A Sporting Chance

Sometimes you listen to something so ridiculous, you wonder how anyone could ever have uttered it. I was listening to the Tony Kornheiser show from today. Kornheiser's a sports guy, and generally, he invites sports types to come along.

They were discussing the primaries in which Hillary eked out small victories in three of four states. They treat it as if this were some kind of sporting event, where the margin of victory doesn't matter, just that the team won. Were this a winner-take-all primary, maybe that would be true, but these are proportional, and so a 5% win or a 10% win, is essentially a tie. And with Obama having racked up lots of delegates so far, a tie mean Obama still has more delegates.

One of his sidekicks put forth the notion that Obama couldn't get a knockout punch, that Hillary was effectively on the ropes, and Obama couldn't knock her out.

Talk about using sports analogies to make a point!

Ridiculous.

This is not a game where the players determine the sole outcome and the audience is merely a passive entity. This is an election, where you try to convince people to vote a certain way. There was even some talk that Republicans wanted to vote to have Hillary win because they like their chances against Hillary.

But all of that is mostly irrelevant. The point is that these are people are being convinced. Making a knockout? If Obama had inflected his words a certain way? If he had picked up one more endorsement? What is going on? They make it seem like this is a sporting event, as if this were boxing. Well, it's not.

That it sometimes resembles one is merely coincidence.

Sports people should sometimes refrain from making everything into sports, even if that's mostly their world. Because not everything you hammer is a nail.