I was back to be a hermit yesterday. The furthest I got was the grocery store a block and a half away; I needed eggs and milk. I didn’t do my laundry. The question is what do I do today? Do I stay home again and do laundry? Do I go see Anaïs Mitchell at Lincoln Center? The reason that’s not an obvious yes is that I’d have to line up and wait for hours to get in and then she’s not the headliner but the opener. David Crosby is at the top of the bill. I saw him at Clearwater and think he described himself well, “I’m an asshole.” I’m not thrilled with seeing him again. Michael Daves is playing tonight but it’s down at Jalopy. I’d do either if I had someone to go with but I don’t. I was very social in the weeks leading up to Falcon Ridge but it’s just been me and the cats since then.
I was productive, I finished editing and posting my Falcon Ridge photos and I created the event for the September John Platt’s On Your Radar.
Enough about me. I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about choosing a president. I’m going to go about it in a round about way, retracing my mental steps. It starts with baseball. Everything you need to know you can learn from baseball.
If you follow the game long enough there are patterns you pick up. It doesn’t always work but changing a manager can turn a team around. Sometimes it just takes changing a pitching coach. The thing is that the original manager or pitching coach didn’t have to be bad. They could have a great record of success. So what happens? Part of it is about how well the person fits the team, chemistry. But a big part is that different people have different perspectives and different strengths and weaknesses. Want to build a winner? Hire Buck Showalter then fire him. He’s is poor at decided which players to use and in-game strategy. He’s great at developing young players. So you let him develop players then bring in someone else to take the team to a new level.
That’s one of the few cases I can see the causes, most often it’s not something you can observe from the outside. Why did the Mets’ pitching turn around when Phil Regan became the pitching coach? I have no idea. I haven’t read any analysis showing how he changed their pitch usage, but that doesn’t mean it he didn’t do it. Some coaches are just good at working on mechanics. But whatever it is, when you hire someone new, if he’s any good he will keep doing what the old manager did right and change what he did wrong. He can see things from the outside. He will bring in new ways of thinking.
So what does that have to do with picking a president? We’ve had 45 presidents that have shared one quality, they were all men. While I am skeptical of all claims of biological differences between the brains of men and women; their experiences are very different. If we hire a woman she will more clearly see the inefficiencies that the 45 men have been blind to. She will bring a perspective to the White House that has never been there.
This is an aspect of seeking diversity that is too often ignored. It does not just help women and minorities; it helps the institutions that diversify. That doesn’t mean that I’d support any woman who would run but it means I see an inherent advantage in supporting a woman. It’s not the biggest reason, but it’s a reason that I support Elizabeth Warren. There is another reason to put a thumb on the scale, to counter the thumbs on the scale that are not out in the open. How do we know what leadership looks like? By judging people against other leaders. When it comes to choosing a president that means all the comparisons are to men. So who will out gut say looks like a leader? A man, more than a woman. That doesn’t make you a misogynist, it makes you human. It’s what all your experience has taught you. You have to actively remind yourself that your experiences are not a fair sampling.
What does someone electable look like? Well all the people elected president have been men. But on low level elections women who run do just as well as men. The difference is that women run less often.
That’s been bouncing around my brain for a while and I’ve always had more immediate things to write about. Today it was released from the prison of my thoughts and out into the Worldwide Web.
Now to eat then figure out what I’m doing today. I might just run over to Riverdale for an Irish Session at An Beal Bocht. I just have to get myself moving by then.
Wise Madness 