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Go Cats!

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release                               May 4, 2012

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

HONORING THE 2012 NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL CHAMPION 

KENTUCKY WILDCATS

East Room

5:03 P.M. EDT

     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you!  (Applause.)  Thank you very much.  Everybody, have a seat.  Have a seat.  Welcome to the White House, and congratulations to the Kentucky Wildcats on your 8th national championship.  (Applause.)  Eighth national champ -- that’s not bad.  (Laughter.)  That’s not bad.  Although, this is the first in 14 years.

Now, this was the fourth year that I filled out my bracket on ESPN.  And what I’ve learned is that if I make the right picks, I look like a genius.  But if things go the other way, then a team like Kentucky gets to come to my house and remind me, in person, that I was wrong.  (Laughter.)  So it is a double-edged sword.

Of course, I knew Kentucky was good.  I had them in the championship game.  But in the end, I thought, they got all these freshmen.  These guys are too young.  (Laughter.)  And keep in mind, at this time last year, three of the Wildcats’ five starters were still in high school.  Michael Kidd-Gilchrist couldn’t even vote yet.  (Laughter.)

But let’s face it, sometimes talent trumps experience.  And sometimes, a bunch of young players, even if they’re used to being big fishes in their ponds, even if they’ve never played together before, they can buy into a system, they understand the concept of team, and they do something special right away.  And that’s exactly what happened in Kentucky.

Of course, a lot of credit for that goes to their outstanding coach, Coach Calipari.  (Applause.)  My understanding is, when he recruited these players, Coach started off by asking them some simple questions:  Do you want to win a national title?  The answer was yes, apparently.  (Laughter.)  Can you do it by yourself?  The answer was no.  He took a roster with six former All-Americans and got them to do something even more impressive, and that was share the ball.  So you had six players average double figures in points this year; nobody averaged more than nine shots a game.  If you didn’t play defense, you didn’t play. 

And as a result, the Wildcats started winning.  At one point, they won 24 straight.  They spent the final eight weeks of the season ranked number one.  They cruised through the tournament, trailed for less than 10 minutes total, before beating Kansas in front of 70,000 fans at the Super Dome.  (Applause.)  So that’s a pretty good run.

Most importantly, though, they did it as a team.  And nobody, I think, was a better example of that than Anthony Davis, who -- everybody kept on remarking on it.  Nobody has ever seen somebody who didn’t have a lot of field goals and yet still controlled the game.  Still ended up being the most valuable player -- racked up sixteen rebounds, six blocks, three steals.  That doesn’t count all the intimidation factor -- (laughter) -- that the other team had to go through.  Of course, that’s what happens when you grow eight inches between your sophomore and senior years of high school.  In fact, he has grown an inch since he got to the White House.  (Laughter.)  His pants are already like this.  (Laughter.)  Just got a new suit.  (Laughter.) 

When Anthony needed help, Doron Lamb stepped up, dropping 22 points in the biggest game of his career.  (Applause.)  First off the bench, Darius Miller, who became -- (applause) -- the first player in Kentucky history to be named Mr. Basketball, win a state championship in high school and win a national title with the Wildcats.  (Applause.)  I’m pretty sure Coach Cal is right that if Darius decides to run for governor he’ll do all right in Kentucky.  (Laughter.)  I also want to congratulate Darius and Eloy Vargas for getting their diplomas on Sunday.  That’s worth a big round of applause.  (Applause.) 

And I want to congratulate them for doing their share of community service in the Lexington community -- from packing backpacks full of food for kids who don’t have enough, to raising money for tornado victims. 

So these guys do it all.  Everybody’s got to take a good look now, because a whole bunch of these guys are going on to the NBA.  Who knows, one of them might end up here in Washington.  We’ll take him.  (Applause.)

Coach Cal is back on the recruiting trail, and if the next group of Wildcats is anything like this one, then I might see them again sometime soon.

So congratulations again to all the fans, to all the faculty, to all the -- everybody who helps to make Kentucky such an outstanding university.  Most of all, congratulations to the team and to coach Calipari.  (Applause.)

     COACH CALIPARI:  Thank you very much.  Mr. President, on behalf of the Big Blue Nation, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we are honored and humbled to be here.  This team, when they won that championship on that court in New Orleans, they were jumping up and down not saying, “We did it!  We won!”  They were saying, “We’re going to the White House!  We’re going to the White House!”  (Laughter.)  Because they wanted to meet you.

     As a member of our team, I’d like our seniors, Darius Miller, to give you his #1 jersey that he wore for four years.  Eloy Vargas has a ball that the team has signed, and the young

-- (laughter and applause.)  There’s the #1 jersey.

     THE PRESIDENT:  That's a good-looking jersey right there.  (Applause.)

     COACH CALIPARI:  And the young guy from your home city of Chicago --

     THE PRESIDENT:  Chicago!  (Laughter.) 

     COACH CALIPARI:  -- would like to present you with the 2012 National Championship ring, and it might say, it is the first.  (Applause.) 

     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  Look at that.  Well, this is some nice gear.  (Laughter.)  I have to say, by the way, after the game, I called the coach and the team, and I mentioned to Anthony that I had actually been to his school, a small charter school in Chicago, when I was still a senator.  And I had spoken to the kids there, and he told me, yes, I was there.  (Laughter.)  But I didn't recognize him.  He looked a little different apparently four years ago, so what a wonderful set of gifts.  I appreciate that. 

                                                END                               5:10 P.M. EDT

Crimson White House!

Political poll that I just got

I got an automated telephone poll tonight, conducted by National Opinion Surveys for an unnamed client.

Here are the questions I got:

1) Do I think the economy today is improving, about the same or getting worse?

2) Approve or disapprove of Barack Obama's performance in office?

3) Who will you vote for this fall: Obama, Romney or don't know?

4) Who will you vote for in the Senate race this fall: Cantwell, Baumgartner, or don't know?

5) Who will you vote for in the governor's race this fall: Inslee, McKenna, or don't know?

6) Who will you vote for in your local House race: Democrat, Republican, or don't know? (Generic party ID, not candidate names).

7) Who will you vote for in your local state House race: Democrat, Republican, or don't know? (Generic party ID, not candidate names).

Demographics next:

8) What is your age?

9) What is your sex?

10) What is your party ID: Democrat, Republican or independent?

11) Do you have a 4-year degree?

12) Do you have an advanced degree?

13) Are you of Hispanic descent?

14) What is your race?

15) Are you a current or retired union member?

16) Is anyone else in the household a current or retired union member?

17) How would you describe your political views: liberal, moderate or conservative?

Fascinating bit of political history...

"Rep. Zioncheck had made a decision not to run but at the last minute changed his mind and asked King County Prosecuting Attorney Warren Magnuson to drop out of the race which Magnuson refused. Later that day, Zioncheck jumped out the 5th story window of Seattle’s Arctic building to his death."

-- From WA Secretary of State's Office, "Members of the U.S House of Representatives from Washington State who did not complete their terms 1889-2012."

Court-packing, understood

Now I better understand FDR's effort to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s after the noble justices declared parts of the New Deal unconstitutional...

E.J. Dionne nails it here:

Liberals should learn from this display that there is no point in catering to today’s hard-line conservatives. The individual mandate was a conservative idea that President Obama adopted to preserve the private market in health insurance rather than move toward a government-financed, single-payer system. What he got back from conservatives was not gratitude but charges of socialism — for adopting their own proposal.

Fair and balanced on the campaign trail, 1972...?

A passage straight out of Jay Rosen's "view from nowhere" thesis, spotted in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

Nixon's southern strategy

I have heard Republicans claim that segregation was the creation of Democrats in the South.

It's true. The Democratic Party was completely dominant in the former Confederate states almost until the end of the 20th century.

What's not true, however, is any notion that today's Republicans in the South are the inheritors of Republicans in the pre-civil rights era. That's the implicit (explicit, even) point of southern Republicans who go to great lengths to note their party allegiance and how the GOP was the party of blacks and progressives (at least on matters of race) from Reconstruction until the presidencies of FDR and LBJ.

For it's simply true that today's Republican Party in the former Confederate states is the inheritor of the anti-civil rights Democratic Party of decades ago.

As a young acquaintance from Alabama once said to me with a serious tone: "If you're white, you're Republican."

And it dates back to Strom Thurmond and his political ally, Richard Nixon. It was taken up by the likes of Jesse Helms and Richard Shelby ... and so many others.

It's the result, partly, of Richard Nixon's ingenious "southern strategy," which I once had a conservative correspondent claim he'd never heard of not to long ago.

The reason for the history 101 here is that I came across another great passage in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland today:

This isn't to say that all southern Republicans are racists. They aren't. Just as all northern liberals aren't colorblind.  The point here is that history is history, and there's no white-washing the fact that today's southern Republicans are the descendants of a political backlash against civil rights and integration.

The crows are getting smarter

On Saturday, I was walking along Beach Drive in West Seattle, on the lookout for waterfowl of interest.

Seattle is full of crows, so I didn't pay much attention to the ones I saw hanging out by the beach, until I heard something drop.

A crow had been sitting on a telephone wire above Beach Drive and it had dropped something. I didn't think much of it. Crows are curious sorts and they're always picking up random stuff in hopes that there's food inside.

I kept walking. A few seconds later, I heard the same dropping sound -- the sound of a rock hitting pavement. I turned around to see the crow swooping down to the road to pick up the rock or whatever it was.

The crow then alighted back onto the telephone wire, where it proceeded to drop the rock again.  This was getting interesting.

So I watched as the crow continued to swoop down, pick up the rock, and fly back up to the wire. Then I realized, the crow was dropping the rock whenever a car was approaching.

I watched the crow repeat the dropping trick three or four times.  Each time, the bird would settle on the wire and wait for a car.

Finally, I walked over to see what the rock was. Turns out, it was a shell, some sort of nautilus. The shell was very thick. Stomping on it with my foot (I was trying to help a bird out!) didn't even dent it.

So this crow had figured out quite a few things.  First, it knew it couldn't open the shell. Second, it knew a car is heavy. Third, it knew that it could sit on the wire above the road and drop the shell as a car neared.

Surely it's only a matter of time before they're selling us iPods at a substantial markup...

Right wingers for gun control?

I'm reading and immensely enjoying Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. I'm learning a lot more about that era's politics, the narrative of which is much more nuanced than I ever appreciated.

For example, conservatives in California tried to ban carrying guns in public places after the Black Panthers started arming themselves. An excerpt:

Wonder what would have happened had armed black people showed up outside George W. Bush rallies in 2001 ... a la tea party. Somehow I think things would have played out quite differently.

Image courtesy Washington State Archive and Kurt Schaefer's "The Black Panther Party in Seattle, 1968 - 1970" (via UW).

(Sidenote: The things you find online... bobbyseale.com)

Testing a google spreasheet form