Wailing Into The Void

When I first read and Hillary’s latest comments and then had a chance to see her making them, I found myself more or less in agreement with the view that she had merely clumsily used an unfortunate example of a primary campaign that lasted beyond May.  She meant no harm, but her opponents were quick to perceive sinister motives.  I still believe that in this case, but as Melinda Hennenberger at Slate points out there have been an awful lot of seemingly innocent statements emanating from the Clinton campaign that get “misinterpreted” in ways that appear to serve her interests.  My paranoia is on the rise.

Al Giordano over at The Field is reporting that superdelegate Dennis Cardoza’s defection from Clinton to Obama may be the first of at least 40 delegates who are ready to switch allegiance from Clinton to Obama.  Is this the End of The Beginning of the End?

Josh Beckett won’t return Pat Jordan’s phone calls, and Jose Canseco is proving to be elusive as well.  Jordan uses these and a number of other personal anecdotes to demonstrate how the stature of magazine writers has been greatly diminished in the world of professional sports over the last several decades.  He takes a while to reach the story of his own ephinany on the matter.  It came while watching a young Deion Sanders ham it up for a TV crew:

It was at that moment I realized that the tide had turned for print journalists like myself. Why should Deion waste his time talking to someone like me, who might write an embarrassing story based on my perceptions of him? TV cameras didn’t have perceptions, only images, which Deion could control. There was no analysis in Deion’s TV interview, just his flamboyant image and whatever words he wanted to use to create the image of “Prime Time.”

He laments this turning of the tide as a bad thing, claiming that it’s something of a shame that fans today don’t really get to know their favorite professional athletes the way they used to.  Maybe it’s bad for guys like Pat Jordan who no longer have the access to the stars they once enjoyed, but I wonder if fans in general really care about this kind of stuff.  

Sure, there was a time not so long ago when a Sports Illustrated profile was something most athletes coveted, and that profile would be widely read by fans around the country.  But that was also a time before twenty-four hour sports channels, sports radio and the internet.  Your typical sports nut experienced a lot of down time back in the 60’s and 70’s.  Sports Illustrated gave them something to fill it with.   Maybe fans were just thirsty to read anything about their favorite sports stars, whether it be an in-depth personal profile or a total puff piece.

I’m guessing Leon Kass is not a big pizza guy.

Will Bob Barr’s candidacy help Obama in the fall?  I’m not sold yet, but Noah Millman thinks it’s a real possibility.

A new SuveyUSA poll shows Obama leading McCain by seven points there.

For those of us who believe in the wisdom of free markets, this might be a little disturbing:

Investors rushed to buy oil futures contracts as far forward as December 2016, pushing their prices as high as $139.50 a barrel, up more than $9.50 on the day. The spot price hit a record $129.60 a barrel.

Veteran traders said they had never seen such a jump and said investors were increasingly betting on the idea that production would soonpeak because of geopolitical and geological constraints.

From FiveThirtyEight.com:

6:16 PM. It’s one thing for a campaign surrogate to spin information, but Terry McAuliffe just flat out made something up on Hardball, claiming that there was a general election poll in Kentucky that showed Hillary Clinton ahead of John McCain. If such a poll exists, there is no evidence of it anywhere on the Internet. I also heard him make the same claim about a week ago, so it wasn’t any kind of misspeak.

With the polls set to close in Kentucky at 7:00 pm eastern time and Clinton apparently poised to rack up a big win there, we seem likely to be treated to another round of yammering from the talking heads about how Obama has trouble winning white working class voters.  Little will be made of the fact that Oregon, whose polls close at 11:00 pm eastern time and where Obama seems poised to win decisively, is lily-white and arguably no less working class than Kentucky.

George Packer’s current piece in the New Yorker offers a nice account of the apparent decline of the conservative movement and how it got to this point.  Lots of plausible explanations are offered: the movement is a victim of its own success, and once it had achieved its primary goals the movement ran out of ideological steam; the movement was always more interested in building an electoral majority and less so in the actual job of governing; the movement defined itself too much in terms of what it was against and not enough in terms of what it was for; the movement’s underlying disdain of government was never really shared by a majority of Americans; etc.  Whatever the reasons, the consensus seems to be that conservatives are in for a rough ride in the short term and in need of some kind of shakeup in the longer term  - either a back-to-basics return to fundamentals approach or some kind of reformation.