TV Review: Archer Season 8 (spoilers)

TV Review: Archer: Dreamland (spoilers)

The mantle of “Best animated show on TV” has obviously moved around over the past 30 years.  The Simpsons held the crown for about a decade, then came King of the Hill for a year or two.  South Park showed amazing staying power.  At some point the crown passed to the marvelously irreverent series Archer.  The show was both brilliant and stupid, sort of like its main character.  Sterling Archer was cut from the same cloth as Maxwell Smart, at times a brilliant super-spy, at other a dim-witted boob.  The vocal cast is amazing, the show became increasingly bold in its visual style, and like South Park there seemed to be no limit on how low the show would go for a chuckle.

Archer ended season 7 in an awkward place, namely the title character face down in a pool, profusely bleeding from a stomach wound.  But the show had been renewed for multiple seasons!  Where to go?  Creator Adam reed made a daring decision that showed how much he enjoyed reveling in clichés while mocking them: he reinvented the show as a fantasy in a comatose Archer’s mind, with the cast transported to a 1940’s film noir plot.

The resulting abbreviated eight-episode season was dubbed (appropriately) Dreamland. Archer was now a low-rent shamus seeking to avenge the death of his partner Woodhouse, who in reality had been Archer’s heroin-using manservant.  His mother was now an underworld boss named (again, appropriately) Mother.  Cyril Figgis, the office schlep, was now a police detective; Lana Kane, Archer’s partner both as a spy and as a parent, was a torch singer who was an undercover Treasury Agent; and oddest of all, HR director Pam Poovey was now a male bruiser cop just called Poovey. 

The premise showed promise at first.  The artwork had never been better, the cast was still the best vocal cast on TV, and the show had interesting touches, like having Archer suffer from PTSD flashbacks whenever he was in a fight with mobsters.  The re-imagined characters were both familiar and fresh, making the entire show seem new and improved.

I’m not sure where things went wrong, but they went wrong.  Nothing ever became of the PTSD flashbacks, the supposed plot of finding Woodhouse’s killer got endlessly sidetracked (although, to be fair, the show did meta shout outs on this fact regularly), and the show’s reliance on excessively graphic violence, only possible on an animated series, went over the op and became sadistic but not funny.  Archer’s closest relationships, with his mother and Lana, got attenuated and lacked the sharp give and take from previous seasons.

One doesn’t watch Archer for the reality, but there is a difference between being divorced from reality and reality having a 150 foot restraining order.  Archer’s resident demented genius, Krieger, turned a hood named Barry into a cyborg; okay, the same thing happened previously on the show, but what was fanciful in the 2000’s was downright silly in the 1940’s (even given that this is Archer’s subconscious fantasy).  The plot involving a nutso heiress (the always fabulous Judy Greer) went nowhere and distracted from the plot about the dozen or so Chinese sex slaves, which was for the best because that was the creepiest plot ever on Archer.

The real disappointment was the final episode, where no effort was made to go back and establish that this whole thing is going on in Archer’s imagination.  The violence was WAY over the top, with cyborg Barry being mauled to death by bionic Dobermans, then the Dobermans being gruesomely dispatched by the hulking assistant to Mother.  Lana was killed in an incredibly stupid manner to service a bad joke, and the solution to Woodhouse’s murder was just sort of tossed out there.

Archer (the series) has made some bold choices for season arcs.  I am still unsure what to make of the Archer: Vice season when the spy agency was turned into cocaine distributors (I read somewhere that series creator Adam Reed justified this by pointing out they were really BAD drug dealers).  

Reinventing the show as modern Hollywood detectives in season 7 was a mixed bag as well.

I don’t know what the future holds for Archer, but the show’s been renewed through season 10 by FXX, so it’s got a couple of more years to go.  Shows that take chances and don’t entirely succeed are infinitely better than shows that don’t try anything new and completely succeed.  As disappointed as I am in the conclusion of Archer: Dreamland, I am still eagerly awaiting season 9.

TV Review: The Flash season three (spoilers)

TV Review: The Flash season 3

When The Flash debuted three years ago, it was a breath of fresh air.  In the aftermath of the successful super-angsty Christopher Nolan Batman films, as well as the nearly as angsty Spiderman movies, it was a relief to find a superhero who was thrilled to have powers and was delighted to casually help strangers without their knowledge.  There was a loose, jokey (pardon the expression) vibe amongst the cast, and the whole enterprise was a lot of fun.

Three years in and now the show is as sullen as a Goth teenager. The Flash, AKA Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) agonizes over creating an alternative timeline where he was even happier because his parents weren’t dead, which made things worse in the long run.  Barry’s friend Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) has metamorphed into a villain called Killer Frost.  His other friend, Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) has also metaporphed into someone called Vibe, but isn’t happy about it.  His girlfriend Iris (Candace Patton) was prophesied to be killed at the end of the season, and said death was replayed at least twice each episode.  Season 3 is NOT happy.

About the only consistent bright spot has been Tom Cavanagh, who at this point has played so many variations on the character of Harrison Welles that I have lost count.  This season’s iteration was “HR” who was from a parallel dimension and, unlike the Harrison Welles’ from prior seasons, was not a genius.  But unlike the other versions, this one had a perpetual smile on his face and a drumstick (musical kind, not chicken) in his hand.  Cavanagh’s ability to create totally different characters from subtle variations in the source material has been astonishing, and he is without a doubt the MVP of the series.

Like individuals in a time loop, the characters in season 3 keep making the same stupid mistake over and over and over.  Someone tries to keep a secret from the group; the secret threatens the group in ways the person didn’t anticipate; the secret is divulged and the problem resolved.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like the show.  Gustin and Patton have great chemistry, and the show is ridiculously clever in creating problems out of alternate time lines, parallel dimensions, and crossovers with other CW shows (loved the musical number with Supergirl and The Flash).  But I truly empathize with Iris’s father Joe (Jesse Martin), a cop who is forever asking the scientists, “So, how do we stop the time wraiths from the speed force from traveling to a parallel dimension?”  I empathize because I was just as confused.

Season’s three “Big Bad” (copyright Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was the speed god Savitar, which was a stupid concept to begin with. I mean, for a god he wasn’t very god-like.  The tension in the first half of the season was the secret identity of Savitar’s acolyte, which (surprise!) turned out to be the new cast member (Tom Felton), which anyone could have seen coming a mile away.  The tension in the second half was could Team Flash stop Savitar from killing Iris, and again this being network television the answer was almost assuredly “yes.”  So, there wasn’t a lot of dramatic tension.

But the show can rebound next season.  One promising sign is that the creators/producers seem to be aware of the angst problem.  A late season episode had Barry develop amnesia, and everyone comments on how much cheerier and less angsty he seemed, which I took as meta-commentary. 

And the show does have its imagination going for it, even if it is creating portals and parallel dimensions.  One highlight this season was the musical episode which reunited Glee co-stars Gustin and Melissa Benoit from Supergirl.  The show takes risks, with a throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks attitude.  When you have that, you can appreciate the hits and forgive the misses.

Of course, the season ending cliffhanger left things open.  Step one is finding a way to bring Barry back from the speed force prison; step two is finding yet another way to bring back Tom Cavanagh.  After that?  They have an infinite number of universes and any number f alternate time lines available to them, so they should be able to come up with something interesting (and less angsty).

TV Review--Supergirl Season 2 (spoilers)

TV Review: Supergirl season 2

The TV adaptation of Supergirl finished its second season, and its first on the CW instead of CBS.  It’s not easy keeping the plates spinning on these superhero shows (frankly, The Flash is looking a little peaked after three seasons, but on that later).  Overall, the switch from major network to weblet seems to have improved the show for the most part, providing the show with a more welcoming environment to work in.

A couple of months ago I mentioned a few of the pluses and minuses this season has wrought.  Winn (Jeremy Jordan) got out of the “friend zone” (by that I mean a character defined solely by his status as Kara’s platonic friend), not by starting a romantic relationship but by becoming a tech genius that was only hinted at in season 1, and by being head of technology at the DEO instead of IT support at Catco.  Alex (Chyler Leigh) got a meatier role than just being Kara’s adopted sister, with a new girlfriend (Floriana Lima) and more responsibility at the DEO.

The show also added by subtraction, making the role of Kat Grant (Calista Flockhart) much more effective by sending her to a yurt in Nepal for the season and only bringing her out at the very end.  This not only accommodated losing Flockhart due to the smaller budget, but also helped shift story lines away from boring Catco, Inc. in favor of the more interesting DEO.  Unfortunately the biggest victim of this was Jimmy (excuse me) James Olsen (Mechad Brooks), who was so at loose ends he decided to become a vigilante.  The problem is, who needs a masked vigilante with no super powers when you’ve got Supergirl?

The show also deserves huge praise for finally finding its Superman (Tyler Hoechlin).  It had to be tricky finding an actor with the necessary gravitas but at the same time fit in with the lighter, slightly loopier tine set by Melisa Benoist.  Hoechlin looks good in tights, and his Clark Kent is the best since, well, Dean Cain played the role in the 1990’s.

One of the smaller but ingratiating things this show does is integrate with the past, casting a former Superman (Dean Cain) as Kara’s adopted father; a former Supergirl (Helen Slater) as his wife; and a former Lois Lane (Teri Hatcher) as evil Queen Rhea.  It’s similar to the obvious fondness that The Flash has for the cast of the 1990 version, with John Wesley Shipp, Amanda Pays and Mark Hamill all reprising their roles from a show that frankly few people remember.

Supergirl had a few problems over its sophomore season.  As noted above, James Olsen got relegated to the sidelines, and trying to make him relevant as the vigilante Guardian smacked of desperation.  Pairing him with Winn did provide some nice buddy comedy moments, but the decision that he wouldn’t be a love interest for Kara was accompanied by the sound of squealing brakes.

Finding villains that posed a credible threat to the Girl of Steel was another problem, that the show tried to solve by increasing the number of types of aliens on Earth.  I thought this made things more confusing, and while I agree with the show’s obvious tweaking of current US policy towards immigrants, it became heavy-handed at times.

Probably the most contentious addition was bringing in Chris Wood as Mon-el of Daxum, the love interest for Kara.  He did such a good job projecting vapid sweetness, it was hard to take him seriously as a potential life partner for Kara Danvers.  Looking back, I have to say that as annoying as he was on an episode-by-episode basis, they did a great job of not rushing his development as someone worthy of Supergirl.

There were a few problems with the season finale.  Kara staves off a Daxum attack by challenging Queen Rhea to a mano-a-mano fight, but then the Daxums attack anyway.  Lena Luthor devises a way to drive the Daxums away by filling the atmosphere with lead, which sounds like an environmental disaster for the humans as well.  And after the lead is released, Mon-el immediately leaves the planet; couldn’t they build an air-tight chamber at the DEO with a safe atmosphere?  Couldn’t Winn whip up some sort of helmet Mon-el could wear to filter out the lead?  They were too focused on the romance ending to deal with some of the ways to avoid it ending.

But then, endings are hard.  Consistency is difficult to maintain over a 22-episode season (which is why so many shows do a 13, or even 10-episode season).  The show retained enough of its original premise to start the season strong, then managed to build up the supporting cast without diminishing the contribution of Benoist. 

All in all, it was a successful move to the CW for Supergirl.  My biggest suggestion: if they try to do another cross over with the rest of the CW-verse (and the first attempt picked up the network’s highest ratings ever), try to integrate Supergirl a little better.  The Supergirl contribution was the last minute of the show, and it was shown again at the start of The Flash. 

Oh, and more musical duets with Benoist and Flash star Grant Gustin; those kids have chemistry.

Sex and race

I read somewhere that one of the few places where minorities were over-represented in the American workforce were Asian women in television news.  The explanation was that women assumed Asian women were smart, while men thought they looked exotic.  This perception is supported by another piece of trivia floating around in my head, that there used to be an annual survey where people were asked to name the male and female newscaster they thought was the most intelligent; Connie Chung won several years in a row despite the consensus among some of her colleagues that she was not a rocket science (an evaluation supported by her marriage to Maury Povitch).

Perceptions about sex and race have always been a volatile combination.  For centuries racist perpetuated the myth that African-American men were fascinated with white women.  In the musical South Pacific, the handsome white naval officer is seen as the perfect match for an attractive native girl by her mother; she sings the song “Happy talk” about their union, overlooking the fact that they don’t speak the same language so the two of them are doing something other than “talking” when they were together.

I recently took another look at some data on the matter from Christian Rudder’s 2014 book Dataclysm.  Rudder was a c-founder of the dating site OKCupid and therefore had access to its database.  Anyone who wants to go to the horse’s mouth can check out pages 101-102 of the book.

Below is an amended version of a chart he presents that shows how men of different races perceived the attractiveness of the women the met.  For simplicity, race is restricted to White, Asian, Latino, and Black (I will eschew the PC African-American as nationality is not reflected in the data).  The data comes from 10 million users of OKCupid, where men described the attractiveness of the women they met on a 1-5-point scale.  Here is the breakdown by race:

	Woman’s race
Man’s race	Asian	Black	Latina	White	average	range
Asian	3.16	1.97	2.74	2.85	2.68	1.19
Black	3.4	3.31	3.43	3.23	3.34	0.20
Latino	3.13	2.24	3.37	3.19	2.98	1.13
White	2.91	2.04	2.82	2.98	2.69	0.94

I see three things of note in this data.  1) Black men find women in general more attractive than men of other races.  The average attractiveness for Black men is 3.34, a full 1/3 of a rate point above the next highest race.  Asians, Latinos and Whites all have average ratings below the expected median of 3 on a 5-point scale, but Blacks are above the expected median.

2) Black men are the most egalitarian.  The range between the high and low of the other three races is close to or over a full rate point, but for Black men the difference between their least attractive race (White women; there goes that myth) and the most attractive (Latina women) was only 0.20.  Black men not only find women more attractive in general, they find ALL women more attractive.

3) Black men are the only race who do NOT find women of their own race the most attractive.  Asians, Whites and Latinos all prefer women of their own race, but Black men find Latina women the most attractive, followed by Asian women, and then Black women.  Black women are rated last by Asians, Whites and Latinos and third by Black men, meaning for some reason no one finds Black women that attractive (who volunteers to break the news to Halle Berry?).

Here is another chart from Dataclysm, where the author “normalized” the above data using the unweighted averages:

	Woman’s race
Man’s race	Asian	Black	Latina	White
Asian	18%	-26%	2%	6%
Black	2%	-1%	3%	-3%
Latino	5%	-25%	13%	7%
White	8%	-24%	5%	11%

What these numbers mean is, for example, that Asian men find the typical Asian woman to be 18% more attractive than the average woman of any race; on the other hand, Asian men find the typical Black woman to be 26% less attractive than the overall average woman.

What jumps out with these numbers is that men of all races find Black women to be less attractive than the average woman. The only interaction where a man of one race finds a typical woman of another race less attractive than average, other than Black women, is Black men and White women.  It’s sort of like Lake Woebegone, where all children are above average, except here almost all women that are below average (using averages) are Black.

What does this mean?  I have no idea.  Extrapolating from aggregated data is always tricky.  I suppose you could say that the fact that there is enough inter-racial mixing to have data like this is encouraging (unless you are an unrepentant anti-miscegenist).  But the numbers indicate that the way men of different races perceive women of different races is not cut and dried.

I seem to recall that when Will Smith made the movie Hitch, he said that his romantic lead had to be Hispanic, like Eva Mendes, because a White actress would have lost the American audience and a Black actress would have lost the international audience.  Then just ten years later he made Focus, where his romantic lead was Margot Robbie and no one commented on the fact that she was White (people did notice that she was 22 years younger than him, but that’s another issue about Hollywood and ageism).

As Bob Dylan said, the times they are a ‘changing.

Let's end the NBA draft lottery

I am a fairly intelligent human being, well educated, employed in a field where I use more brains than brawn.  There is not a lot I don’t understand, but I know this:  I do not understand the NBA draft lottery.

Here is an example, describing a conditional pick in this year’s draft, regarding the 76er’s transaction with the Sacramento Kings: “76ers option to swap 2017 first round picks with Kings (Kings pick protected #11-30 if Kings do not convey first round pick to Cavaliers in 2016).”  What does that even mean?

It used to be simple—the team with the worst record picked first, the team with the second worse record picked next, and so on.  But then someone noticed that teams would apparently lose games on purpose in order to increase their draft pick.  Shocking! So a scheme was worked out where draft order was determined not by won-lost record, but by a lottery BASED on won-lost records.  That would eliminate tanking, right?

Well, it turned out that if a team was willing to tank to get a higher draft pick, they would also tank in order to get a higher chance at a higher draft pick.  This was confirmed this week when Maverick's owner Mark Cuban admitted that the Mavs did their best to lose as many games as possible once they were eliminated from the playoffs.

Since the creation of the draft lottery, the situation has gotten more confusing, with conditional picks like the one quoted above. In this year’s draft the Sacramento King’s pick went from 8 to 3 to 5. With all these permutations, how do teams know what they are trading for?  If future consideration was based on outcomes (that is wins and losses) you could do some projecting, but teams are making trades and the value they get back depends on luck, not skill.

Several years ago I wrote about my problem with the lottery, namely that the whole point of a last-picks-first lottery is to help teams with poor records (okay, this year the number one seed in the East got the number first pick, but leave it to the Nets to make a bad trade).  Sometimes a good team will have a bad year, like when the Spur’s great David Robinson was injured and the team won only 20 games.  They won the first pick in the lottery, selected Tim Duncan, and created a dynasty, a dynasty entirely due to the fortuitousness of winning the draft lottery. 

On the other hand, a team like the Kings can be near bottom dwellers for over a decade but never get a chance to improve because they are either unlucky in the lottery, or they win the lottery in a year when there is no transformative player available.  The draft is the only way for the Kings to improve because you know Sacramento won’t attract free agents, unless MAYBE they last played in Utah.   

After Cuban’s comment, there have been renewed calls to “fix” the lottery in order to discourage tanking.  This follows the exploits of the Philadelphia 76ers, who used “the Process” to lose badly, get a high pick, chose a player who is too injured to play his first year, and do it all over.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But if you want to penalize poor teams for tanking, they best way would be to penalize teams with poor records by having them draft after the good teams.  That’s right, give the NBA champion first pick, the loser in the Finals second pick, and the team with the worst record picks last.  Harsh, yes, but in sports don’t we usually reward winning?

That is, of course, an absurd prospect, but it is what people who want to discourage tanking are basically suggesting.  As long as it is impossible to differentiate deliberately losing games and just being bad, all you do by diluting the draft is to make it harder for poor teams to rise up and assure the same teams make it to the finals year after year after year.

Of course, that is the NBA, which is on the verge of having the same two teams in the Finals three years in a row. Baseball and football may have teams go from worst to first, but that never happens in basketball.  From 1980 to 2010, there was a 30 year period where 6 teams won 28 of the NBA championships: the Celtics, Bulls and Pistons in the East and the Lakers, Spurs and Rockets in the West (the Heat and 76ers won one a piece).  Bottom line: do NOT bet on the Kings, 76ers or Knicks to win the title in 2018.

The NBA should ditch the lottery and just have a good old fashioned last-picks-first draft.  There is no excuse for a system that allows the Spurs to get Tim Duncan thanks to a ping pong ball bounce.  Or the Knicks to get Patrick Ewing based on a frozen envelope.

The gaping maw of network television

Being a network programmer used to be simple.  You were one of only three (then four) networks, so anyone who had a series to sell had limited options.  More than three-fourths of the shows on your network were probably renewed, so you had relatively few holes in your schedule to fill.  You heard some pitches, and then all the networks (at the same time) commissioned “pilots.”  During “pilot season” in Hollywood, unemployment among actors plummeted as dozens of pilots were filmed simultaneously.  The networks watched the pilots, maybe ad some focus groups, and then the next September would be transformed into “Fall Premiere season!”

Now?  The broadcast networks have to compete not only with basic cable, but with premium cable, Netflix, Hulu, and even the cyber-equivalent of a shopping mall, Amazon. Very little TV is successful, even with diminished expectations, so you need to replace over half of your time slots on a regular basis.  Shows no longer get 22 episode orders; 10 is the new norm, so you must find twice as many shows to fill the same number of empty time slots.  Actually, make that three times as many, because no one will watch a re-run anymore (kids, if you don’t know what a “re-run” is, ask your grandparents).  There is no “pilot season” any more as now series can start anytime of the year, not just September.

The one underlying constant of network television is that the networks have 22 hours of television to fill in prime time every week (less for Fox and the various weblets over the years).  You can’t have dead air, and major broadcast networks can’t fill time with infomercials (although that would be an improvement in some cases).  So, the next time you watch network TV (assuming you do watch network TV) and wonder “How the heck did that get on the air?” no you know the answer.

The necessity of filling all that time per week is an explanation of why TV started tackling difficult subjects before they show up in major studio movies.  NBC broadcast one of the first films about AIDS, An Early frost, in 1985, nearly a decade before Philadelphia tackled the same subject.  If you are producing a movie you only have to fill 2 hours, but broadcast networks have 1,144 hours of prime time to fill every year.  With that much time to fill you produce crap like Full House, but you also take a chance on addressing controversial topics.

Given the complexity of the situation, networks can be forgiven for being a little squirrelly in making their renewal/cancellation decisions. I have written before about how networks are now loathe to say a show is “cancelled,” preferring instead to simply announce that no additional episodes will be ordered and then letting the episodes simply run out.  That way there is no way that a cancelled show might suddenly get hot and get better ratings before the end comes (and it can go to another network).

Now, even the post-run cancellation announcement isn’t the last word.  NBC announced that it would not be showing more episodes of Timeless, the mostly incoherent show about time travelers battling a mysterious adversary.  Apparently, one of the time travelers then went into the future and brought back a newspaper hailing Timeless as the biggest hit of 2018, as the show was uncancelled.  The reason?  NBC looked at its Fall schedule and saw a Timeless-shaped hole that needed to be filled.

I gave Timeless more than a fair shot, as I stuck with it despite its increasingly absurd premise.  The MVP of the series was Malcolm Barrett as Rufus, the pilot of the time machine who was the show’s best actor and most reliable source of intentional humor (in the first episode Rufus, who is African-American, points out to the time machine’s inventor that there is no time or place that he can go in American history “that’s going to be awesome for me.”).   The rest of the cast ranged from intriguing to wooden.

Eventually the entire conspiracy about chasing a villain with the improbable name of Garcia Flynn (of the Acapulco Flynns?) just imploded onto itself.  It was just another show attempting to emulate the late, not lamented series Lost by setting up mysteries and then steadfastly refusing to provide any answers.  The difference is that I never (maybe foolishly) lost faith that the creators of Lost had some end game in mind, while Timeless just seems to be making it up as they go along.

In another development in the new “Platinum Age of Television” we now live in, the CW announced that they had, in fact, cancelled two of their lowest rated shows, Frequency and No Tomorrow, but then released a wrap up for each on their website.  As a faithful viewer of No Tomorrow, and knowing the title was prescient, I was happy they at least added a tag to the final episode to let everyone know how the characters turned out (assuming all of humanity wasn’t killed by the coming inevitable apocalypse).  It used to be when your show was cancelled, that was the end, something I seem to recall Sheldon having a problem with on Big Bang Theory.  Now everyone can have some sense of closure.

The nature of television has been topsy-turvy in the past decade, but one thing is constant: the need for programming to fill the gaping maws of the networks’ schedules.  Binging sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon don’t have “time” to fill and so don’t have this problem, but their existence makes it harder for networks to fill those one thousand plus hours per year with quality material.  Consider that the next time you turn on your TV and complain there are 400 channels but nothing on.

American politics summed up

The post-mortem on the Presidential election started about 5 minutes after the result was formally declared, but after the passage of six months we are starting to get some facts, as opposed to speculation.  I weighed in on this topic previously, but it is worth raising the issue again now that some details are known.

What has come out is frankly not surprising. The major contribution is Shattered, a book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.  Without getting too much into the weeds, the book observes that one problem was that the Clinton campaign had no message except that Hilary Clinton ought to be President. This is not a revelation, given that the commercials for her that I saw only made the case that her opponent was a lying, pervy lunatic, which were the very reasons most of his voters had for supporting him.

An article from the McClatchy news group echoes these themes.  What I find disturbing is the talk of Democratic strategy going forward.  Basically the choice laid out is whether to try and increase turnout among loyal Democrats, or try and craft a message that picks off just enough GOP voters to win in the next election (or the 2018 mid-terms).

The article makes the point that many Democratic strategists see increasing turnout as cheaper, more cost-effective, and more likely to be effective.  That may be right.  But how entrenched are people’s actions?  If Democratic voters couldn’t be bothered to vote to defeat Donald Trump, just how loyal are they to the Democratic Party?  Conversely, would those GOP fence-sitters be easily persuaded by a few platitudes and an acknowledgement that just maybe blue collar workers are as valued by Democrats as gay, drug-using, immigrants?

I think the choice—increase turnout or pick off the minimum needed GOP voters—is fundamentally the wrong question, and a fitting commentary on current American politics.  Neither strategy is about governing after victory, only about winning.  Yes, winning is important; just ask Hilary.  But if you squeak out a victory with 50.1% of the vote and alienate the other 49.9%, you won’t be able to accomplish anything that helps anyone, base or opponent.

What the Democrats should be doing is crafting a message that explains to blue collar Midwestern workers that Democratic policies will help them more than a billionaire who’s only focus is making himself and his friends richer, a message that simultaneously motivates the base AND convinces a larger pool of the American populous that the Democrats are more likely to make things better than the Republicans.

It may be easier to push buttons and pull levers in order to get a few more Democrats to the ballot box, but if the Democratic party can’t explain to middle America why their leadership is better than the current President’s, then they should go away and let Bernie Sanders lead a socialist revolution.  Building a coalition among a broader swath of the voters would enhance their chances of victory and improve their ability to lead, something the current president is having trouble doing despite his party controlling both houses of Congress.

The Democrats did a magnificent job of presenting a united convention, where they wrapped themselves in the flag and made the case that liberalism was as American as apple pie.  This was in contrast to the GOP convention, where a bunch of overweight white men screamed “Lock her up!” (a campaign vow immediately reneged on by Trump) and portrayed America as a dystopian hellhole.  If Democrats had presented that message in the general election, instead of just saying “vote for Hilary because . . . I dunnow, she’s a Clinton?” the outcome might have been different.

I wish there were more politicians like Daniel Moynihan, Jerry Brown, and yes, Ronald Reagan, all of whom put a priority on governing instead of carefully counting votes; with staking out a consistent vision (in Jerry’s case, a consistently inconsistent vision) rather than catering inflexibly to interest groups.  All politicians have to be politicians at times, but it seems that most simultaneously want to please their constituencies while displeasing no one near the middle, leaving themselves in a pretzel-shaped mound of irrelevancy.

If the Democrats can’t explain to blue collar America why their policies will improve American for everyone, then they need to rethink those policies.  If Republicans can’t explain to a legal immigrant from south of the border that the GOP can make their lives better, then the fastest growing demographic group in America will never vote for them.

We need leaders who want to govern, not just win elections.

NFL draft--reaching for the stars--and failing

There is a quote from Citizen Kane, the movie that holds the record for most great quotes in one movie: “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”  That line seems to sum up the attitude of NFL teams when it comes to the draft; if you pick a player #1 (or #2) in the draft, that will make the player worthy of being that high of a pick.

That certainly seemed to be the attitude of the Rams last year, who picked Jared Goff as the #1 overall pick when nobody really thought he’d live up to that sort of hype.  He was a first-round level talent, but the number one overall pick?  But the Rams needed a quarterback, and with no honest-to-goodness number-one-pick caliber talents available, the Rams took a flyer on Goff.  Now, a year later, one source jokes that next year the Rams will be drafting his replacement.

This year’s quarterback class was even worse.  All the major QB prospects had significant downsides, and one talking head on ESPN said that after so much debate between Mitchell Trubisky, Patrick Mahomes, Deshaun Watson and Deshone Kizer (the top four QB prospects) his takeaway was that they were interchangeable and that if you wanted one but didn’t get him, just take the next name on your list.

But that’s not the way the draft played out.  With such a poor class at QB it was thought that most of the top picks would be defensive players, but Trubisky, Mahomes and Watson all went in the top 12.  All three teams traded up to acquire a new quarterback, with the Bears giving up a ton of draft picks to move up ONE SPOT to get Trubisky (after apparently being psyched by the 49ers, who only feinted interest in Trubisky to get trade bait). 

This is the logic used by the Bears, the Chiefs, and the Texans: we need a quarterback, but there are no sure thing QBs in the draft, but there are even fewer QBs available via trade, so we will draft a QB way earlier than he deserves and hope we get the next Dak Prescott or Tom Brady.  For how many years will NFL teams take an absurd risk on an unproven QB hoping to find the next Tom Brady in the 6th round?

The problem is, highly touted top picks often flame out.  I’m sure there must be a Wikipedia page for “Highly drafted quarterbacks that failed.”  Oh wait, it's at Sports Illustrated.  So drafting a QB who started 13 games at a mediocre football school in a bad conference, and led them to a mediocre record, is not encouraging for the number two overall pick.  Trubisky may work out, but nothing in his record says, “Winner.”  Having physical gifts is not enough; the Raiders thought Jamarcus Russell was the most physically gifted QB ever, but that didn’t work out so well.

At least Watson led his team to a National Championship, beating Nick Saban.  But a guy named Tebow won a Heisman and a couple of National Championships, and right now he’s hoping to move up to the Mets AA team (seriously who names their A franchise the Fireflys?  Joss Whedon?).  Yet two QBs were drafted ahead of Watson, which may provide him with some incentive.  All those years ago a guy named Aaron Rodgers was expected to be drafted possibly number 1, but he fell, fell, fell, and he has had a chip on his shoulder ever since.

So, good luck all you aspiring NFL quarterbacks.  The good news is that Watson is going to the Texans and Mahomes to the Chiefs, good teams where they can grow.  Trubisky is going to the terrible, awful, not very good Bears.  Prey for Mitchell Trubisky.