I was told by a friend tonight that I should be writing about the World Series. I was like, “I am.” He was like, “The blog never updates.” Then I realized that I never officially sounded the death knell for this. I’ve taken the act to bryanjoiner.com. Anyhow, I just said the World Series is over. Sorry.
To the four of you who came here yesterday, I’m sorry to report that I’m too busy to post again today — and that’s no lie, Joe Wilson. Things should ease up next Wednesday. Until then, watch yourselves some football.
No post today. Too busy, got actual work and an essay due later. If you really need a post… just wait longer.
The gods have raineth actual work upon me, so until next Wednesday we’re only hitting doubles. We were taught to aim for the monstah as a kid anyway. It’s the smaht play.
FIRST BASE: ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE The country took a day off (or in my case, four) over the weekend to celebrate getting back to work. Only in America! Gotta love it. And those who participate in our national pastime were at it over the weekend, fighting largely for Wild Card spots. All the divisions are more or less wrapped up except, perhaps, the NL West, where the Rockies have closed to within 3.5 games of the Dodgers. That’s a dramatic reversal of fortune from June 1st, when the Dodgers held the largest division lead in baseball (eight game), and the Rockies were in last place, 10 games below .500. The Rox lead the Giants by 2 for the Wild Card, and the Red Sox are up 2.5 on the Rangers after getting manhandled by the Pale Hose.
But that’s not the big baseball story from this weekend. Prince Fielder hit a walk-off home run on Sunday and orchestrated perhaps the greatest organized celebration of all-time, much to the consternation of the Giants, who fell at the Prince’s mighty blow. To paint a visual picture, Fielder hits the homer and stars running around the bases, untucking his comically oversized shirt after he rounds first base. At this point, he also starts pointing to his teammates spilling out onto the field. Nothing major; who knows what this means? Anyhow, as he approaches home, he leaps and lands on home plate with a thud and his whole team — everyone — falls backward as if a bomb went off. It was fantastic, original, and sure to be fined and banned. So enjoy the crap out of it.
SECOND BASE: MAD WORLD The fourth episode of Mad Men aired Sunday night, and if you don’t watch the show or aren’t interested, you can skip ahead to tomorrow’s post. I have a notoriously bad history of judging shows within seasons, especially in the first few episodes. So I’m going to withhold my judgment of certain plot elements, and the way certain things are handled. The one thing I’m concerned about that I will talk about is the wink-nudge peeks at the future that occur in, I believe, increasing frequency. The first season was about Don Draper and basically only Don Draper; outside events were cleverly inserted into the “text” of the show. The second season added a little more and expanded Peggy and Betty’s characters, but increasingly, in the third season, the world is the main character — hardly 10 minutes goes by when you’re not clued in to some event that will happen in the future. That shit I can learn about on Wikipedia; I want to know more about these characters, and not the half-by-rote way in which they smoke marijuana for the first time or learn about the conflict in Vietnam.
Alright, see you tomorrow.
Gonna move quickly today for various reasons.
FIRST BASE: NEW PITCHERS MOVE WEST New Giant Brad Penny’s 8-inning shutout performance in his return to the NL Wednesday night goes in the “well, that was predictable” Hall of Fame. I don’t have a fundamental problem with the DH like some NL fans, but I recognize the disparity it’s created between the leagues. Unfortunately, it’s a problem that’s impossible to fix because the DH is the highest-paid player in the AL, on average. But this is getting ridiculous.
Scott Kazmir made his Angels debut last night, throwing 8 Ks and losing. Ho-hum. The Red Sox lost to the Rays, the in-feuding Marlins won, as did the Rockies to stay one game up in the NL Wild Card.
SECOND BASE: NON-STEROID RELATED ASTERISKS Prodded by a reader, we looked into why Dan Marino’s 22* lost pounds carried asterisks all over the Nutrisystem website. Turns out that the FTC throws up a red flag for weight loss “systems” that advertise losses of more 15 pounds over any time period. Now, we weren’t saying that Nutrisystem didn’t work: just that disposal income-having celebrities like Dan Marino and Chris Berman were far more likely to have hired personal trainers to lose their more than 15 pounds of weight. We’re sure that anyone who engages in portion control — be it through Nutrisystem or anywhere else — is apt to lose weight, should they add some exercise into the mix. Preferably vigorous exercise, and ideally under the watchful eye of a personal trainer. But I’m sure Dan Marino knew that!
THIRD BASE: NO YOKE If you haven’t seen the video of hundreds of thousands of baby chicks being put through meat grinder in Iowa as a bi-product of our egg consumption machine, it’s, uh, here. I would say it’s gruesome, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that our meat and egg consumption habits are brutally bloody and mechanized. I sure know, and I continue to eat meat. Why do I do it after seeing videos like this?
The answer is simple: I like it. The organization that made the video, Mercy for Animals, created the video and uses it to advocate for a vegan diet. They have done a real service here, but a vegan diet is only the simplest solution to a complicated problem, and not one that’s likely to get the marginal results needed to affect widespread change. It’s sort of like asking teenagers not to have sex: some will listen, but most will not. You bring parade a pregnant teenager through a high school, and they will become a cautionary tale for as long as they’re within sight. Same thing with the video (which, again, is good and useful) — some people will be affected immediately and give up meat entirely. That is good. For the others, better solutions are needed.
The most effective way to push the anti-cruelty agenda is to emphasize the planet-wide costs of the mass creation and shipping of meat and eggs. The website referenced at the end of the video, chooseveg.org, has a section devoted to the costs of eating meat, and the UN has called for a drop in meat consumption because of the effects on the environment. But it goes beyond that: animal rights organizations must outline ways for people to eat meat if they want to by referring them to humane, self-sustaining, organic farms. If eating meat remains taboo to change organizations, everyone’s going to want to do it (such is the nature of taboos, see: our drinking age). If we can take the small step of getting people to realize the real costs of what they eat, and not just meat (corn-based products do serious damage as well), we’ll take a giant step toward a smarter, healthier future. But without some loud allowance toward eating meat — with responsible-sourcing guidelines — the movement seems to be missing something vital to its success.*
* Go vegetarian organizations that do this are to be saluted.
HOME: I’M NOT SAYIN’, I’M JUST SAYIN’ Saw Inglourious Basterds last night. At one point, a Nazi officer is attempting to negotiate a surrender and asks for land on Nantucket. Tarantino be knowin’.
Off tomorrow for a miraculous four-day weekend. Be back on Tuesday.
Good morning, Chochachos. It’s Wednesday, September 2nd. The Rockies are back up a game in the NL Wild Card race, and the Red Sox may be turning things on at the right time. Let’s go.
FIRST BASE: SIX SHOOTER Jonathan Papelbon has been maligned this year despite putting up solid numbers; this is one of the cases where the statistics, to hear his critics talk, don’t tell the whole story. For the talk of Daniel Bard being groomed as the “closer in waiting” to those that newly-signed Billy Wagner opens the door for the Sox to jettison Papelbon in the offseason, Papelbon was still an effective closer, if not as dominant as before. Last night, Papelbon relieved an ineffective Hideki Okajima with the bases loaded in the eighth inning and the Sox up 7-4 — and didn’t give up a run (Thanks to a large degree by a ridiculous sliding catch by Jacoby Ellsbury). He finished off the Rays, now six back in the Wild Card standings, in the following inning for his first regular season six-out save. Meanwhile, the Rangers swept their doubleheader from Jays and sit 3.5 back. In the NL. Cole Hamels 2-hit the Giants for 1-0 victory, and the Rockies beat the Mets 8-3. In other action, Albert Pujols hit his 42nd home run in the Cardinals’ 7-6 win over the Brewers, the Yankees beat the Orioles 9-6, and the Braves beat the Marlins, 4-3.
SECOND BASE: NUTRISYSTEM? NUTRI-SHIT IF YOU ASK ME This morning I was watching SportsCenter when I saw the ad for Nutrisystem — the weight-loss meal subscription plan that engages in portion control — featuring Chris Berman, who claims to have lost 41* lbs. on the diet. He joins celebrities such as Dan Marino, who lost 22* lbs., Marie Osmond, who lost 50* lbs., and Don and Anne Shula, who lost 32* and 23* lbs., respectively, on the diet plan, according to their statements.
I have a piece of news for you: this is a CROCK OF SHIT.
Everyone I’ve listed above is a celebrity. Now imagine, if you will, that I’m a celebrity (bend your brain). I am overweight. I want to lose weight. How would I go about doing this? Would I:
a) Subscribe to an info-mercial based diet system that sends you plastic-wrapped, subpar microwaveable food, OR:
b) Hire a personal trainer?
To spare you the suspense, the answer is b. I would go so far as to guess that of the celebrities listed above, zero of them consistently use, or have ever used Nutrisystem. I would go so far as to say that Nutrisystem basically admits this. See all those asterisks above? I got those straight off the Nutrisystem web site. Every single “testimonial” from a celebrity about their weight loss carries one of those asterisks, every time their weight loss figure appears. Here’s how Marino’s bio reads:
I saw the success my buddy Jim Stuckey had on the program, so I gave Nutrisystem a call. Boy, am I glad I did. I lost 22 lbs.* on the program and I feel great. I haven’t been this weight since I started playing pro football back in 1983. I got a variety of delicious foods to eat, and they were super easy to prepare. It was an easy, convenient and delicious way to feel satisfied.
“My friends call me ‘Skinny.’”
The weight just kept coming off. My goal was getting to 20 pounds lost, and I got to 22*-and I’ve kept it off for two years now. My wife loves the way I look and my family is amazed at how much younger I appear. I even have a new nickname. My friends call me “Skinny.” I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that. I wanted to look better and feel better than I had since retiring, and Nutrisystem help me reach that goal. Nutrisystem was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
On each page on the site that an asterisk appears, somewhere these words will as well: “*Results not typical.” So that’s it, folks: if you want a diet “system” where losing 22 lbs. isn’t even typical, Nutrisystem is the one for you. But I wouldn’t take Dan Marino’s word for it.
THIRD BASE: GFAIL There was a minor panic from some quarters of the Internet when GMail went down for about 100 minutes yesterday. Google was doing some upgrades and took part of its server offline, not realizing that they had miscalculated how much those servers kept GMail chugging along — that’s the story according to the GMail blog. Sounds good enough to me, and I was able to access GMail through my iGoogle portal. Still, some people reveled in the “GFail” episode. A certain floppy-haired former sports blog editor exulted on his Twitter feed: “By the way: So rarely is stubbornly hanging onto Yahoo! Mail worth all the mockery I receive. Thanks, Gmail!” He’s right about one thing: it’s rare that holding onto other mail systems is worth it. I consistently recruit people who have no reason otherwise not to switch to GMail — can’t, for work or paranoia reasons — to make the leap, and many of them just won’t do it, hemming and hawing about people not finding their new address, or whatever. I’m sure they felt good yesterday, but let me impress this upon them: they likely spend far more than those 100 minutes negotiating the anachronistic layouts of those mail systems per year already; this evened the playing field for a bit. GMail was, and still is, better than any other mail system, and the fascination — from GMail users and non-GMail users alike — with a slight service disruption is silly. It’s the Internet. It happens.
HOME: YES Deadspin put together a comprehensive look at the Mets’ season-to-date, an exercise in creative losing that would make Cubs fans proud. Some Mets fans are over it, consoled by the fact that “no one cares,” but to deny the cause-and-effect involved — and to ignore the sheer artistry of their losing — would be unfortunate. Seasons like this often seep into the ether once they’re over, gone forever, and this one probably will, too, so we’ve got to cherish it while it lasts. These results aren’t typical.
FIRST BASE: OLD FACES, NEW PLACES Good morning, it’s September 1st. The Boston Red Sox lead the AL Wild Card by four games. One of their former pitchers joins the wild-card leading Giants of the NL, and Jim Thome heads to L.A. Let’s dive into it.
First, Jim Thome, twelfth on the all-time home run list, has been traded to the L.A. Dodgers along with pitcher Jon Garland. Thome’s trying to win his first World Series in a 19-year career. Of the 11 people ahead of him on the all-time list, only five ever won World Series winning teams. A-Rod, at number eight, is also trying to win his first this year. If the Yankees face the Dodgers, that would just be one subplot of many (Torre vs. the Yankees, Manny vs. the Yankees, former New York teams vs. each other, coast vs. coast). Of the 11 people ahead of Thome, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Mark McGwire won World Series titles, while Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Sammy Sosa, A-Rod, Harmon Killebrew and Rafael Palmeiro did/have not.
Joe Torre says he has to talk to Thome, who has exclusively been a designated hitter for the past two seasons, about playing first base. At the very least, the Dodgers will have an accomplished, expensive pinch hitter.
The Giants don’t have a space problem with Brad Penny: he’ll go straight into the fifth spot in their lineup, though not everybody’s happy to see him. I think, in the grand tradition started by John Smoltz this year of leaving the AL East for the NL, he’ll be fine, especially in AT&T Park. Or, to quote Seth Meyers’ Twitter feed from the moments after he was released by the Sox: “News From the Future: Brad Penny K’s 9 in return to NL.”
In Wild Card news last night, the Rangers battled back against the Blue Jays to turn 11-0 deficit into 11-10, only to give up seven more runs and lose, 18-10. Rod Barajas had two homers and Adam Lind drove in eight. The Rays beat the Tigers, 11-7, to climb to 5 back of the Sox. Other scores of note: Yankees 5, Orioles 1; Braves 5, Marlins 2; Angels 10, Mariners 0; and D-Backs 5, Dodgers 3.
SECOND BASE: YOU WIN, ESPN I have not been a Brett Favre fan. The last few years, I haven’t considered him an above-average quarterback. When it looked like he was going to retire, I was fine with that. Then he signed with the Jets, and I was fine with that too: anyone it bothered clearly hasn’t live in the NYC area for the last few years. That is: if I have to watch the Jets, at least Favre would make it interesting, and probably throw interceptions to my favorite team.
Then he retired again, and that was fine with me. Watching him was no great shakes anyway. Well, you know what happened. I tried to tune it out as much as possible, determined not to care, but when word finally came that he was on the Vikings, I realized ESPN had won: I watched the channel for hours. After months of effectively beating my brain with a hammer getting me to care about Brett Favre, they got me to care about Brett Favre, and I watched the first half of last night’s game with genuine interest. I care about Brett Favre now. I’m not sure I like this development, but I assure you, it’s not voluntary.
Funny Favre note: the Vikings play the Panthers this year. One of my friends is a humongous Panthers fan, but is realistic about Jake Delhomme’s inability to throw to the right team. For the Panthers/Vikings game, I suggested a twist on the fabled “Race in which the winner’s horse gets someplace second,” in which the participants merely switch horses before setting out. Have the teams switch QBs, then play the game. Only makes sense.
THIRD BASE: THE HEART OF THE GAME Last night, I watched a documentary entitled “The Heart of the Game,” largely about former Seattle high school basketball player Darnellia Russell. The documentary begins with Seattle’s Roosevelt H.S. hiring a new coach and follows that coach, a Tax Law professor, through his first season as he embraces the Gladwellian philosophy of pressing like crazy. They win there first game by 68 points, and eventually lose in the State finals tournament. The following season, Russell, a black student, enrolls in the largely white school and (easily) makes the varsity squad as a 14-year-old. Her dreams, it seems, are limited to joining the WNBA. The doc follows the team through the next five seasons, during which Russell leads the team to several state finals appearancs, drops out of school, becomes a mother, goes to court, and returns to the team after a yearlong ban against the Washington Interscholastic Activites Association’s judgment and plays her team toward a title, becoming a lightning rod for criticism in the process of… well, I won’t tell you how she fits in on the team. Two things are clear from this: one, you’ll never see a better documentary on the subject of women’s high school basketball, and two, Russell will definitely play in the WNBA. Neither of those testimonials really do the film justice, and by now you probably know whether it interests you or not — but if you need that final push toward queue’ing it up, consider this it.
HOME: OLIGARH Much has been made of Glenn Beck’s inability to spell “Oligarchy” on live TV, a wonderfully comedic moment that I saw live. But does it mean anything? The left has used it as another shotgun shell to fire in the “Glenn Beck is stupid” argument — and I assure you, Glenn Beck is not stupid. That doesn’t mean, however, that he makes any sense. Watch Beck for an hour and you’ll be captivated as he rails against virtually all forms of government, connecting his thoughts in sometimes a wonderfully entertaining manner: in the following day’s program, he managed to quote the full first verses of Beatles’ “Revolution,” with it cued up to enter the break. It was a wonderful piece of theater. Beck’s problem is that he’s against everything, and for nothing. He offers nothing in the way of solutions to the point where it seems that he has no worldview at all; and if you think of him as standing for absolutely nothing, he’s a lot easier to swallow. It pisses a lot of people off (Democrats, mostly), but if you can take the long view, someone who’s effectively a nihilist shouldn’t scare anyone that much. To quote another 60’s era performer: You can fool some people some time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. Glenn Beck is a talented on-air performer the same way Brett Favre is, but that’s not going to help him on the field, or Beck with his actual revolution. He says he’s got a real solution, but I’m still waiting to see the plan, and until I do, I’m not worried.
No one topic to write about today, so let’s go around the bases:
FIRST BASE: GO GIANTS The San Francisco Giants beat the Rockies yesterday to pull even in the NL Wild Card race. This is a development we’re solidly behind. As has been written here before, we visited the lovely Jersey Shore last weekend for a gathering of gentlemen, one of whom is scheduled to enter matrimony this fall. Sprinkled among the Red Sox fans was one Giants fan who is a longtime friend, and who reminded us that the Giants have never won a World Series in San Francisco. I would wager that not many people realize this. Eventually, after some Anheuser-Busch products had sufficiently loosened the conversation, I asked this man how often he thought about Felix Rodriguez, who effectively cost the team a game six in which they were up 5-0. He said it was probably twice a week, and, but for our convivial surroundings, that is something that is Not To Be Discussed in the Bay Area. The only thing that’s worse, we decided, is discussing the tuck rule in Oakland. They’re… still angry, let’s put it that way.
Anyhow if it comes down to Giants vs. Rockies, the choice is clear. Tim Lincecum vs. Jason Marquis, the Giants’ classic unis vs. black-and-purple, PacBell/AT&T park vs. Coors Field, and San Fran vs. Denver. It’s a no-brainer, people. As CF would say, choose life.
SECOND BASE: MORNING JOE I often watch MSNBC in the morning. The host of its morning shoe is Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman from Florida. It’s a strange and curious match for the otherwise left-leaning network. I’m all for a sense of balance at networks, but I still find Scarborough provocative in the morning; it’s the difference between striking a balance for the network as a whole and on the show, or projecting neutrality. Scarborough isn’t a right-wing zealot by any means, but he does not project neutrality. He’s a solid Reaganite. The day after Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, the gang was discussing Kennedy’s life and Scarborough referred to Kennedy’s 1980 Convention speech as being one of the worst of his career, and did so in such a matter-of-fact way that I, who was not familiar with it, thought it must have been the conventional wisdom. I’m not sure the other people heard it, either, because they didn’t fight back, but in the days following, that speech was singled out as likely Kennedy’s best — or at least most important — speech. For his “the dream shall never die” rhetorical flourish at the end, though, the speech was a blistering broadside against Reaganite policies, and Scarborough seemed to be passing off his political opinion as fact to see if he could get away with it. Good for his agenda, but at 7:45 a.m., I’m not sharp enough to take stock of these things, and to be asked to do so seems a little odd at the (relative) crack of dawn, especially on that network. Maybe it’s all that Starbucks. At any rate, it’s still better than Fox & Friends, which was visited by friend of the blog 538.com and got a nice little writeup about its… Fox & Friends-ness.
THIRD BASE: WII ARE ALL MADE OF STARS So TGBB bought a video game system that involves a wireless remote control that you use like a tennis racket, golf club, baseball bat, or bowling ball to control the goings-on on-screen. So far there have been no incidents of throwing the remote through the TV, but the days are young, so to speak. But after a Friday night of “bowling” and “tennis,” another problem emerged: we woke up Saturday with an emphatically sore arm. To be fair, as some have pointed out, it is not necessary for any game to actually act out the on-screen events with full-body motion: you can do almost everything sitting down. In my defense, you kind of get into it, especially when you are enjoying Simpler Times, as I was, and you think you justlearnedOMG how to throw a strike every time by lining up on the left side of the lane and holding the remote upside down, only to find you cannot duplicate it. I DIGRESS. Anyhow there was only one recourse for all this, after a left-handed video-game playing solution went awry: we dusted off our dumbells and did some left-arm only exercises to make sure our growing body develops proportionally. As I wrote above in the Scarborough item, balance is important.
HOME: TEDDY VS. GODZILLA Over on Jeff Pearlman’s (The Bad Guys Won!) blog, he’s debating the merits of Teddy Roosevelt vs. Godzilla with a college friend. Our pick? Shockey, of course. Which is probably another post.
The home stretch is upon us, with just over a month of baseball left to go. The dog days have passed/were never here (And Vick’s out of jail. Coincidence?), and it’s hurricane season on the East Coast. Last week Hurricane Bill ruined the watery dreams of those on the Jersey Shore, throwing up a red flag to all those who sought to end the water. Go in above your knee, and be prepared for a sharp whistle and an arm-flailing admonishment from the adolescent teenage lifeguarding crew. Push it, and they’ll come sprinting down to the water’s edge with a floaty thing in their hand and repeat the whole thing up close. Better to play football on the beach than risk such abject humiliation.
But wait! Attempt to do so, and be approached by a member of the local police department — identical to the lifeguards, but for their three extra years and the extra sense of importance — and shirt — they wear on their shoulders. He will ask for your beach passes, and when you produce them, tell you that you’re not usually allowed to play football on “days like this,” but it’s “okay” as long as you don’t tackle. You refrain from asking what exactly is so “this” about this day, happy in the result that your football game will continue as long as you have the energy. Alas, it is not long.
This weekend, back home, the situation repeats itself. The remnants of another hurricane bear down on the city. There will be rain, and preseason football. And there like an old friend: baseball.
You’ll admit: you haven’t paid much attention. The Red Sox have struggled, but not too much to be knocked off the scene. You look at the standings and there are some surprises. Not so much in the division leads, but for someone like the Nationals, who are 14-11 this month and still have the worst record in baseball. The standings are, on the whole, uninteresting. You never used to feel that way, and then you realize why: you don’t look at them every day. In the newspaper heyday, they’d be there, every day, right in front of you. Watching the numbers move was like following the plot of a book. Now, you focus on one character, and trying to jump into the standings — or care — is like jumping onto page 370 and expecting to know what the hell is going on.
It’s not easy.
Still, if you’re ever going to make the effort, the time is now. But the words of Peggy Olson echo: “One day, you’re there and there’s less of you, and you wonder where that part went. If it’s living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking… maybe you’ll get it back. And then you realize — it’s just gone.”
And then you realize.
See you Monday.
Another Teddy K. story. Actually, this one’s more about me.
I had lived on Martha’s Vineyard for four years when the Mitt Romney/Ted Kennedy Senate race in 1994 heated up. “Heated up” is a relative term: everyone knew, at every moment, that Teddy was going to win. The questions of the election were how foolish Romney could make Teddy look and how much money he could spend doing it.
I had never heard of Romney before the election. All I knew was that he was upsetting the standing order. I liked the idea of that, especially because I still felt like the outsider at school. Everyone around me blindly supported Teddy, and here was this intellectual guy coming out of nowhere to challenge everything they believed. I bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
There were a couple things to remember here: one, I couldn’t vote yet, so my stand was all for show; and two, if I could have voted, I probably would have voted for Kennedy. I do not think, even at the age of 16, the few rebellious bones in my body would have allowed me to vote against a Kennedy. But as I was two years away from voting age, I was free to act out on my impulses.
I can’t remember now what Romney’s platform was, as I keep confusing it with Steve Forbes’ Flat Tax run for President. All I know was that I angered some students, was a curiousity to others, and seriously annoyed some of the parents of my friends to whom I mouthed off. It’s one thing to knock the Kennedy religion; it’s another to do so when you’re 16 years old and brash about it. Hadn’t my mom raised me right?
In retrospect, she had. That flirtation — a period identifying with politics based on a gut feeling, rather than an appreciation of the complexities of the issues, the complexities of the job, and the weight and importance of history — was good to get out of my system. I’ll also say that I don’t begrudge anyone who was a Romney supporter based on all the issues raised above — I just know that I wasn’t. I was practicing a politics that I’ve never rekindled, and I’m happy I got to do it at such a young age.
But my message to Teddy is this: no matter what I said, I would have voted for you. And when you beat Romney by 17 points, your “smallest” margin of victory ever, I realized that what I didn’t know about politicis could fill the high school cafeteria. I didn’t see it as a close race. I saw it as a thumping. Once I set out to learn what I hadn’t know before, I started to learn about the dream that’ll never die by my ballot.
