Sports has role in politics, and vice versa

JOHN JEANSONNE | john.jeansonne@newsday.com

February 3, 2008

Not all footballs are political, of course. But this week's close encounter between Super Sunday and Super Tuesday provides powerful evidence that presidential candidates are game-planning madly to merge our national gridiron extravaganza into their own personal pep rallies.

And one way to do that, beyond Barack Obama's $250,000 investment in a 30-second TV ad in the Boston area during tonight's big game, is for the White House contenders to demonstrate how thoroughly they identify with sports in the American culture.

Just last week, Mike Huckabee announced his intention to run April's Boston Marathon. Mitt Romney repeatedly refers to his success in organizing the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and casts his first-place primary finishes as "a gold" and his second places as "a silver." Not as publicly, Obama has spoken of his joy in pickup basketball games, Hillary Rodham Clinton of her interest in "speedwalking" and her pride in high school tennis success.

This makes perfect sense. With sports in general - and the Super Bowl in particular - so imbedded in U.S. society, "Politics is almost a necessary evil to regular people, so whatever points of commonality candidates can find, they are looking for," political consultant Colin Rogero said. "With sports, it's the 'I'm one of you, I feel your pain, I'm on your level' thing."

Pundits push the connection with references to the long primary season as a "marathon" and Tuesday's 22 state contests as the "Voter Bowl." Today's endless television coverage on Fox commences with what the network promises to be a "two-hour block of political and sports coverage," including an interview with George W. Bush wherein Bush proclaims himself "absolutely!" a football fan, "fired up for the Super Bowl."

"Our challenge is to have our clients give the message to people of things they want to talk about," said Boston-based political consultant Jim Spencer, president of The Campaign Network. "No one wants to talk about health care. So what we want to do is come up with messaging that makes our people human, because voting is not an intellectual experience. People don't vote with their heads but with their heart and their gut."

That Huckabee, known for losing 110 pounds, runs marathons "can be a metaphor for who he is as a person," said Jordan Lieberman, the publisher of Politics magazine who has experience running political campaigns in the New York area. "And people like athletes; they're turned off by sloth."

Still, the claims to jockdom can be tricky if the hoi polloi detects the slightest hint of forced sporting bonds, as when Romney referred to "the Patriots winning the World Series" or Clinton insisting she was both a Yankees and Chicago Cubs fan as a child.

Furthermore, as Bruce Reed wrote for the online magazine Slate recently, the country might not want another president "whose greatest fear is getting fat," citing presidential historians who have found "no correlation between body mass and greatness" and noting that "Bush works out, but his policies don't."

Fitness and nutrition author Lou Schuler, whose latest book is "The New Rules of Lifting for Women," wants to see in politicians, "as with anyone else, something that's real. If some of them do sports, fine. Obama playing pickup basketball, that's different than pandering to me; it's unlike John Kerry dressing up and pretending he's a duck hunter. What rules say somebody has to be a sport fan or an athlete, anyway?"

Beginning with John F. Kennedy, whose touch football games with family members were marketed to counter reports that he had a restricting back problem, a demonstration of fitness was a synonym for "vigor." (Even China's Mao Zedong ran with that ball by distributing pictures of himself swimming in the Yangtze River.)

A fondness for sports and physical activity "in this day and age, though, is more trying to tell people that you're regular," Spencer said. Likewise, the need has diminished for a male candidate to rely on sports talking points when running against a woman.

"It used to be," Spencer said, "you couldn't beat up on a woman, you couldn't yell at her, so we'd advise the male candidate to constantly use sports analogies in their speeches: 'When I was playing ... ' It gave a subtle, subliminal signal that 'I'm a man and she's a woman,' that 'she never played on a team or understood a coach.' By sprinkling everything with sports analogies, it reminded of the gender differential."

Now the culture has changed enough that such a tactic likely wouldn't help Clinton's male opponents. But other realities haven't evolved so much.

"If you want to reach white males, go to sports," Spencer said.

And: "It's a popularity contest, and Washington, D.C., is still populated by people who were student council nerds in high school.

"Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. I didn't make up that line. But I did make up this one: Politics is sports for the uncoordinated."

Which may be the ultimate proof that candidates are one of us. On our level. Feel our pain.