Best front page EVERWe're attacking them from multiple fronts today:
- As briefly noted yesterday betwixt paroxysms of ecstasy, the Mets landed Minnesota ace and certified B.P.I.B. (Best Pitcher in Baseball) Johan Santana for a couple of beers and a six-foot sub; all that's left is to work out a long-term extension with the ace in the 6 year, $150 million range, a step considered by most observers to be a fait accompli.
How did this happen? After all, when the Santana sweepstakes opened last fall, the clear front-runners were the Yankees and Red Sox, the only teams with both the top-flight, low-pay prospects Minnesota craved, and the pockets deep enough to swallow the ace's exorbitant salary demands. The Mets' bid - a package pretty near identical to what the Twins ultimately accepted, incidentally - was considered quixotic at best, a desperate effort by GM Omar Minaya to appease a fan base shell-shocked by the team's disastrous late-season collapse. So why, oh why, did Minnesota GM Bill Smith end up shipping off the B.P.I.B. for Phil Humber, Kevin Mulvey, Deolis Guerra, and Carlos Gomez? Easy: hubris, humility, stupidity, and persistence.
The hubris is that of the Boston Red Sox, the incumbent World Series champs who elected to stand pat when presented with the opportunity to roll out the Voltron of pitching staffs against, say, the Yankees in a September set in the Bronx. The humility is that of said Yankees, whose new ownership mouthpiece, Hank Steinbrenner, was obviously soiling himself at the prospect of adding Santana to the family trophy case. Cooler heads prevailed though, with GM Brian Cashman recognizing that the Sox were only in it to drive up the price for the Bombers, who decided to hang onto prize pitching prospect Phil Hughes and save the $150 million for a rainy day. The stupidity is that of Bill Smith, who should have snatched the Hughes-Melky Cabrera deal when it was still on the table back in December. Instead he went for the slow play, betting that either the Yankees (probably) or the Red Sox would ultimately panic and offer him a smorgasbord of ready-to-go young impact players. Contrary to expectations, both teams maintained discipline, and Santana himself, wanting the situation resolved before spring training, forced Smith's hand by threatening to invoke his no-trade clause and ride out the season to free agency - meaning Santana walks a free man after the '08 World Series, and the Twins get zilch. Smith put out an RFP for last, best offers and the Yankees passed, the Red Sox low-balled, and the Mets trotted out a farm-system clearing deal (well, all except for top OF prospect Fernando Martinez). Indeed, it is the Mets' persistence that sealed the deal, hanging in when everyone said they were D.O.A. Omar Minaya's faith was ultimately rewarded, and he managed to spin four ciphers into the B.P.I.B.
- 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 Rudolph Giuliani 9/11 9/11, after 9/11 9/11 Senator John McCain in Florida 9/11. Giuliani will now throw his 9/11 behind McCain.
Allow me to translate: Rudolph Giuliani, the first politician to decide on a last stand before he made a first, saw his strategy of skipping out on Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina fizzle as transplanted Northeasterners failed to deliver the Sunshine State into his clutches. A victory probably would have catapulted Rudy back into the front-runner mix; unfortunately Florida Republicans were unwilling to cast their lot with a candidate a) who pulled a national disappearing act, and b) whose track record, personal history, and refusal to prostrate himself completely before the Religious Right (he refused to take a hard line against abortion; Pat Robertson endorsed him anyway - nice work douchebag) suggested that he was fundamentally out of sync with the G.O.P. mainstream.
Rudy's presidential run exposed his uncomfortable relationship with national Republicans. Throughout his career as mayor, he was a convenient mascot: first as the no-guff crime-fighter who cleaned up New York City single-handedly (implicitly saving it from decades of soft-headed, soft-on-crime liberalism), then as the Churchill-esque figure of 9/11. And while he remained in New York, he was useful: as a connection to New York's money spigot, as a firewall against Hillary Clinton (though he eventually dropped out of the 2000 Senate race), and as a credible backer of the Bush Administration's post-9/11 policies. It was possible to ignore his inconvenient past: his contorted family life, his stands on abortion and gay rights, his endorsement of Mario Cuomo over George Pataki in 1994, his cronyism (after all, he nearly shoehorned Bernard Kerik into Bush's cabinet), and his pre-9/11 security failures (placing the Emergency Command Center at a known terrorist target, failing to upgrade Fire Department radios, et cetera). Once he decided to seek the G.O.P. nomination, however, the fig leaf that distance and sentimentality afforded him fell away, and Republicans discovered that he was basically just a very angry RINO with a predilection for pissing liberals off (a quality whose appeal to hard-core conservatives cannot be understated).
The truly bizarre thing about Giuliani's decline is how it happened. Sure, he was always kind of a long shot to pull of the whole shebang, even when he led in the (national) polls, but the campaign's decision to decamp to Florida and cede a significant chunk of media attention and, ultimately, momentum to his opponents always struck me as bordering on suicidal. If anything it recalled Giuliani's infamous decision to attend Opening Day at Yankee Stadium in 2000 instead of campaigning against Hillary Clinton - a moment when everyone pretty much figured out that Rudy's heart wasn't in the race. Perhaps, then, his heart wasn't exactly in this one either. Or his campaign, led by what-have-you-done-for-me-lately poster boy Michael DuHaime, was run by idiots who couldn't even hold onto the enormous leads the candidate built in his own backyard.
I won't be sorry to see Giuliani go: he struck me as an extension of the present administration, single-handedly capable of continuing the official culture of fear-mongering, secrecy, and recrimination - a task President Bush at least required some assistance with. Certainly, Rudy presided over a great many positive changes for New York - particularly the decline in the crime rate (to whom, or what, the credit for that should belong is still a matter for debate); he undoubtedly left our greatest city better than he found it. However, America is not New York City and nor is Baghdad merely a dangerous neighborhood. These times call for a diplomatic hand, capable of consensus building both here at home and especially abroad, where the United States' reputation has been thoroughly soiled by unilateralism and misadventure. Giuliani, a famously dictatorial figure, is precisely the wrong man for the job.
- I am sorrier to note the exit of John Edwards from the presidential race. In many respects I cannot abide Edwards: his protectionist, anti-globalization economic stances typically represented wooden nickels for working Americans; he might as well have told them that he and he alone could prevent the sun from rising in the east tomorrow. However, he was sincere in his concern regarding the plight of impoverished Americans - the existence of whom is itself disgustingly incongruous with our present plenty. Barack Obama summed up Edwards' contribution to the race best: "At a time when our politics is too focused on who's up and who's down, he made a nation focus again on who matters -- the New Orleans child without a home, the West Virginia miner without a job, the families who live in that other America that is not seen or heard or talked about by our leaders in Washington." Both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton have pledged to make poverty a central issue in their campaigns; I hope that one of them has the opportunity to make it a focus of their administration.
