure Americans by declaring that “we’re spending unprecedented resources to protect our nation.” Any expenditure in the name of fighting terrorism was justified.
A decade later, though, it’s clear this approach is no longer sustainable. Even if the U.S. is a safer nation than it was on Sept. 11, it’s a stretch to say that it’s a stronger one. And in retrospect, the threat posed by terrorism may have been significantly less daunting than Western publics and policymakers imagined it to be. …
Politicians and pundits frequently said that al Qaeda posed an “existential threat” to the U.S. But governments can’t defend against existential threats—they can only overspend against them. And national intelligence was very late in understanding al Qaeda’s true capabilities. At its peak, al Qaeda’s ranks of hardened operatives numbered in the low hundreds—and that was before the U.S. and its allies launched a global military campaign to dismantle the network. “We made some bad assumptions right after Sept. 11 that shaped how we approached the war on terror,” says Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. “We thought al Qaeda would run over the Middle East—they were going to take over governments and control armies. In hindsight, it’s clear that was never going to be the case. Al Qaeda was not as good as we gave them credit for.”
Yet for a decade, the government’s approach to counterterrorism has been premised in part on the idea that not only would al Qaeda attack inside the U.S. again, but its next strike would be even bigger—possibly involving unconventional weapons or even a nuclear bomb. Washington has appropriated tens of billions trying to protect against every conceivable kind of attack, no matter the scale or likelihood. To cite one example, the U.S. spends $1 billion a year to defend against domestic attacks involving improvised-explosive devices, the makeshift bombs favored by insurgents in Afghanistan. “In hindsight, the idea that post-Sept. 11 terrorism was different from pre-9/11 terrorism was wrong,” says Brian A. Jackson, a senior physical scientist at RAND. “If you honestly believed the followup to 9/11 would be a nuclear weapon, then for intellectual consistency you had to say, ‘We’ve got to prevent everything.’ We pushed for perfection, and in counterterrorism, that runs up the tab pretty fast.”
Nowhere has that profligacy been more evident than in the area of homeland security. “Things done in haste are not done particularly well,” says Jackson. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes in his new book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, the creation of a homeland security apparatus has been marked by waste, bureaucracy, and cost overruns. Gartenstein-Ross cites the Transportation Security Agency’s rush to hire 60,000 airport screeners after Sept. 11, which was originally budgeted at $104 million; in the end it cost the government $867 million. The homeland security budget has also proved to be a pork barrel bonanza: In perhaps the most egregious example, the Kentucky Charitable Gaming Dept. received $36,000 to prevent terrorists from raising money at bingo halls. “If you look at the past decade and what it’s cost us, I’d say the rate of return on investment has been poor,” Gartenstein-Ross says.
Of course, much of that analysis has the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It is interesting to note as well that, for all the campaign rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama that we needed to change our foreign policy approach, president Obama changed almost nothing, including our Afghanistan and Iraq involvements. It is also interesting to note that the supposed change away from President George W. Bush’s us-or-them foreign policy approach hasn’t changed the world’s view, including particularly the Middle East’s view, of the U.S. Someone years from now will have to determine whether homeland security, military and intelligence improvements prevented Al Qaeda from another 9/11 attack, or if Al Qaeda wasn’t capable of more than just one 9/11-style U.S. attack.
Hindsight makes one realize how much of the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented or at least their worst effects lessened. One year after 9/11, the New York Times book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers points out that eight years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, New York City firefighters and police officers still could not communicate with each other, which led to most of the police and fire deaths in the WTC collapses. Even worse, the book revealed that the buildings did not meet New York City fire codes when they were designed because they didn’t have to, since they were under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And more than one account shows that, had certain people at the FBI and elsewhere been listened to by their bosses, the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have caught our intelligence community dumbfounded. (It does not speak well of our government to note that no one appears to have paid any kind of political price for the 9/11 attacks.)
I think, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek argued, our approach to homeland security (a term I loathe) has overdone much and missed other threats. Our approach to airline security — which really seems like the old error of generals’ fighting the previous war — has made air travel worse but not safer. (Unless you truly believe that 84-year-old women and babies are terrorist threats.) The incontrovertible fact is that every 9/11 hijacker fit into one gender, one ethnic group and a similar age range. Only two reasons exist to not profile airline travelers — political correctness and the assumption that anyone is capable of hijacking an airplane, killing the pilots and flying it into a skyscraper or important national building. Meanwhile, while the U.S. spends about $1 billion each year trying to prevent Improvised Explosive Device attacks, what is this country doing about something that would be even more disruptive, yet potentially easier to do — an Electromagnetic Pulse attack, which would fry every computer within the range of the device?
We have at least started to take steps like drilling our own continent’s oil and developing every potential source of electric power, ecofriendly or not, to make us less dependent on Middle East oil. (The Middle East, by the way, supplies only one-fourth of our imported oil. We can become less dependent on Middle East oil; we cannot become less dependent on energy.) But the government’s response to 9/11 has followed like B follows A the approach our culture has taken to risk of any sort, as if covering ourselves in bubblewrap, or even better cowering in our homes, will make the bogeyman go away. Are we really safer because of the Patriot Act?
American politics was quite nasty in the 1990s. For a brief while after 9/11, we had impossible-to-imagine moments like this:
And then within the following year, the political beatings resumed. Bush’s statement, “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy,” was deliberately misconstrued as Bush saying that Americans should go out and shop. Americans were exhorted to sacrifice for a war unlike any war we’ve ever faced by those who wouldn’t have to deal with the sacrifices of, for instance, gas prices far beyond $5 per gallon, or mandatory national service (a bad idea that rears its ugly head in times of anything approaching national crisis), or substantially higher taxes.
Then again, none of this should be a surprise. Other parts of the world hate Americans because we are more economically and politically free than most of the world. We have graduated from using those of different skin color from the majority as slaves, and we have progressed beyond assigning different societal rights to each gender. We tolerate different political views and religions. To the extent the 9/11 masterminds could be considered Muslims at all, they supported — and radical Muslims support — none of the values that are based on our certain inalienable rights. The war between our world, flawed though it is, and a world based on sharia law is a war we had better win.
In one important sense, 9/11 changed us less than it revealed us. America can be both deeply flawed and a special place, because human beings are both deeply flawed and nonetheless special in God’s eyes. Jesus Christ is quoted in Luke 12:48 as saying that “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” As much as Americans don’t want to be the policeman of the world, or the nation most responsible for protecting freedom worldwide, there it is.
Readers know I have been, shall we say, skeptical about the C8 Corvette, a mid-engine design GM is unfamiliar with, which lacks a proper (manual) transmission and is grossly overpriced.
A quarter-century ago, though, GM had an idea for the Corvette that would have been bigger, in one sense, than anything in the C8. R&T (the upgraded Road & Track, or something) tells the story:
The original Dodge Viper was a game-changer. With its outrageous proportions and massive 8.0-liter V-10 engine, it outclassed pretty much anything else out of Detroit at the time. Except maybe this one-off V-12-powered Corvette.
Chevy built this experimental Corvette in the early Nineties as its answer to the Viper, and it’s a beast. Called the ZR-12, it uses the C4-generation ZR-1 as a base. The entire nose was stretched to accommodate the 600 cubic-inch V-12, built by Ryan Falconer Racing Engines. The all-aluminum engine was rated at 686 hp and 680 lb-ft of torque when new—far more than the then-new Viper’s output of 400 horsepower and 450 lb-ft of torque.
Of course, the ZR-12 never made it to production. The sole example languished at GM’s Heritage center for a number of years before being moved to the Corvette Museum, where it currently resides, according to LSX Magazine. The car used to have side-pipes and a different set of wheels, but has since been converted into a more subtle specification.
The DtRockstar1 YouTube channel was lucky enough to get insider access to the Museum while the ZR-12 was started and driven around, giving us a chance to listen to the unique engine note (above). Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t sound like your average Corvette.
This was far from GM’s first attempt at a V-12. Cadillac had one in the 1930s, along with a V-16. In World War II Rolls–Royce’s Merlin and the Allison V-1710 powered planes. Packard’s V-12 was placed (three each) in PT boats.
According to the always-accurate Wikipedia:
Each bank of a V12 engine essentially functions as a straight-six engine, which by itself has perfect primary and secondary engine balance. By using the correct V-angle, a V12 engine can therefore have perfect balance. The even firing order for a four-stroke V12 engine has an interval of 60 degrees, therefore a V12 engine can be perfectly balanced if a V-angle of 60 degrees, 120 degrees or 180 degrees is used. Many V12 engines use a V-angle of 60 degrees between the two banks of cylinders. …
At any given time, three of the cylinders in a V12 engine are in their power stroke, which increases the smoothness of the power delivery by eliminating gaps between power pulses.
The weirdest V-12, perhaps, was GMC’s, and I have seen an example of one reported by Driving.ca:
When you think of a V12 engine, your mind runs immediately to the high-tech, rev-happy, screamers made by Ferrari and Lamborghini. But did you know that between 1960 and 1965 GMC made a V12 of their own? And it was the size of two Ferrari 599 V12s combined.
It’s outrageous now to think of a gasoline-powered semi-truck but, in the 1960s when fuel was cheaper, a sizeable percentage of operators preferred gasoline power. Chevrolet offered a heavy-duty version of its famous 427 V8 to truck operators, but GMC knew they could do one better. They needed an engine with cubic inches, and lots of them. So they took the basic design from their 5.7L V6 and made a monstrous 11.5L V12.
This was not just two V6s bolted or welded together. The V12 had its own block, cam, a special oil pan that held 15L of oil, and a special crankshaft that weighed 82 kilograms. The engine was an absolute monolith. It was 1.3 metres long and weighed more than 680 kg fully assembled. Due to its inherent weight and girth, it wasn’t an engine you could simply bolt into a Chevy C10 pickup and drive around in. It was installed in full-on semi-trucks, and also as standalone power units for irrigation. It was never installed into a passenger car or truck by GMC, but many hot-rodders have shoved it into service for hot rods, and custom pickup-trucks.
For all its size and displacement, the V12 wasn’t a horsepower king, it was made for torque. It made just 275 hp at 2,400 rpm but produced a freight-train-like 625-lb.-ft. of torque at just 2,100 rpm. If those numbers aren’t enough for you, a Florida-based shop called Thunder V12 will happily sell you a rebuilt one in any specification from bone stock to tractor-pull stormer. Prices start at US$10,800 for a complete engine, so get your chequebook ready. Beat-up originals can be found on eBay for around $5,000, but buyer beware as no more spare parts are being made for these beasts.
The GMC V12 was made between 1960 and 1965 and, in that time, they made about 5,000 of them. Nobody’s sure quite how many are left but most guess that there can’t be any more than 1,500 in semi-serviceable condition. After the big V12 ran out of production the writing was on the wall for gasoline-powered trucks. At 11.5L it remains one of the largest gas engines that ever powered a road vehicle, and we’ll never see a dinosaur like it again.
Except that, according to Fox News:
Sure, you’ve got a V8 in your Chevy, but you could’ve had a V12.
At least now you can.
A new Australian outfit called V12LS has created a 12-cylinder version of the venerable General Motors LS1 V8 and is putting it on sale.
The company started out by taking two LS blocks, lopping off a couple of cylinders and melding them together to create a V12, but has now developed its own single cast block that is compatible with many LS parts. The last time GM made its own V12 was the GMC “twin six” truck engine in 1966.
V12LS is currently offering a 9.0-liter crate engine with an iron block good for 717 hp for $35,000, but is working on an aluminum version. Various kits in different states of dress run from $21,300 for a basic builder package to a dyno-tested turnkey engine for $46,200.
Those prices include shipping to the USA.
For that matter, while GMC was producing V-12s, Cadillac was contemplating a V-12 for its new front-drive Eldorado personal luxury car. Caddy never built a V-12 Eldorado, but Popular Mechanics reported in 1988 that since BMW was developing a V-12, other luxury carmakers would, including Cadillac.
Cadillac worked to develop a V-12 with Lotus for its Solitaire concept car, the two-door version of its Voyagé concept car.
As an aficionado of big coupes, as you know, I would definitely drive that.
Not to be outdone, Cadillac proposed in 2003 the Sixteen, powered by, of course, a V-16.
Motor Trend drove one.
“Would you like to drive our 13.6-liter/1000-horsepower V-16 sedan?” asked GM’s Jeff Holland. Even though we knew there’d be extra-sticky driving rules and caveats regarding the $2 million concept’s mechanical polish, there was only one possible answer: “Duh.” Next thing we knew, we were piloting Caddy’s sexy showstopper around GM’s Milford, Michigan, Proving Ground. The Sixteen has been literally the biggest thing to roll onto the auto-show circuit this season. Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman of product development and chairman of GM North America, says it’s “a modern interpretation of everything that made Cadillac the standard of the world.” But is it merely a lavish reminder of a once-glorious past or a relevant vision of the future? Enough scene-setting. What’s it like to drive almost 19 feet and 16 cylinders of handbuilt concept car?
Remarkably sweet. Entering the Sixteen requires punching a button on the key fob or lightly squeezing a microswitch inside the top of the front door. There are no door handles to clutter the Sixteen’s lyrically curving body sides. Once inside, you’re surrounded by the rich scent of fine leather, glints from polished walnut and aluminum, and thick carpets–woven of silk, no less.
The driver’s leather bucket is large, soft, and gently contoured. It power-adjusts to a comfortable position, surprising given the lack of ergonomic work that usually goes into a turntable toy. Likewise, the leather and polished-wood steering wheel can be powered into a just-right spot, which lets you easily read the speedo/tachometer gauge in the center of the dash.
To start, step on the brake pedal and push a green button to the right of the wheel. You’ll hear a strange, aircraft-style starter whine, then the mammoth V-16 erupts in a raggedy roar that quickly settles down to a somewhat bumpy idle (virtually no tuning was done on the powertrain’s five engine mounts). As the engine starts, the instruments–including the clock–cycle and sweep their needles to calibrate themselves, emitting odd ticking and ratcheting clicks.
From inside the cabin, the engine’s sound is neither the jungle murmur of a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG nor the near-silent thrum of a Bentley or Rolls. It’s slightly rowdy and clearly coming from something in large displacement, particularly as you blip the throttle. Asked if they’d done any exhaust tuning, one powertrain engineer shrugs and says, “Well, we had four mufflers, and we threw two away.”
Ease into the throttle, and the car moves with a quickness that belies its mass and size. The automatic transmission has four gears, but we feel only two shift surges during our drive. This huge sedan glides precisely, with a catlike balance that puts us at ease. The steering feels light, and the car drives smaller than it looks. Give it more gas, and the result is a Mississippi River’s worth of torque that surges the car forward. We back off to listen for crunching, grinding, or banging. Nothing–impressive for a machine whose primary purpose is to dazzle a show crowd. The Sixteen’s ride is a bit jiggly, which doesn’t say anything positive about the suspension, since the pavement is billiard-table smooth.
The brakes don’t feel up to the engine’s grunt. Despite six-piston calipers and 16-inch rotors, not much happens when the brake pedal is depressed. Perhaps that’s because the master cylinder is remote-mounted in the trunk and operated via a tangle of electronics. We remember that our GM support crew warned us about “green” brake pads.
There isn’t much turnaround room for us at the end of one particular Proving Ground road, but four-wheel steering comes to the rescue. Turning in opposite phase to the front wheels at low speeds, the rear wheels tighten the car’s long turning circle to approximately that of a midsize sedan.
The Sixteen isn’t as polished as a production car; understandable, as that’s not its mission. But it’s easily the most refined concept car we’ve driven, which further teases us about what sort of production potential it, or some of its componentry, might have. The car’s design represents an updated, and somewhat more elegant, variation on Cadillac’s crisp-edged design language; perhaps some of the Sixteen’s themes will show up on the upcoming Seville/STS and the next-generation DeVille.
Does anyone need 16 cylinders or 1000 horsepower? No. But the idea–like the engine itself–sounds simply wondrous.
Of course it does.
Back to the original premise: What about a V-12 Corvette?
Remember that this was right after Chevrolet debuted the King of the Road, a Corvette with a double-overhead-cam 32-valve-per-cylinder V-8 designed by Lotus and built by Mercury Marine in Stillwater, Okla.
Given GM’s history with the Northstar V-8 — an unfamiliar engine design (also DOHC, built for Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles) that became notorious for head gasket (actually head bolt) failures, which result in antifreeze in the cylinder walls and engine oil in the radiator, with really bad result (If you’re driving when it’s, say, 10 below zero and your car starts to overheat, that’s not good) — the thought GM could have successfully designed a V-12 that would have worked as designed for every Corvette is, well, optimistic. A V-12 designed by someone else, as the King of the Road V-8 was, might have made more sense.
Whether a V-12 Corvette could have performed better sales-wise than the King of the Road (whose sales slowed after the first year) is a better question. For years Corvettes have seemed to pale in comparison with more exotic Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches (even though they are powered by mere flat-sixes) in part because of interiors perceived to be subpar, despite the Corvette’s superior horsepower-per-dollar. (The mid-engine C8 is GM’s attempt to compete with more expensive supercars, though ironically the C8’s V-8 still uses pushrods, as every Corvette except for the first two years of the C1 and the King of the Road.)
It’s not clear that the wealthy snobs who apparently drive supercars would be interested in a V-12 Corvette any more than they were interested in the DOHC Corvette. People who appreciate American-made performance and value might have had a different opinion.
Today in 1956, London police were called to break up a crowd of teenagers after the showing of the film “Rock around the Clock” at the Trocadero Cinema.
That prompted a letter to the editor in the Sept. 12, 1956 London Times:
The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm loving age group and the result of its impact is the relaxing of all self control.
The British demonstrated their lack of First Amendment by banning the film in several cities.
Kylee Zempel:
He doesn’t seem well. In fact, he sounds exactly like every person I’ve encountered on their deathbed. These thoughts ran through my mind Thursday while I watched Joe Biden breathlessly address Kenosha community leaders through his surgical mask.
Aside from the former vice president’s extortionate call-to-action that if you don’t vote for him, racism and riots will reign forever, my primary takeaway from his remarks was that Biden is the weakest and least-inspiring candidate I’ve ever seen. This was quite a contrast from the energy I felt pulsing through Kenosha as I walked the glass-littered streets the day President Donald Trump came to town.
Sometime around the second month of the pandemic, I made my peace with a Biden presidency. There was no way Trump could win, it seemed. With the death toll rising, businesses closing, and the economy tanking, things weren’t looking too good for the incumbent. Pair that with the fact that Democrats wield unrivaled power in our major institutions, controlling all of them save for some churches — including media, education, and entertainment — a second-term victory for Trump seemed impossible.
But administrations come and go. Unlike many prominent Democrats, who’ve thrown a four-year tantrum since 2016, most people realize presidential elections aren’t the end of the world. Would it be a bummer if Biden sealed the deal? Sure, but it would be fine. We would survive (without an embittered #NotMyPresident campaign).
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that’s a reality we’ll never have to face. As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway pointed out, Biden held a 25-point lead in the betting odds at the beginning of August. Fast-forward just one month, and Trump has made up the entire deficit, now neck-and-neck with Biden.
“So here is the cold reality the media are for some reason refusing to tell people as the country rounds Labor Day and this campaign really gets into high gear,” Hemingway wrote. “This race is effectively tied today, Trump has momentum, and Biden is going to have to campaign hard, energize his voters, and earn it if he hopes to unseat the incumbent.”
Beth Baumann begins by violating a rule of good writing — one-word lead paragraphs — in writing the perspective of the guy on the left I recently ran into at Culver’s:
Wisconsin. It’s a state that’s known for its dairy farms, cheese curds and the Green Bay Packers. The state is often overlooked and lumped in with other states in the midwest as simply a “flyover” area. But as November quickly approaches, all eyes are on the Badger State. It’s considered a swing state. Wisconsinites went for Barack Obama in 2012 and President Donald Trump in 2016. It’s a state Hillary Clinton abandoned all together and it’s Democrats’ general attitude towards Wisconsinites that has Republicans confident Trump can carry the state again this election cycle.
What’s amazing, however, is how little people across the nation understand Wisconsin, both culturally and politically. Very few people realize just how loyal Wisconsinites are, both to their neighbors and the Packers. When the Packers play, the state literally shuts down so that everyone can watch their team play.
“We used to joke. We didn’t do this – obviously joked about it – that politically, if you wanted to have an impact, you’d call on the day of a Packers game, during the Packers game, for your opponent, because people would be so ticked off, that they got a call from your opponent,” former Gov. Scott Walker told Townhall with a chuckle. “Obviously, we didn’t do that but that’s how sacred the Packers are. We say on Sundays there’s church and there’s the Packers game. Both are considered religious experiences in Wisconsin.”
Even though people don’t understand the culture in the Badger State, they also don’t understand the state’s demographics. In a lot of ways, Walker said Wisconsin is a “microcosm of America.”
“You’ve got two really big cities, although those cities are very different as well. Milwaukee is a classic blue collar city with a large minority population, but is Democrat but isn’t necessarily radically liberal. They’re just kind of traditional Democrats and a lot of the elected officials over the years in that city have reflected that,” he explained. “And then in Madison you have the second largest city. You have a campus town, home of the capital, state employees. It’s a much more radical. It’s the place where Bernie Sanders signs were still up four years after he first ran.”
Milwaukee suburbs tend to be more traditional and Republican but they’re not as red as the cities are blue. Rural areas generally go Republican, with the southwest corner of the state being the exception because of its close proximity to the state’s capital.
“The northern part of the state, the wooded areas, is not very densely populated and a lot of people feel forgotten. The key to winning is the industrial, mid-size cities – ironically, it’s the Kenosha, the Racine, the Sheboyans, the Fox Valley cities – those are the places that are up for grabs. The Green Bay, the Fond du Lac, places I did well in, Tommy Thompson (R) did well in, the president did well in four years ago but two years ago Tammy Baldwin (D) did well in as well,” Walker explained. “It’s a microcosm of America.”
What makes the Badger State so unique is the independent streak Wisconsinites have.
“There’s this midwest nice sentiment that transcends politics,” Walker said.
Milwaukee, however, still has a very small town feel. People say hi to and look out for one another, something that is missing from larger cities.
“It’s not as dramatic of a culture clash as if someone from New York City met someone from North Dakota,” he said. “Politicians are independent, they’re bold, but they’re courteous. They’re pretty decent towards each other.”
It’s that independent streak that has Wisconsinites vote for both Republicans and Democrats.
“Traditionally, the back and forth, I think is reflective of the fact that because of that kind of evolution from a small town feel, even if we’re still somewhat of a mid-size state and a very diverse demographically, age – every category – race, sex, very diverse state reflective of America,” Walker told Townhall. “I think that because there’s that small town feel, and because there’s a really strong sense of civic responsibility, very high level of volunteerism, one of the highest rates of participation in elections, very high voting turnout, very high civic involvement, and what comes with that is people take it very seriously.”
The other aspect that Walker said plays into is voter registration.
“People can say they’re Democrat or Republican but you don’t have to register as one to vote, unlike many states,” he explained. “I think there’s that independent streak that even if someone traditionally votes one party or another, they take every election seriously. They look at the facts. They look at the person. They weigh it all. And that’s why historically you’ve had votes that seem somewhat contradictory.”
When former Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) was re-elected to his fourth term, Russ Feingold, a rather liberal senator, won his second term.
“People say, ‘How can that happen?’ Again, when you have a state who takes it very seriously and who values people who are plain spoken [and] tell what you’re going to do and do it,” Walker said.
When Walker won the state’s first-ever recall election in 2012, President Obama carried the state.
“We found that about 11 percent of the electorate were people that voted for me and then turned around and voted for Obama, which, politically, makes no sense, but they’re people are very independent,” he explained. “They may not agree with everything each of us did but they like the fact that I didn’t back down with 100,000 protestors and they feel like the president did the things he was doing. And that’s why voters like that, even if they voted for Obama in 2012, are still voters President Trump was able to get a small percentage of … those are the voters they’re fighting over right now.”
According to the former governor, most people think of Wisconsin as a rural state with dairy farms but there’s so much more to the state. While there are dairy farms (and cheese!), Wisconsin also has a heavy logging and industrial presence, especially in the northern part of the state. And those are where voters have felt the most forgotten… until President Trump came along.
“The appeal [Trump] had and where he did well – it was statewide – but particularly well in the northern part of the state, in the 7th and 8th Congressional Districts, in the most northern part of the state, they did exceptional in the 6th too but the two in the north, that’s where people felt forgotten. They’re out of the big media markets. In fact, in the northwest, often times they get their media out of the Twin Cities and not out of the Wisconsin market,” the former governor said. “They feel forgotten. They feel like everybody in the state only pays attention to Milwaukee and Madison and so, in general, they feel forgotten.”
Walked said he made extensive efforts to frequently visit that part of the state because of how constituents felt. He said that paid off.
“They felt like, ‘Hey! Finally, someone knows we’re up here and pays attention to us,’” he explained. It’s Trump’s messaging and focus on those exact voters that helped him carry the state.
“In 2016, the president’s whole message of ‘Hey, I’m fighting for the forgotten man and woman, for too long people made bad trade deals, they’ve come to enrich themselves in Washington, they don’t care for the little guy and gal trying to fight hard just to make ends meet.’ That was a compelling message, along with Donald Trump’s ‘I don’t need this job, I’m going to lose money on this job, I’m going to give my salary back, I just love America, and I’m sick and tired of all these people in Washington screwing us over.’ That in general, but particularly to those people who feel forgotten, is very, very compelling.”
“I think one of the best things he did in the last few months that appeals to those voters, wasn’t even a campaign thing, it was what he did a couple weekends ago when he signed those Executive Orders on unemployment and the payroll tax and a few other things, because here you saw all this bickering in Washington, in the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans couldn’t get their act together and boom, in Trump comes in,” Walker explained. “The media says he can’t do it but he comes in and just does it and I think – not even going to argue about the legality of it – I think to those voters, they look at it and say, ‘This is why we voted for Donald Trump.’”
Today in 1962, the BBC banned playing the newly released “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett on the grounds that it was offensive. To use vernacular of the day, uncool.
Eleven years later, the BBC banned the Rolling Stones’ “Star Star,” but if you play the clip you can hear why (really):
The Kinks had the number one song today in 1964:
A group of 10 Midwest politicians are adding to the voices pleading for the Big Ten Conference to overturn its decision to postpone the fall football season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A letter written by Michigan Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield was signed by nine fellow Republican state legislators — including Wisconsin Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald — and sent to Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren and the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors.“After hearing from many concerned students, parents and coaches, we have been encouraged to convey our support for their wishes and our responsibility to defend the students’ long-term academic and career interests,” the letter reads.
Leaders from Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania also signed the letter.
The letter states the Big Ten’s decision to push back football and other fall sports while other conferences have chosen to play has put the Big Ten and its athletes at a disadvantage, and are costing athletes future opportunities. The ACC, Big 12, and SEC are all on track to play football this fall.
“This is even more frustrating when we think of how our Big Ten athletic programs are leading the way by providing outstanding health and safety protocols. All of that unprecedented planning and teamwork was an unmitigated success, and yet somehow the conference has decided to cast it aside anyway,” the letter reads.The Big Ten COP/C voted 11-3 early last month to not play football this fall, a move that has sparked anger and dissention inside the conference. President Donald Trump spoke with Warren last week about starting the football season “immediately,” but issues with rapid testing availability, COVID-19’s effects on the heart and other factors remain in the way.
Big Ten COP/C bylaws state 60 percent of the council had to vote to nix the fall seasons, so if a vote to restart them held the same standard, six voters would need to flip their vote. Warren released an open letter Aug. 19 stating that the decision to play fall sports “won’t be revisited.”
“The support among players, parents, coaches and fans is overwhelming. Therefore, we respectfully ask that you take their concerns to heart and work with the leadership at our universities to allow sports to continue safely this fall,” the letter reads.
UW has seen a spike in cases since students arrived, and Chancellor Rebecca Blank said Monday she may shut down campus if students in Madison don’t limit themselves to only essential activity — buying food, going to work, attending classes, getting a COVID-19 test, attending a religious observance or participating in academic activities such as conducting research or studying.
Back in June a Yahoo! Sports writer suggested that the aforementioned Warren was trying to influence the presidential election. In June it was about registering student–athletes to vote and engaging in other political activity. One wonders, though, whether Warren’s decision that obviously affects swing-states Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania is designed to get voters angry enough to not vote for Donald Trump.
(The counter to that argument is that a lot of Trump voters are already angered enough by athlete political activism, which of course always seems to be on the Democratic side, to vow they will not watch pro or college games. National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball TV ratings are not good, though ratings are good for the National Hockey League, the league with the least political activism by players. Regardless of how you feel about athletes as activists, alienating the paying customers is not a sound business strategy.)
Who else isn’t getting on to the field, by the way? Marching bands, and you know how important they are.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 