Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers throws a pass against the New York Jets during the first half of an NFL football game, on Dec. 23, 2018, in East Rutherford, N.J.The Associated Press
When the first statement you issue as a would-be politician is one denying that you believe the Sandy Hook school massacre was a false-flag operation, things are not headed in the right direction.
“I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events [at Sandy Hook] did not take place,” NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers wrote on X this week.
Now we know two new things about the possible candidate for U.S. vice-president – he draws his policy cues from TikTok, and that a grasp of written English is not his strong suit.
It was big news this week that Rodgers is a finalist to team up with the least compelling Kennedy, Robert Jr., in his no-hope bid for the U.S. presidency. The other guy on Kennedy’s list is former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura.
This infotainment aspect of U.S. politics isn’t new, but the current iteration does not have the same heft as, say, Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin vying to run New York City. At least those guys were in on the joke.
This is another one of those developments mainstream media pretend to hate when they could not possibly love more. If Aaron Rodgers becomes vice-president, The New York Times’ market cap will be bigger than Nvidia. CNN and MSNBC might have to start launching their own satellites.
This phony media outrage has a focus – Rodgers’s views. Let me assure you that they’re not going to fly in Brooklyn.
That said, nothing he’s on the record believing in is wildly out of step with the U.S. electorate. He’s pro-life (like 44 per cent of the population, per Gallup). He’s anti-COVID vaccine (only 28 per cent of U.S. adults have up-to-date shots, per Pew).
And that’s about it. Outside of a blanket hostility toward wokeness (whatever that means any more), Rodgers doesn’t have many public views. That worries some people.
Here’s what I’d be worried about – that Rodgers has never had a real job.
Plenty of politicians fit that profile, and they are always the worst ones. The fantasists and true believers; the most rigid and the ones who are unable to adapt.
Give me a John Bircher who has worked retail over some lefty dilettante who had a no-show position at his dad’s company every single day. Nothing is better training for high-level diplomacy than working an opening-to-close shift in the week before Christmas.
All Rodgers has done is play football. He started when he was in short pants and he’s still at it at 40.
Football is not a job. It’s an unusually intense hobby that, for a very few, pays well.
A job is something nobody thanks you for doing. It’s something you do to keep yourself and your family off the streets. It’s something you perform whether you feel like it or not. A job is an obligation.
Sports is not an obligation. It is an entitlement. Particularly, an entitlement of the West. We cannot conceive of a childhood in which everyone doesn’t grow up playing organized soccer, which only shows how terminally out of touch we are with our global neighbours.
If you don’t like your colleagues, then too bad. You can find a new job. If Aaron Rodgers doesn’t like his colleagues, he demands a raise and a trade.
I can accept that some pros hanging on to the fringes have experienced sports as a job, but Rodgers isn’t one of them.
Bottom line – never trust someone who doesn’t do their own laundry. If you have never lived near the edge, you cannot understand where the edge is or what it takes to stay on the right side of it.
I’ll give Rodgers one thing – he knows enough to know he can’t start at the very top.
A less scrutinized sports-political development this week involved NBA star Steph Curry. In a sit-down about his new children’s book, Curry was asked if he would run for U.S. president.
“Maybe,” Curry said.
As he said it, he nodded in that way that people do when they want you to know they are serious, but don’t take themselves seriously. It was a politician’s nod.
Later in the same interview he was asked about 2028.
“Too soon,” Curry said.
This is something he’s actually thought about.
Curry is in an even more out-of-touch position than Rodgers. His father played for years in the NBA, meaning he’s been on top since he was old enough to understand how hierarchies work.
The worst thing that’s ever happened to Curry was that he wasn’t recruited to play Division 1 in college. That story gets told and retold with a gravitas usually afforded tales of immigrants escaping across the border in war-torn wherever.
But because Curry has the right ideas, everyone gave this one a pass. Nobody laughed at him, which is the only sensible reaction to a guy who bounces a ball for money telling everyone that when he can’t do that any more, he would like to run the whole world.
The comeback to this is ‘Better than what they got now’, which is not a helpful position.
Maybe it never used to be that you worked your way up from the bottom, but most of us did at least believe it should work that way. Now everyone’s given up on any sort of quality control. They won’t drink whole milk because, you know, that will kill you, but they will tick a box for the guy with the nice smile.
That’s why I like popes. None of them starts out as a bishop. There is a long period of knife-fighting before they get the big hat. The guy you end up with may not be your favourite, but at least you know he’s had to dig his own graves.
American leaders no longer dig anything. As long as a majority of people recognize them from the scroll, they have the qualification they require. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of really committing to say whatever you think it is most people want to hear.
If things go completely sideways, then no worries. The Nixon types may never live failure down, but you won that big game back in aughtie-whatever-it-was. Nothing you screw up on the global stage is ever gonna come close to matching that sort of pressure.