The Battle for the Duck continues

The year 1947 is remembered for Jackie Robinson’s debut in major league baseball, the beginning of the Marshall Plan, creating of the Central Intelligence Agency, or perhaps even the very beginning of the Cold War.

But within a small circle 1947 is famous for the debut of the A-Bowl, a Thanksgiving Day football game played in the Noe Valley of San Francisco for 61 years.



Just about every Thanksgiving morning of my life, regardless where I am living or what I’m doing at the time, it is time to head for the Alvarado School in San Francisco to meet up with other like-minded friends and family for a two-hand touch football game.

My dad was one of the six teenage rowdy book stackers (stories of their exploits in the library could fill another column) at the main San Francisco Library who started this game. He was a member of the Three-As who would play the three members of the Red-As in the annual A-Bowl (with A being the polite way to say the derriere.)

My dad, along with two other participants of the original A-Bowl, is gone. He died between the 54th and 55th games. Another of the original footballers lost contact with the others sometime in the 1950s. Jack Goodwin, the captain of the Red-As told his wife he would only play for 60 years, and the 60th game was played two years ago.

My uncle, Louie Barberini is the last of the original remaining A-Bowlers.

Uncle Lou was my Dad’s best friend when they were kids, and that is how my Dad met my Mom, who was Uncle Lou’s younger sister. It’s possible I owe my very existence to the A-Bowl.

The original players had stopped playing regularly many years ago, with the second generation taking over most of the playing of the game. The third generation, led by my own son, supplies most of the speed while us older generation playing quarterback or pretend to block each other. My grandson came to the game this year as the first of the fourth generation team, but at 364 days old he wasn’t ready yet to get substituted in.

At times there has been a rather strenuous test to decide who could or couldn’t play. When one of the teams seemed to be fixing up daughters with talented players from San Francisco high school teams the other team started demanding marriage licenses.

Twenty-years ago three neighborhood kids (the McFadden’s) wanted to take part in the game and they have been part of the game ever since, with now their children participating in our family tradition. Two of the brothers were added to the Red-As and one to the Three-As.

The A-Bowl has had every bit as much controversy as the its Granddaddy, the Rose Bowl.

In the 1970s my sisters thought they should get to play. They showed up one year with signs and marched back and forth picketing the game. The next year they got in the game, but not with out protest. They said they felt unwelcome enough to never come back.

A number of years ago, a brother-in-law was tackled on the school pavement and required surgery on two knees. That was the end of my brother-in-laws playing in the A-Bowl.

There is a book of stats, showing participants and who scored every year since 1947.

There is even a trophy. Back in the 50s the early players found an old stuffed duck in a dumpster, and that has been the trophy since. It now has been mounted and put behind glass and goes home with someone from the winning team. My Mom used to hate it when it would come home with my Dad.

The Red-As lead the series with 34 wins, 25 losses and three ties.



Alvarado School has a divided schoolyard, with a lower and upper level. The original game is on the lower level, with a couple of Barberini’s younger brothers starting a new game on the upper level. They’ve only been playing around 55 years and have no trophy or stats.

At the end of the game we all get together, drink beer and smoke cigars at the Sunshine Market, one of those small neighborhood corner markets, which opens up special just for our group for a couple hours on Thanksgiving.

This year’s affair was a low-key game. Without the Goodwins from years past, the Red-As were a small group with many of their key players missing. It isn’t clear if something will have to be done in future years to make the teams more competitive than descendants of the original Red-As and Three-As.

The Three-As won this year, 35-16.

The Tiger Woods Effect

It becomes easier to accept a black President after having learned to accept a black athlete as the greatest golfer in the world.

There has been a sea change in American racism over the last dozen years. A black athlete as the greatest in the most conservative of sports has helped for many with little experience with race.

Tiger Woods is the son of an African-American father and a Thai mother. Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas.

Golf, like politics, has always been a very traditional game. Change is not something golfers go for unless it is a tax cut. At the professional level there is no sport with more Republicans and conservatives as participants.

Prior to the arrival of Tiger, most professional golfers only experience with people of color was as caddies or servants at their country clubs.

Golf itself has a very shameful past. The PGA Tour still had a Caucasian-only clause 14 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.

In 1961 they were forced to finally drop the Caucasian-only clause by California Attorney General Stanley Mosk who refused to let them play on California golf courses if they didn’t change their rules.

Even the dropping of the clause didn’t lead to sudden integration in golf.

Augusta National, home of the Masters Tournament didn’t have a black competitor until 1975. One of the founders of the Georgia club, Cliff Roberts, famously said, “as long as I’m alive, golfers will be white, and caddies will be black.”

I started a Web site dedicated to golf in 1993. This was the very beginning of the Internet Age, with no more than a couple hundred Web sites, and most of those .gov or .edu sites.

We didn’t have a lot of money and didn’t have anything to spare for travel to golf events. Most of our coverage of golf tournaments was wire service stories.

Less than a year after our start the new U.S. Amateur Champion, a skinny 18-year-old kid from Southern California started playing for Stanford University, 20 miles north of our world headquarters.

We covered the heck out of this young kid. I really enjoyed covering Tiger. He was my son’s age and was fun to talk to before fame made him more careful. He could also make some amazing shots.

We continued to cover Tiger through his two years at Stanford, his two more U.S. Amateur Championships, his turning pro in 1996 and Tigermania in the winter of 1996-1997.

Not everyone liked that we covered Woods.

We’d often get very angry, racists letters complaining about our coverage. Some were not the least embarrassed by their racism and made it clear that was their complaint. Others complained about his youth or arrogance, or his daring to take titles away from Phil Mickelson and other white golfers.

The racists were fighting a losing battle with Tiger. His talent was always his answer to his critics.

Golf is a meritocracy. It is golfer versus the golf course. No teammates. No coaches. No technology advantages. Shoot the lowest score shows you are better than your competition.

Tiger was clearly better.

Tiger winning the 1997 Masters Tournament, playing it for the first time as a professional, drove racists crazy. By 2000 it had to become obvious to them they had lost the war. Tiger was much better than all of his competition. The argument was no longer if he was the best golfer, but was he the best of all time?

Tiger has been out of action since winning the U.S. Open in the summer, recovering from surgery. He has not been on the stage. He hasn’t said either way who he supported or voted for in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Tiger does not speak out on political issues.

It is more than possible the richest athlete in the world would have joined most other professional golfers and supported John McCain.

Sportswriter Jamie Diaz wrote, “Golf is a sport that requires judgment, intelligence, emotional control, focus, organization, integrity,” all abilities that would also serve a president of the United States.


Most agree there is a clear line from Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. That doesn’t mean the civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened without Robinson. He gave it a boost.

Obamamania might have happened in 2008 without the Tigermania of the previous decade, but he also gave Barack Obama a boost. He helped to make it possible for many conservatives to accept the idea of exceptionalism in people of color.

When Tiger was just starting out his career, Earl Wood said about his son, "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."

When Earl said that about his son’s potential impact on the world it sounded like a father getting carried away by his son’s abilities.

It is starting to sound a little less bombastic now.

Note: After I wrote this column, Tiger Woods announced, "I think it's [Obama' election] absolutely incredible. He represents America. He's multiracial. I was hoping it would happen in my lifetime. My father was hoping it would happen in his lifetime, but he didn't get to see it. I'm lucky enough to have seen a person of color in the White House."

Think I’ll have another beer

“Bart, a woman is like beer. They look good, they smell good, and you'd step over your own mother just to get one!”
--Homer Simpson

Hoppy Brewpub was the place to be early on election night. It should be easy to get a table for seven on a Tuesday night at 6 pm. Little did we know the world would show up at Hoppy.

Sacramento is a beer and a burger kind of town, but there aren’t as many microbreweries as other cities of its size. Perhaps the town is more of a Bud and a Big Mac than a dark porter with a Kobe burger town.

While Hoppy beer started brewing over 15 years ago, the brewpub in Sacramento opened at its present location on Folsom near 65th Street in the summer of 1999.

Tuesday night was a rough night for Hoppy Brewpub. Service was a step under mediocre, while the food would have to be greatly improved to get the badge of mediocrity. The good news is the beer. Between the Burnt Sienna Ale and the Total Eclipse Black Ale, one was just okay, but the other was excellent.

The joint was crowded, and our group waited about 20 minutes for a table, a rarity early on a Tuesday night. When we sat down we found out why from our server, with anyone saying they had voted that date getting a free pint. The brewpub should have been ready for the onslaught, having promoted the offer.

Eventually we got our first pints, but that was all we got. No rolls, sourdough or even crackers set on the table. This became especially uncomfortable, as some of our dinners came with soup or salads, some didn’t. It’s never comfortable to be the one or two eating prior to everyone else in the group.

The Burnt Sienna Ale was picked as the free pint. It was a good, but not nearly a great brown ale. Delivered slightly colder than recommended, but that is typical of American brewpubs were Americans expect their beers colder than they should be.

The brown ale (free on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November) was less hoppy than expected, more of an English brown ale than the preferred Scottish browns. It had none of the distinctive freshness expected of a microbrew.

The second brewsky was the highlight of the evening. The Total Eclipse Black Ale ($5.00 pints, $18.00 pitcher) is the type of stuff you would step over your own mother just to get one. Hoppy Black Ale is a stout brew, delivered slightly warm, with the perfect color and head. The slight coffee flavor was perfect with such a robust beer.

Since Hoppy is a brewpub we had to order some food to go with our beer, especially due to a complete lack of any sort of munchies on the table.

Three Brothers is a trio of sausages with sauerkraut and roasted red potatoes ($11.85).

The sauerkraut tasted like dried out Del Monte. It had no flavor, more similar to overcooked angel hair pasta than true sauerkraut. The red potatoes were just a couple boiled potatoes, quartered, with no seasoning.

It’s tough to turn down anything with andoulee sausage. When andoulee is good it is the sausage from heaven. When it is bad, it is Oscar Meyer.

Hoppy was Oscar Meyer.

And the bratwurst and chicken apple sausages weren’t much better. These three brothers had too similar of DNA to show off much difference. Even the brat and the andoulee were not that easy to tell apart, a cardinal sin of specialty sausages. The chicken apple was distinct, but hardly memorable.

And what is the point of sausages without specialized mustard? A really good sausage doesn’t need great mustards, but mediocre sausage does. Hoppy sausages needed great mustards.

Three Brothers came with soup or salad. The cæsar salad wasn’t anything Caesar Cardini would recognize, but it’s tough to find a cæsar salad he would approve of anywhere.

The rest of the table seemed happy with their selections. A couple of the salads looked very good, and the sandwiches and burgers looked like reasonable choices.

The desert menu might have been tempting had the second pint not gone down so easily. The Chocolate Wall ($5.25) and the Carmel Apple Granny ($3.95) might be worth a spin on the next visit.

The atmosphere was typical brewpub. High ceilings and bunched tables made the room much noisier, making it difficult to hear conversation for a table of seven. They had a single large screen television with a local station giving election returns. Had it been a slower evening we might have asked the server to turn to CNN to watch their new holographic interviews.

Hoppy deserves another chance. They were busier than usual because of the free pint promotion, and it looked like on a nice quite evening service would be much more helpful with beer and menu selection.

If for no other reason than the Total Eclipse Black Ale, this reporter will be giving Hoppy at least one more chance.

Hoppy is at 6300 Folsom Blvd, Sacramento 95819. (916) 451-HOPPY. Map

Chickens Home to Roost

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was right about the possibility of the chickens coming home to roost; he was just early in his prediction.

Republicans have controlled the federal government most of the last eight years and the country largely blames them for the mess we currently are in. They will be trying to hold some positions this election, but are sure to have less power after Nov. 4.

The 2008 election has lost some of its excitement at the top of the ticket, with just about everyone not named Sarah Palin knowing the election is already over.

There are still critical issues to watch with the Democrats looking for a filibuster proof Senate and other critical votes across the country.

The U.S. Senate currently has 49 Republican and 49 Democratic Senators, with Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, VT. and Independent Joe Lieberman, CT, caucusing with the Democrats.

There are 35 seats up for vote this Nov. 4 (33 up for terms expired, two up in special elections.) A total of 23 of these seats are currently held by Republicans, 12 by Democrats.


Should the Democrats get up to 60 Senators they will be able to control the Senate, giving them enough to override any potential filibuster. The minority Republicans will have little reason to show up in the Senate.

A strong opposition, regardless if it is Republican or Democratic, is important in our government and could be sorely missed should the Democratic Party realize the gain of nine more seats.

According to the some of the latest polling, there are six states considered potential tossups: Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi (the second seat), New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon.

If you count Sanders and Lieberman as Democrats, and concede the Democrats winning new seats in Virginia, Alaska, Colorado and New Mexico, then the Democrats would need five of the six tossups to get to 60 Senators.

One critical race to watch is North Carolina, where Lizzie Dole is running for reelection, but most polls have her behind Democratic challenger Kay Hagen.

Dole, who was once talked about as potentially the first female President, has gone beyond the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove stlye, calling her Sunday-school teaching opponent “godless” and using a female voice to leave the impression it is her opponent saying “there is no god.”



Minnesota is another race that is much closer now than it was a few weeks ago.

Republican incumbent Norm Coleman is facing a tough challenge from former Saturday Night Live writer Al Franken. Coleman looked like the clear favorite until the economy collapsed.

It looks like Coleman is the best Republican hopes amongst the tossups, but you never know in Minnesota, which elected Jesse “The Body” Ventura governor less than 10 years ago.

Another interesting race on Nov. 4 is the Senatorial race in Alaska. Sen. Ted Stevens was found guilty at the end of October of seven counts of failing to report gifts. Since then he has refused to withdraw from the race and challenger Mark Begich has taken a small lead in the polls.

Should Stevens win he would probably remain in the Senate while his case is appealed. Should he fail on appeal, he could be booted out of the Senate, and the governor of Alaska would appoint an interim Senator until a special election could be held.

Gov. Sarah Palin could appoint herself to the seat to keep in the national spotlight until 2012 or 2016. It would be a gamble, since if she would then lose the special election she would be jobless.

All of the 435 House of Representative seats are up for re-election, with Democrats, who already control the House, playing offense and Republicans playing defense.

Locally we have a couple interesting races with Dan Lungren (R) facing off against Bill Durston (D) and Charlie Brown (D) and Tom McClintock (R) fighting for John Doolittle’s seat.

One congressional seat this reporter will be watching is a Congressional race is Minnesota.

Incumbent Republican Michele Bachmann is in her first term representing Minnesota’s 6th district. On MSNBC Bachmann recently claimed Barrack Obama “may have anti-American ideas,” and the media should look into her fellow congress people to see who else might have un-American ideas.



Bachmann was the clear favorite prior to her call for renewed McCarthyism. Her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg raised $1.8 million since her appearance and has moved the race toward a tossup.

The final race to watch this Tuesday is the California vote on Proposition 8, the initiative to change the California Constitution to eliminate same-sex marriage. For most of the campaign cycle this looked as if it was going down to defeat, but a late influx of cash has resulted in only a slight edge to No on Prop.8 side.

Both sides are well aware of the old quote, “as goes California so goes the nation.” Should Prop. 8 fail the gay rights movement will move out from California. If Prop. 8 passes it will set back the gay-rights movements a couple years.

After Nov. 4 the Democratic Party will be taking control of both the executive and legislative branch of the government. If the Democrats aren’t careful it could result in a future blowback much like the Republicans are facing this fall.

Twist socialists and capitalists

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels said in the opening of the Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

The term socialist has been bandied about lately. While our government is busy nationalizing failed industries we have politicians fighting over who is the least socialist.

We are all socialists.

It isn’t possible to have a large powerful government and claim you still are a free market economy. When the government becomes involved in the economy they will be looking for reasons other than free markets to spread their largess.

Perhaps government could work better if they used free market principles, but just as Adam Smith preached incentives as the key to free markets, we would need to come up with incentives to get the government to behave as a free market.

Our founders believed democracy could work as the incentive for elected officials. Since then elected officials have been successfully changing the system to reduce the influence of the vote.

As Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations, “The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproductive hands. Such are the people who compose a numerous and splendid court, a great ecclesiastical establishment, [and] great fleets and armies.”



With our large economy (3.10 trillion budget in 2009 – not including supplemental bills for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan) we are left with a hybrid economy, capitalism and socialism all mixed in together, with the decision on which will gain prominence by which best benefits those in power at the time.

As the recent bailout has shown on a grand scale, we now capitalize profits and socialize losses.

It hasn’t always been so. The wealth created during the United States’ Gilded Age led to a move from a government-controlled economy to laissez-faire free market.

Following Black Tuesday in 1929 the government moved away from an unfettered free market economy into a socialized concept of the government stimulating and regulating the economy. The Great Depression demonstrated the dangers of un-checked free-market economics, when capitalists went for short-term gain.



The New Deal economy started by Franklin Roosevelt was trickle-up economy. Help those at the bottom who will then have capital to buy goods from the market. Corporations would compete over the capital of the working class.

We became the premier economic world power with trickle-up economics.

Lately McCain supports have been constantly repeating their Plumber Joe mantra how you cannot penalize corporations because they create jobs.

Corporations have never created jobs. Consumers create jobs. Corporations respond to the needs of consumers. If a corporation quits because taxes are too high, a more parsimonious corporation steps in, hires the employees and takes over where the last corporation existed, calculating the higher taxes into the price of their goods.

As long as the consumer creates a market, corporations will fill the need. If not Peet’s then Starbucks, if not Dell then Apple, if not Yahoo! then Google.

The bourgeoisie owned politicians and weren’t going to watch government largess go to working class forever.

In the 1980s a new concept of socialized economics came to America. We took a shot at economist Arthur Laffer’s ideas of supply-side economics -- better known as trickle-down.

This worked well for the political class. Giving benefits to the bourgeoisie was more in their self-interest than giving to the proletariats. Those with spare capital were much better at showing their appreciation than those without (especially as unions lost power – remember the air-traffic controllers?)

The trickle-down concept was simple. If you socialize those at the top of the economy, their buckets will fill, and the benefits will trickle down to the rest, stimulating the economy.

One thing supply-siders didn’t count on was the owner of the buckets having the means to buy bigger buckets. Our economy has spent the last few decades trying to determine if there is a limit to how big of a bucket the rich will use.

We’ve found there isn’t.

Despite how much goes into the top of the buckets, the trickle keeps getting smaller and weaker, with the top end of the economic ladder getting more and more of the socialized benefits.



Trickle-up works the same, but only the opposite.

To stimulate the economy you give the benefits to the lower rungs of the ladder, they will then turn around and spend the capital on the most competitive corporations.

The ideal way to stimulate an economy would fly-over trickle-up economics. You fly over populated areas dumping buckets of money out of small planes.

When money falls out of the sky, people have a strong desire to spend it quickly. It burns a hole in their pockets.

While stimulating through the rich results in a trickle of money getting into the economy, stimulating the non-rich results in close to a 100 percent of the money quickly returning to the economy.

Most Americans would argue fly-over trickle-up is unfair. We Americas are tied to fairness doctrines. We can use the tax system to work as the fly-over. It won’t be as effective, but it will pass the fairness doctrine.

If our government decided it needs to stimulate the economy, the question isn’t are they going to spreads the wealth, but rather whom it is going to spread it to?

They can either spread it to the top of the economic ladder and hope it will trickle down, or they can spread it to the working class, and know the free market will spread it up to the most deserving corporations.

Remember the HufPo

“The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still - must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions”
--George Bernard Shaw

If Mr. Shaw is right, then you have to wonder how Arianna Huffington has managed to achieve her many accomplishments.

Huffington has spent a career all over the political map. She has changed her views more often than a little girl changes party dresses before her sixth birthday party.

Huffington first gained prominence in her adopted England (she was born Arianna Stassinopoulos in Athens, Greece) as the first elected female president of the Cambridge Union, anti-feminist author, and girlfriend of The Times columnist Bernard Levin, 22 years her senior.

After a breakup from Levin she would leave for the United States, and be seen on the arm with then California Governor Jerry Brown prior to his relationship with Linda Ronstadt.

At a party in New York she met oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a friend of the Bush family and a conservative politician. After their marriage he ran successfully for Congress, but then lost in a senate race to Diane Feinstein in 1994. He spent $28 million of his own money on the senate race.

During her marriage Arianna was a favorite of conservative radio and television. Her Gabor-sister accent worked well as a counter-point to liberal pundits. Columns by Arianna often appeared in the conservative National Review.

In 1997 Michael and Arianna divorced. A year later Michael announcing his bisexuality. Terms of the divorce were not revealed, but Arianna has led an elite life with only limited source of income besides what came from the divorce.

Arianne co-hosted a public radio show titled Left, Right & Center, a show were she has spent time comfortably sitting in each of the three seats. By the California recall and gubernatorial election in 2003, Huffington was a moderate, and ran for governor as an independent, coming in fifth after withdrawing from the race with three weeks remaining.

“I left the Republican Party [because] my views of the role of government changed. I used to think that the private sector would solve many of the major problems we are facing--poverty, inequality. And then I saw firsthand that this wasn't going to happen.”

By the time Huffington started the HuffingtonPost in 2005, she was then sitting in the Left seat, with HUfPo being one of the premier liberal blog sites on the Internet.

She says her change from moderate to liberal had much to do with the treatment of Sen. John Kerry when he ran for President in 2004. Many of her posts on her Web site have been warnings against potential “swift-boating” by the GOP in 2008.

Much like her political convictions, Huffington’s style is constantly growing and changing. She is developing a Web friendly writing style, with shorter paragraphs and numerous links to outside sources. Her posts generally lack frills, and get right to the point.

In her most recent column, she summarizes John McCain’s campaign:

McCain's campaign was all about experience -- until he picked Palin. It was all about putting country first -- until he picked Palin. It was all about the success of the surge -- until everyone from General Petraeus and the authors of the latest NIE made it clear that victory in Iraq exists only in McCain's and Palin's stump speeches. It was all about William Ayers -- until voters rejected that line of attack. It was all about national security -- until the economy collapsed.

HufPo is the fourth most linked to Web site, according to Technorati.

“People still marvel at her ability to keep reinventing herself,” says Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz. “But even skeptics recognize that she has built something in the Huffington Post. She’s no longer the political gadfly trying to sell herself. Now she’s selling something much larger.”

HufPo is dominated by blogs by her many friends and associates, with none of the bloggers getting paid for their writings. Comedian Tracey Ullman imitates Huffington is her comedy routine, asking her to write for the site: “Daaahling, would you like to blaaagh?”

Links:

• Bio and recent blogs by Arianna
  
• Books by Arianna
  
• Arianna's upcoming schedule
  
• Arianna's TV appearances
  
• Arianna's Radio And Podcast Appearances
  
• Arianna In Print
  
• Arianna's Speeches and Public Appearances
  

Battle for the soul of the sixties just getting started

It’s been four decades since the battle over the 1960s to determine the direction of the country. The kids from the era are grown, grandparents, AARP members, but still fighting the same old fights.


National politics remains a battle between the doves and the hawks, with the battle lines determined during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Chicago.

The factions remain the same, but what has changed in 2008 is the team that is winning the latest skirmish.

After years in the hinderlands, away from the power in D.C. the Clean for Gene crowd have finally found their Messiah and are prepared to follow him to the halls of power.

The struggle in the sixties can be encapsulated as a clash between the two sides’ lovable losers: Barry Goldwater representing the hawks and Eugene McCarthy representing the doves.

The kids that followed these two real mavericks are now the sometimes power brokers in the Democratic and Republican parties, but remain the “America, love it or leave it” crowd versus the “Make love not war” gang.

Neither side has the slightest idea what the opposition is all about.

Take for instance the controversy over William Ayers. One side thinks living within a three-block radius of his residency is enough to disqualify a Presidential candidate. The other side sees Ayers as a 60s hero. Classic -- failure to communicate.

The “I’m with Barry” crowd of 1964 learned a lesson from their huge defeat in 1964, but the “Clean with Gene” crowd weren’t nearly as quick to crack the books as their Republican counterparts after their big defeat at Chicago68.

The Goldwater kids were trainable: Nixon wasn’t the One, but he was going to be the One for the time. They managed to go to the capital and learn about how to work the system.

The McCarthy followers were named Clean for Gene in 1968 because many of the followers were youth who cut their hair, replaced their sandals with shoes, and put away their beads and flowers to canvas for McCarthy.

After their loss in 1968 the Clean for Gene crowd went home to run for their local water districts and city councils, assuming all they had to do was bide their time and pay some dues.

The McCarthyites would occasionally show up in national elections, but always with poor results – George McGovern, ABC (Anybody But Carter), Governor Moonbeam, Teddy Kennedy, John B. Anderson, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry.

The Democratic party winners since the 1960s, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, were hardly the Clean for Gene types. Both were moderate Southern governors who took off the 1960s. They weren’t even in Chicago, damn it.

Meanwhile the Goldwaterites had found their man, the heir apparent to Goldwater, but much better at the getting elected part: Ronald Reagan.

While 1976 was too early for the Gipper, by 1980, everything was perfect, and all fractions of the Republican party were in line to get Ronnie elected, and for them, it was Morning in America.

One thing Ronnie could do better than Goldwater, Nixon, Pete McCloskey, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Gerald Ford, or any other GOP wannabe, was pander. Ronnie was everything to everybody and combined all the remnants of the party behind a cause, with that cause being getting Ronald Reagan elected.

Their party’s problem was a lack of a Ronnie Jr.

Bush the Elder served as Ronnie’s VP, but the Grand Old Party served with Ronnie, they knew Ronnie, he was a friend of theirs, and Pappy Bush was no Ronald Reagan.

Bush was from the rather small but sometimes powerful Kennebunkport segment of the GOP.

Still, they’d grown accustomed to their Georgetown brownstones, and really didn’t want to give them up for ideology. They could handle one term of Bush, but heck if they were going to work hard for him against some Arkansas governor.

To get back to their Georgetown brownstones, the GOP was going to have to be trained by the enemy: William Jefferson Clinton. They went looking for their own Bubba, and found him right next door to Clinton's old stomping ground in Arkansas.

Who would have imagined Ronnie Jr. would be none other than Pappy Bush’s Texas boy? He had the pandering to the groups down cold, and he would let the old Goldwater gang do what they wanted.

Then came John.

It was finally John McCain’s turn. McCain wrote in his memoirs, “I admired him [Barry Goldwater] to the point of reverence.” Surprise, surprise! Eight years of George Bush has torn apart the Grand Old Party that has nothing left for the oldest and loyalist of the Goldwater gang.

He tried to pander. Even his sacrificing his VP pick to the base wasn’t enough for the old hands. One thing they had learned is patience. With the country in such bad shape – caused by their own hands – Palin in ’12 could be their Ronnie III (or is that Goldwater IV?)

Everybody knew it was the end of the line, for Big John.

The Democratic party in Ott-Eight was having their own mini-battle over the soul of their party. Hillary was no Clean for Gene type. She even dared to write in her memoirs, “I liked Senator Goldwater because he was rugged individualist who swam against the political tide.”

Former Senator Tom Daschle never forgot his first love. As a 20 year old, then not even old enough to vote, he was there at O’Hare airport greeting Eugene McCarthy in 1968, the last great moment for the Clean with Gene crowd. Daschle had no need to get clean for Gene -- he was an ROTCer at South Dakota State University -- but the feelings from the tarmac in Chicago stayed with him for 40 years.

Daschle went looking for his own Ronnie Reagan and found him in Barrack Obama. It seemed a strange choice: inexperienced, a product of the Chicago Daly machine, African American, a funny name, young, and not involved in the sixties at all, but who would have thought the heir to Goldwater would come from the Bedtime for Bonzo movie (and not be the chimp.)

The Clean for Gene crowd now have their own Reagan Jr. ready to lead them to the promised-land, and surprisingly enough it looks like it is going to work.

And it only took 40 years.

The only thing the Goldwater/Reagan/Bush gang hadn’t counted on is the drop in value on their Georgetown brownstones. Will they sell them to their old nemesis, the Clean for Gene crowd, and take a chance they’ll still be in the tank in four years, or will they hold onto them hoping for Palin ’12?