During the 7th inning stretch at Yankees Stadium, they play God Bless America and show on the big screen pictures of anyone famous who's in the audience that night. Dick Cheney is apparently in the audience, and as soon as his face went up, the entire crowd started booing! As my friend Michael tells it, this is the blue-collar Bronx we're talking about, and Cheney is still getting booed - not a good sign for the Bush-Cheney ticket. As soon as the camera guys realized Cheney was getting booed, they quickly switched the picture on the screen to someone else.

Good. As someone who in the past has had to squealch any even vaguely liberal political expression while watching a game at Yankee Stadium, for fear of inciting violence upon my person, I can attest that the folks there aren't normally your progressive types. If Bush & Company has started losing them, then perhaps the tide has indeed started to turn.

Update: Coincidentally, the Yankee's cable network, YES (which rebroadcasts the games later in the night), showed this section of the game about 10 minutes after I wrote the above. There was some booing at the beginning of the song, and some cheering near the end, but because the cameras weren't showing what was on the big screen in the Stadium, it's not possible to know from the broadcast whether the crowd was reacting to Cheney or not. Nevertheless, this report of the game in the Hartford Courant says that "Yankee fans booed Cheney during "God Bless America", and it's confirmed by ESPN. Atrios says that the New York Times had it in their account of the game, but removed it later. A Google News search on "Cheney booed" just now brought up reports from the Tampa Tribune and the New York Post (see below), neither of which were there when I looked a few minutes ago.

Vice President Dick Cheney, a Red Sox fan, was among the large gathering. He watched the early innings from George Steinbrenner's box and later sat in the first row next to the Yankees' dugout. Cheney was booed when his picture appeared on the screen during the singing of "God Bless America."

Of course, this puts a bit of a kink in my theory about Bush/Cheney losing their support, because it's always possible that the Yankee Stadium crowd booed him not because he's the worst Vice President in recent memory (and remember, I lived through Spiro Agnew), or because he and Bush have done their damndest to destroy this country's economy, its environment, its relationships with the rest of the world, our civil liberties and everything that America stands for, but because he's apparently a Red Sox fan. In Yankee Stadium, that's a hanging offense.

Update: Although I saw him in Giuliani's usual spot next to the Yankee dugout earlier in the game, apparently Cheney was in Steinbrenner's box by the time of the seventh-inning stretch.