For those few innocents unfamiliar with how a point spread works, here’s an example: Say Alabama is playing Ohio University in a football game Saturday. Because Alabama is heavily favored, Las Vegas puts out a line encouraging you to bet by giving the Crimson Tide a 24-point handicap going into the game. This means that if Ohio University holds Alabama to only three touchdowns, though the Tide wins the game it hasn’t covered the spread.

Enter Nevada’s Harry Reid, the senator for Las Vegas. Before the roll is even called on the gun law – or a court nomination, or a Cabinet appointment – Reid makes a deal with his opponent Mitch McConnell that in order to get anything through the Senate it will take not 51 but 60 votes. A nine-vote spread.

That means that even when an amendment like Manchin-Toomey passes by a comfortable margin (54-46), McConnell’s team comes out grinning, while Reid (hypocritically) fulminates.

Why does Reid agree to handicapping his team in this way? Senate Club rules, old chap. Comes the day that Democrats are in the minority, Reid will be grinning while McConnell (hypocritically) goes away fulminating.

It’s been said, by no less an observer than the President of the United States (a former member of the Club), that Washington is broken. Right. And if I were to pinpoint the fracture, it would be in the wing of the U.S. Capitol that calls itself the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

World’s Greatest Debilitated Body would be more like it. See you at the game.

Sound Bite to Remember

It doesn’t take a genius to understand football. You don’t have to be a Norman Einstein.

– Washington Redskins quarterback/Notre Dame graduate Joe Theismann

–Headline, Washington Post editorial, 3/14/13

According to presidential aides, the decision to shut down visitor and student tours of the White House because of the sequester was made by the Secret Service. Along with “I did not have sex with that woman,” this stands as one of the most disingenuous statements coming out of a president’s office since Richard Nixon was in full cry.

To believe this line, we have to visualize the head of Barack Obama’s protective detail entering the Oval Office to announce, “We’re eliminating White House tours until further notice,” the President looking up to say, “Oh? Sorry to hear that.”

Somehow I don’t think that’s the way it came about. More likely, at a morning session of the Obama staff gathered to consider how best to embarrass Republicans for bringing on the sequester, one of Obama’s prime Spin Doctors, in balloon-floating mode….but let’s listen in on the colloquy:

SPIN DOCTOR: We could close down the Washington Monument.
CHIEF OF STAFF: It’s already closed down for repairs.
SPIN DOCTOR: What about cutting off Saturday mail?
CHIEF OF STAFF: So what? Who’ll miss it?

Long pause. Then….

SPIN DOCTOR: What say we cut off White House tours?
CHIEF OF STAFF: What’s that got to do with saving money? People come in, move out, no charge.
SPIN DOCTOR: But doesn’t the Secret Service have to –
CHIEF OF STAFF: Screen them. Right. Great idea.

So it was, by my way of thinking, that the Secret Service, once the most unpolitical agency of the government, was brought in to flack for the White House, its spokesman explaining that by eliminating White House tours, they’ll save up to $2 million between now and September, the remainder of the fiscal year.

Two million dollars. Let’s see. That’s about what the President’s new political PAC picks up with a five- – no, make that two-minute phone call. But that’s another issue for another day.

For now, let’s leave it at this: If you’ve lived in Washington as many years as I have, the White House is a familiar part of the landscape. But for millions of Americans, most especially young people who come to their nation’s capital to touch history, a visit to the home where Madison, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan lived is an unforgettable experience.

For the current resident, who once spoke of “empathy” as being a key part of leadership, to shut down White House tours as a political ploy isn’t, as some would say, disappointing. No. A more appropriate word is revealing.

Sound bite to remember

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

–David Mamet, dialogue from “State and Main”

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Thursday threatened a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States and other purported aggressors, describing Washington as a “criminal threatening global peace.”

– Online article, Washington Post, March 7, 2013

Isn’t it about time for some historical revision? As a veteran of the Korean War, permit me to say: MacArthur was right – Truman, Acheson, Marshall and the know-it-alls at the State Department were wrong.

Sound bite to remember
“There is no substitute for victory.”
– General Douglas MacArthur, 1951

Though we live to become old-timers, we still see our sports heroes, as my college friend Roland Swardson once mused, through pre-adolescent eyes; which, I guess, is why some sportswriter with a sociological bent (or a sociologist with a sports bent) came up with the term Role Model.

A Role Model, by definition, is an athlete who in his conduct both on and off the field sets a standard for young people to emulate. The standard in my antediluvian youth was exemplified by those athletes who were game-centered rather than self-centered. They didn’t boast, didn’t taunt, and let their on-field (or in the case of Joe Louis, in-ring) performance do the talking for them.

All of which, for many athletes who came of age after what Tom Wolfe called “the Me Generation,” made for a standard of conduct best ignored or in some cases scorned. NBA star Charles Barkley, for example, let it be known that he had enough on his plate in terms of salary caps and product endorsements without being burdened as a role model for other people’s kids.

Fortunately there are others – even in an age when ESPN exalts a new generation of swaggering I-Am-the-Greatest athletes – who don’t share Prince Charles’ (as Barkley calls himself) view.

In my time I’ve come to personally know two Role Models who fill the bill on standards you’d want your kids to emulate. One is Larry Brown, the Washington Redskins’ great running back, who won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award in 1972 – a player remembered not only for his hell-for-leather running style but the fact that after crossing the goal line he didn’t spike, didn’t dance, didn’t point to himself or the heavens (as if he were God’s Chosen Halfback). He simply handed the ball to the referee.

The other gifted Role Model I’ve been privileged to know was Stan Musial, the nonpareil St. Louis Cardinal outfielder/first baseman of the 1940s and ’50s who died last week at the age of 92. All I might say in praise of Stan – his gift, his modesty, his humanity – was summed up in the headlines run by the New York Times on Jan. 20, reporting his death. The first read, “Stan Musial, Gentlemanly Slugger and Cardinals’ Stan the Man, Dies at 92”; the second, above an obituary by George Vecsey: “The Star Who Stood Out by Not Standing Out.”

A cherished memory of Stan: Some years ago, after Frank Mankiewicz and I organized the Stan Musial Society, a Cardinals fan club in the national capital area, we traveled to St. Louis for dinner and a baseball game with The Man. All went smoothly until we approached the entrance to Busch Stadium where a crowd of youngsters – my estimate was between 30 and 50 kids, both boys and girls – swarmed in, asking for autographs.

We live in a time, understand, when celebrity signatures go for $25 a shot at autograph sessions organized and promoted by sports stars and their agents. That thought ran through my mind as Frank and I stood by and watched – for 15, 20 minutes – until every kid in that crowd went away happy.

Stan the Man. He remembered, he said, being a kid like that himself, back in Donora, Pennsylvania. Allow a nostalgic old-timer this well-worn cliché: They don’t make them like that anymore.

First we go to our senior analyst David Gergen who, having worked for both candidates at one time or another, is guaranteed to be—

GERGEN: Objective, which allows me to say in all fatuity that while both candidates get high grades for making their case, I think Douglas did a better job connecting with the back rows because of his—

BLITZER: Projection?

GERGEN: Exactly. I don’t know how many times I’ve told Abe he has to do something about that tinny voice—

GLORIA BORGER: I couldn’t agree more, David, but I think Lincoln’s inability to speak from the diaphragm is the least of his worries. I got the distinct impression he felt he was above it all, didn’t even want to be there.

PAUL BEGALA: Yeah, right, I mean pulling out his pocket watch in the middle of Douglas’ peroration was bad enough, but that habit of looking down at his opponent, it’s a definite no-no.

MARY MATALIN: Hey, he’s a foot taller, what do you expect? Though I have to admit, Lincoln’s body language wasn’t all his base could have hoped for. Not to mention that fuzzy reference to a house—how did he put it?

ARI FLEISCHER: A house divided against itself cannot stand. I think that’s what he said. For a moment I thought he was going to get into the housing crisis but—

CANDY CROWLEY: May I say something here? I thought the same thing, that he’d get in a personal touch about growing up in a log cabin with his mom Nancy Hanks, then splitting rails—

JOHN KING: A missed opportunity there, no doubt about it. Our focus group by a 3-to-1 margin gave Douglas the edge in likeability and having a personal narrative more like their own.

BLITZER: Fascinating stuff, John. Next, our CNN poll telling us who won, Lincoln or Douglas, after this brief station break . . .

Sound bite to remember 

“You will find out that you cannot do without politicians. They are a necessary evil. But the thing for the school people to do is that if the politicians are going to steal, make sure they steal for the schools.”

–Huey Long to the faculty of LSU, April 12, 1935

That’s not always the case in partisan argument during an election year. Consider the following, from a recent Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger, a frustrated partisan who thinks “the content and course of the Romney campaign does not feel equal to an historic mandate election.”

“Barack Obama is asking voters for a mandate to pursue the visions and policies he outlines in speech after speech,” writes Henninger. “As of now, if Mr. Obama wins, it will be because a confused electorate gave him their default, not their mandate.”

Now that’s more like it. Check the record, whenever hot-eyed (and dull-witted) idealogues take stock of why their side isn’t doing well in (or at) the polls, it’s always a case of their candidate’s not getting his Message across. Why else would the electorate not see the “historic mandate” at stake in this year’s election and come down on Romney’s side? The idea that voters might actually get the Message and reject it – how many years has Mitt Romney been campaigning? – is out of the question.

You know, like the dogs that, despite millions in advertising, don’t like the dog food. The mutts are obviously “confused.”

Sound bite to remember (circa 1955)

“With all respect, counselor, I’d rather blow the f—— case.”

Mafia don Frank Costello on being advised by his lawyer to wear Sears Roebuck suits at his trial for tax evasion.

Sad, sad, sad. Just two years ago, there was talk that Davis, who represented the state’s Birmingham district, might become Alabama’s first African-American governor. As a candidate for the Democratic nomination, he had the support of none other than George  Wallace’s daughter, Peggy. That he nevertheless lost the nomination – to a candidate who in turn lost the general election to Republican Robert Bentley – obviously left him embittered.

In over half a century in politics (yes, that long), I have yet to meet a losing candidate, other than Barry Goldwater, who took personal responsibility for his loss. They are either (1) let down by people they depended on, (2) victimized by the lying tactics of their opponents, or (3) misrepresented or otherwise treated unfairly by a biased media.

Davis, for his part, chose Option (1): He blamed his loss on what he perceived as the backstabbing treachery of Alabama’s Democratic establishment. That in mind, he packed his bags, left Alabama, and headed for Northern Virginia, within a local phone call’s distance from the White House where his friend and former Harvard law school colleague Barack Obama now lives. What happened next – Davis’ switch to the Republican Party, his endorsement of Mitt Romney, and his appearance at the GOP convention – can best be explained by what didn’t happen.

To the point, can you imagine this sort of political embarrassment being visited on a White House run by either Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton? Obama’s campaign aide Stephanie Cutter attributes the defection to Davis’ being a self-interested, attention-seeking opportunist – as if that tells us anything we didn’t know about anyone (including the man she works for) who runs for political office.

No, whatever Artur Davis’ egocentricity, my bet is that he wouldn’t have switched parties, endorsed Romney, or shown up in Tampa if the man whose nomination he seconded four years ago, and/or members of his White House staff aimed the slightest bit of – to borrow a once-favored Obama term – empathy  in his friend’s direction.

A job offer? Possibly, though presidents like Johnson and Clinton knew that reaching out to wounded egos often means simply a private lunch or dinner; a weekend at Camp David; a flight aboard Air Force One; or merely a photo, autographed, taken with the president.

Ah, but this president, as Jane Mayer revealed in her recent New Yorker piece “Schmooze or Lose,” isn’t much for that sort of empathy. He has no time for posed, autographed photos with guests at White House holiday parties. Little time for table-to-table schmoozing at fundraising dinners. Not even, as Maureen Dowd tells us, a thank you note to supporters who make their homes available for fundraising events.

How to explain a president who sees and practices politics this way? Looking back (before my time), I can think of only one model. Not Kennedy, as Obama’s admirers would have us believe, or Carter, as his detractors would argue, but Woodrow Wilson, another cool professor with no time for the nitty-gritty.

Of course, for all that, Wilson did win a second term – but narrowly. Whatever that bit of ancient political history tells us, it would be well for Artur Davis’ erstwhile friend in the White House to remember that Tip O’Neill had it only half-right: All politics is local, yes, but more than that, it’s personal.

Sound Bites to Remember (in translation):

“In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.”

–Charles de Gaulle, circa 1965

“You kiss ass one day so you can kick it the next.”

–Alabama Gov. Big Jim Folsom, circa 1955

Translated: La Constitution, c’est moi. Call it the Tea Party credo, otherwise reflected by Ted Cruz’s notion that the only way to get things done in Washington — or in his words, “Take our country back” — is for everyone to adopt his point of view.

Would Barry Goldwater agree? George Will thinks so. In a column cheering Cruz’s victory in the Texas Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate nomination, Will writes that it is Goldwater’s “spirit” that “infuses the Tea Party.”

To which Barry, if still around, would predictably respond, “B——–!” How can I be sure? Let me put it this way: I knew Barry Goldwater. I was on Barry Goldwater’s staff. And believe me, Barry Goldwater would have nothing good to say about the Tea Party.

Nor, let me add, would the Tea Party have anything good to say about Barry Goldwater. Who can doubt that a political faction that finds Bob Bennett, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Lugar not conservative enough would be fulminating today over a Republican senator who in his autobiography wrote:

“For years, the New Right preached little or no spirit of compromise—political give and take. … Public business— that’s all politics is — is often making the best of a mixed bargain….Our Constitution seeks to allow freedom for everyone, not merely those professing certain moral or religious views of ultimate right.”

So much for George Will’s notion that it’s the spirit of Goldwater that infuses the our-way-or-no-way Tea Party. But then, we have to consider Will’s perspective: While Barry was running for president in 1964, Will was away from the fray, taking his tea at Oxford.

Sound Bite to Remember

“Neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness, and other cognitive problems.” — Tea Party fellow traveler Michael Savage on John Roberts’ vote in the healthcare case

                          — From the New York Times report on Mitt Romney’s Memorial Day speech in San Diego

 With unerring inaccuracy, Mitt Romney sets out to honor those fallen in battle and ends up making a speech better suited for Armed Forces Day. More military spending – money even the Pentagon says it doesn’t want – but let’s understand the man’s dilemma: With John McCain by his side, you can’t very well come off sounding like a tree-hugging peacenik.

McCain, who can’t throw a dart at a map without hitting some country he thinks American troops should be invading, had his own inspired Memorial Day moment when, according to the Times, he “joked about the Marines and received laughter from the audience.”

Memorial Day tribute? Rename it: Patriotism in the age of sound bites is no longer the last refuge of scoundrels. It’s the first refuge of political clowns.

Putdown to Remember (circa 1950)

REPORTER: Mr. Lewis, somebody asked President Truman to make you U.S. ambassador to Russia, and he said he wouldn’t appoint you dogcatcher.

U.M.W. CHIEF JOHN L. LEWIS: Of course he wouldn’t because if he did he’d have more brains in the Dog Department than he has in the State Department.

–Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, explaining why he ran up an $800,000 travel bill making 27 personal trips to his California home via government aircraft since July 2011.

Forty years enchained in Washington! Good God, where was the Thirteenth Amendment when Leon Panetta needed it? There was Leon, working his heart out for the American taxpayer in the unhealthy environs of our Nation’s Capital for four decades as – let’s see, how many government offices, elective and otherwise, has the poor soul had to endure? Let’s run down the list, beginning with his arrival as an upwardly mobile indentured servant in the mid-1960s:

From 1966 to 1969 he was legislative assistant to California Senator Thomas Kuchel; after which he served for two years at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; after which he took a two-year break from Washington – to go into the private sector? No, to indenture himself on New York’s public payroll as the executive assistant to Mayor John Lindsay; then back to the federal payroll as a U.S. congressman for 15 years; after which he was shackled to the Clinton White House as OMB director and chief of staff, then. . . .

Have I made my point? If not, the question to be asked is how – after eight years breathing free air during the Bush 43 era – Leon was lured back to Washington to serve as CIA director (2009-2011), then Secretary of Defense (2011- )?

Given his obvious distaste, if not contempt, for the place, it’s an ongoing mystery. My solution? Term limits for appointed federal office holders. After four to six years in Washington, back to private, not to mention family, life. Call it the Panetta Rule, an Emancipation Proclamation for all those put-upon political hacks who’ve been in Washington so long they consider the town a place you have to “get out of periodically just to get your mind straight and your perspective straight.”

Sound bite to remember

“I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do; and for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down.’”

                                                                                         –Bob Newhart