Barack Obama made many promises, and proffered many visions, in November, 2008, the month he was elected President. You don’t have to be Mitt Romney to acknowledge that not all have been realized. But one, at least, has now come to pass: the championship in college football will be decided by a playoff. “This is important,” Obama said on “60 Minutes” in one of his first interviews as President-elect, laying out a vision for an eight-team, three-week final series. “I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.” Now it’s done.
So does Obama get points for the playoff? Maybe not: he wasn’t exactly a voice in the wilderness; the university presidents on the B.C.S. committee went for a playoff with only four teams, not eight; and their media adviser for the decision and its announcement was Ari Fleischer, who used to work for George W. Bush. Then again, Obama loses points for other things similarly out of his direct control, like Greeks bearing debts. Perhaps the ideological test of the moment is whether credit goes to Obama, or to Orrin Hatch, of Utah (who fought this battle on the Senate floor), or just to simple good sense. But it’s happened, and it’s good, and it’s pretty certain that our President, who, as I’ve written before, is a master of sports-political pandering, will have more to say about the playoffs—even if he’s out of office for the first one, in 2014.
When, though, will Mitt Romney learn to talk about sports? He has to, both for his own sake and ours. He and his campaign had a poor week on that front, especially given the material they had to work with. At a fundraiser in Boston, President Obama thanked everyone for Kevin Youkilis, the Red Sox player who had just been traded to the Chicago White Sox. The audience booed; Obama tried for faux-contrite humor. (“I’m just saying, he had to change the color of his socks.”) The Romney team went for awkward outrage. “In baseball, an error is a misplay or fumble, as when a player drops a pop fly or lets a ground ball through his legs,” Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail to reporters—a definition that would be unnecessary for anyone likely to actually care. She said that Obama had made one of these so-called errors by “taunting” and continued.
That’s the way to stand up for a team—remind everyone of the many ways it is to be pitied. The Boston Globe thought, or hoped, that the Romney statement was “tongue in cheek”—and, I can say from experience that the field of sports-political pandering does encourage that—but, if so, it would help if it didn’t read like a quick gloss of the Wikipedia entry for “Curse of the Bambino.” More clumsily, the Romney campaign set itself up for this reply from Jay Carney:
What Obama is doing, though, is not in any way a rejection of sports pandering; it is its apotheosis. Obama’s reach is just broader, playing to sports fans generally, rather than to the city or state he may be visiting. This also helps on the bipartisanship front. When the Bushes visited the White House this month, Obama thanked his predecessor for his kindness: “Plus you also left me a really good TV sports package. I use it.” Romney needs better game if he is going to mess with the sports-panderer-in-chief.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.
