Primary Update

With the NFL draft starting any minute now, it made me wonder why we don't examine our elected officials the same way we examine college football prospects? We tend to look at them through their ability to win elections (a reasonable metric, though not terribly insightful into the kind of person they are) and the media-driven partisan blather of our choosing (not a metric at all, indeed nothing but a distortion of reality).

For the next POTUS the first order of business will be (presumably) a Supreme Court nomination. We've been watching these candidates for almost a year now and what have we learned about their judicial philosophies? Virtually nothing. The candidates themselves are ciphers, we are free to impose our own beliefs onto them because the most skillful candidates actually do and say as little as possible. And we spend so little time as citizens (or as consumers of political rhetoric) considering the depths of the judicial system (the current judges, the current judicial trends, the current prosecutorial fads and fashions, etc), that even if the candidates did discuss this stuff it would be meaningless to us. That's unfortunate. The candidates have no interest in informing the public how how these decisions get made. Nor does the media, who just wants a show (and when it comes to politics, the dumber the show the better).

How will each of these candidates relate to Congress? How will each of these candidates relate to other leaders around the world? How will these candidates relate to previous administrations?

With football players the numbers aren't perfectly comparable: the ACC and the SEC and Div III are not the same thing. Good numbers don't necessarily mean a player will succeed at the next level, unimpressive numbers don't mean he'll fail. There's still a great deal of subjectivity involved but there are a helluva lot more useful metrics to analyze. Since the candidates just give us hard to pin down abstractions, we rely on projections of vote counts and exit polls to give us something concrete, some analyzable. But that's like looking at the attendance of the game rather than the score. Indeed, the whole election process is like watching the post-game press conference instead of the game itself.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this but I can't help thinking in this election season that USA should trade the #1 pick this year. There's no Greg Popovich out there wanting to lead us, no Steve Kerr that'll fight through back surgery to be our Coach of the Year. Maybe we'd be better off bolstering the State Department and the Pentagon and just going with a Byron Scott-type in the White House for the next few years. Who are the good free agents out there? Think Dwight Howard would make a good Supreme Court Justice?