Bill Clinton’s Favorite Ad Is An ESPN Commerical; Too Bad He Thoroughly Misinterprets It

In an outtake to an extended interview with the New York Times, former President Bill Clinton expresses admiration for an ESPN commercial that deals with baseball statistics.

He said it was a metaphor for policy discussions in the United States. If Americans cared about politics and policy as much as they did about sports, he said, they would be more focused on hard facts. This, he said, would help Democrats (Republicans would disagree).“What we have to do as a country is make this more like football,” he said. “If this were important to us like football, our side would be doing very well this election.”

Of course, Clinton also misses the point of the ad, which you can see after the jump, and conflates the roles of sports and politics in American society. But, hey, it’s “fabulous” and ESPN can brag about that!

To his credit, Clinton seems to know this ad isn’t about caring about hard facts; it’s about how being a nerd is only cool when it’s applied to something that is cool. (The truly uncool people in that ad are as stereotypically nerdy as ever, and they’re not the sympathetic figures. Also, the true cool kids are still using WHIP.) ESPN saying baseball statistics are becoming cool passes the smell test, I guess, but it’s telling that Clinton told the Times of a need to make politics, or policy discussions, more like football. Football, the real king of American sports and the one that’s been most resistant to statistical analysis, the one consumed with the most shallow criticism, the one that relies on all sorts of “traditions” that are hackneyed ideas of what a coach or a man or a running back should be and tends to forget that women exist for reasons other than pom-pom shaking.

Moreover, Clinton’s idea that politics needs to be more like football is a bad one. Football is one of many, many escapes from politics and the day-to-day grind that is life in America in 2010, and Americans tend to resist attempts to make their escapes more like their day-to-day. Redirecting the passion won’t work, either: how are politicians and thinkers supposed to make Cowboys or Phillies or Lakers fans worry about health care like they do Tony Romo or Chase Utley or Kobe Bryant? Health care can’t dunk.

Maybe it’s a good thing, though, that this will inevitably fail. If Americans cared about politics like they care about sports, wouldn’t we have analogous situations to maple bats shattering in baseball, publicly-financed stadiums cheating taxpayers, and a concussion epidemic? I don’t need more of football’s problems in American politics. None of us does.