2016: The In Crowd

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

Pundits are back pedaling so fast on their predictions for the Republican nominee for President that they are bumping into themselves coming forward with new predictions.

There were the “don’t underestimate Michele Bachmann” pundits, the “Sarah Palin must be running because why else would she be doing this” pundits, the “Huckabee has a lock on the Christian right” pundits, and the “(fill in the blank) will surprise a lot of people” pundits.

Standing apart, in a swirling sphere of his own is poor, hapless George Will.  In 2007 Will said that the candidate who had a lock on the Christian right and was the one to watch for the nomination was Sam Brownback, who dropped out after the Iowa Straw Poll.

In 2010, Will said the clear Republican choice to challenge and defeat Barbara Boxer in California was Chuck DeVore who finished third in his party’s primary to Carly Fiorina and Tom Campbell. Boxer went on to handily defeat Fiorina.

This year Will had his act together.  And he knew as early as May.

 “This is the most open scramble on the Republican side since 1940 when Wendell Willkie came out of the woodwork and swept the field.  I think — people are complaining this is not off to a brisk start. I think that’s wrong. I think we know with reasonable certainty that standing up there on the West front of the Capitol on Jan. 20, 2013 will be one of three people: Obama, Pawlenty and Daniels. I think that’s it.”

George Will is the Sports Illustrated cover of political punditry.

I’m not going to claim to be of that caliber.  I’m not going to claim to have any political acumen at all.  But if you look at the trend, you can see who will be a serious contender for at least a day in 2016.

Mayor Bruce In of East Fairmont Oklahoma.  Never heard of him?  Doesn’t matter.  It’s all about the trend.

In 2008, the Republican nominee was John McCain.  Right now the Republican frontrunner is Herman Cain.  Doesn’t take a genius to spot the trend:

McCain – [Mc]Cain – [Ca]In.

Being mayor of East Fairmont isn’t a full time job.  It does pay ten dollars a meeting, but a fellow needs a little something more to sustain himself.  Mayor In is a dentist. And don’t try to trip him up with fancy reporter “gotcha” questions.  He knows all the ways to twist the “the doctor is in” joke.

Is the doctor In?

Yes.

May I see him?

He’s not here.

I thought you said he was In.

He is.

Well then I’d like to see him.

He’s out.

He’s out?  I don’t understand.

What’s there to understand?  In is out.

In is out?

That’s what I said.

And I suppose Black’s white and Wright’s left.

As a matter of fact…

Do I expect the professional pundits to spot this trend and get In on it?  Will won’t.

The Day After

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

It’s been a full day since I gave up the mantle as President of the San Diego Press Club and I’ve had time to reflect and write my memoirs.

It was a crisp morning and I woke feeling tired yet buoyant, as though a weight both physical and psychic had been lifted from my shoulders.  When the dog and I went for our walk, I was struck by the quiet.  No one was clamoring around to get a word with me, take a picture or ask for an opinion.  We walked quickly but I breathed in the fresh air and felt exhilarated. Still, there is a certain sense of a loss of purpose and direction that is both foreign and liberating.

Yes it was odd going out to the car and having to drive myself.  Out of habit I sat in the back seat and when I realized no one was coming to drive I moved somewhat sheepishly to the front.  There were very few phone messages to return and much of the day was spent just gathering up mementos.

The real work of collating my papers will start soon, though much of it is already in order.  I was fairly meticulous through my term in keeping things in a binder.  Twelve meeting agendas with my handwritten notes will provide guidance to some future administration.  Today was for reflecting a little and also looking ahead, searching for a new mission.  The work of fundraising to construct the presidential library shelf will start soon enough.

Pens

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

I always carry a pen.  Always.  OK, not in the shower.  Well, not on the golf course either, but then I have a pencil. My pen is on the bedside table, though there may not be paper there.  But otherwise, always.

Some people call them ink pens, which I always thought was redundant.  But maybe they feel the need to distinguish their pen from the one that encloses pigs or prisoners.

When I was sixteen, my parents gave me a gold Cross pen.  It was the first good pen I ever had and I still have it.  I carried it in my shirt for more than twenty years.  In my shirt, but not in my shirt pocket.  I put my pen in the placket of my shirt, between the second and third buttons.  I never put it in the pocket.  When I used to wear ties, the tie would cover up the pen.  On one of our trips to Thailand, I had dress shirts made for myself, and I had them made without a pocket.

One day when I lived in Portland Oregon I was running across the street in the rain and the pen fell out of my shirt and I stepped on it.  I didn’t know it had fallen, but I felt it when I stepped on it.  Crushed it pretty badly and it wouldn’t turn to retract or extend the point of the pen.

Fortunately, when I was best man at a friend’s wedding he had given me a Parker pen and pencil set with my name engraved on the barrels.  So I replaced the Cross with the pen from the set.  Never really used the pencil.  I carried that pen for several years until one day I dropped it in the car and it wedged into that little crevice between the driver’s seat and the console, next to the railings that move the seat back and forth.  It’s impossible for me to get my fingers down there and still keep them attached to my hand.  I tried lying on the floor in the back seat and reaching under the seat and I could touch the pen but I couldn’t move it.  So I took a coat hanger and went fishing for it.  I got the pen out but managed to scratch up the finish of the pen pretty badly.

Since it was as much a keepsake as it was a pen I put it in the drawer so it wouldn’t get any more scarred than it already was, and I bought a Waterman pen.

I carried this pen until about a year ago when it simply disappeared one day.  It wasn’t on the dresser, the bedside table or in my shirt.  Those are the only places a pen belongs and it wasn’t in any of them.  After I looked where it should have been, I looked where it should not have been; one or two of which I should not have been either.  It was nowhere to be found.

I was a little upset, but I was more angry than anything.  Obviously I don’t lose things.  I particularly do not lose pens.  But I couldn’t find it and I had to have a pen so I bought another Parker.

Then one day Cheryl took the grill off the front of the refrigerator to vacuum the lint out from in under it, and out came my Waterman pen.  A little dusty but none the worse for the experience.   My four pens

So now I have them all; the four pens of my life.  At least the past forty-four years of my life – and counting.

You might think that since I always have a pen that I do a lot of writing.  Aside from taking notes on phone conversations and signing birthday cards and credit card receipts, I probably don’t use a pen for much.  I don’t remember the last time I used my pen to write a letter.  I learned to compose my thoughts at the typewriter when I was in journalism school and have been writing at a keyboard ever since.

And I imagine the pen’s days are numbered.  It will go the way of the typewriter, the slide rule, 45’s, film and VHS tape; replaced by the iSomething.

It is increasingly difficult to find refills for my pen.  Drug store clerks look at you quizzically if you ask for a pen refill.  Even some stationery stores don’t carry them though you would think that if anyone had a vested interest in selling ink it would be the store that sells paper.

Which makes me wonder how much longer the ink supply can last anyway?  I suspect there will come a day when it’s just not economical to drill for ink any more.  When it was just us pen users who needed ink the supply seemed endless.  But then came the typewriter, printing press, adding machine and now every house probably has a printer next to its computer.  That’s an enormous amount of ink coming out of the ground.

When they sink an ink drill into the ground the first ink to come up is red. It is closest to the surface. But since it is only used by teachers and accountants there is not much demand for red ink so the drillers usually press on.  No one is exactly sure why ink changes color deeper into the earth, though it’s obvious that it does.  Soon, the ink turns dark blue.  There is a gigantic pool of blue ink.

Deeper still is the black ink. It is the oldest ink and the most difficult to bring to the surface. And it is used for just about everything.  I use black ink in my pen.  Always have.

I’ve had people try to tell me that you can’t drill for ink, but those people have obviously never heard of an ink well.

Friends

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

It could have been last weekend. I went to a movie and then sat in the parking lot and stared out the window. “I think I know all those people,” I thought.
But it wasn’t last weekend. It was 1983 and the movie was “The Big Chill.”

The Big ChillLast weekend was a Big Chill weekend, without Kevin Costner. Costner was the character who committed suicide and brought the friends together for his funeral, though he and the flashback scenes to their anti-war days at the University of Michigan were cut from the movie. (I did stop at the cemetery when I got to my little hometown and believe me when I say that unless you donate huge sums to your alma mater you don’t want to see your last name engraved in granite.)

So there we were, friends from high school and college together again, and I was right. I do know all those people.

Granted, it’s been forty years and maybe some of us have changed, just a little.

Kevin Kline’s character, the successful businessman, is retired. His success turned him conservative, so at least while he was there we didn’t discuss much politics.

The pot, pills and cocaine have been replaced by alcohol.

I often come away regretting more what I didn’t say than what I did. Though perhaps it’s safer that way.

The William Hurt character has the cabin that Costner started on “the property” and, as in the movie, we drove out to see it and spent a fine afternoon there. Looking out at the trees and grass I understood immediately why Hurt liked it there and I heard my inner Jeff Goldblum say “that’s what’s great about the outdoors. It’s one giant toilet.”

The JoBeth Williams married a man who wasn’t in our school but he fits in perfectly and could have been in the neighborhood if only geography hadn’t gotten in the way.

When it was time to get back to the city to catch my flight home, there was a part of me that wanted to say “we took a secret vote. We’re not leaving. We’re never leaving.”

But I did leave. Whether I went away is another question altogether.

It was quite a weekend. I am glad I went to The Big Chill in 1983. The other choice was “Poltergeist.”

Car

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

Let’s just get this out there right up front:  I drive an old car.  Not one of those highly polished, fully refurbished, driven-only-in-parades old cars.  This is just a car that is old.

How old?  It has a hole in the driver’s door where you can poke in a key and turn it to unlock the door.  There are no buttons on the key chain that make the lights flash, the horn honk, the car chirp and the doors open.  There’s no USB port, iPod connection or LED screen showing me what I’m hitting when I back up.  The spot where the cigarette lighter is supposed to be has a cigarette lighter.  It doesn’t have a CD player; it has a cassette player.  And I have a cassette.  A couple of them in fact, because I have a cassette player.  No soothing voice tells me where I’m going or whether I’ve taken a wrong turn.  The only voice I hear when I drive is Ira Glass, unless I’m talking to myself (which happens more often than it probably ought to).

There was a period of time when mine was the only voice I heard in the car.  The motor that moved the antenna up and down broke and radio was mostly static.  I’ve heard myself talk and frankly I’m not that interesting so I looked in to getting the antenna fixed.  They wanted three hundred dollars.  So I went to a parts store and bought a generic antenna.  It gets a clear radio signal, but it doesn’t go up and down.  It also doesn’t quite fit on the rear left fender.  I put it up but after driving a few blocks down the street it’s fallen over and is horizontal, pointing out like a curb feeler. Except that instead of guiding me to park the ideal distance from the curb it’s poking the parking meter in the quarter slot.

The car needed a little help studying for its smog test and I began wondering if its parts weren’t worth more than the car.  I drive a little slower past dealerships now, looking at gleaming metal and sparkling glass and wondering what it would be like to have a car that gets noticed for all the right reasons.  Just a couple of weeks ago my old car turned 200,000 miles but its mechanic assures me it has plenty of life left in it so I’ve decided to drive it until it stops.  I’m not keeping it because I am at all sentimental about it. The car doesn’t have a cute name, hasn’t been waxed in years and is washed only when I can no longer see out the windshield. So if I go out tomorrow and it stops in the middle of an intersection, I’ll push it to the curb, slip the house key off the ring, take the golf clubs from the trunk and walk away.

Then I’ll be the owner of a car that isn’t an embarrassment to me.  Probably.  It also won’t be paid for.  I don’t remember the last time I made car payments, but I’m pretty sure my feeling toward them has something to do with why I drive an old car.

Fashion Advice

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

There’s a guy I often see in the morning when the dogs take me for a walk.  He wears a blue t-shirt, work boots, black socks, denim shorts and clip-on suspenders.  The suspenders just sort of top it off.  Big, wide suspenders clipped to his shorts. He’s a short, round little man and in a couple months he could trade them in for red suspenders and get a job at any department store on earth, except that he rarely says anything more than “hello” and even that only grudgingly.

Looking at him as he came down the street this morning I couldn’t help but wonder, “does he think that’s a good look?”

I, on the other hand, wore my usual morning walk uniform — running shoes in which I’ve never run, nylon warm up pants and a white t-shirt with some sort of logo on it.

One of the advantages and disadvantages of a lifetime in television news is a large collection of free t-shirts and caps. Advantage because I haven’t had to buy a t-shirt in a long time, maybe ever. And disadvantage because many of them have dates on them.

Today’s shirt, for instance, was “ABC News – The Vote 2004” – from either the Democratic convention that nominated Kerry and Edwards in Boston or the Republican convention that re-nominated Bush and Cheney in New York.  I was at both and don’t recall where the shirt came from.  I do remember coming away from New York firmly convinced that there was no way in hell those two were going to get re-elected.  It was the same feeling I had four years earlier in Philadelphia as we watched waves of henna-headed women stand beneath the podium and chant “Bush and Dick.”

The t-shirt drawer is pretty full.  And there’s a stack of baseball caps in the closet at least three feet high.  I look at that stuff and I’m sometimes reminded of the farmers where I grew up.  No farmer in America has ever bought a cap.  And not many bought jackets.  The joke was, “why don’t farmers wear tennis shoes?” “Because seed corn companies don’t give them away.”

So, now as I walk down the street, anyone who bothers to notice knows my t-shirt is seven years old. Not the worst fashion statement and not even the oldest piece of clothing I own.  There’s a sweater from the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, for instance.  It’s been well cared for and is in pretty good shape.  Invariably when I wear it, someone will look at the logo and say “I wasn’t even born then.”

But I’m ready for them. “This ‘old’ sweater,”   I point out “is from the U.S. Open where Tom Watson made what’s no doubt the most famous golf shot in the history of the Open, the iconic chip shot from the rough behind the 17th green for birdie to win the championship and defeat Jack Nicklaus.  And I was there.  Saw it with my own two aging eyes.  And, because photo credentials were easier to get in those days, have the picture to prove it.”

They invariably look at me, shrug and say “yeah, well it still kinda fits.”

Smart ass kids.

Blackout

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

I learned a lot during a power blackout here in San Diego the other day.  The whole county, parts of other counties and part of Mexico were without electricity.  “Plunged into darkness” as the newspapers would have you believe.  Truth is, the darkness came at about the same rate it usually does, it just wasn’t artificially supplemented.

The blackout started in the afternoon long before dark set in and the neighborhood parties got going and it was informative to watch people try to get home.  All the stop lights were out and cars were backed up blocks long all over the city.  But at least on the city streets I was on, people were patiently waiting their turn.  No horns and shouts, no cars sneaking across the intersection to try to get ahead of others.  Everyone seemed to know that each car had a right to go across the intersection and everyone let them get there.

And it got me thinking.  Maybe stop lights aren’t such a good idea.  Almost everyone seems to run the yellow lights, if not the red. If there’s no light, and no stop sign, people seem to do pretty well at being cooperative.  I know, I know, it was slow and cumbersome.  But in due time everyone got where they were going.

It was civilized and considerate.  Everyone agreed without argument; without even discussion. But more than traffic control, I’m wondering  what can we do to get a blackout on Capitol Hill?

Dining

~ Lee Swanson ~ 3 Comments

Something’s happened at the restaurant.  I keep seeing people look through the menu, then turn to their server and say “I’ll do the black linguine.”

Do the black linguine?  Really?  Not order, not eat?  Do?  Given the connotations of the word, watching someone at your table do the black linguine risks your appetite, not to mention the restaurant’s reputation and liquor license.

Where did that come from?  What happened to “I’ll have the black linguine,” or just “the black linguine please.”  But do?  Generally speaking, the meal should be done by the time it gets to the table, shouldn’t it?

That’s just the most recent of the many annoying things people say at restaurants.  Why do servers come by and look at your nearly empty plate and ask “are you still working on that?”

“Actually, no, I’m not working on it at all.  I’m eating it.”

I worry that the question may become “are you still doing that?”

And who thought it would be a good idea for the server to introduce himself to the patrons. “Hello, I’m Donald. I’ll be your server.”

“Hi Donald, I’m Lee.  Want to have a seat?  Let’s get to know each other. Can I read your screenplay?”

What am I supposed to do with that information?  Can I stand up and call to him across the room?  “Donald, oh Donald, be a dear and bring more scotch over here.”

But the one that aggravates me most is when they come to clear your table and decide they have to do play-by-play on your eating habits.  “Wow, you really cleaned that up.” Or “you didn’t leave anything on that plate did you?”

Is there something wrong with eating all the food I’m paying for?  “Were you planning to serve the leftovers to someone else?  Just take the plate and go away……Donald.”

Wining

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

You can tell a lot with a bottle of wine.  Not as much as you can tell after a bottle of wine, but close.

Say, for instance, you’re invited to someone’s house for the evening.  It’s the expected and accepted practice to bring a bottle of wine.  The expected and accepted reaction is to raise one eyebrow, smile quietly and say “well, thank you very much.”  This generally means that even though you don’t know wine from wine vinegar you need to pretend to know.

Some people see it as a gift and put in on a shelf in the corner.  That’s the last it will be seen.  These people we’ll call Receivers.  Others see it as a contribution to the evening and open the bottle and pour it.  They are Sharers.

A Receiver can become a Sharer, but not in the same evening.  Not until the next time he has a party, when he brings out the wine you brought him last time and shares it.  A Sharer, on the other hand, cannot become a Receiver, unless inundated with wine from guests at the party.

I’m not about to pass judgment on which is the appropriate response.  The problem, if there is one, comes when a Sharer gives a bottle to a Receiver.  The Sharer spends the evening walking nonchalantly in and out of the kitchen looking for the wine bottle he carefully selected and wondering why it isn’t open yet.  If he’s particularly bold, he will move the bottle out of the corner and put it next to the box wine that is being served.

The Receiver, on the other hand, figures that if the Sharer wanted to taste the wine he would have left it at home and drunk it on his own time.  It was given to the Receiver to do as he pleases and it pleases him to open it when he can have more than five drops in the bottom of a glass after passing it around to everyone else in the room.  Or he’ll take it to make a good impression at someone else’s party.  The Receiver, after all, usually chooses wine by the color of the label.

By the way, that’s also the extent of what I know about wine. And that’s why I’m a Sharer when it comes to wine. I’ve seen people snort, swirl, squint, swish and spit wine trying to decide if it is worthy of walking around with while they mingle. Whether they approve or disapprove, it all tastes disturbingly like wine.

Now if you want to talk single malt scotch or brandy, we can have an intelligent conversation.  I know, brandy is just wine on steroids, but in the process it can turn into a nice grownup beverage.  And if you drop by with one of those bottles and expect to have a glass or two, well, you better bring a bottle for yourself.