Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century: Collected Columns from the Chicago Tribune

Geographic snobbery at home in the news media

Sunday, January 30, 2000

It’s well-known among journalists that across this broad land, people dislike the news media. Why those of us who spend our working lives fearlessly bringing the truth to the American people should be met with such ingratitude is a mystery. But the average person tends to think of journalists as arrogant, insular and condescending. I can think of only one obvious explanation for this perception: In many cases, it’s true.

This will not come as breaking news to Southerners, who are used to being lampooned in the national press as snaggle-toothed bumpkins prone to marrying their underage cousins and keeping rusted-out jalopies in the front yard. The arrival of out-of-state reporters in Atlanta for the Super Bowl provided the occasion for some of them to wax scornful about the city’s countless shortcomings.

USA Today sports columnist Jon Saraceno, who is to humor what Mike Ditka is to self-control, felt the need to joke about his dissatisfaction with the host city, whose enumerated sins include John Rocker, Ted Turner, bad traffic and the bomb that went off at the 1996 Summer Olympics. In an effort to be fair, he did express regret that Tampa Bay didn’t make it to the big game so we could have had our first Bubba Bowl. . . . For all the grits.

Saraceno also had to acknowledge that he had once bought a truck in Atlanta, and it didn’t have a gun rack, a CB radio or tobacco juice splattered all over the dash. Gee, you think he got a discount?

But that one tolerable experience was not enough to justify the NFL’s inexplicable decision to play the Super Bowl in the Georgia Dome: Atlanta has hosted only one previous Super Bowl. Personally speaking, I could’ve waited until Y3K for the second.

Saraceno should commiserate with New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, whose snobbery toward the Southern provinces is even more pronounced. After North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms spoke recently at the United Nations, Friedman was sputtering with outrage. Who authorized him to speak for America? he demanded. Why don’t they send Jed Clampett from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ to the UN too, so we can hear what he has to say about foreign policy?

Maybe Friedman, who seems more at home in Jakarta than in Jacksonville, has been spending too much time abroad. Jesse Helms has some authority to speak on international affairs because he happens to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And though his arch-conservative political views put him badly out of step with The New York Times’ editorial page, this hillbilly has not been too dimwitted to be elected to the Senate five times by the people of North Carolina.

If Friedman has never journeyed to that trackless waste, he can read up on it in the latest edition of The Almanac of American Politics, whose editors (Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa) are card-carrying members of the New York-Washington elite. They describe it as one of the leading-edge parts of nation, a state whose growing economy, booming demography and vibrant culture are in many ways typical of the way the nation is going. In fact, North Carolina has made so much dadgum progress that Jed Clampett would barely recognize the place.

The South, however, is not alone in generating derision from ultrasophisticates in the news media. Every four years, Iowans get a lot of attention from the national press corps — along with more than their share of jibes, sneers and patronizing pats on the heads for being so earnest, rural, white-bread and dull.

The day after last week’s presidential caucuses, Boston Globe columnist David Nyhans addressed the Hawkeye State dismissively: You had your fling, it’s over, and now as you slip back into somnolence, take solace knowing you get more bites at the apple than most citizens elsewhere. Somnolence? It’s kind of him to let those Americans located west of the Hub of the Universe know that they’re not dead — just sleeping.

What else could they be doing without the diversions of the Northeast Corridor? New York Times columnist Gail Collins ventured into the American Siberia to find out why anyone would show up to hear a campaign speech by Steve Forbes and left with the mystery not quite solved: It could just be, she finally concluded, that people who live in Iowa in the winter have a lot of time on their hands. ‘It was either come here or go to exercise class,’ one elderly woman said.

Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker got in a lot of trouble for his hostile caricature of New Yorkers, which relied mostly on gross stereotypes of millions of people he has obviously never tried to know or understand. He could be finished in baseball, but maybe there’s a future for him in journalism.

The GOP should sit back and savor its victory

Thursday, February 10, 2000

It’s 1975. South Vietnam has just fallen to communism, inflation is surging, the federal budget is deep in the red, the economy is in a straitjacket of wage and price controls, socialism is in vogue among young people, crime is rampant, taxes are painfully high and government is growing ever bigger. For conservatives, libertarians and other advocates of limited government, the present is grim and the future looks worse.

Suppose back then, a visitor from the future had arrived to report on the state of America in the year 2000: Communism is dead, the United States is the world’s only superpower, socialism has been discredited, inflation has been vanquished, the free market reigns, crime is ebbing, the federal budget enjoys a fat surplus, tax rates are down and federal spending is declining. And all this under a Democratic president!

What would anti-government types have said then if they’d known what lay ahead? They’d have rejoiced: We don’t have to die to go to heaven; we just have to wait till the turn of the millennium.

But here we are 25 years later, and liberals are the only people who feel they’ve reached the promised land. A few decades from now, history may remember Bill Clinton as one of the most successful Republicans ever to occupy the White House.

For the moment, though, Clinton’s critics persist in feeling deeply dissatisfied, not because the world is still going to hell in a handbasket, but because Democrats are still in power, pushing many liberal ideas and getting all sorts of credit they don’t deserve.

Some of their complaints are understandable. It was the tight money policy of Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand, that laid the foundation for the longest economic expansion in American history. It was a Republican president who carried out much of the tax-cutting and deregulation now powering the engine of growth. It was a GOP-controlled Congress that forced Clinton to agree to a plan that produced the current budget surplus.

While taking credit for policies that he had nothing to do with, didn’t originate or adopted only under duress, Clinton also continues to press for new spending programs — $126 billion worth in last week’s State of the Union address, which came only five years after he declared the end of the era of big government.

But no one expects him to get most of the goodies he wants to pass out. And whatever his budget fantasies may be, the era of big government really is pretty much over. Even with swelling surpluses, the Congressional Budget Office projects that federal taxes will take a slightly smaller share of our income in coming years than it takes now.

On the expenditure side, the CBO says that even if federal discretionary spending grows as fast as the rate of inflation after this year (which is more than it would under existing policies), federal spending will drop from 18.5 percent of national income today to just 16.5 percent in 2010. The last time federal outlays were that low was 1958. Ronald Reagan never got spending below 21.5 percent of gross domestic product.

No one could have ever predicted that a Democratic president someday would boast about his plan to completely pay off the national debt — something not done since 1835. Until Reagan came along, liberals laughed at anyone who worried about such matters. But years of opposing tax cuts have conditioned Democrats to extol fiscal discipline as the highest possible virtue. Al Gore promises to continue running surpluses even if the economy stalls — a shift on the order of the pope endorsing premarital sex.

Some liberals have noticed the reversal and don’t like it one bit. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich castigates Clinton and other Democrats for sounding like Coolidge Republicans because they are spooked by the possibility that voters will be attracted to ambitious Republican tax-cutting plans in the fall, and they haven’t the confidence to build public support for an equally ambitious program centered on education and health care.

He’s right. Democrats may propose small programs, but they are leery of big ones. Why? Because the party learned the hard way that Americans are skeptical of expansive government and don’t trust Washington to spend their money wisely. They would rather see taxes go to retiring the debt, a project that may do some good and can hardly do any harm, than fund a federal spending spree that may be useless or worse.

Judging against where the nation was a quarter-century ago, opponents of leviathan have largely carried the day. Instead of lamenting Clinton’s success, they might take it for what it is: their victory.

And now, fans, here are the Arena Football results: Anaheim beat Toronto 16-10, Chicago

High scores should give offense to baseball fans

Something needs to be done to rescue the game

Thursday, May 11, 2000

And now, fans, here are the Arena Football results: Anaheim beat Toronto 16-10, Chicago topped Seattle 18-11, San Francisco edged Cincinnati 13-9, Florida got by Pittsburgh 12-5, and . . . What’s that? I’m sorry. Those scores are not from the Arena Football League. They’re from the Arena Baseball League.

Of course, Major League Baseball hasn’t adopted the name yet, but the handwriting is on — make that over — the wall. The thinking is that you can never have too much offense. Home runs have been flying like airliners out of O’Hare: in large numbers and at a nonstop pace.

Monday night, Oakland’s Jason and Jeremy Giambi both cleared the fences, making them the first brothers to homer in the same game since — well, since last October, when Vladimir and Wilton Guerrero did it for Montreal. In the entire history of Major League Baseball, how many pairs of brothers had previously attained that distinction? Three.

What the headlines suggest, the box scores confirm. In April, a total of 931 balls reached the seats — breaking the record for the month and exceeding last April’s total by 140.

In the first five weeks of the 2000 season, teams played 457 games, during which they averaged nearly 11 runs a game and 2.59 home runs. In the first 457 games of the 1992 season, by contrast, teams managed just 8.39 runs and 1.45 homers per game. In eight brief years, total scoring has risen by 28 percent and long-distance connections are up by a whopping 79 percent. And we’re not even into warm weather, when hitters really get cooking.

Some of the reasons for the offensive surge are obvious, and some are in dispute. Hitters claim they are just bigger, stronger and better than hitters of old, thanks to advanced nutrition and hundreds of off-season hours spent lifting weights, instead of fishing or selling insurance as their forebears did.

There is something to this argument: Joe DiMaggio, who won two home run titles, was a willowy 6 feet 2 inches and 193 pounds, which these days is a good size for a patent lawyer. Mark McGwire goes 6 feet 5 inches and 250 and is large enough to moonlight in rodeo bull-riding — as the bull.

Expansion has made life easier for McGwire and other hitters by letting them face undertalented pitchers who otherwise would be riding buses in the minors. In the struggle to fill pitching staffs, major league teams have become about as selective as a 1st-grade talent show. Baltimore currently has four pitchers with an earned run average of 9.00 or more. Toronto has three with ERAs above 11. In the old days, an ERA of 9.00 would get you a job driving a truck.

New fields have also been kind to hitters. The cavernous Houston Astrodome, where home runs went to die, has been replaced with Enron Field, which measures just 315 feet down the right field foul line and 326 feet in left — reasonable dimensions for a high school stadium.

Hitting a baseball 315 feet used to be good for a single, if you were lucky. Letting a team put the fences that close makes about as much sense as letting a team put the pitcher’s rubber 55 feet from the plate.

And let’s not even talk about Colorado’s Coors Field, where thin, dry air and weak gravity combine to turn pop-ups into homers and pitchers into quivering wrecks. During the 1998 All-Star game there, the best moundsmen in the National League wore themselves out throwing 214 pitches and giving up 13 runs.

But pitchers insist that much of the problem lies with a turbo-charged ball, and no one this side of Bud Selig doubts it. Even Atlanta’s peerless Greg Maddux says the current ball is so hard it should have a Titleist stamp on it.

If the offensive boom is due to good hitters and weak pitchers, why did 71 players strike out 100 times or more last season? After 35 games this year, Sammy Sosa has as many strikeouts as Joe DiMaggio ever had in an entire season.

What can be done? The ball can have a little of the juice taken out, fences can be placed farther from home plate, the strike zone can be expanded beyond postage-stamp size, and batters can be barred from wearing all that plastic armor on their forearms and elbows, which makes them impervious to inside pitches. It also wouldn’t hurt to eliminate a few teams in smaller markets, thus freeing a lot of guys to pitch in Sunday morning softball leagues.

Nobody wants to return to 1915, when Braggo Roth won the American League home-run title with 7. But something needs to be done to rescue a game that should be more than longball. Arena football isn’t true football, and baseball fans may eventually conclude that this new version of their game should be outta here.

The Great Emancipator

Or was Abraham Lincoln actually a white oppressor?

Sunday, May 14, 2000

Millions of admiring words have been written about Abraham Lincoln, but not one of them was composed by Lerone Bennett Jr. Bennett is executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of an incendiary new book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, which depicts the 16th president as an oppressor, a supporter of slavery and the relentless enemy of black equality. Racism, says Bennett, was the center and circumference of his being. Next to Bennett’s version of Lincoln, David Duke looks good.

Despite its provocative thesis, the book has been a well-kept secret, most likely because it comes from the obscure Johnson Publishing Co. Time magazine columnist Jack E. White complains that Forced Into Glory is not getting the kind of attention non-fiction works by white authors have received. To address our racial issues, he says, we need to stop ignoring Bennett’s discomfiting book.

The book is useful because every generation ought to re-examine the received assumptions of our political culture. Bennett’s portrayal will surprise both whites and blacks raised to revere the Great Emancipator. But this massive exercise in demonization fails because it misunderstands both Lincoln and his era.

At a superficial level, Lincoln harbored many of the racial prejudices of the time. He grew up in a society where black inferiority was assumed, and he was given to racial jokes and even use of the N word. Before becoming president, he said he didn’t favor racial equality. As president, he insisted that if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.

But Lincoln’s racial attitudes evolved as he grew older — to the point that Frederick Douglass said he was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.

Bennett accuses Lincoln of caring nothing about the plight of blacks, but the truth is that Lincoln took the position throughout his career that slavery was a monstrous injustice. The important thing is not that Lincoln was free of racial prejudice, but that he could rise above it to oppose slavery and work toward its extinction.

Part of the fraud Bennett ascribes to Lincoln is the Emancipation Proclamation, which he says did not free any slaves. It’s hardly news that the decree applied only to areas under rebel control — where Lincoln’s writ did not run. But it did make clear to everyone, North and South, that the war was henceforth a war not only to save the Union but to end slavery.

It was cheered by abolitionists despite its limitations, while being bitterly denounced by pro-slavery leaders, who saw it as an invitation to slave revolt. Lincoln didn’t stop with this: He pushed for a constitutional amendment to abolish the institution everywhere, which he lacked the legal authority to do by himself.

If Lincoln had pushed harder and earlier for abolition, he might have satisfied Bennett. But, says Princeton historian James McPherson, he would have shattered support for the war, with the result that the Confederacy would have established its independence, and with 14 states instead of 11. And slavery would have survived.

His proposal to resettle blacks abroad is reviled by Bennett as the ethnic cleansing of America. Lincoln did support the idea, not because he hated blacks but because he knew the depths of racism among whites. If blacks couldn’t gain equality here, he reasoned, might they not be better off in a homeland of their own? And wouldn’t that prospect defuse white support for slavery? Lincoln eventually abandoned this option, though, and set about trying to create a society where blacks could live in freedom.

He pursued his goals with a political skill and cunning that often confused his friends as well as his enemies. But pursue them he did, without cease. Said Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.

Lincoln didn’t have to embark on a war to put down the rebellion of the slave states, but he did. He didn’t have to accept the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers in the effort, but he did. He could have made peace with the rebels and left the slaves to their fate in a Confederate States of America, but he refused.

Instead, Lincoln never veered from a painful, costly and bitter course aimed at both preserving the republic and ridding it of slavery. And in the end, he succeeded, to the everlasting benefit of both races. If those achievements were the work of an enemy, black Americans would not need friends.