Saturday, August 30, 2008
All kidding aside, now begins the scramble to get to know Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP ticket’s “surprising,” “dark-horse,” “outside-the-box” pick to be the woman one 72-year-old heartbeat away from being our commander-in-chief.
As Gov. Palin’s dossier thickens for those of us playing catch-up, it becomes clearer with each passing minute, though a surprise to no one, that she is a purely political asset whose most valuable contributions will be made during the next two months and who will defer to Sen. John McCain’s experience and leadership should they be elected to the White House in November.
Already I’ve encountered the phrase “trophy V.P.” while scouring the Internet, and while she certainly can represent the White House with some strength on domestic issues, the idea that she will get her foreign policy training on the job should not be particularly comforting to any of us. (And that’s not me talking. An actual McCain adviser dismissed her lack of foreign-policy experience by saying, “She’s going to learn national security at the foot of the master for the next four years.” So yeah, be afraid.)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m ecstatic that McCain chose neither Mitt Romney or Joe Lieberman. Notwithstanding that either of those pairings would make for a fun train wreck to watch between now and November, neither would I be willing to rule out some accident or travesty of democracy that would actually put one of them in power.
(Furthermore, it bears mention that, as America is just now coming to grips with the likelihood of electing a black man to the highest office in the Western world, they would also have to revisit the issues of the primary elections and contend with their feelings about electing a Mormon or a Jew as well. For all of us, progress happens an inch, not a mile, at a time.)
Lieberman clearly is the man McCain would be most comfortable having at his side, but as a long-time Democrat-turned-unpredictable Independent, I don’t think anybody in the Republican Party would have been happy with that selection, any more so than I was happy when Al Gore selected Lieberman in 2000. The man is about as dynamic as a cap gun.
Romney, meanwhile, would have filled in the gaps with both executive experience and economic chops and was starting to look like a front-runner. Except for one little thing: he and McCain clearly can’t stand each other, and the rigors of a brutal campaign already in progress allowed no time for them to get away to a Sandals resort to kick back and work through their differences.
That left McCain’s fellow veteran Tom Ridge, who I had to admit was beginning to look like the obvious choice as we moved ever closer to McCain making a selection. As a popular two-term former governor of Pennsylvania, Ridge would have turned that state into a true battleground for its 21 electoral votes, while as the former head of Homeland Security, he would have brought much stronger defense and foreign-policy cred into the V.P. debate against Joe Biden. If the GOP wanted to continue to beat the drum on Iraq and national security, I can’t think of two stronger guys to have at the top of the ticket.1
One problem, though: Tom Ridge is pro-choice. And McCain, who is already vulnerable to the Christian Right2, could not afford to alienate them further by selecting a running mate who doesn’t line up with them on arguably their most critical issue.3
Never mind the other up-and-comers on the short list — Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Charlie Crist and Ohio’s Rob Portman. The fact that McCain cast aside his three most visible and viable options, all of whom have experience on the stump, either of whom would have strengthened his campaign in crucial areas — Lieberman on the legislative agenda and to some extent foreign policy; Romney on the economy; and Ridge on national security — seems like suicide given McCain’s own shortcomings as a candidate and his still-unsteady footing within his own party.
Through that filter, then, after so much thoughtful vetting went into Obama’s selection of Biden, it makes McCain’s selection of Palin seem to be calculated on matters much more circumstantial and arbitrary than what her actual qualifications might be.
For starters, as has already been noted, the selection of Palin completely undercuts the campaign’s criticism of Obama as being “inexperienced” and “not ready to lead.” It’s almost a knee-jerk response, as though McCain is saying, “I’ll show you guys. So confident am I in my experience and my health that I am selecting Dan Quayle in a dress to be my second-in-command.”
A more disturbing angle — and this is my own concern for Gov. Palin speaking, not my fear of losing any ensuing debate — is that the GOP might use Gov. Palin’s own children as window dressing for two of the legs that prop up their platform: abortion and the war in Iraq.
It’s not simply that Gov. Palin opposes the former and presumably supports the latter — it’s that she practices what she preaches. She chose to give birth to her youngest son, Trig, after learning that he would be born with Down syndrome, and her oldest son, Track4, is deploying to Iraq with an infantry brigade this month. (As she mentioned 9/11 twice in a single breath while talking about Track in her introductory remarks, I’m all but certain that we’re about to witness the Giulianification of Sarah Palin.)
True, Gov. Palin offers a compelling storyline, a deeply personal narrative that makes these issues appear as more than political positions and throwaway talking points, but it’s not far-fetched to assume that the GOP — who no doubt thinks they’ve got a V.P. nominee whom the left can’t in good conscience unleash its dogs on5 — will nonetheless exploit those narratives in selling those planks of the platform. They’ll be two more things the right can fall back on so not to go too far off the rails with John McCain’s oft-repeated POW narrative. Whether Gov. Palin is going into this process with her eyes open remains to be seen. The extent to which she is willing to have those narratives exploited for the good of her party will be telling.
With regard to her strong pro-life stance, it’s hard to imagine that the campaign thought even for a minute that Gov. Palin would be able to woo disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters to the cause of electing a woman to the vice presidency. So other than securing the votes of women within its own base, what more does the McCain camp hope to gain with its selection of Gov. Palin?
Palin is pro-drilling — she actually claims that Alaskans are eager to share their natural resources with the rest of America and the world — and there’s reason to believe she could help deliver ANWR to Big Oil and the right provided she could convince McCain to forfeit his objections to it. But that’s something they have to hope will happen sometime during the next four years in office, not a come-to-Jesus moment they expect McCain to have during the next two months. (Or do they?)
Continuing that thread, Palin is also dismissive of climate change as being man made, and she has sued the federal government to remove the polar bear from its list of endangered animals. I can see how that’s music to the GOP’s ears, but I’m still mystified as to how it makes her an attractive running mate to McCain, who has long been touted as a friend of the environment.6
Palin is also a hunter, for what it’s worth. Again, she plays strongly to the base here, but what does that gain McCain? Especially when Barack Obama says that even he supports the Second Amendment; he just wants to see a more thoughtful, judicious application of it that supports the rights of hunters and other law-abiding gun owners while preventing assault rifles and handguns from getting into the wrong hands.
Well, I’m sold. I think we’ve found the darling of the Republican Party. Now what?
At this early stage, I see Gov. Palin as potentially being a strong surrogate for the campaign, particularly on domestic issues (other than the economy, on her grasp of which the verdict is still out). Hell, put her out there on the campaign trail in targeted town hall meetings, let her make the rounds on the cable news networks and talk radio, let her push the talking points on the issues that are her strong suits. She seems earnest and down-to-earth and approachable enough to push aside all the usual Beltway bullshit and present the issues in a way that allows American voters to relate to her as an equal instead of the Washington insider she so clearly is not. She’s a fresh face that might do a lot of good for the campaign. For anybody’s campaign.
But as McCain’s running mate? Miss One-Heartbeat-Away 2008?
Hear me now: Joe Biden’s going to clobber her on national television on October 2. I’m not saying he’s going to gut her the way Lloyd Bentsen did Dan Quayle (for all the good that did), but it’s not going to be pretty. It’s going to further exacerbate the experience and fitness-to-lead issues for the GOP, because she’s won’t be debating Obama, whose inexperience the GOP wants to highlight — she’s going to be debating a 36-year veteran of the U.S. Senate and a chairman of both its Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees. The one time in this entire campaign when she needs to look like a Beltway insider, she’s going to look like a hockey mom from Wasilla, Alaska.
Good luck with that one, GOP. Let me know how that works out for you.
In the end, this amounts to an elaborate way of me admitting that I don’t get it. I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about politics since I began engaging the process in earnest over the past eight years, but if this is the genius political move of our time, I’m just not seeing it yet.
I hope it’s a moot point. While I don’t think even I’m cynical enough to say that McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin is the move that handed the election to Barack Obama all tied up in a pretty pink ribbon, neither can I see how John McCain bought himself any real advantage aside from some nice arm candy and a little misdirection during some key news cycles.
Would I like to be proved wrong? Of course I would. Especially if the unthinkable happens and Sarah Palin ends up one heartbeat away from the Oval Office. And if my brief but frantic education in American politics has taught me anything, it’s that the unthinkable happens all the time around here.
1 With the exception of Gen. Colin Powell in a perfect parallel universe where George Bush and Dick Cheney hadn’t completely shat on his integrity and ruined his political future by taking advantage of the good soldier’s mandate to follow direct orders from his commander-in-chief.
2 Say, where was I when they started referring to the Christian Right as “social conservatives”? Did that happen while I was on the cruise?
3 Ridge is a staunch opponent of gay rights, but perhaps not enough so to cancel out his pro-choice stance to their satisfaction.
4 I love alliteration, but this is just troubling.
5 Remember how Dick Cheney tore into John Kerry for daring to mention, not judgmentally, in the third 2004 presidential debate that Cheney’s daughter Mary is a lesbian?
6 I’m not so sure about that, though. Just compare the McCain campaign website’s “Climate Change” page with Obama’s “Energy & Environment” platform and decide for yourself which campaign has a better grip on promoting viable environmental solutions in a way that the American electorate can wrap its mind around and throw its support behind. McCain’s platform is so laced with economic double-speak and “market-based” this-and-that that it’s clear it wasn’t written with either his input or that of an actual environmentalist.
Friday, August 29, 2008
I don’t want to diminish the service of any one of our men and women in uniform, and it’s noteworthy and admirable that John McCain’s two sons, Jack and Jimmy, are presently serving in our military and that Joe Biden’s son Beau, the Delaware attorney general and a captain in the Delaware National Guard’s JAG Corps, will also deploy to Iraq soon.
But isn’t it a little too perfect that Gov. Sarah Palin’s son Track not only enlisted in the United States Army on September 11 of last year but will also be deployed to Iraq on this coming September 11? She could just as easily have said “last September” and “next month,” but the Republicans do love them some 9/11, don’t they?
(Gov. Palin starts talking about her son Track at about the 12:40 mark of the video posted here.)
Yours truly, standing in front of Gov. Palin’s office — the
Alaska State Capitol in Juneau — a mere 17 days ago.
Because Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin is not just a woman but — let’s be brutally honest for a moment — a great-looking woman with questionable credentials, perhaps the news media should refrain from any references to Sen. McCain “tapping Gov. Sarah Palin” to be his vice president.
Might I suggest “choosing,” “selecting,” “picking,” “naming” and “nominating” as the go-to verbs of this particular news cycle?
Honestly, I’m hoping to get to know more about Gov. Palin so I can attack the ticket strictly on the validity of its campaign platform, but as the pairing is just a few hours old as of this writing, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only political observer who’s going there right now.
After mercifully remaining silent for the first time in the entire week of convention coverage and allowing the magnitude of the moment speak for itself at the conclusion of Barack Obama’s nomination address, when MSNBC finally turned its commentators’ microphones back on, both Keith Olbermann and Brian Williams compared Obama’s speech to the work of Aaron Sorkin, name-checking both The American President and The West Wing to describe the literary cadences and cinematic qualities of an Obama speech.SAM SEABORN Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place. We should be talking about not being satisfied with past solutions; we should be talking about a permanent revolution.— The West Wing, “The Portland Trip”
written by Aaron Sorkin
Those of you who have indulged me on a regular basis during the past five or six years know all too well how frequently I refer to Sorkin into my political commentary here. I do so for two simple reasons:
1. Everything I know about presidential politics and the presidency1 I learned from The West Wing; and
2. I have always believed in my heart that, if Aaron Sorkin could create an intelligent, charismatic, enlightened president like Jed Bartlet on the page, there is no reason to think such a leader could not exist in our living, breathing world.
Because of which I have spent the last eight years holding George W. Bush up to the standards of the Bartlet administration and have found Bush and his motley band of cronies and criminals sadly wanting.
Well, Olbermann and Williams were on the money: the rightful heir to the Bartlet legacy strode onto the stage at Mile High Stadium Thursday evening, and he blew the doors off the place.
Barack Obama put John McCain, George W. Bush and the GOP on notice, proposing nothing less than a revolution to remove the despots from power, to replace them with wise, impassioned leadership, and to give America and its future back to the majority of Americans — which, if everything I’ve been told is true, is the way real democracy is supposed to function.
Game on!
1 Or a good 85 percent, anyway.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo this week spotlighted an archived interview he conducted with Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden back in the summer of 2004. Transcribed directly from their conversation, it’s a lengthy and sometimes rambling interview [insert your own Biden-is-verbose joke here], but if you have the time and the patience, there are some fascinating insights to be gleaned regarding our post-Sept. 11 foreign policy.
Most interesting is that Biden doesn’t necessarily disagree in theory or in principle with some of the individual objectives the Bush Administration has pursued — fostering democracy in the Middle East; leveraging power and its effect on alliances; regime change in Iraq — but he’s highly critical of the ignorance, incompetence and lack of vision they exhibited in pursuing those objectives.
For example, Biden observes how no one in the Bush Administration could seem to wrap his mind around the idea that a sophisticated terrorist organization like al Qaeda could exist or operate without the sponsorship of a nation-state. Hence, the “Axis of Evil” and the flawed idea — albeit one spun into manufactured intel that justified their case for the invasion — that, if the U.S. and its allies could disable or replace the regimes in rogue states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea, they could cut off terror at its source.
The money quote from the interview, the one that neatly sums up the disastrous path the Bush-Cheney cabal has taken us down since Sept. 11, is this:
Near the end of the interview, Biden relates a great anecdote about sitting down with Muammar Qadhafi for a conversation in which he called the Libyan strongman a terrorist to his face, then later made an off-the-cuff joke that elicited laughter from Qadhafi.“You know the president always brags with me. And what he said to me not long ago was, ‘Joe, I don't do nuance,’ as if that was a real cool thing, right? I mean literally, that’s a quote. When I said to him, ‘It’s a nuanced situation, Mr. President,’ he said, ‘I don’t do nuance, Mr. Chairman.’”
If that doesn’t demonstrate an acute understanding of nuance, I don’t know what does. And if ever we needed a guy who can identify nuance and respond accordingly — in negotiation, in diplomacy, in the judicious application of military force — it’s now.
That’s why Biden is the right man to be Obama’s right-hand man.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Adriane has posted on her gallery the crème de la crème of the 1,085 photos she took during our voyage through Alaska’s Inside Passage. In addition to Adriane’s, a great many cameras were deployed among the 70 (!) members of the extended Varley family who embarked along with us.1 Even as I type this, memory cards are being downloaded, CDs are being burned and inboxes are filling up all across Wyoming and to points continental, so I don’t know how many hundreds upon thousands I have still to look through, but Adriane’s travelogue of 205 images should give you a pretty good impression of our trip.
For those of you who don’t believe pictures really tell the whole story, I’ve got your thousand words — and then some — right here:
- First off, I appreciate that rain and gloom aren’t everybody else’s preferred brand of vodka, so if you ever plan an Alaskan cruise of your own, you might aim for June, when, I’m told, it is much sunnier and drier there than during our August cruise. The weather seemed to be better during our time aboard the ship than it was in any of the towns where we docked.
- Aboard a freestyle cruise, you can wander into the cafeteria or grill just about any time of day and eat for free. It’s convenient, and it’s one less thing to be charged for aboard the ship, but it’s like dining at Ellis Island, circa 1901, and even the food that has just been put out has already been warming under lights behind the scenes for God-knows-how-long.2
To really enjoy dining aboard the ship, make reservations at one of the ship’s many specialty restaurants, grit your teeth and pay the cover charge. The quality of the meal, the service and the ambience will be superior in every regard; the cover charge actually ends up being less than you’d pay for dinner at a comparable downtown restaurant on land; and you will buy at least a brief reprieve from bellying up to the trough, elbow-to-ribcage with the ordinaries. - Our stateroom included two twin beds, plus a trundle under one and an upper fold-down berth mounted to the wall, indicating that, in theory, you could squeeze four people into one interior stateroom. I don’t even want to think about what that means for the crew members living below deck.3
- Pretty much from the moment one boards the cruise ship, one gets the impression that the entire operation was devised as an elaborate ploy to sell jewelry to a captive audience. Our first afternoon, we were handed fliers and raffle tickets for a jewelry showing being presented in the Grand Atrium that very evening. Representatives from various jewelry concerns seemed to have tables set up there on a rotating basis. Going ashore on rainy days, we spied a number of our fellow travelers walking under complimentary umbrellas bearing the logo of a certain diamond wholesaler. And whenever we disembarked to explore the various ports in which we had docked, the first two blocks of the business district we encountered immediately upon entering town consisted of dozens of jewelry stores standing shoulder to shoulder — diamonds, gold, tanzanite, opal, what-have-you — with perhaps the occasional furrier thrown in for variety. Once we navigated beyond those first two blocks, we could finally see where the life of the town itself began, with cafés and five-and-dimes and booksellers and hardware stores.
- I would advise against anyone under the age of 25 ever going on a cruise. No matter how many diversions and entertainments the crew takes pains to create, shipboard life is not geared to the average adolescent attention span.
For example, on about Day Five of the cruise, Adriane and I were hanging out in the Internet Café, which overlooks the Grand Atrium from Deck 9. Down on Deck 7, some bored, bratty 11-year-olds took over the main stage with an impromptu stomp show, performing a well-choreographed version of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” If they had stopped there and evaporated to other parts of the ship, it might have been OK — the little brats weren’t half bad, and the ringleader actually knew all the lyrics of a song released at least two decades before he was even spawned. But the adults assembled in the atrium had to go and encourage the little bastards with cheers and applause, so they kept coming back with more songs, one after the other, steadily declining in organization, synchronization, rhythm and memorized lyrics. After a while we just wanted to strangle the ringleader and leave his limp little body on the stage just to send a message to the others (and their parents), and Adriane declared that she refuses to reproduce with me unless I can persuade her that our offspring won’t be little demon spawn like the unsupervised hellions on our cruise.
Over the final couple of days, we noticed that everyone aged 13 and below had gradually sought each other out and formed little roving gangs that trolled the decks looking for action. Any longer and we might have tried to incite them to rumble with each other, a tiny maritime production of West Side Story staged for our own amusement and possibly resulting in the occasional little brat being tossed overboard.
That doesn’t mean that annoyance has an age limit, though. One night in the Red Lion Pub, heretofore the only bar on the ship in which one might enjoy a quiet drink, some high school prodigy sat himself down at the pub’s out-of-tune upright piano, playing and singing first Tom Petty’s “Listen to Her Heart,” then Barenaked Ladies’ “Shoebox.” That would have been fine — he wasn’t half bad, either — but the overindulgent adults he was with kept encouraging the conceited little jagoff to play another and another, and each was louder and more concussive than the one before it, until he was pounding the keys as if to turn them to dust, and the peace and quietude that had once dwelled in the Red Lion was but a fading memory.
At that point I seriously wished I could find the little “We Will Rock You” brat so I could swing him by the ankles and beat the pub piano kid with him. - On another occasion at the Red Lion, though — that same night? did we actually outlast the teen troubadour and his mollycoddling parents? — I looked up from our table, and sitting there at the corner of the bar was a dead ringer for Ernest Hemingway. Picture this incarnation of the late-in-life Papa — the same squinty, twinkling eyes but with closer-trimmed white hair and beard. I didn’t want to pester the man, because he probably gets it all the time, but he totally could have blown away the field at the annual look-alike contest down in Key West.
- Speaking of Hemingway, on our return road trip Adriane and I crashed late Saturday night (early Sunday morning, really) in Meridian, Idaho, at the most atrocious excuse for a Motel 6 either of us has ever experienced. (Adriane’s online review, which she intends to scatter throughout the Internet on every available travel website, is submitted for your perusal at the top of this page.) That was the second time I’ve spent the night in Idaho, and all I’m sayin’ is that, based on my experiences so far, I’m beginning to understand why Hemingway ate the barrel of a shotgun there. If Idaho wants me ever to come back, they’re gonna have to woo me and throw in some pretty serious amenities.
- The crew member who impressed me most was the maitre d’ at Cagney’s Steakhouse, an elegant, tuxedoed black gentleman (I believe he was Trinidadian or Bahamian) named Basil Jumpp.
During our dinner there, four or five guys with drinks in their hands, led by some swaggering, thick-necked steroid case like a side of beef stuffed into a T-shirt, ambled into the steakhouse, clearly without a reservation but exuding an air of, “Yeah, this looks like a place we could take over for the evening.”
Basil approached this landing party as coolly as though he were shooing away a fly and very quietly persuaded them that these were not the ’droids they were looking for. His manner and expression all business, Basil exuded so much quiet authority during this simple exchange that you’d have thought he was aiming a gun at the steroid case’s heart. Clumsily they retreated out of the steakhouse.
At which point Basil turned to our table, and with a sudden smile of pure honey, asked how we were enjoying our meal. He engaged us for the next few minutes with ease and charm, as if the previous incident had never happened.
If you told me Basil had once headed the security detail for the Trinidadian prime minister or a Bahamian shipping magnate, I wouldn’t even blink. - As we docked and disembarked in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, the ship was greeted by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in full Dudley Do-Right regalia. This particular officer was straight out of Central Casting, too — tall, broad shouldered and square jawed, with a thick, perfectly groomed brush of auburn mustache. People were lining up to have their picture taken with him, to which he gamely submitted for a good hour or so before everyone had disembarked and gotten it out of their systems.
My comrade Phil, who hails from Ontario, informs me that RCMP officers wear the full uniform now only for ceremonial occasions, although I used to joke with him that I was going to make it my mission to get them back in the uniform again full time. Because honestly, is there a more iconic image of law enforcement anywhere in the world than the red serge tunic, the jodhpurs, the jackboots and the flat-brimmed Stetson? If you were engaged in the commission of a crime, would you not just soil yourself seeing a troop of Canadian Mounties ride up on horseback? - Before we passed through Customs to be greeted by the Mountie, however, we found our path down the gangplank blocked by a photographer and a crew member dressed in a giant plush otter costume.
Spotting them up ahead, Adriane released my hand and said, “Walk in front of me,” and as we approached single file, we each head-faked and juked the otter like wide receivers trying to slip open-field tackles.
That evening in the ship’s picture gallery, one would find photos of slower, less agile tourists grimacing anxiously as they squirmed in the otter’s grasp. - Prince Rupert itself depressed us mightily, although we’re willing to concede that perhaps we didn’t travel far enough toward the downtown area during our exploration. The shopping mall there was so squalid and bleak, though, that it sapped us of our will to continue onward.
We retreated then to the Cow Bay area near our mooring and settled in among the locals at a charming little waterfront dive called Breakers Pub, where we ordered beers and dinner and sat at the bar watching the Olympics on the CBC.4
My one complaint was that the CBC aired the men’s 100m sprints out of order, so that we actually watched first the semifinal in which the injured Tyson Gay came up short and was eliminated, then the preliminary heat that Gay won running away, giving us the impression that he had somehow been allowed to advance on a technicality. That small trifle aside, I believe that, if I lived there for a month, Canadian television could totally win me over with its little quirks and differences. (I’m particularly intrigued by a news-and-interview program there called The Hour, which I’m going to start checking out online.)
At any rate, we got to watch Michael Phelps win his sixth gold medal and set his sixth world record of the Beijing games, swimming in the 200m individual medley. We were seated at the bar beside an engaging young Hungarian whose countryman László Cseh was Phelps’ main competition in the race, but our new friend professed to be a big Phelps fan, so it was hard to discern for whom he had the strongest rooting interest. (This was the race in which Phelps led Cseh by five hundredths of a second at the second turn, then managed to gain a full second in both the third and fourth laps, finally winning the race by 2.25 seconds, with Cseh holding on for the silver.)
The following evening before dinner we assembled the full contingent of Team Varley for an official group photo on the last night of the cruise. As we converged on a Deck 7 stairwell near the midship elevators to pose for the photo, Adriane and I looked up to discover that the photographer was our Hungarian friend from the evening before.
In the final analysis, shipboard life is a 50-50 proposition. For every plus, there’s a minus. For every pleasant experience, there’s another that seems custom designed to press against your rawest nerve, specifically enhanced for your personal social discomfort.
It’s not that sea travel is necessarily awful; it simply requires one to be on one’s guard at all times, reading the room the way a Secret Service agent watches crowds and rope lines. It’s up to you to gauge your own comfort level against the temperature and temperament of your surroundings at any given moment, carefully calibrating the yin and yang of annoyance and avoidance, embracing and evading, engagement and estrangement — the volume of each inversely proportionate to its opposite number, the desired balance a reflection of each individual traveler. Given how much money one invests in such a vacation, though, it seems one shouldn’t have to put so damned much thought and effort into it.
Then again, perhaps that’s precisely what the cruise lines are counting on: keeping you off balance and preoccupied as they look for ways to separate you from still more of your disposable income. Meanwhile, they seem to err on the side of providing the same experience for all their travelers, assuming that everybody wants to play bingo and sing karaoke and pose and mug and grin like an idiot for every camera that they shove in one’s face instead of allowing that some of us came about our disposable income because we’ve been rewarded for living lives of quiet dignity and grace, and we might like our vacations to be a reflection of such.
Clearly that was too much to hope for. I’ll just have to prepare accordingly the next time I embark on a sea cruise.
Which means packing a canister of mace in my shaving kit.
1 “Varley” referring chiefly to Ed and RaeDell, the couple whose 50th anniversary we had all convened to celebrate on our cruise. Our party also included Johnsons, Skinners, Morrises, Bertonceljs, McCulleys, Baldwins, Jacksons, Hartleys, Vassers and a lone Shepherd. As I may have overlooked one or three other surnames, I’m sure Adriane will help me complete the passenger manifest upon her review.
2 Case in point: Adriane and I would take walks at night to the rear of the ship on Deck 7, where we could steal a few moments alone and stand at the rail watching the wake of the ship as it frothed and foamed behind us and appeared to chase the ship, licking at the hull like flicking white tongues. Whenever we rounded the starboard aft corner of the ship, usually between 9:30 and 11 p.m., we swore we could smell the aroma of warm french toast wafting through the exhaust vents there.
3 Sometimes late at night, if one happens to be walking on deck, one totally expects to look down and see hundreds of oars pushing through the water in unison.
4 That evening marked our only chance to do so, as the ship’s television system limited us to CNN and ESPN as our only news sources. Therefore our knowledge of the Olympics was limited to whatever updates and results crawled across the ticker at the bottom of the screen during other broadcasts.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
It wasn’t the best-kept secret in America, although the campaign, the candidate and his eventual running mate came awfully close to making it so.
Given the various names that have entered the national conversation these past few weeks and the sudden, 11th-hour addition of Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) to the presumed shortlist, the last 48 hours have held for me a Christmas Eve-like sense of anticipation. And while initially I had other designs for the role the senior senator from Delaware might play in my dream administration — even during the primaries, I saw him as a serious contender for secretary of state in any administration — I had finally come around to the idea that Joe Biden is the right choice, perhaps the only logical choice, to join forces with Barack Obama in the fight for November and beyond. Now, with all the buzz building to a fever pitch, I was just waiting for my insight to be confirmed.
As I’ve played armchair campaign manager these past several weeks, I’ve thought all along that it was important for Obama to select first and foremost a partner in governing, not just a savvy political choice who could help him win critical swing states or boost his numbers within a desired demographic. I feel that’s an outdated, cynical way of selecting a vice president, that Americans who are paying attention want somebody chosen for what they bring to the next four to eight years, not just the next three months.
As much as I like Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, there was a sense that he would add more youth to a ticket that is already battling concerns about experience, his own strong credentials notwithstanding, as well putting two senators from neighboring Midwestern states on the same ticket. Gov. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) would bring executive experience to the ticket, but again not as much as would make people comfortable. The same could be said of our Gov. Kathleen Sibelius (D-Kan.), but then Obama would piss off the already riled legions of Hillary Clinton supporters who feel, among other things, that Hillary is the most qualified woman for any job, period. And I have great admiration for Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), but I also have to respect, albeit reluctantly, that certain Americans who need to wake up and smell the future brewing are not ready for two brown-skinned candidates on a single ticket, let alone one.
And that brings us back around to Joe Biden.
As a six-term senator, Biden brings experience and wisdom to the partnership, but he also holds his own in vigor and stamina in a bid against the younger Bayh and Kaine. He’s a young 65, telegenic, credible, self-deprecating, with a great broad smile and a better-than-average combover for a balding man. He’s good-looking and polished without looking plastic like Mitt Romney (who might very well be John McCain’s running mate), and he looks like he’ll have no trouble keeping pace with the 47-year-old Obama.
Furthermore, for all those who say that his six terms in the Senate make Biden a Washington insider, part of “the old guard” and therefore a detriment to Obama’s campaign for change, I would argue just the opposite. I believe that Obama is offering Biden a chance to be an integral part of something that he has wanted to do ever since he made his first bid for the presidency back in 1987 — the opportunity to move America forward.
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he brings unparalleled foreign policy cred to the table (the biggest reason why I always pictured him as a perfect fit at State). If Obama is the guy to rally the world and our allies behind us again, then Biden is the guy to sit down at the table and iron out the details. He’s going to be the diplomat that Dick Cheney has never been and which we need now more than ever.
Because he’s the guy who put Delaware on the political map, Biden is also the man who’s going to bring its neighbor Pennsylvania into play for the Democrats and turn that swing state into the street fight that the McCain camp hasn’t been anticipating.
He’s also the attack dog the campaign needs. He’s direct. He says what’s on his mind. He has natural charm, guile and wit to burn. He’s not afraid to take on anyone. The rap on Biden is that he occasionally shoots his mouth off, but unlike our current vice president, at least he’s never told a respected colleague to go f*** himself. That argument ends right there — point to Shepcat and the Dems.
But he’ll also speak his mind to his president, providing Obama with a valuable sounding board instead of an expendable yes-man. The best presidents, to paraphrase Bartlet chief of staff Leo McGarry, are those who surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them. Joe Biden will challenge Barack Obama to cover all the bases and consider all the angles before finalizing his policies.
Joe Biden is the pick that makes sense on so many levels, and now John McCain must scramble for a running mate who can put his party and his base at ease to an even greater extent. My sense is that it can’t be done. Because Biden is a high-profile nominee, McCain’s nominee should be someone people already feel they know, one they can envision stepping in to fill the void should, God forbid, anything befall President McCain while in office. And it has to be someone who can immediately hold his or her own against Biden in the imminent vice presidential debate, which could spell “game over” before he or she even settles in comfortably to the role of nominee.
And who is that, exactly? Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.)? Thirty-seven-year-old Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.)? First-term Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.)? First-term Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska)? I don’t know anything about those short-listers. Do you? Does anyone outside the RNC leadership or their own home states know them? That leaves former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, which means an unsteady marriage of two former rivals who, by all accounts, still don’t like each other all that much, as well as a pair of millionaires who seem hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of common Americans. (And with how many residences between them?) Good luck selling that one to anyone who makes less than $150,000 a year (or is it $5 million?), GOP.
In the meantime, I’m 100% behind this choice and this ticket, and I look forward to seeing Barack Obama and Joe Biden working together for America.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
APPROACHING PRINCE RUPERT, B.C. — Get ready to heave, Felix.
If anyone was going to toss their own chum over the side of the ship, Thursday morning was the time to do it. I awoke to the extreme teetering and rolling of the Norwegian Star upon the open sea off the Canadian coast, buffeted and bullied about by Force 4 winds and 4- to 8-foot swells, both of which the Navigator’s Log channel on our stateroom television charitably referred to as “moderate.” Meanwhile, the bulkheads creaked, the sliding glass door of our shower banged like the screen door on a Mississippi porch, and the bathroom rocked as though I were standing on a board perched atop a ball, making a routine morning trip to the toilet seem more like a circus act.
Probably we’ve been spoiled by this voyage so far, because until now little about the ship’s attitude has been remarkable.
Other aspects of the trip, however, have been quite remarkable indeed.
For example, just after I posted here the other day, I strode out to the deck and saw a glacier. A no-kidding, honest-to-God, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die glacier. Someday Adriane and I will tell our children about what we saw and how it felt and what it meant, then we’ll all sit down and cry.1
We approached the Dawes Glacier by entering a narrow inlet littered with small icebergs2 — scattered here and there at first but rather like navigating a glacial minefield the farther we cruised into the inlet. The water here is a milky jade green because of the granite silt that is ground from the mountainside by the shifting of the ice and rocks then deposited into the bays below by cascades of glacial ice melt that pour down from the tops of the mountains and the glaciers themselves.
From some large bergs there protruded large chunks of rock that they had torn from the mountainside — literally from between a rock and a hard place — as they worked loose and tumbled into the frigid waters below. One of the larger bergs, past which the Star cruised very closely on our starboard side, was flattened out a bit on its white top, with a thick layer of blue ice beneath it that seemed eerily illuminated from within. It could have served as a scale model of Superman’s fortress of solitude.
The Dawes Glacier demonstrates the kind of grinding I’m talking about on an epic scale, with two parallel, S-shaped black veins running from the top of the glacier down to the bay. These lines show where the Dawes was formed by three glaciers colliding and grinding together over millions of years until they fit perfectly together like puzzle pieces between the mountains.
The town of Skagway, Alaska — “Gateway to the Gold Rush” — whose streets we walked on Wednesday, is laid out on a perfect grid at the base of just such a glacial creation, laid out so flat and precise in the valley between bay and mountains that you could play Scrabble on it.
We assumed that it was another of those little towns that hated the breathing guts of every bag-toting, cap-wearing, tchotchke-shopping tourist that infested it, but Valerie, our guide on the Skagway streetcar tour, assured us that the citizenry looks forward to our return from the end of September, when cruise season ends and winter rolls in, until May, when warm weather brings the cruise ships back into port. The town’s population swells from 800 to 2,300 during the summer months as the gift, apparel and jewelry shops reopen and the tourist trade booms anew. On a day like Wednesday, with four big cruise ships docked in the harbor, there are between 9,000 and 11,000 of us pumping our dollars into the local economy as the locals give us a wide berth.
Notwithstanding their apparent goodwill, however, Adriane and I allowed ourselves to hate certain tourists on behalf of the Skagwegians.3
Bade farewell by a trio of seals who popped their heads out of the water near our anchorage as we boarded the ship, we departed Skagway for an evening spent watching the shoreline from portside windows, first at dinner, then in a small, quiet room off the forward Spinnaker Lounge where we assembled for drinks until the curtain of night fell and we retired to our quarters.
One view looks pretty much just like the next out here, running together in a seamless, wallpaperlike continuum — the endless blanket of lush green pines, patched with granite and shale and interrupted by narrow white cascades that bisect it like pulled threads; the frequent snowy peaks and occasional glacial ice caps; the slivers of shoreline and narrow spits of land marked by lighted buoys or even small lighthouses; the dense profusions of low-lying clouds and the merest pale wisps of candy-floss fog that seem to have been applied not arbitrarily along a beach here, above a stand of trees there — but it’s virtually impossible to take your eyes off any of it.
Because one never knows whether one may return someday or whether these wonders will have vanished from the face of the earth by the time one does.
In a gift shop yesterday I saw a magnet depicting the late Kurt Vonnegut alongside his quote, “We could have saved the earth, but we were too cheap to do anything about it.”
Based on what I’ve seen here, I hope he was wrong on that one point.
1 Adriane, with camera poised, will occasionally tell me to look out to sea as if I’m contemplating my own or our collective mortality — yours and mine — and while it’s become one of our in-jokes on this voyage, it’s hard not to imagine the concept writ large for our survival when you’re staring out at an actual freaking glacier.
2 Entering the inlet is a piece of cake, relatively speaking. Because our forward progress was blocked at one end by the glacier itself, getting out involved a deft bit of maneuvering similar to performing a driveway right turnabout, except with a 1,000-foot-long ship instead of a Volkswagen Jetta. After going about as far into the channel as we could, the pilot kicked our propellers into reverse, turning us to starboard as we inched backward (impeding somewhat the exit of a much smaller craft as we did so).
At one point, we were perpendicular to the opposite shorelines, and because from our forward perch we could see only the one directly ahead of us, it was not hard to imagine the scene in which Austin Powers wedges a utility cart between the walls of a narrow corridor. The ship, however, seemed to turn as though it were on a central pivot, and soon enough we had performed a neat 180 and were headed out the way we came in.
3 I kid you not: that’s the actual collective noun by which the citizens of Skagway refer to themselves.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
DEPARTING JUNEAU, ALASKA — Adriane and I are on Day 4 of our Alaskan cruise aboard NCL’s Norwegian Star, and to those among you who have never been to Seattle but suspect it must be miserable because of what you’ve heard about its average annual rainfall, I have this to say about that:
Quit your bitching.
Monday we spent a lovely, rain-drenched day walking the streets of Ketchikan, Alaska, noted to be the fourth wettest spot in the world, with an average annual rainfall of about 20 feet.
That’s not a typo: 20 feet of rain.
Again: Quit your bitching.
The upside to all that rain is all the green. As opposed to the Rockies and Uintas in Adriane’s Wyoming (to say nothing of the golden billiard table that is my Kansas), here there are no treelines above which rise great rocky peaks. Wherever you look, the pines grow all the way up mountainsides to the very summits, presenting massive outcroppings of lush green reaching all the way up to the sky (when you can see the peaks through all the fog and low-lying clouds).
While the rain has so far spoiled our plans for a kayak adventure, we’ve nonetheless enjoyed walking about in it, exploring Ketchikan and Juneau, even as we pity the poor locals for having to put up with tourists like us. (Well, not us, exactly, but them — the dazed vacationing masses, the strolling, purposeless proles with whom we’re cruising aboard this massive floating brick and those populating the three or four other floating bricks that dock simultaneously alongside ours from port to port.)
Modern sea travel has much to recommend it. Adriane and I find that our interior stateroom is more than spacious enough to accommodate both movement and storage, and we’re traveling quite comfortably together without falling over our luggage and each other. Before I departed for the voyage, my mother remarked, “Well, you’re about to find out how well the two of you can live together,” but we needn’t have fretted the possibility of living elbow-to-cheek for seven days, nor of stepping on each other’s last nerve. Whether we’ve passed the first litmus test of couplehood or are merely still smitten with each other we can’t say for sure.
Even with all the teeming humanity aboard the ship, Adriane and I have managed to steal quiet, romantic moments in the unlikeliest of places, including a forward prow on the very public Deck 13, where we stood facing into the wind Saturday and Sunday evenings seemingly with the entire front of the ship to ourselves, except for the odd interloper. Perhaps because we haven’t been particularly interested in the onboard entertainment, we’ve capitalized on the occasional vacancies afforded by everyone packing into the Spinnaker Lounge for bingo and karaoke or the nightly performances in the Stardust Theatre.
To wit, one must allow that onboard entertainment is developed to suit the homogeneous tastes and watered-down sensibilities of the typical cruise masses — said demographic skewing a great deal older and squarer than Adriane and myself — upon whom it is then forced with the sort of unctuous charm offensive for which I have little patience.
Sunday afternoon we wandered accidentally into a bingo event presided over by the kind of aggressively cheerful former collegiate yell leader to whom I generally take an instant disliking.1 Except that this guy, who referred to the assembled vacationers as “Star family,” was so over-the-top that I wanted to hurt him. The first time he spoke, I wanted merely to punch him in the face, but as he continued to rally the bingo crowd in attendance, I found myself wanting to inflict grievous bodily harm upon him. Slowly. Last night, Adriane and I were walking out of the only quiet pub on the ship when we passed him in the Grand Atrium. He greeted us with as much guileless joie de vivre at 11 p.m. as he had possessed during the 4 p.m. bingo session, and I had to quicken our step lest I should take advantage of such close-range target acquisition.
Sunday night at dinner, we were serenaded by a woman singing in the piano bar beneath our Asian restaurant. She started off promisingly enough, although she was too obviously attempting to render the standards exactly as previously recorded by Diana Krall, and switched occasionally to acoustic guitar. Later, though, she launched into the most depressing prolonged medley of songs I’ve ever heard performed at one time — “Send in the Clowns,” “Dust in the Wind,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” “Angel”2 and on and on until I was certain that the onboard suicide rate would spike sometime in the next 24 hours.
The rest of the musical entertainment is provided by capable but mirthless Filipino combos whose “Moon River” count, as of this writing, is three.
The coffee aboard the Norwegian Star, I cannot stress enough, is ass.
I am happy to note, however, that if Ketchikan and Juneau are any indication, Alaska is littered with fantastic local chain and independent coffeehouses and kiosks. I’ve resolved to have juice with my breakfast and hold out for coffee until we disembark for our daily adventures in town.
How a big cruise line like Norwegian has not caught on by now that, next to water, coffee is the most critical element on the planet — and not just for me, I like to believe, but the very lifeblood of its entire clientele — is beyond me.
Notwithstanding the coffee, the onboard dining experience has its high and low points, which distinction one must spend the first few days of the cruise figuring out for oneself. We think we’ve got a grip on it by now — breakfast in the Market Café being consistently the best of all possible meals here and the perfect start to our days of walking — but there are still moments when we wander unprepared into a maelstrom of unsupervised foot traffic amid an attempt at organized food service that simply cannot be choreographed under such conditions. The effect is rather like watching a Western Union courier attempt to deliver a telegram in the middle of Grand Central Station without using the loudspeaker, and one pities the service staff for having to work a restaurant whose primary walkway also happens to be one of the main public thoroughfares of the ship. For this, I’m sure they’d like to string up the ship’s architects from the nearest yardarm.
For every underwhelming dining experience, however, there is one like we had last night in the ship’s steakhouse. Between the six of us at dinner, I believe we ordered the most representative cross-section of the menu possible, with the exception of one duplicated dessert, and had not a single complaint among us. A virtually flawless meal that bought enough goodwill on behalf of the ship’s other restaurants to excuse the next couple of meals gone somehow awry.
And something always seems to go or to be a little south of ideal, whether it’s the suspiciously cheerful Filipino servers (so many on this ship alone that the streets of Manila must be as empty and silent as a graveyard right now) or the grinning ship’s photographer who shows up at your table at the precise moment after you’ve shoved a forkful of salad in your maw (or worse, the server who spies your camera on the table and volunteers to shoot an entire portrait set of your evening meal) or the missed connection on some or other course you ordered (we’ve had about three items show up in place of something else or go unserved altogether). We try to roll with the punches because, after all, we’re on vacation, but we’re also paying through the nose for the privilege, so occasionally one would like to see one’s appetizer arrive before the entrée.
I’ll say this: it’s a clean ship. Perhaps a little too clean — somewhere between Disneyland clean, with wait and bus staff swooping in to whisk away plates as soon as you’re finished in the Market Café, and Berlin 1936 clean, with crew members standing by with spray bottles of hand sanitizer every time you enter one of the public dining halls or return to the ship from a day in town. (This in addition to the ubiquitous legions of hand-sanitizer dispensers standing at attention throughout the ship, the frequent use of which is adamantly encouraged by our hosts and hostesses.) I can appreciate the spirit behind the cruise line’s commitment to a germ-free environment, but from where I’m sitting I can almost see the tipping point at which Norwegian is unwittingly developing its own strain of sanitizer-resistant maritime bacteria.
In the meantime, at least, I feel somewhat safe from an unforeseen outbreak of something that may or may not be brewing, bubbling and breeding in one of the ship’s pools or hot tubs even as I type this.
More to follow, perhaps, as our adventure continues…
1 Think Peter MacNicol and Christine Baranski as the camp counselors in Addams Family Values. Now add mescaline. Shake.
2 I’m dead serious. I only wish I could be making up that set list.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Any serious discussion about boxing today begins at 147 pounds, and that discussion has to focus largely on the two men who battled for the WBA title last weekend — Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto.
For the most part, no one really wants to fight either of these guys. They were eager to fight each other, though, and that eagerness, combined with the absence of the prima donna Floyd Mayweather — who preserved his unbeaten record, his “legacy,” by avoiding both men, even turning down $8 million for a match with Margarito — has made welterweight a much more interesting place than any other division in boxing.
I have extolled at length in this forum the virtues of the previously undefeated Cotto, and now that he’s suffered his first loss, I’m no less impressed. I believe a fighter’s true character is revealed after he gets roughed up a bit, and I have faith in what Cotto is capable of showing us going forward. Furthermore, I believe the division benefits from all the major players having losses on their records (with the exception of Andre Berto, who hasn’t really fought anyone of note yet; he’ll get his L soon enough).
Cotto executed the same methodical fight plan I’ve watched so many times before, though adjusted to box away from the more aggressive Margarito. Cotto was in fact winning early — the ringside judges had him up about four rounds to two, but I saw it as a 6-0 fight simply because of the way he prevented Margarito from throwing his usual high volume of punches and kept him from closing off the ring. Cotto didn’t just run from Margarito the way Mayweather ran from De La Hoya; when he stopped, stepped forward and stepped inside, he scored very effectively, placing powerful shots precisely where he wanted to land them and ducking Margarito’s counters.
Putting the taller Margarito at a further disadvantage, the 5’8” Cotto stayed inside where he could deliver the short, bruising punches for which his arms are ideally muscled — heavy blows to the body, fierce uppercuts to the head. By staying in close and underneath Margarito, he kept the taller man from throwing his most effective punches, the medium-range shots he fires from a more upright posture, like missiles gaining momentum as they stretch out toward their target.
Had Cotto fought the same fight against anybody other than Margarito, he’d have won. Unlike his previous opponents, however, Margarito has a granite chin and an inhuman capacity for taking a punch, and because the rangy Mexican is accustomed to throwing as many as 110 punches a round (that’s not a typo), he doesn’t tire easily.
The fight turned in Round 7.
Cotto, ordinarily so effective as fights wind into the later rounds, when he’s apt to grind down his opponents little by little until they have nothing left, had his own stamina turned against him. As he began to slow down, he opened himself up to Margarito’s strengths, and the patient Mexican finally began firing the projectiles he’d been reserving all night. He had bloodied Cotto’s nose early, but now he was punishing the Puerto Rican, who looked worse for wear than I have ever seen him, especially considering how effectively he had been outpointing Margarito only minutes before.
Then Margarito hurt Cotto — something else I had never seen before.
Cotto took a knee twice in the 11th before he and his corner determined he could take no more. In the end, he had been worn down the same way he had worn down so many others before, and by an opponent who landed only 27 percent of his punches to Cotto’s 43 percent. (According to CompuBox, they landed roughly the same number of punches, but Margarito threw 332 more over 11 rounds.)
As I’ve said, I hope no one gets too confident now that Cotto has been beaten, because he wasn’t beaten by just any fighter.
So who wants the honor of tuning up Cotto for the rematch? And who wants Margarito at all?
The Ghanaian fighter Joshua Clottey should figure prominently into someone’s plans after beating Zab Judah Saturday night for the vacant IBF title (which Margarito vacated because he wanted to fight Cotto instead of mandatory IBF challenger Clottey — in essence saying, “Here, hold this for me while I go over there and fight that other guy who wants your milk money”).
Clottey says he’s eager for another shot at Margarito, and Margarito has a slot open on his dance card for a tentative November 15 fight in Mexico. But the way Margarito and Cotto have raised the bar in the division, Clottey, who favors counterpunching, will have to bring a lot more into the ring with him if he fights either of them. Like maybe another guy.
Zab Judah, on the other hand, is done, treading water as his act grows more tiresome from fight to fight. If you had gone into Saturday’s bout with low expectations, you might have thought that Zab fought well enough against Clottey. Zab, however, always wants you to believe that he’s a changed man, a more mature, disciplined fighter than he was in his previous two, three, five fights. He also acts as though he’s still the champion of something, which in his mind means he’s owed respect he’s not getting, but if he were truly a hungrier, more serious fighter, he’d actually go out and earn it.
Invariably, though, he preens and postures on his way into the ring, throws low blows during the fight, then cries foul afterward when the decision doesn’t go his way. By the time Saturday’s fight went to the scorecards after nine rounds — a technical stoppage because of a serious cut over Judah’s eye and his own failure to see how many fingers the ring doctor was holding up inches from his face — he had already been hurt by a few big shots and was clinching Clottey like a life preserver until he could get his legs back under him.
As soon as the decision was awarded to Clottey, though, Judah acted as though he had been winning a fight in a parallel universe and was shocked — shocked! — to learn that he was behind on all scorecards. Meanwhile, he’s standing there in wraparound sunglasses and sporting a Flavor Flav grill, calling himself “the people’s champion” as though he might still be relevant in the division whose undisputed champ he once was. In reality, he is the Norma Desmond of the division, waiting in vain for a closeup that will never come again.1
That said, if Judah wants a shot at either Margarito or Cotto, I’ll be happy to watch his punk ass get beaten down, if that’s what it takes to make him go away once and for all.
Elsewhere in the division:
- Paul Williams is a big hitter who beat Margarito 13 months ago to claim the WBO title, but since then all he’s done is lose the belt then win it back in two fights with Carlos Quintana. He needs to branch out and draw some attention to his talents to put himself back into play for a unification bout.
- Shane Mosley has already lost once to Cotto and will next fight Ricardo Mayorga in September. Both men are sort of on their way out, but Mosley is generally well conditioned and well prepared and deserves some consideration in upcoming title bouts. Even at 36, he’d be the sort of mandatory challenger who’d make someone work hard to hold on to their belt and maybe even end up with one before all is said and done.
- Trained out of the Kronk by the great Emanuel Steward, Kermit Cintron has lost only twice in his career, but both losses were to Margarito, on whom he bestowed first the WBO then the IBF belt. If he gets another shot at the new champ, I’d advise him to go back empty-handed next time.
- Argentina’s Sebastian Lujan — who, as you might recall, once nearly had his left ear torn off by Margarito — looked strong and fierce against a fading Jose Luis Castillo last week, but he needs to book more fights on American soil in order to get his name into the conversation in someplace other than hospital emergency rooms.
- Wednesday night ESPN showed off another Argentine fighter named Luis Carlos Abregu. He’s low on the food chain (currently ranked 35th in the division) and hasn’t fought anybody yet (he certainly didn’t Wednesday night), but he hit his latest victim with such force and ferocity that I have to believe his blip will appear on lots of radars very soon.
- Oscar De La Hoya has only one fight left in him before he rides off into a lucrative sunset, and now that he’s seen what Margarito is capable of, he’ll almost certainly elect to meet lightweight dynamo Manny Pacquiao on December 6, making the Filipino come up two weight classes to face him at 147. Freddie Roach, who has trained both men (preparing Oscar for his 2007 match against Mayweather), believes that the extra 12 pounds won’t slow Pacquiao down at all. Oscar, says Roach, will have his hands full.
The bout will be essentially a catch-weight fight for Pacquiao, so expect him afterward to drop back down to 135, which is a much more natural weight for him right now. However, if he succeeds at 147, it will only fuel support for him in the pound-for-pound conversation in which he is now a major player.
Short of some big fireworks from Williams in upcoming bouts, though, he, Clottey and Berto may be champions in name only and perhaps not for long. All eyes will continue to follow Margarito and Cotto as they continue to circle and stalk each other and vie for dominion over the weight class that is now the class of the boxing world. Theirs has the potential to be the next great rivalry — think Ali-Frazier or Leonard-Hearns — in a sport that could use a little defibrillation right now.
Cotto may have been beaten last Saturday night, but in many regards, he is still the man to beat. And as of this writing, the only man who can beat him is Margarito.
1 For the cineastes scoring at home: yes, I really did just make a Claude Rains and a Gloria Swanson reference in the same paragraph.
