Bye George, They've Got It

It's about friggin' time. With two weeks left till the midterm elections, the Democrats seem--and I emphasize that tentativeness--to have cemented their apparent lead in popular polls and are geared to regain the majority in at least one of the two Congressional houses. According to the latest poll in AOL, 64% of the population--or at least of the AOL subscriber respondents--prefer the Democrats to the Republicans. That would appear to be enough to tip the balance and reconfigure the political landscape that was created by the Republican's 1994 surge.

Not that the Reps aren't trying, with increasing desperation, to avoid the humiliation. Campaigns are getting nastier, such as the local California congressional contest in which the Republican sent out threatening letters to Hispanic voters, or in New York, where Hillary's opponent is hurling lame accusations about cosmetic surgery. Of course the Democrats are hardly angelic during this process, though they are not as likely to attempt the Big Lies as the Reps, who had such success with the Swift Boat calumnies.

The Cynic in me still awaits some last-minute October surprise, and Bush is certainly working on it. He has actually, amazingly, backed away from the great "Stay the Course" idiocy about Iraq that impresses no one anymore, not even Laura or the dog. His sudden devolution into flexibility is no more convincing that Arnold Schwarzennegar's retreat into moderation and conciliation with the California Democrats. But we know Arnold still has to sleep with a Democrat, so some of that might stick. George is simply posturing to try to allay the disgust of so many independents who mistakenly believed that he was our Protector-in-Chief.

Aside from softening the Iraq stance, though, the Reps have practically nothing going for them, even as the Stock Market hits new highs. Most high-end investors who've profitted this year trend Republican, anyway. The Reps also have the temporary glut of oil and the resultant plummeting of gasoline prices to wave to the electorate. This may help with a few who have short-term memory. On the other hand, the real estate market is flopping, trapping those who bought unduly high prices and those who still can't afford entry purchases.

The real problem is that the Republicans, after twelve years of arrogant power grabbing, are so awash in endless scandals that they cannot scrub themselves enough. The Foley affair, trivial as it is, is another reminder of Congressional hypocrisy, and elicits an ick response that could figure in the voting. Abramoff's name keeps on reemerging in some context, as in the revelation that he's spoken to the White House countless times despite Executive denials. DeLay is gone, Hastert is on the bubble and Frist has his own dirty laundry. Vice President Cheney has become the spokesperson for Pragmatic Evil, which he calls "the dark side," and everyone but everyone hates Rumsfeld. And L'il Kim in North Korea has the bomb. Swell.

With all of this, the Democrats no longer need to promote any agenda (which is good, especially since none of them have a clue how to extricate gracefully from the quagmire in Iraq). The Administration and its fawning congressional lackeys have become identified in the public consciousness as hopelessly incompetent. All the Dems need do now is emphasize that fact and position themselves as the anti-Republicans. And to this end, they have finally devised a clear campaign slogan that may have the same impact as the Republican's simple "Contract with America" of 1994. This is thanks to a book recently published by James Carville (and where has he been?) Increasingly we see signs that say "Had Enough?" That seems pretty straightforward and all-encompassing. It underscores the fact that the Republican malfeasances have become so rife that they aren't worth enumerating any more. There simply has been too much to bear. Time for a change.

One hopes this bare-knuckles approach will be fostered by the clever Rahm Emanuel (brother of Ari Emanuel, the model for Jeremy Piven's agent character on "Entourage'). After the disastrous Donna Brazile-led campaigns of earlier this century, which promoted such pabulum slogans as "Hope Is On the Way" and "Together We Can Do Better," now we have something short and pointed. It speaks directly and unambigously to the disgust the population has for a regime that has taken us far back to the past and championed ignorance over science, emotion over rationality, and greed over compassion.

So devoid are the Republicans now of any persuasive ideas that they are down to their last card, the Fear Factor. They have recently produced a campaign ad parading images of Bin Laden and ending with the slogan "These Are the Stakes." This is a direct echo of the Daisy/Bomb ad that Lyndon Johnson aired once, in 1964, to devastate Goldwater. Ah, those were the good old days when the Dems could be as shameless as the Reps are now. But will the public continue to buy the nonsense that only Republican leadership can prevent Bin Laden and Al Qaeda from blowing up a shopping mall or a stadium? Hard to believe, since it's the Republicans who let Bin Laden get away.

Meanwhile

There is a hiatus within a hiatus in the baseball postseason, as rain has washed out the critical fifth game between the Mets and Cards as the Tigers await the winner on Saturday. I've been off in my predictions (well, largely underestimating the Tigers at least), but I think that whichever NL team prevails, its pitching should not be a match for Detroit's.

Meanwhile I get a chance to review some of the news TV series that have graced the hard drives of my DVR and computer. I did more than my share of sampling of the network output, and like many of my fellow citizens, have been a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of serialized dramas. The glut of choices forced, I'm sure, some hurried and frantic creative decisions to ratchet up the action to outdraw the competition. Maybe that's why "Vanished" got so audacious in the face of "Kidnapped" that it saw fit to kill off its detective protagonist in the seventh week.

Neither "Vanished" nor "Kidnapped," though thematically nearly identical, promised the plot fabric that would entice a viewer to stay on for more than a season, if that. In the case of these two, I don't believe two months. "Kidnapped" was a bit grittier and had the intriguing actor Jeremy Sisto as its troubled lead. "Vanished" was bloodier and trashier, combining obvious "Da Vinci Code" devices with an unconvincing interplay of attractive actors who looked better than they performed.

The surprise of this season, for me as for other paid TV analysts, is the breakout of "Heroes," NBC's nearly buried comic-book lead-in to the ambitious "Studio 60" with its "West Wing" pedigree. While "Studio 60" is proving to be fascinating to former players such as yours truly, it has yet to demonstrate a broader public appeal. Not many people welcome the disillusioning fact that sketch performers are not making it up as they go along, and are not especially impressed by the process. I thought that was proved by the failure of "The Comeback," a dead-on TV satire already geared to a sophisticated HBO audience. Notice how HBO's only successful Hollywood-based series, "Entourage," is about the characters, not the making of the movies.

But "Heroes," unlike "Studio 60," makes no pretense to satire or faux documentary or any kind of reality. It is a well-conceived X-Man variation, with a sense of humor about itself, and seems to revel in its total outlandishness. The last episode ended with the "Immortal Girl" discovering that her body was undergoing an autopsy. (It's setting a rather high standard to continue topping itself, somewhat like "24.") There is cleverness in the selection of superpowers, usually an inane collection of physical mega-abilities, but here fraught with an intriguing eclectism, from Supermanish flight to personality projection to the very useful bending of the space/time continuum. Hiro, the Japanese Hero (fuck subtlety) may be the break-out character of this TV season. Who'd a thunk it? The producers also understood the need to insinuate a major Jeopardy early on the grab the audience, and the nuking of New York is catastrophic--and, unfortunately, credible--enough. I feel a degree hoodwinked that I am falling in with the rest of the crowd, but damn, this show is fun.

A few other noteworthy new series--and after three weeks any judgment is reservable and reversible--are "Justice," "The Nine" and "Brothers and Sisters." The latter has the potential to fall into flat predictable family drama, but it has a terrific cast--one in which the amazing Rachel Griffiths practically gets lost. It needs to keep intensifying the mother-daughter rift between Calista Flockhart and Sally Fields, and also not mince the words of Flockhart's character, who is supposed to be an amazingly glib national conservative voice. The politics has been severely downplayed, surely after a lot of creative in-fighting among producers, writers and the network.

"Justice" is a flashy legal variant on "House," but it wears its glossiness well. That it has an irascible personality-challenged lead with a staff demographically mirroring that of "House" I'm sure is not a total coincidence. And it's Jerry Bruckheimer, yecch. But its cynicism is somewhat refreshing, though not as much as it would if it were on pay cable (like Showtime's nihilistic and totally amoral "Dexter.") As for the highly touted "The Nine," two episodes cannot tell me much about its slow revelations and the potential of its characters, but it is not as compelling at this stage as its lead-in and model "Lost" was. Will I care to be watching in 2012? Eh.

One show I know will not be on my DVR list or computer menu five years hence is the wildly overrated "Ugly Betty," a thin and simplistic comedy drama that by no means justifies its weekly hour length. We get the gist of "Ugly Betty" from, well, two minutes of reviewing "The Devil Wears Prada" or "Working Girl" or "Nine to Five," for that matter. The glam aspects of the fashion world may hold fascination for some, but not in this household. I've never even watched one episode of "Project Runway," which is supposed to be one of the better reality contests--and I like reality shows. This show obviously has some general audience underdog appeal, or it would not have been an international phenomenon. But being an international hit is no special measure of greatness. Witness "The Man from Atlantis," David Hasselhoff and The World Cup.

My problem is that its portrayals are hopelessly broad and obvious. And its characters seem like stereotypes populating a particularly dated musical. And I like musicals. At any second I expect the extras to jump into a chorus line and berate our poor heroine about her nerdiness while high stepping through a maze of dancing wardrobes. Dull stuff. There may be enough material and story machinations to fill a bland half-hour comedy, but I'm sure anything it could do, "The Office" can do a lot better. And there, everyone is Ugly.

Dead Man Flying

It's been a week of rather sensational and grotesque news events, whose impact at first took me far from the drab concerns of a disappointed post-season baseball fan, and then flung me right back into the rarified air of Baseball Tragedy.

It began with a dog-and-pony political carnival involving a gay congressman's flirtatious e-mails. I agree with what Bill Maher said on his show, pointing out that as tawdry as Foley's actions were, they pale in importance to the real threats to our national well-being effected by Bush's wayward foreign policy. That Foley was the chairman of the Committee to Protect Young People from Internet Sexual Predation merely reiterates the moral hypocrisy in which the Republican leadership wallows. The exposure of another hypocrite has become as common as a Republican's knee jerk pronouncements blaming Bill Clinton for pretty much everything bad that has ever happened. Well, all I can say is, Clinton did not chair the Committee Protecting Blue Dresses from Cum Stains.

With all the who-knew-whats and why-didn't-they-act caterwauling going around, and the obvious political posturing from both sides, the sad fact is that at the basis of the scandal is homophobia. Had Foley been caught e-flirting with some young chicks there would not have been the slightest ripple. Ironically, it is the Democrats who are now trying to benefit by eliciting the ick factor among the Red Staters. Given that the Republicans rode the anti-Gay-Marriage initiatives right back into the White House in 2004, this is a fair, though regrettable irony.

But that was a tempest in a teapot, compared with the tempest in a tempest of North Korea first announcing an atomic test, then producing one. The entire region is now on panicky alert, and Kim is proving himself a much more potentially threatening madman than that old weathered asshole sitting on an endless trial in Baghdad. Right now the best whistle-in-the-dark attitude I can draw from the situation is that the North Koreans can't yet fly nuclear missiles into Los Angeles--though they can do Seoul in an instant, and Tokyo too. Tokyo too. Of course, the Republicans are blaming Clinton, whose earlier attempts to negotiate with the North Koreans only slowed but did not deter their nuclear development. The NeoCons would rather have engaged in the kind of persuasive confrontation that has so succeeded in the Middle East and has left the world in a state of everlasting peace and contentment.

Ignoring that looming mushroom cloud in our future, there was yesterday's tragedy in New York, which began as a terrorist alert and then turned into a bizarre baseball disaster. When I saw on my computer headlines that there had been a small plane crashing into a Manhattan high-rise, my first impulse was, like most people's, fearing some kind of terrorist activity, perhaps a lone suicide bomber trying to shake things up. That the aviator turned out not to be an Arab, but to be a Yankee--not just a Yankee but a New York Yankee for Christ's sake, Cory Lidle--this was almost too bizarre a confluence of events to digest. Had the Yankees won the series against the Tigers, of course, Cory wouldn't have been flying and his wife wouldn't be a widow. But life is randomly cruel, but not only does he not get a chance at a World Series ring, he doesn't get to breathe ever again. As someone will surely state some time at his funeral, "God works in mysterious ways."

Frankly, I think it makes more sense to blame Bill Clinton.

Where Have You Gone, Scotty Brosius

Major policy decisions should not be rendered during the emotional backwash of a disaster (see 9/11 and Iraq), and the recent disgraceful collapse of the Yankees in their Divisional series, after a promising start, is no exception. Any team can have a bad couple of days, and their poor short-term performance reflects not an inferior line-up, just a total lack of concentration and of grace under pressure.

That being said, there will be some major consequences of what is becoming an annual (and predictable) disappointment in the Bronx. The Yanks, perennial divisional winners, have become what the Braves were for fourteen years--overconfident and underachieving. A seething George Steinbrenner is inclined now to fire Joe Torre and replace him with the sparkplug Louo Piniella, perhaps to generate some fire in the team's belly. This despite Torre's remarkable job this year holding a wounded squad together and winning the division by its largest margin since 1998.

Now Piniella does have some record of success, winning a championship in 1990 and helming the Mariners in 2001 to the best seasonal record ever. But history also shows that he lost the ALCS to the Yanks in a shocking five games. And for all the talk about how friendly he is with Arod, let's not forget that the 2001 Mariner team did not include Mr. Rodriguez. Or that Lou is notoriously clunky in handling pitchers. Perhaps, with Torre's team failing now in three consecutive post-season series, and looking especially listless in this last one, some kind of different motivational approach is needed--if not an entirely new motivator, like Joe Girardi.

One has to wonder why this powerhouse team floundered, when the dynasty of the late '90s prospered so well. Actually, it's simple. This current pitching staff of aging starters with storied pasts simply could not function as well as the group that included David Cone, Jimmy Key, Dvid Wells, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens and El Duque. The only reliable current starter is the Yankees' youngest and cheapest, Chin-Mien Wang. The talented young Detroit staff (a bewildering Kenny Rogers notwithstanding) challenged the Yankee's vaunted line-up and totally befuddled them. The Yanks need to wean themselves of reliance on the aging Mussina and Randy Johnson and bank on younger talent. Assume that we'll see Philip Hughes earlier than we might have thought.

There is really nothing Brian Cashman can do to improve the offense. He will have to decide whether to keep Gary Sheffield and use him at first base, or utilize that money to purchase a more reliable and younger starting pitcher (and risk Sheffield going to Boston). He will need mucho moolah to outbid the Red Sox and the Mets for the likes of Barry Zito. More usefully he could trade Arod to a Chicago or Los Angeles team for a top-flight starter and young stud infielder (say Ervin Santana and Howie Kendrick from the Angels).

But whatever changes Cashman effects, how does one know when he picks up a player with the heart and soul needed to perform in the clutch? How is it that Scott Brosius, who hit .201 the year he was picked up by the Yankees in 1998, would provide so many memorable and necessary home runs in key moments? Or that second-string catcher Jim Leyritz would do the same? Arod has had instant after instant in his three-year stay in New York to contribute one major offensive blow that would cement his Yankee credentials. He has consistently, almost comically failed. The turning point in this year's divisional series came in the first inning of Game Two, with the bases loaded and the Yanks about the blow out the reeling Tigers with a big bang. Arod stood with the crowd rooting him on. Before one could blink--three pitches, and a strikeout. Arod did not get a hit the rest of the way, and now has played in twelve straight post-season games without a run or an RBI. I tend to be patient, but in a climate where post-season performance is all by which Yankee success is measured, he has now earned his acrimony. He deserves being a Cub.

As to the rest of the play-offs, I overestimated the Cardinals' collapse. They still have Edmonds and Pujols, though that may not be enough to overcome the Mets. The Mets, interestingly, have pitching problems as severe as the Yankees (and the Cards), and a line-up bolstered by free agents, yet they have managed to sweep their series over an energetic Dodger team. They are probably hungrier than either the Yanks or the Cardinals, which accounts for their fighting spirit. I still believe they will face the A's in the series, though by that point their paucity of pitching may cost them.

My Good

The "regular" baseball season is over, and with it my Rotisserie affair, which ended with a disappointingly lame 9th place finish. That it was the high -ater mark for the season says something about how miserable it had been, and we salvaged what we could only after trading away our entire pitching staff for front-line lead-off types who could deliver runs and stolen bases. A rule change in my league awarded prizes for the top finishers in all the stat categories, and we succeeded in leading in the aforementioned two areas, so there will be a little payback. As usual, the exhalation at the end of the Rotisserie year was anti-climactic, though unlike last year, we actually succeeded in our short-term objectives. Now it's time to erase memories of the stiffs who overpopulated our team, losers like Bruce Chen, Fausto Carmona, Ryan Dempster, Laynce Nix, Mike Napoli, Javier Valentin, Brian Watson (who?) and Nate McLouth.

On the other hand, I am now allowed to crow about my preseason predictions. For those who have not followed my blog, these were the teams I selected to finish first: Yankees, Twins, As, Mets, Cardinals and Dodgers. Their final standings were respectively, first, first, first, first, first and tied for first. I don't think a lot of pundits who were well-paid by CBS Sportsline or ESPN fared as well in their prognostications. Granted, three of the choices were relatively easy (Yanks, Mets, Cards), and I did not select the correct Wild Card teams (I chose the Braves and White Sox), but I did well enough to earn a pat on the back, if I must stretch awkwardly to do it myself.

Now I come to the more difficult task of calling the post-season. At this juncture the best team is probably the Yankees, whose line-up has been fortified, and who have two great hitters--Sheffield and Matsui--who have not been worn down by six long months of ball. Not to mention Jeter, Cano, Posada, Giambi, Abreu, Damon and even Arod. Their pitching is still questionable as long as Big Ugly Tall Lefty is hurting, and he is scheduled to pitch in the critical Game #3. But the best team rarely wins this thing. If the Yanks don't sweep the Tigers at home, they could be in trouble. The next best team is probably the Twins, while an argument could be made for Oakland--though their starter, Rich Harden, is also lame. And the poor Mets have lost Pedro for a year, and must depend on El Duque and Tom Glavine to keep them in games against the Dodgers until their offense kicks in. A Yankee-Mets Series would still produce the best match-up of the two teams with the best seasonal records, but I don't think it will come to pass.

Since I was so acutely accurate in my spring forecast, I feel obliged to stick with my original long-term World Series choice of the As over the Mets. To get there, I foresee the following results. The Yanks will beat the Tigers, but probably after losing the first game. The As surprise the Twins in four; the Mets beat the Dodgers in five, and the Padres beat the Cardinals, also in five. Then the As surprise the Yankees and the Mets overcome the Padres.

There are, as usual, some promising marquee match-ups. The nation would probably enjoy a Yankee-Dodger World Series more than it would a Yankees-Mets. Subtract the Yanks and there are still some intriguing rematches. Cardinals-Twins, for example, after the 1987 series (though hardly anyone expects the Cards, who heaved and limped to the finish line, to make it that far this year). Tigers-Cardinals would replay 1934, with Joe Medwick and the Dean Brothers. Mets-Oakland would harken back to the 1973 contest when Willie Mays fell in center field, denoting the end of his storied career, and Reggie Jackson started to earn his "Mr. October" soubriquet. The Padres and Trevor Hoffman would enjoy another shot at the Yankees after they were dismantled in 1998, and the Pads could also avenge their 1984 loss to the Tigers. Then there are the bizarre or yawn-inducing pairings, like Twins-Padres, which Fox would not be very happy about.

One thing I know--I will be totally sick of the same commercials and promos running endlessly on all the Fox broadcasts. But at least, for the first time since 1990, I will not have to endure the onerous chant of the Brave fans and their tomahawk chops. For that, all of America, as well as all the Native Americans, can be grateful.