Common Sense

One of my favorite columnists, Bill Simmons, thinks that sports teams should employ common-sense assistant coaches. These people, whose expertise might only have been formerly employed playing countless hours of sports video games would be on hand to point out the obvious. A couple of items in the news recently have had me feeling like people should pay me to common-sense-advise. Unfortunately, I haven't received any offers, so I guess I will just vent my common sense here.

As you may have noticed, the 2008 Presidential race has unofficially begun, with a plethora of candidates beginning their undignified scramble to Washington via New Hampshire, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, yeehaaawww! Perhaps the biggest splash so far has been made by the Democratic Senator, Joe Biden, who, on the day he declared himself a candidate, also made an inopportune comment about fellow Democratic candidate, Barak Obama. What Biden said, was that Obama was the "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Of course, he immediately issued apologies left and right, calling Obama, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson to try to diffuse the backlash that threatened to destroy his campaign before it even began. There a couple things that are wrong about this story. First the specific and then the general:

How can Biden play this off by saying something like, "Oh, I called, Al and Jesse, and we had a good talk, they understand what I was trying to say." What Biden was trying to say is that Obama is young enough (and not of African-American heritage) to campaign, unencumbered by the racially divisive politics of the civil rights era. Lets see, who, if not Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (Carol Moseley Braun or whatever her name was) could Biden have been thinking of when he said what he said? That he had to tag on Obama's aesthetic advantages over those two could not have made his apologies any easier to take.

The link above in the parenthesis is to a New York Times article whose grand thesis was that Barack Obama actually seems to be getting less support from Black people than Hilary Clinton is -- the tone -- shock. I really don't understand how this is a shock. It's an unfortunate catch 22 that any black candidate with a realistic chance of winning a major political contest (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice (sounds like a mexican dish,) Barack Obama, that guy from Pennsylvania, etc.) must be people who appeal greatly to the 90% or so of the population that isn't black. Not to say that it is impossible for a black politician who appeals to white people appeal to black people, but... I think it's a lot easier for a white politician to have that type of cross-over appeal. And after all, Hilary Clinton's husband is in the African American Hall of Fame (whoever wrote the article felt the need to include this gem, "this is not in any way an effort to say that Clinton is an African American") while Obama's boyfriend is not even out of the closet... no, I mean, Obama's wife isn't a celebrity.

But the general problem with this whole thing is that the campaign creeping earlier and earlier is really quite damaging. Biden is just the first of the candidates to have to weather the storm of political scandal. I can't see any of the candidates making it through the year and a few months before the primaries actually begin to be held without some seriously damaging comment, story, photograph, etc. -- not unless they are incredibly boring people who are totally uninspiring to the hordes of bored news reporters (and I guess bloggers,) who are now being forced to cover this nonsense for longer than ever before. We're going to end up scaring off most of the good candidates (to be candidates) and then eliminating or damaging the rest of them during the marathon primary season, so by the time it's time to have a "meaningful debate between the two parties" the two candidates are going to be so scandal ridden and exhausted that our chance of actually having that debate will be even less above zero than it usually it.

My second common sense story has to do with Michael Vick, a football player being caught in an airport with a water bottle that had a secret compartment in it. The whole world went nuts until it was discovered that there wasn't actually any marijuana in it. Since then everyone has been falling over their own lack of cojones to apologize to Vick and to point out that they and everyone else were to fast to jump to conclusions. No one, no where has even paused to pose the question: if Vick wasn't smuggling weed, what was the secret compartment for? Hmmm, here's a FREAKISHLY quick athlete who is being paid millions and millions of dollars that are contingent on his remaining FREAKISHLY fast. Gee, what else, other than weed, might he be smuggling?