TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024
But first, Kate Bolduan's question: We spent the day addressing the question of The Surgical Wound That Would Not Heal. (More accurately, that wouldn't heal as of yet.)
For that reason, we'll extend yesterday's side trip into the realm of sport. First, though, a question from CNN's Kate Bolduan.
This morning, Bolduan interviewed Gretchen Whitmer on CNN News Central. Our question goes exactly like this:
Did Kate Bolduan's question make sense?
BOLDUAN (9/3/24): In terms of what [Candidate] Harris is promising to get done, is to improve the lives of the middle class. We've heard that in Michigan.
I want to play for you, with that in mind, what JD Vance said on CNN about her promises to get things done.
VANCE (videotape): If she wants to tackle the affordability crisis or close down the southern border, she should be doing it now. And I think it takes a lot of shame—shamelessness, I should say—to be able to stare at the American people's eyes and say, "I'm going to fix your problems now when I've already been in power for three-and-a-half years."
BOLDUAN: How do you make the case that you're going to get stuff done if you have three-and-a-half years that you haven't gotten it done? Does he have a point?
Do you think that question makes sense? Bolduan has been a much more genial cable news presence of late—but with respect to that question, good God!
At least for today, we're going to leave our question about that question right there. Regarding the realm of sport:
The Chicago White Sox have created a remarkable statistic. They've now lost 41 of their last 45 games.
Largely because of the dominant role played by starting pitchers, it once would have seemed darn near impossible to create a statistic like that.
Under current arrangements, the role of the starting pitcher has been scaled back. Does that help explain that statistic?
Finally, one of our favorite data sets! It involves the years during which Babe Ruth invented the modern home run, at least within the MLB context.
American League home run leaders
1914: Frank Baker, 9
1915: Braggo Roth, 7
1916: Wally Pipp, 12
1917: Wally Pipp, 7
1918: Babe Ruth / Tilly Walker, 11
1919: Babe Ruth, 29
1920: Babe Ruth, 54
1921: Babe Ruth, 59
As President Biden would say, "No joke!" In 1917, Wally Pipp led the American League with seven (7) home runs. Three years later, Ruth hit 54. It was off to the races from there.
(And yes, that was the Wally Pipp—the one who gave way to Lou Gehrig. Also yes—that was Frank "Home Run" Baker! Revolution was in the air—and it was leaving the park.)
We've never seen a full explanation of the way that (MLB) home run revolution occurred. As a general matter, we're inclined to compare it to the way Bill Russell showed up in the NBA and invented the modern blocked shot.
Meanwhile, God bless (sadly, the late) Kevin Hardy! We sat on the bench next to Sivils, right there in the old Stanford Pavilion, marveling at the way he would pirouette through the lane. (The next day, it was Gary Beban, on his way to a Heisman trophy.)
Hardy never played high school football (or at least so it's still said and so we always heard). He then became a first-team All-American tackle at Notre Dame, which was still Notre Dame at the time.
(Seventh player chosen in the NFL draft. At 6-5, 270, he was impossibly light on his feet.)
Back to Bolduan's question for Whitmer:
We'd have to say that no one ever really "invented" questions like that!
Final assessment: Regarding Vance's question, we'd be inclined to go with this:
In a word, Sad!
No doubt about it, the pitch clock killed the White Sox...
ReplyDeleteYes, the Biden Harris admin has not accomplished anything in 3.5 years; other than by most measurements being the most accomplished administration in 50 years. How come nobody can remember what a shit-hile country Trump had ceated. Mass deaths, mass protests, tax cuts for the wealthy, more dead in combat than Biden Harris, etc. No health care improvements, no jobs, no infrastructure. Even to the point where the wackaloon party design tax bills to punish folks in blue states.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention he colluded with Russia in order to win the election and tried overturn a free and fair election by inciting a mob to violently overthrow the government which killed multiple police officers.
DeleteLet’s not get too down on Trump, it’s not like he hates America, everything it stands for, and the American people more than any other Right-winger.
DeleteDon't forget 154 out of the roughly 40,000 actively working and retired historians in the United States have said Trump was the worst.
DeleteObviously, they didn't survey all 40,000 historians but 154:
Delete"The tally came from 154 presidential specialists who are current and recent members of the American Political Science Association. They were asked to give every president a score, from 0 to 100.
Zoom in: Abraham Lincoln topped the list with an average score of 95, while Biden scored an average of 62.66. That put him two spots above Ronald Reagan...Trump averaged just under 11 points..."
When you rank order the presidents by their average points, Trump winds up last (worst president ever).
Not all historians specialize in the American presidency. That's one reason why you wouldn't ask all 40,000 historians to respond. You wouldn't ask the retired historians either, because we may not keep up with our fields after retirement.
DeleteHow many units of 'presidential greatness' should a president earn for signing a bill to cut taxes that stimulates the economy but adds to the deficit?
DeleteHow many units of 'presidential greatness' should a president earn for taking a foreign policy action that alienates France but brings us closer to Germany?
For tariffs that raise prices, but add to jobs?
What objective criteria would allow presidential historians to consistently and objectively answer these questions?
The ability to juggle weighty tradeoffs is why historians get the big bucks.
DeleteSomerby doesn’t trust experts when they disagree with his own opinions. That makes him a lot more like a conservative than a liberal.
Seriously, if there were controversy about how bad Trump was as president, his average would be closer to 50, since pro ratings would raise the con ratings. His 11 shows agreement that he was awful. If these judgements were hard for historians to make, there would be more variability in them.
We have to know the procedures they used for coming to their conclusions, the origins of "facts" they used, the context of any quotes and testimonials they used and research any benefits they may receive from convincing others of their conclusion. We can't take them at their word.
DeleteThere was a very influential and rich Democrat that claimed last week multiple police officers were killed by January 6th protesters. Maybe some of the historians are dealing with the same set of erroneous facts.
Sure were a lot of suicides in the months following J6 by cops who were there. So coincidental.
Deletehttps://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-of-capitol-riot/
"January 6 protestors". Think you meant - January 6 rioters terrorizing Congress to overturn a free and fair election. I guess after freeing 5,000 Taliban terrorists, what's the big deal for the felon to pardon 1,700 Magat terrorists? You MAGA's (® trademark Reagan) are a weird bunch.
DeleteHistorians go to grad school to learn their methodology.
DeleteIt's strange that a major Democratic contributor would publicly state in 2024 that January 6th rioters killed multiple police officers which was never true and for which there is no evidence. It shows you how poorly liberals are misinformed by their partisan information ecosystem.
DeleteWhen someone causes the death of another person, even indirectly or unintentionally it is accurate to say they killed them. If that person would be alive but for another person’s actions, there is causality involved.
DeleteObligatory, "those cops were no angels" comment.
DeleteI am a single issue voter and I am voting against Dems for their eagerness to capture and trans other people’s children. It is one one thing when members of the Blue team trans their own children just so that they can say “As the parent of a trans child ….” at parties and social media. That is sick enough – a parent ruining their own child’s life for leftist bona fides. But using school teachers and social workers to lead people’s confused children to mutilation is pure evil.
ReplyDeleteParents ruin their children by telling them things that are not true too. I would totally lose respect for anyone telling me stuff like @5:27 just said. Sad when a child loses respect for a parent.
DeleteName them Dems transing their kids just so they can brag about it. Just 'cause you be jiberring about it does not make it a thing.
Delete"...a parent ruining their own child’s life for leftist bona fides. But using school teachers and social workers to lead people’s confused children to mutilation is pure evil."
DeleteNeither of these things actually happens.
I wonder what Bob thinks about the Press’s reaction to Trump signing off on Obamacare?
ReplyDeleteThey changed ball design, going from a rubber center to a cork center. (Golf balls changed too, adding dimpling and improving ball quality, making it more uniform and spherical and giving it better aerodynamics and rebound characteristics.) Somerby is talking about the live ball era, when they changed manufacturing techniques (wound the ball tighter). Then they changed the manufacturing again and introduced a dead ball era (late 1960s). There was a period where teams were not used to the changes in balls due to the dryness in places like AZ, so they invented a humidor to keep the balls at a constant humidity.
ReplyDeleteSomerby could have looked this stuff up if he had wanted to do more than muse about it. Maybe it takes the fun out of wondering, to actually know things, but on the other hand, understanding more about things is fun too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_(ball)
I always try to keep my balls at a constant humidity
DeleteHow do you compensate for the humidity loss when tanning your balls?
DeleteSaran wrap.
DeleteSmart. Wish I had thought of that as the rash is killing me.
DeleteBolduan seems to be confused about what Harris's job has been for the past 3+ years. Harris is not president yet -- she is running for office to BECOME president. The president and the VP do very different jobs. Look at Trump and Pence for an example. It is sad to have to explain elementary civics to a reporter. It is even sadder that Somerby needs to tease this. Either Bolduan was teeing up a chance for Whitmer to embarrass Vance, or Bolduan was agreeing with Vance that Harris should have done more as VP.
ReplyDeleteI don't know which because I didn't see the larger context and I don't watch cable enough to know Bolduan's politics (and thus her intentions with that question). Vance was obviously being stupid with his own question, but no doubt some right wingers will consider it brilliant. Somerby might have told us more about what happened, but he is too busy being coy and cutesy about baseball non-miracles.
Of course Vance has a point. Kamala is a key part of the Biden Administration. She can’t run on the Biden Admin having done a lousy job. It’s not logical.
ReplyDeleteBy comparison, Bush won, running on a platform that Reagan had done a great job and he would continue on the same track.
Kamala Harris is running on "Turning a new page" which means continuing some of Biden's programs but advancing her own agenda too. Vance may be hinting that Harris has no ideas of her own, or suggesting that Biden did a bad job (despite all ways of measuring, which show excellent results) and Harris will be more of the same (conservatives believe whatever Trump tells them, and he is telling them we are a third-world country heading into WWIII).
DeleteHow much more might Biden have accomplished if he hadn't had to clean up the mess Trump made of the covid pandemic? There is lots more for Harris to do.
@7:02 Two questions
Delete1. In what ways did Trump leave a Covid mess?
2. In what ways did Biden clean it up?
If Biden cleaned up the mess, why were there more Covid deaths under Biden than under Trump?
We’ve all been over that ground before. If Trump had dealt with covid effectively, the pandemic would have been better controlled with fewer unnecessary deaths.
DeleteDave should inject disinfectant into his eyes and shine a bright light on the convicts record to clear up his views on the fraudsters Covid response.
Delete@7:31 - Are you @7:02? You didn't answer my question. In what ways could Trump have been more effective?
DeleteAs of Feb, 2023, around 700,000 more Americans had died of covid under Biden than under Trump. By today, Biden's death count can only have grown, although I can't find an up to date figure..
You can't get more "bad faith" than this: "why were there more Covid deaths under Biden than under Trump?"
DeleteThe pandemic gathered steam and caused more deaths because Trump failed to support his public health advisors, enact proper measures to slow the increase in cases, supply hospitals, and encourage vaccination. Instead he promoted ineffective quack remedies like ivermectin (his cronies benefitted financially) and held unmasked gatherings himself that infected attendees. He concealed how sick he himself was when hospitalized. Herman Cain died from attending an unmasked event. He lied to the public about the danger and politicized covid, deriding the science involved and making the job of doctors and nurses much harder. Biden had to play catch up when he took over, both to save the economy and people’s lives.
DeleteDave does have a point, Covid is still pretty hot and destructive. We are living with about 1,000 deaths per week most of this summer, surging from a pretty steady 500 per week before that. Long Covid continues to take its toll. In a sane non-maga world we would all be wearing N-95 masks in crowded indoor areas and all healthcare facilities - masks that we are trained on fitting to our face. We would be getting our eighth or ninth Covid Vaxx this fall. Where Dave is wrong is MAGA makes all this impossible, to a point where routine children being vaxxed is no longer required for many schools, or communities where wearing a mask is now illegal. Protecting yourself and protecting your neighbors from disease can now be illegal! This is all on Trump and the idiot movement. Don't want the mask to screw up his orange fuckface, and have to disown his greatest achievement to keep Q happy. So Dave should also be proud for his personally spreading the stupid on honor of the Orange.
DeleteIt has been estimated that 180,000 excess COVID deaths occurred due to policy during the Trump administration, roughly 40%. I will not cite the Lancet study again. DIC likes to publicly wallow in his self-imposed ignorance. Commenter 9:26 is correct. I feel sorry for those who refused vaccination in favor of treatments proven to be ineffective, (resulting in more deaths in counties voting Republican). The pertinent question here is what role in his administration Trump promised to carve out for RFK Jr in exchange for his endorsement. DeSantis chose an unqualified anti-vaxxer for Secretary of Health in Florida, whose views were publicly disparaged by medical faculty at the Universoty of Florida. Favoring politics over science is a modern Republican trait.
DeletePersonally, I'd like to see Netanyahu try to gaslight Hamas the way Trump tried to gaslight COVID.
Delete"When Babe Ruth invented the modern home run!"
ReplyDeleteWas the home run de-invented during the dead ball era?
"Former President Donald Trump made a number of controversial pardons and commutations on his way out the door in 2021, but one that has flown under the radar has been the sentence commutation of Jaime A. Davidson, a New York man who spent decades behind bars after being convicted of murdering a federal law enforcement officer in the early 1990s.
ReplyDeleteSince his pardon, however, it seems that Davidson has not kept his nose clean.
Independent progressive journalist Judd Legum recently did some digging on Davidson and discovered that he was convicted on domestic violence charges and sentenced this past summer to three months in jail after authorities say he strangled his wife during a domestic dispute.
What's more, Legum documents how Davidson circumvented the traditional process for seeking pardons to lobby Trump directly for his release."
https://popular.info/p/murderer-whose-life-sentence-was
"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump defended his campaign's recent trip to Arlington National Cemetary by saying he was there to "celebrate" the anniversary of the deaths of soldiers who died in Afghanistan."
ReplyDeleteTrump said:
""I went to Arlington at the request of people that lost their children," he explained. "And they asked me if I'd come and celebrate with them three years, three years. They died three years ago."
"And I got there, and we had a beautiful time. I didn't run away," he continued. "And it was amazing. So I did it for them. I didn't do it for me. I don't need the publicity."
Trump has also said that he has all the best words, that he is a genius at speaking. Did he really mean to say that he or any of those families were "celebrating" the deaths of their loved ones? People with better words might say commemorate, or remember or honor their deaths. Celebrate doesn't mean what Trump thinks it does.
There's a promising looking article about the dead ball/rabbit ball evolution and its effect on home runs at The Athletic, but it's behind the NYT paywall. Subscribers can see it here. I'm not a subscriber, so I can't tell you whether the article answers Our Host's question completely or not.
ReplyDeletehere's the article
DeleteNEW YORK — On Dec. 9, 1930, a man named Julian W. Curtiss walked into the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan. Armed with a suitcase full of statistics, he had come to discuss the most contentious topic at baseball’s annual Winter Meetings: the ball itself. Curtiss was 72 and a luminary in American sports. Introduced to golf during a trip to England in 1892, he came to evangelize the sport in the United States. As the long-time president of the A.G. Spalding Company, he helped its founder, Albert Spalding, design the first basketball for James Naismith.
Curtiss worked with the Amateur Athletic Union and the American Olympic Committee. He donned a dark suit and sported a thick mustache. He prepared to answer a simple question for a room of National League owners: Why was the Spalding baseball flying out of parks at a record pace?
The question of the baseball had hung over the sport for years, but the issue had come to a head in 1930. Offensive numbers exploded across both leagues. Sportswriters waxed about the effects of the “rabbit ball.” Purists such as New York Giants manager John McGraw and legendary umpire Bill Klem criticized the integrity of the entire sport.
“When you have 20 or 30 runs in a game, that is not baseball,” Klem said. “How can there be any strategy in games of that kind when pitching, which should be the most important part of the defense, is reduced in importance.
“Any time anyone hits that jack-rabbit ball squarely, it travels five miles a minute. Baseball owners will have to reduce the liveliness of the ball if they expect to maintain the fans’ interest.”
Klem, known as baseball’s “old arbitrator,” was convinced that the sport needed to step in and deaden the ball. But elsewhere, opinions were mixed. William Veeck, the president of the Cubs, believed the increase in homers had fueled the game’s rise. Others believed the sport could take different steps to curb scoring. One owner proposed a complicated “zoning system” for homers; another proposed hanging chicken-wire “screens” above short porches, knocking potential homers back into play. And then there was Babe Ruth, the man most responsible for the sport’s shift toward power. He had another idea. The rabbit ball, Ruth wrote in a newspaper column that year, was a “mere alibi for pitchers who won’t take enough interest in their work to really learn how to pitch.”
As owners from both leagues gathered in New York for the Winter Meetings in the second week of December, officials prepared for an “autopsy” of the ball. Yet nobody could agree on what to do next. The home run was dominating the game in unprecedented fashion. Pitchers were getting pummeled. Would fans actually revolt?
In the middle of the discussion stood Curtiss, the president of Spalding. For months, Curtiss had answered questions about the baseball. He explained the manufacturing processes. He described the materials. He shot down the myth that the leagues used different balls. Then he repeated something that almost nobody in baseball seemed to believe.
There had been no change in the baseball in the last five years.
In the summer of 1930, nearly 90 years before the “juiced ball” dominated the 2019 baseball season, before commissioner Rob Manfred shot down conspiracy theories and ordered another study, before Justin Verlander told ESPN that the balls were “a f—ing joke,” before fans wondered if the balls had been de-juiced for the postseason, New York Giants manager John McGraw had his own suspicions.
“I think the club owners ought to get together on the ball,” McGraw said. “It has taken the confidence out of the pitchers and is so lively the fielders cannot handle it. Bunting is gone and baserunning has disappeared. The public liked that.”
DeleteMcGraw was a purist, of course, a believer in the game as it was. He liked to win, and he possessed the ability to adapt, but he also appreciated the little things, the strategy that made the sport. For him, the 1930 season was hardly baseball. By season’s end, major-league teams would average a record 5.55 runs per game; the 16 clubs combined to hit a record 1,565 homers, 900+ more than 1920; in the National League, the average hitter batted .303/.360/.448.
And then there were the individual feats. Bill Terry hit .401. Ruth hit .359 with 49 homers. The Cubs’ Hack Wilson, a 5-foot-6 outfielder, clubbed 56 homers and set a major-league record with 191 RBIs. An incredible 17 players hit at least .350, and 10 had at least 30 homers. (In 1920, Ruth was the only one.)
The offensive trends so alarmed Klem, the veteran umpire, that he voiced a warning in an interview with a New York reporter in May. “This season we have the liveliest ball we ever had,” he said. “It is making the game ridiculous.” During the following days and weeks, the words were syndicated in newspapers across the country.
“I can remember when McGraw would leave the bench and go home about the seventh inning if his team had a six- or seven-run lead,” Klem said. “Not anymore. The Giants had a seven-run lead in one of those terrible games in Pittsburgh recently. McGraw stayed right on the job. A seven-run lead means nothing these days with that jack-rabbit ball.”
By midseason, the protests grew louder. But the rabbit ball was not exactly a new phenomenon. Sportswriters had been writing about differences in the ball for years. Offense spiked throughout the 1920s. The revolution arrived in the years after the Black Sox scandal rocked the sport.
In 1920, baseball officials had enacted a partial ban of the spitball and other “freak deliveries,” which included the use of foreign substances. One year later, after the death of Cleveland’s Ray Chapman following a beanball to the head from Carl Mays at the Polo Grounds, the sport took it a step forward. The spitball was legislated out of the game. And game balls were to be replaced before they became lopsided and brownish-yellow. The result was a cleaner, whiter and livelier baseball.
No less an authority than Ty Cobb would declare the spitball ban as an act of selling out to the home run. And yes, the power followed. When a generation of players followed Ruth’s lead, crafting their swings to hit the ball in the air and aim for the fences, the home-run “epidemic,” as Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist Jack Ryder put it, was upon us.
“This is the age of the big punch,” Veeck told the Chicago Tribune in November of 1930. “(Jack) Dempsey was an all-time outstanding heavyweight because he could punch. Ruth and Wilson are similar in baseball. It’s the punch that has made baseball over in the last 10 years.”
By the time baseball’s owners arrived in Manhattan in December, the debate over the rabbit ball had already raged in the press for most of the year. In May, Ruth authored a column for a syndicate run by ghostwriter and agent Christy Walsh. Ruth believed the ball was the same as it had been in recent years; he thought the true culprit was lousy pitching.
“It is my humble opinion that the so-called ‘lively ball’ is just about the best alibi for a lot of inferior pitchers that was ever heard of,” he wrote. “It’s an excuse for a lot of foolishness out in that box, and a lot of fellows are getting by as pitchers these days who ought to be back in the minor leagues.”
The Pittsburgh Press ran a poll on the rabbit ball in which readers could clip a ballot, fill it out and mail it back to the newspaper. Jimmy Woods, a columnist for the Brooklyn Daily Times, believed the answer was allowing pitchers to throw the spitball. There was no sense in decrying the homer, he said, but there were ways to level the playing field. “The rabbit ball has been a success from the fanatical point of view,” he wrote. Meanwhile, Walter Trumbull, a syndicated sports columnist, thought the answer lay in the past. “Let the balls stay in the game longer,” he said, “or let the pitchers stain them with tobacco juice, as they did in the old days.”
DeleteAh, the old days. They had a special allure, and in the weeks before the Winter Meetings, a group of executives — magnates, as they were called — were said to be “on the warpath against the pop-fly home run.” Among them was Charles Stoneham, the 54-year-old owner of the New York Giants. Stoneham’s club played in the Polo Grounds, which had a right-field foul pole that stood just 258 feet from home plate, a mesmerizing target for hitters. Yet Stoneham sided with McGraw, his legendary manager.
The Giants faced fierce opposition from Veeck, who did not wish to curtail the exploits of Wilson, his valuable slugger. The National League clubs in Brooklyn and Philadelphia were also reported to be opposed to a change. But if the objective was curtailing homers, well, Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss came to the meetings with his own idea. He was the leading proponent of a “zoning system” that would create minimum distance for any home run — even when a ball wound up in the seats. In the zoning proposal, which had support from Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith, any ball that did not travel at least 300 feet would be ruled a double.
In another proposal, which percolated among American League owners, certain parks with short porches would be outfitted with wire screens, which would create flimsy proxies of the Green Monster (then known as “The Wall”) and send homers back onto the field. American League president E.S. Barnard believed fans would get a “bigger and better thrill” from seeing a runner leg out a double or a triple than slowly jog around the bases. The idea only had one problem: Colonel Jacob Ruppert Jr., the owner of the New York Yankees, was furious about making any cosmetic changes to Yankee Stadium, or hindering the talents of Ruth.
Another staunch opponent of any changes to the ball was Judge Emil Fuchs, the owner of the Boston Braves, who pointed to attendance records the previous season and rising stars and a connection to the rabbit ball.
“The game has thrived on the lively ball,” Fuchs said. “Why not give the public what it wants?”
The meetings came and went, and nothing was decided. The proposals were lobbied. The ideas were debated. Curtiss made the case that the ball was, in fact, the same.
“There isn’t even a change in the yarn,” he said. “If we bought our yarn, there might be, but we don’t. We have our own yarn mills and there has been no change in the manufacture or quality; no change in the wrapping; no change in the covers; no change in the rubber or cork.”
For a moment, it seemed as if the rabbit ball would live on, and then in early January, a story out of New York went out on the Associated Press wire. The changes were being shrouded in mystery, the story stated, but “whispers have been heard that a ball with a heavier cover and thicker stitches will be tried out in some training camps this spring.”
It added: “Whether these experiments will lead to a general deadening of the ball remains to be seen. (But) unless something is done to curb the ‘jack-rabbit’ tendencies of the ball, infielders soon may be classed as bad subjects for insurance policies.”
By February, the change was official. The National League approved a new ball with a heavier cover and more prominent stitching, while the American League said yes to the new stitching and no to the cover. One hitter even applauded the move. “It will give home runs their proper value,” Phillies slugger Chuck Klein said.
DeleteAnd with that, the debate was over. Both leagues would see a reduction in scoring in 1931, but the National League’s was considerably steeper. The rabbit ball was gone, the leagues would not use the same ball again until the 1940s, and then, a few months later, the press began asking about the disappearing homers. In a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that August, the newspaper took a swipe at Wilson, the diminutive Cubs slugger who had seen his power totals crater. In 1930, Wilson had threatened to hit 60. One year later, he began the month of August with just 11.
“After bagging 56 in one season, Hack couldn’t hit the side of a house with a handful of birdshot,” the story went. “Another example of the uncertainties of following the hounds when there is no rabbit.”
Thx
DeleteIt was strange when Harris adopted a Creole accent in her speech the other day. Maybe she had been spending time with James Carville. But really .. wtf?
ReplyDeleteDoes Harris' inclusivity of all Americans have a limit?
DeleteShe wasn't talking to a group of 19th century Creoles. But I see what you are saying and I understand your reasoning.
DeleteHarris is being accused of pandering for votes.
DeleteUnlike Trump, who uses the N-word in private, so you know that's the real Trump, and he's not just pandering to Republican voters (i.e. bigots) on the stump.
Harris spoke in Detroit then PA. Is “creole” bigot-codefor sounding black? Not many actual creole-speaking people in her audience given thatcreole is a LA dialect.
DeleteThis is yesterday’s anti-Harris talking point, that she can engage in linguistic code-switching, just like every other bicultural person. A dog whistle to bigots.
DeleteNo she actually broke into a creole accent. Maybe *she* was the one who thought it sounded black. Coming out of nowhere in Detroit, it was very strange. Her handlers are going to have to teach her how to sound more authentically black. Build black better.
DeleteVoters just want a person to be real though. I don't know why she is wasting her time trying to sound black.
DeleteThe ability to adjust one's delivery to different audiences is a plus for a candidate. What's the problem?
Delete