The baseball commissioner struck out and went down swinging, thinking he could drink his own bathwater.
Rob Manfred’s All-Star Error
The commissioner politicized baseball over a law he likely hadn’t examined.
Major League Baseball decided last week to move the All-Star
Game out of Atlanta after the Georgia Legislature passed changes to the state’s
voting laws that many, including President Biden, called racist. Activists
urged Commissioner Robert Manfred to punish Georgia. By rushing to do so
without first protesting the substance of the law, Mr. Manfred made a serious
mistake.
The use of “muscle” or financial power to influence policy is an
ancient tactic. The term “boycott” has its roots in 19th-century Ireland, where
the nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell urged his followers not to
deal with Charles Cunningham Boycott, a highly unpopular British land agent. A
boycott is generally an act of desperation, and the original one was largely
unsuccessful.
Organizations like Major League Baseball have sometimes
participated in public debates over policy. Moving directly to an economic
sanction suggests that Mr. Manfred believed the Georgia law required drastic
intervention. But consider what he didn’t do: He didn’t limit the number of
home games the Atlanta Braves will play. He’d need the approval of the players’
union to do that, and Braves owner John Malone would surely resist. To move the
site of the All-Star Game is one thing; to ignore union and ownership powers is
quite another.
The midsummer All-Star Game is an exhibition that benefits only
the city where it’s played. It was reported Tuesday morning that Denver will be
the new host. The players will get paid no matter where the game takes place.
MLB will get the same television revenue. The only people hurt by Mr. Manfred’s
decision will be Atlanta’s stadium workers and local vendors.
The talk shows and editorial pages are full of questions. What
is the basis for acting so forcefully against Georgia? If Georgia is racist,
how can baseball talk of doing business with China? Mr. Manfred failed to spell
out specific criticisms of Georgia’s voting law. Now he’s put himself in the
awkward position of having to defend Colorado’s voting laws.
During my time as commissioner, I learned that the American
people view baseball as a public trust. They want the game to stand for the
best and noblest of our national virtues. They see baseball as the repository
of their dreams, even as they root for their favorite teams. They don’t want,
and won’t accept, anything that separates them from the game’s history and
leadership.
Major League Baseball can’t become a weapon in the culture wars,
a hostage for one political party or ideology. It can’t be only for the rich or
the poor, nor can it only be for one race, as it was until 1947. Baseball must
always stand above politics and its dark elements of corruption, greed and
sordid selfishness. It can’t go wrong by standing for national greatness.
The situation calls to mind the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, when
many erred—like Mr. Manfred has here—by leaping to a conclusion based on assumptions
rather than carefully considered facts. I’ve done the same thing, to my regret.
Much rides on Mr. Manfred’s shoulders so he must be prudent. Perhaps he now
sees how complicated these issues can become. I wish him well.
Mr. Vincent was commissioner of baseball,
1989-92.
+++
Meanwhile, Dufuss Does Not Know How To Swing:
Joe Biden at
His Worst
A
combination of flattery and racial bullying convinces him he has a mandate.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
How to explain the rush of bad government, citing false crises,
end-running constitutional limitations, that the Biden presidency in its early
days has become?
I’m persuaded by one of its
practitioners, Charles Blow of the New York Times, that a key
feature, the administration’s rampant race-baiting, is partly a matter of a
ticking clock: “If Hispanics and Asians vote then the way they vote now—a third
of each group voted for Trump—their combined votes for Republicans will eclipse
the Black vote for Democrats.” He means for good.
Other clocks are ticking too. Mr. Biden is likely to be a
one-term president; every historical precedent suggests the Democrats’ slim
congressional majority won’t survive next year’s midterm elections.
This still doesn’t explain why Mr. Biden is lending his
presidency to unrepresentative activist groups to pursue an agenda for which he
has no mandate. So much for the talk of a modest and dignified “transitional”
presidency. He, or someone on his behalf, has substituted a Tijuana-or-bust
progressive Hail Mary that is quickly becoming needlessly and noxiously
divisive, that has Mr. Biden uttering lies and demagoguery as scurrilous as any
his predecessor uttered.
Maybe he really has changed due to some woke epiphany. Or maybe
we are seeing a man of diminished capacities acting out one long reaction
to Kamala Harris playing
the race card on him in the 2020 primaries.
Maybe the race card is being played partly to control Mr. Biden
himself.
I hate to say it but there’s a reason
telemarketers target the
elderly. You don’t have to be old to be weak, of course. See those CEOs who
have no thought of anything except how to shield themselves from interpersonal
discomfort amid a political game that’s largely going over their heads. If Mr.
Biden has lost his fastball, he won’t have forgotten a
searing experience: how insouciantly a top fellow Democrat, youthful and
quicker on her feet, used the race card against him in front of a national
audience. The fallout, obsequiously awarding Ms. Harris the veepship, was
hardly reassuring either.
Or take his recent and ludicrous inaccuracies about Georgia’s
new election law (four Pinocchios, said the Washington Post). He sounded like a
man riffing on a few poorly understood lines that somebody fed him, making
himself a prop for an agenda that he may not quite grasp.
You might have had zero faith
in Donald Trump’s judgment
but at least you knew he was capable of asserting his own judgment—and of
doubting the motives and incentives of his advisers and camp followers. (A
president seldom goes wrong by being too cynical about the motives of his
allies.)
In 2020, Republicans secured 74 million votes for their
presidential candidate, narrowed their disadvantage in the House, and tied
Democrats in the Senate. In many states Mr. Biden won, he was outpolled by GOP
House candidates. Especially because voters were told (falsely) by pollsters
that Mr. Biden was running away with the election, it’s hard to doubt even many
supporters wanted a check on his administration.
For all the Democratic demagoguery
about the filibuster, the system is working the
way it should—thwarting legislative enactments based on ephemeral majorities
that have no stability in the body politic.
Mr. Biden might be in fine fettle for
a man pushing 80 but that doesn’t mean he’s up to riding herd on the forces
that followed him into the White House. Mr. Biden did not wrestle the
nomination away from anybody (unlike Barack Obama or Mr. Trump). It landed on
him. His career was that of an undistinguished but long placeholder. A habit of
foolish grandiosity has repeatedly brought trouble, such as convincing himself
of a glorious academic record that didn’t exist (he finished near the bottom of
his law-school class after being disciplined for
plagiarism).
And nothing about Mr. Biden today suggests he’s up to the
heroic, arm-twisting, barnstorming public effort that it would take to get so
radical a program past a resistant public and Congress—if he were, almost by
definition he would not be the kind of presidential dog that unrepresentative
activists would find so easy to wag.
This “modern” left obsesses about race and “identity” because
it’s their only claim to being progressive; in every other way they are
reactionary heirs to the bureaucratic and technocratic elite that the New Deal
and World War II delivered into being and now is in need of replacing by
something truly of our own times.
On present trend,
Mr. Biden is on his way to being a failed and divisive president. Richard
Posner, the retired federal appeals judge and polymath, devoted a book, 1995’s
“Aging and Old Age,” to the changed incentives, declining capacities and
shortened time horizons that make us different people in old age than we were
when young. We improve in some ways with age but also become more prey to our
worst propensities. Ironically, one trait of the elderly, Mr. Posner tells us,
is usually a desire to leave a legacy and reputation our survivors can feel
proud of.
+++
But he knows how to pay all by himself:
Partisanship Is
Biden’s Way to the Highway
An
infrastructure bill some Republicans can support would help Democrats in 2022.
By William A. Galston
By introducing the ambitious American
Jobs Plan, the Biden administration is betting it all on its ability to unify
the Democratic Party around a bill that will attract little to no Republican
support. There is no margin for error in the Senate, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford to lose only a
handful of Democrats in the House. Achieving unanimity won’t be easy, and
failure would deal a body blow to the rest of the administration’s agenda.
Reporters and pundits often refer to the administration’s
proposal as an “infrastructure” bill, but it is much more. Portions of the bill
are devoted to investments in science, technology and manufacturing innovation
needed to counter the challenge from China. Other parts address shortcomings in
what the administration calls the “infrastructure of care,” especially for
children and the elderly. Still others are designed to address what the
administration regards as a climate crisis. Woven through the entire plan is an
emphasis on racial and gender equity and on unionizing the workforce.
These longstanding Democratic goals explain why Republicans are
unlikely to support this proposal. Most Republicans don’t regard climate change
as a crisis, and they reject moving away from fossil fuels. They don’t place
racial and gender inequalities at the center of their vision for social change.
And they hesitate to involve the federal government more deeply in areas—such
as child care—that they regard as the province of families, churches and
nonprofits.
Although the sticker price of the plan is $2.25 trillion, an
analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that the full
price is about $400 billion higher—the cost of clean-energy tax credits that
add to the total of “tax expenditures.” Most of this total would be spent over
eight years, while increased taxation of corporations would pay for the plan
over 15 years.
To the extent that the expenditures represent long-term
investments, this gap is unobjectionable. But not all provisions fit this
definition—for example, the $400 billion set aside to improve home-based care
for elderly Americans and boost the wages of home health-care providers. The
goals may be worthy, but such spending isn’t investment.
The administration is asking the GOP to repeal a substantial
portion of the 2017 tax bill Republicans supported all but unanimously. The
corporate tax rate would be raised to 28% from 21%. The plan would institute a
new corporate minimum tax and a new global minimum tax for U.S. multinational
corporations.
Republicans are no more willing to repeal what they regard as
the signature legislative achievement of the Trump administration than were
Democrats to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the signature achievement of the
Obama administration. And Republicans think there is a viable alternative, at least
for roads, bridges and other public projects—namely, user fees.
President Biden has rejected this option because it would
violate his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than
$400,000 a year. In a similar vein, the progressive wing of the Democratic
Party has cooled to a carbon tax—widely regarded as an efficient and effective
way of fighting climate change—because it would impose some costs on
lower-income Americans. (There are ways of structuring a carbon tax to avoid
this, but that has had no discernible impact on the debate so far.)
The administration appears to have decided to move the entire
plan through the Senate using the budget-reconciliation procedure, which
requires only a simple majority. The Senate parliamentarian’s reported
willingness to allow more than one reconciliation bill on a single year’s
budget will encourage this strategy. But leading Republicans have indicated
their willingness to do business with Democrats on pieces of the bill—road,
bridges, dams, water systems, ports and airports, as well as broadband and
measures to counter China’s economic rise. Why not explore the possibility of a
discrete bipartisan agreement before moving on to areas where agreement is
unlikely?
Unlike 1933 and 1965, the country is closely and deeply divided.
The Biden administration is betting that assertive use of its wafer-thin
congressional majority will cement the shift in public attitudes toward more
expansive government. If the administration wins its bet, it could end the Reagan
era.
If the
administration guesses wrong, it will unravel its gains among moderate and
suburban voters and restore a Republican congressional majority. If I were
President Biden, I would take out an insurance policy by demonstrating my
openness to honorable compromise before going to the mattresses.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In less than 4 months Biden has accomplished a lot if you judge him by those he has pissed off and alienated:
a) Cost oil workers high paying jobs while making America unnecessarily energy dependent again..
b) Just endeared Atlanta Blacks and all of Georgia by helping send baseball to Colorado and calling us Jim Crow bigots. https://townhall.com/columnists/larryoconnor/2021/04/06/this-is-bidens-baseball-boycott-n2587459
c) Increased Israeli's concern about being attacked by Iran if he allows this renegade nation to go nuclear.
d) Campaigned as a healer and turned out to be a heel.
e) Added trillions to America's debt for projects totally unrelated to the thrust of bills he signs.
f) Continues to evade the public and dodges reporters prepared to ask tough questions.
g) Allowed drug dealers to become wealthier and illegal immigration to soar.
h) Presses for legislation that will make American Industry less competitive.
i) Helps unions to avoid opening schools so an entire generation will be less competitive and more mentally ad socially unstable.
j) Governs more as a dictator by functioning through Executive Orders rather than working through/with Congress.
k) Harmed women sports and imposed on our military social demands that make defending our nation more difficult and morale dispirited.
l) Claims he will follow the science but his actions suggest otherwise.
m) Shows evidence he is mentally incapacitated but refuses to allow release of medical reports or even take appropriate exams to build public confidence in his ability to serve.
n) Promised to be bi-partisan and has functioned in a haughty and arrogant manner. Like his previous boss, Biden has his pen and cell phone.
o) Made America the laughing stock of the world and cast doubt on whether he can stand up physically and mentally to adversary threats and challenges.
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