Driving Bush Bats

Despite the mockery of groups like Billionaires for Bush, not all ten-digit-arians are loyal Republicans. In fact, no billionaire makes the president feel as bilious as George Soros, the ardent funder of defoliate-Bush campaign groups and the inspiration of many statewide medical marijuana initiatives. When it comes to White House liberal-phobia, Soros comes across as Ted Turner with real money.

Soros recently added a new nettle to his nettlesome reputation by emerging as a major financial backer of a consortium out to buy the front-running, nine-game-winning-streak Washington Nationals, an orphan team owned by the other 29 major-league franchises. The dramatic return of baseball to the nation's capital (34 years after the hapless Senators relocated to, yes, Texas) is fast creating a new slogan: "Washington -- last in post-war occupations, last in peace, but miraculously first in the National League East." Now as a free-market Republican, George W. Bush, of course, believes in the inalienable right of any billionaire, freed from the burden of taxes, to buy any plaything he might desire. That is, unless the thing of beauty is a baseball franchise, located just a few miles from where the president presides over the only Secret-Service-secured Tee-Ball league in the world.

With the polls turning south on Iran and the economy, Bush probably wakes up many mornings longing for the happy days as a baseball owner when he was a front man running the Texas Rangers from 1989-94. In fact, against the troglodyte backdrop of baseball, Bush was an enlightened front-office executive, bravely voting against the ouster of Fay Vincent as the last legitimate commissioner and opposing such tradition-tromping abominations as inter-league play. But Bush also surely assumed that whoever bought the Washington Nationals would fit into the politically conservative clubbable atmosphere of big-league baseball where only a handful of teams (notably, the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox) have Democratic leanings. An Associated Press survey last October found that owners of more than half the big-league teams contributed to the president's reelection campaign.

That's why Soros is causing Bush so much tsuris. Even though he is a late entry to buttress the long-shot effort by Washington entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky, Soros has the deep pockets to prevail in a Babe Ruthian bidding war. This was the point of a shrewd and little-noticed article in the conservative Washington Times which theorized that "Mr. Soros' status as the 24th-richest man in America makes it impossible to discount him as a factor in the Nationals race."

The odds still favor a rival group headed by former Nixon aide Fred Malek, which has enlisted Colin Powell as its glad-handing public face. But the only thing that counts more than social and ideological compatibility in tapping an ownership group for the ballyard equivalent of Skull and Bones is cash on the barrel head. Which is why it would be so much fun on opening day 2006 to see our baseball-loving president sitting in the owners box of the Washington Nationals, right next to his arch-nemesis George Soros.