The Wall Street Journal-20080201-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Taste- Much Talk About the Action

Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080201

WEEKEND JOURNAL; Taste: Much Talk About the Action

Full Text (1009  words)

Americans have a weakness for excess. Too much of a good thing is not enough. We build cabins in the country with more square footage than most medieval castles, drive alone to work in SUVs large enough to carry a baseball team and watch "Law & Order" reruns in 24-hour marathons. "You wanna supersize that?" Sure, why not.

So the roughly two-day period from this Sunday afternoon until late Tuesday night will give the country an opportunity to overindulge in two of its abiding passions -- football and politics. First the Super Bowl and then, before you've had a chance to recover from an avocado overdose, the Super Tuesday returns will start coming in from 24 states holding primaries or caucuses. Time to see what Tim Russert, Juan Williams, Candy Crowley and 50 or 60 other experts can divine from the early returns.

For two days, there will be too much of everything -- not least of "experts." No zone blitz and no Kennedy endorsement will go unanalyzed. We will all learn more than we ever wanted to know -- or even thought it possible to know -- about Tom Brady's ankle and John McCain's age. (Is "old" the new "young"? Tune in and find out what our panel of experts thinks.) Many of the experts will venture predictions, some of which will even be correct, thus proving that a blind pig can occasionally find an acorn.

Sitting in front of the television during this 48-hour extravaganza, a viewer might find himself wondering just what it takes to get employment as an "expert." Clearly, it is a growth industry. The main qualification seems to be an instinct for finding any potential silence and filling it with words. So many words that one wonders how Troy Aikman and Chris Matthews manage to breathe.

Of course, if they talked only about the actual events -- the game and the elections -- the experts could never fill all that airtime. There is only so much you can say about the "Tampa Two." Or the "Nascar vote." After a while, even the bleariest, most stupefied viewer will get it.

Safeties deep and fly to the ball. Check.

These guys don't like Hillary because she reminds them of their fourth-grade teacher. Check.

Fortunately for the experts, there are many, many "story lines" (plain old "stories" don't interest them) weaving through the worlds of football and presidential politics. Take crying, for instance.

We recently got a lot of expert analysis about how Hillary Clinton cried before the primary in New Hampshire and Terrell Owens cried after his team, the Dallas Cowboys, lost a game and a chance to play in the Super Bowl. According to the experts, Mrs. Clinton added to her stature -- and vote -- by crying. Mr. Owens ("T.O." to the aficionados), by contrast, didn't fare so well in the experts' esteem. But then, he is a man playing football and . . . well, draw your own conclusions. Actually, whatever the judgment of the experts, it doesn't matter any longer. The crying stuff happened days ago, and the talk wasn't about conclusions. It was about filling silences.

During Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, the experts will be scanning the horizon and scouring the countryside looking for story lines that they can then analyze to death. Anything to avoid those silences.

The principal personalities will be good for many hours of pointless analysis. In the case of the football game, there are a few colorful characters. Randy Moss of the New England Patriots is one of the sport's legendary bad boys. The "story line" on Mr. Moss is that he has gone straight since the Patriots got him from the Oakland Raiders in a trade. Perhaps. It is true that Mr. Moss has had a wonderful season and been a good team-player. But, then, he was recently slapped with a restraining order, so who knows? Certainly not the experts, though that won't stop them from providing expert analysis.

They can talk about Bill Belichick, too. He is the famously taciturn head coach of the Patriots. Mr. Belichick and Hillary Clinton have a lot in common. In fact, the experts could probably cross over comfortably from one sport to the other when talking about these two. They are both highly intelligent and exceptionally humorless. Both are ferociously driven to win and would rather spend time alone with a briefing book than with other people. The word "convivial" does not come to mind.

"Unscrupulous," however, does. Mrs. Clinton, is cheating on her pledge not to campaign for delegates from Florida and Michigan. Mr. Belichick got slapped with a half-million-dollar fine early this season for electronically spying on rival teams, a violation of National Football League rules. For weeks afterward, Mr. Belichick would respond to press questions about the episode with a surly shrug and some mumbled words about how it was "time to move on." The phrase is not original with him.

By the end of the two-day festival, the experts will have talked themselves to exhaustion -- ours if not theirs. The nation will have eaten so many corn chips that, had the raw material been used to make ethanol, we could have stopped worrying about global warming and the price of oil for a few days. Thousands of people will have called in sick (hungover, that is) for work on Monday morning. Records will have been set for television ratings -- for the football game, anyway, and, who knows, maybe for cable news as well.

And oddly, nothing will really be settled. Mr. Belichik and his Patriots will most likely take the Lombardi trophy as champions of the NFL, but will it still count if they cheated to get to the big game in the first place? The political winners will, of course, have more primaries and the general election to go. And both political parties may soon begin to second-guess their choices. In other words, the experts won't be out of a job.

---

Mr. Norman edits the Web site vermonttiger.com.