Winning is a mindset. Dems just haven't accepted the fact that they are popular and could freaking run the table if they acted like it and weren't running scared all the damn time.
So why can't their message be strong safety net? Affordable health care and education, strong middle class. Eisenhower era but for women and ethnic, religious, and sexual/gender minorities? The message that let FDR and Johnson run the table?
Clinton, Obama, and Biden ran moderate, third-way campaigns based explicitly around rejecting leftism, and they won. They credited their wins to hippie bashing and left bashing. Gore, Kerry, and Hillary did the same thing and lost by respectable and polite amounts.
That's their whole move. A 40 year career of being a hardcore moderate, Hillary makes one speech where she, with tons of equivocation, suggests maybe some, a few, Trump voters are deplorable and it's all anyone remembers. She supported the Iraq War and was against same sex marriage until 2010, but she's been recast in the popular imagination as some far-left radical.
So they learned. Moderate, kiss the butt of the right and openly insult the left = victory or a graceful loss. Why do anything else?
The new ones do. The so-called squad and squad-adjacent. Also the new to elected office, like Warren. Sanders was holding down the fort by himself for a long time.
It's so, SO dumb. It barely worked against Trump and he was the actual President. How is "One of 435 people is a raging bigoted nutbag!" a sellable message? Who cares?
The problem is, the Democratic voter base has trained the Democratic party to be total equivocating wimps who don't care about actual policy. For a generation, the country moved hard left economically, but it was papered over by social issues. Candidates got popular support based on birth control, same sex marriage, legalising weed. And the way activists framed those stories in the media, was emotional. There was an enemy and it was a Christian nutjob like Pat Robertson. An old man out of touch. Some lecturing Sunday school teacher. They were evil and hateful, and being against abortion or same sex marriage meant there was something mockable about you as a person. (This is the same tactic the right uses when they rail against the woke, or cancel culture, but that's another discussion).
So the wimps in the Democratic party learned that as long as they appeared like our concept of educated, cool, urbane liberal, screw actual policy. March in the Pride Parade. Speak foreign languages. Read the right books. Make fun of the dumb religious culty hicks who wear slips and drop their monocles when they see a gay couple.
So that's what the Democratic party will do. Run on culture war garbage, "lol look at the dumb redneck and Jew space lasers, what a joke" and we won't notice they don't offer anything. I remember that for much longer than it should have, a D politician could march in a pride parade and be against same sex marriage.
Another Cubs fan here and I fully and completely agree. In '15, when they beat the Cardinals to go to the NLCS, I actually thought, 'Oh, god. I have to keep doing this.'
My wife and I have been together 17 years and we started dating basically the day before Game 6 of the NLCS in 2003. She still, somehow, joined in the Cubs fandom and I have the most amazing picture of her, face down in on an ottoman during the '16 World Series. What the picture didn't capture was her yelling, "AAAAAAAUUGGGGHH THIS IS SO STRESSFUL." That basically sums it up.
I worked with a lawyer years ago who used to say “there’s no means test for being delusional.” Between Montfort, ramshackle skyscrapers and Q, that idea feels like today’s theme.
Also, I was going to give you a hard time about the Delmonico thing, but I didn’t want to have a cow.
The entire Delmonico thing went over my head until I saw your spelled stakes wrong. Even then, it wasn't until I saw A-1 in the next line that I finally put it together.
Delmonico is the preferred cut for me, even though I believe that it's basically just a thick rib eye. I got what he was cooking right away.
There was another Twitter thing this week that asked for the most expensive thing that you ever paid for that wasn't worth it and one of the answers, from someone who I'm pretty sure is a subscriber to this newsletter, suggested Filet Mignon, and then posted an article featuring a dozen chefs backing him up. A good steak should have some marbling, that's where the flavor comes from, and so I always look for Delmonico when I buy steaks.
Thanks for taking Ken down a peg. His articles have been infuriating. I’d take 10 Verducci videos on his ballot over another labor article by Rosenthal.
I, too, grew up in a time a place where people worked in factories and made enough to own a home (and another "up north") , took vacations and sent their kids to college. They worked damn hard but their labor was compensated fairly. They drove the economy and created more jobs for everyone else. And now there are people who actually think that $15/hr is too much to pay those same people. Reading about the Flint sit-down strike struck a chord in my heart. And those last two paragraphs -- Jeebus, Craig.
It's more than minimum wage. It's that we saw value in workers. The biggest mistake the labour movement made was to not aggressively try to bring retail and service workers under the big unions. We need to see folding sweaters or making coffee the same was we do working in an auto factory or a coal mine. Or driving an uber. Or being a hospital orderly. Or being a receptionist. Or an agriculture worker. The fact that we don't explains a lot of the current problem.
But we don't. Maybe it's because these jobs are done by women or minorities. Maybe it's because we see them as temporary. Or unnecessary. But it's impossible to even conceive of a McDonald's cashier ever owning a house. Or even a studio apartment without roommates.
A friend of mine from law school tried to organize the workers in a Borders (remember when there were 2 bookstores?) warehouse in Flint, of all places. To say that it didn't go well, is an understatement. The UAW and Teamsters both tried to organize at the same time so one group could never get enough cards to get NLRB recognition, the workers kept getting better jobs so no one who did sign stayed long enough to take ownership of the effort. Eventually my friend gave up and became a rabbi.
Clergy - one of the few jobs that exists fully outside the free market. Good for him. I think there needs to be widespread union organization on the part of retail workers. Even for temp/seasonal jobs.
My unpopular baseball take concerns Dwight Gooden. His career narrative is simplified to “generation talent falls off obvious Hall of Fame track due to substance abuse.” That’s essentially true but he also suffered a serious shoulder injury that robbed him of his best stuff at an early age. I contend that his career would not have come out much differently than it did even if he had never used drugs.
Another argument in favor of eliminating the post-season: we’d lose all the terrible “but he can’t get it done when it *really* counts” arguments that people for years would drag out against Clayton Kershaw or, in the NFL, Peyton Manning. I’ve literally seen people reduce 20 year careers down to seven or 14 games where they maybe underperformed and conclude a player really wasn’t that great. It’s infuriating.
My favorite part of that article was the description of Ms. Abramovich and her husband as “retired business owners who worked in the oil and gas business” just like my cousin Leroy who runs the Quik Lube over on South Main.
I thought a lot of the big condos were foreign tax shelters? They were seen as wins for big cities, especially NY, because they bring in tax revenue but don't cost a thing for services since no one lives there? Money that, in theory, trickles down?
We turned every big city into a fancy resort town. It was a very, very, bad idea.
Another take away is, ,just because the private sector built it for the very rich doesn't mean it's well made.
I think supertalls are fine all in all, If they are built well and can free up other housing. I think the tenor of that article was essentially trying to discourage other supertalls. my yimby tendencies didn't like that
Yeah a lot of it is aesthetic. What’s the point of living in [any big city but especially New York] if it’s not full of real New Yorkers? People want to live in the New York of the Mad Men era at the absolute latest. Ideally earlier. They want to take the subway to Ebetts and play stickball with Willie Mays and hang out with Sinatra at Toots Shor’s. To be there at the birth of hip hop and see the Ramones at CBGB before they were famous.
What’s the point now, when the brownstones are cookie cutter condos and none of the artists or immigrants can afford the city any more? When it’s rich transplants shopping at pressed juice bars?
We’re hungry for community and we don’t know how to say that.
Sadly, I agree completely with your last bit about the middle class.
Growing up outside of Detroit, in the shadow of the Big Three in the '90s, I had a somewhat acute awareness of what middle class is; it's a little different in Michigan, I feel like, because of the UAW and the legacy therein.
As I've navigated life and moved away from Detroit and moved through my own career path and watched the world change in the last decade especially, I couldn't help but just think... is the middle class an aberration, a historical bump? History is resistant to lasting change - and it's hard to find a lot of historical instances of a sustained "middle class". What happened in middle of the 1900s was, I think, a combination of things - a reaction to the robber baron era, a reaction to the depression, and a reaction to World War II - and those things both created and ultimately sustained a middle class.
Those things have eroded, in large part because the wealthy saw ways to erode them and reestablish the previous, historically dominant, order. I think the handling of stimulus money during COVID has been particularly telling in the US, that we are full swing in a new robber baron era, and we'll see what comes of it. Maybe it's better in other countries; I don't know, I'm here.
I don't think a middle class is natural. Left to inertia, we'd have a powerful few at the top and a big group of poor people barely surviving. Business and government would be corrupt hellholes.
Middle class exists because we create artificial boundaries. Unions. Tenure. Licenses for cab driving and hair styling and plumbing. Wage and labour laws. All these are unnatural, but we need them. We have to accept that the idea of a free market is nonsense, and we need artificial constraints.
I hate post season baseball so much, I'm a fan of the Indians.
I'm a fan of the Indians. I hate post season baseball so much.
But seriously, you left out the biggest difference between regular season baseball and post season baseball: "We'll get 'em tomorrow," just doesn't exist.
I read this somewhere some years ago, but baseball transcends time and space. As long as you get the 90 feet and the 60'6" part right, a baseball field can be any size. And, the first baseball game played 160 years ago could still be going on. There's no clock to run out.
It puts a finite end to it and I also feel like that's when the non-regional announcers really get to dictate their narrative of baseball. Beyond hearing things like "Gleyber Torres is only 12 years old" 56 times per game, they seem to push ideas (pitch clock, game length, labor issues, etc.) on a national level to the casual fan in a way that makes it sound like they, too, think baseball is an inferior sport because of the very basic, enjoyable things that Craig listed.
I've always thought it should be the dreaded 3-person booth. One national announcer and then one regional announcer from each team. While it might be messy from a commentary flow perspective, it could be amazing to have people who know each team weigh in with more than just "I think the key to this inning is for the pitcher to throw the ball and for the catcher to catch it."
It used to be, they would trade off innings. During the top of the pandemic I watched a few world series games. I think one was 56? Dodgers/yankees at any rate. Few innings of Allen, a few innings of barber.
Clearly, the raccoons were getting into the hot garbage...
Winning is a mindset. Dems just haven't accepted the fact that they are popular and could freaking run the table if they acted like it and weren't running scared all the damn time.
So why can't their message be strong safety net? Affordable health care and education, strong middle class. Eisenhower era but for women and ethnic, religious, and sexual/gender minorities? The message that let FDR and Johnson run the table?
Clinton, Obama, and Biden ran moderate, third-way campaigns based explicitly around rejecting leftism, and they won. They credited their wins to hippie bashing and left bashing. Gore, Kerry, and Hillary did the same thing and lost by respectable and polite amounts.
That's their whole move. A 40 year career of being a hardcore moderate, Hillary makes one speech where she, with tons of equivocation, suggests maybe some, a few, Trump voters are deplorable and it's all anyone remembers. She supported the Iraq War and was against same sex marriage until 2010, but she's been recast in the popular imagination as some far-left radical.
So they learned. Moderate, kiss the butt of the right and openly insult the left = victory or a graceful loss. Why do anything else?
The new ones do. The so-called squad and squad-adjacent. Also the new to elected office, like Warren. Sanders was holding down the fort by himself for a long time.
It's so, SO dumb. It barely worked against Trump and he was the actual President. How is "One of 435 people is a raging bigoted nutbag!" a sellable message? Who cares?
The problem is, the Democratic voter base has trained the Democratic party to be total equivocating wimps who don't care about actual policy. For a generation, the country moved hard left economically, but it was papered over by social issues. Candidates got popular support based on birth control, same sex marriage, legalising weed. And the way activists framed those stories in the media, was emotional. There was an enemy and it was a Christian nutjob like Pat Robertson. An old man out of touch. Some lecturing Sunday school teacher. They were evil and hateful, and being against abortion or same sex marriage meant there was something mockable about you as a person. (This is the same tactic the right uses when they rail against the woke, or cancel culture, but that's another discussion).
So the wimps in the Democratic party learned that as long as they appeared like our concept of educated, cool, urbane liberal, screw actual policy. March in the Pride Parade. Speak foreign languages. Read the right books. Make fun of the dumb religious culty hicks who wear slips and drop their monocles when they see a gay couple.
So that's what the Democratic party will do. Run on culture war garbage, "lol look at the dumb redneck and Jew space lasers, what a joke" and we won't notice they don't offer anything. I remember that for much longer than it should have, a D politician could march in a pride parade and be against same sex marriage.
I'm also a Cubs fan and I'm with you about '16 and '17. Absolute misery despite the unsurpassed joy of the final out in 2016.
The post season is like the regular season with far more stress.
Who needs more stress?
Another Cubs fan here and I fully and completely agree. In '15, when they beat the Cardinals to go to the NLCS, I actually thought, 'Oh, god. I have to keep doing this.'
My wife and I have been together 17 years and we started dating basically the day before Game 6 of the NLCS in 2003. She still, somehow, joined in the Cubs fandom and I have the most amazing picture of her, face down in on an ottoman during the '16 World Series. What the picture didn't capture was her yelling, "AAAAAAAUUGGGGHH THIS IS SO STRESSFUL." That basically sums it up.
I worked with a lawyer years ago who used to say “there’s no means test for being delusional.” Between Montfort, ramshackle skyscrapers and Q, that idea feels like today’s theme.
Also, I was going to give you a hard time about the Delmonico thing, but I didn’t want to have a cow.
Your take on the post season isn't unpopular with me. Your most unpopular baseball take for me is your pro-DH position,
The entire Delmonico thing went over my head until I saw your spelled stakes wrong. Even then, it wasn't until I saw A-1 in the next line that I finally put it together.
Lost all the vegan potential subscribers with one paragraph! Though you might grab those who appreciate clever; maybe they have no beef with you.
Those vegans are soy annoying. They should just shut tofu up.
Me too, I read "steaks" and thought, "oh, Craig." Then the light bulb went on and I went back and read it from the beginning.
Not me! I caught it from... okay, fine, I caught it from the same moment as Perry.
Delmonico is the preferred cut for me, even though I believe that it's basically just a thick rib eye. I got what he was cooking right away.
There was another Twitter thing this week that asked for the most expensive thing that you ever paid for that wasn't worth it and one of the answers, from someone who I'm pretty sure is a subscriber to this newsletter, suggested Filet Mignon, and then posted an article featuring a dozen chefs backing him up. A good steak should have some marbling, that's where the flavor comes from, and so I always look for Delmonico when I buy steaks.
Now I want one.
Thanks for taking Ken down a peg. His articles have been infuriating. I’d take 10 Verducci videos on his ballot over another labor article by Rosenthal.
Let's not say things we regret.
That was said upon much reflection on the level of pain I’m willing to bear.
BUT, it needs to be narrated by Tom Rinaldi, Jimmy Roberts, and Jeremy Schapp in unison with borrowed camera gauze from the Beth Littleford Interview.
I, too, grew up in a time a place where people worked in factories and made enough to own a home (and another "up north") , took vacations and sent their kids to college. They worked damn hard but their labor was compensated fairly. They drove the economy and created more jobs for everyone else. And now there are people who actually think that $15/hr is too much to pay those same people. Reading about the Flint sit-down strike struck a chord in my heart. And those last two paragraphs -- Jeebus, Craig.
It's more than minimum wage. It's that we saw value in workers. The biggest mistake the labour movement made was to not aggressively try to bring retail and service workers under the big unions. We need to see folding sweaters or making coffee the same was we do working in an auto factory or a coal mine. Or driving an uber. Or being a hospital orderly. Or being a receptionist. Or an agriculture worker. The fact that we don't explains a lot of the current problem.
But we don't. Maybe it's because these jobs are done by women or minorities. Maybe it's because we see them as temporary. Or unnecessary. But it's impossible to even conceive of a McDonald's cashier ever owning a house. Or even a studio apartment without roommates.
this thing here. [finger pointing up]
As I am currently reading “High Rise” by JG Ballard your notes on the tensions of among the rich and pampered tenants certainly struck a note.
A friend of mine from law school tried to organize the workers in a Borders (remember when there were 2 bookstores?) warehouse in Flint, of all places. To say that it didn't go well, is an understatement. The UAW and Teamsters both tried to organize at the same time so one group could never get enough cards to get NLRB recognition, the workers kept getting better jobs so no one who did sign stayed long enough to take ownership of the effort. Eventually my friend gave up and became a rabbi.
Clergy - one of the few jobs that exists fully outside the free market. Good for him. I think there needs to be widespread union organization on the part of retail workers. Even for temp/seasonal jobs.
My unpopular baseball take concerns Dwight Gooden. His career narrative is simplified to “generation talent falls off obvious Hall of Fame track due to substance abuse.” That’s essentially true but he also suffered a serious shoulder injury that robbed him of his best stuff at an early age. I contend that his career would not have come out much differently than it did even if he had never used drugs.
Yeah, Gooden’s story is one as much in favor of strict pitch/inning limits on young pitchers as it is about the perils of drug use.
Which might make my unpopular take that pitch counts are actually good.
Didn't he throw like 200 innings in rookie ball?
Not sure about rookie ball, but 744 MLB innings before your 22nd birthday probably wouldn’t happen today.
Another argument in favor of eliminating the post-season: we’d lose all the terrible “but he can’t get it done when it *really* counts” arguments that people for years would drag out against Clayton Kershaw or, in the NFL, Peyton Manning. I’ve literally seen people reduce 20 year careers down to seven or 14 games where they maybe underperformed and conclude a player really wasn’t that great. It’s infuriating.
My favorite part of that article was the description of Ms. Abramovich and her husband as “retired business owners who worked in the oil and gas business” just like my cousin Leroy who runs the Quik Lube over on South Main.
I thought a lot of the big condos were foreign tax shelters? They were seen as wins for big cities, especially NY, because they bring in tax revenue but don't cost a thing for services since no one lives there? Money that, in theory, trickles down?
We turned every big city into a fancy resort town. It was a very, very, bad idea.
Another take away is, ,just because the private sector built it for the very rich doesn't mean it's well made.
I think supertalls are fine all in all, If they are built well and can free up other housing. I think the tenor of that article was essentially trying to discourage other supertalls. my yimby tendencies didn't like that
Yeah a lot of it is aesthetic. What’s the point of living in [any big city but especially New York] if it’s not full of real New Yorkers? People want to live in the New York of the Mad Men era at the absolute latest. Ideally earlier. They want to take the subway to Ebetts and play stickball with Willie Mays and hang out with Sinatra at Toots Shor’s. To be there at the birth of hip hop and see the Ramones at CBGB before they were famous.
What’s the point now, when the brownstones are cookie cutter condos and none of the artists or immigrants can afford the city any more? When it’s rich transplants shopping at pressed juice bars?
We’re hungry for community and we don’t know how to say that.
Sadly, I agree completely with your last bit about the middle class.
Growing up outside of Detroit, in the shadow of the Big Three in the '90s, I had a somewhat acute awareness of what middle class is; it's a little different in Michigan, I feel like, because of the UAW and the legacy therein.
As I've navigated life and moved away from Detroit and moved through my own career path and watched the world change in the last decade especially, I couldn't help but just think... is the middle class an aberration, a historical bump? History is resistant to lasting change - and it's hard to find a lot of historical instances of a sustained "middle class". What happened in middle of the 1900s was, I think, a combination of things - a reaction to the robber baron era, a reaction to the depression, and a reaction to World War II - and those things both created and ultimately sustained a middle class.
Those things have eroded, in large part because the wealthy saw ways to erode them and reestablish the previous, historically dominant, order. I think the handling of stimulus money during COVID has been particularly telling in the US, that we are full swing in a new robber baron era, and we'll see what comes of it. Maybe it's better in other countries; I don't know, I'm here.
I don't think a middle class is natural. Left to inertia, we'd have a powerful few at the top and a big group of poor people barely surviving. Business and government would be corrupt hellholes.
Middle class exists because we create artificial boundaries. Unions. Tenure. Licenses for cab driving and hair styling and plumbing. Wage and labour laws. All these are unnatural, but we need them. We have to accept that the idea of a free market is nonsense, and we need artificial constraints.
I think that you need to treat postseason baseball as its own sport. Regular season is long, languid, the better teams separate themselves over time.
Postseason uses the same rules, but it's a completely different game and a complete crapshoot.
I hate post season baseball so much, I'm a fan of the Indians.
I'm a fan of the Indians. I hate post season baseball so much.
But seriously, you left out the biggest difference between regular season baseball and post season baseball: "We'll get 'em tomorrow," just doesn't exist.
I read this somewhere some years ago, but baseball transcends time and space. As long as you get the 90 feet and the 60'6" part right, a baseball field can be any size. And, the first baseball game played 160 years ago could still be going on. There's no clock to run out.
But the post season puts a finite end to it.
It puts a finite end to it and I also feel like that's when the non-regional announcers really get to dictate their narrative of baseball. Beyond hearing things like "Gleyber Torres is only 12 years old" 56 times per game, they seem to push ideas (pitch clock, game length, labor issues, etc.) on a national level to the casual fan in a way that makes it sound like they, too, think baseball is an inferior sport because of the very basic, enjoyable things that Craig listed.
Wouldn't it be great if the local announcers could call the games instead? How cool would that be?
I've always thought it should be the dreaded 3-person booth. One national announcer and then one regional announcer from each team. While it might be messy from a commentary flow perspective, it could be amazing to have people who know each team weigh in with more than just "I think the key to this inning is for the pitcher to throw the ball and for the catcher to catch it."
Diggin it
It used to be, they would trade off innings. During the top of the pandemic I watched a few world series games. I think one was 56? Dodgers/yankees at any rate. Few innings of Allen, a few innings of barber.