When Barack Obama used his election-eve interview on Monday Night Football to assert that the reform most needed in sports was a college football playoff system to replace the current Bowl Championship Series, he confirmed he could pander with the best of them. When the president-elect reinforced that proposal on 60 Minutes, he signaled his intention to include in his ambitious portfolio the hat of Couch Potato in Chief.
This acerbic assessment is offered without apology. Better sooner than later, giddy Obama voters are going to have to come to terms with the real-world challenge ahead, not just the bright side of our historic win. The economy is in flames. The terrorist siege in Mumbai, India, is a reminder that one of Obama’s many pieces of campaign brilliance was the hint that the candidate who rose, in part, on the basis of his clean hands in Iraq might prove a bit hawkish on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pausing to drool over college football, without adding any countervailing social commentary, is the Democratic equivalent of asserting that we can shop our way out of the current crisis.
At some point the Obama honeymoon will end, triggered by something no one can predict, and a long-term marriage’ s hard tradeoffs will begin. The new president will be responsible for a mistake, because there are lots of decisions to be made and not all of them will be perfect. When that happens, the smartest among those with high hopes for the Obama Administration will no longer be cheerleaders. They will be constructive critics.
Obama’s task ahead has been compared variously to Abraham Lincoln’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s. The latter is much the more on point -- the key anecdote being the time FDR was said to have interrupted an impassioned Oval Office visitor advocating a certain policy to say: “I agree with every word. Now go out there and put pressure on me.”
Gay rights would be a nice place to start. Obama-maniacs are deluded if they don’t realize that one of the reasons the rancid Proposition 8 passed in California was that their guy didn’t really lift a finger for the fight against it.
As for the concept of pitting Red State against Podunk Polytechnic for the real national championship in prime time -- presumably in mid-February on ESPN I, II, III, and IV in HD with Bluetooth -- let’s just say it’s a vision about as profound as George H.W. Bush’s old plebean assurances that he loved pork rinds and hated broccoli.
If Obama is such a big fan -- as I think he genuinely is -- he might consider also taking the lead in the dialogue over why the thousands of disproportionately African American men on the 119 Division I college football teams go unpaid and without adequate health and safety standards, or even enough life insurance for a decent burial. This decade of BCS glory is littered with the avoidable deaths, during “voluntary” offseason practices, of “student-athletes” ranging from Rashidi Wheeler (Northwestern, 2001) to Ereck Plancher (University of Central Florida, 2008). Fewer than one percent of the more than 99 percent who don’t die go on to careers in the National Football League.
In 2003 I wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times Magazine about the movement to organize the performers in the obscene profit-center college sports of football and men’s basketball (the piece can be viewed at http://articles. latimes.com/2003/aug/31/magazine/tm-athletes35). One of the players featured in the story was Stanford’s Jon Alston, now a linebacker with the Oakland Raiders.
The leader of the struggle to form a quasi-union for college athletes is ex-UCLA football player Ramogi Huma, who has in common with Obama a father from Kenya’s Luo tribe. Yo, Barack -- how about picking up the phone and calling my friend, Ramogi? I know he voted for you: we traded high fives on email right after the election.
The leader of 300 million diverse people can’t survive without kitsch chops, but I for one would like to hear our next president do a little more than just enable the attitude that what’s good for industrialized sports is good for the country.
In 1962 John F. Kennedy attended the baseball All-Star game in Washington. He said we needed “not just a nation of spectators -- though that’s what we are today -- but also a nation of participants.” Kennedy used the occasion to spotlight his new President’s Council on Physical Fitness, an initiative aimed at combating a trend toward youth inactivity and obesity that, nearly a half-century later, is much worse.
That is the standard to which I will continue to hold Obama. He has not earned a lookaway pass every time he chooses to score cheap points with the “booboisie.”