I finally got around this weekend to using a Borders gift certificate I was given for Christmas, and picked up (or more accurately, hefted) a book I’ve been eyeing for a while: Michael Holt’s massive and magisterial Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, a 1999 study of the antebellum party that died a sudden death in the slavery crisis of the 1850s. I managed to steal enough time from sleep and domestic chores to get through a key section on the runup to the 1840 presidential election, the famous “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign that gave the Whigs their first White House win.
Two things of present relevance really jumped off the page from Holt’s account.
(1) Today’s intraparty tensions are small beer by comparison. The early Whigs were a truly amazing and unstable coalition. It included the most violently nationalist and violently States Rights elements in the politics of the day, and also the most extreme pro-slavery and anti-slavery spokesmen. Despite the general assumption that the Whigs were the successor party to the Federalists and the antecedent to the Republicans, at one point, the tariff-nullifier and slavery-expansion-zealot John C. Calhoun was firmly inside the Whig Tent, while the former Federalist Daniel Webster was trying to create a new coalition with the Whig Nemesis Andrew Jackson. Nor were the Democrats of that day much more united, even under the stewardship of Martin Van Buren, who virtually invented the idea of party discipline.
(2) Conventional wisdom about political history is often wrong. Holt spends many pages skillfully demolishing the standard account that the Whigs gained power by tossing their principles out the window in 1840 and nominating the ideological cipher William Henry Harrison, an act for which they were swiftly punished by Harrison’s death and the elevation of John Tyler, who blew up their fragile and artificial unity. Turns out Ol’ Tip was about as solid a Whig as anybody this side of Henry Clay; that his nomination was less a deliberate act of cynicism than a semi-accident produced by the odd timing of the nominating convention (actually held in 1839), a decision of many pro-Clay southerners to boycott the gathering because they felt it contradicted their attacks on Van Buren’s “convention tyranny,” and a major blunder by potential nominee Winfield Scott. Tyler was an even bigger accident: a man far outside the mainstream of Southern Whiggery who won the Veep nomination basically because none of the obvious alternatives wanted it or could be reached to accept it.
Now: a lot of those who formed the CW about 1840 were present at the time, or were at least a lot closer to the events than Holt, but sometimes participants in political history either can’t see the big picture, or have ulterior motives for promoting a distorted view (in the case of the Tyler disaster, Henry Clay’s supporters had a pretty strong motive for claiming it was deliberately engineered by his enemies). I’ll have more to say about that in a future post about the CW that is emerging in some quarters about the recent decline of Democratic fortunes.

This week’s weirdest story is the revelation that the Bush Administration’s Department of Education paid right-wing TV host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act in the course of his broadcasts.
As Josh Marshall observes, purchased punditry is not a new development, but I haven’t heard of anybody collecting 240 Large for nestling a few references to education reform into a litany of ranting and raving.
If I were running the Education Department, I’d sure as hell think twice about relying on a guy like Armstrong to promote my message. Unless he’s changed recently (I refuse to watch him anymore), Williams is one seriously wacked-out dude. I once made the mistake of going on the show he did years ago for Paul Weyrich’s National Empowerment Network cable outfit, supposedly to talk about crime policy. He introduced me by saying: “My guest today not only thinks like a liberal and talks like a liberal. HE LOOKS LIKE A LIBERAL.” And his first question was: “How can you sleep at night?” Before I could answer, he went off into an insane tirade about Clinton that lasted for a good five minutes. And that was nothing compared to the callers to the show, whom Armstrong revved up into a hate frenzy that made me wonder if I’d wandered into a parallel universe where the Thousand-Year Reich was still underway. We never did talk about crime policy. But I guess no one was paying him to do that.

Don’t know what the rest of you think, but I’m inclined to feel that Democrats should move on from the post-election-analysis phase of our common endeavor. There’s a relatively strong consensus on many important points of that analysis, and I hope this blog has helped formulate them, as suggested by my friend and yours, Ruy Teixeira. The areas where there is a lack of consensus, including national security and cultural issues, have been with us for a long time, and will accordingly require an extended debate that goes beyond a discussion of what happened in 2004.
But there’s one nagging issue that I have not discussed directly that bears at least one mention: the argument that our big problem is not the lack of a compelling message, but simply the lack of a compelling messenger.
This argument often comes up in connection with criticism of John Kerry’s (and four years, ago, Al Gore’s) personal shortcomings in charisma and communications skills. But within moments, the argument always goes back to a paen to Bill Clinton as the prime example of the master messenger we need.
Interestingly enough, this particular variety of Clinton nostalgia is most common not among New Democrat types who view him as an important figure in the modernization of progressive politics, but among those who actually have serious misgivings about Clinton’s distinctive approach to public policy. A good example is in Howard Dean’s recent book, You Have the Power, which devotes a whole chapter to the proposition that Clinton’s unique political gifts made it possible for him to advance an unprincipled, “accomodationist” policy agenda in a way that actually advanced the progressive cause.
A similar argument is being made today among Democrats who say that our real problem as a party is marketing rather than substance, and in the failure to provide a “narrative” rather than our failure to have a message. The “narrative” argument is especially seductive until you think about what it really means. In a recent Washington gabfest where I made a presentation about Democrats and the South, a young journalist whose ability and insight I particularly respect asked me if there was something about southern politicians that made them uniquely able to “tell a story” and provide a “narrative” that helped connect the Democratic message with regular folks. And much as I was tempted to validate the assumption that crackers like me have preternatural political skills, I told her that “narrative” was a supplement, not a substitute, for a political message, which is not “a story,” but an argument for how a candidate intends to organize public resources to advance the interests and vindicate the values and aspirations of the American people.
And that’s how it actually worked with Clinton, folks. Nobody has to explain Clinton’s political gifts to me. I first personally encountered him in 1980 at a National Governors’ Association meeting, when he walked into a room crowded with big egoes and simply lit up the place. The first time I was convinced he was a future president was at a boring economic development conference in Atlanta during his second term as Governor, when he took a boring speech topic and turned it into a compelling presentation about the need to convince southerners that economic opportunity did not demand debasement of public services or abandonment of the higher aspirations of our people.
Then and later, Clinton’s political appeal did not just depend on political skills or “charisma” or the “ability to tell a story,” but on the content of his message, which was consistently unorthodox, provocative and comprehensive–all qualities lacking, in general, from the messages advanced by our last two presidential candidates, and by most Democratic candidates for Congress during recent cycles. Clinton was able to expand the Democratic voting base because he was willing to defy stereotypes about the party and make skeptical voters rethink their assumptions about the ol’ Donkey, which is also why he drove Republicans crazy, who before and after Clinton figured they had our number. And this, not some overweening desire to take credit for everything that happened in 1992, is the source of New Democrats’ special identity with Clinton’s political accomplishments. His message mattered, and without it, he would not have been elected or re-elected as president. Indeed, without his message, he probably would not have survived the Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging allegations that hit his 1992 campaign at the worst possible time, and certainly wouldn’t have survived a presidential impeachment with one of the highest job approval ratings in recent history.
Lord knows I wish we had another messenger of Bill Clinton’s abilities in the wings, but he would be the very first to tell you that what he said was at least as important as how he said it. And right now, two years before we seriously begin to audition candidates for the presidency, we ought to focus on what our party stands for and what we would do in power–on our message–on what we can say to persuadable voters, with or without a charismatic leader or a nifty “narrative”–and then worry about how to add the sizzle to the steak.

Now that the effort to hold up the official ratification of George W. Bush’s re-election has failed, Democrats have three choices about how to deal with the electoral irregularities that characterized this, and the last, presidential election.
(1) They can ignore the issue because there is no immediate payoff for dealing with it, an approach that will make Republicans quite happy.
(2) They can make it a partisan grievance by advancing an essentially conspiracy-theory based argument that Republicans have now stolen two straight presidential elections, which will also make the GOP quite happy.
(3) They can aggressively push for dealing with the problem by enacting a new, and this time effective, election reform law that ensures intrastate uniformity and interstate minimum standards for how federal elections are conducted.
The second approach is a mistake. And the first approach is inevitable unless we agree to pursue the third approach. That’s what the DLC called for in today’s New Dem Daily, and this is one strategy Democrats of every ideological persuasion ought to be able to agree upon.

Well, it’s official now, to my chagrin as a citizen of Virginia who happens to share the surname of the Attorney General of that state. Jerry Kilgore has announced he will run for Governor of Virginia later this year, and he’s the odds-on choice for the GOP nomination.
But just days before his announcement, veteran Hampton Roads Daily Press columnist Gordon Morse penned a piece in the WaPo that not-so-delicately raised the big question about Kilgore’s candidacy. Entitled “Will Being There Be Enough?” Morse’s column aired GOP concerns that the candidate is not considered to be exactly the sharpest tool in the Commonwealth’s shed, as witnessed by his flailing performance in a preliminary debate with his likely general election rival, Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine.
While the title of Morse’s piece ostensibly refers to Kilgore’s unique position as a visible and independent statewide GOP elected official who served his time in the party and conservative cause, you have to assume there’s a sneaky reference here to the unlikely, idiot-savant politician Chauncy Gardiner of the Jerzy Kosinski novel (and Peter Sellers movie), “Being There,” as well. “Kilgore is game,” quoth Morse, “but someone must hand him the right script.”
As we speak, someone in the vast infrastructure of the Virginia or national GOP may be working on that script. “In the fall, we plant the seeds. And in the spring, the flowers bloom,” as Chauncy Gardiner explained the theory of supply-side economics.

Just before the election, I offered readers a list of Ten Magic Phrases designed to make them sound like political insiders, and promised to eventually publish a parallel list of terms aimed at helping aspiring young jiveasses sound like Washington Insiders. True, at the time I thought this might prove helpful to Kerry campaign alumni, instead of eager-beaver BC04 staffers fresh from vote-suppresion efforts in Ohio, but what the hell, a promise is a promise.
I should mention that I’ve picked up these tips at a respectable distance, having worked pretty hard to avoid becoming a Washington Insider myself. Yesterday marked my tenth anniversary of full-time work here in the Emerald City, and I’m proud to say I’ve never attended a Washington cocktail party, made anybody’s list of up-and-comers or even has-beens, eaten lunch at The Palm, or hung out in a Georgetown Salon. Still, you soak up a lot of this crap by simple osmosis, so here we go:
1. “This Town.” Washington, DC, is a city of more than a half-million people, and the center of a metropolitan area of about three million people. But Insiders invariably call it “this town,” as in: “Those of us who understand the real sources of power in This Town…” or “The word around This Town….” The terminology is intended to convey the Insider’s intimacy with the small, cozy network of fellow Insiders who actually pull the levers in “This Town,” and also to indicate membership in the Permanent Washington Establishment, as opposed to the shabby parvenus who come and go because, say, they are elected to the U.S. Senate.
2. “Downtown.” Another geographical Insider reference, which sometimes refers generally to The Executive Branch of the Federal Government, and sometimes specifically to The White House and its hyper-powerful occupants.
3. “Style Profile.” This refers to the ultimate goal of every Washington Insider, which is to be profiled in a big, fat article on the front page of the Washington Post Style Section. If given a choice, most Washingtonians would rather achieve a Style Profile than win a Nobel Prize.
4. “The Hill.” Short for Capitol Hill, meaning Congress. Subsidiary terms include “House Side” and “Senate Side,” which refer to entire neighborhoods, not just to the legislative chambers or their office buildings, as in the common Hill Intern greeting: “It’s Dollar Margarita Night at Red River over on the Senate Side.”
5. “Chairman’s Mark.” One of many magic phrases from the congressional arena, this refers to a first draft of a committee or subcommittee’s version of a bill, before “mark-up,” the formal drafting action. Getting hold of an pre-release copy of a “Chairman’s Mark,” or speaking knowledgeably of its contents, is a really big deal in Washington, usually legal tender for free drinks.
6. “CR,” “UC,” “Rule.” Just three of the magic parliamentary phrases that deal with congressional floor actions. A CR is a “continuing resolution,” a means of providing appropriations when, as is generally the case, appropriations bills are late or never finished. A “UC” is a “unanimous consent agreement,” which means regular business can be suspended to handle some quotidien chore unless a Member objects. In the House, The Rule represents the restrictions placed on amendments to a bill on the floor, with “closed rules” prohibiting amendments becoming wildly popular under that chamber’s current management.
7. “Columbus Day Recess.” In America, Columbus Day is a relatively minor bank-and-government holiday of special significance to Italian-Americans. In This Town, it represents a lengthy annual Congressional recess thanks to its proximity to both the beginning of a new fiscal year, and biennially, to Election Day. Definitely make and loudly announce your plans for the Columbus Day Recess early in your Washington tenure.
8. “CBO Baseline.” The most popular of many budgetary phrases, meaning the Congressional Budget Office’s annual estimates of present and future spending and revenues based on what would happen if, miraculously, Congress did nothing. “Out-Years,” referring to future budget estimates, is another nice phrase, as in: “That prescription drug benefit is pretty tasty for seniors today, but the out-year costs will be a bitch.”
9. “Hold Harmless.” This is just one example of thousands of cool Insider terms from the wonderful world of federal grant programs. It means a provision which ensures that no jurisdiction actually loses money when the funding formula for a program is rejiggered to benefit some constituency favored by Hill Barons or an Important Person Downtown.
10. “Meet.” Short for the most important weekly gabathon, “Meet the Press,” the Washington equivalent of Sunday School, as in “Didja see what Russert asked Frist on ‘Meet?'”
Ah, there are so many other Magic Phrases, and given the relative seclusion of my messy little office on The House Side, I’m probably a few years behind in the latest legerdemain. After all, WashingtonTalk does evolve. Ten years ago I would have included the term “A.A.,” short for Administrative Assistant, the then-universal term for congressional chiefs of staff, an appellation since discarded when Washingtonians realized the title had become a neologism for “secretary” throughout the private sector. And some once-Insider terms, including “K Street,” “West Wing,” and of course, “The Beltway,” have entered the common vocabulary via television and other popular media.
So: use these Magic Phrases judiciously, but never forget that Insiderdom is a circle constantly exerting centripetal pressure to exclude People Like You. Because there’s only enough air here to nourish a limited number of ever-expanding egoes.

Let me be upfront about this: I remain a fan of David Brooks for the simple reason that he is capable of a level of humor, and of sociological insight, that are rare in Washington, even if both those qualities have clearly suffered after his acceptance of the House Conservative spot on the New York Times op-ed page. His 1995 Weekly Standard piece, “How To Become Henry Kissinger” (available online, I am sad to say, only in an excerpted version unless you subscribe to The Standard) remains far and away the most screamingly funny send-up of the Washington Think Tank culture ever written. And nearly all his various ruminations on red-state and blue-state culture have been worth reading, even allowing for the methodological sloppiness and overstatement that so many of his rather humorless critics have exposed.
But Brooks has fallen into a habit that is once again on full display in his column today: drawing lines between the two parties, and between the Left and Right of American politics, that are distinctly remote from reality, in the apparent effort to make his partisan brethren seem more reasonable than they actually are.
I first noticed this habit back in 2000, when George W. Bush savagely despatched Brooks’ candidate, John McCain, and before you could say “revisionist history,” Brooks penned a puff piece (sorry, no link available here) on W. that essentially said he had adopted McCain’s “national greatness” message.
More recently, on the eve of a Republican National Convention that lionized Bush’s right-wing record, message and agenda, Brooks was at it again, in a lengthy and much-discussed New York Times Magazine feature that triumphantly outlined a future “progressive conservative” Republican ideology. The only problem was that about 98% of the delegates at the Convention would have violently rejected as godless liberalism most of the suggestions Brooks made.
And now, in his column today, Brooks draws a picture of “liberal” and “conservative” economic strategies from so great a height of generality that he doesn’t seem to notice, or doesn’t want readers to notice, that he’s not actually describing the options the two parties are offering to the American people.
“Conservatives have tended to favor the American model, with smaller government and lower taxes, but less social support” says Brooks, while liberals “have supported programs that lead to the European model, with bigger government, more generous support and less inequality.” In a nice ju-jitsu trick, Brooks winds up arguing that the only reason America can afford to continue programs “liberals” favor like Social Security is that “we have not been taking their advice for the past 50 years.”
Aside from the cheap shot of identifying conservatives with America and liberals with Europe, which indicates that Brooks may have the private vice of spending too much time watching Fox News, there’s the little problem that both of his characterizations of “conservative” and “liberal” economic theories are straw men.
The mainstream of American liberal economic policy has never been thoroughly “Social Democratic” in the European tradition; one of its hallmarks has been support of an “American Model” that combines strategic public investments that promote growth, along with relatively small “social supports” that prevent mass impoverishment and promote upward mobility, and the maximum degree of entrepreneurial freedom consistent with genuine competition and key social goods like a clean environment. That’s certainly where most Democrats this side of Dennis Kucinich want to take our economic policies today.
Moreover, the rise of the contemporary Conservative Movement in the U.S. has led the Right towards economic theories that abandon this “American Model” in favor of a monomanical commitment to lower taxes for high earners and lowering business costs regardless of the social costs–an “American Model” only if you think of Mississippi circa 1975 as a model for anything other than economic self-abasement. And to the extent that today’s conservatives can be said to embrace the true “American Model,” it’s via the deeply dishonest method of engaging in massive public borrowing to sustain a social safety net the public demands, and to finance strategically targeted tax cuts aimed at favored constituencies. Brooks spends a lot of time in his column deploring the huge level of public debt in European countries today. Exactly which party, and which end of the ideological spectrum, is associated with the happy accumulation of public debt in this country? It ain’t us donkeys, David.

The Papers of Record over the weekend had two items that cast a revealing light on the shifty reasoning behind the current conservative drive to ram “strict constructionist” judges through the Senate. In WaPo, George Will, through the device of putting unlikely words in George W. Bush’s mouth, argues that this drive is only incidentally about abortion; Roe v. Wade needs to be reversed, he suggests, not because it is likely to lead to the outlawing of abortions (he denies, in fact, that states would do anything of the kind), but simply because the decision was such an egregious affront to democracy.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Christian Right leader James Dobson is issuing threats to “red state” Democratic Senators to take them down in 2006 if they interfere with the GOP’s judicial nomination agenda. Indeed, Dobson promised “a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea” if Bush doesn’t get his wat in shaping the courts, and especially the High Court.
Now: does anyone really believe James Dobson gives a damn about theories of constitutional interpretation, judicial review, or the policymaking powers of state governments? Is it conceivable that if Roe is reversed Dobson will get out of politics with a deep sense of satisfaction, happy to trust the wisdom of the states on how to regulate abortion? Is there any doubt that Dobson would be the most avid supporter of judicial activism on earth if a future Supreme Court were to recognize the fetus as a human being shielded from destrution under the Equal Protection Clause? Of course not. He wants to criminalize abortion by any means necessary, and all the talk about “activist judges” is just a shuck.
I realize there are legitimate arguments against Roe‘s constitutional provenance; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for example, wrote about them before her own appointment to the Court. But there are not a few questionable decisions in the Court’s recent history, including, ahem, Bush v. Gore, and just about every opinion penned by Sandra Day O’Conner. But somehow these shaky decisions don’t lead to a relentless campaign to reshape the federal judiciary. That’s because the real issue here is abortion, and nothing else.
Pro-choice advocates frequently make the mistake of suggesting, and perhaps even believing, their opponents are motivated by generally reactionary social views at best or by savage misogyny at worst. Some of them may well fit that profile. But for the most part, serious right-to-lifers oppose abortion because they think it’s legalized murder, adding up to an ongoing American Holocaust. So they aren’t going to stop at overturning Roe v. Wade; and their ultimate aims include bringing the full power of the state to bear on physicians and women to stop every abortion for every purpose at every stage of pregnancy. And if you thought legalized abortion represented mass murder, you’d probably feel the same way.
I can’t completely explain why fundamentalist Protestants have joined conservative Catholics in taking this position. Catholic opposition to abortion is rooted in an Aristotelian natural law tradition that goes right back to scholasticism, and sola scriptura Protestants have to twist the Bible pretty hard to come up with much of anything on the subject. But it’s important to understand these are serious people who are deadly serious about their goals.
For that very reason, pro-choice Americans need to be highly strategic in how they deal with the current drive to outlaw abortion one step at a time. Don’t concede the “judicial restraint” argument by opposing every conservative judicial nominee regardless of his or her actual impact on the law. Don’t help serious right-to-lifers disguise their agenda and win unwitting allies by treating every proposal to marginally (or in most cases, symbolically) restrict abortions as though they represent a fundamental threat to the right to choose. Don’t demonize Democrats who fail to meet some absolutist litmus test. And do keep your eyes on the prize: the basic right to choose, which for the foreseeable future is going to be challenged as never before by people who haven’t for a moment forgotten their ultimate goals.

There are plenty of other political lessons we learned in 2004, but I think I’ll conclude with what we learned about our dear ol’ fightin’ donkey, the Democratic Party.
On the plus side, we learned we could get through a tough general election battle, after a fractious nominating process, with extraordinary unity. It wasn’t always easy, but we made it look that way.
We learned it was possible to use technology to create a whole new, decentralized, small-dollar donor base, reducing an advantage the GOP has had in small-dollar funding for a generation, and enormously increasing the overall amount of money available to our candidates. The diversification of the party’s financial base also reduced our dependence on big-money sources ranging from corporations to trial lawyers to unions, without significantly diminishing these sources.
We learned Democrats could at least begin to compete in the “new media” sources of political commentary and advocacy previously dominated by conservatives, ranging from radio to cable TV to the Internet and its boisterous spawn, the blogosphere.
And we learned that Democrats could win younger voters. Although there were not enough of them to make a big difference this year, Democratic strength in the younger cohorts of Americans is a good and important sign for the future.
On the minus side, we learned that self-identified Democrats no longer outnumber Republicans for the first time since the New Deal.
We learned that a lot of the negative perceptions of the Democratic Party that we thought had gone away during the Clinton administration were simply dormant.
We learned that all the excitement, enthusiasm, and money generated by the Dean/MoveOn/Blog phenomena of 2003 are not necessarily transferable into votes.
We learned that we could use a new generation of pollsters and campaign consultants.
And we learned that Republicans have now gained a geographical advantage in the country that undoubtedly gives them an edge in control of state governments, of the U.S. Senate, and (indirectly, through redistricting) of the U.S. House, and a strategic advantage in presidential campaigns as well.
The post-election analysis among Democrats has been relatively free of recriminations (though the brewing campaign for the DNC chairmanship threatens to change that happy situation), with the main divide separating those who think the party needs to significantly change to become competitive in broader parts of the country, and those who think we just need to raise more money, excite more activists, and attract more Hispanic voters, and things will be just fine.
While most Democrats agree that we should now become (in Washington, at least) a loud-and-proud opposition party, there is less consensus about the positive message Democrats should stand for. And some of us, especially at the DLC, are worried about (a) the tiny investment we are making as a party on new policy ideas–we’re basically all living off the policy thinking of the Clinton administration; and (b) the relative lack of interest in the current intra-party debate about Democratic state and local elected officials, who deserve at least as much attention as grass-roots activists and Washington consultants in plotting the course forward.
It’s been a painful but instructive year for this Donkey, and for all of us. And may we toast the New Year with a prayer for unity, imagination and courage.

At my age, and after a lifetime of changing perspectives on just about everything, there aren’t that many rituals that take me right back to early childhood, other than the passion of Election Night and the feeling of renewal that accompanies Easter Morning in every variety of Christian faith.
But then there’s New Year’s Day, when every single atavistic southern chromosome in my body drives me to a television to watch college football.
It surely ain’t what it used to be. In those pre-ESPN, pre-BCS days of my childhood, you would get in front of your black-and-white television with its three channels right after a gut-busting lunch of turkey and ham, and switch back and forth (without benefit of a remote) between the Sugar and Cotton Bowls. After a brief break from eating still more wonderful and non-nutritious food, you’d tune in to the Rose Bowl, followed immediately by the prime-time Orange Bowl, which would usually end at about midnight. There was no “championship game” unless a traditional bowl was lucky enough to get a number one/number two matchup, and no trophy presented on national TV.
Us serious college football fans were dimly aware at the time that there were big monetary stakes involved in these New Year’s games (with the Rose Bowl being the richest), but none of us could have told you the payoff for a particular bowl within a hundred grand, which was real money then. And there were no–repeat, no–corporate sponsorships of bowl games, no Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, much less bowls named completely for the sponsor like the ludicrous Continental Tire Bowl (it’s a small miracle that small children will not be exposed this year to a Viagra Bowl, but just wait).
Tomorrow morning, I will not be able to follow the exact ritual of my childhood, because my team, the Georgia Bulldogs, will be playing at 11:00 a.m., in a bowl named after a certain pseudo-Australian steak house known for its inspired variation on the traditional southern onion ring. I probably won’t bother with the later bowls, just as my interest in the March presidential primaries has lagged unless the outcome happens to matter.
But for at least three hours, I will join my distant cousins and red-and-black-state compadres in watching every play from the money-stained, corporate-dominated Outback Bowl, making barking noises where appropriate. This will signal my own recognition of the continuity between the year passed and the year ahead, and the importance of ritual in coping with an era that seems dangerously evergreen.