From the Department of People Who Obviously Wish They Were On A Different Beat comes Christian Science Monitor blogger Jimmy Orr’s sports-metaphor-laden take on the presidential campaign:
To use a sports analogy, a campaign can be looked at like a basketball game. Not an organized game with referees and enforced rules, but more like a pickup basketball game — “make it, take it” style.
That is, when you are on offense and you score – you pour it on. You get the ball back and try to score again. This continues until there’s a game-changer. Great defense gives the other team the ball back. A thunderous block shot (Ben Wallace, 2006). A magnificent steal (Larry Bird, 1987) . Or the offensive team simply blows it — like perhaps the worst and most humorous play in the NBA last year where New York Knicks forward Zach Randolph was amazingly awful.
He eventually brings the post back to politics, but I love the idea of this guy sitting down to blog about the campaign, then getting so excited about basketball that he loses his bearings and just starts linking to awesome SportsCenter moments. Now that’s a good way to get undecided voters interested in politics.
Justin Peters is editor-at-large of the Columbia Journalism Review.