Dana Blankenhorn

College athletics is all politics

The big mistake made by sportswriters looking at college athletics is to over-estimate the extent to which their stories are about money, when they're really all about political influence.

Fact. College athletics does not contribute directly to the education enterprise. All the money that goes in stays in. It's either paid to coaches in salary or goes into facilities. 

For kids, college athletics is a money sink. As more schools find they have to play the political game of college athletics, kids are charged for it.

My own son, now at Georgia State, is having to pay $85 per semester this year so GSU can field a football team. Why? Because football makes them a player in the legislature. It means they're no longer just a "commuter school" but a big-time competitor for funding alongside Georgia Tech, Georgia Southern and the University of Georgia.

That's what college athletics is about. It's about winning the loyalty of legislatures for the rest of a school's agenda. When the big state school dominates the headlines, it dominates funding. That's the money sportswriters should be following, not the TV contracts but the appropriations.

We can beat England

We can also get drubbed 5-0.

But the U.S. can win their game next Saturday. Here's why.

The Stupidest Man in the World

The history of business is littered with the bones of men and companies that ignored progress.

Usually this ignorance appears after the founder's death. The fate of Polaroid was not sealed until years after the death of Edwin Land. Toyota did not overtake GM until decades after Alfred P. Sloan was a-moldering in his grave. 

But sometimes, in a few tragic cases, the fall comes in the lifetime of the founder. This is increasingly common in the era of Moore's Law. Thus we had the tragedies of men such as Ken Olsen, An Wang and Seymour Cray. New solutions change the game, the Great Man refuses to play, and he is crushed on the wheels of history.

This had not happened in media in quite a long time. True, the Linotype crushed many small papers under the heel of Hearst and Pulitzer. But radio did not kill the newspaper, and many TV licenses were given directly to radio companies, even newspaper magnates.

Thus the industry was completely unprepared for the Internet. I well remember an event at the Atlanta Press Club in 1995, where Cox Enterprises chairman James Cox Kennedy confidently predicted the Internet would be an enormous boon to newspapers, enabling him to "repurpose" his content and get paid multiple times for the same story. I just shook my head. The man was clueless, and history has shown that to be true.

But Kennedy was a genius next to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, feared as perhaps no press baron ever just a few years ago, now stands  as the Stupidest Man in the World.

The reason is on the cover of Michael Wolff's 2008 book about Murdoch. "The Man Who Owns the News."

Squeal Like a Pig

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The recent dust-up between the Obama Administration and Fox News deserves a proper response from someone who knows a little political history.

Squeal like a pig! (This is a family blog. Those who wish to can learn why actor Bill McKinney is smiling at y'all on his Web site.)

Regular readers will know I've been pushing this quite some time. I have actually been looking forward to comparing someone like Joe Biden to Spiro Agnew. And for good historical reason.

The most important thing a Thesis must do, not for validation but just to get its program through, is to change the formula of what is acceptable.

The boundaries were pretty easy to set in our nation's first generational crisis, the Civil War. Supporting the South was treason, supporting peace giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The job was done most subtly by FDR. Many people think of the Hays Code as having been about sex. But has anyone asked why the Roosevelt Administration endorsed it? It was because the Code demanded that movies support the government, saying that "Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed."

The New Madden

No tech today. No business. No politics. It's Columbus Day so we'll pretend it's your day off.

Instead it's something completely different. American football. Specifically its analysis, and the best guy working in that field. Tony Dungy (right).

In his first year Dungy has taken over NBC's Sunday Night football show with his quiet authority, with his knowledge and with his humanity. The network found a perfect sidekick for him in the recently-retired Rodney Harrison, but this is Dungy's show and we're all the better for it.

Football needed a new face when John Madden quit, and while it's a surprise to find it in a studio show host you take what you can get. Everyone on the set defers to Dungy, and it's easy to see why. Everything he says is letter-perfect for the moment. He knows the people, he knows the game as very few do (which he's proven) but there's something about his air of calm, reflective authority I find fascinating.

The Silent Majority

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 33 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The hardest thing for a majority to learn, once its Thesis has overthrown that of the last generation, is that it is in fact the majority.

There is a natural dysfunction to a political balance. The minority acts like an abused spouse, alternately screaming in impotent rage or crouching low, ready to be hit. Liberals have been in this crouch for a generation, ever since the Nixon-Wallace coalition ushered in the Nixon Thesis of Conflict.

This thesis has been especially hard because, as noted, it is based on conflict, on bullying, on disrespecting the opposition as illegitimate, an intractable "other." Those who abandon the Thesis are traitors, no matter their past contributions. This Thesis had its apotheosis during the Bush years, where the right's foot soldiers were allowed to become like the hippies of 40 years ago -- haties I call 'em -- intimidating their opponents, shouting them down, forcing them off the political stage through their own triumph of the will.

Every new Thesis faces this type of battle with the past. Confederates. Populists. The Rich. The Hippies. It took a Great War for Lincoln to beat his enemies, Teddy Roosevelt co-opted populism, FDR used the media and Nixon used scorn -- his "nattering nabobs of negativism."

Mexico Wins

I actually preferred watching the USA-Mexico match yesterday on Telemundo, even though my Spanish is horrible.

Andres Cantor is one of the world's great announcers, the vocabulary of the game is sparse (pelota is ball, partido is game), and they concentrate on what is in front of them.

What was in front of them yesterday was some good football. For once I can't fault USA coach Bob Bradley for either his game-day selection or his second-half tactics. The players just didn't execute.

(Notice how in this picture from SoccerbyIves both fans are smiling, and they're not segregated from one another. An example for the rest of the world. I love Mexican soccer fans, by the way -- really enjoyed them during the recent AC Milan-Club America match in Atlanta.)

The USA got a small lead when Charlie Davies got a through ball from Landon Donovan, beat the off-side trap, got behind the defense and finished brilliantly. (The Usher-at-the-microphone celebration was also first-rate.) That was the idea. Long balls from Tim Howard (brilliant all game long), from the defense, anything to get over the midfield fast and hit them on the break.

The Left's Katrina

Four years ago this month, the worldview of conservatives began to collapse with Hurricane Katrina.

The reliance on leadership, the rhetoric about drowning government in a bathtub, the assumption that government was more a hindrance than a help, it all came together in the figure of Michael Brown. "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" became the epitaph of the movement.

The Netroots rose as a direct consequence of Bush-era failure. The idea was that people, ordinary people, could get involved in politics, could take power on behalf of intelligence, and prevent new Katrinas from happening.

But a Katrina is happening right now, testing whether that movement, or any movement dependent on volunteer activism, can long endure.

That crisis is health care reform.

Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson

Of all the people I thought it unlikely I would ever write about, Marian Robinson would rank pretty high. 

Mrs. Robinson is the "first grandma," brought to Washington by her daughter in order to continuinglooking after her grandaughters at the White House. The widow of Frasier Robinson (to the left in this picture, taken when their daughter Michelle was a baby), it seemed like a nice, small story, a curious sidelight.

I'm wondering if we shouldn't make it a little more. 

First because, as The New York Times reports, Mrs. Robinson is having a good time. She has gone out to the theater, she has seen the Washington scene, and she has taken to it as it has taken to her. 

Second because Mrs. Robinson is an excellent role model. A former sprinter, she and her husband raised two lovely children, she nursed her husband through his long-term (losing) battle with MS, and she seems to be an excellent grandmother, a good person. The perfect image for our aging society. 

So I was thinking...

Nixon Nova

Stars are born and stars die.

It's true for us, and it's true for political philosophies as well. They have sell-by dates. They expire. Often explosively.  

That's the real lesson of today's Republican Party. As Markos Moulitsas notes it's strange for Netroots Democrats to be watching the edifice of the once-almighty conservative movement collapse like Sauron's eye at the end of Lord of the Rings.

But I am old enough to have seen this before. Welcome to the 1969 Game. 

The 1968 election had been wicked close, so Democrats at that time had no sense they had lost the mandate of heaven, that their New Deal politics was as dead as Herbert Hoover, on whose political grave they had danced for a generation.

Their inclination was much like that of today's Republicans. In response to their electoral defeat most Democrats decided the answer was to become more like themselves. George McGovern. 

The views of that era's Democrats were far, far to the left of anything which might be considered politically acceptable today. They rejected the Cold War in mid-stream, not just the Vietnam War but the entire premise. They supported truly progressive tax rates across-the-board, not just on the federal level but on the state and local level. They wanted to resume the War on Poverty and wars against every form of injustice known to man or woman, just as most Americans had grown exhausted by the effort.