Calinger: Clinton-Sanders similar to Brady-Manning
By J.W. CALINGER
ISL Correspondent
For those who follow politics, the 2016 Democratic primary reminds me so much of the most intense football rivalry of the last 16 years, Brady vs. Manning, it’s scary.
Bernie Sanders is Peyton Manning. He’s popular, has a sense of humor, is extremely likable, and most importantly to his fans, he’s nice. He talks about how the fans deserve more for what they do and how much they pay, and people have fallen in love with him, politically speaking. Even people who usually don’t give a hoot about the whole process have noticed him and, really, he’s made more casual fans or non-fans excited about what he does for a living, in one year, than most of his colleagues make in a career. He’s straightforward, honest about what he says, and he sticks to his principles. He’s a True Believer, and that’s powerful.
Hillary Clinton is Tom Brady. During decades of playing second fiddle to someone who probably isn’t as smart as she is, she’s learned to study the playbook, make connections, and figure out what she would do when she came off the bench, and when she did, she threw strikes and make sure she wasn’t going to get sacked. Eight years ago, she lost the conference championship – but then, that defeat showed the pragmatism she had that is serving her so well today. She lost to some guy, a senator from Chicago, who was more charismatic and unifying than she, and she immediately became his cheerleader in the Super Bowl – and for her trouble, she got a cushy position in his Cabinet for a while.
Brady learned, early on, that even when many people believed he was the front-runner, he needed to approach the game as if the New England Patriots were going to be spanked unless they pulled out all the stops. This turned out to be very wise. Manning grew and developed as a quarterback, and as time went on, he had enough talent around him, especially when Tony Dungy whipped the Indianapolis Colts defense into shape, that despite his history against Brady, he might just win that next game – which, to be fair, he did, right before Super Bowl XLI. Cut to 2016, when Sanders was building a following and plenty of momentum. Clinton learned to act as though she was going to be spanked in the primaries unless she got to work.
There are some times when being too terribly superior in one metric actually is a disadvantage. If the Patriots had played conventional football all the times Brady faced not only the Colts, but Kurt Warner’s St. Louis Rams, for instance, they almost certainly would have lost. But, Brady and Bill Belichick learned the rules, and they tweaked their offense with unconventional practices and the invoking of obscure rules involving unbalanced lines, running backs playing right tackle, split wide, and putting linebackers in at tight end on the goal line.
In the same way, if Clinton had faced Sanders in a contest in which votes were all that mattered, Sanders may well have prevailed this year. But, each state has a rule book for how they send delegates to the national convention. In football, an offense can gain more yards than their opponents, and lose. This year, there were a few times Sanders outgained Clinton in votes, but because of rules involving the selection of delegates, Clinton ended up either on top or so close behind Sanders that it wasn’t much of a trick to catch up in the next state to hold a vote.
We can argue that Brady and Clinton played a little dirty. There’s the bit about deflated footballs, espionage, and getting away with downfield chucking for the Patriots, and with Clinton, there were a few possible hijinks in the New York primary, among other things. For the most part, though, they just learned the rulebook and followed it precisely. Meanwhile, fans who usually didn’t watch football or follow politics were looking at results and yelling at the TV, “They can’t do that! Where’s the flag?”
After all those conference championships Brady won, Colts fans had the very poignant choice of cheering for the team that beat them in the Super Bowl, or going to the other conference. One can say that at least the quarterbacks who faced Brady in the Super Bowl were somewhat likeable. Sanders fans have an even tougher choice, now that it looks as though Clinton has all but won her conference championship – they can vote for the candidate who beat their prophet, or they can vote for the Republican conference champion, who probably will end up being a man who is everything their idol isn’t.
Whether we follow football or politics, we eventually learn that things aren’t as straightforward as they seem, and we learn that whatever our idea of who would win if karma chose the winner, there are other factors in play. Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is that the relatively stern, sour, pragmatic, cold rule-bender might actually be the most qualified person to be the Super Bowl champion, or to be the President of the United States.
