“I hate the Packers,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said of his state’s rival football team from Wisconsin....
He's trying to show his aptitude for national politics by insulting the people of a swing state. Genius! The "coach" has a "game plan."
“The Sixers suck right now,” declared Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, lamenting the decline of Philadelphia’s basketball team.
Yeah, at least insult your own team.
The hot takes are flowing as a parade of ambitious Democrats talk sports, trying to accentuate their salt-of-the-earth credentials and forge stronger bonds with voters.
Count the metaphors:
a flowing hot substance, a parade, a forge, and the salt of the earth. The Bible (KJV) says: "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."Meanwhile, back at the Times article: there's Gov. Andy Beshear — ready to go on Kentucky Derby podcasts — and explaining that voters want “candidates and people serving who don’t just sound like normal human beings, but they are normal human beings.” That's a tall order. And, sadly, also a short order.
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57 comments:
Steve Buscemi's T-shirt now reads "Sports Team" instead of "Music Band".
It would probably behoove the Dems to shut up for a while and have some internal conversations about what might be successful with the voters going forward. The current ad hoc approach is embarrassing even to me and I pretty much vote for Republicans. The Dems really are paying the price for selling out to the Bernie/AOC/Obama wing of the party. This won't last forever, but while it does I intend to enjoy every moment.
Oh, my! (none of them have any idea what I’m saying)
…anything but adopt popular policies…
Sports talk radio went full Kaepernick a few years ago and listeners tuned out by the bus load. At least the ones I listen to are very clear now that politics are off limits. I don’t see that changing.
The problem with sports is they got too political.
No one wants politicians inserting themselves into sports. Yeah the Sixers suck. But they aren’t as bad at hoops as the Dems are at politics.
"candidates and people serving ..."
"Serving"? Really?
So these are male politicians trying to figure out how to talk to men? Per prior discussion, try talking about boobs.
Are we going to be treated to an endless parade of White Dudes for Kamala, only with sports this time? Is Tim Walz going to change his oil again? Are they all going to change their oil at the same time, leaving no doubt the Democrats are back with the mailing list, sending out their talking points?
If this is their idea of their New Big Idea, 'Bro-mance for Democrats', then they're in worse shape than the Chinese census bureau.
"So these are male politicians trying to figure out how to talk to men?"
They need to talk to Kamala. She's already run ads for that.
It's hard to believe that anybody will be fooled by that stuff but let them go ahead and try. When Walz showed up in Ann Arbor last fall to watch Minnesota get beat by Michigan the attending football fans, a good contingent of whom are Democrats, didn't seem to be too enthused about his presence. It's less lame than the governors of each state betting a bushel basket of apples against a barrel of cheese on the outcome of the game but barely.
This is the stupidest media strategy I ever saw. Every sports outlet that went "political" lost massive market share. This has been well known for several years.
How much DO they pay their media advisors, anyway? They're probably happy. It never seems to come back to bite them, so why not?
Clueless.
Greetings, my fellow Democrat sports aficionado man bros. How do you do.
Walz is a putz and his national political career is a nonstarter; he is just too stupid to realize this. The Dems lack a leader and a message other than opposing any thing Trump does.
He is dangerous, a trained MNG Chief Master Sergeant. A trained minister of death, a messenger of pain and fear to MAGA!
And biological males pretending to be females isn’t going to come up on sports radio shows and podcasts?
@Josephbleu 6:24
I don't know brother Walz didn't look particularly well-trained when he was doing that "I'm going hunting" media op that Democrats often do, when he was fumbling around with that shotgun like he knew what he was doing.
Professor, I laughed out loud at "He's trying to show his aptitude for national politics by insulting the people of a swing state. Genius! " Very well done.
I can't wait to get Gretchen Witmer's (Michigan State) take on Michigan/OSU football. She hates 'em both.
“The Dems lack a leader and a message”
RFK would have been perfect in that position.
As "organic" and spontaneous as a North Korea Military Parade.
Like everything the New Soviet Democraticals do.
Most recently, the Soros/ActBlue funded astroturf events at republican legislator townhalls, the "protests" at Tesla dealerships, the moron sheep holding up their little signs on cue, the astonishing mind-numbed buffoon dems sending out their word-for-word identical videos, the talking points of the lefties and LLR-democratical lefties at Althouse blog, etc.
If this is not the first rule of marketing it should be: "First, have a product people want."
Every posting I see at Althouse referencing the Democrat's desire to increase their appeal to certain groups always seem to revolve around messaging. Their problem isn't the message. People have rejected them because the product sucks and they can no longer hide that with messaging.
There's a clever piece by Anthony Burgess that plays on two meanings of "forged." In one sentence the word shifts from ruggedly honest to deliberately false.
Sports, including daily sports talk TV/radio shows are an escape. Last thing I want to here when I am watching/listening is to have some clueless politician blabbering. Always hated when Obama took on airtime to discuss his NCAA brackets.
“I hate the Packers,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said
Gee, I didn't know that when I didn't vote for you.
Isn’t Walz the guy who was picked to make Kamala look smart by comparison? The guy who lied about his rank and stole valor from the guys in his own unit?
The Dems are completely lost.
It would probably behoove the Dems to shut up for a while and have some internal conversations about what might be successful with the voters going forward.
@minnesota farm guy, that’s not not going to work either. That’s a variant on the Chinese Emperor’s nose fallacy (It’s probably know by some more Latinate name). You assemble a group of ordinary Chinese people and ask each of them how long the Emperor’s nose is. The problem is simply that no ordinary Chinese person is allowed to look at the Emperor, so however you mathematically massage the data you collect, you’re merely mathematically massaging wild guesses.
How this applies is straightforward — get a bunch of Democrat strategists and thought leaders who do not actually understand anything at all about the working class and middle class, and whatever guidance they produce will be completely and utterly worthless.
As usual. Cringeworthy. If you don't know anything then say you don't know.
i don't know brother Walz didn't look particularly well-trained when he was doing that "I'm going hunting" media op that Democrats often do, when he was fumbling around with that shotgun like he knew what he was doing.
@Deep State Reformer, I watched that, and I had to wonder whether he was taught how to use a shotgun by Dick Cheney.
Isn’t Walz the guy who was picked to make Kamala look smart by comparison?
@Bob Boyd, the main thing that defines Walz is that he said JD Vance was weird. Then came the VP head to head debate and we discovered that JD was very smart but otherwise perfectly normal while Walz himself was a genuine, gold-plated, goggle-eyed weirdo.
Deep State Reformer said...
"I don't know brother Walz didn't look particularly well-trained when he was doing that 'I'm going hunting' media op that Democrats often do, when he was fumbling around with that shotgun like he knew what he was doing."
And Coach Walz can run a mean pick pick six, too.
The Dems should remember to never forget that they should never be photographed trying to throw a ball or run, as that would expose them to derision, mockery and being laughed at in general.
Remember that time Walz tried to do that Democrat "I'm going hunting" schtick? This featured Walz fumbling around with a shotgun that he clearly didn't understand how to load or to use. Walz was trying to appeal to gun owners and hunters that Democrats regularly hate-on, albeit quite unsuccessfully. Dems don't mean it and they can't even plausibly act ("lie") like they mean it. It's all a scam and a con. Lying liars that lie.
I guess they feel like they need a counter to Trump buzzing the Daytona 500 with Air Force One and getting a huge cheer.
"Can't anybody here play this game?" -- Casey Stengel
It's a lot easier to appear normal when you are, you know, normal.
Politicians should be talking about the debt and manufacturing and energy and shipping and whether the Ukraine is really a stalemate. Let sports be sports.
I'm reminded of a lefty who tried to act superior with a disdainful comment about the Redskins sucking, they can't even beat the Eagles. Well, the Redskins dropped that name five years ago, and they've been the Commanders since 2022. Also later that season the Commanders would (1) make the playoffs with an impressive 12-5 record, and (2) play the Eagles in the NFC championship game. The Eagles, as most folks know, won the Super Bowl pretty handily over a damned good Kansas City team. Oh, and the Commanders were one of the three teams that actually beat the Eagles this past year.
If you're going to try to show you're "just a normal guy" it helps to know something about football if you're going to talk about football.
Big Mike said: "...and I had to wonder whether he was taught how to use a shotgun by Dick Cheney."
I'm not a fan, but at least Cheney knew how to load it and pull the trigger.
This might work if the politician is a true sports fan, but if he is not, he is setting himself up to suffer a humiliating exposure of his ignorance.
Putative Red Sox fan John Kerry was asked who his favorite player in the 2004 championship season was, and answered "Manny Ortez", a player who does not exist but might have been a delusional amalgam of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz in his addled brain.
That wasn't even the worst of it though. When he was asked to name his all-time favorite Sox player, he embarrassed himself further by naming Eddie Yost, who played for three other teams but never the Red Sox. (He did play in D.C., though, which was and will always be more of a hometown to the likes of John Kerry than any place as authentic as Beantown.)
Sports talk radio went full Kaepernick a few years ago and listeners tuned out by the bus load.
Not many sports journalists ever suited up and went out on the field. Those that weren't equipment managers and statisticians were jock-sniffing school newspaper reporters and yearbook photographers. They ache to be taken seriously by the rest of the journalistic establishment, much as restaurant critic Frank Bruni fancied himself a political commentator, and so they tend to be ostentatiously left-wing assholes.
High level pro athletes have extraordinary skills. Their skill sets are objectively measurable. High level politicians have skill sets that are not measurable. When they use their political perch to criticize actually talented people, it falls flat. We didn't elect these people to explain sports to us, except insofar as we want to have someone persuasively explain how genetic men don't have an unfair advantage over genetic women.
Ask the NBA how combining sports and politics worked out.
It went from must-see TV to a niche sport where even Turner Sports is publicly saying they made the right decision to leave it.
John Kerry. Lambert Field.
"John Kerry. Lambert Field."
I forgot about that!
Not many sports journalists ever suited up and went out on the field.
In my defense, I did sports 'journalism' way, way back in the day. Radio.
I did it because I loved the game(s). And the pay was crap.
But. I still have George Foreman's autograph on my Seahawks press pass.
The best team since the Founding Fathers recently took over Washington DC.
Ed Rendell pulled it off when he was Governor of PA. He was a true sports fan, especially the Eagles. Most of his appearances on WIP were about the Birds and any politics were kept to mostly innocuous, bipartisan stuff.
Ya can't fake it.
The democrat party continues to serve up turds that they have tried to polish to a high sheen. At some point, even the dullest democrat voter may come to see this. But they will still vote for the "D" candidate. You may come to your own conclusions as to their reasons for doing so.
Show me a governor who's up on sports and I'll show you a governor who isn't doing his job.
"rehajm said...
Oh, my! (none of them have any idea what I’m saying)"
Dick Enberg does.
"Hassayamper said...
This might work if the politician is a true sports fan, but if he is not, he is setting himself up to suffer a humiliating exposure of his ignorance.
Putative Red Sox fan John Kerry was asked who his favorite player in the 2004 championship season was, and answered "Manny Ortez", a player who does not exist but might have been a delusional amalgam of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz in his addled brain.
That wasn't even the worst of it though. When he was asked to name his all-time favorite Sox player, he embarrassed himself further by naming Eddie Yost, who played for three other teams but never the Red Sox. (He did play in D.C., though, which was and will always be more of a hometown to the likes of John Kerry than any place as authentic as Beantown.)"
Obama claimed to be a die hard Chicago White Sox fan. When asked who was his favorite White Sox, after some hemming and hawing he answered "all of them."
@Bob Boyd, the main thing that defines Walz is that he said JD Vance was weird. Then came the VP head to head debate and we discovered that JD was very smart but otherwise perfectly normal while Walz himself was a genuine, gold-plated, goggle-eyed weirdo.
I recall that the entire MSM commentariat simultaneously began calling all Republicans "weird." It lasted a week. The sports thing is the next Acme box delivered to Wile E.
George W Bush helped arrange a syndicate to purchase controlling interest in the Texas Rangers. He bought a small stake in the team and convinced the investor group to make him managing general partner. He played baseball in college and so did his dad.
Obama's Cominsky Park.
That Hunter Thompson interview with Nixon in the limo proved that Nixon was indeed a genuine football fan.
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