I recently remarked on Sarah Palin’s use of a basketball analogy, since I can’t think of many female politicians who regularly drop sports references into their speeches (though as Wash Post columnist Ruth Marcus has aptly pointed out, after the point guard passes, does she typically walk off the court?).
But speaking of sports analogies in political rhetoric, here are several other recent examples, courtesy of my West Wing colleague Julia Lam:
President Obama offered a workout metaphor to describe Washington politics during a June 28 energy roundtable (after Energy Secretary Steven Chu casually dropped a Wayne Gretzky reference):
“Look, I just think that what we’ve been doing over the last six months is getting people back into fighting trim. This is a town where there was just a belief that nothing could get done. Steve used the Gretzky metaphor, and I’ll use just the workout metaphor, and that is, you know, when you start training again and you’re pushing your body a little bit harder, sometimes it hurts. But if you keep on at it, after a while your body adjusts. And I think that’s what’s happening to politics in Washington. Folks have been sitting on the couch for a while, and now they’re starting to feel like, hey, you know what, I can run. And that’s why we’re getting stuff done.”
And embattled California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger throws down mountain-climbing, slalom-navigating, and weightlifting allegories in a New York Times magazine article this past weekend:
On running California: “It’s the tightest slalom course you can find, with bumps and moguls all on top of it. You have every obstacle you can think of. You jump in the middle of the air. Then do the turnaround with the gate. That’s what it is.” It’s very easy to catch your skis and wipe out, he added. I asked him if he wiped out. “People wipe out all the time,” he said, not answering directly.
On not taking the easy way out: “Why do people go everyday up to Mount Everest? I mean, think about it. You go there, and you look at this thing and you think, Isn’t it just better to go up in the helicopter and land? Some people will say that.”
More on stepping up to leadership: “You have to psych yourself up, even though you have to lift at a weight you’ve never lifted before. Everything’s going against you. There’s noise out there in the audience. There are people whistling, someone talking Russian behind you, all this stuff.”
Of course, sports’ influence on American politics isn’t merely metaphoric: Sports Illustrated lists two dozen U.S. elected officials who started their careers as professional athletes – before setting their sights on that other contact sport, politics. Perhaps not surprisingly, all 24 are men. But who knows — maybe someday, we’ll see an athlete go from the WNBA or Women’s Pro Soccer or Wimbledon or Olympic figure skating or gymnastics into the U.S. Congress. Senator Patty Murray famously ran as a mom in tennis shoes; here’s to a female Senator in cleats!
