Kari Lake Won’t Entertain Your Crazy Hypotheticals
Plus: Spring training in the air.
Joe Biden’s new strategy: leaning into the age thing. “I know I may not look like it, but I’ve been around a while,” Biden quipped during his State of the Union address last week. “And when you get to my age, certain things become clearer than ever before.”
Now the Biden campaign is making a similar argument in a new ad. “Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret,” a quarter-zipped Biden says with a grin. “But here’s the deal. I understand how to get things done for the American people.” The ad rattles through Biden’s first-term accomplishments, then ends with an “off-script” moment: When an off-screen voice suggests “one more take,” Biden replies: “Look, I’m very young, energetic, and handsome. What the hell am I doing this for?”
Happy Monday.
Kari Lake Is Trying to Chill Out
Senate Republicans, who really need a win in Arizona this year, have begged Kari Lake, their MAGA-darling likely candidate, to cool it with all the hardcore election-denial talk. And hey—don’t say she isn’t giving it a shot. Here was Lake in an interview with CNN that aired Sunday:
CNN: “If you had been vice president, would you have certified the 2020 election results?”
Lake: “These are crazy—this is like a hypothetical going forward, a hypothetical going backward—I’m not going to entertain that. What I will entertain is talking about, how do we go forward? And going forward, when we get an America First president and some great leadership in the Senate and the majority, we’re going to do great things for the American people.”
In reality, given Lake is on Donald Trump’s VP shortlist, the question is anything but hypothetical: Americans might be interested to know whether Vice President Lake would believe she had the power to singlehandedly throw out America’s election results. And in fact, we don’t have to wonder: Lake tweeted last year that Mike Pence had “sold his country out” when he refused to help Trump steal the election on January 6th, calling Pence’s stand against his boss “one of the greatest acts of cowardice in American history.”
Still, this was an answer to bring a tear of gratitude to the eye of even the most jaded GOP strategist. The Republican Establishment long ago gave up on ever telling the truth about 2020—why cause extra needless strife with the base voters who already hate them?—and instead landed on precisely this strategy: Talking about the need to move forward while jeering contemptuously at anyone who dares suggest the events of November 2020 through January 2021 might still be relevant to our politics.
You might recall House Speaker Mike Johnson’s first press conference after taking the gavel last fall. Flanked by dozens of House Republicans, Johnson took a question from a reporter: “Speaker Johnson, you helped lead the effort to overturn the 2020 election, do you—” She got no farther than that; the whole gang started hooting and booing, drowning her out. “Shut up!” North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx yelled. “Shut up!” Another congressman shouted: “2024!”
Whether Lake can maintain even this level of message discipline, however, remains to be seen. Pressed by CNN’s reporter, Lake was soon talking about how “we had major problems in our election” in 2022, “and we’re really working to resolve those problems. We still have some court cases.” And on 2020: “No, the 2020 election—I think it was a rigged election. President Trump—I believe it was. But what I’m trying to do is look forward.”
—Andrew Egger
Play Ball!
On a flight to Florida for a speech recently, I was seated near a family of four. The boy, ten years old or so, bored (I assume) by the conversation his parents and I were having, decided to jump in.
“Are you going to spring training too?” he asked me.
“No,” I sadly informed him.
But he was happy to tell me that he was, which games they had tickets to, and what players he was most looking forward to seeing.
I told him that I was envious, to have a great time, and that I’d been a baseball fan since before his parents were born. (He seemed to have difficulty grasping that concept.)
And I thought back to an essay that probably appeared before his parents were born, but that has stayed with me: Bart Giamatti’s great reflection on baseball, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” prompted by the final day of the Red Sox’s 1977 season.
The piece appeared in the Yale Alumni magazine in November 1977. Giamatti—then a literature professor at Yale but also class secretary for his college class of 1960—had submitted this short essay to the Yale Alumni magazine to fulfill his obligation to write something for his class note. The magazine rejected it. But when Giamatti was announced as president of Yale (at age 40) soon after, the piece was promptly published. (How about that?)
Here are some excerpts from “The Green Fields of the Mind.” The essay’s short—do, as they say, read the whole thing:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
Out here, on Sunday, October 2 . . . Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two, and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day, or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5 . . . Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo . . . uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over the center-field wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics as elegant as the arc the ball describes.
New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever…
The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide.
Rice is up. Rice, the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league . . .
The sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England . . .
That is why it breaks my heart, that game . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
There are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts . . . I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
Bart Giamatti left Yale in 1986 to become president of the National League, and then, in 1989, became commissioner of Major League Baseball—before dying, suddenly, of a heart attack, a few months later, at the age of 51.
He was by all accounts a remarkable man—who wrote a lovely appreciation of a great sport.
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
Biden’s 2025 budget marries progressive tax hikes with populist campaign planks: CNBC
Peter Navarro, Trump aide who defied federal subpoena, ordered to prison on March 19: Politico
Congress set to vote on TikTok ban as early as this week: NBC News
Trump meets TikTok investor, suddenly doesn’t want to ban it: NY Mag
Joni Ernst to run against Tom Cotton for Senate GOP No. 3 this fall: Politico
Former advisers sound alarm that Trump praises despots in private and on the campaign trail: CNN
Conservatives are furious, but they’re not threatening Speaker Johnson’s job: NBC News
Quick Hits
1. Hanging with the Illiberals
Today in illiberalism news: Donald Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening, where he showered praise on the Hungarian autocrat’s refusal to let little things like checks and balances get in the way of his rule: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said. “He’s a noncontroversial figure, because he says, ‘this is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.”
The lovefest was mutual, with Orbán calling Trump a “man of peace”—since, he said, Trump would stop funding Ukraine if reelected: “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told his allies in Hungarian state-run media Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet.”
2. That Clears That Up
Republicans, who long considered themselves the party of cutting federal spending, are recently a lot more ambivalent about entitlements. What would Trump’s plan for popular benefits like Social Security be if reelected? He was asked this on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning:
CNBC: Have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlement—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? It seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever.
Trump: So, first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements. Tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening Social Security, because the country is weak. I mean, take a look at outside of the stock market—we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. They have—I believe that number is 50 percent. They say 32 and 33 percent. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50 percent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed. And the middle class largely built our country. And they’ve been treated very, very badly with policy.”
So, uh, now you know!
3. What’s Still at Stake in Ukraine
Bill’s latest Conversations podcast is out, featuring Yale historian and Russia/Ukraine/Eastern Europe expert Timothy Snyder:
“The Russians see us as the weak link, and unfortunately, they’re correct,” Snyder says. “This is still a war that Ukraine can win. But whether or not they win it depends upon whether they have allies who are capable of seeing the political stakes and capable of behaving in a way which is consistent with simple military logic, which is: What do you need to do to help your ally to win?”
More from Snyder:
There are people who like the fact that Russia’s killing lots of Ukrainians. They like the fact that Russia’s pushing for a world where might makes right… And that is unfortunately the appeal of, I’m going to use the word, fascism. Fascism is about saying, “Look, it’s all about the one guy. It’s all about this one guy who’s beyond history. Look at him. He’s breaking all the rules.” And yes, of course there’s killing involved, but that’s necessary. It’s normal. It makes us feel good. And that’s what we’re dealing with now.
The Ukrainians have defended the international order. They have held off, in large measure, a genocide. The Ukrainians are fulfilling the entire NATO mission, basically on their own. There won’t be a war in Europe so long as the Ukrainians are fighting the Russian army because there’s no way the Russian army can fight another war. And the Ukrainians are showing that there are people out there in the world who are willing to take risks for democracy, which is a pretty important example, I think, for us and for everybody. They're doing all these things for us.
Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cheap Shots
"I know that they’re going to end up weakening Social Security, because the country is weak. I mean, take a look at outside of the stock market—we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. They have—I believe that number is 50 percent. They say 32 and 33 percent. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50 percent. That means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50 percent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed. And the middle class largely built our country. And they’ve been treated very, very badly with policy.” (DJT)
At what point will the professional interviewers, apparently overwhelmed at being in the presence of the Great Man, do what the rest of us, amateurs, would do and ask him for SPECIFICS to back up his bogus, intentionally inflammatory claims? Y'know, actual data, from actual sources, requiring actual quantifiable and verifiable information. And, for good measure, a specific game plan to get better results than just four more years of DJT and whatever he feels like doing?
We've all seen the data that the economy is doing quite well now, inflation is declining, wages are catching up with and even surpassing said inflation in many cases, jobs are plentiful, discretionary income is rising, etc. etc. So hit him with that -- HARD -- and make him answer for it beyond self-serving soundbites claiming that whatever gains are happening, he made it possible and Biden is merely riding his coattails -- again, asking in real time for actual facts to back that up irrefutably. And if he won't or can't do that, let the whole world see it, for as long as it takes.
It's our future at stake. We need better than sham interviews that serve as little more than a platform for him to spew his lies and distortions with no serious attempt to get to the truth and hold him accountable for his words. Better still, just don't interview him at all, and give the airtime over instead to a heartwarming story about a boy and his pet yak. We'd get much more out of that in the end.
If anyone could help me make sense of today's Cheap Shots, I would appreciate it.
Kari Lake is genuinely deranged, so any GOP hopes that she'll be able to hide the crazy for a sustained period of time are misguided. She couldn't even sustain it for the span of a fifteen minute interview.
That Biden campaign ad is a good ad. It's civil, appropriately calibrated in its attack of "his predecessor," touts Biden as a man who knows how to get things done and has a record to prove it, and it's self-deprecating.