Jason Sokol's first book is There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

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August 28, 2010: If Glenn Beck Knew the Half of it

Today, on the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington, Glenn Beck is taking his cause to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. According to Beck, Tea Partiers are "the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement." The Tea Party itself circulated a petition declaring, "We believe, like Martin Luther King, Jr., in a colorblind, postracial society."

These pronouncements make me wonder whether Glenn Beck and his acolytes have any idea of the society in which Martin Luther King truly believed.

Here are 5 Things Beck and other "Tea Partiers" may not know:

1.) Martin Luther King, Jr., fought for the expansion of the federal government. King was an ardent supporter of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs. He favored numerous new laws and large expenditures on welfare, health care, education, and the like - from the 1964 Civil Rights and the 1965 Civil Rights Act to the 1968 Fair Housing Act (a bill passed shortly after his death).

2.) King defined himself as a democratic socialist. He believed that an unfettered free market contributed to vast inequalities in income, and that the United States ought to redistribute more wealth.

3.) In 1967 and 1968, King led the "Poor People's Campaign." Moreover, he was a friend of organized labor throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He believed that unions and blacks were natural allies in the struggle for a more just America.

4.) For all this and more, King's enemies labeled him a "Communist." One billboard, popular on southern highways, featured a photo of King consorting with other leftists. It screamed, "King at Communist Training School."

5.) The 1963 March on Washington was a march for "Jobs and Justice." King believed that the federal government ought to "guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work."

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July 9, 2010: South Africa On My Mind

Anyone who knows me could pretty easily craft a melodrama that captured my head and my heart. They would write a story about race and sports.

"Jerry Maguire" comes to mind - a sports movie with a genuine interracial friendship. Or "Friday Night Lights" - at least the good seasons, like the Smash Williams story in season one. I watched "Invictus" last week, however, and was disappointed. It had the race and the sports, but not really the history. Telling the Nelson Mandela story through a couple of rugby matches didn't really resonate with me.

Which brings me to South Africa. I don't follow soccer at all until the World Cup. Then I immerse myself in the game, once every four years. What's so great about the World Cup is the history enfolded within it. When nations play one another, everyone knows it's about more than just the players on the field - it's about epic narratives of countries and their people, involving everything from border spats to continental rivalries.

This is why it's shocking to me that so few members of the media are talking about the Dutch in South Africa. Widely considered "the best side never to win a World Cup," the Netherlands might finally reach this apex in the very land that they dominated so horrifically. If they win the crown in Johannesburg, they will achieve this in the city that they built on the back of black blood. Does nobody else find this intensely fascinating? So compelling and almost terrifying?

The Netherlands has never played up to its potential on the world stage before. To do so, it had to return to the nation that it conquered at the ends of the earth.

There are some pretty straight-forward reasons why nobody is talking about this. For starters, there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between the soccer players in orange in 2010 and the Afrikaners in the 1940s, those architects of apartheid. In recent years, the Dutch squads were awash in racial diversity. Patrick Kluivert scored 40 goals for the national team. Former Dutch footballer Ruud Gullit now sits in the ESPN studio and dissects each match.

And when you really pry open the history of any nation, ugly ghosts will come quickly to the surface. Was Franco's Spain any more humane than Botha's South Africa? Who can really say? What I can say is that if the World Cup were being played in Israel, and if Germany made it to the championship game, there would be a lot more talk about the weight of the past than there is right now.

The Afrikaners themselves certainly see the link. Orange flags fly from South African cars and across the sheltered white suburbs from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

I'm no expert on South Africa, but I do know that it's a place still ravaged by racial inequality, racial violence, and - yes - racial hatred.

The few articles that have been published about this - one in the Christian Science Monitor, one in the Wall Street Journal online, and another by the Associated Press - present disparate portraits of black South Africa's response to Holland's soccer success. In some narratives, they strongly support the Netherlands. In other stories, black South Africans glimpse in the all those seas of orange an awful racial history and a still difficult present.

(A quick congrats to my close friend Jeremy Sharrard who, before the World Cup began, predicted a Netherlands/Spain final. For the record, I picked Spain over Brazil.)

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May 25, 2010: It's All About Race

When I watched the clip of Rand Paul's now-infamous interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, it sent me back not to 1964 but to 2003. During the first several months of that year, I devoted all of my waking hours to researching what white southerners thought of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Seven years ago, I was gleeful when I discovered the stacks and stacks of letters that citizens had written to their elected representatives. Now, the thought of those letters - folder after folder, pile upon pile - makes me shudder.

In an attempt to defeat the Civil Rights Act, southern senators filibustered for a record three months. Their constituents cheered them on. Sam Ervin, leader of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, was in the thick of the fight. So was Richard Russell, the de facto head of the southern Democrats. I pored over Ervin's papers, which remain the largest collection of all at the very-large Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill. I also spent days at the Richard Russell Library in Athens, Georgia. Anyone who reads these letters will arrive at one inescapable conclusion.

Opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was all about race.

Sure, most every white southerner couched his opposition in the vernacular of freedom generally and property rights specifically. But the law was then, and it always has been, about one particular type of freedom: the freedom of black people to enter a business if they wished to do so. (Yes, Title II was all about public accommodations. Neither Rand Paul nor Barry Goldwater had much of a problem with that. White southerners did, but, for now, that's neither here nor there).

The typical white southerner would begin a letter to his senator the way Iredell Hutton began his note to Sam Ervin. Hutton owned the Paramount Theater in Burlington, North Carolina, and the Civil Rights Act was still a year off when he penned his letter. Hutton was incensed, and quite frightened, by John F. Kennedy's June 11, 1963 speech. Kennedy first proposed the idea of civil rights legislation. Kennedy called this issue "as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the Constitution." The president and the cinema owner didn't read the same Scriptures or revere the same Constitution.

"Little by little they are taking away our individual freedoms," Hutton said of the "Kennedy boys." "It is getting to be a hell of a note when a person that owns a business cannot sell to or serve whom he chooses." Indeed, this was the essence of Goldwater's argument in 1964 - and of Rand Paul's argument in 2010. But in hundreds upon thousands of letters written by white southerners, this was only the beginning of the argument - not its thrust. The Civil Rights Act was not about serving an individual American in the abstract. It was about serving a black person in a southern business. And therein lay Hutton's real objection. "When the negro has earned the right, he should be accepted and not until then." Congress deemed that African Americans had finally "earned" that most American of rights in July 1964. Millions of white southerners disagreed.

If we argue about the Civil Rights Act, this is what we are arguing about. And behind every theoretical debate about "big government" lurks something real and physical. In the specific case of the Civil Rights Act or in the general case of the Tea Party, we're not really arguing about principles.

We're arguing about whether a family (black or white or Latino, and almost always impoverished) should lose their home because of the actions of traders on Wall Street (often rich and white). We're arguing about whether working person without employer-provided health care should be allowed to see a doctor when he or she is sick. And, yes, the fact is that the number of black people who can't afford health care is vastly disproportionate to the number of whites. When we argue about the role of government, we're not arguing about concepts. We're arguing about what happens to the most disadvantaged among us. And when a vast majority of the disadvantaged are black people, then we're also arguing about race.

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February 25, 2010: An Anniversary Barrage

Get ready, because the 1960s are upon us - again. Or, for those of us born in the late 1970s, the Sixties are upon us for the first time. That decade when everything happened, when so many things changed, when the world seemed up for grabs - when history was made every ten minutes.

Just as the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of February 1, 1960 effectively launched the decade, so the recent articles and exhibits commemorating that struggle have officially kicked off the fiftieth anniversary of the Sixties.

For the next decade, we could be treated to a silver anniversary with every meal. Soon we will be seeing the Kennedy/Nixon debates once again and replaying that epic election. We will see Martin Luther King, Jr., hundreds of times, landing in jails, rallying the troops, orating so eloquently that justice will have no choice but to roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Next will come the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Freedom Rides and the Albany Movement, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. The cast of characters are too many to list, and there are the cities whose very names speak multitudes: Birmingham; Philadelphia (Mississippi) and Selma; My Lai, Hanoi, and Saigon.

Then there are the assassinations: Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy - the killings that so maimed, tore, and stained the nation. These all must have their fiftieth anniversaries. How could they not?

And didn't the 60s also have LBJ? And Woodstock? And Muhammad Ali?

That's just to confine it to the United States. A few things happened in Prague and in Paris, in Moscow and Mexico City.

And that's all just a start. Brace yourselves, because it's about to hit.

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January 31, 2010: Letter from Massachusetts

It's been 15 years since I last lived in Massachusetts. I moved back to my native Bay State two weeks ago - and, my, what a rude return.

My clothes were barely out of my bags before the Harvard Square burger joint Mr. Bartley's was advertising its newest addition to the menu - The Scott Brown.

So much for the comfortable and progressive Massachusetts of my memories, I thought. I watched the local news for hours on that election night. One series of interviews with "the people" was set in a Worcester pub. Here were all of these innocents proclaiming their allegiance to Scott Brown. I felt like Don Draper in Palm Springs, or like my own strait-laced grandfather when he was once plopped down on a bench on Main Street in Northampton. "Who are these people?!"

That's a loaded - not to mention a rhetorical - question, one I'm not quite prepared to answer. But I can say one thing for certain: when Massachusetts voted Scott Brown into the "people's seat," they were not voting against the idea of a government-run health care system. That's because they already have it.

Granted, Bay State voters seem sick of one-party rule in the state. But their vote can only be construed as an anti-health care vote insomuch as one acknowledges that Massachusetts already has universal health care. This point, while occasionally noted by the national media, has rarely been explored. And it needs to be. Massachusetts voters dislike "taxes" and "big government" in the abstract. By the same token, they also really like - and understand the need for - the social services that their government provides, health care chief among them. They weren't voting against health care per se. They were saying that since they already have a statewide system, it wasn't so critical that they install a senator to support the national bill. Altruistic? Of course not. Anti-health care? Not really.

A glance at Massachusetts political history also tells us that as much as a particular brand of liberalism has dominated state politics for the past half-century, its senate seats have been won by scions of prominent families or owners of larger-than-life personalities.

It has been almost a hundred years since senators were first elected by popular vote. Since then, Massachusetts has elected two Lodges, two Kennedys, two Weeks', a Coolidge, a Saltonstall, and a Kerry. The outliers? David Walsh served for about twenty-five years; Frederick Gillett and Paul Tsongas each served for a term. And in perhaps the most compelling senate campaign of all, Ed Brooke - an African American and a Republican - bested Chub Peabody in 1966. Brooke went on to win re-election six years later; no black senator or governor has won re-election before or since. Nobody else served a full term in a Massachusetts senate seat.

Significantly, they have all been men. And in general, seldom have female politicians been perceived as charismatic, smooth, or stylish. Martha Coakley certainly projected none of these qualities. She was perceived as the next in line among state Democrats; Scott Brown pilloried her as the choice of the "machine." And as strong as the Massachusetts political machine has been at the local levels, that strength rarely translates to elections of statewide and national significance. Brown seemed the candidate from the lustrous family; he was glamorous as much as he was populist. He was the one who floated above, while Coakley remained in the humdrum muck of politics-as-usual.

For these reasons of personality as much as policy, Brown - and not Coakley - convinced the electorate that he was the rightful successor to the Saltonstalls, the Brookes - and the Kennedys too.

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November 15, 2009: The Other 20-Year Anniversary

Two days before the Berlin Wall fell, monumental breakthroughs occurred in American racial politics. Douglas Wilder became the first African American to be elected governor – and in a southern state, no less. David Dinkins won election as the first black mayor of New York City, as did John Daniels in New Haven and Norm Rice in Seattle. The New York Times editorial page boasted of “trans-racial triumphs, once as unimaginable as the end of the wall.” Such victories displayed a nation in transit, traveling “messily, unevenly, toward a standard of racial equality probably unknown in history.”

The ensuing years rendered that new day of racial equality more a figment than a reality – painful truths demonstrated by Crown Heights and Rodney King, by every statistical indicator from incarceration percentages to poverty rates.

One year removed from Barack Obama’s presidential victory, Americans might look back two decades and view the election season of 1989 in a new light. For it writes the prologue to the rise of Obama. November 2008 forces us to re-remember November 1989. Those elections no longer smack of hopes unfulfilled and expectations unmet; that piece of the past now becomes an essential chapter in an epic American story.

In 1989, all four candidates emphasized messages of change, healing, progress, and unity. They offered themselves as motors to propel their states beyond a painful racial past, or to steer their cities around an ugly present.

German television stations and British newspapers followed Douglas Wilder across Virginia. His campaign ads urged, “Keep Virginia moving forward. Don’t let Marshall Coleman take us back.” Wilder referenced the years of massive resistance against school integration, when the “old commonwealth’s reputation was corroded.” He navigated the swirling currents of Virginia’s history: the blemishes of slavery and segregation on the one hand, and the tradition of the Founding Fathers on the other. Wilder’s presence in the statehouse could help Virginia purge the sins of the past, and realize the prouder parts of its heritage. Wilder eked out a victory, heralding a new Old Dominion.

Race was even closer to the surface of David Dinkins’s campaign. The Democratic primary battle between Dinkins and Ed Koch unfolded amid an ever-exploding terrain. This included the infamous rape in Central Park and the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. Dinkins offered racial healing to a city in dire need of it. He won a nine-point primary victory, praising New Yorkers who “voted our hopes and not your fears.” In the general election, up against Rudy Giuliani’s law-and-order appeal, Dinkins invoked the “gorgeous mosaic” of cultures, races, and ethnicities that composed the city. Dinkins’s uplifting message carried the day.

In New Haven, John Daniels made sure that voters understood the stakes. “The whole race issue is a key factor. How can a black man…be elected in a city which is… predominantly white? Can the city overcome racism?” He won the election with 69 percent of the vote. Daniels proclaimed in triumph, “People are busting with pride and joy.”

In this sagging post-industrial city, citizens craved change. If voters elected black politicians, they seemed to be guessing, then their cities might also change for the better.

A longtime city councilman, Norm Rice entered Seattle’s mayoral campaign on the day of the filing deadline – deciding to run only after the issue of race came to assume political weight. Another candidate, Doug Jewett, had emphasized the controversial issue of school busing and heightened racial friction. Rice presented himself as the only leader who could bridge America’s most bedeviling divide. In a city where less than one in ten residents were African Americans, he won a sixteen-point victory.

No such reconciliation was in the offing. In 1991, Mayor Dinkins could not extinguish the racial fires that burned in Crown Heights. Wilder changed the color of the Richmond statehouse, but no gubernatorial election could batter down the racial inequalities that defined American life. By 1994, Norm Rice was the only one of the four leaders still in office.

Barack Obama’s election places all of this in a different context. It raises the possibility that the story of American racial politics does not wind inevitably toward violence, tension, and inequality – but that interracial progress is as much a part of that tale as regression. The elections of 1989 might now be glimpsed as one small step within a longer journey. And as Americans recall the elections of 1989, they will see that Obama’s presidency did not amount to a complete break from the past. He did not signal a rupture with America’s racial history. Rather, he was the culmination of one of its slices. Obama not only followed in the footsteps of black candidates who had forged multiracial coalitions two decades before. He also made their footsteps larger.

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October 26, 2009: A World Series From Hell

For reasons unknown, the baseball gods have pitted the Yankees against the Phillies. The conventional wisdom has it, as Tim Kurkjian writes at ESPN.com, that "this could be a World Series for the ages." For Mets fans, it is a waking nightmare.

I was talking with my brother, wondering which fate is worse: to live in Philadelphia when the Phillies win the title (as I would be), or to live in New York when the Yankees win (as he would be). The fans of both teams are intolerable, but for very different reasons.

Yankee fans feel entitled to the championship each and every year. Often arrogant and more than a little spoiled, they pity the supporters of every other team - bemused and confused as to how anyone could ever enjoy rooting for a club that often battles mediocrity.

Phillies fans, on the other hand, are forever looking to unload the enormous chip on their collective shoulders. The City of Brotherly Love is a huge metropolitan area, with a bustling downtown and plenty to be proud of. But it is also an intensely insular place, one in which it never even occurs to most city residents that the individual they are passing on the sidewalk might not have grown up within a 30-mile radius. Philadelphia is a solidly second-tier city, with the mentality of a third or fourth-tier city. Phillies fans are far more aggressive and violent than are Yankee fans, yet there is about Phillie-lovers something much more authentic and emotional.

When the playoffs began, I was rooting for anything except a Yankees-Phillies series. Now that the worst has come to pass, I must grudgingly cast my lot with one or the other of these evils.

And the Phillies have one enormous tie-breaker: former Met Pedro Martinez. At this point, I would like nothing more than to see Pedro throw two shutouts against the Yankees. So I will join my Philadelphia brethren for the next two weeks, and raise a glass high for Pedro.

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September 30, 2009: Health Care Blues

There is little reason to weigh in on the health care debate when Rachel Maddow so expertly skewers the opposition; I often have nothing to say other than "Amen."

But when I read the reports about yesterday's votes against a public option (in the Senate Finance Committee) I found my head spinning. I needed to work out these thoughts by putting words to the page.

Forget "death panels" and trumped-up fears about "socialism." The bizarre thing is the way that Republican senators attacked the public option.

First, Charles Grassley claimed, "Government is not a fair competitor." A government plan would "ultimately force private insurers out of business." He fears that the government plan would be so great, the public option so attractive to so many millions of Americans, that private companies could not match it. I don't really see the problem here. If the government can offer a far better plan than private insurers, why shouldn't it? Anti-government conservatism of the past was rooted in the fundamental idea that the private market - because it responds to economic incentives - will certainly produce a better product than any "government bureaucrat" would. Grassley has turned this reasoning on its head. He seems to grant that the government would be able to offer better health care - at a better price - than private corporations. This, to him, is the scary part - the very notion that the government might do something well. In the end, he prefers a bad health care plan - so long as it is private - to a good one, if it happens to be public.

Nevada Senator John Ensign agreed. "Does anybody believe Congress would let this public plan go away once it has a constituency? No way. Once it's started, you will never get rid of it." Ensign fears that the government would offer such a good plan that nobody would ever want to end it. Again, this is a rather ludicrous line of reasoning. His very premise is that a public health plan should never be permanent - even if it works and if it has wide popular support. The premise ought to be, instead, that our leaders will support the best health care plans available.

What is so galling is that these conservatives have flipped upside-down the most basic beliefs of the new conservatism. They have confused means and ends. To them, the end seems to be small government. They will use any means to get there. I have no trouble believing that Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley would object to the public option. But I don't think they would object to it on such absurd grounds. To them, the desired end would be good and cheap health care for Americans. They happened to believe that the private market could achieve this, and that the federal government couldn't. But if the opposite were accepted as fact, I think they would have found another line of attack.

The conservatives of today have already conceded the most basic point: that a public option would provide the best health care at the best price. An overwhelming majority of Americans happen to agree with them, as a recent New York Times poll showed. Grassley, Ensign, Jon Kyl, and others are concerned that the public plan would be so amazing, and it would last so long, that the likes of Blue Cross and Aetna would be driven out of business. If this scenario came to pass, most Americans would rejoice. Because for most every member of the conservative coalition - from California tax crusaders to racist white southerners and Northeastern "hard-hats" - there was never anything theoretical about liberalism and conservatism. They supported whomever they believed would improve their lives - either economically, culturally, morally, or any other way one wants to define the "good life." They once thought that smaller government, more privatization, and less taxes would do this. If bigger government and a public option ends up improving their lives, they are very happy to back that instead.

Senate Republicans are not sticking to their "conservative principles" when they crusade against a public option. At the very best, they're mistaking means for ends and misreading the American public. At worst, they are betraying the trust that we place in our public servants.

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September 16, 2009: On Not Going Back to School

No kid ever relished the turn from August to September, because that meant, of course, that summer vacation was gone. No more camp; no more days at the beach; no more sleep-overs on weeknights; no more trips to Friendly's for lunch.

But there was one September ritual I always loved: the buying of school supplies. I would enter CVS with my parents, gazing at the bounty of Trapper Keepers, mechanical pencils, and tri-colored pens. This all announced that something new was afoot - new classes, new friends, a new year. A new notebook was, quite literally, a blank slate.

Which is to say that I am filled with less of a sense of possibility this fall, no feeling that something new is about to begin, that there is much to experience and much to be learned. I am technically affiliated with a university - I am a Visiting Scholar in Penn's History Department. But this is solely a research and writing position. I have no contact with students, no time in the classroom. Some professors, of course, would think upon this as a a much welcome sabbatical - a respite from grading papers, writing lectures, and holding office hours. And indeed it would be - if it functioned as an actual sabbatical.

As it is, I miss the rhythm of the class schedule, the spirit of the new year. I miss the welcoming of first-year students to the campus, with their ideas of what college might be, and what the world might be, and their gung-ho attitude about the assigned readings, at least for the first couple of weeks.

I harbor the vague feeling that I am missing out on something. It's not just that I cherish the chance to teach students - to share with them hard questions, to challenge them with complex arguments, to laugh with them about whatever teachers and students happen to share a laugh about. It is also that I miss the chance to learn from them. Because although teaching always involves some slogging through - some tedious grading one doesn't want to do, some office hour one would rather have to himself, some lecture that hasn't been completely polished - it also involves an exchange from teacher to student and from student to teacher. It is that latter exchange that I might miss the most: the chance to learn something from my students, the opportunity for a 32-year old with a doctorate to glean some real nuggets about the world and about himself from an 18-year old just out of high school. It doesn't happen all the time, but there is some small thing that I always have learned, with every course I have taught, something that always trickles in.

And it is disappointing to realize that, for me, this September holds no such sparks. In most every way, it's just the same as August.

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Beginning on September 15, the blog will return to posts that focus almost exclusively on history, politics, and race.

September 10, 2009: The Best Barbecue in the North

One chapter in my book is titled, "Barbecue, Fried Chicken, and Civil Rights." I researched the desegregation of southern restaurants primarily because I thought the experiences of restaurateurs illuminated many larger truths about the impact of the civil rights movement on white-owned businesses - and particularly about the history of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I also had a personal interest in the fried chicken joints and rib shacks of the South. Here was some of the best food in America, and it was housed in some of the most unassuming, and out of the way places. For a son of New England, I have always nursed a curious hankering for barbecue and fried chicken; it is a soft-spot that has stayed with me.

I have also always liked to rate things. I think this was an outgrowth of a sports-oriented upbringing. I became obsessed with the college basketball tournament from an early age. Before the NCAA bracket had appeared on t-shirts and TV ads and in so many office photo-copiers, I was filling out as many as I could get my hands on - and forcing my parents and friends to do the same. It is with both pride and embarrassment that I admit I was barely seven years old when I filled out my first bracket. And I haven't missed one since. The seeding of teams and the order of the bracket - its seeming scientific beauty - were seductive to me. The democracy of the bracket also captivated me, with its opportunity for the underdog. Villanova won the title when I was seven. All of this is to say that the seedings and rankings of college basketball have really led me toward an enjoyment of rankings in general.

So, if you wish to indulge me, please read on.

The South has a barbecue culture all its own, and the places I am about to rank can't hold a candle to the glorious barbecue joints in Lockhart, Texas (Kreuz); Athens, Georgia (Weaver D's); New Bern, North Carolina (Moore's); or Kansas City, Missouri (Arthur Bryant's).

As the pork craze spreads across the North, I would like to present my personal top 5 rib joints above the Mason-Dixon line.

There has been a lot of talk in New York City about Daisy Mae's, and also about Blue Smoke (especially after it got a booth at the new Shea Stadium). These places are good, but I don't think they are the best places in New York - let alone in the North. Fair warning: I have not yet tried either Hill Country or RUB. And I have not yet been blown away by the ribs here in Philly. I live very close to the Rib Crib, and found their Pork Ribs platter merely average to above-average - though I will return soon, and order the short end platter.

Here are my top five:

5. Flint's, Oakland, CA. When I first moved to the Bay Area, in 2000, this place was excellent. But the more I went, the more inconsistent it seemed. On its best day, Flint's ribs could match up with anyone...on their worst, they were entirely mediocre. Flint's cracks my list because of the high upside, but it comes with considerable risk.

4. Dallas Jones BBQ, New York, NY. I have eaten at both locations - one in the heart of the West Village and the other that recently opened on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn - and was highly impressed with both. (Not to be confused with Dallas BBQ, the city-wide chain.)

3. Curtis's, Putney, VT. Curtis wins points for degree of difficulty. To call his place a rib "joint" is itself a stretch. Curtis is open only during the summer, when he parks his sky-blue-painted school bus on the side of the road in Putney, Vermont, about a half an hour north of the Massachusetts border and just west of the New Hampshire line. Indeed, it does not seem the most obvious place to do a great business in ribs - but Curtis pulls it off.

2. Dinosaur BBQ, Syracuse, NY. The silver medal goes to Dinosaur - not the Harlem location, but the original Syracuse one. I was underwhelmed when I visited the Harlem restaurant, but every time I have been to the Syracuse headquarters, it has blown me away. Which brings up another point that I must emphasize. It can become hard to separate the quality of the ribs from the overall experience, which of course includes the side dishes. And Dinosaur serves salt potatoes.

1. Everett & Jones, Jack London Square, Oakland, CA. I might catch some flak for the number one ranking here, but I have been to this place at least 10 times and have never been let down. Again, I would caution anyone who frequents the Everett & Jones satellite locations spread around Oakland and Berkeley. They are downright disappointing; the Jack London restaurant is the place to go. The pork ribs are amazing, as are the yams and baked beans. This is my favorite, hands down.

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August 31, 2009: Reflections on Philly.

I have lived in Philadelphia for a year and a month now. The economy came crashing down just after I moved here, cratering the academic job market and changing what I thought would be a 9-month fellowship at Penn - and a way-station to something bigger and better - into a situation much more lasting and much less secure.

Still, it has been a good year. In particular, November 2008 held all sorts of drama for us here in the city of Brotherly Love. I saw dancing in the streets when Obama won the election (a euphoria that I shared), and dancing in the streets when the Phillies won the World Series (one I did not share). We did some more dancing after I proposed to Nina (and she accepted, happily).

We spent our summer alternating trips to the Berkshires - searching for the elusive beautiful-yet-cheap wedding spot - with weekends in New York and weekdays in Philly. Naturally, this has given me plenty of time to sample the city's iced coffee selection.

The results:

3.) Spruce Street Espresso. Philadelphians are not all that subtle in their naming of neighborhoods. This tiny and charming cafe is situated in the section of Center City known as the "Gayborhood." It serves Counter Culture coffee beans, and makes a delightful iced coffee.

The distance between my number three and my top two is vast. Spruce Street isn't near the upper echelon just yet.

2.) Chestnut Hill Coffee Co. Fortunately, this coffee shop is on my street. I don't love their hot coffee, but the espresso drinks are great - as are the iced. My only word of warning is that the quality of the iced coffee can vary wildly. Sometimes, the cup here at Chestnut Hill compares with the best I've ever had; at other moments, it seems merely above-average. This place roasts its own beans - which are excellent. It also serves cream, milk, and half and half from a local farm; this can actually make all the difference between a good cup of coffee and a great one.

1.) Ray's. This unassuming Chinatown establishment specializes in dumplings, bubble tea, and really expensive coffee. Ray's is certainly not your best bang for the buck, but it is simply the best coffee in town - far and away. A small iced coffee is $3.70, and a large is somewhere in the vicinity of 5 bucks. Back in May, I was serving a day of jury duty, and I was really slogging by the time our lunch break came. I walked into Ray's, and was blown away by the quality of the coffee. I will return.

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May 29, 2009: The Best Coffee in New York City

I have been a sports dork forever, and I have been a history dork at least since my early adolescence. It was not until I moved to California for graduate school that I discovered I was also a coffee dork.

My first summer in Berkeley was 2000, and I had the good fortune to live several blocks away from one of this county's temples of coffee: Royal Coffee on College Ave., since renamed Cole Coffee. Royal, together with the other cafe treasures scattered throughout the Bay Area, created my obsession for strong, high-quality coffee. And when I left the West Coast for New York in 2005, coffee-dorkdom came with me.

Thankfully, the coffee-craze was starting to blanket the Big Apple just after I moved back East. In the years since, it has gathered substantial steam. Now, there are many ways to go when compiling a list of the top coffee spots in New York.

Like other gastro-gourmet entities, Brooklyn is the new frontier for the coffee bean. The Portland-based Stumptown Coffee opened an outpost in Red Hook, and is also supplying cafes from South Slope to Williamsburg (and many other shops in Manhattan) with their beans. Root Hill cafe sits among the auto shops that shelter Park Slope from Gowanus, and they brew a variety of beans in their clover machine. The Red Horse Cafe, also in Park Slope, brews Barrington Coffee, and offers iced-coffee drinkers the choice of ice cubes made with coffee or water. Colson Bakery, on 6th Ave. and 9th St., recently decided to buy beans from George Howell's touted Terroir Coffee company. (I can't personally vouch for how this experiment is going.) Gimme Coffee, the Ithaca-based cafe, opened a store near the Lorimer L stop, and does great business. The Verb, in the hipster mall on Bedford Street in Williamsburg, boasts cold-brewed iced-coffee: it's very smooth, as advertised, but not strong enough for me.

Manhattan also has many coffee haunts. First, there is Joe, the Art of Coffee. It has two locations in the Village, and has expanded to Columbus Ave. as well as to Grand Central. Their espresso drinks are quite good, but I've never found their brewed coffee to be all that great. Which is a criticism I could level at many of the places listed above. Baristas are trained for so long on how to make the perfect latte, how to pull a great espresso and artfully pour the steamed milk over it. But I've always preferred a strong and smooth cup of coffee to a great espresso drink.

Ninth Street Espresso was often guilty of the same, though I haven't been there since they started using Stumptown beans. MUDD, in the East Village, makes a good cup of coffee. I am definitely a fan of Oren's, which has several uptown locations; I am most familiar with the shop near Columbia. My major gripe with Oren's would be that they don't let customers pour their own milk and cream - which makes me feel a little bit like I'm ordering at a Dunkin' Donuts.

I could go on. But without further ado, I present my own ranking of the top three coffee places in New York City. I end up favoring those cafes that import - or, even better, roast - their own beans. I also went with New York-based places, which pretty much excludes the likes of Stumptown and Gimme.

3.) Porto Rico Importing Co. This choice might raise some eyebrows. Porto Rico has been going strong for decades, and it hasn't changed much even amid the recent coffee craze. The coffee bar has sporadic hours, and there is no cafe-culture to speak of. But the sheer variety of beans in the store, particularly at the Bleecker Street headquarters, cannot be matched - and neither can the price. Most of the beans are high-quality, though a few of the blends border on the mediocre. And while the servers at the coffee bar won't let you pour your own cream, they still make a mean cup - hot or iced. As an added bonus, Kenny Shopsin's son now works at the Bleecker location.

2.) Cafe Grumpy. This cafe in Chelsea is heavy on the wallet, but they really know how to run a clover machine. The customer picks his bean (usually they offer 3 or 4 different choices), and it comes out of the clover rich and smooth. They seem to use coffee from Central America and Africa almost exclusively, and you can buy bags of beans in the store. Apparently, they are opening a shop in the heart of Park Slope very soon. This will provide much-needed competition for...

1.) Gorilla. I first set foot in Gorilla early in 2005, back when you could actually walk into the shop without enduring a line out the door. Every time, it has been worth the wait. I haven't had a better cup from a place that brews it by the pot. Sure, at Royal and Grumpy, you choose your bean and they brew it on the spot. But Gorilla is able to approach that kind of quality on a massive scale. The hot coffee is hot and good, and rarely bitter - and the iced coffee never gets watered down. The prices are reasonable for cups and beans alike; the beans go for 11 dollars/pound. The music is always loud and obnoxious (and intentionally so). This place is not, indeed, for the weak of heart. If you can grab one of the three benches outside, you're golden. With a cup of coffee from Gorilla, and a seat in the sun, it can seem like a slice of Berkeley has been transported to Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn - with a little more edge and grit and attitude.

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NOTE: As the seasons change to spring and summer, I will be experimenting with the blog. Instead of a blog laden with posts about history, politics, and race, expect to read more about two of my other writing passions: sports and food. Enjoy!

April 16, 2009: Danny Boy

Two weeks before the New York Mets signed Gary Sheffield, Mike Francesa's voice boomed over the WFAN airwaves as it is wont to do and pronounced upon the relationship between Mets fans and their starting left fielder. "If you are a Met fan, you LOVE your left fielder," Francesa said, clearly amused - and more than a little perturbed by the amorous tone of so many New York callers that day. "You don't like your left fielder. You don't just like him. You LOVE him!"

The love affair between Met fans and Daniel Murphy began to crystallize last fall, and it solidified in spring training. It was in the final week of February that Jerry Manuel declared Murphy an everyday player. Murphy was discussed initially as a solution to the Mets problem at second base - which goes by the name of Luis Castillo - and tried his hand at the keystone in the Arizona Fall League. That experiment bore little fruit, and Murphy found himself in a four-way competition for the two corner outfield spots, vying against Ryan Church, Nick Evans, and Fernando Tatis.

Before the competition had really gotten under way, Manuel announced the winner of the left-field job and the Amazins' brains trust waged what resembled a marketing campaign. Manuel and Omar Minaya praised Murphy's plate discipline, his ability to go the other way (which had become the focus of an exhaustive drill that Manuel brought to spring training), his grittiness, and his fire. And Met fans ate it up.

The kinds of fans who place calls to Mike Francesa's radio show are the sort of men (and they are almost all men, especially now that Doris From Ozone Park has passed away) who gravitate, almost magnetically, toward athletes with such "intangibles" as grit, scrappiness, and hustle. And it does not hurt if the possessor of those characteristics also has a last name like Murphy.

Think about those ballplayers who build careers, or win occasional roster spots, on the basis of their "hustle": Craig Counsell, David Eckstein, "Super" Joe McEwing, or Aaron Miles. There is a certain likeness among them, one that goes skin-deep. We Americans don't like to think that we look through race-tinged lenses when we pick our sports heroes or even our political leaders. But race often lurks in the background, especially when words like "scrappy" and "hustle" appear. Since their double-signing of Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran, the Mets came to be known in some circles as Los Mets. The Mets are not shy about their business relationship with Banco Popular, or their elaborate scouting program in the Dominican Republic. It would not hurt the franchise to shore up the backbone of its fan base in Massapequa, Carroll Gardens, and Hartsdale.

In the end, of course, general managers make decisions based upon who will win ball games or, at least, who will turn profits for the franchise. The decision to start Daniel Murphy has everything to do with what the Mets see in him on the field. The rest is all backstory and undertone. It makes sense to look beyond the veneer of grit and scrappiness, and to ask: what exactly do the Mets have in Daniel Murphy?

Murphy is still feeling his way in left field, a position made more difficult by the sloping walls and winds of Citi Field. While Murphy held his own during the first five games of the season, the sixth turned on his misplay. In the midst of a pitcher's duel between Johan Santana and Josh Johnson, Murphy dropped a fly ball on the warning track. The error led to two runs, and the Mets lost, 2-1. Santana was visibly upset. In post-game interviews, Murphy made no excuses and berated himself for a lazy approach. This did not win him forgiveness, but the damage was controlled. The 24-year-old seems wise beyond his years, already greeting the New York media with all the right answers.

Despite Murphy's adventures with the glove, the love affair will ultimately intensify or founder based on how he swings the bat. He enters a situation where the odds seemed stacked in his favor. If hitting number two in the Mets order - between Jose Reyes and David Wright - is not the single best spot in the major leagues, it is close. And the gushing of the Mets brass about Murphy's plate discipline is not just idle talk. This seems to be his greatest asset. In the last two months of the 2009 season, Murphy saw 4.25 pitches per plate appearance. According to Baseball Prospectus (the sports-dork bible), this ratio over the course of an entire season would have placed Murphy third among all National League hitters. He reached base at a .397 clip during that stint with the Mets, and hit .308/.374/.496 in just over 400 plate appearances at Double-A Binghamton. This represented an enormous step above his 2007 numbers in High-A ball, where Murphy posted a .768 OPS. Murphy's ability to keep drawing walks, and his capacity to generate any kind of power, will determine whether he becomes the star of the Mets dreams or the mere scrapper-and-slapper of their rhetoric.

On the future of Daniel Murphy, Met fans and PECOTA (that is, Prospectus's "deadly accurate" projection system devised by Nate Silver) do not see eye to eye. Murphy's weighted mean projection for 2009 sits at .264/.328/.407, an outcome that would place him squarely in the bottom tier of the league? left-fielders. The long-term forecast is no better. By age 27, PECOTA has Murphy slugging .395. Frank Catalanotto is his closest comparable, with Chad Tracy and John Kruk as the only glass-half-full specimens on that list. For those who see this forecast as far from the mark, the explanation might be that PECOTA seems to place as much weight on Murphy's first full season in the minors as his second. He took a great leap forward between 2007 and 2008, and did not slow down once he got to Flushing.

Murphy presents a beguiling conundrum. On a team with four of the very best players in the National League, and bullpen savior Francisco Rodriguez to boot, Murphy has already found the hero's cape fastened to his collar. This can be explained in part by the psyche of Met fans of all fans, really. As much as our heroes loom larger than life, we also like to see in them a slice of ourselves. The Met fan, like the Cub fan or the Red Sox fan until a few years go sees himself as the eternal underdog. His team's payroll might dwarf most others, but it is restrained when compared with the Yankees. Their stars do not have the holier-than-thou aura of Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez. And as baseball as a whole grapples with the post-steroids future, the image of the superstar might change more than a little. Dustin Pedroia is the reigning MVP, not Rodriguez. Many muscle-bound sluggers may find themselves to be the anomalies; grit may one day soon become the new brawn. McLouth and Kinsler on the high end, or Denard Span and Daniel Murphy lower down the pole these players are throwbacks, and they might become the household names of the future. crat Jim Martin to fight another day.

For Murphy himself, however, much work remains. In New York, the pressure is always on. Everyone loves their young left fielder, but only until he starts to falter. They can stay with him through a botched fly ball and even through a mediocre couple of months. But the line between working-class hustler-hero and replacement-level player is thin, especially in Queens. Met fans will be rooting hard for their left fielder in September. And they really hope it will be Daniel Murphy. But Ryan Church is just as likely. Or Gary Sheffield. Or, if things get dire, maybe Josh Willingham or even Adam Dunn.

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November 30, 2008: The Strange Career of the Georgia Runoff

Why must Georgians vote again on Tuesday? Not surprisingly, the answer has something to do with the tangled history of Jim Crow.

From the days of slavery to the years of the civil rights movement, the Deep South was a one-party land: the citadel of the Democrats. Without a viable two-party system, it was a fait accompli that the Democratic nominee would win every general election. If a number of politicians decided to run for the Democratic nomination to any given office, the vote might split six or seven ways. To ensure that no candidate could triumph with a mere 20 or 30 percent of the vote, the party required a runoff between the two top finishers.

This was no endorsement for majority rule. Most obviously, African Americans were denied the vote. In addition, Georgia's infamous county-unit system awarded rural voters a measure of power far greater than their numbers. Each county possessed a given number of unit votes, ranging from two for the smallest counties to six for the largest. Atlanta counted for six unit votes; the 121 smallest counties in the state counted for two apiece. This was how, in 1946, Eugene Talmadge could lose the popular vote by 16,000 while winning the governor's office in a landslide. The Supreme Court ruled the county-unit system unconstitutional in its 1963 Gray v. Sanders decision. But some remnants of Georgia's old politics endured.

As the national Democratic Party tied itself to the rising civil rights struggle, and as the Sunbelt suburbs boomed, the Republican Party was born anew in Dixie.

Shortly after Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the state of Georgia adopted a majority-vote requirement for its general elections. Anticipating the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the specter of black political power, the majority-vote requirement diluted the voting strength of African Americans who might be able to score 40 percent or more in a Georgia election, but could never corral the votes of the white conservative majority.

The majority-vote requirement helped to decide Georgia's 1966 gubernatorial election. In the Democratic primary, a progressive former governor Ellis Arnall captured the most votes, but not an outright majority. The ensuing runoff pitted Arnall against the runner-up: Lester Maddox, a segregationist icon. Here was a battle for the Democratic Party's soul, a fight between the party's liberal traditions and its segregationist legacy. Ironically, Republicans decided that contest. Any Georgian could vote in the Democratic runoff. Supporters of the Republican nominee Howard "Bo" Callaway surmised that Maddox would be an easier target in the general election than Arnall. So some 75,000 of them crossed party lines to vote. They supplied Maddox with his margin of victory, and unwittingly cast ballots for the next governor of Georgia.

In the general election, liberals launched a write-in campaign for Ellis Arnall. Although Callaway polled 3,000 more votes than Maddox, the write-in siphoned away 53,000 votes enough to deprive Callaway of a majority. But in 1966, Georgians did not vote again. The election was thrown into the state legislature. That body was dominated by Democrats who backed Maddox by a margin of 182 to 66. So if Republicans (and the runoff system itself) helped Maddox win the Democratic primary, liberal Arnall supporters lifted him into the governor's office.

To ensure that the legislature decided no more elections, Georgia changed its laws to require a runoff in the general election. The majority-vote requirement remained.

In 1992, Democratic United States Senator Wyche Fowler lost a re-election bid due to the runoff stipulation. Fowler won a plurality of the vote against Republican Paul Coverdell on election night, but Coverdell claimed victory in the runoff. Because of Fowler's defeat, the Democratic-led Georgia state assembly abolished the majority-vote requirement in 1994. The winner on election night, so long as he or she won a 45 percent plurality, would take the election. In the name of political strategy, Democrats finally abolished this relic of Jim Crow.

The two parties seemed to agree that the majority-vote requirement favored the Republicans. In this conservative state, only a third-party candidacy could spell the GOP's demise. So in March 2005, with the assembly back in Republican hands, legislators changed the laws again and reinstituted the runoff. Ironically, they have allowed Democrat Jim Martin to fight another day.

As a runoff approaches for a seat in the United States Senate, Jim Crow's political legacy still lingers. According to the exit polls, only 23 percent of white Georgians voted for Barack Obama. While every publication has hallowed America's ability to turn the page, the Peach State has showed its ties to the racial politics of the ugly past. Along with other states in the Deep South where no more than 15 percent of whites backed Obama (in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana) Georgia displays its racial attitudes in its votes.

In a sweet irony, a fragment of that same history - the runoff - now provides Georgia voters with a second chance.

Georgia might use an instrument of the racial past to propel itself nearer to the political future, where the rest of the nation now lies.

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November 16, 2008: Dixie is Still Red

It is wonderful that Barack Obama won three southern states: Florida, Virginia, and, most shockingly, North Carolina. But let us not mistake a blue dent in the red South for a blue South. The commentators who have committed this error allowed their hearts to get far ahead of their heads. I did the same thing when I predicted Obama would win Georgia. Despite massive African American turnout in the state, and whopping majorities in the city of Atlanta, Obama was beaten handily. The Atlanta suburbs are nasty country for liberals, and so is much of rural Georgia. Obama lost by wide margins in these areas, as he did in most every part of the rural and suburban South.

Bob Moser's article in "The Nation" heralds a New Blue Dixie. It is not really. Dixie remains very red.

In North Carolina, Obama defeated McCain, 49.9 percent to 49.5 percent. In Virginia, the margin was far more substantial: 52-46. And in Florida, Obama won by 50.9 to 48.4.

In no state did he come close to winning a majority of white southern votes. He won 42 percent of white votes in Florida, 39 in Virginia, and 35 in North Carolina. 10 percent of whites in Alabama voted for Obama, 11 percent in Mississippi, and 14 percent in Louisiana. Overall, McCain won 69 percent of the white southern vote to 31 percent for Obama.

Add to this the map that the New York Times compiled shortly after the election. It is shaded in red and blue, county by county. The reddest counties voted for McCain by a wider margin than they supported Bush in 2004. The bluest counties supported Obama by a wider percentage than they voted for Kerry in 2004. There are only 4 states colored all in red on this map: Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.

Once upon a time, Tennessee was looked upon as an outlier amid the conservative South - the state of Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore and Gore, Jr., the state of the Nashville Tennessean and David Halberstam, of the Highlander Folk School and the Nashville sit-ins. No longer. Tennessee now seems to be one of the more conservative states in America.

In contrast, Virginia's political transformation appears remarkable. Virginia is now a Democratic state. The Old Dominion - the home of Robert E. Lee and Harry Byrd's machine and Prince Edward County, which closed its schools rather than integrate them - may now lean Democratic for years to come. This is indeed remarkable.

But I do not expect North Carolina and Florida to be shaded blue for the indefinite future. And I would be surprised to see Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, or Arkansas vote for Obama in 2012.

Virginia is solidly Democratic, and Florida and North Carolina both voted for an African American president. But on the whole, the South remains the most reliably Republican region -- and the most politically and racially conservative -- in the country.

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November 4, 2008: Election Day Picks

"I voted for Obama, but I can't explain it." So said my landlord -- a marine corps veteran and small-business owner. This bodes well for Barack Obama.

Am I qualified to make election day predictions? Not really. But I have lived in a lot of different parts of America. I currently live in Pennsylvania; I went to college in Ohio; I lived for five years on the west coast, two years in upstate New York, almost two decades in New England and three years in New York City. So if you look at my election picks, that's what you'll be getting. I should add that I have also been a prediction-addict for much of my life. I filled out my first NCAA bracket at age six, and have done so every year since. In that spirit, I make my predictions as much with my heart as my head -- and with a lot of help from the CNN Electoral Map Calculator, Real Clear Politics, and Five Thirty-Eight.

In short, I think the African American turnout will be enormous -- and I think this will propel Obama much further in the South than anyone thought he would go. I also think white voters in the Mountain West and Midwest might be slightly less willing to vote for Obama than the polls suggest. So my big upset pick is Obama to take Georgia.

Here are my battleground picks:

Pennsylvania: Obama by 6

New Hampshire: Obama by 5

Virginia: Obama by 4.

Indiana: McCain by 4.

Ohio: McCain by 2.

Missouri: McCain by 3.

Colorado: McCain by 1.

Nevada: Obama by 2.

North Carolina: Obama by 3.

Georgia: Obama by 2.

Florida: Obama by 5.

According to the Sokol Map, Obama wins the electoral college vote: 339-199.

On this map, South Carolina is the only Atlantic Ocean state that goes for McCain. I will get a lot of flak for picking McCain in Colorado -- a place that most pollsters think is safe for Obama -- but I have a hunch that they will split Colorado and Nevada, and I'm not quite sure which way either state will go. Admittedly, the Colorado pick is solely to have an upset in there for McCain.

In the Georgia senate race, I don't think either candidate will pick up 50 percent and we'll be looking at a December 2 runoff. This will give grist to the pundits for the next month.

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November 3, 2008: Jeremiah Wright Sighting in Pennsylvania

I read Mark Danner's wonderful article in the New York Review of Books a couple of days ago, and was heartened to learn that John McCain was dead-set against airing footage of Jeremiah Wright in his ads. Apparently, McCain's advisors had pushed him to use video of Wright in his ads -- but the "maverick" resisted the temptation. I am heartened no longer.

A Republican PAC ran a Jeremiah Wright ad late last night in Philadelphia, during the Sunday Night Football game. It is further proof -- if any more is needed -- that McCain is staking the election on Pennsylvania. McCain thinks he can win here, and has forsaken any and all principles in that pursuit. He will win, or he will forever sully his once-decent name trying.

Ironically, I had just started to think that McCain might not be so terrible after all. I watched him on Saturday Night Live, and applauded his humor and wit. And I had read in the Danner article about McCain's refusal to explicitly exploit white racial fears. He has now stooped that low -- and I officially retract my applause.

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November 2, 2008: Shame for Springfield

When I was a teenager, I delivered the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican every Sunday. One of my parents usually woke up at 5 AM to help out. I would wheel a shopping cart -- stuffed to the brim with papers, containing cartoons and circulars -- along Riverview Street to Chase Avenue, down Fort Pleasant and onto Leete Street, then back up the hill again.

I later learned, while in graduate school, that the Springfield Republican was once a leading editorial voice in America. In the days before Abraham Lincoln's election, the Republican lent eloquent support to his upstart political party and applauded the young politician from Illinois -- the supposedly inexperienced congressman who would lead his nation in a time of crisis. Alas, those days are long gone.

The Springfield Republican has now endorsed John McCain for president. Even in the bluest of the blue states, in a sagging post-industrial city whacked by the plummeting economy, one where racial minorities compose 44 percent of the population and where Deval Patrick won 68 percent of the vote in 2006, the Republican denounced Barack Obama as "an unreconstructed liberal" who "has talked a good ballgame -- and little else."

I cringe to think that I cut my journalistic teeth as an intern and summertime staff writer for the Republican's sports section.

In a time when foreclosures seem a part of the natural landscape, the Republican barely mentions the economy. Its endorsement initially mentions three issues -- judicial nominees, immigration, and campaign finance reform -- on which it calls McCain "the candidate to buck his party and work for consensus." It laments that "so much talk in recent weeks has been about the economy." This emphasis is misplaced, the Republican thinks, for "we are still a nation at war" and "those who were behind the planning" of the September 11 attacks "remember their goal: the destruction of this nation and its critical institutions."

The endorsement continues to mystify. "The next president of the United States will be a war president...McCain will keep us safe, not only from Al-Qaida and its sympathizers, but also from the excesses of some of the most liberal members of the Congress." It then paints a doomsday scenario if Obama is elected. "The political left will have a stranglehold on all the sources of power in Washington...Democrats...will be legislating like it's 1933." My initial reaction is just to shake my head, so misguided the reasoning seems and so misplaced the emphasis.

Then I thought about the Republicans I know -- and some other plausible reasons to support McCain. One diehard Republican -- my grandfather -- spouts little of the Springfield newspaper's rhetoric. He voted for George W. Bush in Florida (twice), was an ardent Reagan supporter, and voted also for Nixon and Ike when he lived in New Jersey. He votes almost every year on the basis of taxes -- which candidate he thinks will take less out of his bank account. I don't really know how much money my grandfather has, but if he has a lot, he's probably right that Obama would tax him higher. I think he's wrong to boil his presidential choice down to this issue every year, but at least there is some logic.

In contrast, the Republican offers no grounding for its claims -- no reason to think that McCain will "keep us safe" (and that Obama won't), for thinking McCain and his vice president would "buck" their party, or that Obama is an "unreconstructed liberal." Obama has actually shown a willingness to discard ideological straitjackets whenever necessary; he has gained the endorsements of quite a few lifelong Republicans; and General Colin Powell, for one, thinks America will be safer in Obama's hands than McCain's.

It's as if the Springfield Republican's editors crafted their endorsement years ago, and proceeded to ignore the substance of the entire presidential campaign.

The newspaper's argument, or lack thereof, provides a glimpse into why this city has been struggling so hard for so long -- hemorrhaging jobs, wealth, and residents. In a place where civic leaders' most creative ideas are to build a new Basketball Hall of Fame once every 15 years, and where they transform the city's most beautiful park into an autos-only holiday light show, the Republican's endorsement of McCain seems rather fitting. It lacks what Springfield's local leaders have long lacked: sense and vision.

In 2006, only 24 percent of Springfield voters chose the newspaper's preferred gubernatorial candidate. That number will decrease this year. .

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November 1, 2008: Trolling for Votes in West Mt. Airy

Anyone familiar with the neighborhood of West Mt. Airy, in Philadelphia, will instantly recognize this title as a cheap attempt at sarcasm. Canvassing for Barack Obama on West Allens Lane is a little like searching for Red Sox fans in the middle of Southie. The village idiot couldn't screw it up.

The experience was enlightening nonetheless -- it offered some insights not just into Obama's chances but provided a unique (and probably anomalous) perspective about race and space in urban America.

I knocked on 68 doors over a few hours (the Obama demands keeping statistics like this), and I didn't find a McCain supporter in sight. Granted, the campaign's efforts are now focused on turning out the base in Philadelphia -- not so much on persuading the still undecided. Every house on my list was already leaning toward Obama. And what houses they were. Many had spacious lawns, basketball hoops (and pretty nice cars) in the driveway, and dogs barking at the door. Out of those 68 doors, I can only remember a few white people. Here was a black neighborhood that was completely middle class, and trending upward.

In reality, according to the statistics cited in Thomas Sugrue's forthcoming "Sweet Land of Liberty," the neighborhood is 51 percent black, 46 percent white, and 3 percent multiracial. For someone raised in a chocolate city of the post-industrial Northeast, whose parents later moved to a vanilla suburb, the cognitive dissonance was shocking -- and uplifting.

It was also a little strange when it was I who had to ask them who they were voting for. The first woman who answered the door chanted "O-Ba-Ma, O-Ba-Ma." Most people answered something like, "Obama, of course." One man, clad from head to toe in Phillies garb, asked us inside and offered coffee and water. Some people just gave me knowing looks or slight grins -- mocking me for even posing such a ridiculous question. But it was a question that the campaign office -- based in Roxborough, a historically white working-class area -- required. I am sure the folks in Roxborough were not quite so unanimous in their support. And I couldn't help but wonder whether my time would have been a little better spent on those streets. But I can't complain. The temperature was in the upper-60s; the streets and houses were pleasant. And this was truly Obama Country.

That West Mt. Airy boasted such unanimity, and such anticipation, was refreshing and inspiring. Many people said they could not wait to vote. Little kids waved to me madly from the windows. Two girls jumped up and down and chanted, "Buttons! Stickers!" Sadly, all I could offer them was literature about their rights as a voter. Even that they accepted with enthusiasm.

From this vantage point in Northwest Philadelphia, a victory for McCain in Pennsylvania seems difficult to imagine -- not quite so hard to fathom as a Yankee fan in Boston, but close. And if McCain can't win Pennsylvania, he will have quite the uphill climb to 270. It cannot be heartening to Republicans that the common sentiment was summed up by one woman, in a bathrobe, who had this response when I inquired whether she needed a ride to her polling place: "If I'm breathing, I'll be there."

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October 30, 2008: Look Toward Georgia

We are five days away from the election, and much of the media has been slow to pick up on what may become the biggest upset of the night: Jim Martin's bid for Saxby Chambliss's senate seat in Georgia.

The New York Times published its first article on the Martin/Chambliss race this morning, and Nate Silver's website provided statistical grounding for the notion that a progressive Democrat has a real shot in the Deep South. Silver pointed out that 12 percent of African-American voters are supposedly "undecided" on their senate choice. An Obama/Chambliss split ticket is all but inconceivable, and if those undecided black voters break 4-1 in favor of Martin, this would propel him into a statistical deadlock. (He is currently running 2 points behind -- 46 to 44 -- in the latest poll.)

Fully one-quarter of Georgia's registered voters have already flocked to the polls in early voting. As Chambliss himself noted, "We know that the people turning out," the many thousands who have endured long, snaking lines are "not voting for Saxby Chambliss and John McCain." How does he know? So many of them are African Americans -- descending on the polls to vote for Barack Obama, and along the way, to defeat one of the U.S. Senate's more putrid characters. In 2002, Chambliss waged the dirtiest of campaigns against wheelchair-bound veteran Max Cleland. He dragged Cleland's name through the mud, and branded him "soft on terrorism." And Chambliss's record in the senate is laughable in its obeisance to the policies of the most loathed president in United States history.

But all of this is not mere anti-Chambliss and anti-Republican anger. Jim Martin is a longtime legislator, a Vietnam veteran himself, an intelligent policy-maker, a fiery populist, and an eminently decent man. His anti-corporate rhetoric is no idle threat. Martin has spent his career on the side of working and middle class Georgians, and would continue that noble endeavor next January.

Even more enchanting, the prospect of a runoff hovers over this election. Due to the presence of Libertarian Allen Buckley on the ballot and the close nature of the contest, both candidates will have a hard time attracting the requisite majority of votes. If Martin and Chambliss must gear up for a runoff on December 2, and if the Democrats maintain a 59-40 lead in the senate at that point (or even if they do not), the political eyes of the nation will be fastened on Georgia. Indeed, if more eyes had been there during the past few weeks, they would have witnessed Martin's riveting and spirited comeback.

And if Martin happens to cross the 50-percent threshold on Tuesday, he will owe it in part to an extraordinary historical irony: that in one of the redder slices of Dixie, a white southerner's political fortune hinges on how many African Americans come to the polls. As their numbers rise, so will his prospects.

"If we don't turn out," Chambliss told the Atlanta-Constitution yesterday, "it will be a sad night on Nov. 4." In fact, such a result would embody democracy at its sweetest.