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The Last Word

Mark Herrmann

January 20, 2008

Here's some exit poll data you won't hear on the cable channels: When the political pundits reach into their bag of sports clichés, we all want to run like crazy for the exits.

Enough of saying that candidate so-and-so "won this round." Please head to the paddock with the analysis that "this is a two-horse race." Sports writers offer this deal to the political cognoscenti: You take care of your verbal side of the aisle and we'll take care of ours.

Face it, our ilk stopped referring to a baseball season as "a campaign" decades ago. Is it too much to ask to return the favor?

Sports and politics simply are different. For instance, there is the truism voiced by Tom Hanks' movie character: "There's no crying in baseball." Surely, you can't say the same about politics.

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So let the sporting types keep our own (synthetic) turf.

The boiling point for this viewer was the New Hampshire primary, when the pundits were trumpeting a stunning upset by way of describing their own hideous poll miscalculation. That night, the experts looked like the 2007 Mets in September.

Apologies for the sports analogy. It comes from watching the talking heads as they prepare to cover the "crowded field" on "Super" Tuesday.

True, it is flattering that sports are so basic to our cultural language that commentators have to use athletic examples to make politics understandable. And sometimes the imagery can be clever, or at least original: Boston Globe columnist James Carroll wrote, "In both contexts, `Go Patriots.'

Steve Markley, a commentator with the Chicago Tribune's RedEye Edition, compared the Republican contenders to the National Hockey League -- "Lost, mostly irrelevant, and still beating up on one another though no one's watching" and the Democratic race to a home run derby between slugger Alex Rodriguez (Hillary Clinton) and a talented rookie (Barack Obama).

But mostly, it's all too much. After the Iowa caucus, a leading Obama supporter in Ohio said, "His speech was a home run" and USA Today reported that Mike Huckabee "got a huge boost with a home run speech." Following the New Hampshire primary, Pat Lynch, a commentator in Arkansas, said, "Clinton hit a home run and there was nothing the talking heads could do about it."

Not exactly. The talking heads talked sports.

Tom Brokaw, taking a turn on MSNBC, made a wry grin and said he always has chided sportswriters for being certain who was going to win the Super Bowl before the kickoff. Hey, big guy, don't pin this one on us. Since when do all sports reporters carve their predictions in the same stone as the pundits did in New Hampshire? They sure aren't as spectacularly wrong as you guys were (at least not since Joe Namath's day).

Chris Matthews (wonder where he came up with the name for his MSNBC show, "Hardball") said that presidential races are the only places where the playoffs come before the regular season. Interesting, but not quite accurate. The final national campaign is long and not as frenetic as the primary season, but it has all the pressure of the playoffs. Nice try.

Joe Scarborough on the same network (apologies for picking on MSNBC, but it's just a function of what this political junkie was watching) made the ludicrous claim that the pundits' reporting on Clinton's New Hampshire poll deficit was just as valid as sportswriters' reporting that the Yankees led the Red Sox three games to none in the 2004 American League Championship Series. The slight difference, Joe, was that in the ALCS, the teams had played three games!

Sadly, that night just led to more of the same. A Democratic strategist said Obama could have scored "a knockout" had he focused on other issues. A senior fellow at a Washington think tank said South Carolina and Nevada wouldn't be "knockout states." One of Mitt Romney's national coordinators said, "This seems more like a 15-round heavyweight fight rather than a one- or two- or three-round knockout like some predicted it might be."

Ugh, it's enough to make a country punchy. We haven't heard the last of what Obama's leading western New York backer said, "It's become a real horse race." You could look it up, on the CBS News blog, "Horserace."

Consolation is in knowing it won't last forever. One year from today, one of those candidates will be inaugurated.

By then, the victor will have come down the stretch neck-and-neck in a dead heat because the election probably will not have been a slam dunk. The winner will have taken a timeout after the convention, kept from going out of bounds and been on his or her game whenever someone threw a curve or moved the goalposts.

The next President will know that it was a marathon, not a sprint.