We begin with an interesting non-musical anniversary: Today in 1945, Major League Baseball sold the advertising rights for the World Series to Gillette for $150,000. Gillette for years afterward got to decide who the announcers for the World Series (typically one per World Series team in the days before color commentators) would be on first radio and then TV.
The number one song today in 1965:
Three years later, the singer of the number one song in Britain announced …
Today in 1976, Chicago released what would become its first number one single, to the regret of all true brass rock fans:
The number one song in Britain today in 1964 was brought back to popularity almost two decades later by the movie “Stripes”:
That same day, the Kinks hit the British charts for the first time with …
This was, of course, the number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
That same day, KLUE in Longview, Texas, organized the first “Beatles Bonfire,” where Beatles fans offended by John Lennon’s recent “bigger than Jesus” comment could throw their records to be burned.
The next day, KLUE’s tower was struck by lightning.
Additional respect for free speech came from Rev. Thurman H. Babbs of New Haven Baptist Church in Cleveland, who suggested that Beatles fans be excommunicated.
Two baseball news items sadly chronicle my advancing age.
First: Today is the final day of the baseball career of Alex Rodriguez.
I saw Rodriguez before he was “A-Rod.” Rodriguez’s baseball career began in Appleton in 1994, after he was drafted by the Seattle Mariners. We saw him at Goodland Park in Appleton, playing for the Foxes, one year before the Foxes became the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers and moved to Fox Cities Stadium, and 15 years before the Timber Rattlers became an affiliate of the Brewers.
Rodriguez had quite a 1994 season. He started with the Foxes, then right after we saw him was promoted to Class AA, then to the parent Mariners. Just before the season-ending strike Rodriguez then was demoted to Class AAA so he could keep playing. One year later, he was on the big club for good.
Rodriguez undoubtedly will go down as one of the most famous Foxes/Timber Rattlers (the franchise dates back to 1942). Whether he becomes one of the three ex-Foxes named to the Baseball Hall of Fame depends on how Hall of Fame voters view the players of the steroid/PED era of baseball, such as Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.
Rodriguez is also a symbol of the wacky finances of pro sports, including Major League Baseball. After coming up with the Mariners, Rodriguez signed with the Texas Rangers for $252 million over 10 years. Four years later, the Rangers traded him to the Yankees, and four years after that he signed a 10-year $275 million contract.
Speaking of the Rangers, the Dallas Morning News reports:
Three sources close to the situation confirmed Tuesday that [Prince] Fielder’s career is over after a decade in the majors due to a pair of disk herniations in his neck. An official announcement will be made Wednesday afternoon in Arlington where, presumably, Fielder, still in a neck brace from his second spinal fusion surgery in the last 27 months, will address the decision.
Fielder, 32, will be declared “medically disabled,” as doctors will not clear him to return to baseball over the perilous risk to his spine from the two cervical fusions, according to sources. The Rangers were aware of this possibility at the time he underwent the surgery in July. Teammates such as Adrian Beltre said at the time they were “shocked” over the development. In that regard, the news Tuesday, which broke about an hour before a 7-5 win over Colorado, wasn’t a complete surprise to his teammates, but was depressing nonetheless.
“I don’t know exactly what he is going to say, but his family has to come first,” Beltre said Tuesday after acknowledging that he’d known the situation was dire. “If he’s pushed out of baseball at 31 or 32, that’s tough to swallow. We know how talented he is. But he has to do what is right for him and his family.”
He is due to receive the full remaining value of his contract, roughly $104 million through 2020, unless the sides work out a retirement settlement. The Rangers will be responsible for $44 million of it, Detroit $24 million and another $36 million will come via an insurance policy the Rangers inherited when they traded Ian Kinsler for Fielder after the 2013 season. The Rangers will receive 50 percent of their annual $18 million salary commitment to him via the claim.
As big as those figures are, they still seem a little bit menial when it allows a father of two boys – one a week shy of his 12th birthday and another a rambunctious 10-year old – to actively partake in their growth. It will also allow Fielder to continue to grow his marriage to his wife Chanel, with whom he celebrated his 10-year anniversary on the day the surgery was announced. Fielder has often said that they were kids when they got married and they were kids having kids. They made mistakes together, but still grew a close-knit and also extended family. …
He simply can’t play baseball anymore. His neck won’t allow it without a significant risk of impaired mobility – or worse. It is not a weight issue; as Rangers personnel told me, his neck didn’t carry the burden of carrying his weight. It is more a function of a violent, jerky swing that created incredible force on baseballs, but also incredible torque on the neck.
It seems unthinkable that he has gone from being one of the most durable players in baseball to incapacitated in three years. He played 157 or more games from 2006 until the Rangers traded for him after 2013; only after he experienced some neck stiffness and weakness in his arms two months into the 2014 season. After a sad end to his tenure in Milwaukee and two unhappy years in Detroit, the recovery from the surgery gave him time to rediscover how much he enjoyed playing. He responded with a .305 season and 23 home runs in 2015, but struggled all this season before the latest herniation was discovered.
Fielder, of course, came up with the Brewers, and was part of the 2008 and 2011 playoff teams.
MLB.com gives the Milwaukee perspective:
Drafted seventh overall by the Brewers in 2002, Fielder hit .282 with 230 home runs 656 RBIs over parts of seven seasons in Milwaukee. He ranks third on the franchise’s home run list behind former teammate Ryan Braun and Hall of Famer Robin Yount, is sixth in club history with 439 extra-base hits and seventh in RBIs. Among players to make at least 2,500 plate appearances in a Brewers uniform, Fielder ranks first with a .929 OPS and a .390 on-base percentage.
Fielder’s 50 home runs in 2007, 141 RBIs in 2009 and 114 walks in 2010 are single-season franchise records. His 87 extra-base hits in ’07 tied Yount’s record from 1982, when Yount was American League MVP. Fielder owns the top two seasons in franchise history for home runs, the top two seasons for OPS, and the top three seasons for walks. He’s also the only player in franchise history to play all 162 games in multiple seasons.
“I remember one day I was doing the Kenny Macha show,” Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker said, referring to the former Brewers manager. “Macha tells me he was giving Prince a day off. I said, ‘You haven’t told him yet?’ He said, ‘No, but I’m going to.’
“I looked at him and I said, ‘Kenny, I can tell you right now, that ain’t gonna happen. He might kick your [rear end].’”
Sure enough, Fielder played that day. He set a Brewers record by playing in 374 consecutive games from 2008-2012 before sitting out a game in Houston with the flu. Fielder was so sick that the Astros team doctor administered intravenous fluids, and Fielder still lobbied for a spot in the lineup.
When he did return to action, Fielder started a new streak that spanned 547 games and three teams — the Brewers, the Tigers (who signed him to a free agent mega-contract in January 2012) and the Rangers (who traded for Fielder in November 2013). The 547-game streak, which ended with the onset of his neck woes, is the 25th-longest in Major League history.
“He played so hard all the time,” Uecker said. “If he hit a bouncer back to the mound, he ran his butt off. Every time. That’s the one thing that people should remember about Prince, and I think once people sit back and read this, they will say to themselves, ‘That is right.’ He always ran hard. He played hard. I just liked him, and I appreciated what he did. I played. I know what it is.
“I’m sad, I really am. I talked to him in the spring when they came over the play in Maryvale. We had a really good talk about his family and himself and how good he felt, and how things were going to be better. It didn’t happen. But he’ll always be one of my favorite guys.”
One doesn’t necessarily think of hustle when considering 275-pound (according to the Rangers’ roster, and that might be 30 or so pounds light) baseball players. But Fielder clearly was a team leader for the Brewers, and an enormously clutch player on teams that most seasons had just two power threats, Fielder and Ryan Braun.
Doug Russell adds:
“The doctors told me that with two spinal fusions, I can’t play Major League Baseball anymore,” an overcome Fielder said, flanked by sons Haven and Jayden on one side and agent Scott Boras on the other. “I just want to thank my teammates, all the coaches. I’m really going to miss being around those guys. It was a lot of fun. I’ve been in a big league clubhouse since I was their age, and not being able to play is tough.”
We’ve seen Fielder jubilant and stoic. Until Wednesday, we had never seen tears.
Someday, Fielder will certainly have a Brewers Wall of Honor plaque outside of Miller Park; he already meets several of the criteria, any of which would provide for his enshrinement. Perhaps one day he will have a Walk of Fame induction ceremony at Miller Park as well. As an elector, I plan to vote for him the year he becomes eligible.
After all, his 230 home runs rank third on the team’s all-time list, but his name is littered all over their offensive leaders’ all-time top-ten lists. Fielder is sixth in extra base hits; seventh in RBI’s, eighth in total bases, and ninth in runs scored and career batting average.
Simply put, Prince Fielder is Milwaukee Brewers royalty.
Prince was never a guy who said more than he needed to when there microphones and cameras around. Perhaps he felt betrayed by reporters who wanted to fish around his strained relationship with his father, former MLB slugger Cecil Fielder. Perhaps he was just shy around people he didn’t really know well.
But that’s okay. He was never rude. He just didn’t say much, at least not until the cameras and recorders were gone, and he became the heart and soul of the Milwaukee clubhouse. Craig Counsell called him one of the most influential players he had ever been around.
“I’m sad,” Counsell said shortly after Fielder made his announcement. “The game never lets anybody go when they completely want to, but for somebody like him, he should still be in the middle of a great career. It’s sad that it has to happen like that.”
“It’s heartbreaking for him,” former Brewers teammate Ryan Braun agreed. “I remember how hard he competed. I think he played the game as hard and competed as hard as anybody I ever had on my team. He’s a guy who never wanted to come out of any game, played through so many injuries, wanted to play every inning of every game.”
My generation of Brewers fans had Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. A previous generation had Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn, and Eddie Mathews.
Millennial Brewers fans have Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun.
Life will go on for Prince Fielder and his family; After all, he’s just 32 years old. But a part of him – the athlete part – died on Wednesday.
And even though he had been gone for a half-decade from Milwaukee, a part of Brewers history died too.
Fielder left the Brewers after their last playoff season, 2011. Before that the Brewers decided to give Braun a huge contract and not Fielder, which probably foretold Fielder’s departure. (As it is, Fielder will get $102 million to no longer play baseball.) I think a majority of Brewers fans understood the decision, though, upon looking at Fielder, who already was larger than his father, Cecil, and seemed unlikely to get smaller. Both Fielders basically had bodies meant for the designated hitter position, and indeed both ended up as DHs. (And hit exactly the same number of home runs, 379.)
That, of course, demonstrates the reality of small-market baseball. The Brewers traded for pitchers C.C. Sabathia (2008) and Zack Greinke (2011), but couldn’t keep them. The Brewers developed pitcher Yovani Gallardo, but traded him away because what rebuilding team needs a number one pitcher? (One of the three players for whom Gallardo was traded, Corey Knebel, is with the Brewers; pitcher Marcos Diplan has a 4.62 ERA in Brevard County, Fla.; and infielder Luis Sardinas is already gone, traded to Seattle (and designated for assignment Thursday) for outfielder Ramón Flores, currently batting .202 for the Brewers.) The Brewers traded for outfielder Carlos Gomez, but didn’t keep him either, in part because he’s sort of an underperformer (now batting .210 for Houston). The Brewers developed catcher Jonathan Lucroy, but he’s gone too.
When you have little margin for error, as the Brewers have due to their poor finances, you have to be superior in developing players, particularly since you seem destined to not be able to keep them. The Brewers did not successfully develop anyone to replace Fielder, as evidenced by their playing 24 first basemen since he left. The replacement was supposed to be Mat Gamel, but he (1) missed nearly two seasons due to the same injury, (2) was a butthead according to his minor league manager. and (3) ended up hitting exactly six home runs in his major league career. Then the Brewers acquired Mark Reynolds, who in a 130-game season (platooned with ancient former Brewer Lyle Overbay) had more strikeouts (122, which you’ll note is nearly one per game) than hits (74, for a batting average of .196), and had the unlikely stat combination of 22 home runs and 45 runs batted in. (At least the 2000s answer to Dave Kingman apparently isn’t a jerk like Kingman famously was.) The Brewers did acquire left-handed first baseman Adam Lind one year late, and after a decent season (.277, 20 HR, 77 RBI, .820 OPS) traded him away for three minor leaguers after last season.
The sad irony is that had the Brewers held on to Fielder, this column would be about the end of Fielder’s career with the Brewers. Their current first baseman, Chris Carter, has Reynolds-like stats (.217, 25 HR, 61 RBI, .782 OPS, and by the way 143 strikeouts in 109 games). Carter is claimed to have brought stability to first base, but as someone in his seventh big-league season, well, what you see is what you (are going to) get. The Brewers’ Class AAA first baseman, Andy Wilkins, is now with the Brewers despite hitting just .238 in Colorado Springs; at 27 and in the majors for the second time, he seems unlikely to have a very long career. The Class AA first baseman, Nick Ramirez, is also 27 but hasn’t gotten to the majors yet, and with a .197 batting average he probably never will.
The best first baseman in Brewers history is either Fielder, the aforementioned career leader in OPS who hit 230 home runs in seven seasons, or Cecil Cooper, who hit 201 home runs in 12 seasons with the Brewers, including the team’s first seven winning seasons. After them would be George Scott (for whom Cooper was traded in one of the best trades in Brewers history), who hit 115 home runs in five seasons of some bad Brewers baseball. (Scott hit 36 home runs and drove in 109 in 1975. The Brewers still finished 68–94.) After Prince, Coop and the Boomer? Take your pick.
Right on time for Chicago’s appearances in Appleton Saturday, Rockford Monday and Madison Tuesday, Motor Trend interviewed Chicago trumpet player Lee Loughnane:
While Chicago has celebrated 49 years music that has spoken to several generations, and was just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Lee Loughnane considers his BMW M5 the first real rock-star car he’s ever owned.
“I don’t know if I ever considered myself getting a rock star car, I just got a car to drive around in. I wasn’t going, ‘I’m a rock star, I’m doing this.’ I always felt, ‘I’m a musician and I’m having a great time on the road,’” he says. “And now it’s 50 years later, and I’m going , ‘Oh my God, I still get to do this.’ Now I got a rock-star car with the M5. I definitely consider that a rock-star car.”
He gives his 2008 BMW M5 a perfect 10. “I was looking for a 5 series and there was an M series sitting in the parking lot that was used and for sale. That was after I (drove) the 5 series, it was a 530 or 540,” Loughnane says.
Loughnane test-drove the used 2004 BMW M5 and the salesman suggested taking it up to 70 and then hitting the brakes. “It stopped on a dime, straight as an arrow, there was no swerving at all. I went, ‘Yeah, this is pretty nice,’” he says. “I started driving it around, taking it too fast for particular corners and that sucker would move around the corners with no problem at all. So it really hugged the road nice. It’s a great car. Unbelievable.”
He bought the used 2004 M5 back when he was living in California and that sold him on the model, so four years later Loughnane got a new M5 in 2008. That M5 is his current daily driver.
“I still only have about 40,000 miles on it,” he says , laughing. “This one I’m probably going to drive into the ground, I have what – 200-300,00 miles to go? This one does the same thing however, so I knew that all the M5s were going to be as good,” he says.
He’s planning on keeping this M5 for the long haul but his son has other ideas. “My son wants me to get a new car. He keeps looking at cars on the highway and wants me to get new stuff, and I’m, ‘I’m happy with this, it’s paid off. Come on!’” he says.
The M5 has a nickname. “I call it the Batmobile because it’s so fast off the line. It’s 500 horsepower. It’s fast, it’s like a rocket ship. The biggest problem is I don’t really get to put it through its paces because you can only do 80 miles an hour. I do five miles an hour over the speed limit because I’ve gotten a couple of tickets for doing too much. I’ve had it up to 90, but I don’t want to keep getting tickets, so I don’t do it. But it definitely deserves to be driven and it’s not fair that I can’t put it through its paces. Maybe I should take it down to Bondurant or something when I have some time off,” he says. “We work a lot. And then when I’m home I’m raising my son, taking him back and forth to school and stuff in that car.”
Clearly the M5 is the car that …
I have never driven an M5, but I did drive a 1994 540i with the six-speed once. To say that was nice is a gross understatement, though when a former coworker mentioned the $125 oil changes BMW sells for his 3-series … well, I’ve never had a car whose oil change costs $125.
The story also mentions Loughnane’s first car, first purchased car and favorite drive:
Loughnane grew up in Chicago, where he learned to drive in a 1960 Ford Fairlane 500, “With those big wings in the back, you could you hurt yourself if you ran into those.”
His dad bought it for him for $400 and he passed his driver’s test in it as well. “I was raised in Elmwood Park, city streets. It wasn’t highway driving but there were people going different speeds all at different times, so it was getting used to all that stuff. He didn’t want me borrowing his car anymore. The first night I took it out I got into a fender bender,” he says, with a laugh.
Loughnane drove it to the South Side that night. It was raining and he was too close to the car in front. “He stopped, I hit the brakes, but the brakes weren’t great at the time, we had to get the brakes fixed, and I ran into the guy in front of me,” he says, with a laugh, mimicking his voice back then. “Dad! I had an accident!”
His dad got it for him as his high school car and a neighbor helped teach Loughnane to drive. “My next-door neighbor actually took me out in his stickshift and started teaching me some of that stuff. It wasn’t all that often, but I remember him putting me in the car and teaching a few things about it,” he says. “I met my first wife in California. She had a stick shift, that’s how I learned to drive stick shift, with those hills, learned how to put the emergency brake on it or you slide all the way down the hill.”
Since it was just meant to be his high school ride, Loughnane says the Fairlane “wasn’t that great of a car. On a scale of 1 to 10 I give it about a 4 or 5. It was just a car to be driving around and it gave me independence.”
He adds, it was a good car to learn to drive on, “Figuring out the right side of the road, how to stay in the lane, because looking off the right fender, it always looked like you were closer to that side of the road than you actually were.”
First car bought
Loughnane was one of the founding members of Chicago and by 1971 he was living in Malibu when he bought his first car, a new Pontiac Firebird. “We had made some money with the band at that time, so I was able to buy a car,” he says. “We had a couple records out, we were doing pretty good.”
Comparing it now to his M5 it wasn’t that great, he says, but back then it got him where he needed to go. “I went everywhere in it – practice, to dinner, everywhere, to the airport. And I loved driving though Malibu canyon with it, it was great, with those turns,” he says.
He kept it for a while until one day when he was on the 405 freeway when he got into an accident. “We were coming home from a tour and I remember Robert (Lamm) and Jimmy (Pankow) were in the car with me, and when the cops came up to the scene, they put us in separate areas so we couldn’t practice our story,” he said. ‘They talked to us individually, we all came up with the same story, and they let us go home. They realized it was the other guy’s fault. He had stopped on the highway, you couldn’t tell right away, about 200 yards ahead of us.”
Loughnane got rid of the Firebird after that accident. “I don’t remember what I bought after that,” he says, with a laugh. “I might have bought the CJ-7. By that time, it had the rotating hubs in the front you had to get out to put it into four wheel drive.”
His mid-1970s CJ-7 came in handy for his Malibu life then. “I had a lot of fun with that car because I put a winch on the front of it. It wasn’t good for the radiator, it heated it up for long drives, but just driving around the city and up to my house, I had a house on the top of a hill in Malibu. It was on a dirt road, and the dirt was clay, so when it got wet, it turned to – like ice,” he says, laughing.
It was tough to navigate the dirt road when it rained. “The tires went around it one time, the tires would kick up with the clay and you had no more traction after that,” he recalls. “So if you hit the brakes, you’d slide whatever way the road was graded, so you just had to keep going straight if you could.”
When he did get stuck, the winch helped get him out.
Favorite road trip
Loughnane’s favorite drive is one he does often, driving the two hours from his Sedona home to Phoenix and back. “It’s just really pleasant. I just have a good time doing it. It’s comfortable, the car is great, and I love the drive, I love the scenery. I wish I could take it through its paces more, but I can’t without getting pulled over,” he says, with a laugh.
The route he takes is I-17 north. “It’s running errands, it’s going to the airport to go on the road, for a one-nighter we’ll take a plane over to the gig, play the next day and then the day after that we fly back home, so I just leave my car at the airport,” he says. “If my son has something to do in Phoenix, we’ll drive down there in that. Airport, shopping, there’s more shopping in Phoenix than there is in Sedona, a small town.”
On the drive, Loughnane usually listens to Real Jazz on SiriusXM. “They play some of the greatest stuff,” he says. “I usually listen to jazz and make phone calls. I can catch up on a lot of business too.”
One wonders if Loughnane thinks to himself on one of those I–17 runs …
Loughnane came up with one of the funnier lines in Chicago’s (ridiculously overdue) Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction when he listed the three things he said have never failed him — his trumpet, his lungs and his bandmates — and then added, “I want to thank all my ex-wives for making sure I have to keep working.”
Today in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the first time when they rehearsed at a London studio. You know them as Led Zeppelin:
James Taranto, who is not a Hillary toadie:
A juxtaposition of headlines from the Hill reveals a lot about politics and journalism in 2016: “Clinton to Press: ‘Hold Me Accountable’ ” and “Journalists Applaud Clinton at Event.”
The latter story appeared three minutes after the former Friday afternoon, and both were about the same event. The second story was not a direct response to the first, which is to say the journalists didn’t applaud Mrs. Clinton’s call to hold her accountable. According to a Time.com transcript, they applauded her eight times in all; National Review has a video montage.
Our favorite applause line, as per the transcript: “I served as secretary of state. And when I left, I had a 66% approval rating.” You know who else likes to boast about poll numbers?
Mrs. Clinton’s appearance, at a conference of the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists, was described after the fact as a news conference, though it was really something of a hybrid with a campaign rally. She took seven questions, which the Washington Examiner lists. Most were softballs, but not all.
The biggest news to come out of the Q&A portion came when NBC’s Kristin Welker asked about her latest evasion in the classified email scandal (noted here last Monday). She prefaced a long, rambling answer with a vivid quote regarding the false answer she gave Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”: “I may have short-circuited it.” One must reckon that a setback to the campaign’s effort to “humanize” the candidate.
The Hill reports that “before [Mrs.] Clinton’s appearance, conference staffers went around the room reminding people that it’s inappropriate for journalists to give politicians standing ovations.” So was she speaking to journalists or to supporters of her candidacy?
That line seems even more blurred than usual this year, and some journalists find that acceptable. Jim Rutenberg writes a column for the New York Times business section called “Mediator” (it’s about mass communications, not dispute resolution). In today’s paper he raises the following question:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Before we consider Rutenberg’s answer, let’s try offering one of our own: Maybe you shouldn’t. If you have such a strong opinion about one of the major candidates, perhaps you shouldn’t be reporting on the election. You could request a transfer to another beat, or to the opinion section. If you really feel strongly about preventing Trump’s election, perhaps you should consider a career change. You could go to work for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, or for one of the many independent advocacy organizations that support it.
Rutenberg never considers these possibilities. Instead, he wants to bring the mountain to Muhammad:
If you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
He notes that Trump and his backers “are reprising longstanding accusations of liberal bias”:
A lot of core Trump supporters certainly view it that way. That will only serve to worsen their already dim view of the news media, which initially failed to recognize the power of their grievances, and therefore failed to recognize the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
This, however, is what being taken seriously looks like.
Hang on a second. Is Rutenberg claiming that journalists—who, whatever their biases, have heretofore maintained at least the pretense of fairness and balance—have never taken a candidate seriously before? Or that they are not taking Mrs. Clinton seriously?
Another way of putting the media-bias complaint is that conservatives—including some who oppose Trump—have long seen the media as tilting toward the Democratic Party and taking an “oppositional” posture toward Republicans. Rutenberg is recommending that they dispense with the veneer and embrace open partisanship.
He doesn’t put it that way, of course. He tries to justify his proposed departure from journalistic standards with an appeal to journalistic ideals: Not to treat Trump differently from other candidates, he argues, would “be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world.”
There are two obvious problems here. First, “what the candidates will be like” is a matter of speculation, not a fact that can be “ferreted out.”
Second and more important, the premise of Rutenberg’s column is that reporters have already made up their minds about Trump. If that is the case, then what they are ferreting out is facts that reinforce their preconceptions, and that they hope will persuade voters to cast ballots against Trump. That’s called “opposition research,” and it is a job for campaign operatives, not journalists.
Rutenberg acknowledges that the approach he recommends “is more than just a shock to the journalistic system. It threatens to throw the advantage to his news conference-averse opponent, Hillary Clinton, who should draw plenty more tough-minded coverage herself.” Well, yeah—though that would seem to be the objective, would it not?
The greater threat from the abandonment of journalistic standards is that it compounds the danger to the country if Mrs. Clinton is elected. In that event, our partisan press would no longer be oppositional. They would be mere servants of power, to an even greater extent than they have been for the past 7½ years.
What Winston Churchill said about an adversary — “He spoke without a note, and almost without a point” — can be said of Donald Trump, but this might be unfair to him. His speeches are, of course, syntactical train wrecks, but there might be method to his madness. He rarely finishes a sentence (“Believe me!” does not count), but perhaps he is not the scatterbrain he has so successfully contrived to appear. Maybe he actually is a sly rascal, cunningly in pursuit of immunity through profusion.
He seems to understand that if you produce a steady stream of sufficiently stupefying statements, there will be no time to dwell on any one of them, and the net effect on the public will be numbness and ennui. So, for example, while the nation has been considering his interesting decision to try to expand his appeal byattacking Gold Star parents, little attention has been paid to this: Vladimir Putin’s occupation of Crimea has escaped Trump’s notice.
It is, surely, somewhat noteworthy that someone aspiring to be this nation’s commander in chief has somehow not noticed the fact that for two years now a sovereign European nation has been being dismembered. But a thoroughly jaded American public, bemused by the depths of Trump’s shallowness, might have missed the following from Trump’s appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
When host George Stephanopoulos asked, “Why did you soften the GOP platform on Ukraine?” — removing the call for providing lethal weapons for Ukraine to defend itself — Trump said: “[Putin’s] not going into Ukraine, okay? Just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down and you can put it down, you can take it anywhere you want.”
Stephanopoulos: “Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?”
Trump: “Okay, well, he’s there in a certain way, but I’m not there yet. You have [President] Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama, with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this, in the meantime, he’s going where — he takes — takes Crimea, he’s sort of — I mean . . . ”
What Trump, in that word salad, calls the “certain way” that Putin is in Crimea is called annexation, enforced by the Russian army. But Trump — channeling his inner Woodrow Wilson and his principle ofethnic self-determination — says what has happened to Crimea is sort of democratic because “from what I’ve heard” the people of Crimea “would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
Before the interview ended, Trump expressed his displeasure with the schedule for presidential debates, two of which are on nights with nationally televised NFL games. (There are such games three nights each autumn week.) “I got a letter from the NFL,” Trump claimed, “saying this is ridiculous.” The NFL says it sent no such letter. But before this Trump fib/figment of his imagination/hallucination can be properly savored, it will be washed away by a riptide of others. Immunity through profusion.
The nation, however, is not immune to the lasting damage that is being done to it by Trump’s success in normalizing post-factual politics. It is being poisoned by the injection into its bloodstream of the cynicism required of those Republicans who persist in pretending that although Trump lies constantly and knows nothing, these blemishes do not disqualify him from being president.
As when, last week, Mike Pence reproved Obama for deploring, obviously with Trump in mind, “homegrown demagogues.” Pence, doing his well-practiced imitation of a country vicar saddened by the discovery of sin in his parish, said with sorrowful solemnity: “I don’t think name-calling has any place in public life.” As in “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz and “Little Marco” Rubio and “Crooked Hillary” Clinton?
Pence is just the most recent example of how the rubble of ruined reputations will become deeper before Nov. 8. It has been well said that “sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.” The Republican Party’s multicourse banquet has begun.
We begin with a non-musical anniversary, though we can certainly add music:
On Aug. 11, 1919, Green Bay Press–Gazette sports editor George Calhoun and Indian Packing Co. employee Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a former Notre Dame football player, organized a pro football team that would be called the Green Bay Packers:
(Clearly the photo was not taken on this day in 1919. Measurable snow has never fallen in Wisconsin in August … so far.)
Today in 1964, the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” opened in New York:
Two years later, the Beatles opened their last American concert tour on the same day that John Lennon apologized for saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus. … Look, I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than God or Jesus, I said ‘Beatles’ because it’s easy for me to talk about The Beatles. I could have said ‘TV’ or ‘Cinema’, ‘Motorcars’ or anything popular and would have got away with it…”
James Taranto analyzed Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Convention speech to prove a point about Hillary’s belief that “It takes a village to (do something that requires a new or expanded government program in her view)”:
Hillary Clinton reminded us of what is least appealing about Donald Trump. She then proceeded to remind us of what is least appealing about her. (To be more precise, what is least appealing about her apart from the corruption and nepotism.)
“Don’t believe anyone who says, ‘I alone can fix it,’ ” she exhorted the audience at home and here, in the Wells Fargo Center:
Yes, those were actually Donald Trump’s words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? I alone can fix it? Isn’t he forgetting troops on the front lines, police officers and firefighters who run toward danger, doctors and nurses who care for us, teachers who change lives, entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem, mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe? He’s forgetting every last one of us.
And remember, remember, our Founders fought a Revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power.
Two hundred forty years later, we still put our faith in each other. Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers. Police Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them. And you know how the community responded? Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days.
That’s how Americans answer when the call for help goes out.
This was excellent work by Mrs. Clinton’s speechwriters, at once inspiring to the listener and merciless to her opponent.
In fairness to Trump, it was based on a misinterpretation of his comment—and surely a deliberate one, as there is no question of the literacy of Mrs. Clinton’s speechwriters. Here is what he said … in Cleveland, with some context:
I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves.
Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders—he never had a chance.
(As an aside, that last bit turned out to be truer than anybody outside the Democratic National Committee and WikiLeaks knew, didn’t it?
Trump didn’t say, “I can fix it alone,” which is the claim Mrs. Clinton rebutted so effectively. His meaning was Only I can fix it—a more highly energetic formulation of a vanquished rival’s slogan, “Jeb can fix it.” Whether it is true that Trump can fix it, or that nobody else can fix it, is an open question.
But understood properly, the claim is no more than a bit of promotional hyperbole, similar to the assertion, often repeated in Philadelphia (though not by Mrs. Clinton herself) that she is the “most qualified” man, woman, other type of adult, or child ever to seek the presidency. It’s laughable when taken literally, but then so are most sales pitches.
Further, “I alone can fix it” had rubbed us the wrong way, and the subtle difference between it and “I can fix it alone” didn’t occur to us until after Mrs. Clinton had finished speaking and we were thinking about what to write about her speech. That means it likely occurred to very few of her listeners. And by the standards of political rhetoric, her twisting of his meaning was quite mild.
In sum, Mrs. Clinton effectively exploited her opponent’s poorly chosen phrase, and did so in a way that was almost fair. Good show. But then she went on:
Twenty years ago I wrote a book called It Takes a Village. And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, what the heck do you mean by that? This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
America needs every one of us to lend our energy, our talents, our ambition to making our nation better and stronger. I believe that with all my heart. That’s why “stronger together” is not just a lesson from our history, it’s not just a slogan for our campaign, it’s a guiding principle for the country we’ve always been and the future we’re going to build, a country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top.
In the first part of her passage, she spoke of archetypal individuals—the soldier, the policeman, the teacher. That was an invitation to listeners to think of particular individuals they know and admire.
But then she got to “the village,” where everyone is subsumed in a drab collective to “heal a community or lift a country”—whatever that might mean. In the lengthy programmatic portion of her speech, Mrs. Clinton made clear that it means an ever-expanding army of administrators paid by taxpayers to meddle in their lives.
“He doesn’t like talking about his plans,” Mrs. Clinton said of Trump. “You might have noticed I love talking about mine.” Someone inclined toward individualism might reasonably conclude that Trump alone might possibly leave you alone.
One other disjunction struck us about Mrs. Clinton’s speech and the convention. Especially during the closing night, the Democrats made a great show of patriotism.American flags were everywhere during Mrs. Clinton’s speech. One wondered if the Democrats had given up on identity-politics balkanization, in favor of the American identity.
Sorry, no. Toward the end of her speech, Mrs. Clinton said this:
And we will defend all our rights, civil rights, human rights and voting rights, women’s rights and workers’ rights, LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities.
Without disputing the merits of any of the “rights” Mrs. Clinton enumerated, we will observe that each of them (with the possible exception of “human rights”) is an appeal to a particular voting bloc.
And what about constitutional rights? Well, Mrs. Clinton pledged that she would curtail the right of free speech: “If necessary, we will pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!” She didn’t mention that Citizens United vindicated the right to distribute a movie critical of Hillary Clinton.
She also said: “I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not here to take away your guns.” Uh-huh, and there was no classified information, and Nixon was not a crook.
Mrs. Clinton was easier to listen to than we’d expected; having attended both nominees’ acceptance speeches, we are surprised to report that Trump’s was considerably shoutier. Although it runs counter to conventional expectations, we are less surprised to report the Democratic Convention was much more fractious than the Republican one. Mrs. Clinton was interrupted at least a dozen times by hecklers, who were quickly drowned out by chants of HIL-LA-RY!
All in all, the Democrats put on a good show and made a strong effort to disqualify Trump as a crazy, risky candidate. They even made explicit appeals to Republicans and conservatives. But Mrs. Clinton made clear last night that she is anything but conservative. And the Real Clear Politics polling average finds 68.9% of Americans saying the country is on the “wrong track.” … We’ll find out if the Dems’ appeal to risk-aversion is enough to overcome all that.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 