Political Junkies and Sport Fans

Politics and sports, especially team sports, have a lot in common. Both involve competition. Both are covered by journalists who love the activity but cannot, or will not, play the game. Both involve teams, and both are closely followed by people who believe that they know more than the professionals.

Most bloggers, even ones who follow politics closely, have never run for office and/or managed a campaign. They don't have the practical experience of people who have done both. This makes them very similar to sports fans. How often have you heard a friend who is a sports fanatic tell you how stupid a coach is, or a team's general manager, or a player, or how bad their decisions were or are?

The same is true, of course, among political junkies. Most of the bloggers who follow politics on the Internet are passionate about their opinions. They want their side to win. As mentioned above, though, they don't have the practical experience of actually doing politics as opposed to talking about politics.

This was brought to mind by this post by Arianna Huffington. Here's a woman who has never managed a political campaign, has only run for office one time herself, and was soundly beaten. She is presuming to give advice to Barack Obama whose team just beat the Clintons and who has both won and lost political campaigns. Which one would you trust when it comes to knowing how to get elected?

Online Presidential Debates Being Scheduled

Huffington Post and Yahoo are teaming up to provide online presidential debates this fall. There will be two debates, one for Democrats and one for Republicans. The debates will be hosted by Charlie Rose, a talk show host whose talk show appears on PBS. You can read more about the debates here.

Huffington Post Claims Sherrod Brown's Internet Director Created Hillary 1984 You Tube Ad

If you click on the link in this entry's title you can read a blog post by Arianna Huffington in which she claims that Philip de Vellis, who she describes as follows: "the Internet communications director for Sherrod Brown's 2006 Senate campaign, and who now works at Blue State Digital, a company created by members of Howard Dean's Internet Team." Now we are not big fans of Arianna Huffington, although we read her blog. She is a former right-wing conservative who supposedly had this "road to Damascus" experience and has now become this left-wing blogger. Color us skeptical, but she has run columns from both Sherrod Brown and his wife Connie Schultz. She would seemingly have good contacts with the Brown campaign people. So we present this information for what it is worth.

UPDATE: One of our readers pointed out that Philip de Vellis resigned yesterday from Blue State Digital and has confirmed that he was the creator of the video.