Office of the Independent Blogger

Bill Kristol made an interesting prediction today: Dick Gephardt for Vice President of the United States. It’s been written recently that John Kerry wanted Gephardt but changed his mind at the last minute, although it has also been written that Kerry wanted Dick Durbin to be Vice President, too, and changed his mind when he decided that he couldn’t run with a fellow Catholic for fear of a backlash against the ticket. I must say that I think Gephardt would be a fine choice for the political balance he would bring to the ticket, but Michael Dukakis chose Lloyd Bentsen to add more traditional liberalism to the ticket and an older figure with foreign policy credentials, and we see what that got him. Obama will sink or swim on his own merits, but Gephardt might help safeguard the Midwest from Republican intervention so he is worth a long look.

An old friend from the Chicago Debate League looked me up on Facebook recently and sent me a note saying, “I was actually reminded of you by an assignment for school. We’re reading some of the Federalist papers in my humanities class and I remembered the first time I had ever heard someone discuss them was when you spoke about them in a debate speech.” There’s very little I like more than contact with old friends, especially those that I held in high regard. I hate losing touch with people.

It has been a time-consuming weekend. Now I’m just relaxing with the film “Forrest Gump,” on TBS. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love that movie.

Forgive me for being busy lately, but final exams tend to take up time. The work I put in seems to have paid off as I aced three of the exams I took and performed adequately on the one I expected to perform just-adequately on, so there is no disappointment on my part. More than anything, I am relieved to have ended the semester as I expected to end it: with very good grades and a variety of new friends made. I had five classes this spring and took four finals, with one portfolio due in a poetry class in place of an exam. I wish I had been assigned more papers and portfolios than tests, but I did fine anyway. I simply am not fond of exams because I think they do not measure a student’s anything particularly well.

Now if you wonder why this entry is so brief, Dear Reader, since final exam week is over, I would answer that it is final exam celebration weekend. I will return in greater detail tomorrow, but for now I refer you to this article about Grand Theft Auto’s artistic and political value. Quote of the article? “I found that Grand Theft Auto actually offered a less sensational portrait of gangland and ghetto streets than the one put out by most cops, politicians, policymakers, and even academics.”

Guess we didn’t capture the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. We captured the name of a person who has the name as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In Iraq. How embarrassing for the Iraqi government.

We’ve captured the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Where did we capture this leader? In Iraq. This is good news for obvious reasons. Now pardon me, as I have one last final to take tomorrow and a good night’s sleep followed by a morning of study to come.

I haven’t seen the election summed up
this concisely before.

A Clinton adviser said the situation was increasingly becoming one in which ’she cannot be nominated and he can’t get elected.’ ”

Obviously, the election is a ways away, so we have to wait and vote, but I thought I’d pass the quote along as I suspect it is accurate. Or will be, anyway.

It is super hot, I have a string of difficult finals before me and I have made significant progress on a few projects I’ve been stuck on but can’t work out the kinks further because, again, I have exams! Briefly, let me say that it is clear Hillary Clinton is not going to be the Democratic nominee without another significant Barack Obama bombshell landing. Jeffrey Toobin raised the possibility tonight that northwest Indiana was engaging in vote fraud, and if there’s a shred of truth to that it’ll change the dynamics of the race but now Obama is going to be the nominee for as-sure-as-you-can-be-in-politics-pre-convention and it does not appear likely that Senator Clinton will be able to stop him. For better or for worse, Obama is going to lead the Democrats into battle against John McCain, and while I suspect it’s for the worse it is clear that Clinton should withdraw and allow him to take the fight to McCain. I am worried about the blue collar support Obama is going to have to scrap for against John McCain and I am concerned that Obama might lead to a demographic realignment in favor of McCain-Republicanism but we’ll have to wait and see for all that. He’s won the Democratic Primaries fair and square, even if the game here is much different than the big show.

Reading Slate this morning only re-affirms my belief that Barack Obama will be rocked by John McCain. A Democrat cannot win without significant Catholic support, and for reasons detailed in this article I am not sure Obama can win a significant percent of the Catholic vote. When we factor in elitism, and his failure to succeed with white working class voters, the smoke around Obama becomes thicker. After he loses Indiana and barely holds onto North Carolina, there should be even more question about his prospects in November.

The man who is the closest thing I have to a father wrote an article a few years ago for his hometown newspaper, and he shared it with me over email the first time we corresponded after meeting at the University. I gave it another read today while researching my weekly baseball column. In it, he pauses to recognize his “dear reader” and as I began to type this entry, I smiled realizing how much Jon and I have in common. Not just because we occasionally refer to our “dear reader” in our writings, but you can read it for yourself and figure it out.

Back to our regularly-scheduled programming, there are two articles I would recommend to you, Dear Reader, that have a lot more to do with problems in the black church and black community than with baseball. Gary MacDougal’s Jeremiah Wright’s Wider Toll, published in the Washington Post, is a thought-provoking read and Christopher Hitchens’ article from awhile back, while a lesser-read than MacDougal’s, is still worthy of one and I recommend it here.

I have some friends over and despite the fact that this is not a political gathering one of them made the point that John Edwards would be the strongest candidate for President against John McCain. I ask, “Are you kidding me? He’s a trial lawyer whose homestate would have rejected him in 2000 had he stood for re-election. An Edwards-McCain race would be disastrous, like Bush 41 versus Dukakis Zzzzzz.” This isn’t the first time I’ve had this conversation with someone, and I know what everyone says: he’s young, Southern, charismatic and passionate, but they forget that he is sanctimonious, repetitive and a known loser who also happens to be famous for his work in one of the most unpopular fields in America. That is not a winning recipe. So my friend says, “Over at Slate — your favorite magazine — they wonder where he is when he can change the race and get one of the candidates to promise to put him on the Supreme Court!” What do I think, she wants to know. I say, No one wants Edwards’ endorsement that bad because he isn’t fit to be a Supreme Court Justice and he probably isn’t all that powerful in North Carolina. He does have nice hair, though.

Yesterday at an end-of-the-year party, a Russian literature Professor and I were having a talk about a variety of subjects. She asked me how much longer I had to graduate and I said, “A few years.” She said, “Really? What year are you?” and I said, “First year.” That caused her to literally do a double-take, and when she recovered her jaw from the floor she said, “No way.” This isn’t all that unusual: people who meet me typically think I’m a few years older than I am because, as the Professor put it, I “do not have the composure of a first-year.” I’d like to think it’s because I’m too busy to shave more than once a week, but others will form their perceptions as they will.

As our conversation went deeper, I told her at one point that my ambition is to be a politician. I wish I had the words to describe the look on her face. I told her not to lose all her respect for me at once — “I can see your respect for me leaving you, Dr.” She said I was too good and smart a person to want to be a politician. This isn’t the first time I’ve ever heard that, either. But it always makes my heart sing to know that someone thinks highly of me. I sent her an email last night asking if she’d prefer me to word the sentence “I want to be a politician” as “I want to be a statesman.” She answered that this was preferable as “the crookedness and conniving of many politicians seems antithetical to your character.”

I went for a workout today. It’s the first time I’ve formally lifted weights since last spring, but I felt and feel good. I think it’s time I tone up again, and I was inspired to do so when my best friend took me rock-climbing a few weeks ago and I was able to climb it but not without much fatigue. I bring that up because yesterday was also his end-of-the-year mathematician party, and I felt a great sadness when I said goodbye to Louis Kauffman for a month as he travels to Europe. Fortunately he’ll be back in late June when my best friend defends his masters thesis, but I will miss him and told him so. Despite all the premature sadness, it was a hilarious farewell. I came into his office to find my best friend sitting alone. So, I sat down at the desk I always sit down at and set Lou’s umbrella up to cover any view of me. When he entered the room, he said, “Ah! Mr. Pratt! Are you under the weather?”

It wasn’t as good as a few weeks ago when he was focusing exclusively on a math problem and I walked into the office, sat down and began reading Edward Teller’s Conversations on the Dark Side of Physics until Lou Kauffman looked up and said, “It appears that Mr. Pratt has snuck in.” D.C. told me that Lou’s surprise was worth a thousand words.

Unlike most students, I am not happy that the semester is (almost) over. I’ll be thrilled when the examinations are done with, because I think examinations are generally unhelpful, but I will miss school. It’s a good thing I am as independently motivated as I am and have a million projects in my back pocket. Several weeks ago, my friend Jonathan referred to me as “hard-working” and while I am “hard-working” and have always been “hard-working,” it was the first time someone had ever referred to me as “hard-working.” It’s strange, but in a lot of ways I feel as if all the recognition and respect I crave for, all the positive thoughts I’ve always had about myself, are being shared by other people. I don’t know if people have always seen me these ways or if they’re just starting to notice, but I appreciate kind words.

One of the best things someone has said to me in a long time was in Los Angeles, on my “vacation,” where a man asked me how I could afford to travel across the country for three days, just because I felt like it. I said, “I flew Southwest. And really, I have money saved up here and there, so when the opportunity to visit someone and someplace was extended to me, I took it. I take my opportunities. And I needed a good break. I’ve been overworked and….. –” My friend’s friend interjected: “–under-loved?” and she gave me a hilarious eyebrow raise.

There was a time when this wouldn’t have been funny to me, of course, and I wouldn’t have been free to travel to Kentucky or Indiana or Tennessee, let alone California. I was certainly under-loved and under-appreciated in high school and over-protected in high school, but that’s changed drastically and the quality of my life has been outstanding lately. Since last summer, I can count maybe five “bad days.” Nothing’s perfect, of course. Nobody’s perfect. But I feel like I am a member of a community for the first time in my life, and while this isn’t a conclusion I arrived at today it is one that I didn’t begin to articulate until recently.

I’ve been writing this on my laptop as I wait for it to be closer to noon so that I can go into my work offices and edit like a good censor extraordinaire. I don’t know if that’s a glimpse into my character character character! or not, but there you go, Dear Reader. I’ll be back to blogging about politics later tonight or tomorrow, depending on whether or not I go out this evening or have people over.

Strong words from Paul Krugman today, as he discusses Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric in the campaign toward various policies here.

[b]oth Democratic candidates have been saying things they shouldn’t; Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have endorsed the bad idea of a gas tax holiday. But I think Mr. Obama is doing much more harm to the Democratic cause by echoing Republican attack lines on such issues as insurance mandates and Social Security. And now he’s demonstrating his post-partisanship by giving Republicans credit for good ideas they never had.

That is just the conclusion of the article, and while I have “spoiled” the ending I do recommend you give it a good read.

While we’re at it, I’d like to update this entry about McCain’s refusal to allow the North Carolinan Republican Party to run a Jeremiah Wright advertisement by noting that McCain now says the reverend is fair game. By all means, I’ve known from the beginning that the GOP will use Wright to batter Obama until November but I thought McCain himself was better than that. I guess not.

Following up on this story, the Bush Administration has asked for seven hundred million more dollars in food relief for poor countries. Good news.

The news that Nelson Mandela is on our terrorist watch-list is more embarrassing than sinister, but it was the last thing I expected to see when I checked the news this morning. Then I read this story about an Australian politician who doubles as a chair-sniffer. On my way to the University I picked up a copy of the Chicago Reader and Dan Savage wrote in his column this week that he couldn’t find right-wing outrage over the disturbing polygamous sect that was busted in Texas. I agreed that it was odd and shameful for people who are up-in-arms over gay marriage to ignore such a story of rape and polygamy. Next, I came across a new article on the Austrian man who has imprisoned his daughter in his cellar all her life and fathered children with her, where he threatened to “gas” her and forced her to write a letter at one point saying that she’d come back to her home in time (he’d told the family that she fled to “join a cult”). There are strange earthquakes occurring in Reno, and just a couple of weeks ago there was an earthquake in central Illinois that I felt here in Chicago in the middle of the night. I have a variety end-of-the-semester tasks to take care of, much research on Herbert Hoover and a mild tummy ache. I don’t know what to make of today!

I often declare on this blog that I love Slate magazine, and this entry demonstrates exactly why.

“Right here, over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets,” Hillary Clinton says in a TV spot currently airing in Indiana. The camera zooms in on a shuttered factory in Valparaiso, Ind., formerly operated by a defense contractor called Magnequench—one of two Indiana facilities the company closed down after it was purchased by a Chinese consortium. Clinton’s voice-over continues:

They were good jobs. But now, they’re gone to China, and America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts. George Bush could’ve stopped it, but he didn’t. As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here and to turn this economy around. … American workers should build America’s defense.

Just one little problem. As blogger David Sirota points out, the Chinese consortium’s acquisition of Magnequench occurred way back in 1995, when Hillary’s husband was president. Before the sale could go through, it had to be approved by an executive-branch panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Apparently it was, partly in deference to highly implausible promises by the Chinese that the weapons parts would continue to be built in the United States. (The takeover was also greased by participation in the deal by Archibald Cox Jr., son of the revered Watergate prosecutor and Common Cause chairman, now deceased.) In 2003 the Chinese welshed on its promises and moved production to China, prompting Sen. Evan Bayh, D.-Ind., to ask President Bush to intercede. Apparently Bush had some legal authority to force Magnequench’s return to U.S. ownership, but even Hillary seemed to concede, in a speech two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, that such a move was impractical at that late date. (“Couldn’t do it.”) The point is that no such divestiture would have been necessary had Hillary’s husband disallowed the deal eight years earlier.

Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They’re building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we’re basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.

It’s an irony that should be pointed out, and I’m glad Slate did it for the record. I likely would have noticed it myself, but I haven’t seen any of the advertisements of late as I have been busy with historical research and studying for the finals that are a week away. And that has been an emotional and intellectual drain. I don’t necessarily want the term to end, as I love being in school and taking classes, but I hate ultimately-superficial examinations. If I had my way, our final exam in our International Relations course would consist of a game of Risk!