The Weekly Sift

Who Should You Back in the Midterm Elections?

Deciding what to do with your time and money is the rare instance where speculating about the political horse race makes sense.

One of things I criticize most about American media’s coverage of politics is the endless horse-race speculation: Who’s going to run? Who can win? What issues will the voters respond to, and what positions will they support? What do the polls say about elections that won’t be held until after a whole lot of things have changed?

Speculating about the future is engaging and easy. It fills airtime cheaply, and nobody ever suffers for being wrong.

Endless conversation about things that might never happen is an entertaining way to cover sports, where fans love to argue about who should be traded for who, or where some hot free agent will land. But sports are fundamentally about entertainment; politics shouldn’t be. For the most part, the time we spend speculating about the future draws our attention away from what is happening here and now, and what our leaders are doing about it.

There is one exception, though, and I’m about to invoke it. In every election cycle, people who want to affect the direction of the country have to decide who they’re going to support with their time and/or money. You can’t work for everybody and you can’t give to everybody, so you have to make choices.

One way to choose is to follow your heart; if some candidate inspires you, devote your resources to helping them. Another strategy is to take a pragmatic approach more like triage: There are inspiring candidates who are going to win with or without the help of people like you. (AOC has gotten over 75% of the vote in both of her races.) Other races are lost causes. (It would be great to beat Republican Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy, but he won by nearly 25 points in 2020, and every prognosticating outlet rates his seat as safe.) So you want to give a push to candidates who might or might not win, depending on whether people like you rally around them.

Most of us do something in between. We’d like to simultaneously feel good about our candidates and make a difference in the outcome. That means looking at races that could go either way and seeing how we feel about the candidates involved.

Figuring out which races those are requires speculation. So that’s what we’ll do this week. (But I’ll try not to make a habit of it.)

The overall climate. Conventional wisdom says that 2022 is going to be a bad year for Democrats, for a number of reasons:

Off-year elections usually go badly for the party in power.
The marginal voters Democrats depend on are less likely to show up in non-presidential cycles.
Biden’s popularity is low.

The current generic-ballot polls (would you rather vote for a Republican or a Democrat?) have the GOP ahead by 3.3%. If that holds up, gerrymandering produces a substantial Republican majority in the House. Generally, Democrats have to win nationally by at least 3% to break even. In 2020, they won nationally by 3.1%, which netted them a narrow 9-vote House majority. By contrast, a 1.1% Republican win in 2016 produced a 47-seat majority. (So Republicans are right when they say the system is rigged. It’s rigged in their favor.)

And who knows, things might play out that way. But November is still 9 months off, and there are other factors that could turn the situation around.

The Republican primaries may fracture the party, producing damaged candidates either too Trumpy to win or not Trumpy enough to mobilize the base. Nominating bad candidates lost the Republicans Senate seats they should have won in Missouri in 2012 and in Alabama in 2017, just to name the two most obvious cases.
The GOP has no agenda, which should become more apparent as election day approaches. In general, Democrats are running to do good things, while Republicans are running to stop bad things. Republicans only win if the public is in a sour mood, which it currently is, but may not be in a few months.
A lot of that sour mood is the public’s frustration with Covid, which might not be as big a factor by November.
By November, inflation should be slowing down, but Biden’s job growth numbers will still be something to brag about. Moody Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi writes: “The hair-on-fire discourse over high inflation is understandable, but it’s overdone.”
The Democratic base could get energized if the Supreme Court reverses Roe in June, as it seems they will.
As the legal net closes around Donald Trump, he may decide to take the GOP down with him.

Summary: As you go into the midterm elections, be realistic but not fatalistic. The future isn’t written yet.

The Senate. The current Senate has 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. 34 seats are up for election in 2022; 14 held by Democrats and 20 held by Republicans. Wikipedia has a table of how four different well-regarded sites rate the elections. They don’t all agree, but most tilt slightly towards Republican control. The most pessimistic is Inside Elections, which favors Republicans in all their current seats, but thinks three Democratic seats are toss-ups: Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and Mark Kelly in Arizona. Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire also faces a tight race, though she’s currently favored to win.

All these predictions are subject to the same possible turns of the tide that I listed above. Raphael Warnock’s seat in Georgia is a good example. Current polling has Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Herschel Walker ahead of Warnock by 1%. But other than his name recognition from winning the Heisman playing football at University of Georgia in 1982, Walker is a terrible candidate. He’s not very articulate (especially if you put him on a stage next to Warnock, who is extraordinary), he has no political philosophy to speak of beyond loyalty to Trump, and he has a history of violence, domestic abuse, and mental illness. (No wonder Trump likes him.)

And finally, let’s be honest: A lot of the White racist voters Republicans need are going to lose interest in a contest between two Black guys. Republicans have a history of fantasizing about Black candidates like Colin Powell, Herman Cain, and Ben Carson, but changing their minds sometime before election day. Right now, when all most voters know about Walker is his name and his football career, is probably Walker’s peak.

But anyway, if you’re inclined to play defense, look at Warnock, Kelly, Cortez Masto, and Hassan to see who you feel best about. Warnock would be my choice, though I have supported Hassan in the past when I lived in New Hampshire.

If you expect Democrats’ fortunes to improve and want to play offense, the states to look at are Wisconsin (Ron Johnson), Pennsylvania (Pat Toomey is retiring), and North Carolina (Richard Burr is retiring). Of these, the most satisfying outcome would be to boot Covid-misinforming, coup-sympathizing Ron Johnson out of the Senate. The problem is that the Democratic challenger won’t be chosen until the August 9 primary. The current front-runner is Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. I worry a little about the rural Republican base getting energized to fight a Black candidate from Milwaukee, but my quick look at Barnes suggested an Obama-like charm that might protect him. He did win statewide office as Tony Evers’ running mate in 2018.

Pennsylvania’s primary won’t be until May, and there is still a large field. But to me the promising candidate is Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman. He’s a little off-the-wall, but in a folksy way that should make him hard to demonize. (“John and Gisele have chosen not to settle in the Lt. Governor’s Mansion, instead opening up the pool in the official residence to children who typically wouldn’t have access to one. They live with their three children Karl, 12, Gracie, 10, and August, 7, in a restored car dealership in Braddock with the family dog, Levi.”) But if you hold the run-a-moderate-in-swing-states theory, Rep. Conor Lamb is probably your best bet.

In North Carolina, the field is wide and the primary is in May. The current favorite is Cheri Beasley, who was the first Black woman to be chief justice of the state supreme court. She narrowly lost a re-election campaign in 2020.

If you’re really ambitious, you might hope to knock off Marco Rubio in Florida. You’ve got a strong candidate to work with: Rep. Val Demings, who was on the short list to be Biden’s vice president.

The House. House races don’t get as much national attention as Senate races, so finding one you want to get involved in is harder (unless you happen to live a swing district with a good candidate). On the other hand, you’re more likely to have an influence on a smaller race.

In general, the people you would feel best about beating — Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, etc. — are in very safe Republican districts. (That’s why they can be as extreme as they are.) I keep getting email from a Democratic guy running for MTG’s seat, and I definitely feel the temptation, but I keep reminding myself that there are more effective things to do than tilt at that particular windmill.

If you don’t have a good local candidate to support, take a look at the 16 crossover districts identified by Sabato’s Crystal Ball. These are House districts that elected a representative from one party, but voted for the other presidential nominee. In other words, they seem like races that could go either way, and so are obvious places to attack or defend.

In Maine-2, for example, Democrat Jared Golden was re-elected by 6.1% in 2020, while Biden was losing the district by 7.4%. In New York-24, Republican John Katko won by 10.2% while Biden was winning by 9.1%.

Sadly, the crossover Republicans tend to be the most reasonable people in their conference, so beating them won’t be all that satisfying. Katko, for example, voted to impeach Trump and negotiated the deal for a bipartisan January 6 commission that the rest of his party rejected. Possibly seeing the handwriting on the wall from both left and right, he’s retiring.

Likewise, if you’re on the leftward wing of the Democratic Party, the crossover Democrats aren’t likely to make your heart beat faster. Ron Kind is retiring, and of the remaining six, only Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania-8 has a 2020 GovTrack ideology rating more liberal than Nancy Pelosi; he was the 58th most conservative of 237 House Democrats while Pelosi was 48th.

Other seats rated as toss-ups are CA-22, CA-27, CA-45, CO-8, IL-17, IA-3, KS-3, MI-3, MI-7, MI-8, NM-2, NY-11, VA-2, and WA-8.

Governorships and other state offices. At this distance from November, it’s hard to guess which governor’s races will be competitive. For what it’s worth, the races that look close to outside experts are: Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Other than Kansas, those are precisely the Biden states Trump tried to steal, so having a Democratic governor in place in 2024 might be pretty important. Other than Arizona, where Gov. Ducey has been term-limited out, they all have Democratic governors now. Republican primary candidates are competing to see who can take the most extreme positions about the 2020 election, with most saying they would not have certified the results. (In Arizona, Trump-endorsed Kari Lake has pushed it even further: She said “I agree” when a crowd of her supporters chanted “Lock her up” about Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.)

For similar reasons, you might want to support Democratic candidates in purple-state Secretary of State races that you’ve never cared about before. Republican candidates are basically promising to cheat, if that’s what it takes to put their favorite fascist back in the White House.

Two gubernatorial races that seem like long shots would be very satisfying to win: booting out Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas. Abbott’s approval ratings are negative, but it remains to be seen whether Beto O’Rourke can cash in on that. DeSantis seems to be in better shape.

Local races. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, state legislatures and local school boards make important decisions. And as the Supreme Court whittles away at the power of the federal government (at least until Republicans can get back in control), that trend will only increase.

Local races are often the most satisfying to work on. You’re shoulder-to-shoulder with the candidate and working with your neighbors. And who knows? Once you get involved in local politics, you might find yourself running for office yourself someday.

February 14, 2022 – 10:11 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged 2022 elections |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This is an I-do-your-homework week. If you want to make a difference in the November mid-term elections, who should you be sending money to or volunteering for? I’ll go through Senate races, House races, and governorships, while reminding you not to lose sight of state legislatures and school boards.

That should be out maybe around 10 EST.

The weekly summary covers the Canadian “Freedom” Convoy, the latest Trump revelations, Omicron’s continuing fade, Super Bowl commercials, and a few other things. That should be out maybe noonish.

February 14, 2022 – 8:56 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Plantation Economics

In certain critical ways, the NFL is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation. Its 32 owners — none of whom are Black — profit substantially from the labor of NFL players, 70% of whom are Black.

– Brian Flores’ lawsuit against the NFL

This week’s featured post is “Racism in the NFL“. It gives some long-term historical background on the dearth of Black NFL coaches, which Brian Flores lawsuit made topical this week.

This week everybody was talking about censorship

When I wrote about the Maus controversy last week, I was inclined to interpret the school board’s actions as generously as reason allowed, a position several of the commenters disagreed with. Sadness for McMinn County’s 8th-graders was my main reaction, rather than anger at the small-minded board members.

The censorship stories in the news this week, though, are worse. McMinn County, after all, was just preventing teachers from assigning a book; they weren’t doing anything to stop kids from reading it if they want to. (And if that’s what they intended, their action backfired spectacularly. Maus is selling out all over the country.)

In Texas, though, conservative politicians and parents are removing books about sex and gender from school libraries.

Hundreds of titles have been pulled from libraries across the state for review, sometimes over the objections of school librarians, several of whom told NBC News they face increasingly hostile work environments and mounting pressure to pre-emptively pull books that might draw complaints.
Records requests to nearly 100 school districts in the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin regions — a small sampling of the state’s 1,250 public school systems — revealed 75 formal requests by parents or community members to ban books from libraries during the first four months of this school year. In comparison, only one library book challenge was filed at those districts during the same time period a year earlier, records show. A handful of the districts reported more challenges this year than in the past two decades combined.

Books related to race are another target, including one absurd request to remove a children’s biography of Michelle Obama because “it promotes ‘reverse racism’ against white people”.

It’s one thing to object to books the school tries to make your child read, but it’s something else entirely when you try to control the books made available to other people’s children.

Back in Tennessee, a church in the Nashville ex-urb of Mount Juliet took things one step further with an honest-to-Hitler book burning on Wednesday. The tinder included young-adult series the church deems “demonic”, like Harry Potter and Twilight, as well as anything related to Masonry.

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this plan, because to me re-enacting Nazi rituals seems like a good way to raise demons, not fight them. But I guess my ceremonial magick training was just different from theirs.

I think if I were one of the authors whose books are being burned, I’d put out a statement saying that I did indeed embed demons in my books, but I designed the spell so that the demons are released by fire. (So you just possessed your own church, you idiots. Pay me if you want the banishing spell.) Burning the book works like Obi-Wan explained to Darth Vader:

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

But back in the world of practical politics, I have to wonder when the civic establishments in these places are going to realize how much damage these stories are doing to their public image. Say I’m an educated professional with school-age kids and I’m on the job market. The absolute last place I’m going to move is somewhere that puts my kids’ education under the thumbs of Christian Taliban yahoos. Similarly, if I’m a business that needs to attract an educated work force, I’m not going to locate anywhere near such towns.

and the pandemic

Omicron case totals are going down as fast as they went up. The current daily average just crossed under 300K, down 57% in two weeks. As always, hospitalizations and deaths lag a few weeks behind. Hospitalizations are down only 23% in two weeks, and deaths-per-day are still increasing by that measure, though on a shorter time scale, it looks like they peaked at 2632 on Thursday.

Apparently white-tailed deer also get Covid. My first thought was not to worry, because I seldom find myself sharing an elevator with a deer. But today’s NYT speculates on the possibility that the virus might mutate in the deer population and then come back to us.

Chris Hayes:

I keep coming back to the dumb, crushingly obvious point that everything about Covid in the US would be better if we were 80% vaccinated and 60% boosted (like Denmark)

Karl Rove wrote a Wall Street Journal column in response to the death of his sister from Covid. I think of Karl as one of the villains of American politics in recent decades, but that doesn’t matter in a situation like this. Today, I hope he finds comfort.

and January 6

The Republican National Committee went full fascist Friday. If they want to censure Republican congresspeople, that’s their business, but their censure resolution against Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger gave these reasons:

WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes …

Nothing in the resolution draws a line between good and bad participants in the January 6 riot, so the clear implication is that the whole event was “legitimate political discourse”. Beating up Capitol police and breaking into the Capitol building to prevent Congress from overseeing a peaceful transfer of power — that’s just how Republicans do politics these days. Attempting to figure out what happened that day and why (which is all the January 6 Committee can do; they have no “prosecutorial power”) is “persecution”.

The rest of the resolution is full of conspiracy-theory thinking and Orwellian gaslighting. Among other things, Republicans need to get the House majority back in order to stop the Democrats’ “systematic effort … to create record inflation designed to steal the American dream from our children and grandchildren”. So inflation — which nowhere near 1979’s record of 13%, but never mind that — isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of (successful) policies to get the economy moving again; it’s an intentional plot with nefarious purposes!

Meanwhile, the defeated ex-president is excusing and encouraging political violence in his own ways. At a rally in Texas January 29, Trump suggested pardons for the January 6 rioters.

If I run and if I win [in 2024], we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.

https://nickanderson.substack.com/p/dangling-pardons

Two things to note about that: First, he’s attempting to influence witnesses who might be able to pin responsibility for the riot back on him. That’s illegal. And second, he’s encouraging people to use violence on behalf of his 2024 run: Don’t worry about it; if we win I’ve got you covered.

Trump has a record of making good on pardon-for-silence deals: Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort successfully obstructed the Mueller investigation by refusing to talk. All have been pardoned.

Trump also threatened that his supporters would take action if he gets indicted, as he might in any of several venues:

If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or corrupt, we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.

And if one of those protests turns into a violent attempt to intimidate public officials, no worries — he can pardon the terrorists after he’s back in office.

Witness tampering leads us to the Vindman lawsuit. In his role as the National Security Council’s Director for Eastern European Affairs, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was on the infamous 2019 call in which then-President Trump made delivery of military aid to Ukraine (that Congress had already appropriated) contingent on Ukraine participating in Trump’s attempt to smear his most-feared challenger, Joe Biden.

Recognizing that Trump’s linking of US aid to his personal political interests was “improper, if not unlawful, and risked national security”, Vindman properly reported his concerns to NSC Legal Counsel John Eisenberg. After someone else with knowledge of the call made a whistle-blowing complaint to Congress, Vindman was subpoenaed to testify at Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Later, Trump retaliated by firing both Vindman and his brother (who had no role in the impeachment) from the NSC. Trump also attempted to prevent Vindman’s promotion to full colonel, and Vindman subsequently retired from the Army.

Wednesday, Vindman filed suit in federal court against Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and two Trump White House staffers: Deputy White House Communications Director Julia Hahn, and Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino. Vindman’s complaint charges that they participated in

in an intentional, concerted campaign of unlawful intimidation and retaliation against a sitting Director of the National Security Council and decorated military officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, to prevent him from and then punish him for testifying truthfully before Congress during impeachment proceedings against President Trump. …
The attacks on Lt. Col. Vindman did not simply happen by accident or coincidence, nor were they the result of normal politics or modern newscycles. Rather, the coordinated campaign was the result of a common understanding and agreement among and between President Trump, Defendants, and others comprising a close group of aides and associates inside and outside of the White House, to target Lt. Col. Vindman in a specific way for the specific purpose of intimidation and retaliation. The coordination and agreement on purpose and strategy is exactly what made this unlawful campaign against Lt. Col. Vindman so damaging.

This is a civil lawsuit. Vindman is seeking compensation for the “significant financial, emotional, and reputational harm” he suffered as a result of this illegal conspiracy.

But the suit is not just about financial damage: Witness intimidation and retaliation against witnesses are crimes. Reading the lawsuit makes me realize all over again how extensively Trump has worn down the nation’s conscience. We’ve gotten used to the idea that of course he and his people break the law; they do it constantly.

Speaking of ignoring the law, Trump regularly tore up documents that crossed his desk, even after being informed that he was breaking the Presidential Records Act. He also illegally took boxes of documents with him to Mar-a-Lago.

“He didn’t want a record of anything,” a former senior Trump official said.“ He never stopped ripping things up. Do you really think Trump is going to care about the records act? Come on.”

Do innocent people act like that?

We also learned this week that the Trump White House plan to seize voting machines got a lot closer to implementation than we had previously realized.

It’s hard to tell yet how seriously we should take the recent Republican gestures pushing back against Trump, his coup, and his encouragement of political violence.

Friday, former VP Mike Pence uttered the unthinkable phrase “President Trump is wrong.” Pence was denying that he could “overturn the election”, as Trump had wanted him to do when he presided over the counting of electoral votes on January 6. He added:

Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.

And Lindsey Graham on January 30 disagreed with Trump about January 6 pardons: “I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol.” How weird is it that this is a courageous statement in today’s GOP?

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/mike-luckovich-blog/22-mike-luckovich/2LAIGNR4B5DWLL2UBDKGEATN4E/

and you also might be interested in …

The Ukraine tension continues, and I continue not to know what to make of it.

Friday’s January jobs report was surprisingly good. Analysts had expected the Omicron surge to slow the economy down, but instead there were 467K new jobs. In addition, the November and December estimates were revised upward, each by hundreds of thousands of jobs.

One of the more bizarre media clips circulating this week is of the Fox & Friends hosts gleefully anticipating a bad report that they could use in their Biden-is-a-failure narrative, only to be disappointed by the good news for American workers.

As I’ve been saying for months, inflation stories and jobs stories should be melded together, because they result from the same policies. Inflation is the price of getting the post-Covid-shutdown economy going again.

Mississippi Today describes an actual Critical Race Theory class at the University of Mississippi Law School. It doesn’t resemble the Republican propaganda about CRT.

https://jensorensen.com/2017/11/14/patriotism-vs-nationalism-cartoon/

and let’s close with something a little bit creepy

Before the advent of tape recorders, Soviet music-lovers discovered they could make samizdat recordings of banned Western music on used X-ray film, which they could grab (illegally) out of hospital garbage. The result became known as “bone music“.

February 7, 2022 – 11:56 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (10)

Racism in the NFL

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1009806/dont-look-behind-the-shield

The lack of coaching opportunities for Blacks in the NFL is more than just the usual it’s-hard-to-break-into-management problem, and a new lawsuit explores why.

As far back as 1908, when Jack Johnson won the heavyweight boxing championship, sports have been a prime setting for America to work out its racial issues. Blacks might have been barred from most opportunities to excel, and what they managed to accomplish in spite of racial barriers could usually be minimized. But sporting events have objective outcomes. In the 1930s, for example, Whites who wanted to downplay Black achievements could claim that jazz wasn’t really music. But they couldn’t claim that Jesse Owens wasn’t really fast.

In sports, the 20th century was a long story of racial barriers falling and Black athletes succeeding. In 1947, Jackie Robinson was the only Black player in the major leagues. But he became the rookie of the year that season, and by 1949 he was the National League’s most valuable player. Willie Mays entered the league in 1951, and Hank Aaron in 1954. By 1981, the major leagues were 18.7% Black, but then percentages began to fall, possibly because Black athletes drifted into other sports. In 2016, major league baseball players were 63.7% White, 27.4% Hispanic, 6.7% Black, and 2.1% Asian.

Basketball is the sport most dominated by Black players: In 2020, about 3/4 of NBA players were Black, a number that has been relatively stable for some while. The change from majority White to majority Black happened fairly quickly: The first three Black players entered the league in 1950. By 1957, Bill Russell was the most important player in a Celtic dynasty that would win 11 championships in the next 13 years. Whether White owners and executives continued to have racist beliefs or not, there was no arguing with that kind of success.

The story of race in the National Football League has always been more complicated. The NFL had a handful of Black players when it was getting started in the 1920s, but instituted an informal color barrier from 1933 to 1946. That barrier was broken not through the efforts a crusading White general manager like baseball’s Branch Rickey, but out of legal necessity: When the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946, they played in the publicly-owned Los Angeles Coliseum. Public accommodations couldn’t be segregated even in that era, so the Rams needed at least one Black player. The Washington Redskins became the last team to integrate in 1962, when the Kennedy administration similarly threatened not to let them play in a stadium on federally-controlled land.

The quarterback mystique. But even as Black athletes in many sports succeeded in blowing up the myth of White superiority, racism established a fallback position: Some Blacks might possess a raw animal physicality, but only Whites had the intellectual and moral virtues that made athletes truly admirable.

And so an article about base-stealing baseball players might emphasize a Black player’s blazing speed, but a White player’s painstaking analysis of pitchers and their moves. Black basketball players might be imposing Goliaths like Wilt Chamberlain, but (as the sports magazines of my youth told the story) White players compensated through smarts, hard work, and an indomitable will to succeed. That racial distinction was rarely spelled in so many words, but whenever I heard an athlete described as “crafty” or “scrappy”, I could be pretty sure he was White.

Baseball and basketball are inherently egalitarian sports — everybody bats, anybody can shoot — so this pro-White image-making had limited effects. But football is more corporate and specialized. In particular, a racial mystique developed around the quarterback position: Of course arm strength and other physical gifts mattered, but intangible (White) qualities like leadership and courage were more important, and quarterbacks needed the (White) mental capacity to analyze defenses and make sound decisions under pressure.

As a result, it took decades for football’s conventional wisdom to recognize that Black athletes could be good quarterbacks. The prophecy was self-fulfilling: High school and college coaches didn’t want to “waste their time” training unsuitable Black players to be quarterbacks, so by the time the quarterback pipeline reached the NFL, it contained mostly White players. As that pipeline combined with NFL coaches’ own racial preconceptions, Black NFL quarterbacks remained exceptional and usually had short careers until Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham became stars in the 1980s.

Naturally, if Black athletes lacked the cerebral and moral virtues needed to be good quarterbacks, it followed that they couldn’t be good coaches either. All sports have had racial barriers to management positions, as the larger society still does in many fields. (Bill Russell once explained the dominance of Black players in the NBA by semi-seriously observing that young Black men weren’t distracted by their opportunities in banking.) But no other sport has such a wide gap between its majority of Black players and its tiny number of Black coaches: 69% of players are Black, but only one of the 32 head coaches (Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers). With only a slightly higher percentage of Black players, the NBA has seven Black head coaches.

Until a few weeks ago, Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins had been a second Black head coach. But he was fired at the end of the season, a move that seemed mysterious: In 2019, Flores had joined a team mired in mediocrity. The Dolphins had managed only one winning season out of the previous ten. His first season had been even worse: 5-11. But then he turned the team around, going 10-6 in 2020 and 9-8 in 2021. 2021 had seemed like two different seasons: The team had started 1-7 (and if Flores had been fired then, it would made some sense), but then finished 8-1. Teams that finish with that kind of spurt usually have high hopes for the next season. They don’t usually fire the head coach. So Miami’s Channel 4 seemed a bit puzzled:

During a Monday morning news conference, the primary issues [team owner Stephen] Ross cited for the decision to fire Flores seemed to have little to do with the on-field product and more with communication within the team’s braintrust — though there were no specific examples offered of how the team determined Flores wasn’t the right fit in those regards.

Anyway, life in the NFL. Flores moved on to apply for other coaching vacancies. And then, for a minute, it seemed like he had found something. The Patriots’ Bill Belichick — Flores had been his defensive coordinator during the Super Bowl winning 2018 season — sent Flores a text congratulating him on landing the New York Giants head coaching job.

The weird thing was, Flores hadn’t heard anything and hadn’t even interviewed for the job yet. That was supposed to happen in a few days. After a quick back-and-forth it turned out that Belichick had gotten the wrong Brian: The Giants had decided to hire Brian Daboll, a White coach who had also been a Belichick assistant at one point.

But even though they were telling people like Belichick that the decision was made, the Giants didn’t inform Flores. They went ahead with his interview, then announced that Daboll was their new coach.

Why they would do that has a simple answer: the Rooney Rule.

Rooney Rule. Named after former Pittsburgh Steeler owner Dan Rooney, the Rooney Rule says that NFL teams have to interview non-White candidates for coaching and management jobs. It puts no quota on hiring, but Black candidates at least have to get in the door.

It was established in 2003 after a similar controversy: Tampa Bay had just fired coach Tony Dungy (who would later win a Super Bowl in Indianapolis), and Minnesota had sacked Dennis Green (after his first losing season in ten years). A study showed that Black NFL coaches had, on average, better records than White coaches, but were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired.

Clearly, the rule didn’t solve the problem. Nearly 20 years later, the NFL is down to one Black coach again. Instead, the rule has become a box-checking exercise, in which Black coaching candidates are put through charade interviews without being seriously considered.

They have long suspected this, but the Belichick text was the first time it could be established in a particular case.

The Flores lawsuit. Tuesday, Flores filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York (where the NFL is headquartered). It’s a class-action suit on behalf of

All Black Head Coach, Offensive and Defensive Coordinators and Quarterbacks Coaches, as well as General Managers, and Black candidates for those positions during the applicable statute of limitations period

The suit asks the court to declare the league in violation of several non-discrimination laws, to award monetary damages (both compensatory and punitive), and for

injunctive relief necessary to cure Defendants’ discriminatory policies and practices

And that’s where it gets interesting. What would a court have to do to “cure” the NFL of racism?

The problem is that each team hires only one head coach at a time, and those decision depend on subjective judgements: How well does this coach’s management style fit the team’s vision and the talent on the field?

So far this year, five of the nine coaching vacancies have been filled (all by White coaches), but it’s hard to pick out any one of them as a racist decision. The Jaguars, for example, just hired Doug Pederson, who in his last job won the Super Bowl with a back-up quarterback.

The fact that a coin comes up heads once doesn’t prove it’s rigged. But if it keeps coming up heads again and again, it probably is.

What Flores claims. Several of the specific charges in Flores’ lawsuit have gotten attention from the media, but not enough attention has been paid to the suit’s larger narrative.

For example, the accusation that Dolphins’ owner Ross offered Flores a bonus for losing games so that the team could get a better draft pick (an officially denied practice known as “tanking”), has been widely reported. But the larger implication is that hiring Flores in the first place was a sham: He wasn’t hired to succeed; he was hired to be the fall guy for losing seasons that would build a team that some other coach (presumably White) could lead to victory in the future.

Another former Black coach (Hue Jackson of the Cleveland Browns) has told a confusing story that supports Flores up to a point: At first he seemed to imply that he also was offered money to tank, but later backed off to claim only that the management above him was trying to lose.

I told [the Browns’ owner] that what he was doing was very destructive, to not do this because it’s going to hurt my career and every other coach that worked with me and every player on the team. And I told him that it would hurt every Black coach that would follow me. And I have the documents to prove this.

The Miami tanking scheme (which Flores obviously did not implement), also throws a different light on the official explanation of poor “communication within the team’s braintrust” as a reason to get rid of him.

In other words, the NFL’s problem is even bigger than the numbers suggest: Of the few Black coaches hired, how many were hired to take the blame for an intentional failure?

Prospects. The Federalist Society, which wouldn’t be able to find racism in a Confederate plantation, outlines the difficulties Flores’ suit will run into in the hardball world of anti-discrimination law.

What the lawsuit doesn’t contain, however, is actual proof that the NFL is a systemically racist organization and needs to be punished for discriminatory behavior.
Most of Flores’ allegations don’t come close to proving legally actionable systemic discrimination, which must involve finding racist intent or internal statistical “patterns” of inequity. He points out that the NFL currently employs only one black head coach (and three minority head coaches, counting Ron Rivera and Robert Saleh) in Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But judging an organization by one year of results is not actionable.

I agree with their analysis this far: Flores can’t win purely on the evidence that he cites in his complaint. But the class-action lawsuit is an open invitation for other Black coaches and coaching candidate to join his class. Hue Jackson is telling his story. How many others will chime in?

Informally, there’s a lot of sympathy with Flores. I’ve heard ESPN analysts quote unnamed Black coaches saying “I’ve been on that interview” where Rooney-rule boxes are checked without any real chance at a job. But does that mean they’ll come forward?

https://claytoonz.com/2022/02/02/nfl-racism/

At some point, it’s not just about the law. The NFL needs public support. The racist blackballing of Colin Kaepernick is already a stain on the league, and so is the race-norming in the original concussion settlement. (Until a new settlement in June, Black players had a harder time claiming cognitive impairment, because the assumed baseline for cognitive function was lower for Blacks. In laymen’s terms: The league assumed Black players had less brainpower to lose.) Independent of what a judge might say, the NFL just can’t have a parade of Black players and coaches testifying about its racism.

And finally, there’s the discovery process. If Flores can get a look at NFL teams’ internal communications, who knows what he’ll find? The NFL is run by billionaires, and billionaires often assume the rules don’t apply to them.

February 7, 2022 – 10:10 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

Tagged race |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Probably there was more important news than football this week, but to me the Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL was a shiny object I couldn’t put down. It’s been common knowledge for years that Black coaching candidates face an uphill struggle in the NFL, a league where 69% of the players are Black. But an “oops” text message from Bill Belichick provided Flores with a smoking gun, and now he has a viable discrimination case.

I decided to give the story what I think of as “the Rachel Maddow treatment”. (It might also be called “the Heather Cox Richardson treatment”.) In other words, I’m going to take a long historical perspective and talk about the role of sports in America’s racial debate, going back to Jack Johnson’s heavyweight boxing championship in 1908.

Short version: NFL coaching isn’t just the usual hard-to-break-into-management problem. When Black athletes like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis started proving that Whites aren’t a superior race, racism retreated into a fallback position: Some Blacks might be gifted with awesome animal physicality, but Whites compensate with superior intellect and character.

In the NFL, this created the Blacks-can’t-be-quarterbacks myth that persisted into the 1980s. The continuing prejudice against Black coaches is the current battle line.

Anyway, I’ll try to get that article out by 10 EST.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: censorship, more 1-6 revelations (and pushback from Trump and the GOP), the retreat of the Omicron surge, more good economic news, Ukraine, and so forth. That should appear a little after noon.

February 7, 2022 – 8:25 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Such Stories

It would take many books, my life. And no one wants anyway to hear such stories.

– Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman,
quoted by his son Art in Maus

This week’s featured post is “McMinn County’s Maus Problem“.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/25/revisionist-history/

Often in this blog, I encourage people to trust the experts. Unless you have some really solid reason not to, listen to the CDC about Covid, and to the climate scientists about global warming. If a bipartisan election commission certifies your state’s results, believe them. And so on.

Defense and foreign policy, though, is one place where I get skeptical. I don’t usually characterize national-security-state insiders as villains, but I also don’t always believe what they say. I remember how they misled us into the Iraq invasion, and how victory in our 20-year Afghan War was always just a few months away. I also remember how easily respected news platforms like The New York Times and The Washington Post let themselves be used to spread Iraq-invasion propaganda.

So now the experts are warning us that Russia might invade Ukraine at any moment, and they could be right. I certainly have no reason to think Putin is on the side of the angels, or that he was satisfied by the chunks of Ukraine he stole away in 2014.

But still. This is one of the hidden costs of the Iraq deception: The Pentagon and the State Department have lost a lot of credibility with Americans like me. It’s going to take a long time to win it back, if in fact they deserve to win it back — which they might not.

So who do we believe in all this?

The most convincing thing I read this week was written by Ukrainians. The gist is that Putin does threaten Ukraine, but not as immediately as Western sources make it sound.

According to our estimates, supported by many of the indicators below, a large-scale general military operation can’t take place for at least the next two or three weeks. As of Jan. 23, we do not observe the required formation of several hundred thousand troops, not only on the border with Ukraine, but also on Russian territory behind the front line.

They’re not seeing behind-the-lines mobilizations necessary for a major invasion, like medical infrastructure for handling mass casualties. Overall troop deployments, they say, haven’t changed since April.

Russia could mobilize for an invasion — that’s where the “two or three weeks” comes from — but the Ukrainian writers don’t think it’s likely.

Overall, a large-scale offensive operation with an attempt to hold large occupied territories is a gamble that has no chance of a positive outcome for Russia. It is impossible to calculate the course of such an operation, and when implemented, it will quickly move to an uncontrollable point.
When we add non-military components to this formula, such as international isolation and sanctions, then the result of an invasion will be politically suicidal for the Kremlin. We believe that, if Putin and his team have not lost their ability to think rationally, they will not go for such a scenario.

More likely, they say, is a multi-faceted pressure campaign aimed at “destabilization and demoralization of the population”. The troops on the border are part of that, but so are

cyberattacks, which are already taking place, … psychological operations, such as active disinformation, mass bomb threats at schools, subway systems, administrative offices, and other facilities, along with the spread of disinformation and other methods.

A Putin talking point that I’ve seen repeated on both the Left and the Right is that NATO promised Russia in 1991 that it would stop expanding. This seems not to be true.

One striking thing about the media debate in America is how quickly the MAGA-right repeats Putin’s propaganda. Peter Navarro parrots Putin’s line that “Ukraine is not really a country.” Tucker Carlson on multiple occasions has wondered why the US would side with Ukraine rather than Russia. The distinctions between aggressor and target, or between democracy and authoritarianism, seem to elude him.

Meanwhile, Tucker’s identification with the authoritarian nationalist government of Hungary gets ever more explicit. The new “documentary” Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization that Carlson has made for the subscriber channel Fox Nation supports Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban’s Nazi-themed tropes: Jewish money is behind Hungary’s troubles.

https://ragingpencils.com/2022/1-28-22-death-to-democracy.html

and the Supreme Court

https://www.reformaustin.org/political-cartoons/supremely-partisan/

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three liberals remaining, announced his retirement Thursday, kicking off what is sure to be an epic battle over his replacement.

President Biden had promised during the campaign that he would nominate the first Black woman to the Court, and he appears ready to make good on that promise. There are many worthy candidates, as you would suspect from the fact that previous presidents haven’t used up any of the good choices.

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi characterized Biden’s unnamed nominee as “a beneficiary of affirmative action”, and without knowing any more about her than her race and gender, predicted that “this new justice will probably not get a single Republican vote”.

I will point out that Jackie Robinson was an “affirmative action” pick in exactly the same sense: Branch Rickey went looking for a Black player to sign, because he saw the Negro Leagues as an untapped source of talent for the Dodgers.