SUMMER HEAT

The New York Mets are a National League baseball team.  

For most of their fifty-nine year history, the team has been star-crossed.  At their birth in 1962, they lost 120 games, a record that stands to this day.  In their first seven seasons, in a then ten-team league, they finished last five times and second to last twice.  After professional baseball divided the leagues into divisions, their miracle in 1969 and another World Series appearance in 1973 were followed by eight years of mediocrity punctuated by the disaster of having given Tom Seaver away in 1977.  

In the mid-'80s they rebounded but never achieved the heights their talent foretold.  They were champions in 1986 and won a hundred games in 1988 (only to be eliminated by the Dodgers in the divisional series). They made the play-offs in 1999 and snuck into the World Series as a wild card in 2000 (which they lost) .  And they made the play-offs again in 2006 and went to the World Series again in 2015 with a solid record (but lost that one as well). Between these intermittent successes, they have basically been a .500 team.  Along the way, they were even one of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi victims.

For a while this year, it looked like things might be better.

A lackluster April was followed by a lights out May, when they went 17-9 (a .604 percentage).  In June and July they held their own.  All told, they were in first place  for ninety days.

And then came August.

They are 6-15 in August. 

They aren't hitting.  Of the thirty teams in the two leagues, their team batting average (.234) puts them in 26th place. So does their slugging percentage.  In runs batted in (RBIs),  they place third to last.

Their two best pitchers are on the injured list (IL).  

One -- Noah Syndergaard -- hasn't played all year and is still recuperating from Tommy John surgery.  The other -- Jacob deGrom -- was putting together a Cy Young season with an unheard of 1.08 ERA but was sidelined with right forearm tightness on July 18 and has been on the IL ever since.  He won't be back at the earliest until mid-September (and there are rumors he won't be back at all this season). On July 18, their starting shortstop, Francisco Lindor, also went on the list and will not be returning until next week.

The Mets aren't losing because they are poor. They are a major market team. They have the third largest payroll in baseball, behind only the Dodgers and Yankees.  They are losing because they have had a bad August.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have had a bad August too.  

This is not just a view shared by Republican Trumpers, for whom any month is a bad month for Democrats regardless of facts.  

Even the non-Trumpers are exhaling a bit, confident that an actual factual record may energize their comeback in lieu of the voter suppression they previously depended upon (and which the party itself has no intention of pulling back).

Inflation.

Cuomo.

The California recall.

Afghanistan.

Just as the Democrats were hitting their stride, a bi-partisan infrastructure bill having passed the Senate and budget reconciliation (allowing for a second and larger package) satisfying early procedural votes, the combined effect of which was to paint the party as the adults in the room setting the rusty wheels of government  in motion and getting something done, they ran into . . .

August.

The first thing to say about August is that it requires perspective.  

Inflation at this point is probably a short-term response to supply chain bottlenecks brought on by the pandemic and not a signal that the economy is overheating on account of on-going pandemic relief or stimulus.  The Federal Reserve, moreover, has its eyes on the data and is more than able to hit the brakes if that becomes necessary.  

The California recall effort is a regional issue and the result next month will depend largely if not exclusively on whether Democrats in that state take the possibility of a Larry Elder as Governor seriously enough to create the result -- defeat of the recall -- everyone expected only a short time ago.  Elder is a libertarian radio talk show host who promises to end mask mandates and vaccine requirements. The expected result is now in doubt only because recent polls show energy among  Republicans to approve the recall and boredom among everyone else over the fact that it is even happening.

Memo to California Democrats -- get off your asses and vote.

The two A's -- Andrew (as in Cuomo) and Afghanistan -- were and are more serious.

Cuomo will resign tomorrow.  This follows a report by the state Attorney General's office concluding that he sexually harassed eleven women and otherwise was difficult to work for.  His rebuttal, such as it was, was that he didn't do any of the physical stuff and didn't understand that the verbal stuff crossed any lines (which he claimed had changed over time).  There was no full on trial on any of the claims and the soon to be former Governor argues that the lawyers who conducted the investigation were biased.  

Though the bias claim is difficult to square with the reputations of the actual lawyers, the absence of any ability to confront the charges and cross examine the complainants is a fair criticism.  Be that as it may, however, there is some truth in numbers on the serious physical claims (harassment is generally not a one-off event and there is more than one accuser here),  and the verbal allegations to which he appeared to cop some form of an I-didn't-think-it- crossed-the-line plea reasonably provokes one big "C'mon".  Did he really think it was OK to ask a married aide if she'd cheat on her husband?  Or disclose to twenty-something female employees that he would be fine dating anyone their age? 

Maybe some of that wasn't harassment.

But it was creepy.

Afghanistan is, of course, a tragedy.  Not because we should have stayed.  If the mission was to get Osama bin Laden and degrade Al Qaeda, we did that long ago.  If the mission was to stand-up a western democracy, we probably should have known long ago that we were not succeeding and that throwing additional resources at the region was not going to change the likely outcome.  The ethnic and tribal rivalries in Afghanistan had thwarted the efforts of one empire (the British) and one superpower (the Soviet Union) before we arrived in the wake on 9/11.  And those rivalries were not put on hold once we got there.

This does not mean the initial invasion was wrong. 

Al Qaeda killed more than 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and the Taliban supported them and gave them a base from which the attack was launched.  Taking them and bin Laden out was more than right; any President who refused to do so would have rightly been shown the door.  In retrospect, the problem was staying beyond that point.  The new government was corrupt, and the military incapable or unwilling to fight.  The good that was done, especially in freeing women from the Taliban's inhuman interpretation of Sharia law and allowing a generation of girls to go to school, remains and will be difficult to undo.  More than 60% of the Afghani population is less than 20 years old and has no allegiance to either the Taliban's past or its sexist exclusions.

What remains is the chaos that enveloped our withdrawal and the on-going efforts to retrieve Americans still there and Afghanis who supported us and will now be targeted.  

For the past week or so, the airwaves have been agog with claims that Biden has screwed up, that he had intel predicting the Afghani government/military's imminent collapse, and that in any case he should have planned for a more orderly removal of Americans and those Afghanis who supported us.

Here, too, however, perspective is in order.

As well as historic accuracy.

To begin, this is not Saigon in 1975.  The vast majority of Vietnamese refugees did not leave on American planes or helicopters as Saigon was about to fall.  They left in boats over time -- sometimes years later --  and were allowed to enter the US as refugees.  In contrast, and as Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday on CNN, over 20,000 people were removed from Afghanistan in the last week without one American death.  More will be coming out in the weeks ahead.  Is it the smoothest process?  No.  But is it Saigon 1975, or Dunkirk 1940, two events to which critics have compared it?  Not even close.

Biden owns this problem because he is the sitting President.  Unlike his immediate predecessor, he is not ducking responsibility or shifting blame.  The success of the current evacuation has been and will be his responsibility.  The cause of the implosion, however, cannot be laid at his feet.  Almost uniquely among executive officeholders in the last twenty years, he opposed mission creep.  He wanted us out when he was Vice-President. Trump to his credit wanted us out when  he was President.  

But Trump  wouldn't pull the trigger.

Why not?

Because the generals told him it would be messy and Trump didn't want the bad pictures.

What Biden understood and accepted, and Trump just avoided, is that it was always going to be messy.  There was not going to be a time when the addition of 5,000 troops tasked with evacuating Americans and at-risk Afghanis was going to proceed in an environment where the Afghani government retained control and its military fought effectively.  To the contrary, any evacuation at any time was going to be a signal to those institutions that American support was over and they were on their own, a signal they would almost certainly have taken as a green light to the abandonment they ultimately practiced. 

To forestall chaos or defeat or whatever anyone wishes to call what is now going on would have required troops on a more or less permanent basis and more of them as the Taliban’s control increased.  And those like Liz Cheney who wanted that forever war outcome are a distinct minority in the country at large.

So August has been bad.

For the Mets and the Democrats.

But it has not been fatal.

Largely because both the team and the party have weak opponents. 

In the National League’s Eastern Division, where the Mets sit, their opponents are more or less .500 teams as well. The Mets are seven games behind at this writing. But a May in September could resurrect their hopes. 

As for  the Democrats, they have the Republicans.

The Trump-supporting, insurrection-inciting, COVID-denying, vote-suppressing Republicans . . .

Who refuse to get rid of the sexual harasser-in-chief  in their own ranks. 

August is almost over.