PROGRAM NOTE: My wife and I were watching the 11 p.m. news two nights ago, on a station whose news program we don't normally watch (the local ABC News affiliate).

The commercial teaser said something about a "lost helicopter" being the top story. At 11 the reader led off by saying, "The Army Black Hawk helicopter from Fort Bragg that had been lost today, has just been found."

Lost? Found? What did the Army do, misplace this helicopter? Well, no, it had been on maneuvers, and where they found it was submerged in the Little Pee Dee River. The common word for this sort of event is "crash," but the anchors completely avoided that word. The helicopter had been missing, but now was found. If not for the news reader's grim tone of voice, you'd have thought it was good news for the Army.

Three Army personnel were aboard. Normally, one would say that what happened to them is they were "killed." But again, the program used very roundabout language: "Fort Bragg officials had hoped for the best, but the worst outcome was confirmed."

A. and I remarked on this weird, confusing, passive way of telling the story. Lousy writing, we said. Then a couple minutes later, they reported a story from Iraq about an American soldier being "murdered." He was on patrol, was ambushed, and Iraqi insurgents "murdered" him.

No, I'm sorry, this soldier was not "murdered." He was killed in combat. The biggest bleeding-heart international lawyer in the Hague could not dress it up as a murder.

Our local media market includes Fort Bragg, as well as Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and Camp Lejeune Marine Base. So all our news shows bend over backwards to "support the troops." But it doesn't support anybody not to state facts clearly. I won't be tuning to this news show again, at least not without a copy of George Orwell's collected essays nearby.

RIP PAT TILLMAN: Pro football player Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan last week. He was serving as a U.S. Army Ranger and was killed in an ambush.

Everywhere I turn on the Web today, even when I’m just trying to find a recap of the NFL Draft, I find another emotional, almost worshipful obituary for Tillman. This is a man who walked away from a $3.6 million NFL contract in order to put his life on the line in the service of our country. Peter King of Sports Illustrated writes, “[I]n 100 years, school children across a changed United States will be reading books about an American hero named Pat Tillman.”

Pat Tillman is a potent figure. From pro football player to Army Ranger: this guy’s real life was like two Nintendo games put together. I half-expect to read that Tillman dated the Playmate of the Year and test-drove BMWs in his spare time, just to complete the package, and make him the perfect object of male adulation.

What’s more, Tillman was cool, in the way rock stars and champion surfers are cool. He wasn’t a striver. His talent flowed out of him, bringing him joy, not angst. He defied the glitz and soullessness that fans too often observe in sports today. He didn’t succumb to the undignified fate of most bigtime jocks, desperately wringing every last day and last dollar out of his career. When the passion was gone, he walked away with hardly a look back.

I say all this with perfect hindsight. Tillman proved it by actually walking away from football. As it happened, what caused Pat Tillman to lose that passion was to look up and see the United States in peril. The enormity of the terrorist threat and the reality of American troops patrolling Afghanistan made football seem trivial. Men in Tillman’s family in past generations had put their lives on hold to serve in the military in times of national need. To uphold that tradition, and to join ranks with the thousands of anonymous servicemen and women in harm’s way overseas, was worth putting aside fame and wealth.

From all I can tell, Tillman himself would be truly embarrassed by the fuss being made over him today. He regarded his choice as a personal one; he didn’t want to be held up as a hero or a recruitment poster boy, and he would surely protest the amount of ink being devoted to his death as opposed to the scores of other recent deaths among our troops.

But the sheer fact of Tillman’s celebrity, and the remarkable selflessness of his decision to enlist, tend to blind us to some important questions raised by his story and his tragic death.

Who really feared that Pat Tillman wouldn’t make it home? I feel foolish for writing this, but surely I’m not alone in thinking it. Tillman did not even enter basic training until June 2002—months after we had apparently defeated the Taliban. War in Iraq was not planned at this time, if we take the Bush Administration at its word. When Tillman volunteered, football fans on the whole greeted the news with congratulations, not with forboding. He would be part of a policing operation. I could see Tillman was generously sacrificing a huge sum of money and a few years in the NFL spotlight. I had no inkling that he would sacrifice everything. Who dreamed that in April 2004, two and a half years after U.S. troops arrived in the country, that conditions in Afghanistan would still be so deadly?

The writers memorializing Tillman usually mention the lucrative contract he spurned when he joined the Army. He had been living on a filet mignon salary, but he willingly traded it for a steady diet of MREs. He was the complete antithesis of a war profiteer. But if we applaud Tillman’s economic sacrifice, what do we make of Halliburton and the other private subcontractors turning a profit in Iraq and Afghanistan? What do we make of the thousands of professional soldiers—Americans and others--who finish their hitch on active military duty, then quickly hire on to do a similar job for a sharp rise in pay for private security firms?

Football and warfare: both are the stuff of video games and prime-time television. Lots of American men would give up a body part for a chance to play football for a living. Sure, it’s a dangerous business, but a rewarding one as well. Warfare is a somewhat different matter. Certainly, many young Americans enter military service freely, out of a sense of duty, or sometimes as a path of upward mobility. But many others conclude that the risk and hardship outweigh the reward. We like the video-game version of warfare better than the reality; if military service is voluntary, most of us find that we have other priorities. Why are we so uncomfortable on the rare occasions when a public figure raises the question, as Sen. Chuck Hagel did recently, whether the United States should reinstitute a military draft? Why is Pat Tillman such an exceptional case? If the country’s freedom is worth fighting for, shouldn’t all citizens share in that cost?

What does it say about this moment in our history, when we make extravagant outpourings of grief over this star athlete, this golden boy, yet the multitude of people who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan go uncommemorated by name? When the Pentagon does its damnedest to prevent civilians from seeing photos of our war dead, even unidentified, even laid out solemnly in flag-draped coffins?

I wouldn’t dare presume to ascribe my views to Pat Tillman. He seems to have pursued his mission with skill, bravery, and devotion. In my small way, never having known him, I salute his sacrifice and mourn his death. I hope school children are reading about him in 100 years, but I fear he will be forgotten. The final count of the dead may be too high; America’s cause in Afghanistan, too murky; the outcome, ambiguous or worse.

STRANGE DAYS: I wanted to post today for two reasons.

One is to make sure I remember how.

The other is to commemorate this week. Iraq is a hornet's nest; today marked the 100th American death there in the month of April. Our coalition partners, few and paltry though they are, are pulling out in droves. The 9/11 Commission, albeit in fits and starts, has turned up some shocking evidence of the Bush administration's nonchalance in the face of the threat from Al Qaeda in summer 2001. Bush held a prime time press conference in which he babbled like a damn idiot, and showed himself for the empty suit and moral retard that he is. The very next day, Bush and Ariel Sharon just shat all over the "road map" and any chance for peace in Israel and the occupied territories. Then over last weekend, Bob Woodward rolled out his new book, which portrays Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar as practically a cabinet-level player in Bush's government.

Then, to the utter shock of Democrats across the country, two polls released this week show Bush's public support actually improved slightly. They show Bush ahead of John Kerry, whereas they'd been showing Kerry ahead for awhile.

Here, I think, is what depresses me the most. Woodward writes that the Saudis have promised to manipulate the oil supply for Bush's political advantage this coming fall. Nobody seems all that outraged. Right now I don't think Americans care what their politicians do to get elected. Sure, they pitched a fit about Clinton and Gore's '96 fundraising, but that was just the weapon conservatives had at hand at the time. Bush is selling out America's interests, Arab lives, and maybe the lives of American military personnel, for the sake of his political fortunes. But that's all right. In my lifetime we've had Watergate, we've had Kissinger sabotaging peace talks with North Vietnam, we've had the October Surprise, we've had hanging chads in Florida. But the sun keeps rising in the east every morning. This guy W., he lowers taxes, he projects a personality that people can relate to, he bashes all the things people want bashed. He's like Wal-Mart: he adds comfort and convenience to our lives, so any way he can stay in business is all right with us.

It's a long campaign. There are bound to be twists and turns that nobody could foresee. I have to take heart, and keep faith. But this week I wanted to make a diary entry.

Next post will be about Dolly Parton.

I HOPE PATRICK HENRY IS SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE: I wanted to comment about this story in the New York Times.

A lot of people home-school their children, and on the whole these are a nutty, xenophobic bunch, but, thankfully, a scattered and unorganized one. So I thought. Well, they’re getting organized. A fellow named Michael Farris has built a nationwide network of home schoolers, with proven lobbying punch on Capitol Hill and impeccable Republican connections. He has established Patrick Henry College, catering to home-school students, in Purcellville, VA --a real praise-Jesus-and-pass-the-ammunition kind of area, in my experience.

A couple of choice quotes:

Only about half a million families around the country home-school their children and only about two-thirds identify themselves as evangelical Christians, home-schooling advocates say.

Only? ONLY??? Reading on, you see the context: Given their numbers, these home-school products are securing plum GOP internships at an impressive rate. And these advocates are trying to downplay the Bible-thumping image of the home school movement, but the article shows that Mr. Farris and his organization definitely spring from the Bible-thumping segment.

"We are not home-schooling our kids just so they can read," Mr. Farris said. "The most common thing I hear is parents telling me they want their kids to be on the Supreme Court.”

Glory! Let a generation of men of Christian character reform that wicked Supreme Court – the very institution that wrecked the public schools, by throwing out the Bible and letting in the colored people.

Public schools – their quality, their fairness, the values imparted there -- are a legitimate subject for debate, but I like to keep sight of the fact that universal public education is one of the chief things that has made the U.S. a great nation. The experience of attending school with a diverse group of peers is vitally important, in my view. Not just for turning out well-educated, well-socialzed, robust people, but for inculcating citizenship. To function in an institutional framework, with respect and tolerance for people different from yourself – if we don’t learn that in school, where else are we going to learn it?

Obviously, in many places today, the public schools are stressed and beleaguered. I don’t condemn every parent who seeks a private education for his child; he only gets one shot at it. But even a private education should acknowledge the need for students to encounter the Other, to have their viewpoints challenged, and to integrate themselves into a collective whole. In other words, even private schools need to ensure a diverse student body and a climate of free debate and inquiry.

I am suspicious of people who home-school. I’m also suspicious of people who send their kids to lily-white Christian academies. It is essentially un-American to limit a child’s learning environment only to family members or some other hand-picked group.

I don’t have a link, but our local TV news reported the other day that a private school in Southern Pines, NC, a “Christian” school, has a shooting range on site. Think about that. Maybe the stories of Columbine and the other school shootings of the past few years didn’t get reported there. Or maybe this little school is confident that it is not part of the culture that produced school shootings – American culture. These kids may never master Socratic dialogue, but they’ll be hellacious in a firefight.

AN AWKWARD FIX: Ruth Sheehan has a twice-weekly column in the Raleigh News & Observer. Today in her column she went public with her campaign to persuade her husband to get a vasectomy. (I won’t link because the N&O puts columns behind a pay wall after a week or so.)

“It's an issue contemplated by so many couples at our stage in life. It's easy enough to agree that you have enough children, even if it's none. But what to do next? For those of us who have suffered through pregnancies and childbirth, a vasectomy seems like a small thing to ask in return.”

Yeah, yeah, it’s an issue, and the personal is political, yadda yadda. And this is Ruth Sheehan’s baileywick: kitchen-table feminism kind of like Ellen Goodman is known for. I still can’t help being mortified on behalf of her husband. She says she got her husband’s blessing to write about the subject. But I know how those getting-your-blessing deals sometimes go down between spouses.

“I told Harry I was planning to go public, to write in the newspaper about our continuing conversation. I told him he'd hear from a secret brotherhood of men who have had vasectomies, who would offer their support. Harry said a Million Man March of guys would rise up and carry him on their shoulders. We'll see.”

I wonder how many people they’re going to hear from who say, Keep your damn gonad negotiations out of the pages of my morning paper.

I raised this subject with my trusted cohorts at Peoplesforum.com, and nobody shared my objections. In fact, this guy mounted a multi-part series of blog posts about his vasectomy and the aftermath. Which led me to ponder the different standards of acceptable discourse in blogs vis-a-vis a signed column in the daily paper, etc.

Maybe I’m just a tight-ass. Believe me, though, I'm not nearly so squeamish about a man's sacred precious jewels, as about TMI.

The thing is, I know this couple, sort of. In a friend-of-a-friend sort of way. (One could say that all of Raleigh knows this couple; she after all is a featured columnist in the daily paper, and her husband is a politician, he used to hold statewide elective office.) Somehow it feels as if they just marched up to me at a cocktail party, and made their respective cases, Pro-Vas and No-Vas, and demanded a ruling. Ruth – Harry – I love ya, seriously, but we just don’t know each other all that well.

When my wife and I first decided to try and conceive, I begged her not to tell anyone in her family. Because her older sister and her husband had had some fertility issues, and the family phone conversations became an ongoing Zygote Watch. When did you do it last? What position did you do it in? Stuff like that.

What. A. Nightmare. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, spare me from the day when my mother or mother-in-law occupies herself with discussions of how goes it with my sperm. So Harry, this secret brother has got to stay secret.

BYE-BYE, JOHNNY: Actually, let's not say goodbye to John Edwards, but rather so long, because I think it might be real fine to see him on the dais in Boston being introduced as Kerry's running mate.

Back to politics. Okay, I didn’t have much to say the day after Iowa, when I felt pretty dumb for having been enthusiastic for Howard Dean. So I’ll post today, when I feel pretty smart for having expressed doubts about John Edwards.

More unenlightening armchair quarterbacking from Slate magazine. John Edwards was never a serious candidate, says Chris Suellentrop. Look at his delegate totals; the man did no better than Howard Dean at actually winning votes, and think what a joke Howard Dean is by now.

I hate to credit the conventional wisdom about the Howard Dean campaign, but apart from the smug tone it usually carries, the argument makes sense. The Dean campaign was not a failure; it served its purpose as a protest candidacy. Dean changed the terms of the debate. He proved that it was not fatal to attack Bush. Dean’s message was useful; it was Dean himself that was found wanting.

To me, it follows from the above, that the primary season has been a process of self-definition, or re-definition, for the party: defining the message, the messenger, and that ineffable something-or-other we call Electability. John Edwards represented an important stage in the process, so for Suellentrop to harp on raw vote counts seems to miss the point somewhat.

Suellentrop begins by asserting how highly touted Edwards was by the media when he entered the presidential race. Then he ends by reciting the list of Edwards’s weaknesses (too young, weak on national defense, etc.), which is the same list one could have recited three years ago. I suppose Edwards was highly regarded, according to the somewhat condescending standard the press has for Democratic presidential hopefuls: that good looks and a Southern drawl are a great starting point, and we’ll fill in the policy positions later. But Suellentrop faults Edwards for not living up to his advance build-up. Not a moment’s reflection about who the press builds up, or why.

It’s not easy for me to admit as a spitball-throwing populist, but Kerry’s emergence as the nominee looks like a victory for insiderdom. Kerry has good people working for him, he has a well-organized and reasonably well-funded operation, and his years of experience on Capitol Hill and as a campaigner have served him pretty well.

And I got no problem with that. 2004 is not about having a perfect simon-pure party of the left, it’s about getting rid of Bush. He’s the worst US president in my lifetime, possibly in history, and I don’t say that lightly; Richard Nixon set the limbo bar mighty low.

Here’s my eulogy for Howard Dean: My support for him was pragmatically based. I saw a Democratic Party cowed by the Bush war presidency, demoralized by the 2002 midterm elections, and reliant on a PAC-based finance system that was obsolete and feeble in comparison to the GOP’s. Howard Dean showed us a way out. Kerry and Gephardt and Lieberman were appeasing Bush; Dean drew a line and issued a battle call, and empowered regular people to enlist in the fight. Lots of them.

Dean got a bum steer from the media; he’s a better person and a much more moderate politician than he was portrayed as. But you know, he had a buttload of money, he had his face on the covers of Time and Newsweek – he got his shot. That’s what I wanted from the beginning, a competitive primary season in which the outcome was not foreordained, but decided by voters.

The primary season was a big success. The spotlight and momentum are with the Democrats. Now is the time for true patriots to pull together and come to the aid of the John Kerry campaign for President.

MONDAY MILESTONE: I hadn’t exactly been quivering with anticipation—I had actually forgotten about today’s significance, but a couple of minutes into my morning commute, I was reminded.

I stopped for gas on the way to work. After perusing the contents of my wallet, I figured I could buy $13.00 worth of 87-octane and still be able to afford a cup of ersatz quickie-mart cappucino. Alas, I miscalculated; the tab came to $14.07. The cashier had to spot me the seven cents.

This was NOT the thing to bolster my self-esteem on a Monday morning.

The car has been making a troubling noise, coming from the front end. Brake-related, I’m pretty sure. I have been dragging my feet on getting it looked at, not wanting to hear the bad news. It’s that difficult stage in a car’s life, where you know you’re not going to keep it very much longer, so you don’t want to put a penny more into repairs than you have to. Although the brakes, shit, that’s not really an optional repair, is it? I have to transport my kids in this car.

The tailpipe rusted and fell off a few months ago. Speaking personally, I could not care less, but I know from experience (this is the third time the tailpipe has rusted off) that the car won’t pass state inspection with a missing tailpipe. My inspection comes up for renewal in May. Also, I can’t just get a tailpipe installed; a whole new muffler is required. $150 or so, if memory serves. Can I dump this sucker before May? I’ve been thinking I need to hold on until August.

These are my thoughts as I drive. The radio is on, Cokie fucking Roberts is on NPR giving her regular Monday morning commentary. (NPR, do you realize how many of your regular listeners have really grown to curse Cokie Roberts?) Something about the all-important party regulars; next week it’ll be something about the all-important swing voters. I switch to the modern rock station. “All Apologies” is playing. Good song. I sing along, and I’m really belting it out, trying to hit those highs at the end of each line. When I’m in good voice I can hit ‘em, but not this morning. I wonder if the other drivers are staring at me at the stop lights, hollering along with Kurt Cobain. Back to NPR. Something about Haiti. Shouldn’t I understand more about the crisis in long-suffering Haiti?

But a few more minutes’ driving calms me down. Even the troubling noise from the car’s front end seems to subside. I remember the threshold we’re about to cross. I calculate correctly that if I drive directly to work, that I won’t see the magic number this morning, so I drive past my exit, taking a roundabout back-route to the office. I watch as the odometer rolls over to 200000.

It’s really quite a pretty sight. I manage a private smile. Even my father, my avatar of economy and good financial stewardship – even Dad has never kept a car for two hundred thousand miles.

We bought this car when my wife and I were engaged, in January 1991, three months before our wedding. I couldn’t get financing based on my own credit rating; so, in what I sometimes think of as the first moment of our married life, she signed for the loan. It has been downhill for her credit rating ever since.

Praises be to my dear wife. Praises be to the Honda Corporation, for outstanding design and quality control. Praise unto the hard-working auto workers in Ontario who did such a damn fine job assembling this baby. Praises be to those who’ve worked on the car over the years, notably the guys at Tao Auto on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh. I’ve had to expend some worry on this car the last few months, but for many years, I never had to give it a second thought. It has been a great car.

Tomorrow I’m going to take it to the shop to get the front end looked at.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES, or THE ARTS COMMUNITY GETS LOBBYING HELP IN THE ODDEST PLACES: I’m at home this afternoon with a sick child, and we caught some of this PBS show, and it kinda cracked me up.

You know how dated and reactionary most sitcoms from the ‘50s and ‘60s look today? The dad is the Organization Man, the ambitious young executive. The mom is the executive’s wife, cook and homemaker with the apron over the cocktail dress. Many plots involve Dad trying to impress a big client, and Mom trying to host the perfect party, but the kids or the dog create havoc, etc. And everything works out better than planned at the end.

Well, this show “George Shrinks” updates the formula for the Oughties, as well as for PBS’s target demographic. Dad is a wacky inventor/saxophone player with a goatee and a $50 haircut. Mom is sort of a Martha Stewart type, only more soft-edged and free of legal trouble--an entrepreneurial Jill-of-all-trades. In the plot of today’s episode, Mom (whose name is Perdita) is trying to get her arts grant application together, but her kids create havoc, her husband has a pratfall en route to Kinko’s, etc. And everything works out better than planned at the end, I’m sure (though I didn’t stick it out that long).

Sorry, maybe nobody will be amused by this but me. And the website doesn’t make me laugh the way the first two minutes I saw of the show did. (Interesting how many kids’ shows come from Canada these days.)

Support public broadcasting, people! In doing our income taxes, I see that I inadvertently pledged to public radio twice last year and to public TV not at all. D’oh! I swear, PBS station, I’ll catch ya in 2004 (maybe twice).

LOOKING FOR LOVE...: Hey look, Ezra Klein of Pandagon agrees with me about the Democrats and the South. (well, he would agree with me if he knew I existed)

Then there’s Amy Sullivan of Political Aims. Her bottom-line conclusion is don’t punt the South, which I agree with. I would throw a little cold water on her analysis, though. For one thing, (a) yuppies who’ve recently moved to Charleston and (b) displaced textile workers in Dillon or someplace, are two very different groups of people. For another: It’s well worth noting the migration from other regions of the U.S. to the South. And it’s accurate enough to say that “these new Southerners don’t… leave their political beliefs and values behind.” I wish it were that simple. Some of the new Southerners are here because they heard that state taxes and housing costs were low. Some of them are here because of corporate-friendly policies: more lenient land-use regulations and the like. In other words, some people who migrate South are perhaps more comfortable here ideologically than they were in their home states. They brought their conservativism with them when they moved. They self-selected to come here.

Not to reject the Political Aims post; just to complicate it. Incidentally, Ms. Sullivan does know I exist; we had a very cordial e-mail exchange, for which I thank her.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: The fates of the Carolina Panthers and John Edwards are somewhat linked in my mind. Because here in North Carolina, a number of people are commenting what a boon it is to the state’s national profile both that Edwards has surged in the Democratic primaries and that the Panthers made the Super Bowl.

Being a good football team, being the leader of the free world—no distinction is made between these two accomplishments. They’re about equally noteworthy and convertible into the same kind of PR currency. I find this boosterish attitude pretty numbskulled, but it seems to prevail in every U.S. Sunbelt city, Atlanta and Charlotte and Nashville, each of whom jumps up and down shouting Notice us! It doesn’t matter why! So I daydream occasionally about living in a “real” or at least more self-confident city: London… Paris… Pittsburgh…

The Panthers acquitted themselves well in losing a close battle on Sunday. Edwards may be about to do the same thing in today’s South Carolina primary. (Or maybe he’ll do better; I don’t have a prediction.) John Edwards owns a house about two miles from mine, I voted for him enthusiastically for Senate in 1998, so you’d think I’d be more deliriously excited about his Presidential contender status. Surprise, even puzzlement, is more my reaction. As far as I can tell, Edwards is a very smart guy, hard-working, with a good heart and some wonderful leadership qualities. But a lot of people here feel he hasn’t paid his proper dues, put in his time.

Edwards loves to cite his textile-mill town upbringing; opponents love to bring up his career as a trial lawyer. I give him credit for being a genuinely self-made man (a stark contrast with G.W. Bush in that regard) and a great lawyer: winner of some American Bar Association litigator of the year award, victor in a couple of well-known big-money civil cases, and a deservedly rich dude, owner of a sweet house in Raleigh’s Country Club Hills.

Edwards had a bitch of a midlife crisis when his teenage son died in a highway accident, and fairly abruptly shifted his energies from his law practice to politics. Not only was he not a Dem Party activist, Edwards had rarely even voted prior to declaring for the ’98 Senate race. He won that election, on the strength of his charisma, several million of his own dollars, and Lauch Faircloth being an undistinguished Republican opponent. Hardly had Edwards gotten his feet wet in Washington before he was short-listed for Al Gore’s vice presidential nod, and since then John’s sights have been set on bigger things than merely representing me in the United States Senate.

That was a pretty widespread view: that John Edwards was neglecting his constituents in favor of his long-shot prospects for the White House. Just a few months ago, with Edwards’s re-election to his Senate seat in question (he trailed Richard Burr, Karl Rove’s handpicked candidate, in the polls), the state Democratic Party prevailed on him to step aside from Senate re-election. The party needed an actual candidate to stump in Cabarrus County, not in New Hampshire and Iowa.

So the man’s sudden surge is remarkable. And he deserves a world of credit; he has labored mightily to organize his campaign and hone his pitch. It sounds like he gives the most inspiring speech of any of the national Democratic contenders. I just can’t quite shake the cognitive dissonance between Edwards’s standing three months ago and his standing today. To most of the country Edwards has come out of nowhere; to me and to a lot of liberals in the state, he was worse than nowhere, he was in the doghouse, a minor or medium-sized disappointment. Even today, the Raleigh and Chapel Hill movers-n-shakers who talk up John Edwards’s recent celebrity as good for the state, would probably be most comfortable with Kerry at the top of the ticket and Edwards in the VP position.

I’m sure I would take more chauvinistic pride if ex-Governor Jim Hunt had been the Tar Heel to break through in national politics. Hunt is shorter, plainer, less charismatic than Edwards, but he was a political lifer—he was gladhanding voters for N.C. State student government races when he was 18. Hunt’s rapid rise was halted, though, when he tangled with Jesse Helms in 1984. After that he spent some time in corporate law, and liked the view from the suites, and even though he would serve two more terms as governor, Hunt's stock was down and his ambition was muted.

SNOW DAYS: The North Carolina Piedmont has been snowed (actually, mostly iced) over since Sunday. Not until today (Wednesday) did my wife and I get back to work, and the two younger daughters to preschool, for part of the day. And Wake County Public Schools are cancelled through tomorrow, fer Pete's sake, so the oldest girl will be parked in front of the TV all day AGAIN. It's the South for you; the towns don't have enough plows or rock salt, so an inch and half of ice turns into a major natural catastrophe.

So there's been some cabin fever and some frayed nerves in the household, but there were some high points, too. For instantaneous parenting satisfaction, it doesn't get much better than taking your kids out to play in the snow, for the first time in their lives, or it might as well be. (We average one good snow a year, and if you're three years old you don't remember jack from when you were two.) The sled starts off, picks up speed, and moans of apprehension suddenly turn to joyful laughter. To listen to your children as they ride a sled, throw snowballs, even as they scream with delight as Daddy slips and falls on his butt on the sidewalk... Joy is the best word to describe it, for them and for me.

By chance, our family got enlisted to take care of HoneyBunny, the mascot for M.'s prechool class of 3-year-olds, for the weekend. (Yes, the rabbit's name is HoneyBunny. This is what you get when you trust a committee of 3-year-olds to decide on a name.) HoneyBunny digs coming to our house, because we let her out of her cage into the screened back porch, and she runs around pretty freely all day. The problem arose when HB's weekend visit was unexpectedly extended to five days: We ran out of rabbit food. My wife had the brilliant idea of calling our next door neighbor and asking to borrow some cat food. Neighbor agrees, and H., my oldest daughter (age 10) trudges next door in the snow and ice to pick up a Ziploc baggie full of cat food and bring it back home. At which time I point out that cats are carnivores, and while I'm unclear exactly what's in dry cat food I'm pretty sure a rabbit shouldn't eat it. So H. has to make another trip through the snow and ice to return the baggie full of cat food to the neighbors.

And boy, is H. aggravated, and I don't blame her although at the same time I find the situation humorous. And she loudly and eloquently expresses her righteous indignation, and I get a joyful kick even out of that.

Dang, maybe I need parallel blogs, one for the political bloviating, one for the kiddies 'n' bunnies...

MORE TALK OF A “NORTHERN STRATEGY”: Tim Noah in Slate magazine advises the Democrats to forget about carrying any Southern states for Prez in 2004.

Bottom line, this may be perfectly sound advice. The shortest path to a Democratic win may be to circle around the South entirely. But I’d like to enumerate my gripes with this piece, and with Tim Noah, about whom I vacillate between thinking he’s pretty smart, and thinking the poor guy must get the bends when he strays—not even outside the Beltway—to any point where one cannot still smell the phosphates in the Potomac River.

Southerners now consider it their God-given right to supply Democrats with presidential candidates or, failing that, to force non-Southern candidates to discuss Him using an alien evangelical vocabulary. (God doesn't hear the prayers of Episcopalians, Congregationalists, or Presbyterians. No use even discussing Unitarians, Jews, and atheists.)

This bit deserves its own post, and to be fair Mr. Noah is hardly alone in exaggerating the evangelical character of religion in the South. But the news story he links to is about Howard Dean’s groping for a way to talk about his faith at all. Howard’s not an evangelist; he’s just trying to be a pew-warmer. Sample: "I don't go to church that much because I don't have a lot of time for that particularly in this milieu." Not exactly soul-stirring. But let’s move on.

Overindulgence has also made the South grotesquely hypersensitive to what non-Southern liberals say about it; to quote a famous witticism about the writer John O'Hara, today's South is "master of the fancied slight."

I trust Mr. Noah never, ever, referred to Bill Clinton, former Democratic President, Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law graduate, as “Bubba.” That one was the particular slight that gave me a chip on my shoulder about Washington media types looking down their nose at anyone with a twang, no matter how accomplished that person. Maybe I fancied it; it sure seemed real for a few years there.

Thus when Vermonter Howard Dean made the perfectly innocent remark that he'd like to win votes from "guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks"—a comment, incidentally, that indicated he did not intend to write off the South—he had to fall all over himself apologizing to Southerners offended by the shorthand.

Maybe I’m wrong, but who exactly was offended by mixing Howard Dean with the rebel flag? Okay, Al Sharpton, predictably, was offended. John Edwards was offended. Other party figures from the South were offended, and certain personages who consider themselves guardians of the “sensible center” of the party were offended. And not so much offended as threatened, because it’s their job to wield the ancient cultural symbols, and Dean was being presumptuous. Were the Southern VOTERS Mr. Dean intended to address, were they themselves offended? Not in great numbers. Frankly, not many Southerners are alertly awaiting Mr. Dean’s overtures, but I don’t see the harm in his trying.

Noah quotes political scientist Thomas Schaller, approvingly: [T]he South has the fewest independent-minded voters available for Democratic conversion. Protest candidates John McCain, Ralph Nader and Perot all bombed there. Of the 10 states where Perot fared worst in 1992, all were Southern. … The South is where insurgents and independents go to die.

Hold the phone. McCain was the victim of a notorious smear job from the right by G.W. Bush in South Carolina in 2000; it may not be the only factor in McCain’s poor showing in the South, but it’s worth mentioning. And McCain was competing in a Republican primary anyway. This is being rejected by the swing voters? I’d say Ross Perot and Ralph Nader were hampered by the difficulty of a third party candidate even getting on the ballot in many Southern states. Those campaigns had to spend a lot of resources just to get in the door, and historically speaking, we have the Democratic Party to thank for the ballot access problem. And since when are Ralph Nader supporters “swing voters”?

Noah quotes Ruy Teixeira, but for debunking purposes; Noah belittles Teixeira’s remarks thusly: Democrats should resist "wholesale abandonment" because it's … impolite. [Ellipses in the original.]

That’s not what Teixeira said at all, in my view. The Teixeira quote is the single most sensible passage in the article: the Democrats need to guard against seeing the South as “a culturally alien mass that we don’t know how to talk to.” A national political movement, particularly one who very name alludes to democracy, should not write off a huge segment of the populace as immune to the movement’s message.

In the last third or so of the article, Noah catalogs the baleful racial history of the South, from Jim Crow back to secession back to the three-fifths compromise. This is the crux of the matter: Tim Noah deplores the influence of the South in American history. That’s a perfectly defensible point of view. But here I thought we were discussing contemporary American politics, and here is a region of, I don’t know, 40 million people that is not going to go away because Tim Noah wishes it would.

Certainly, the Democrats should spend their resources where they will get the most bang for the buck. I’ll cling to what I said on January 12, that “Southern values” are held by a lot of Northern voters, therefore the party needs to nod, at least, to these values. But this feels somehow like a circular argument. Either you feel enough affinity for the South to embrace it as part of America, or you don’t.

I wouldn’t want to be accused of hypersensitivity, and goodness knows I appreciate Tim Noah’s name-checking a bunch of Southern writers. But it’s ALLEN Tate, you supercilious putz.

Ahem. Sorry.

TRIPPI IS OUT as Howard Dean's campaign manager. Talking Points Memo puts it in perspective.

I figured I would look foolish, but this is a little much.

More to say later.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE: Let me get in a post about Democratic politics before the Iowa caucuses, so I’ll be SURE to look foolish tomorrow.

Y’know, if it looks like I’ve been a Howard Dean supporter, that’s only because, with mild reservations, I have been. I really admire the man’s aggressive attitude and the amazing grassroots campaign he’s put together.

I fell into the trap of thinking Dean was inevitable a few weeks ago, but now the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire say he’s still got a fight ahead of him. Okay, then. Let’s hear from some actual voters. And, guys, no rabbit punches or hitting below the belt, and may the best man win. (By dropping out, Carol Moseley-Braun has endorsed my use of single-gender pronouns.)

The rest of this was mostly written before the weekend:

Matthew Yglesias at Tapped directed me to
this John Harris piece in the Washington Post about competing campaign strategies among the contestants for the Democratic nomination. Here’s Harris:

”In one sense, the strategic question facing Democrats about how to beat Bush amounts to a debate between Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, and [Mark] Penn, a principal author of Clinton's political strategy from 1995 onward.

“That strategy was built around a constant focus on the preferences of swing voters skeptical of both parties. Penn's premises about the primacy of independents and how to engage them are shared by several other Democratic campaigns.

“In an interview, Trippi said, ‘The established way is to go after the middle, even if it means depressing your base.’ He said that swing voters will look at large issues -- the war and the budget -- but that policy positions are secondary to the larger mood and promise Dean conveys.

“That promise, in the campaign's view, is a revival of grass-roots democracy to challenge Bush's alleged coziness with corporate special interests. Independent voters don't necessarily gravitate to the most moderate candidate.

“’There's something very appealing about taking a party back, and that crosses party lines,’ he said. ‘The middle tends to go the most energized party.’

“Penn said there is no evidence for this. ‘The real swing voters are not members of either party, and they are not excited by “political momentum,” ‘ he said. "They make up their mind without reference to political parties.’”

And here is Matt’s response, in part:

”Not to put too fine a point on it, [neglecting the swing voters] is insane. For one thing, a swing voter who switches his allegiance from one party to another is worth twice as much at the polls as a non-voter who you mobilize. Moreover, if Dean doesn't even try to win over former Bush voters to his side, he's going to make it easy for Bush to reach swing voters who went for Gore in 2000. Last but not least, this strategy ignores the single biggest advantage the Democrats have going into the race -- the fact that Bush's policies remain consistently less popular than Bush himself. A clear opportunity exists to convince people to vote their actual beliefs rather than their gut-level affection for the president's personality, but it won't amount to much if the opposition isn't interested in reaching out. It's true that the potential swing electorate is rather small, but it certainly exists, and it's well worth fighting for.”

This gets at the heart of the Democrats’ dilemma. There’s as much unsaid here as there is said, though, and I may well be about to go off on a Rohrschach test-style tangent, seeing something there that another reader doesn’t see. With that disclaimer, here I go.

I think Matt has constructed a straw man here, or bought too heavily into the media image of Howard Dean as the radical-left candidate of angry Bush haters. I don’t think “energizing the party” necessarily means cheerleading for the people who want to boil Bush in oil. Dean can legitimately claim to have remade the party, thanks to hundreds of thousands of small contributors, ten of thousands of Meet-Ups. And the Dean revolution is primarily organizational, not ideological. I think Dean has a great chance of crafting a vivid, vigorous, positive image for the party and the campaign.

Lurch leftward to fire up the base, or lurch rightward to appeal to those mythical creatures, the swing voters. What if it’s not an either-or choice? What if there is a zen process whereby by not trying to get the swing voters, that’s how you get ‘em? That possibility makes as much sense to me as anything. Don’t lurch. Work hard. Show some integrity. Don’t posture, don’t bullshit, and don’t take any bullshit from your opponent or from the press.

Maybe I just need to see more specifically what this Penn-ian swing voter strategy is. What I fear is that it would resemble the Dems’ strategy from the ’02 midterms, which was “give Bush everything he wants, but whine and nitpick about it in the process.”

I acknowledge the point that Americans like G.W. Bush the man better than they like his policies. The eventual nominee will need to moderate the anti-Bush rhetoric. The best way to attack Bush is not to say he’s a liar. It’s to say that he’s well-intentioned but weak, that his administration is out of control, that the real people in charge are Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the ideologues and the stonewallers and the petty political backstabbers. The Democrats are the truth-telling, decent, pragmatic alternative.

Matt’s remark that a swing voter is twice as valuable as a new voter, is a bit facile. A Rolex watch, if I found it lying on the sidewalk, would be worth more than my whole week’s paycheck. But which do I have a better chance of actually getting my hands on?

Okay, my metaphor isn’t that great either. I’m not a complete idiot, and neither (need I point out) is Joe Trippi. No one wants the Democrats to ignore the electoral map or other tactical considerations in the fall. My final word for now: Joe Trippi has worked a near revolution in progressive politics in the last year. Mark Penn works for Joe Lieberman, for crying out loud. Right now I’m a lot more inclined to trust Trippi’s judgment than Penn’s.

Atrios as always is smarter and more concise than I.

Calpundit’s thoughts are here.

Tapped again (Nick Confessore this time). Somebody slap me, because when I read a Beltway journalist, even a good one like Mr. Confessore, say something “verges on gibberish,” my knee-jerk reaction is to give more credence, not less, to the so-called gibberish.

ROSE PEDDLES: Another perspective on the Pete Rose kerfluffle, from The Phil File.

DEMOCRATS AND THE SOUTH: I think Josh Marshall says something smart here.

I am well aware that looking at the electoral map, there are some plausible scenarios under which the Democrats can win the White House without carrying any Southern state. But writing off a large portion of the electorate is risky. It's not just that, as Marshall puts it, whatever definition you attach to white Southerners ("ideologically pragmatic, culturally conservative" is one stab at it) would include a dangerously large number of people outside the old Confederacy. It's that pandering to some voters and neglecting others is a disspiriting spectacle. It de-energizes your core voters, as well as limiting your outreach to new voters.

This is another front on which the Democrats should stand fast and not give ground. We want a political party to offer us a vision of the country's future, not subdivide and segment us like the cable TV dial.

SHOPPING FOR FAITH: I’ve made versions of this comment on several other people’s blogs – now let me use it as fodder for a blog post of my own. I am only slightly deterred by the fact that this op-ed piece by Steven Waldman already made many of my points for me.

Several reporters and pundits have recounted the story of how Howard Dean changed churches, from an Episcopal to a Congregational church, over a bike path. Julian Sanchez in Reason, Franklin Foer in The New Republic, George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, and probably others have referred to it.

It peeves me that this story is retold in a shorthand way that makes Dean seem frivolous or flaky with regard to religion. Stephanopoulos, for instance, seemed bewildered: "A bike path? Really?" (It's partly Dean's fault to allow it to be spun that way.)

The "bike path" episode was a land use controversy, a protracted fight over whether a piece of property fronting Lake Champlain in Burlington, VT would be developed for private profit, or conserved for public use. It seems to have been an important chapter in Dean's life -- part of his transition out of medicine and into politics. It’s also the kind of controversy that a great many communities have experienced, and one that gets pretty much right at the heart at the great American ideological divide: balancing the public and private spheres.

Dean’s Episcopal parish was a player in the dispute; it held a piece of the land being fought over. Dean was disappointed in the position his church took in the controversy, so he switched his membership to a different church. The point, to me, is not that Dean takes his religion so lightly, but that he takes environmental politics pretty seriously, and his politics informs his religious viewpoint.

The Episcopal Church and the UCC (aka Congregational Church) are not that dissimilar. As Steven Waldman points out, “church shopping” is a well-known, much-remarked feature of contemporary American religion. Many, many churchgoing Americans switch between denominations at some point in their lives.

Dean switched from Episcopal to UCC; GW Bush has switched from Presbyterian to Methodist; Wes Clark has switched from Baptist to Catholic. Personally, I don't think ANY of them is a deeply pious or spiritual man. But switching churches doesn't prove anything one way or the other.

Part of the point here is that the national press is (a) reflexively dismissive of a Democrat attempting to talk about his faith, and (b) pretty uninformed about the details of religious life in general. Another point is that millions of people in this country can relate to a pragmatic approach to organized religion, an open search for belief--even to love and marriage and family ties with people of a different religious tradition. So Howard Dean, or another Democrat, can offer a model of spiritual synthesism and pragmatism that can compete with the uptight, intolerant Republican version of religion.

The gay marriage issue may give the Democrats a chance to take the offensive. Religion is one of those aspects of politics where the Democrats just concede huge amounts of territory. They shouldn't concede an inch.

All that build-up, then two months go by with no posts. Hey, it's a New Year, and guess what one of my resolutions is?

CHARLIE HUSTLE: When I was eight I signed up for Little League Baseball, my first experience in organized sports. I was randomly assigned to a team called the Rebels, and randomly issued jersey number 14. There is no big-league team called the Rebels, but in my mind I identified us with the Cincinnati Reds: our colors were red on white, and the names were similar. And thanks to my number I secretly identified myself with Pete Rose.

I don’t know that Rose was my favorite player, exactly. He was more like my patron saint. Other players were more graceful, more powerful, more handsome. But you had to admire the Reds of the ‘70s, and they were on TV all the time, and Rose was one of the most vivid characters in baseball in that period. My father was preaching hustle to me as the cardinal virtue in athletics—Run everything out!—and I was saying Amen, since eight-year-olds make quite a few errors, so it obviously paid to run hard down the line on every batted ball. But more than a clever tactic, hustle was a moral imperative. It was a tribute you paid to the game. And as every fan knows, Pete Rose was Charlie Hustle himself. Diving for extra bases, backing up plays in the field. Sprinting down to first after a base on balls!

Earlier this week the news broke: Pete Rose admits he placed bets on major league baseball games while he was managing the Reds in the late ‘80s. For 14 years Rose had been denying this allegation. During that time I didn’t believe Pete Rose, and I didn’t disbelieve Pete Rose, but I did take his side in my small way (like, in about a dozen arguments on Internet discussion boards). Because official baseball had violated his due process.

But now he cops to it. After 14 years of stonewalling, Rose suddenly caves. And he hasn’t had a change of heart; I don’t even think he had a failure of will after 14 years. No, what Pete did this week was like a judo move: with skill and deliberation, he switched from resisting the attack against him, to yielding and trying to use the attacker’s inertia to his own advantage.

I still believe Rose’s due process was violated back in ’89. But I can’t suspend judgment anymore. Now I think the case of Pete Rose is something like the case of O.J. Simpson: Each time, they framed a guilty man. I feel foolish and betrayed, a little bit, but mostly I feel sad for what Pete Rose has become: a mean little man, hawking memorabilia on cable TV, flogging his quickie as-told-to book, collecting appearance fees to sign autographs at little ag expo halls.

I don’t have the heart to weigh in on the Hall of Fame debate, or the ethics of gambling by an employee of a major league ballclub. Let us stipulate that I am, a priori, a schmuck for viewing big-time sports as any kind of moral arena or crucible of character. But to see the guy whom I remember so well in his prime, and who seemed the very epitome of proper sporting ethics—to see him end up this way smarts a little.

A hundred other writers have beaten me to the play on the word “hustle.” Far from paying tribute to the game, Pete Rose was exacting tribute from it. He was doing this all along.

GOOGLE MOGUL HEEBIE-JEEBIES: Well, that first post is a little self-important, now that I read it again. But I'll let it ride.

I'm surprised and just a little creeped out by the search-bot-generated ad that Blogger has placed at the top of my page -- guess I'll get used to it. Today it links to Google searches for "David+Brooks" and "Christianity." Yessah, yessah, get yer Christian and David Brooks related expert opinions right here...

It's interesting to see myself linked to www.bishopspong.com, the site of well-known (notorious, to some) Christian progressive John Shelby Spong. When I was a teenager, my family were members of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, and Spong was our bishop. I don't have strong firsthand memories of him, though I must have met him and heard him preach two or three times. My mother was a big admirer of Spong's, one big reason being he was a strong proponent of ordaining women to the Episcopal clergy, at the time when that was a controversial topic.

I could be exaggerating his importance, but I think Spong had a significant influence on the Episcopal Church, for good and ill. I think he's been on the side of the angels in regard to the rights of women and gays, but the denomination is in something of a crisis now, facing a possible liberal/conservative schism. The ECUSA is perceived as "Christianity Lite," endlessly accommodating to modernity and a bit soft on Biblical authority. It seems like I've heard that in his recent writings Spong fudges on matters such as the Virgin Birth and the divinity of Jesus. This would certainly fit the conservatives' image of him as at least flirting with heresy.

Some years after leaving NJ I had a friend whose father was an Episcopal priest and worked under Spong, and I gathered from this friend that Spong's management style and personal piety left something to be desired. Bishop yes; saint no.

But I should look over his site. So should you, if the concept of progressive Christianity is novel and intriguing to you.

Okay, here goes.

I had thought of starting with the Dix Hill manifesto, but I’m kind of stumped on that. I’m hoping it will emerge as time passes. Instead, let me write a quick catalog of my current preoccupations.

I am politically progressive. In the Internet circles I run in, this is a perfectly natural thing to be (less so in my real-life circles).

I joined a church two years ago. In the Internet circles I travel in, this is an unusual thing to do (not at all unusual in my real-life circles). I encounter a lot of people who are indifferent, if not actively hostile, to organized religion. I respect these folks, but they conceive of Christianity quite a bit differently than I experience it, and this disjuncture pains me somewhat. I’m trying to pursue Christianity as an intellectual tradition as well a spiritual one, and I’d like to argue to the secular humanists out there that a progressive, modern Christianity is not altogether a paradox.

I don’t intend to proselytize, honest. Merely to explain. This church thing is complicated (if one is paying attention), and it may be that in the end, things don’t work out between Jesus and me.

I am married and have three young kids. I don’t know exactly what to say about that; in fact, a big reason that I spend time online seems to be to interact with other grown-ups and NOT talk about my domestic concerns. But my family is a big part of my life and I hope to say something about family life in the context of religion and culture and politics and other big themes.

I live in the South. I haven’t lived here all my life, but I’m working on 15 straight years, and I would be content to stay here the rest of my life. Honestly, I don’t think the South is that radically different from other parts of the country, but it does have a certain flavor in regard to politics. And religion. Which ostensibly are two of the things this blog is about. So thoughts on the South and Southern-ness may bubble up here from time to time.

I can’t stand George W. Bush. As an apprentice Christian, I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to “hate” him. So let me state for the record in front of God and David Brooks and everybody that I do not hate him. The fact remains, I can’t stand the sight of his face or the sound of his voice, I will dive for the TV remote when he appears. And I desperately want his term of office to end in January ’05.

But there are lots of defeat-Bush blogs and left-wing politics blogs, who plow that turf better than I could. I’m hoping to offer a distinctive and personal perspective. And in my linking behavior, at least early on, I’m going to try to plump for a couple of sites in the blogosphere that are somewhat off the beaten path.