Bush Makes His Pitch

By: Greg Mitchell I can take the flag waving, the Kerry flip-flop sandals, the "Where's Waldo/Osama?" posters, but can we please leave baseball out of the fall election campaign?

Sitting in the gallery at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night for President Bush's acceptance speech, only one thing offended me more than the scarcity of people of color among the delegates on the floor below: the use of our grand old game by the Grand Old Party as the climax to the video that introduced the President.

Now that's going too far.

Since media bias is assumed these days (and Bush added to it that night with an explicit shot at editorial writers), let me admit to a crippling prejudice. I am a huge baseball fan. My two earliest childhood memories: Marching with an "I Like Ike" sign in front of my house in 1952, and wheeling my tricycle around the block to celebrate the New York Giants' sweep of the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series.

I saw Ted Williams at Fenway in 1957, Willie Mays at Shea in 1973 getting his last regular season hit (a swinging bunt), and Derek Jeter at Yankee Stadium in World Series games after that. More recently, I wrote a book about managing my son in youth baseball, and one year I even guided a local Little League team to the state finals.

So, usually, I am sucker for baseball imagery. But the Republicans' effort Thursday night was purely Bush league.

In case you didn't see it on TV, or it was not shown--perhaps everyone was interviewing Kid ("Conservative Values") Rock at the time--here's what that five-minute video looked like: Based entirely on Bush and 9/11, it ended with the President visiting Yankee Stadium for the World Series six weeks after the tragic event, as if this was anything but a no-brainer at the time. Bush ran into Derek Jeter before going out to throw the ceremonial first pitch and nervously asked him where he should stand: in front of the mound, like most honored guests? No, Jeter said, this is New York, do not be a girlie-man, stand on top of the mound.

Then, as the music swelled, we saw Bush on film, toeing the rubber, and throwing a strike right over the plate, as the convention erupted and the President took the stage, which happened to be round and elevated, sort of like...a pitcher's mound.

Did anyone else in the press find this offensive?

First, there was the appropriation of 9/11, a week after a major survey showed that victims' families do not want any political use of the tragedy this year. (I'll have to admit to another bit of bias here: I lost a good friend, one of my Little League coaches, that day.) But even more disturbing was the suggestion that this commander-in-chief was some kind of hero for standing on a pitcher's mound, in a metal-detected stadium, when we now know he was already scheming to send tens of thousands of troops into actual harm's way in Iraq.

Nearly a thousand have died there, without meeting Derek Jeter, in invading or occupying a country that had nothing to do with killing Americans on 9/11.

Or maybe the "strike" was only meant to suggest the lightning attack on Afghanistan, which nevertheless occurred only after the GOP convention's Man Who Shall Not Be Mentioned slipped away. One might suggest that in regard to Iraq, Bush's pitches have mainly sailed low and outside, or gone straight to the screen, in old Rick Ankiel style. Curve balls? Or, as Senator Zell MIller might put it: spitballs?