BRING IT!

When I was in DC yesterday, I was treated to a light snowfall throughout the day.  Although the schools were closed, I didn’t really think much of it.  Granted, I walked and took Metro for most of the day, but my flight home left Reagan without a problem, and I considered it a pretty minor event.

I’ll admit that 4 years in Atlanta has made me pretty soft, but an inch of snow still doesn’t really bother me.  I may live in the south now, but at least I wouldn’t be considered a DC weather whimp.

From the Press Pool report:

“POTUS said he wanted to talk about something unrelated to the economy: “Can I make a comment unrelated to the economy?” — and launched into weather remarks (please check transcript): “My children’s school was canceled today, because of what? Some ice,” he said, and all at the table started laughing.

“As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled,” he said, joking about how kids go out for recess on snow days. More laughter.

POTUS said he would have to instill “some flinty Chicago toughness” into Washingtonians.

“When it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things,” POTUS said. Fighting words!”

Andrew Sullivan’s latest as Obama takes over this week:

“He doesn’t charm like Clinton did and Bush tried to. Unlike both men, but especially Clinton, he appears to have no need to be loved by everyone in the room. He often finds it hard to disguise how tired he feels. He is capable of evoking enormous inspiration, but he has yet to be able to hide it when he is bored. There is a wryness to his conversation and a dryness to his humor, both of which are sustained by an intellect of power. The revered liberal jurist Larry Tribe has said that in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School, he has never had a cleverer student than Obama. I don’t think he’s exaggerating. Intellectually, Obama is in Bill Clinton’s league. But what he has over Clinton is emotional intelligence to buttress his grasp of policy.

What he gets, what he seems to intuit, is how to make others feel as if they are being heard. This is simple enough in theory but hard to pull off consistently in practice. His model is to figure out what another person needs and, if it helps Obama to get what he wants, to provide it.

He sensed that Hillary Clinton needed independent respect in defeat. He couldn’t give her the vice-presidency, which she desperately wanted, because it would have given her a dangerous rival power base if they succeeded. So he offered her the next best thing, and she, unlike her husband, was smart enough to say yes.

He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party.

He sensed that McCain was in deep emotional withdrawal after his horrifying and crude descent into raw partisanship last autumn. And so he celebrated the old, bipartisan McCain and asked for his support in the Senate.

This is not typical for politicians in any climate and era. In the post-Clinton, post-Bush divide of the US, it’s a shock of sorts, and one most Washingtonians have yet to absorb. More shocks, I suspect, are to come, as people begin to realise that the new politics Obama promised is actually more than just a marketing device for a campaign.”

Now that the holidays have passed, activity should start picking up again.  After the Furcal fallout with the Braves and my realted posts, I decided to forego providing my immediate thoughts on signings, rumors, departures of franchise icons, etc.  I’ve never really intended for this blog to be a Twitter or Facebook status replacement, and I’m trying to stick to the slow-blogging approach.

While it’s been awful for Frank Wren and company so far, I’m cautiously optimistic that not all is lost.  As shown below, Kenshin Kawakami appears to be a nice middle of the rotation pickup, and if they can somehow lure Derek Lowe to Atlanta (with a little help from Alan Jackson), it should be a solid, albeit not great, rotation.  It’s been a horrendous offseason from a PR standpoint, but the team still has the potential to contend, given a few breaks here and there.

There’s still a need to add a bat in left field, and, oh yeah, a couple of radio announcers, so I’m looking forward to an interesting month before pitchers and catchers report.