In A Class All His Own
April 9th, 2010 by 
Kevin
On Monday, President Obama threw out the opening pitch for the Phillies-Nationals baseball game, nothing exciting there. By all accounts, his pitch sucked by magnitudes not yet invented…but at least he wasn\’t wearing \”Mom jeans\”. Ok fine, I really don\’t care about the athletic abilities or fashion sense of my candidate. In fact I really don\’t care if he knows what a baseball is, it\’s irrelevant to his job.
What DOES concern me escaped my notice until just yesterday. After his pitch, he went up to chat with the announcers. One of them quizzed him on his favorite White Sox player. Instead of answering the question, he gave this rambling answer.
You know, uh…I thought that, uh, you know, that the truth is, a lot of the Cubs I like too. Uh, I did not become a Sox fan until I moved to Chicago. Because I, ah, you know, I was growing up, uh, in Hawaii, so I ended up actually being an Oakland A\’s fan. But when I moved to Chicago, I was living close to what was then Cominsky(!) Park. And, went to a couple games, and just fell in love. And the nice thing about the Sox, is it\’s real blue-collar baseball. You know, we always tease about the Cubs. They, you know, they\’re up at Wrigley, sipping wine, playing those day games, they\’re having a good time.
Okay fine, you can\’t name a single Sox player, I don\’t care, again, it\’s not relevant to your job. You can\’t pronounce the name of their ball field properly, again, not part of your job, below your pay grade as it were.
But it does bother me that when you\’re backed into a corner on a question you can\’t answer, your first reaction is to start playing the class warfare card. For a chief executive of anything, that is a very disturbing gut reaction.
Email This Post
| 
Print This Post
Posted in The Messiah | 
2 Comments »
April 9th, 2010 at 8:09 am
Mr. Aragula at Whole Foods playing the class warfare card….it just doesn’t get any better than that.
Until November, I hope.
April 12th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Actually, before the comment you quoted, Pres. Obama referred to himself as a “Southside kid” and that was why he was a Sox fan. He left himself wide open for the follow-up question about his favorite player. And while I’ve heard Cubs fans disparaged in a lot of ways, effete wine-sippers is a new one for me.
Jeez, do you think when PBO was negotiating the new START treaty Medvedev might have asked him which missiles he really liked?
“Let me be clear, I always liked those pointy ones because they looked like blunts: good, working-class missiles, not like those Molotov-cocktail sipping Russian snobs.”