Jim Bunning Feels Under-Appreciated

Cantankerous old coffin-dodger Jim Bunning finally relented late Tuesday night. In the end, he got what he wanted: an amendment to the emergency funding bill that stipulates the bill will not add to the deficit. The cost of this amendment may not be much for Bunning. Yes, Democrats and the press vilified him for five days and made him out to be a dangerously callous old buffoon; and certainly these events will, for the rest of his life, overshadow his distinguished career as a hall-of-fame pitcher. Bunning doesn't care about that crap. When a man's had enough, he's had enough. For years he remained quiet while fellow Republicans expanded the budget and deficit to record proportions and conducted hundred-billion-dollar wars off the books. But he can't take this nonsense anymore.

As a ballplayer Bunning famously had issues with the managerial style of Gene Mauch, his skipper with the Phillies. Mauch liked to call pitches from the dugout during important situations, and this drove Bunning mad. Bunning liked to shake off the catcher and throw the pitch he wanted. While an admirable display of confidence for a young pitcher, this same type of attitude is frowned upon in the Republican party.

The cost of Bunning's stubborness to his party cannot be overstated. Republicans were riding the momentum of special election wins and popular discontent against Democrats and the President, and then Bunning starts ignoring signals and tossing hanging curves to Democratic hitters.

Why Gentle Jim, why do this now?

The short answer is that he has no one to please anymore. After twenty-five years in politics, the road had ended for Bunning. His approval rating had become dismal; his fundraising virtually non-existent; and both the state and national Republican party, including Mitch McConnell, had decided by March 2009 to elbow him out of his Senate seat. This, for a man Time Magazine described so lovingly:

During the [2006] campaign the famously irascible Hall of Fame pitcher had endured repeated questions about his age and even his mental stability, and had stood by while supporters called his opponent limp-wristed. Always prone to outlandish statements, Bunning himself made news when he said his opponent Daniel Mongiardo, then a state senator and now a lieutenant governor expected to run for the seat in 2010, looked like "one of Saddam Hussein's sons." In 2006, TIME named Bunning one of America's worst senators.

In the last week Bunning, in addition to holding up the unemployment bill, has told a fellow Senator "tough shit", bitched on the Senate record about missing a college basketball game (even as he was blocking that unemployment and medicaire bill), and flipped-off a team of ABC reporters who confronted him outside a Senate elevator.

Now groups are putting together petitions to get him kicked out of the hall of fame.

Here's a man whose top three contributor groups are health professionals, the insurance industry, and securities and investment. In other words, health care and wall street. His top individual contributors are Fidelity Investments, NorPAC (a pro-Israel group) and Brown-Forman (a Kentucky-based booze company that owns Jack Daniels). His fundraising dinners must be a real hootenanny.

One of the ironies here is that, per-capita, Kentucky ranks 44th state when it comes to contributing to federal tax revenue. The average Kentuckian contributes $5400 in taxes to the federal government. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the average citizen contributes $14,000. For every dollar that Kentucky contributes to the federal government, it gets back $1.45 in expenditures, making it one of the federal government's biggest beneficiaries. Meanwhile New Jersey gets the least for its money: 55 cents for every dollar it contributes to the federal coffers.

But never mind all that. The bottom line is that Bunning is not running for re-election this year, he feels he's been shunned by his constituents and his party, and he just doesn't care what anyone thinks of him, never has.

Upon election to the Hall of Fame in 1996, Bunning set up the non-profit Bunning Foundation. In the first twelve years, the foundation collected $504,000. Of that total, Bunning took $180,000 in salary. How much went to local (mostly church) charities? $136,000. As the president of the American Institute for Philanthropy put it, that doesn't look good: "The IRS doesn't want people to just set up their weekend hobbies as nonprofit foundations so they can take advantage of the tax-protection rules."

Gentle Jim gives not a fuck. He deserved that money. He was the one signing all those autographs. The pain in his wrist alone was worth at least ten thousand.

It took them 25 years to put him in the Baseball Hall of Fame. This, for a guy who ranked second all-time in strikeouts when he retired in 1971, who threw a no-no against the Red Sox in '58 and a Father's Day perfect game against the lovable loser Mets in '64. It was the first perfect game the National League had seen in 84 years, for crying out loud. A seven-time all-star, 225 wins, it took him twenty-five years to get in the hall. Can you imagine that? What kind of unappreciative idiots do they have voting, anyway?

Perhaps those voters (mainly sportswriters) had his "famously irascible" demeanor in mind. Or maybe Bunning couldn't escape the ghost of 1964.

With eleven games left in the '64 season, the Phillies, with Gene Mauch at the helm and Bunning as the ace, had a 6.5 game lead on the Reds and Cardinals. A week later, after losing seven in a row, they were out of first place for good. The Phillies lost ten out of their last eleven games that year and the Cardinals wound up going to the World Series and beating the Yankees four games to three. Gene Mauch was blamed for overusing Bunning and fellow pitcher Chris Short down the stretch. They wore down and couldn't perform when it counted most.

While Bunning spent that off-season answering questions about his stamina and reliving one of the worst losing streaks in major league history, Cardinals fireballer Bob Gibson (seen below with Joe Torre at spring training in '62) spent his winter enjoying his ring, bonus, and World Series MVP trophy. The next year, it would be Sandy Koufax enjoying those honors. Bunning would never make it to the World Series.

Can it be that Bunning has been angry since 1964?

The resentment will only intensify as his last year in office winds down. What does he have to lose? Come January 2011 he'll take a position on the board of Brown-Forman, sign some baseballs, make appearances at conservative conferences, and spend mornings shooting defenseless animals on his ranch in Kentucky.

Of course, the political life may have one last bitter pill for Bunning to swallow. Though he's given the finger to both friends and enemies, Gentle Jim is now being fashioned into a poster child for both parties to exploit.

For ideological Republicans, he represents that slowly dying breed of fiscal conservative willing to make hard choices and suffer the public's disapproval."The buck$ $top here!" the poster will say, above a photo of Bunning scowling, palm stiff-armed out toward the foreground where a collection of tiny bohemians in suits with bugged-out eyes and hanging tongues carry heaps of green bills labeled "tax dollars".

However, for those Republicans less inclined to be ideological 8 months before coming up for re-election, he is a steaming pile of dog shit they want to avoid at all costs. Anti-incumbent fever permeates the halls of Congress like the flu through a day-care center. No one wants to upset the angry unemployed people who have plenty of time to make it to the polls on election day.

For Democrats he represents the unashamed contempt Republicans have for the less fortunate, specifically the millions affected by job loss and the economic recession. "What does Jim Bunning care about more?" the poster might say. "Struggling Americans or a college basketball game?"

College basketball game, of course. And if you don't like it, Gentle Jim has two words for you: "Tough shit".