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Commentary: Mubarak at the Mendoza Line

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 10, 2011 - Life is not always fair. Consider the case of Mario Mendoza as an example. Mendoza was a banjo-hitting shortstop who entered the popular lexicon when slugger George Brett jokingly remarked on ESPN that the first thing he checked in the Sunday paper was to make sure that his batting average was above the "Mendoza Line."

The term caught on and now when a player's batting average sinks below .200, he's said to have crossed the Mendoza Line. Mendoza, incidentally, retired with a lifetime average of .215.

In presidential politics, the Mendoza Line rests at the 30 percent approval rating. Since the era of modern polling began, no president has been able to rebound from a dip south of that mark. If he crosses the line in his first term, he will fail to win re-election. If he reaches that nadir in his second, the party out of power will recapture the White House in the next election.

Jimmy Carter, for instance, fell below 30 percent in 1979 and was subsequently trounced by Ronald Reagan the following year. George W. Bush crossed Mendoza's line in his final year in office, thus paving the way for Barack Obama. Even though each man's popularity would wind up above 30 percent, one trip to the dark side was enough to doom their prospects.

History sometimes reverses the verdict of the moment. Mired in the Korean Conflict, Democrat Harry Truman's approval rating dropped precipitously to 23 percent early in 1952. Predictably, Republican Dwight Eisenhower won the fall election that year, but Truman is now generally ranked in the upper tier of American presidents.

Though polling in nations governed by totalitarian regimes is an inherently dicey enterprise, reports out of Egypt indicate that about 30 percent of the population currently supports the administration of Hosni Mubarak. The embattled president appears to be precariously balanced atop the Mendoza Line.

To the extent that the American experience is applicable to North Africa, Mubarak is in deep trouble. This is not particularly good news for the State Department.

On one hand, Mubarak has been a reliable American ally throughout his tenure and has faithfully lived up to his end of the bargain in the Israeli peace accords. On the other, State can ill afford to seen as an obstacle to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people. Before becoming overly enamored with the bright, shining face of emergent democracy in the Land of the Pharaohs, however, we might want to consider how our democratic experiment in Afghanistan is progressing.

A recent New York Times articletold the story of a young Afghan couple who were stoned to death for attempting to elope against the wishes of their families. This being the 21st century, the grizzly details of the ancient sanction were captured on cell phone videos.

The would-be bride, clad in full burqa, was forced into a pit after which her friends and neighbors gathered round to extract justice. "... Even after a sustained barrage from the crowd pressing close to her," the report notes, "she was still alive and tried to crawl out. Then one of the men shot her three times in the head."

Her fiance was executed separately. He was spared the insult of gunfire because "... the crowd stoned him so ferociously that he was soon dead." Predictably, religious scholars were appalled by the spectacle.

"It really saddened me to see this video," one said. "It is right to stone people for doing such things, but stoning has its own rules and laws based on Shariah, and it is not to be done without a legitimate court, and it is not right to stone people unjustly with big, big stones." It seems a proper stoning employs only small stones and assailants are prohibited from raising their arms above the head to hurl them.

Q: In the extremely unlikely event that we successfully install a viable democracy what kind of government do you think these people will vote in? Hint: When the Bush administration pushed for free and fair elections in the West Bank, the voters freely and fairly elected Hamas terrorists in a landslide.

Hamas, by the way, is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak came to power in Egypt after his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by said brotherhood for signing the peace deal with Israel. A supposedly kinder and gentler iteration of the group is now a major player in the anti-government protests under way along the Nile.

It strikes me that before we offer blanket endorsement to Arabic democracy, we'd do well to figure out where the Mendoza Line lies in regard to inclusion. Do you invite terrorists to the table? What about fascists? Cannibals? Can any society survive by tolerating those who seek to destroy it?

Just as Mendoza was somewhat unfairly singled out as the poster child for lousy hitters everywhere, so too has Mubarak become the face of Middle Eastern repression. His democratic credentials are suspect at best. It may be that his strong-arm tactics have too long thwarted the emergence of a modern, secular state. Or it may be that he was simply a man who understood the situation...

M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.