This week has been all about the scoreboard. If you’re a certain kind of sports/politics geeklike, well, me — you’ve got your computer on split screen and wish you had more screens to divide.
On one side, you’re tracking the House whip count on health care — Pelosi scores Suzanne Kosmas! — as the Democrats push toward the magical 216 votes to pass reform.
And on the other, you’re rooting Xavier home because you’ve the got the Musketeers — yes, Musketeers! — going to the Sweet 16 in your office pool where, at last count, you were just slightly ahead of Ginger (the dog). I just hope Ginger had Kansas winning it all.
This is the inevitable place where C-SPAN and ESPN intersect. It was only a matter of time.
My friend Mark Heisler wrote a piece recently about a conversation we’d had long ago — when we were both sportswriters at the L.A. Times — about how sports and politics had become virtually interchangeable.
It wasn’t just Vince Lombardi’s famous dictum — which he may have never actually said — that winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.
It’s how we keep score on everything — and how scorekeeping is the only thing. That was probably always true in politics. It was just never so clearly true as it is now.
If politics are ugly now — and certainly there were a few beyond-nasty protesters outside the Capitol on Saturday — that’s not to say they haven’t been ugly before. Historians send you back to the 1800 presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Rival newspapers openly backed rival parties, libel was the national sport and, for those keeping score, reporters could be thrown in jail for criticizing the president.
But it was also a time when it took days before the latest political pamphlet was tacked up on a tree in the village square, which is a little different from flipping on the TV to find talking heads immediately, and oh-so-predictably, deconstructing the latest move from Washington.
This is how “deem and pass” — a deservedly obscure political device — becomes a rallying cry moments after Nancy Pelosi has first uttered the words. And how “deem” — which has been officially dumped — becomes a moral issue, even though both parties use it and roughly 99 percent of Americans couldn’t begin to tell you what it actually does.
There’s nothing new about talking points or about echo chambers. But, seriously, can you stand the idea of one more person saying health care is being rammed, jammed, ram- jammed down our throats? Is that an argument or Dick Vitale’s description of a slam dunk, baby?
The fight over health care reform is a serious fight about how to fix a system that leaves millions uninsured and the rest of us paying far too much. But the serious argument routinely loses out to the political argument — who’s ahead?
This is not a one-party issue. I know I’ve mentioned before how most liberals have almost nothing to say about the Obama surge in Afghanistan when they’d almost certainly be hammering George W. Bush if he had done the same thing.
Heisler, in comparing politics to sports, put it this way: “Sports writing was always like this. Every team is a folk movement with fans and media outlets devoted entirely to it, making pretend war with each other, creating super-human champions to worship and villains to revile.”
Now we have Fox vs. MSNBC, and websites for all possible gradations of left and right. And, if you were looking for a rooting interest, Rush Limbaugh got there first in saying he was rooting for Obama to fail. As Obama’s ratings fell — although, you may have noted, they’ve evened out recently — it was seen as a victory. But if health care passes, Obama wins. And if Americans come to like the law — and they probably will — how does that figure in with Obama forcing socialism on America? Do the May Day parades get canceled?
Republicans, all voting against health care, were merrily predicting that if the bill passes, Democrats would lose the majority come November. That’s one way to bet. There’s another. Granny doesn’t die, the pre-existing condition ugliness goes away, Obama doesn’t tell you which doctor you can see. And November is a toss-up.
But there’s something larger at stake. If health care reform passes, it means it’s still possible to get something important done in Washington.
And so, Obama went to speak to the House Democratic caucus Saturday in a final bid to rally votes. He asked Democrats to remember why they had first run for office, how they had been moved to do some actual good, how this was a chance to be on the right side of history.
And as Obama spoke, I couldn’t help thinking that the only place you get could away with calling on politicians to vote their conscience — without being laughed at, anyway — was before a group of politicians.
But, hey, it’ll probably work. And sometime today, we’ll be counting along with the House — on three separate votes — as they try to get the 216 votes needed to send the bill back to the Senate. I just hope they don’t do it during the Xavier game.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
