January 30, 2007
William Pfaff and America’s Role in the World Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST William Pfaff has a piece in the current New York Review of Books, and if one knows Mr. Pfaff’s style, it is not uncharacteristic. If one enjoys the Pfaff style, the piece displays cool irony and magisterial calm in the face of the threat posed to the world by the cretins and villains who have been administering American foreign policy since 1945. If one does not enjoy the Pfaff style, the tone may seem marred by Olympian pronouncements, a fair amount of preening and sneering, and rather less knowledge of history than those Olympian tones seek to suggest. In this example, Mr. Pfaff observes that the Bush administration has been “making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.” Mr. Pfaff is quick to reject the idea that the United States has any such status and thinks himself boldly heretical for doing so: “It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not. This is a national conceit that is the comprehensible result of the religious beliefs of the early New England colonists (Calvinist religious dissenters, moved by millenarian expectations and theocratic ideas), which convinced them that their austere settlements in the wilderness represented a new start in humanity's story.” Freely conceding the religious origins of the sense of American exceptionalism, there were and are some remarkable things about America, and one of them, relevant today, is our unprecedented degree of relative military power. While Mr. Pfaff thinks that military power is fairly useless, this is rarely the view of people who do not possess it, when faced by people who do, on which more below. In this case, as in many others, Mr. Pfaff is urging a much less interventionist stance by the United States. What may undercut this advice is Mr. Pfaff’s peculiar misunderstanding of the older international order he apparently seeks to resuscitate. Attacking Condoleezza Rice, he observes that “she said that the time had come to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute state sovereignty.” Actually, the Westphalian system did not establish the principles of religious tolerance as we now understand them: it did quite the reverse. It established the principle of cuius regio euis religio, which meant that the religion of a sovereign would henceforth be the religion of his or her subjects, if the sovereign so chose, and most did. A sovereign could enforce this preference by torture and mass murder, and often did. Under the Westphalian system, other sovereigns renounced the right to interfere whenever this occurred. Religious toleration, of course, is normally understood to be the opposite of this practice. Mr. Pfaff seems very sure that military power, American or other, has little or no role to play in checking the power of sovereigns against heretical or otherwise objectionable minorities. In the wake of Rwanda and Bosnia and in the midst of Darfur, he is very sure that U.S. military power deployed in what its defenders call humanitarian interventions only makes things worse. Of course, in the case of Rwanda, it is hard to say how it could have made things worse, and in the case of Bosnia, it seems, when belatedly applied, to have almost instantly made things better. In many ways, the Pfaff essay is enormously depressing, but I do find it heartening that within three days of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, someone at Arts and Letters Daily had the wit to post Mr. Pfaff’s essay on the Internet. Somebody over there seems to have a sense of humor, if a rather dark one.
January 29, 2007
Paul Krugman and Partisanship II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:00 PM EST Fredric Smoler quotes the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as follows: “The signature domestic policy initiatives of the Bush administration have been attempts to undo F.D.R.’s legacy, from slashing taxes on the rich to privatizing Social Security. And a bitter partisan gap has opened up between the G.O.P. and Democrats, who have tried to defend that legacy.”
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I have zero respect for Paul Krugman. He used to be an economist, and perhaps he still is when he’s teaching at Princeton. But on the editorial page of The New York Times he is a hyper-partisan of the left and will write whatever suits his agenda, leaving out and twisting facts as necessary to make everything George Bush’s fault. As the Times’s own first public editor, Daniel Okrent, wrote, “Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”
Krugman’s two-sentence history of modern American politics above is a case in point. Slashing taxes on “the rich” did not originate with George Bush. In postwar America it originated with the Democrat John F. Kennedy, who pushed for reductions in the top marginal rate from 90 to 70 percent. Kennedy did not live long enough to sign the bill, but his successor, Lyndon Johnson, an FDR apostle if ever there was one, shepherded it through a Democratic Congress and signed it into law in 1964. It was the Democrat Jimmy Carter who signed the bill, passed by a Democratic Congress, that lowered the capital-gains tax rate in 1978. It was a Democratic House that passed President Reagan’s tax cut proposals in 1981, and a Democratic House that passed his second tax cuts—lowering the top marginal rate to 28 percent, lower than it is today—in 1986. Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the bill in 1997 that lowered capital-gains tax rates yet again. George Bush is merely continuing a trend pushed by both parties, intermittently to be sure, over the last 40-plus years, a trend that has had an altogether beneficial effect on the economy as a whole and on people living from one end of the socioeconomic spectrum to the other. Since you won’t read it in Paul Krugman’s column, here’s an interesting fact. Government revenues have benefited too. The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Tax Committee estimated that George Bush’s proposed cutting of the capital gains tax from 20 percent to 15 percent for the upper brackets (it’s now only 5 percent for the bottom two brackets), would cost the Treasury $5.4 billion in lost revenues from 2003 to 2006. They were off by a mere $133 billion. The CBO thought capital gains tax receipts in 2006 would be $57 billion. They were $110 billion. So these “unconscionable tax cuts for the rich” made the federal government richer by far. As for Social Security, it seems to me that FDR’s legacy is the idea of a mandatory retirement program to secure the old age of all American citizens, not the legal requirement that the funds generated by the program be invested solely in federal bonds, which pay less than any other investment. Paul Krugman has consistently misrepresented what George Bush proposed, as, of course, has The New York Times. As a result, we are now two years closer to the Social Security train wreck that is inevitable if we leave the system as it is. Allowing that train wreck to happen would be the ultimate undoing of FDR’s legacy.
January 29, 2007
The Strangeness of Sports Records: Seven Questions for Allen St. John Posted by Allen Barra at 04:35 PM EST Allen St. John writes the “By the Numbers” column for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. His latest book, Made to Be Broken: The 50 Greatest Records and Streaks in Sports (Triumph Books) deals not only with the greatest achievements in sports but with America’s obsession with big numbers. I recently talked with him about this.
Not to turn you into an amateur sociologist, but what do you think is behind American sports fans’ obsession with breaking records?
Records and record-keeping are really what make a sport a sport. Why is golf a sport, but ballet isn’t? It’s not about athleticism, it’s about competing and keeping score. It’s about who’s better and who’s best. And in this context, a great record is a dare. It a taunting voice from the past that says, “Hey, top this—if you can.”
Does it seem to you sometimes as if many fans don't even know about the existence of a particular record until someone is about to break it?
The most relevant records are the ones that are at least in some danger of being broken. No one cares about the record for triples in a season. It’s not that Chief Wilson is better than Jose Reyes; it’s that the stadiums and the game have changed so much that even the fastest players of today have no shot at hitting 36 triples or anything close to it. On the other hand a record that gets broken a couple of times a year—like world records in swimming and speed skating—seems cheap and disposable. The best records get broken every now and then, but they don’t go down without a fight.
In recent years, numerous record have been broken that no one would have thought possible just a few years ago. Is there really any such thing as a record that can never be broken, and if, so, what would your top nominations be?
Before last season, nobody would have thought that a contemporary player could break Wilt Chamberlain’s record of scoring 100 points in an NBA game. But in the process of scoring 81 against Toronto, Kobe Bryant actually scored a higher percentage of his team’s points than Wilt did. So all of a sudden the NBA single game scoring record seems a lot more vulnerable than it did only 18 months ago.
One of the records that people always refer to as being unbreakable is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. While it’s stood for a very long time, I think it’s much more vulnerable than most fans think. After all, against top college competition, Robin Ventura managed to put together a 58-game hitting streak. And right now we’re in a period where the game is being played in hitters’ parks and a lot of runs are being scored, which translates into more plate appearances per game. That said, if the record does get broken, I don’t think it’s going to be by an all-time great like Albert Pujols or A-Rod. I think it’s much more likely to be a guy who’ll be able to get 30 games under his belt while flying under the radar, like Jimmie Rollins or Luis Castillo.
My vote for the all-time most unbreakable record? Johnny Van Dermeer’s record for consecutive no-hitters. To break it a guy would have to throw three no-hitters in a row. That’s an easy way to win a bar bet, right there.
Is there perhaps a different definition of what constitutes a record now than in decades past? I’m thinking of two things. First, several years ago when Larry Holmes looked like he might win 49 consecutive fights, many in the sports press began saying that he had a chance to break Marciano’s “record” of 49-0. But I never heard Marciano or anyone else talk about going 49-0 as a record until Holmes began to approach it. I’m also thinking of when Jose Canseco hit 40 home runs and stole 40 bases in the same season, the first player ever to do so, and Mickey Mantle commented, “If I’d-a known they were going to make such a fuss about it, I’d-a done it.” I think there’s a point to what Mantle was saying. Aren’t some of what we call records basically media creations?
No doubt, and it’s not a new phenomenon. When DiMaggio was on his hot streak in 1941, they actually had to go back and figure out that Wee Willie Keeler held the hitting streak record. It wasn't common knowledge. The consecutive games streak wasn’t a big deal when Gehrig broke Everett Scott’s mark, but for better or worse it was a national event when Ripken passed Gehrig. But a year later, when Ripken broke the world record held by Sachio Kinugasa of the Hiroshima Carp, there were only about half a dozen of us who noticed. Part of it, of course, is that we simply have more stats and better research at our disposal now. But the bottom line is that all records aren’t equally important, and it’s up to the fans—and the media—to decide which ones really resonate.
One of the best things about Made to Be Broken is that you cover every major sport from team sports to NASCAR, golf, and tennis. Some are obvious while some are not so but deserve to be—for instance, I didn’t know until I read your book that the Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina won more Olympic medals than any other athlete in Olympic history. Which of these unsung records do you find most interesting?
There are a few records that I particularly like. In baseball, what is every hitter’s goal when he comes to the plate? It is, one way or another, to come around and score. Well, that’s what Rickey Henderson did 2,295 times, more than any other player in major league history. Ty Cobb set the old record back in 1925, and every great player in baseball history—Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle—had a chance to break the record but couldn’t. And yet when Rickey broke the record it was the third biggest baseball story of the week, behind Barry Bonds’s seventieth homer and Tony Gwynn’s impending retirement.
You can’t help but be impressed with the résumé of Michael Schumacher, the Formula One driver. He owns every significant record—wins, championships, points—in a tremendously competitive sport. But even though he’s the highest salaried athlete in the history of the world, no one in American knows who he is.
The last one that I really like is Mike Austin and the longest drive in pro golf history. He was a 64-year-old teaching pro, but in the U.S. Senior Open in Las Vegas in 1974 he whacked a ball 515 yards, farther than Tiger Woods or John Daly ever did. And this wasn’t a fluke. Austin was a real pioneer in swing theory, but his short game was so bad that his best pro finish was thirty-seventh. In a way, that hole was a microcosm of his career. Austin drove past the green and three putted, so the longest drive in the history of professional golf only set him up for a bogey.
I noticed that you put Cal Ripken, Jr.’s consecutive-games streak last on your list of 50. Many fans would argue that it should be number one on the list. Why so low?
This one’s a huge pet peeve of mine. I only included Ripken’s record to make the argument against it. I see this as a glorified perfect attendance record, like that weird kid in your homeroom who came to school with whooping cough just so he wouldn’t be marked absent. A meaningful record should represent an aspect of excellence in the game. Well, I think there’s no question that Mr. Ripken and the Orioles would have been better off if he had taken a few days off. If you graph the career of most hitters, it looks like a bell curve. They get better and better every year, reach a peak in their mid- to late twenties, and then begin a decline. Ripken’s career looks more like a ski slope. He had his best year in 1983 at age 22, winning the MVP and his team winning the World Series, and from there—with the exception of his second MVP year in 1990—he began a long slow decline. And the Orioles were just a few games over .500 during his streak and made the playoffs only twice. The longer the streak went on, the worse Ripken played. It has always struck me as truly amazing that a player can be allowed to put his pursuit of a record ahead of the team. And because of his lunch-pail image, Ripken never got called on it. Sports columnists are so quick to criticize the high school kid who scores 100 points in a game against an overmatched opponent or a guy like Rickey Davis, the NBA player who took a shot at the opposing basket with the game out of reach so that he could get a rebound and complete his first triple double. These guys were putting themselves ahead of the game, but they were doing it in garbage time. Ripken cost his team games year after year, and cost himself—and us—a chance to see if he could top Honus Wagner as the greatest shortstop ever. Ripken gets my vote as the most selfish player in baseball history.
If you could look into a crystal ball at an edition of Made To Be Broken from the year, say, 2027, what new records would be likely to have been added to the contents?
A lot of sports fans tend to look at the record book as the canon. But as I’ve said before, I think that many records are more vulnerable than we imagine. Only with hindsight do we see how it’s possible. I think the state of the game determines which records are vulnerable, and right now baseball is in a hitter-friendly phase, football has placed an increased emphasis on passing, and hockey is moving toward an era of shooting and scoring instead of clutching and grabbing. So I think all the records at the top of the list are vulnerable. The baseball home run record could trade hands several times, even after Bonds passes Aaron. Jerry Rice knew that Randy Moss was on record pace for many receiving records, which is why Rice tried to hang on as long as he did. Could Sidney Crosby challenge Wayne Gretzky’s records? It’ll be fun to watch.
One other huge wild card: advances in sports science. Sport medicine is already allowing players to have longer careers, so they don’t go limping out of the game in their early thirties the way Mickey Mantle did. On the other hand, while sports have been very quick to declare victory in the war on performance-enhancing drugs, the reality is that each succeeding generation of performance-enhancing drugs is more effective and harder to detect. And gene doping could change the landscape in ways that we simply can’t comprehend now.
January 28, 2007
Paul Krugman and Partisanship Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:25 PM EST Paul Krugman had a column in Friday’s New York Times, “On Being Partisan,” commenting on Barack Obama’s lamentation that “politics has become so bitter and partisan, and that’s what we have to change first.” Krugman confidently demurs: “Um, no. If history is any guide, what we need are political leaders willing to tackle the big problems despite bitter partisan opposition.” Krugman goes on to claim that the main source of partisanship is the growing polarization of the American economy. On this account, American politics were bitterly partisan in the past because income distribution was then harshly unequal, and “the Republican Party, in effect, represented the interests of the economic elite, and the Democratic Party, in an often confused way, represented the populist alternative.” Krugman thinks that once Franklin Roosevelt evened out income distribution with the New Deal, Republicans became more civil, until Republicans began to undo the New Deal, and as a result American politics is again bitterly partisan, as a result of attempts by Democrats to defend what remains, with Republicans trying to entomb that residue: “The signature domestic policy initiatives of the Bush administration have been attempts to undo F.D.R.’s legacy, from slashing taxes on the rich to privatizing Social Security. And a bitter partisan gap has opened up between the G.O.P. and Democrats, who have tried to defend that legacy.” Krugman seems to think the newly-victorious Democrats should in effect struggle to provoke partisanship: “Politicians who try to push forward the elements of a new New Deal, especially universal health care, are sure to face the hatred of a large bloc on the right—and they should welcome that hatred, not fear it.” One problem with Krugman’s argument is his implied and very partial definition of “partisanship,” which in the context of Obama’s remarks may have meant not only the incivility and hatred to which Krugman adverts but also the tendency to rank the defeat of political opponents over the interests of the country. Obama explicitly distinguished partisanship from mere bitterness. To give two examples: When President Clinton attempted to reform health care, Senator Dole sought a compromise—he conceded that was a real problem, and wanted to do something about it—whereas William Kristol is said to have thought that wholly defeating Clinton’s initiative would produce the greatest gain for the Republican party. Kristol’s views prevailed, and the Republican Party probably did gain from that outcome, but the country lost. A comparable case may be some Democrats who long and wisely insisted that the administration had refused to send enough troops to Iraq but now seek to block any increase in the number of American troops in Iraq, possibly on the theory that a complete defeat for the President is preferable to trying to avert the worst outcomes in Iraq. This simplifies the situation, for people can have sincere motives for opposing both national health care and any protracted military involvement in Iraq, and they can also delude themselves about their true motives for opposing either measure. In either case, partisanship means consciously or unconsciously putting the defeat of a political adversary ahead of any other consideration. So the same total opposition to a President can be either partisan or principled, and my guess is that Obama was talking about the first sort of motive. An additional example: If Krugman, for many years a pretty committed free-trader, were to attack free trade when it was endorsed by his political opponents, and do so in an attempt to seek political advantage for his party, he would become, in the pejorative sense of the word, partisan. Partisanship in this sense means cynical calculation, and all parties can be guilty of it. Another problem with Krugman’s tight focus on partisanship in quarrels over distributive justice is that partisanship in current American politics has sadly little to do with the defense of what remains of the New Deal. It has had a lot to do with the war in Iraq, with some of the war’s defenders aspersing the patriotism of the war’s opponents, and some of the opponents calling the war’s defenders at best apologists for a fascist administration. Venomous political language also infests discussions of religion in America, with people accusing their enemies of being either the Devil’s friends or the American Taliban. Our political contests over many truly economic questions have been by comparison relatively decorous. The Democrats were much less outraged by bankruptcy “reform,” for my money a shocking piece of class legislation, than they are about the proposed surge. Yet another problem with Krugman’s account of partisanship is that it assumes that bitter political divisions in American history were always “really” about economic issues, especially questions of distributive justice. But bitter political divisions could occur over non-economic questions, and did: inter alia, about race, ethnicity, abortion, religion, and war. Sometimes racial politics was inflected by clear economic interest, but not always, and the same is true of foreign policy and war. Even if you truly believe that the Iraq War is really about oil and Halliburton’s profits, what about the Vietnam war? That war produced some venomous political divisions in this country, but it seems peculiarly absurd to say that the political struggles over Vietnam were “about” economic advantage for one section of the population. Similarly, slavery was not, for many abolitionists, a question of economic interest. There is something irredeemably vulgar about assuming that “real” political questions are always about the same thing. The worst problem with Krugman’s account of partisanship is that it misdirects our attention from the psychology and mechanics of politics, and from other places worth looking. Krugman, by training an economist, may here simply be exhibiting what the French call professional deformation; he assumes that politics, about which he may know very little, is always concerned with something about which he knows a great deal. It is also possible that Krugman, himself sometimes an aggressive partisan in several senses of that word, cannot understand a disease from which he occasionally suffers. It is the nature of injustice that when we practice it ourselves, and are careful to cloak it in the passion of indignation, our motives become wonderfully elevated in our own eyes.
January 26, 2007
FDR in His Own Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST Hardly anyone these days, except my old classmate Jim Powell, regards Franklin Roosevelt as anything but an American icon, the greatest, and certainly the most consequential, President of the twentieth century.
But he was, of course, a deeply controversial figure in his own time and sometimes raised a firestorm of opposition. This year, for instance, is the seventieth anniversary of his “court-packing” plan, where he proposed allowing the appointment of extra justices to the Supreme Court, up to as many as fifteen, one extra justice for every one on the bench over 70 years of age. The result was a huge political uproar and, in August 1937, a stunning defeat for the man who had won 46 of the 48 states just 10 months earlier.
Professor Alasdair S. Roberts of Syracuse University has put together a fascinating slide show of political cartoons regarding the plan.
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