Barack Obama is in serious trouble just weeks before the Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Primary.
Barack Obama's amazing run at the White House appears to be in the gutter. Maybe next time he should just keep score.
Last week-end, in an attempt to fit in with the lunch pail, rank-and-file that are the Democratic voters of Pennsylvania, the front-running candidate from Illinois rolled a 37 in a seven-frame game of bowling in the town of Altoona.
Admittedly, to be Presidential you don't have to be an athlete. For example, despite an intense love of baseball, Richard Nixon, according to his former cabinet secretary and special assistant Alexander Butterfield, "was unathletic, so pitifully unathletic." Calvin Coolidge, in the words of historian Donald McCoy was known to be, "unathletic" and prone to "tantrums, the brunt of which his wife bore. Anything that was unexpected could lead him to prolonged moods of sulking and even to fits of yelling."
Okay, so Nixon threw like a girl, and the only exercise Coolidge ever got was from stomping his feet like Jennifer Beals under a big bucket of Pennsylvania steeltown water. None of this means Obama is destined to resign in disgrace or generate domestic policies that will lead America into another Great Depression. And as far as the tantrums, Michelle Obama looks like the type A personality in that family.
Even among the media, Obama isn't getting a pass for his performance in the back alley of down and dirty politics. Joe Scarborough, host of the MSNBC program Morning Joe called Obama's performance at the Pleasant Valley Rec Center, "dainty." He went on to say, "You get 150, your a man, or a good woman."
Enter Hillary Clinton. "I'll be ready to bowl on day one," the other candidate said at a press conference.
Sounds like she fits the Scarborough profile perfectly.
In Obama's favor, he is rolling with the punches he's received from rolling a 37 in his first line attempt at the game in thirty years.
"My economic plan is better than my bowling," Obama during the game. A few lanes over, a man shouted back, "It better be!"
Even the photo used for this article came from a blog within Barak Obama's own website.
And come on, everyone knows you can't bowl worth crap in rental shoes.
Of course, even in rental shoes, Bob Dole could have beaten Barack on this night... with his pen hand.
And If he wins the Presidency in November, he'll have until the end of March, 2009 to get ready
to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day.
Copyright © 2008 Bill Friday
