Who’da thunk it? Campaign Desk tips its hat to a story from the sports section.
The piece, by Jon Sawyer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, looks at first glance like pretty light fare. Headed “President to Toss Out First Pitch at Cards Opener,” it leads off by reporting that President Bush told “a roomful of baseball Hall of Famers at a White House luncheon Wednesday that he plans to throw out the first pitch at the Cardinals opening game Monday.”
The piece starts out as the kind of soft focus feature that must warm Karl Rove’s heart, showcasing the president in the sort of relaxed, apolitical setting in which he’s clearly most comfortable. Sawyer quotes Bush self-deprecatingly joking to his audience that his “arm is a little sore,” so he sought pitching advice from Hall of Fame knuckleballer Phil Niekro. Later, Bush told the crowd that, for him, the event is “kind of like having your baseball collection spread out in real life.”
But lest we suspect Sawyer of serving up softballs, he soon starts bringing the heat, casting the baseball toss as just the latest gambit in a dead-serious game: Getting re-elected. “Bush has been firing political fastballs for months at Missouri, a state with 11 electoral votes that has emerged as a key battleground in November’s presidential election,” Sawyer reports.
From there, he turns to a Brookings Institution study from this week, which tallies the number of trips the president has made to each state since he took office. The study found, among other things, that well over a third of Bush’s trips have been made to states that were decided in 2000 by six percentage points or fewer.
And along the way, Sawyer notes that Ohio, another major electoral battleground, “will get some baseball attention next week as well,” when the opening day first pitch for the Cincinnati Reds will be thrown out by … Vice President Cheney.
No word from Sawyer on whether John Kerry will be doing the opening-day honors for the swing-state Florida Marlins, though given recent news that seems unlikely.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.