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 2002.11.10 EPISODE 9, in which demolition means progress
he last time I played organized basketball was when I was in eighth grade, about 14 years ago. The last time I played competitively would've been last year sometime. This seems to be roughly par for the course among the members of the J-school team, which might explain our wretched performance in our one and only fall semester game on Tuesday night. Things didn't start out so badly. We tried to run a motion offense, which, to be blunt, didn't work at all. We were so caught up in passing and setting pics that we forgot to actually shoot when we got open. Our zone defense did decently, though, and we were only down 12-8 at halftime. The second half was a different story. The intramural leagues have a 28 point mercy rule -- that is, one team gets ahead by 28 and the game ends -- and we did our best to bring it into effect as quickly as possible. We threw up brick after brick and failed to adjust to our opponents' offensive schemes in any substantial way. Final score: 36-8. I shot 0 for 3 with an assist. We're going to need some work before the five-game spring "season." My additional excuse for sloppy play is that I was out until 2 A.M. hustling last-minute literature for the various Democratic candidates on the ballot come Tuesday morning. When I got home Tuesday evening, it became clear that it would be another late night. Early results were looking reasonable enough but there was something in the air, something like the smell of nothingness left in the immediate wake of a vacuum cleaner. All too quickly, it became clear that the Democrats had not gained any margin for error early in the night and would have to hold all their pieces to avoid a devastating checkmate. When Max Cleland and Bill McBride fell by 7% and 13%, respectively, all that was left was for Fox News anchors to begin offering George Bush his choice of several comely lasses of virtue true. Despite what should really be some modicum of expertise on the part of the "experts," a net shift of 6-8 seats (depending on races still to be determined) in the entire Congress was being hailed as a Republican rout. George Bush was now well and truly the King and while the idea of him having a mandate is belied by the actual national vote count, only an enemy sympathizer would look at that data. There's plenty of blame to go around but let's start at the top. Dick Gephardt has been a schmuck for all of his eight years as leader of the House Democrats. The party's House gains in 1996 and 2000 were on the coattails of its Presidential candidates; 1998's gains were a result of backlash against the impeachment proceedings. In 2002, Gephardt had to do the leading himself and failed miserably, even though the public's top three issues -- economy, health care and Social Security -- are very much in the Democrats' favor. He says he's stepping down from the House leadership position because he can't give it his "undivided attention" (i.e. because he's running for President) but I really, really hope that's code for falling on his sword. A Presidential bid would move Gephardt from failed to embarrassing. Terry McAuliffe needs to go, too, and the man to replace him is Bill Clinton. It's a perfect fit -- Clinton's the most popular Democrat since JFK and being head of the DNC would leave him plenty of time to continue his lucrative speaking career. He obviously loves the sport of politics and this would put him right in the thick of it, like a Hall of Fame player coming back to try his hand at coaching. The guy can raise money like a crop and he's got maybe the greatest political mind of his generation. It's ludicrous that the party has him warming the bench in Westchester. I may be in the minority on this but I think Tom Daschle needs to stay. His was the only significant Democratic voice to stand up to George Bush after the plane crash coronation, even if it wasn't standing up quite as often as it could have been. The one race most viewed as a Bush vs. Democrats proxy, the other South Dakota Senate seat, was won by Daschle's boy, Tim Johnson, in what's become a strangely underpublicized story. What's more, somebody's going to point out to Daschle that he has no shot at the Presidency, making him go back to the resiliency and scrappiness that came out when Enron was dominating the headlines. And, of course, the Bush Fan Club in the news media deserves its share of scorn. How many times in the past few days have you heard reference to the 100,000 votes that went missing in Broward County, FL? When they were found they cut over 13,000 from Jeb Bush's margin of victory -- how is it that this wasn't newsworthy back before the election had been called? How is it that the media can uniformly praise the political strategy of a sitting President spending weeks campaigning for other people instead of, I don't know, doing his damn job? I mean, the guy already takes month-long vacations at the drop of a hat; are we really getting our money's worth if he's jetting off to stump for Bill Simon all the time? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Clearly we're getting screwed out of $400,000 annually no matter what he does.) Assuming the illiterate cracker-in-chief hasn't gotten us all killed by November, 2004 (which I don't discount as a possibility), there is a silver lining. Nothing that the Republican WhiteHouse&Congress screw up in the next two years can be blamed on anybody else. This year, the GOP was able to hit the campaign trail with the premise that those pesky Senate Democrats were ruining everything. In '04, their vaunted personal responsibility will be on full display. Now let's just hope John Ashcroft doesn't suspend elections as dangerous to the state. Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
