David Brooks of The New York Times and Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated are both good writers and astute commentators who almost never work the same topic. And they might not think that they were doing so earlier this week. But I do, and it’s my blog.
First, let’s hear from Brooks. “You could easily get the impression that American politics are trundling along as usual. But this stability is misleading. The current arrangements are stagnant but also fragile. American politics is like a boxing match atop a platform. Once you’re on the platform, everything looks normal. But when you step back, you see that the beams and pillars supporting the platform are cracking and rotting. This cracking and rotting is originally caused by a series of structural problems that transcend any economic cycle: There are structural problems in the economy as growth slows and middle-class incomes stagnate. There are structural problems in the welfare state as baby boomers spend lavishly on themselves and impose horrendous costs on future generations. There are structural problems in energy markets as the rise of China and chronic instability in the Middle East leads to volatile gas prices. There are structural problems with immigration policy and tax policy and on and on. As these problems have gone unaddressed, Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system, which is the one resource the entire regime is predicated upon. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive.”
Clear enough, right? Now here comes Joe Posnanski, writing a piece that is complimentary to baseball commissioner Bud Selig. Posnanski says that recently he “wrote a little something about Bud Selig and how people cannot help but underestimate him. This has to do with Bud’s almost mythical ability to look baffled. Who can forget the Bud after the All-Star Game tie? Who can forget his rambling press conference when he held up the rule book after the rain-delayed World Series game? . . . .But Bud Selig has utterly transformed baseball. I’m not saying that he has always transformed it for the better. That’s a discussion for another time. But at the end of the day, baseball has been transformed — expansion, wild cards, interleague play, increased revenue sharing, drug testing, relative labor peace, new stadiums, All-Star games that determine homefield advantage, the World Baseball Classic, on and on. Maybe baseball stumbled into some of these things. Maybe it was pulled kicking and screaming. But this stuff happened. And Bud, unquestionably, was a force behind this stuff happening. He works the back rooms. He coaxes and ponders and considers. And sometimes he boldly acts. . . . Bud Selig might be the most influential baseball commissioner ever.”
Why are these stories connected? Because Posnanski is, in a way, illustrating the point Brooks is making. Selig, who is in charge of a pretty important American institution, is giving the American people what they want: leadership. “Not always for the better,” as Posnanski acknowldeges, but that’s not the point. People are smart enough to know that things don’t always work out as planned. But they do expect problems to be addressed. They do not want endless squabbling. They absolutely do not want endless partisanship. They want, as Franklin Roosevelt recognized, action: try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else. All across America, people make decisions. They figure stuff out and move forward. Our debt issue is a bad thing. If we face it, it’s a problem. If we don’t, it’s a crisis. We need to have the common sense of Bud Selig.