Panic in Year Zero

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In Praise of Bad Debates
2008-04-20 15:27:00
I guess I'm a little late to the table on this, but I didn't actually see the ABC Democratic presidential debate the other night. I saw plenty of snippets and highlights, so I have a pretty good idea what transpired, but I had other plans which were, I think it's fair to say, infinitely more attractive than watching Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lock horns for the 237th time.Anyway, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos have been pilloried ever since for the gotcha quality of the questions they asked the two Democratic contenders. One after another, the veteran newsreader and his diminutive sidekick inquired about each of the mini-controversies that have recently plagued the campaign. Obama seemed to get the worst of it, which greatly offended his blogosphere cheerleaders, but he's the frontrunner now, and that's the way these things go. Though Clinton did respond to pointed questions about her honesty, Obama had to fend off queries about his supposed elitism, his rel...
More About: Debates , Praise

Optimism Saturday
2008-04-19 15:01:00
I'm going to be optimistic this morning. I don't feel this way very often, but we've got clear skies, no deadlines for another 48 hours, and only three days left before we're finally done with the Pennsylvania primary. Not only that, but one year from today, George W. Bush will be in permanent Texas exile, dictating his straight-to-the-bargain-rack memoirs to a ghost writer who knows how to conjugate verbs.But really, the thing that has me temporarily looking to the future with relatively less dread than usual is something a friend told me the other day. She reminded me that sixteen years ago, right around this time of the year, H. Ross Perot was the frontrunner in the race for President of the United States. Her point, of course, was that if old, batty Ross and his cornpone jeremiads could reach top of the charts back in 1992, then we should all know enough to ignore springtime presidential horserace polls.I mention this because John McCain, presumptive nominee of Mr. Bush...
More About: Saturday , Optimism

You Don't Need a Weatherman...
2008-04-18 14:34:00
On a Tuesday morning a few years ago, the New York Times published an article on Bill Ayers, a one-time radical who had just produced a memoir about his time in the Weather Underground. You probably don't remember the article. But you definitely remember the date it appeared.It was September 11, 2001.This was, to say the least, just about the worst possible moment for someone to say, as Ayers did, that he had no regrets about setting a bomb that blew up in the Pentagon. Ayers, of course, could hardly have known what would transpire the morning the article hit the newsstands. Nor, it must be pointed out, has Ayers ever been accused of detonating an explosion that killed or seriously wounded anyone. Still, his timing obviously could have been better.In the six years and seven months that have passed since copies of the Ayers article were reduced to dust in the rubble of the World Trade Center, the former Weatherman has hardly attained the status of a household name. But that probably...

The First Catholic President
2008-04-17 14:54:00
Here's something you can try if you enjoy being offended. Go to Google and punch up "first Catholic president". You will be rewarded with a listing of websites, half of which refer to George W. Bush.Now I know some people used to call Bill Clinton America's first black president, and that was kind of stupid, but at least nobody had to pass over an actual African American chief executive in order to make that claim. And should Barack Obama win the battle for the White House in 2008, nobody will ever again refer to Clinton in that manner.But we did actually have a Catholic president. His name was John F. Kennedy. He was well known, quite popular, and his Catholicism became something of an issue during the 1960 election. His face appears on the half dollar coin even today, so it's not like anyone could really forget about him.Maybe not, but last Sunday, with Pope Benedict XVI coming to America (yeah, I had to look up his name, too) some guy named Daniel Burke wrote the followi...
More About: President

The Straight Talkin' Flim Flam Man
2008-04-16 14:57:00
Is it too late to propose a New Year's resolution? It took me three and a half months, but I finally have one. By the end of the current decade, I am going to play quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals. You may scoff, but I've got it all figured out. First, I am going to read every book ever written by, about, and for NFL quarterbacks. I'll take the best advice from each and put it together to mold myself into the perfect signal caller. Then I'll hit the workout room for at least four hours a day, maximizing my strength and conditioning. I will also pick up the latest version of the John Madden video game, which will help me to hone my reflexes and test my strategy.Finally, I'll wait for the football fairy to sprinkle some pixie dust on me and I'll be good to go.At this point, you're probably wondering if I've been sampling some of the local mushrooms, but I can promise you I've been drug free since…well, since long after the statute of limitations expired. Besides...
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Juicy Libel?
2008-04-15 15:03:00
I learned something today. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but the word is out. I learned that a number of women on college campuses across America are sluts, whores, and a few other nouns that I choose not to repeat. Further, I discovered their names, what university they attended, and what sorority they pledged.The story of JuicyCampus.com is no longer new, but it takes a while for contemporary cultural phenomena to reach my desk these days. I am aware of MySpace and Facebook, of course, but I have only visited one of them a couple of times. I don't remember which one; I have an account there because my students once set up a page for me and I wanted to check it out. Ever since then, I occasionally get requests from people I may or may not know asking me to be their friend. I leave these queries unanswered, which may be a major breach of etiquette and will probably earn me a label as aloof or thoughtless, but I really don't care. It is, I've learned over the y...

It Could Happen to Yoo
2008-04-14 10:58:00
Very little time today, so I must make it short.According to InsideHigherEd.com, a civil liberties group is lobbying the University of California to expel John Yoo, a tenured law professor who, while working in the Bush administration, wrote memos justifying the use of torture against suspected terrorists. The American Freedom Campaign argues that "Yoo should not only be disqualified from ever serving in government again, but he should also be prohibited from spreading his distorted view of the law and the role of lawyers to young law students. He must be fired."This is, quite simply, a terrible idea. I say this not to defend Yoo, who, in a just world, would at least be investigated by a war crimes tribunal, if not shipped off to The Hague for trial before the World Court. But his actions did not take place in his capacity as a Berkeley law professor, nor is there any evidence of related misconduct occurring on the job.Firing John Yoo would set a terrible precedent. If universit...

Parsing Obama's Words
2008-04-13 15:44:00
Let's leave aside for this morning the political fallout from Barack Obama's comments on the bitterness of working class Pennsylvanians. Instead, let's approach it from a different angle. To what extent is Senator Obama speaking the truth?You could scroll town to read his words, but I'll go ahead and re-post them here. Referring to the residents of small towns where "jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama says:"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."Taken as a whole, it's not exactly a shocking statement. The historical record is littered with stories of cultures that resorted to violence and xenophobia in reaction to economic deprivation and hopelessness. The (perhaps too pat) story that every American schoolchild learns about the rise of Adolf Hitler begins with th...
More About: Words

Playing to Your Weakness: Barack Obama's Turn
2008-04-12 15:03:00
I have a theory. Well, it's not my theory exactly; others have said more or less the same thing. Also, I may have mentioned it previously on this blog. Anyway, here it is: politicians develop certain images, exaggerated summaries of their strong and weak points. They tend to get themselves into trouble when they say or do something that plays into—and emphasizes—the fears and concerns that voters already have about them. Thus, what might be a mild distraction for one candidate could become a devastating blow for another.Throughout history, presidential debates have provided a wealth of such moments. In the very first televised debate between Democratic and Republican nominees, John F. Kennedy triumphed over Richard Nixon more on style than substance. Even today, people remember that radio listeners thought Nixon had won, while TV viewers gave the victory to Kennedy. This, it turns out, is an exaggeration, but it is clear that Kennedy won the battle of images. Smartly dressed in...
More About: Barack , Turn

Moral Equivalence
2008-04-11 14:08:00
Their country was under attack. On one quiet morning in the late summer, men flew airplanes into their cities and thousands died. These men came from a faraway land and the dead had done nothing to invite their wrath. Most of those who perished were apolitical, simply average people carrying out the daily rituals of their lives, unaware that this morning would be their last.The country's leaders were desperate. They had no idea where the next attack was coming from or how bad it would be. They viewed the men in the airplanes as vicious enemies, unworthy of humane consideration. They wanted to save their people from further fear and agony.In one of their prisons sat a young man who had worked with the attackers, helping them to plan and execute their assault. Maybe he knew something. Maybe he could provide some detail that would help them ward off the next attack. Maybe if they could break him, they could save hundreds or even thousands of their fellow citizens. Maybe they...
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Office Doors and Free Speech
2008-04-10 15:13:00
There are two types of college professors: those who post cartoons and slogans on their office doors, and those who do not. I fall into the latter category, though I generally have no problem with my colleagues who decorate their academic portals with pithy observations from "Dilbert" or "Ziggy" or even some hack editorial cartoonist. I simply prefer not to have my students know too much about me, other than what I choose to present in class. More important, I don’t want to have crowds milling around my office chattering and otherwise interrupting my deep intellectual reveries ("Why did I draft Pedro Martínez when Daisuke was still on the board?").For the most part, office decorations fall safely into First Amendment territory. I say this guardedly, however, since I believe that a college campus is not the equivalent of the public square and that office doors are state property (we're assuming non-private institutions here, since the argument is constitutional). I think it is po...
More About: Office , Free , Free Speech , Speech , Doors

Blast From the Past
2008-04-09 15:01:00
My day job has the best of me at the moment, so I've reached into the archives (i.e., stuff I wrote before I had a blog) to see what I can post. The following is from 2002. In its defense, the ACLU finally found its voice a year or two after this was written, but its unwillingness to launch a full-throated protest during the sensitive period immediately post-9/11 was costly to them and to the nation. They--and we--have been playing catch-up ever since. The more depressing thing about re-reading what I wrote six years ago is how many of the outrages I mention are now essentially facts of life in Bush's America. And even I didn't anticipate back then that my country would add its name to the roster of those who torture. I wonder how many more years it will be before we right ourselves.Anyway, here are my thoughts from the summer of '02:I love the American Civil Liberties Union. I have been a member of the ACLU, on and off, for a quarter century. No organization in the Unite...
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Absolut Stupidity
2008-04-08 15:09:00
If you're over 30, you can probably remember a time when CNN was a legitimate news organization. Even in its heyday, of course, it could be soft: Larry King has held down a position there since the 1980s. But first and foremost, Ted Turner's Atlanta franchise took news gathering and reporting seriously. When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, the network had reporters on the ground in Baghdad providing first-hand accounts, with pictures, of the initial U.S. bombing of the city. In just fifteen years, CNN became the go-to station whenever a national crisis occurred.During this period, Turner Broadcasting created a companion station, CNN Headline News, meant to provide a television version of the news radio outlets that had become so popular in many of the nation's largest cities. Every half hour, the station would update the top stories, and follow that with sports, entertainment, and human interest features. It was not a channel you'd care to watch for more than an hour...
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Generation Gap
2008-04-07 14:50:00
Defining and pigeonholing generations can be fun as long as you don't take it too seriously. Pop psychologists regularly publish books and articles explaining how the diverse experiences of millions of Americans can be neatly summarized by the era in which they grew up. Thus, you have the Greatest (or G.I.) Generation , the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation Jones, Generation X, and the Millennials. Ever since John F. Kennedy, at 43 years old, captured the White House in 1960, the presidency has been dominated first by the G.I.s (JFK through Bush the First) and more recently by the Boomers (Clinton and Bush the Second). If anything, this reality should give pause to anyone who seeks to explain presidential behavior and success in terms of generational values. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter exhibited none of the boldness of Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush's callow recklessness had little in common with Bill Clinton's timid triangulation.Still, t...

Taking the Week Off
2008-04-06 15:21:00
Now that it's Sunday, I can tell you that I decided to take last week off. I didn't miss work, or stop bathing, or anything stupid like that. Instead, I (mostly) swore off the 2008 presidential campaign. I blogged about it, of course, but I generally avoided watching the cable news networks or checking out the more political websites. Old habits die hard, so I didn't exactly go cold turkey, but I came closer than I have in at least a couple of years.In short, I spent the past week living the life of a typical American.This wasn't something I planned. I don't want to sound like one of those annoying, self-important yuppies who annually observe "Turn Off Your TV Week " and then brag about it to anyone who will listen. I just got fed up. I detest manufactured political news and that's about all there is out there right now. Desperate for something to talk about, the various anchors and their predictable lineup of talking heads are left to speculate on the earth-shattering importan...
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Exposing the Myth of the "PC University"
2008-04-05 15:09:00
The beauty of the right-wing lie is that once it works its way into the national bloodstream there is virtually nothing that can be done to banish it. Even today, in the face of a mountain of contradictory evidence, millions of our fellow citizens believe not only that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden collaborated on the 9/11 attacks, but that at least some of the al Qaeda hijackers held Iraqi passports. Gullible Americans express fears that Barack Obama secretly pledges loyalty to radical Islam and intends to destroy the United States from within. About one in every fifty cars you pass on the interstate carries someone who is convinced that Bill Clinton is a rapist or that his wife is a murderer. Ours is a nation of conspiracy theorists and the far right has exploited that fact with enormous success.In my business, higher education, the most persistent lie involves the prevalence of ideological—that is, liberal—brainwashing on college campuses. From the basic, but largel...
More About: University , Myth

It Was Forty Years Ago Today
2008-04-04 14:46:00
I was sitting in my elementary school classroom when the campus intercom brought word that John F. Kennedy had been cut down in Dallas. I was just waking up and coming to breakfast five years later when the Today Show informed me that Bobby had also been murdered. I was in a cab on the way to the airport when the driver mentioned that the space shuttle Challenger had just exploded. And on 9/11, I was headed to work and happened to flip on the radio, only to hear Peter Jennings' voice on what should have been a music station.But I have no lasting memory of where I was or what I was doing when I first learned about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I understood that Dr. King's death was a major news story and I knew him to be a good man fighting on the right side of history. From my thoroughly Yankee vantage point, however, the civil rights movement was something that was happening "down there" in the South, a hopelessly backward region made up of inexplicably vi...
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End the Tyranny of Caucuses!
2008-04-03 14:04:00
Let's look ahead to November's general election and assume, as is now likely, that Barack Obama wins the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. But let's also make one further assumption: Obama loses to John McCain and the Democrats blow their best chance to recapture the White House in twelve years. Be honest: it could happen. The polls are pretty much dead even right now, and the Republicans have an undeniable Electoral College advantage.I'm not predicting an Obama defeat, you understand. Obviously, unfavorable economic news on top of foreign policy failure typically bodes poorly for the incumbent party and its nominee. And John McCain is perceived by many as an old guy who knows less about economics than the average eBay bidder. Plus, Obama is eloquent, inspiring, he's the choice of a new generation (or was that Pepsi?), etc., etc., etc.Still, the scenario by which Obama loses remains fairly easy to envision, even without a new and devastating terrorist attack. While t...
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Twilight of the Super Delegates
2008-04-02 14:25:00
Whatever happens between now and November, the 2008 election will almost certainly end the era of the Super Delegate. Back in the 1970s, the average voter did not consider it her birthright to choose each party's presidential nominee. In 1972, the Democrats allowed their selection process to be dominated by primary elections for the first time. Their reward was a 49-state defeat, with George McGovern losing to Richard Nixon in a landslide of historic proportions. When the party, appropriately chastened, decided to return at least some of the power to bosses and insiders, almost nobody complained.The Democrats added the Super Delegates , political officeholders and party officials, as a check against the sort of ideological, populist uprising that gave McGovern the nomination. At the time, the press, pundits, and even most of the attentive public considered this a reasonable decision. Parties are in the business of winning elections, and if that means rolling back popular sovereignty...
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Bill's Chill Pill
2008-04-01 15:03:00
Bill Clinton, invoking the slang of his 1990s heyday, told Democrats last week to "chill". Everything, he said, would be all right regardless of how the party's current primary campaign ultimately unfolded. Clinton obviously speaks from a biased perspective—he wants to silence those who insist his wife's perseverance is helping the GOP—but he also understands the dynamics of politics better than most of his peers.He knows, first and foremost, that this has not been an especially bitter campaign. Nobody has crossed a line from which they cannot retreat. Either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could endorse the other without having any truly nasty sound bites thrown back in their faces. As I believe I've mentioned before, George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan's supply side tax proposals "voodoo economics" back in 1980, yet still ran victoriously as the Gipper's vice presidential running mate. No putdown that memorable has been spoken by either Democratic contender in 2008.Peop...
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Anybody But Gore
2008-03-31 14:12:00
We need a fifty-first state and we need it now. It doesn’t matter how we do it. Add Puerto Rico or Guam, take on Saskatchewan, or buy Guadeloupe from the French. Carve West Virginia in half and create the state of East West Virginia. Annex the Moon and give it three electoral votes. I don't care as long as someone promises to hold a primary election next week. Because really, if we have to wait three more weeks for Pennsylvania to go to the polls, we're all going to go crazy.The best evidence of this impending lunacy is the suggestion, which has received a staggering amount of airtime this week, that the Democrats should simply abandon both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and ask Al Gore to accept their presidential nomination. Al Gore! The man has already won a Nobel, an Oscar, a Grammy, and probably the Publishers' Clearinghouse grand prize. And now we want to give him the keys to the White House? Let's just award him the Stanley Cup while we're at it.Seriously, though, t...

When Cynics Fall in Love
2008-03-30 15:54:00
Political reporters are among the most cynical people on the planet. They have to be. Their careers consist largely of parsing the self-serving words of preternaturally ambitious politicians who lie without embarrassment. They watch ideologies blur and positions change as even the most respectable public servants calculate which positions will help them secure re-election. Too often, Washington journalists find themselves covering powerful men and women whose venality, ignorance, and bigotry can never be fully revealed to their constituents, who, in most cases, would simply accuse the messenger of partisan bias anyhow.Astute observers of the political scene often accuse the D.C. press corps of treating government and serious public policy choices as a game, emphasizing winners and losers rather than the impact legislation has on the real lives of real people. The problem, of course, is that the politicians themselves never stop playing, and most of their actions involve trying to ga...
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It's Silly Season!
2008-03-29 14:30:00
Campaigns ought to end the way trials do: as soon as the prosecution and defense rest, we hand the whole thing over to the jury, regardless of whether two, twenty, or two hundred days have passed. At some point, candidates should simply admit that they've run out of arguments and then immediately let the voters decide. Instead, we must wait for some arbitrary date on the calendar before we pass out the ballots, and politicians, like local anchors on a slow news day, must find some way to fill the allotted time.As a result, every highly publicized campaign eventually reaches Silly Season , that moment after all plausible arguments have been made and all serious charges have been leveled. Unfortunately, presidential primaries bring out the worst in politicians because the actual policy differences between them are usually so slight. Our electoral system almost guarantees truly distinctive characters—Dennis Kucinich, say, or Ron Paul—an early appointment with oblivion, leaving us w...

Guns Don't Kill People, But Bad Ideas Might
2008-03-28 13:51:00
Many years ago, I supported very strong—even confiscatory—gun control laws. If you grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s, you understood the power of firearms to equalize the battle between good and evil, often in favor of the latter. JFK. Bobby. Dr. King. Even George Wallace, a generally unappealing character back in 1972, but nevertheless an undeserving target of attempted murder. Gerald Ford, that most benign and inconsequential of presidents, found himself nearly victimized by two gun-toting women in two California cities in less than a month in 1975.And then there was the crime. Thugs with guns never really threatened most Americans, but they dominated our fears, much as they do today. The botched robbery, the violence of street gangs, and the cold-blooded slaying just started to become staples of the local news during that era. Gun control laws were, as a result, generally quite popular, with large majorities favoring the banning of at least some types of weapons (typically...
More About: Ideas , People , Guns , Kill

The Culture Warriors are Wrong: Part MCMXLIII
2008-03-27 13:56:00
The only people who still believe the right-wing critique of academia are those who haven't set foot on a college campus for years or those who are so blinded by their own doctrinaire conservatism that any challenge to the existing order seems hopelessly radical. Most of the pundits and bloggers who push this line, of course, don't really believe it themselves. They merely resent the right's inability to penetrate the academy and silence left-of-center voices the way they have so effectively done in politics and journalism.Because those who see American universities as leftist indoctrination centers are either ignorant, fanatical, or dishonest, there's really no reason to believe that they can be persuaded by facts or data. Study and after study provides evidence that academic indoctrination is neither common nor successful, but that hasn't daunted David Horowitz or the folks at ACTA. Neither will the latest research by a bipartisan pair of political scientists, soon to be ...
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Daily Kos, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore
2008-03-26 13:52:00
Hypocrisy and rationalization grate regardless of the source. But somehow they always seem worse coming from those who claim purity of motive. Barack Obama and his internet cheerleaders promise a new politics, leaving behind the name calling and trivial attacks of the past. What they deliver, however, is generally more of the same.Apparently, Hillary Clinton spoke several times of arriving in Bosnia back in 1996 under the threat of sniper fire, and having to race for shelter upon landing. Video of the event seems to contradict this claim, showing the First Lady and her daughter spending time on the tarmac greeting the locals, apparently unconcerned about the dangers lurking in the hills above. Naturally, this ludicrously unimportant matter has come to dominate this week's political news.First, it remains unclear exactly what Senator Clinton was trying to accomplish with this story in the first place. Even if true, it would hardly make her a paragon of physical courage. Perha...
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The Left Blogosphere Creates a Monster
2008-03-25 13:58:00
The John McCain World Tour is apparently over, having rocked the house in several Middle Eastern and European cities. It didn't get as much publicity as the senator might have hoped, what with the United States engaged in a vital debate over whether or not Barack Obama's former pastor should be allowed to speak at the next American Legion convention. But I'm sure someone in Baghdad right now is wearing the official tour t-shirt, albeit under about twenty pounds of armor and Kevlar. Having dispatched the lesser life forms that once challenged him for the GOP presidential nomination, McCain evidently decided it was time to remind voters that he has foreign policy credentials, though nobody has identified for certain exactly what they are. His current calling card is the fact that he supported the troop "surge" that preceded—but did not necessarily cause—a reduction in violence and American casualties in Iraq. It probably didn't help that, within a week of McCain taking his...
More About: Blogosphere , Left , Monster

Ben Stein's Baloney
2008-03-24 13:43:00
Ben Stein, who gained improbable fame as the quintessential burnout, monotone teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off parlayed that notoriety into several commercial gigs and a short-lived cable game show with a misleading premise. Nobody on "Win Ben Stein's Money" actually won Ben Stein's money; the cash was fronted by the producers of the show and Stein, in addition to his salary, got whatever was left after the contestants were paid off. This little bit of misdirection, however, pales in comparison to Stein's earlier and subsequent work.Before his celebrity breakthrough, Ben Stein was best known as a persistent apologist for Richard Nixon, the disgraced 37th President of the United States. Stein had been a speechwriter for Nixon, a politician known more for his revelatory extemporaneous asides ("I am not a crook!") than for his soaring rhetoric. To this day, Stein insists that Nixon's misdeeds were trivial, and that those who brought him down are responsible for the genocide...

Howard Dean, Barack Obama, and Plan B
2008-03-23 14:08:00
Here's a scary thought for the Democrats: we already know everything good there is to know about Barack Obama . We know his inspiring life story. We have all experienced the power of his oratory and his ability to move a crowd. Nobody could be unaware by now of the fact that Obama opposed the Iraq War from its very outset.From here forward, everything else we will learn about the Illinois senator will chip away at this carefully cultivated image as a man above politics. The first, and stunningly devastating, revelation occurred with the airing of the incendiary words of Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The candidate responded with a characteristically brilliant speech, but the Wright affair nevertheless cost Obama the support of thousands of independents, votes he will never get back. The Democrats may not realize it yet, but this is already Michael Dukakis in a tank, and could turn into Gary Hart in Bimini.As we speak, the only remaining economic question seems to be whethe...
More About: Howard Dean , Plan B

March Madness, Presidential Style
2008-03-22 14:50:00
I was listening to the radio a couple of days ago when someone mentioned March Madness , the 2008 NCAA college basketball tournament. Since the games had not yet started and nearly all the experts had evidently weighed in, the topic at hand was who the major presidential candidates thought would take home the championship trophy. Hillary Clinton answered that she would have to defer to her husband, a huge college hoops fan. I don't recall John McCain's response, but I'm sure he said, "The United States will win, of course, though the tournament may have to go on for fifty rounds and last at least until September." (OK, I made that one up.)The most interesting prediction, however, came from Barack Obama, who picked the University of North Carolina. My first reaction was surprise that Obama, of all people, would be such a chalk player (for you non-gamblers, that's someone who only bets on favorites). Carolina, after all, remains the Vegas choice to cut down the nets on April ...
More About: Presidential , Style