Tag Archives: Tulsi Gabbard

The Sweet Spot and Dan Barreiro

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A couple days ago I swapped vehicles with #1 son. (Because I’ll be damned if I’m going to wedge a pressure washer into my car, which at least gets vacuumed more than once a year.) With ignition came Dan Barreiro of KFAN sports talk radio in mid-soliloquy.

As I pulled out of the driveway two thoughts came to mind. 1: How long it had been since I heard Barreiro’s show, and 2: Why I lost interest in it.

His topic of that moment, and again this was just him alone on stage, was how Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian expert deposed last week in the Trump impeachment inquiry, was being routinely lionized for his military career and combat veteran status. Barreiro’s point was essentially that laudable resume and chestful of medals withstanding, it’s possible some like him, though not necessarily Vindman himself, could still be a lying scoundrel. Point being, “the media” was engaged in yet another exercise of herd-think, equating appearance and pedigree with truthfulness.

By contrast, Barreiro quickly pivoted to say, liberals and “progressives” (a word that came with a tone of “here-we-go-again” disdain), people like Hillary Clinton, had no problem impugning the integrity of people Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, herself a military veteran.*

Where Barreiro went after that I really can’t say, because by the time I was merging onto Highway 100 I had hit the new Sturgill Simpson CD and was moving into a better realm of consciousness.

I might have held that moment of zen-like bliss if I hadn’t heard, a couple hours later, of the latest Republican messaging strategy and how neatly it fit with new polling that showed a large minority of voters explaining away Donald Trump’s Ukraine transgressions on the grounds that, “They all do it.”

Now, full disclosure, I know Barreiro only as an acquaintance in the very short time I worked down the hall from him at what was then KTLK-FM. This was over a decade ago now. But even then Barreiro was established as the #1 act in afternoon drive. I haven’t seen radio ratings in years, but I’ll believe it if anyone tells me he’s still #1. And, for what it’s worth, he’s not a bad guy. He’s smart, and unlike some other local radio titans, not dripping with self-loathing issues.

His show worked because he folded a facility for sports rumination/fulmination/exasperation in with the more relevant news of the day, like politics. Unlike the long, long list of pandering, bloviating radio hucksters, Barreiro’s shtick was/is: “I’m the Sanest Guy in the Room.”

But … there’s always a thing, and here’s that thing.

Success in commercial radio is powerfully, unequivocally linked to the First Rule of Show Biz, i.e. “Give the people what they want.” It’s a rule predicated on knowing who those people are. And if you’re building a succcessful career in sports talk radio, you have no reason — none — to believe you’re audience is deeply, vitally interested in politics, political scandal and matters of government morality. They’re tuning in to hear why the Vikings screwed up Sunday’s game, why the Pohlads will never drop $30 million on a pitcher and whether P.J. Fleck’s brand of hucksterism might be the real deal.

If you the host have a few minutes to dissect the day’s headlines, well go ahead, but get back to Kirk Cousins before the next commercial break. And, while you’re at it, don’t feed us any of that crazy lefty shit.

If you can imagine a scale where zero (heh) is as far left you can go (“crazy progressives”) and 100 is as far right as you can imagine, (Alex Jones and InfoWars), the sweet spot, ratings-wise, for a guy like Barreiro is somewhere between 60 and 65. It’s a Goldilocks zone where the liberals are always kind of “nutty”, too “radical” and “out there” and forever juiced up on “conspiracy theories”, and where prominent Republicans, while laughably self-serving — I give you Donald Trump — are never up to anything worse or more nefarious than anyone else.

Which is to say … “They all do it.”

The sports talk radio audience is, in my experience, a group of people, vast majority male, who are either politically indifferent/agnostic or conservative by default. Default being the result of the discomfort they feel around “politically correct” “elitists” always who are always “talking over their heads.”

So, and here’s the offense: you give those people only what they want to hear, which is a 2019 variation on Ronald Reagan’s sunny cynicism: “Government is not the solution, government is the problem.” It’s an eagerly digestible trope amplified now for 30 years by Rush Limbaugh, et al. A ratings winner. You may win no big liberal audience, but why worry? Liberals are not a reachable audience to begin with. They just don’t spend much time listening to football nattering.

What you are doing though — and in fairness to Barreiro, he engages in a less virulent extent than many, many others — is re-fueling the basic, lazy-minded, deeply-held cynicism that “they all do it”. They’re all corrupt scoundrels. Everyone knows that. They’re all out for themselves. None of them care about you. Liberals especially. So it’s a waste of time trying to sort an of this out.

Or … why get so worked up about whatever they’re saying about Trump? It’s just the same old same old.

As a commercial radio strategy it’s gold. But, and I’m serious here, on a moral level it is appallingly cynical and a not inconsequential driver in the dumbing down and perpetuated ignorance of a sizable chunk of the voting age population.

Now, again in fairness to Barreiro, I haven’t listened to entire show of his in probably a dozen years and I heard less than five minutes of this one. So I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt wait and for someone to tell me that …

As a shrewd judge of human nature, at least in terms of athletes and big time sports management, Barreiro saw Trump for the long term, ludicrous fraud he was as he ramped up for his run in 2016

… and that he admonished his large drivetime audience repeatedly to see Trump’s Obama birth certificate “issue” for the naked racism it was

… as were his repeated attacks on Muslims

… and that there are no “fine people” on the Nazi side

… that the Clinton Foundation actually provided tangible benefits to the poor and desperate while Trump’s foundation had to be shut down for farcical corruption

… that the Mueller Report didn’t exonerate The Donald

… and that, no, “everybody doesn’t” run a hamfisted bribery con on a foreign government, holding up military aid for a bogus investigation of political rival, and then lie about it constantly

… and so on, and on and on.

Handicapping the Democrats 18 Months Out

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[Correction included]. Even if his name is not mentioned directly, every Democratic candidate entering the 2020 race is being measured and labeled on how much of a response they are to Donald Trump, or “Trumpism”. Which is to say, what degree of repudiation are they offering? Total? A bit here and there? Whatever they can get from “across the aisle”?

As of this morning Bernie Sanders, now 77 years old and grumpy as ever, is back in the hunt. Say what you will about The Bern, he isn’t shy about calling it as he (and most of us see it). Trump is a career low-life and criminal (laundering money for Russian gangsters to sustain his “brand” being the least of it), and establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are guilty as sin for greasing the skids for every absurd-to-vile thing Trump has promoted.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to throw myself on any bandwagon (or funeral pyre) this early in the circus performance. But I am telling myself to keep the radar up for what people like Yuval Harari think of as a fundamental breakdown of traditional politics. In other words, we could be seeing a large-scale disruption on the left in response to the disruption of the chaos and criminality of Trump and enabling Republicans on the right.

Put another way, it may be a feeling among comparatively well-informed and rational people who believe “the old way” is too timid and under-powered for the threats against decency and logic presented by Trumpism.

I can’t say how real it all is at the moment. But to mangle Gertrude Stein, there’s definitely some kind of there … there.

The wag-nerds on Nate Silver’s 538 podcast have broken down the Democratic field (as of last week) into a small handful of “lanes”. For example, our gal, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand are described as running in “the beer lane”, trumpeting mostly unexciting, traditional values that have satisfied collegial Democrats for decades. By contrast, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, are described as contenders in “the wine lane”, riling up the passions of mostly well-educated (and female) voters. That crowd can also be described as upscale, (in terms of smarts if not money) and extraordinarily upset with the numbskull, mysogynistic antics of the right as any specific policy position.

But then, by way of fine-parsing, 538 suggests a possible candidate like Beto O’Rourke, defies both of those appeals by splitting the difference with a “craft beer lane”. You know, lots of traditional stuff — blue jeans, rock’ n roll, drive through hamburgers, rural Texas, pickup trucks — all whipped together with a thick, rich hipster sauce of “stop the [bleeping] madness!”

As I say, I have no specific favorite in the hunt here 18 months or whatever before the next election. But I’ll do a bit of my own lane handicapping anyway.

In the “Forget About It” lane. Tulsi Gabbard. Too much conspicuous opportunism. Do four years of serious reading and get back to us.

The “Been There, Done That” lane. Joe Biden and Bernie. The Bud Light crowd loves you in Scranton, Joe. I get that. But the game has changed since you were in your prime, and that was 20 years ago. And Bernie: love ya too, man. But 77 is way past the “serve by” date in modern politics. Your job this time around is to keep goosing the actual contenders to keep the fire and faith.

The “A Little Too Cool for School” lane. Cory Booker. Kind of like what I say about people who want to be cops; the fact they want it so bad is the main reason to disqualify them. No human, much less any successful politician from New Jersey, can possibly be as immaculate as Booker purports to be.

The “No, Just No” lane. Kirsten Gillibrand. The creepy bane of the #MeToo movement. Way too many of the obnoxious “beliefs” she needed to play upstate have done a miraculously 180 since elevating to the Senate. Also, for so many reasons too obvious to mention: Michael Bloomberg.

The “If This Was 1956, Then Maybe” lane. Klobuchar. Being a darling of George Will, Republican colleagues and the Wall Street Journal editorial page doesn’t make my pissed-off little heart go pitter-patter. When you can’t quite say you’re in full favor of a medicare access for all on Obamacare I get an even worse case of morbid eye-roll. [*]

The “I Like What Yer Sayin’, Dude. But Yer Style Needs Some Work” lane. Sherrod Brown. Otherwise known as The Most Rumpled Man in the Senate. Unlike Amy delivering Minnesota’s 10 whopping electoral votes, Brown pulling in Ohio would be serious numbers in 2020. Wonk liberals know the guy and like what they hear. But it’s very hard to imagine any dispassionate independent spending 90 seconds listening to him.

The “You’re Checking My Boxes, Now Sell It” lane. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke. Harris has the feel of the front-runner, based on a near perfectly staged roll-out, and she’s got an interesting mix of prosecutorial dagger and pop-culture crede. Warren, while on the cusp of aging-out at 69, has demonstrated the mix of righteous indignation and legislative bona fides that play like sweet music to liberal ears. And O’Rourke has demonstrated a level of energy and charisma above and beyond anyone else out there.

But he’s got to, A: Decide, and B: Convince a whole lot of women like my friend at a dinner party the other night who announced to the crowd, “I’m never voting for another man!”

[*] The early version of this post suggested Klobuchar wasn’t on board with at least a public option into Obamacare, which she is. My mistake. (To many minds “public option” and “medicare access for all” are very nearly the same thing. But she’s being very careful here.)