Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan opened up the family-size can of worms with yesterday’s piece about the various and sundry deficiencies of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris Needs to Get Serious
Her shaky standing is a danger to the country given the position she could be called on to fill.
President Biden’s poll numbers are bad and Vice President Kamala Harris’s are worse. A survey this week from conservative-leaning Rasmussen had her at 39% favorable, 57% unfavorable.The number that stuck in the public’s mind came last month, from a USAToday/Suffolk poll that put her approval at 28%, disapproval at 51%.
The past few weeks she’s been hammered by bad news. There’s been an exodus of high-level staffers. The Washington Post had a sweeping, searing piece that described a “dysfunctional” and chaotic office full of bitter enmities. A consistent problem: Ms. Harris refuses “to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members” and would “then berate employees when she appeared unprepared” . . .
All this leaves people uneasy. The president is old and his judgment questionable; she seems out of her depth. We will have another three years of this? It is also dangerous: We don’t want their weakness to become America’s weakness.
(Note, please, Exhibit Umpteen of a publication’s choosing the most unflattering image it can find of someone from the opposing team.)
Fear not for the republic, though: Ms. Noodnik had “some thoughts on how [Harris] might improve her situation,” such as a) come to terms with her job, b) become more useful, and c) decide to become serious.
The hardwincing staff will leave the broader critiques of Noonan’s piece to others, such as Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison . . .
or The Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill . . .
or investigative journalist Victoria Brownworth . . .
or TV writer Bryan Behar . . .
or random disgruntled folks.
Here’s our beef. In addressing the possibility that Harris “could become president at any moment the next three years,” Noonan writes that “[we] face grave challenges—China, Russia, the endurance of the American economy. Who leads us matters.”
What also matters is that anyone who looks at the challenges facing this country and ignores the challenge to the endurance of American democracy – the most serious since the Civil War – is not an honest broker of information.
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
And the anti-democratic forces on the right are making serious progress, as Charles Homans reports in today’s New York Times. He notes that a May Reuters/Ipsos poll found that over 60% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. The bigger problem, Homans writes, is that they’re acting on it.
This belief has informed a wave of mobilization at both grass-roots and elite levels in the party with an eye to future elections. In races for state and county-level offices with direct oversight of elections, Republican candidates coming out of the Stop the Steal movement are running competitive campaigns, in which they enjoy a first-mover advantage in electoral contests that few partisans from either party thought much about before last November.
To Peggy Noonan, though, that’s all less of an issue than the U.S. economy. She’s worse than a noodnik. She’s a schnook.
Well the hardworking staff was wending its way through the New York Times yesterday when we come across this full-page MasterClass ad on A13.
Say, that’s some 1992-2016 Murderers’ Row (not to be confused with the 1927 New York Yankees).
But the real killer in that MasterClass sextet is Hillary Rodham Clinton, quite possibly the worst presidential candidate in American political history. She was literally the only Democrat the monumentally moronic Donald Trump could possibly have defeated in 2016.
And yet, here she is in 2021 blithely offering to teach The Power of Resilience (available only with a $180 annual membership). The trailer for Clinton’s MasterClass has her reading part of the 2016 victory speech she never got to deliver because she was absolutely THE WORST PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY.
Let’s give New York magazine’s Sarah Jones first crack at this new gig for HRC, a.k.a. Her Royal Catastrophe.
[My] firm conviction that this country is a horror probably bars me from any kind of public office. Nevertheless, I maintain that Clinton’s inability to account for America’s basic nastiness is partly what cost her the presidency. What is she going to do now, teach a MasterClass in losing?
To the contrary, Clinton flatters herself that she can help Americans “build a life of meaning and purpose.” That is – in the Clinton family tradition – breathtakingly tin-eared.
If only Hillary Clinton would teach a master class in disappearing. I’d pay 180 bucks for that right quick.
So the other night the hardhoping staff tried to get our Twitter account verified.
According to Twitter’s Help Center, an account must be “notable and active” to qualify for verification.
The six types of notable accounts we currently verify are:
Government
Companies, brands and non-profit organizations
News organizations and journalists
Entertainment
Sports and esports
Activists, organizers, and other influential individual
The hardworking staff thought we would qualify as a journalist, given our standing as media analyst for NPR’s Here & Now and senior news analyst for Boston’s WBUR. So we submitted our request for verification, which included an appearance on WBUR’s Radio Boston, a BBC News interview, and extensive digital bylines.
Twitter said it could take up to 14 days to authenticate our request.
It actually took 14 hours.
Our guess? The Twits took a look at our 1200 followers, algorithmically decided we weren’t big enough for a blue check, and never bothered with the rest.
This past year in the NBA, there was a lot of shipping down from Boston – to New York.
In June the Celtics shipped point guard Kemba Walker to the Oklahoma City Thunder, who promptly waived him, allowing Walker to sign with the New York Knicks.
After that, the Celtics signed-and-traded Evan Fournier to the Knickleheads.
Yesterday, New York Times scribe Hoopan – sorry, Sopan – Deb detailed how all that’s been working out.
The Knicks’ Struggles Go Deeper Than Kemba Walker
A surprising reconsideration of the lineup that pushed Walker out of the rotation could help with some of the team’s issues, but not all of them.
Knicks Coach Tom Thibodeau has long been known as resistant to change, particularly in the way he uses his starters. He’s often been criticized for playing them for too many minutes, rain or shine, whether or not they are performing well.
So it was surprising this week, a quarter of a way through the season, when Thibodeau said that he was pulling the plug on Kemba Walker as the starting point guard in favor of Alec Burks, a reserve for most of his career and not a traditional point guard. And it wasn’t just that Walker, a four-time All-Star who signed with the Knicks in the summer, was being yanked from the lineup. Thibodeau told reporters that Walker would be out of the rotation entirely.
The news wasn’t any better for Celtics expatriate Evan Fournier.
Fournier’s stats dipped in November like Walker’s did, causing Thibodeau to barely use him in key moments late in games. Thibodeau did call his number on Tuesday night against the Nets, and Fournier rewarded him by hitting a game-tying 3-pointer with 18 seconds left. But overall, Fournier shot 5 for 12 for 13 points in 22 minutes, with no rebounds or assists. Like with Walker, if Fournier isn’t consistently a 3-point threat, there’s little reason for him to be on the floor.
Bottom line: There might be life after the Celtics, but it’s not a slam dunk.
The building was forty-one years old [in 1969]. Hard years. In a cramped and shopworn corner of the city, one flight up from the train station, surrounded by elevated subway tracks and an elevated highway that kept sunshine and clean air at a distance, the place was sports’ version of an Edward Hopper painting . . .
If the Fabulous Forum was time travel into a Tomorrowland kind of Disney future, the Garden was a walk down the stairs into a cluttered carnival past. Or up the stairs. Up a bunch of stairs . . .
Especially the Stairway to Nowhere, which went from the balcony level to, well, nowhere. That was the place my pal Rob and I went to split a joint at halftime of the Boston Celtics games we frequented in the late ’70s, at which time we witnessed up close and personal The Great Sidney Wicks/Curtis (Skid) Rowe Dumpster Fire of 1977-78. As best I can recall, in that 32-50 regular season, the only thing the Celtics led the league in was getting hit in the back of the head with the ball.
Rob and I were up close and personal only because of the anemic attendance at the Garden back then. We’d buy the cheapest balcony tickets available – two or three dollars – then gradually work our way down to the good seats that were largely unoccupied.
Sometimes we’d sit right behind Celtics legend Red Auerbach in his customary seat in Loge 12, Row 7, Seat 1. We’d be pretty quiet then.
Other times we’d migrate elsewhere in the pricey seats and be more raucous.
Back then, believe it or not, fans could walk around the perimeter of the Garden parquet during halftime, which Rob and I would do on a regular basis. I would also approach the totally cute Garden Gal distributing mimeographed stat sheets to the press corps and ask her for a copy.
Our conversations would go something like this.
How’s it going – can I get one of those?
No. These are for press.
Hey, I’m press – I’m a correspondent for Nightfall.
What’s that?
Only New England’s leading entertainment, arts, and culture magazine.
Seriously?
Seriously. I’m legit – I interviewed Red about his book last year.
About 15 minutes into the interview, Auerbach let me know it was over by starting to go through his mail.
Death by letter opener.
Postscript: The Wicks/Rowe debacle didn’t turn out to be a total loss: After the ’78 season, Wicks got shipped to the San Diego Clippers in return for Nate Archibald, Marvin Barnes, Billy Knight, and two second-round draft picks.
In the fall of 1979, Larry Joe Bird swooped into Boston, the Hick From French Lick in the Hub of the Universe.
Not long after Bird’s arrival, I became Senior VP/Creative Director at a Boston advertising agency and decided that one of my fringe benefits should be an unlimited supply of Celtics tickets. Luckily, for reasons I’m still too discreet to divulge, one of the agency’s partners was wired like Con Ed, so he became the ticket master.
I subsequently found myself quite often sitting in Loge 20 at the Garden (see chart above), which was conveniently located behind the visiting team’s bench so that I could yell at Hubie Brown, the preternaturally unlikable coach of the New York Knicks at the time, for hours on end.
In ’82 the Celtics also came back from a 3-1 deficit to tie the series. But Game 7 was not a repeat – the Sixers cruised to a 120-106 win that cemented Andrew Toney’s status as The Boston Strangler.
The Missus and I ruefully, but lustily, joined in the Garden-wide chant of “Beat LA.”
Two years later we were at the Garden for Game 5 of the 1984 NBA Finals, the legendary Heat Game between the Celtics and the Lakers.
Here’s the redoubtable Bob Ryan in a Boston Globe retrospective.
There were some hot nights in that old building over the years, but there was never one like the evening of June 8, 1984. The male fans wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts. The women wore, well, as little as possible. Halter tops proliferated. There was never a day or evening in the long history of that building when there was so much exposed skin.
CBS announced a game-time temperature of 97 degrees.
The Lakers did not like it, and Kareem disliked it most of all. He was 37, and fairly cranky to begin with, and playing a Finals game in 97-degree heat was not his idea of fun. He would shoot 7 for 25 and wind up sucking on oxygen (honest).
Meanwhile, a lobster-red Larry Bird racked up 34 points (on 15 0f 20 shooting) and 17 rebounds, Robert Parish had 13 points and 12 rebounds, and Kevin McHale notched 19 points and 10 rebounds.
Talk about your Big Three.
Magic Johnson? Ten points and five rebounds, although he did have 13 assists, as the boxscore notes.
By the second half, Garden concessionaires had run out of ice and the entire place had run out of paper products. No doubt Red had also cranked up the heat in the visitors locker room.
The Missus said, “I can’t believe they’re actually playing in this heat.”
But they totally did.
Back to Bob Ryan: “I play in this stuff all the time back home,” sneered Larry Bird. “It’s like this all summer.”
Excellent!
• • • • • • •
As the ’80s wore on, my fringe benefits at the ad agency started to depreciate, with Garden seats shifting from loge to mezzanine to the balcony, which afforded views like this one.
Eventually I began leaving the nosebleed section at halftime and cruising the walkway behind the loge seats for the rest of the game. Sometimes I’d be moving with the action, sometimes against it, but the walking provided a nice rhythm – and a better view.
On May 22, 1988, though, I was in the balcony with my brother Bob for Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, which turned into a classic shootout between Larry Bird and Dominique Wilkins of the Atlanta Hawks.
“It was like two gunfighters waiting to blink,” recalled Celtics forward Kevin McHale. “There was one stretch that was as pure a form of basketball as you’re ever going to see.”
The game was tied 86-86 with 10:26 to play when the teams’ respective stars took over. “They each put their team on their back and said, ‘Let’s go,’” said Hawks coach Mike Fratello.
Bird fired the first shot, a jumper with 10:03 to play, and went on to score nine points in a span of 1:58. But Atlanta stayed close and drew even again at 99-99 on a basket by Wilkins with 5:57 left.
Bird scored 11 points after that, including the go-ahead basket with 3:34 to play and a stunning three-pointer over Wilkins with 1:43 left. Wilkins matched Bird’s 11 points during that stretch, but it was not enough.
The whole thing was breathtaking.
And, for once, I was nailed to my seat in the nosebleed section.
• • • • • • •
I left the ad agency the following year and set up a one-man creative shop that, unfortunately, could not afford fringe benefits (not to mention I was wired like a space heater). So I never did get back to the Garden.
I did, however, have as one of my new clients Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, an engineering firm that oversaw the Garden’s replacement (then called the Shawmut Center, later called the FleetCenter, now TD Garden).
The project was decades in the making, given the complexities of doing anything significant in Boston. There were dozens of surface rights, scores of air rights, and even more underground rights to buy out, not to mention the endless succession of politicians that also needed to be bought out.
Construction began on April 29, 1993. Plans for the new arena stated that it would be slightly north of the old facility. The term “slightly north” ended up meaning that there were only nine inches (23 cm) of space between the two buildings when construction was completed. The site for the new arena occupied 3.2 acres (13,000 m2). It eventually cost $160 million. The ground was broken on April 29, 1993. In 27 months, quick by today’s standards, the arena was built. That included seven weeks of delay caused by heavy snowfall. The Shawmut Center opened on September 30, 1995.
Sometime after that, my VHB client took me, as a sort of bonus, to the new arena for a Celtics game. It was quite different from the old Garden (Leigh Montville: “Rats as big as rabbits could be spotted, bold as paying customers. The smell of the circus would linger for a good month.”)
I hated the new place.
But he was my (paying) client, so I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, “It’s so clean. And look at all the cupholders.”
Renowned Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos premieres a new monumental site-specific installation. Known for her unprecedented multimedia works, Vasconcelos, in her first U.S. solo show, honors Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, an enslaved woman whose court battle for her freedom in 1781 helped make slavery illegal in Massachusetts. The large-scale installation entitled Valkyrie Mumbet, is the newest in her Valkyries series, named after Norse female war goddesses, which pays homage to inspiring women.
(The National Women’s History Museum has a deep dive into the amazing story of Elizabeth Freeman.)
According to the website Lisboa Cool, Atelier Joana Vasconcelos features a team of 45 people “composed of artisans, seamstresses, electricians, carpenters, painters, architects, photographers to record Joana’s work, press officers to handle communication, the entire financial part of a company, and they also welcome trainees from various countries, whom Joana insists on paying.”
Here’s MAAM Executive Director Lisa Tung’s eye-popping curator tour of “Valkyrie Mumbet.”
Here’s a 3d tour that highlights all the spectacular details. But you really should see this monumental artwork in person. It’s a corker.
First, the sad demise of the Crimson Hose, as narrated by the Boston Globe’s resident darn-those-Sox scribe Dan Shaughnessy.
Red Sox ran out of karma, and it all started after the wristwatch taunt
HOUSTON — The Red Sox season ended Friday night with a 5-0 loss to the Houston Astros in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series.
The Sox went down passively, losing three straight games after dominating the ‘Stros and even mocking them in a Game 3, 12-3 rout at Fenway.
The record will show that the Sox flatlined after Eduardo Rodriguez ridiculed Houston shortstop Carlos Correa (pointing at an imaginary watch — a patented Correa move that means “it’s our time”) while coming off the mound with a 9-3 lead in the sixth inning of Game 3. Alex Cora yelled at his young pitcher for poking the bear. But it was too late. Karma shifted. And so did the series.
The numbers were brutal: “After scoring 21 runs and hitting three grand slams in Game 2 and 3 routs, Boston was outscored, 22-1, over the final 26 innings of this series. . . . the Sox bats went cold (0 for 19 with runners in scoring position in Games 4-5-6). For three full games. They had nothing. They were two-hit in Game 6 and they hit .111 (10 for 90) in the last three games.”
Swat Caroline.
By contrast, in Hot ‘Lanta (tip o’ the pixel to the late, great Allman Brothers) the Braves shook off their 2020 collapse in the NLCS (up 3-1, lost three in a row to the Dodgers) and closed out the series last night with gritty 4-2 win.
As the hardgrading staff noted yesterday, Jazz at Lincoln Center ran this totally unreadable full-page ad in the New York Times on Monday to celebrate Wynton Marsalis’s 60th birthday.
(The Missus rightly noted that Wynton Marsalis deserved far better than an ad nobody would read.)
Yesterday was Wynton Marsalis’s 60th birthday, so the fine folks from Jazz At Lincoln Center took out this full-page ad in the New York Times to celebrate it.
Yeah, that’s what we thought.
Here’s a blown up section to give you an idea of the birthday greetings.
The print ad, however, is virtually unreadable and undoubtedly has David Ogilvy spinning in his grave.
For starters, there’s this quote from Ogilvy on Advertising: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Except the JALC ad doesn’t;’t have a headline. So, given the estimated $150,000 cost of a full-page d in the Times (color is extra), the Center just threw away at least $120,000.
Other Ogilvy recommendations (via The Castle Press) that the ad ignores:
Use eye-easy typography
Sans-serif fonts are particularly difficult to read
Yesterday the hardlyrooting staff (which has been a Made Yankee Fan in Boston for 45 years, so draw your own conclusions) presented the case for the Boston Red Sox as this postseason’s Team o’ Destiny.
But now that the Atlanta Braves have managed their second walkoff win against the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers, we seem to have a bakeoff.
On Saturday night, after a Dodger baserunning blunder in the top of the ninth snuffed out a possible rally, the Braves put together a bloop single, a stolen base, and a walkoff line drive into the left field corner to grab the victory.
Then last night the Dodgers jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning, the Braves tied it in the bottom of the fourth, the Dodgers came back with two in the top of the seventh, and the Braves matched them in the bottom of the eighth.
Campaign Outsider 