Author: Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

This author has written 1999 articles
An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Little League Time!

051On Saturday, we signed Isaac up for another season of Little League baseball and I agreed to coach again.  Last year it was non-competitive Tee Ball and it turned out to be a lot of fun, but this year we’ll be moving up to the Bantam level which is where things officially get competitive. Talking with the league commissioner yesterday, he equated dealing with some of the parents to having a conversation with someone who’d drank 20 beers and was feeling punchy, the kind of thing I was worried about happening last season but never did, and now I’m hooked so I’m not worrying about it too much. If anything, it’s more likely that I’d get into a fight with an opposing coach than one of my parents!

The main differences at the Bantam level, beyond there being winners and losers, is that coaches pitch to their teams instead of hitting off the tee and there’s only 12 kids on the field at a time. While the former will be challenging for most of the kids, the latter will be toughest part as it pretty much requires organizing a weekly practice in order to identify who’s best to play which positions and ensure they understand the various nuances involved in fielding those positions. I never really thought about how complicated the game is until I had to explain it to kids.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Obama’s Executive Credentials (and Clinton’s apparent lack thereof…)

UPDATE: Holy shit! Obama has raised over $4m $5m SINCE LAST NIGHT!!!! BarackObama.com is currently down as their servers are overwhelmed so chances are he’s going to blow past $5m $6m by the morning. That’s a movement!

I said recently that Politico’s Ben Smith had become my favorite political blogger, and while still technically true from an informational perspective (check out this post on the question of whether the Clintons are self-financing their campaign), The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan has consistently impressed with me his level-headed insight on various aspects of this roller coaster campaign. Today he offers a compelling assessment of Obama and the “executive experience” question:

He asked me to judge his executive skills by observing how he was managing a campaign.

By that standard, who isn’t impressed? A first term senator – a black urban liberal – raised more money, and continues to raise much more money, than Senator Clinton. More to the point, the money he has raised has not come from the well-connected fat-cats who do things like donate to the Clinton library. His base is much wider, broader and internet-based than hers. It has many more small donors.

Now look at the strategy he laid out last year, as he explained it to me and others. Iowa was the key. If he didn’t win Iowa, it was over. But if he could win Iowa, he would prove the principle that a black man could transcend the racial issue, helping in New Hampshire, and then also helping him peel off what was then majority black support for the Clintons in South Carolina. Then his strategy was meticulous organization – and you saw that in Iowa, as well as yesterday’s caucus states. Everything he told me has been followed through. And the attention to detail – from the Alaska caucus to the Nevada cooks – has been striking.

He goes on to look at how Obama’s handled “the psychological and emotional challenges of this campaign” and declares: “In the middle of this very hot zone, he exhibit a coolness and steeliness that is a mark of presidential timber.”

The entire post is good reading and one to bookmark for knee-jerk Clinton supporters who like to offer the maddeningly vague and misleading “35 years of experience” talking point by way of explaining their choice.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Super Tuesday: The Aftermath

I packed it in at 1am this morning, right after they called a tightly contested Missouri for Obama, and woke up to find that New Mexico still hadn’t picked a winner as he and Clinton are separated by just over 100 votes with four precincts and over 16,000 provisional ballots left to tally. When all is said and done, these two states mirrored the overall results of Super Duper Tuesday as Obama and Clinton effectively split the delegate count right down the middle, and if you believe the old saw “tie goes to the runner”, you could reasonably argue that Obama won the night overall and gets to move forward with his momentum relatively unchecked while Clinton’s campaign — which, prior to Iowa, often said the nomination would be decided on Feb. 5th — is starting to show some cracks in its foundation.

A couple of things came clear based on last night’s results:

  1. Obama has the black vote locked down but has now proven he can win anywhere, including predominantly white/red states.
  2. Clinton’s strongest support continues to be from those over 60 years old and Hispanics, the latter to a slightly lesser degree outside of California where they represent an atypically large percentage of the electorate.

Every other demographic, including women, is completely up for grabs at this point and each side can point to a couple of states that demonstrates their strength with a particular group, though even there, Obama can present a more compelling case for the coalition he’s building vs. Clinton’s more traditionally Democratic foundation which will likely show up in November for either of them.

ETA: MSNBC has some interesting analysis of the last night’s demographic breakdown.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Random Thought on Race

Barack Obama is half black, half white and was raised mostly in Hawaii and Indonesia, but is considered by most to be the "black" candidate. I'm half Puerto Rican and, depending on who's telling the story, probably a quarter black and a quarter white, and was raised in and around New York City. If I ran for President, I wonder how they would label me, especially considering I don't speak Spanish?

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

My Take on New York

Check out my New York installment of "50 Ways of Looking at a Primary" over at the November 3rd Club: Today, millions (hopefully) of New Yorkers head to the polls to cast their votes in the Democratic and Republican primaries, each side offering only two legitimate candidates as a handful of states have once again prematurely winnowed the field. For Democrats, New York is a closed primary, meaning only registered Democrats can vote today, and in an odd and annoying twist that offers just one example of why our state legislature is considered one of the most inept and corrupt in…

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Monday Mash-up, 2/4/08

1) While a couple of good things happened in January (most notably an unexpected promotion at work to Online Ad Sales Director for all of our properties!), overall it was as bad a start to 2008 as I could have imagined. Nothing major, but a lot of bumps in the road that tested my constitution and nearly shook my resolve. I’m very glad that it’s February.

New Fossil Bag2) I’m not a big shopper but I’m a complete sucker for a handful of things, including bags and electronic gadgets. While picking up a new wallet from Macy’s on Saturday (one of those slim, front pocket types that I’m still getting used to, frantically patting my back pocket every couple of hours) I saw this great Fossil messenger bag that kept screaming my name, no matter how many times I said it was too expensive. I make fun of Salomé all the time about the many, many, many bags she owns (rivaled only, perhaps, by her shoes) but I can appreciate a good bag and this is a nice step up from the cheaper, smaller bag I’ve had for the past year or so. It fits all of my gadgets comfortably plus has plenty of room for all of the books and papers I’m invariably carrying around, whether I need them or not. We also came close to buying an HD TV as Best Buy had a great deal on a 32″ Westinghouse but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to pull the trigger. Soon, though. Probably when we get the Wii.

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An arm with a tattoo: "I was made for the library, not the classroom."

Hope vs. Cynicism

I’m a pretty cynical person most days, but I have a couple of good friends who make me look like the love-child of Mother Theresa and Gandhi. One of them emailed me today asking me to convince him about Obama: “C’mon Guy, if anyone can sell me, it’s you….do your worse…..convince me why I’m not just settling for the candidate I dislike the least!”

What started out as a brief reply became a much longer one and I decided to post it here because I suspect there might be others who know my cynical side and are curious about how I fell for the “hope” candidate.

Short answer: Because cynicism enables the status quo.

Slightly longer answer with a dash of cynicism: To paraphrase John McCain’s take on global warming, “If we’re wrong, worst case scenario is we end the Clinton/Bush dynasty and still get a Democrat in the White House.”

Long answer, personal/persuasive essay style: For me, it’s not simply about how progressive Obama is or isn’t, because if it were about that, I’d still be in Kucinich’s corner, the only real progressive to run for President in the past 2-3 elections. Obama is a moderately progressive Democrat, but he doesn’t play the cynical us vs. them game which simply guarantees another 4-8 years of partisan gridlock, no matter which side wins.

What I like most about him is that he’s a realist — putting forth policy proposals that actually have a realistic chance of being passed instead of the pie in the sky shit everyone wants to hear but knows they’ll never see in their lifetime, ie: a Department of Peace —  but he has the heart of an idealist. Bill Clinton was right about the “roll of the dice” thing, but the gambler isn’t those voting for Obama it’s Obama himself, appealing to the idealist in all of us, daring people to not just hope for better but to get off their asses and help make things better; trusting that they are smart enough to look beyond the sound bites they hear on the evening news and look deeper themselves.

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