It’s been great blogging for you on the vice presidency, the debates, baseball, and sundry other political and nonpolitical matters during this four-month guest gig. I’ve been accumulating a pet-peeves list in hopes that it would get long enough to make a decent post, but I guess I’ve been in too good a mood to think of many. All I’ve come up with is: saying “two-thousand ten” instead of “twenty-ten” (and so on — we really need to make the transition before 2066); “early on” when “early” does just as well; and “election cycle” instead of, well, “election.” These are the latest in a long list of pumped-up words and phrases headed by “5 a.m. in the morning” and “medication.” More is less when it comes to language.

So let me wrap things up on an entirely different note, recounting two stories of early-career mentoring for which I am deeply thankful. The first is conventional, the latter…

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Most liberals and many conservatives decry the extent to which George W. Bush, encouraged by Dick Cheney, has drawn unilateral power into the presidency during these past eight years. Even before 9/11, Cheney was hiding the workings of his energy task force behind a curtain of executive secrecy and Bush was, on his own authority, taking charge of how the federal government treats embryonic stem cells.

With Bush and Cheney less than 10 weeks away from eviction from the White House and a former Constitutional law professor about to move in, wouldn’t you think members of Congress would look forward to restoring their branch of government to prominence? Especially those who have a future as leaders within that branch of government.

Apparently not. Joseph Biden, one of the most senior Democrats on Capitol Hill, left the Senate to become Obama’s vice president. Rahm Emanuel, tagged by…

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Match the content to the headline in today’s New York Times: “For the South, a Waning Hold on Politics.” Is the right answer A or B?

A. The president has been a Southerner for the past 20 years, but no more. Until recently, House and Senate Republican leaders were Southerners, and the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. None of this is true any longer. Hence, the South’s “waning hold.”

B. Appalachia voted strongly Republican this year. So did Southern whites. Thomas Schaller was right: the Democratic Party should henceforth “whistle past Dixie,” writing off the South in its quest for political victory.

Here’s a hint: A makes sense (Southerners really aren’t as powerful in Washington as they have been in recent years) and B doesn’t. Why would Democrats choose now to abandon a region which since 2004 has cut the Republicans’ presidential victory margin from 153…

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I spent a couple days at West Point recently, guest-lecturing and visiting with some Army officers on the faculty who teach the introductory American politics course, which is required of all cadets. I quickly learned that they spend a lot more time in class stressing the importance of civilian control of the military than I do in my own intro course at Rhodes. Only much later did it occur to me that one of the reasons I and other professors at civilian colleges can pass over this subject lightly is that the West Point faculty do not.

What a luxury to live in a country where it doesn’t matter which candidate Army officers prefer because they will accept the results of the election no matter how it turns out. Did anyone one wake up last Tuesday wondering whether the Republicans would yield power if the Democrats won? Will anyone — even the most rabid haters of President Bush and Vice…

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Students of presidential transitions all agree that Ronald Reagan did it right and Bill Clinton did it wrong. Two elements of doing it right are filling the major White House staff positions before choosing the cabinet and filling those major staff positions quickly.

By that reckoning, Barack Obama was smart to ask Rahm Emmanuel to be his chief of staff the day after the election. Emanuel, a fellow Chicagoan, knows Obama and knows his way around both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue: He was a leading Clinton staffer and is a member of Congress.

What wasn’t so smart was popping the question to Emanuel without knowing that his answer would be yes and, to make matters worse, allowing the proposal to leak to the news media. Obama is now in the awkward position of cooling his heels while Emanuel decides whether White House chief of staff is the job for him.

Emanuel probably will accept the…

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Here’s the thing: Over the years, almost all of my political predictions have been wrong. For example, Jimmy Carter was not handily reelected in 1980, as I not only predicted but bet.

I’ve been hoping all day that one of my Brainstorm colleagues would quote from my October 9 post. Alas, that hasn’t happened. So you’re just going to have to bear with me as I quote it:

“On September 2, at the time of the Republican convention, I was pinned down for a prediction during a talk I gave at the University of Mississippi. Here’s what I said: “Obama will win the popular vote by 5 or 6 points and the electoral college with roughly 350 or 360 votes.’ . . . Down-ballot gains for the Democratic Party are especially likely this year in the Senate, where the GOP has twice as many seats at stake as the Democrats. But, even in the House, Democrats are poised to add one or two dozen new seats, a…

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Not just candidates but issues are on many state ballots today. Efforts to ban same-sex marriage in California and abortion in South Dakota have gotten most of the attention. But in several states the issue will be one or another form of gambling.

Fifty years ago, not a single state owned and operated a lottery. Today 42 do, along with the District of Columbia, and Arkansas is deciding whether to become the 43rd. As has become the fashion when southern states create lotteries, the proposed Arkansas lottery would fund a new college scholarship program. Based on the experience of these other states, poor and working-class Arkansans will buy the lottery tickets that pay for the children of the middle- and upper-middle class to go to college.

As recently as the late 1970s, only one state authorized commercial casino gambling: Nevada. Today 13 do. Tomorrow that number may rise to 14,…

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There aren’t many stupid things in the Constitution, but one of them is the requirement that the president be a “natural born Citizen” of the United States. It’s stupid because we are a nation of immigrants that, in all other respects, draws no invidious distinction between the rights of natural-born and naturalized citizens. It’s stupid because it restricts the presidential talent pool in ways that bear no relationship to presidential talent. (If you think that being a two-term governor of California or Michigan is reasonable preparation for the presidency, forget it: the governors of both states are not citizens by birth.) And it’s stupid because no one can be sure what “natural born Citizen” means. The term’s English common law roots suggest two contrasting definitions: natural born as in born of parents who are citizens, and natural born as in born on the nation’s soil.

John…

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I’m glad to see McCain and Obama campaigning in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, states with big cities and lots of people. But why haven’t they spent any time at all (except to raise money) in several of the other large states: California, Texas, and New York, to name the three largest, along with Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois? Why, for that matter, haven’t we seen them in my neck of the woods — in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, or Tennessee? Or in New England states such as Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island?

The answer is the electoral college and, to my mind, it represents the chief defect of that system of electing the president. Except in Maine and Nebraska, a presidential candidate receives all of a state’s electoral votes merely by carrying it — it doesn’t matter if he wins the state by 1 popular vote or by 2 million. As a…

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A couple thoughts inspired by John McCain’s closing argument to the voters, which is that electing Barack Obama president would recklessly place both Congress and the executive in the hands of the Democratic Party.

First, what’s wrong with united party government? Through most of our history it has been the norm (from 1900 to 1968, for example, the same party controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for all but eight years). The main benefit of having one party in charge is that in the next election voters will know which party to credit if things go well or to blame if things go poorly. That’s healthy for democratic accountability.

Second, all three branches of the federal government are up for grabs on November 4, not just the two that are on the ballot. Historically, vacancies on the Supreme Court have occurred at a rate of roughly one every two years. In both the…

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Baseball chatter is like Homeric poetry. It relies on the frequent repetition of tropes: “swift-footed Achilles” and “wine-dark sea” in the Iliad and Odyssey, “whaddya say” and “hey now” in chatter. All it takes to come up with a line of serviceable chatter is to string together a few of these catchphrases: “Hey now, eighteen, whaddya say, one-eight.”

Some college teams’ chatter, I’ve noticed, is chronically derisive. I have no interest in them. My subject is positive chatter. It comes in four forms.

The first is upbeat but essentially mindless noise: “Hey now, double-two, come now, kid.”

Another is encouragement to the batter to do something specific: “Lot of confidence, eight, base hit, win the battle.”

The third conveys useful information in upbeat form: “Keep it up, baby, you’ve got that one-two count.”

Finally, there’s chatter whose purpose is to activate more chatterers…

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Jason Wuerfel has no dog in the fight that begins tonight between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies. He’s the vice president and director of baseball operations for the Traverse City Beach Bums, a Frontier League team in Traverse City, Michigan, that plays in Wuerfel Park and whose two chief officers are John (CEO) and Leslye (CFO) Wuerfel, Jason’s parents. An English major at the University of Michigan, Jason pitched for the Wolverines from 1999 to 2003. A couple years later he published his debut novel, Pray for Rain: A Baseball Story.

I stumbled across Jason’s book while searching Amazon for something else. Nothing about the book is auspicious. It was written by, well, a kid. The name of the publisher appears nowhere on or in the book. No blurbs from other authors or baseball players anoint the back cover. I bought the book because it was the only contemporary…

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Baseball “fits America,” A. Bartlett Giamatti claimed in an essay called “Baseball and the American Character,” which is reprinted in a brief, posthumous collection of his baseball writings called A Great and Glorious Game. “Above all, it fits so well because it embodies the antithetical, complementary interplay of individual and group that we so love, and because it conserves our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of lawgivers.” (Think of how much we value the Constitution while simultaneously despising the politicians who hold the offices created by the Constitution.)

Baseball “is primitive in its starkness,” according to Giamatti. “A man on a hill prepares to throw a rock at a man slightly below him, not far away, who holds a club. . . . The batter is, they say, on offense yet batting is essentially a reactive and deeply defensive act. The pitcher is,…

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A. Bartlett Giamatti was famous for many things. A scholar of English Renaissance literature, he became the president of Yale University in 1977. (At age 39 he was the youngest president in Yale’s history.) Nine years later, in 1986, Giamatti was named president of the National League, and three years after that as commissioner of baseball — not the usual career path for a scholar but one that accorded well with both his lifelong love of baseball and the ability to lead difficult people (like team owners and tenured professors) that he developed as president of Yale. It was Giamatti’s misfortune to inherit the crisis created by baseball legend Pete Rose’s gambling on games involving his own team. As recounted by James Reston Jr. in his book Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, the crisis culminated in Giamatti’s painful decision to ban Rose from…

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Years ago, a famous political scientist at a Washington think tank told me that during his years at a major research university he regarded teaching as the price he had to pay to do research. I disagreed strenuously with him at the time and still do. What he should have said was: Grading is the price you have to pay to teach.

I have two conflicting impulses when a stack of papers or exams is turned in, as happened yesterday. The better of the two is to grade them as soon as possible, on the theory it’s going to take just as much time to do them later as sooner, plus the low level buzz of dread, guilt, and anxiety that will permeate my days and dreams for as long as I put them off. The lesser impulse — and the one to which I all too often succumb — is to wait until a convenient time arrives, which, of course, never happens. Either way, a pile of papers almost always means a lost weekend…

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On September 2, at the time of the Republican convention, I was pinned down for a prediction during a talk I gave at the University of Mississippi. Here’s what I said: “Obama will win the popular vote by 5 or 6 points and the electoral college with roughly 350 or 360 votes.”

If anything, I was too cautious.

Barack Obama seems headed for a victory in three weeks that will set the stage for an outbreak of new programmatic activity resembling those that followed Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1932, Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964, and Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. Each of these candidates won what Vanderbilt political scientist Erwin Hargrove and I called an “empowering election” in our 1984 book, Presidents, Politics, and Policy.

Empowering elections are rare — only four in the last 100 years. They share three defining characteristics: The victor runs a…

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Which is stranger?—Newsweek’s report that Sarah Palin, an evangelical Christian, compared her supporters to “the people of Joe Six-Pack like me,” or that beer was publicly served for the first time on the campus of presidential debate host Belmont University, whose Web site describes it as a “Christian community with a rich Baptist heritage” and which has an alcohol policy banning “possession, which may or may not include consumption, of alcoholic beverages” and even “presence at incidents where violations” of the school’s alcohol policy occur?

Surely the latter, but there I was, last night, draining a complimentary Bud Lite at Anheuser-Busch’s media canteen, the same as I did on debate night at Ole Miss and Washington University. Belmont wanted that debate badly — badly enough that President Bob Fisher sold donor Mike Curb on the gift to fund construction of the Curb Event Center by a…

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Last Wednesday night, on the eve of the vice-presidential debate, I gave a talk on the vice presidency at Washington University in St. Louis, the debate site. Toward the end of the program, Steve Smith, who directs the university’s Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, asked what question I’d like to hear put to the two candidates. I responded, “The Constitution doesn’t say much about the vice presidency, but I’d like to know whether Senator Biden and Governor Palin are familiar with what it does say. So I’d ask a question like, ‘If a serious doubt arose in your mind about whether the president was unable to perform the responsibilities of his office, what would be your role under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment?’ or, ‘How will you carry out your constitutional duty as president of the Senate?’”

Why those questions? Because of Alexander Haig. Haig was…

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The first presidential debates occurred 48 years ago, in 1960. The first vice presidential debate didn’t take place until debates resumed in 1976, 16 years later. How come?

The answer is that three very significant things happened to the vice presidency during those 16 years.

1. Half of the six vice presidents in this period went on to become president: Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the office when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 and 1972, and Gerald R. Ford succeeded to the office when Nixon resigned in 1974. Half is higher than the historical average, which for all other periods has been less than one in three.

2. The 25th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1967. It’s often referred to as the presidential disability amendment but it’s first and foremost an amendment about the vice presidency. Section …

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Here was the neatest thing about being in the media tent adjacent to the site of last night’s presidential debate: the ribs from Rendezvous, downtown Memphis’s famous barbecue restaurant, were free and abundant. So was the beer, pretty much everything Anheuser-Busch makes, draft or bottled.

A close second: seeing that nearly every political and media figure looks worse in person than on television — older, paler, more wrinkly and, in most cases, considerably shorter. At a certain age, this becomes a guilty pleasure.

Here’s the worst thing about being in the tent: You really are sealed in an information bubble, into which news from the world you’re supposed to be covering barely intrudes.

Case in point.

Throughout the entire debate, the consensus among the press people sitting around me was that McCain was cleaning Obama’s clock. (Translation: They thought voters were thinking…

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