{"id":15079,"date":"2008-04-01T15:13:28","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T19:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15079.html"},"modified":"2008-04-01T15:13:28","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T19:13:28","slug":"when-obamas-bowling-score-takes-on-political-significance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/when-obamas-bowling-score-takes-on-political-significance\/","title":{"rendered":"When Obama’s bowling score takes on political significance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The six-week gap between the Mississippi and Pennsylvania primaries is a long slog for the political world, but it seems to have taken a painful toll on our poor media personalities. As Dayo Olopade noted<\/a> today, the gap has created “a ‘news’ vacuum that has essentially forced the national media into a sort of 1950s, pre-technological childhood, playing Sputnik with an old refrigerator carton.”<\/p>\n

In this case, the old refrigerator carton is Barack Obama’s inability to bowl well.<\/p>\n

Obama stopped by a bowling alley in Altoona, Pa., over the weekend, and bowled a few frames — for the first time in 30 years. The senator, who’s apparently far more comfortable on a basketball court, didn’t exactly take to the game, and apparently bowled a 37 (though it’s not quite clear how many frames that includes). The point of the campaign stop, of course, wasn’t to bowl well, but rather to help Obama establish a connection with the blue-collar community. The low score didn’t seem to bother locals, and the media in South-Central Pa. played up the appearance as a great success.<\/p>\n

And then there’s the national media. It’s hard to imagine MSNBC (which allegedly favors Obama), for example, spending five-and-a-half minutes on the subject of Obama’s score, and yet, that’s exactly what happened<\/a> yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

During the March 31 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s bowling performance — which Scarborough called “dainty” — at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Deriding Obama’s score, he said: “You know Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man.” Scarborough added, “You get 150, you’re a man, or a good woman,” to which Geist replied, “Out of my president, I want a 150, at least.”<\/p>\n

Later in the show, after NBC political analyst Harold Ford Jr. said that Obama’s bowling showed a “humble” and “human” side to him, Scarborough replied, “A very human side? A prissy side.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Watch the video<\/a>, if for no other reason than to appreciate Scarborough’s embarrassing obsession with the subject. He just couldn’t let it go, and held up the senator’s bowling score as evidence that Obama is short of a “real man.” To top things off, Scarborough added that Obama’s too smart: “I’ve got a feeling he didn’t go bowling in Cambridge that much. That’s a guy that’s been studying a lot of — reading a lot of books.”<\/p>\n

The point, we were led to believe, is that “reading a lot of books” is a bad thing.
\n
\nAnd lest anyone think Scarborough is uniquely inane as a media personality, there’s also Chris Matthews<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the March 31 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s bowling performance at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania, MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman asserted, “[I]f you can’t do something like that, you shouldn’t do it. He should have stuck to shooting hoops — which he’s very, very good at, by the way, and which translates racially, too, especially during the NCAA basketball tournament. Don’t do something you’ve never tried before in front of a national television audience, OK?” <\/p>\n

Addressing MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard, host Chris Matthews responded, “You know, Michelle — and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.” While showing the video of Obama’s bowling, Matthews asserted, “[I]t isn’t the most macho form there.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And people wonder why I’ve sworn off watching television news.<\/p>\n

Update<\/i>: Digg it!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The six-week gap between the Mississippi and Pennsylvania primaries is a long slog for the political world, but it seems to have taken a painful toll on our poor media personalities. As Dayo Olopade noted today, the gap has created “a ‘news’ vacuum that has essentially forced the national media into a sort of 1950s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}