Why the counterintuitive Michigan coach wants quarterbacks who played fútbol and football
Harbaugh is the counterintuitive outlier in a sport that breeds conservative thinkers. In that way his unlikely embrace of soccer is perfectly Harbaughian. It’s something that seems preposterous until you think more about it, at which point it makes so much sense that you start to question why it took so long for others to figure out... “I think every American boy should play soccer till the eighth grade,” Harbaugh said. “Then they should play football. American football.”He explained to recruits that soccer can help them with their footwork, coordination, balance, conditioning and spatial awareness. Those traits are quite useful to a quarterback required to throw on the run while surveying the whole field as 300-pound linemen attempt to spear him.
“It’s one of the best sports that a young person can play getting ready to play football,” said UCLA offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch, who worked under Harbaugh
.. The famously intense coach said he wanted to see quarterbacks compete against each other as much as they possibly could. They could field baseballs. They could peg each other with dodgeballs. They could even play soccer. “You can’t just compete in throwing all day long every day,” Fisch said.
.. It turns out many of the NFL’s star quarterbacks are former soccer players.
Trump has made our politics ridiculous
Anyone who doesn’t “get” Trump’s appeal is said to live in a “bubble.” This means that a substantial majority of Americans are bubble dwellers, because Trump’s disapproval ratings have been hovering between 54 and 60 percent in Gallup’s most recent surveys.
.. The cost of all this is very high. Our political discussion is being brought down by Trump’s self-involvement, his apparent belief that he can only win if he identifies an enemy to attack, and his refusal to make extended and carefully thought-through arguments about anything of substance. Spectacle drives out problem-solving. Our national attention span, never one of our strongest suits, follows Trump down to a level that, in fairness to children, cannot even be called childlike.
The health-care debate is the obvious example. The Republican Congress spotlights “repealing Obamacare.” But this is simply a slogan. What Trump and his party said they’d create was a better health-care system — “something great,” he enthused.
.. A functioning democracy would grapple in a bipartisan way with how to cover everyone more cost-effectively.
.. Trump will declare anything the GOP pushes through — no matter how many of the people who voted for him lose insurance — a “win.” That is all that matters to him.
.. If there was anything useful about the Trump campaign, it was the extent to which it forced Americans who live in thriving parts of the country to notice how badly other regions are doing and how angry many of the people who live in those beleaguered communities are.
.. But where are the practical remedies to help those workers find better-paying jobs? What they get from Trump are mostly symbols
.. Trump announced that thanks to his intervention, a Carrier plant in Indiana would keep at least 1,100 jobs in the United States. But last month, Carrier announced it was cutting 632 jobs from an Indianapolis factory and moving them to Mexico. It’s not clear what Trump accomplished — or if he cares.
.. employment in the nation’s auto plants is down from a peak of 211,000 last year to 206,000.
.. his budget cuts could cost more than 5 million American workers access to job training, job-search assistance and career-development programs.
.. Nothing should be more important to Trump’s presidency than keeping his commitments to workers in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But these don’t fascinate the president nearly as much as his vendettas and his role as a cable-news critic.
Why Trump Won’t Save the Rust Belt
Mr. Trump has his reasons for focusing on manufacturing, though. They don’t all have to do with economics. He ignores the fact that many of Michigan’s auto industry jobs were lost to automation, or to foreign manufacturers operating in the right-to-work South, because depicting the Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans as job-stealing alien villains better fits his America First narrative.
.. Mr. Riddle is skeptical of Mr. Trump’s promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States: “If other presidents couldn’t do it, how can he?”
.. He’s also ahead among voters ages 50 to 70, who came of age when a factory job was still a birthright, and share his nostalgia for those years.
.. Reagan Democrats — in 1980, they were 65 percent of the electorate, compared with 36 percent in 2012 — but Mr. Trump has tailored his politically incorrect alpha male persona and his protectionist message specifically to them.
.. As Lansing’s mayor, Virg Bernero, has noted, G.M. can build the same number of cars with 5,000 workers as it did with 25,000 in the 1950s and ’60s.
.. The Trump conundrum is that his campaign is about loss. His appeal is strongest among people who feel their social, economic and political influence slipping away, but he appeals to them specifically because their numbers are dwindling, thus making them less effective as an electoral coalition.
No, the Battleground States Are Not a Terrific Fit for Donald Trump
For most of this conversation, we’ve been talking about the “white working class” as a single demographic category. But the white working class is fairly diverse. White working-class voters in Appalachia, for instance, have behaved very differently from those across the Northern tier in recent cycles (Obama lost a lot of ground in Appalachia, but did better than John Kerry or Al Gore in a place like Wisconsin). There was a fairly similar split with Trump in the primary. He did really well with white working-class voters in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, but really struggled in places like Iowa and Wisconsin, or Vermont and Minnesota. So I wouldn’t be very surprised if it turned out that Trump made gains among white working-class voters nationally, but didn’t pick up much or anything in a state like Wisconsin.
.. I guess all I would say is that if Trump can’t be competitive in Ohio, he’s not going to even come close nationally, or in states like Virginia and Colorado.
.. Can Mr. Trump really win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote there again, especially after he went after home-state favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? Then factor in the rapid pace of demographic change and the extent that Obama already lost a ton of ground among older, white working-class voters in the state. Suddenly it’s really hard to figure out how Trump is going to win the closest battleground state from the last election, even if he fixes his problem with well-educated white voters nationally.
I think there’s a real case that Florida could save Democrats in a close election
.. Mitch Stewart, who served as battleground states director for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, said that Michigan was the state Democrats should worry most about being flipped.
.. I think a quick Hillary Clinton-Sanders unity tour through New Hampshire, Boulder, Ann Arbor and Madison wouldn’t be too surprising. I think Bill Clinton is probably at his best in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which is also where the Obama campaign tended to use him.
.. the Democratic advantage in the Electoral College would start to look pretty flimsy if the Republicans started to make further gains in the Upper Midwest instead of Appalachia.