Thursday, January 12, 2012

Buck And A Quarter Back

I suppose the confluence of sports hero worship and Village disappointment with the participants in the 2012 presidential race breeding Matthew Dowd's latest piece was inevitable.

Tebow is the kind of leader for his football team that our country needs at this crucial moment in history.  Yes, the Denver Broncos streak will probably end, and the odds are a team like the Green Bay Packers will win the Super Bowl.  But no matter the outcome, Tebow has shown what faith, and confidence and humility can do for a team of limited skills that was losing consistently before. This is exactly what President Franklin Roosevelt and President Reagan understood about leadership.

This economy, and our country, do not need more programs out of Washington, D.C., or legislation from Congress, or tax cuts for the wealthy, or more spending on government stimulus.  What citizens and businesses need is a leader who can raise us all up to a level we didn’t know we had in us, give us confidence in ourselves, give us a common goal to work toward, and make us believe in and have faith in ourselves again.

It seems this is a leadership lesson we keep having to learn over and over again through our country’s history.  It is so easy to forget how successes were achieved along the way by Kennedy-style exhortations such as “we are going to the moon.” It is so easy to default into failing Washington-style, us-against-them, to try and get short-term political success.

But maybe a quarterback who seems as much boy as man can show us all, including the candidates for president, how to win and how to get our country back on track.  And how to have a little fun along the way.  Now that is a leader I would enthusiastically go in the huddle with.

It's frightening to see that with all the actual problems facing the United States and the world right now, growing poverty and income inequality, the assault on civil liberties and civil rights, climate change threatening tens of millions as weather patterns become more unstable, limited resoiurces prompting growing military tension worldwide, and the specter of war looming over it all, it's nice to know that policy be damned, what the Village really wants is President Shiny Object who can score touchdowns in 11 seconds.

This may in fact be the most insipid and most saccharine dipstick of a "You know who oughtta run for President?" piece I've ever read.  It's actually kind of insulting thinking that a quarterback of an 8-8 team that stumbled into the playoffs just because everyone else in the division is horrific is what America needs right now at the helm.  A nice guy who means well and takes a knee to pray once in a while?  That's leadership?

Look, Tebow's a quarterback.  That's great for him.  I certainly can't play NFL ball.  But comparing the skillsets is just ludicrous.  Utterly.  I bet Dowd would love to cover a Tebow run for the Oval Office, rather than reporting on the people we actually do have trying for the position.  That's much more important.

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