The Political Split in the Sports World

I am fascinated by the ways politics play out in the sporting world. Athletes are by and large conservatives, often of the worst kind. This tends to transcend race. I think 1/2 the nation's black Republicans are current or former professional athletes. Many hard-core sports fans are also quite conservative, though this is not so pronounced as among the athletes.

But most sports journalists tend to be pretty liberal (or at least centrists) and over the past couple of years, they have been more open about their political stands. Perhaps widespread disgust over Bush and the war created this new climate. But I have to wonder what athletes and fans think when they read bits like this ESPN piece by Gregg Easterbrook.

The latest politico to join these ranks is former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who now "serves as chairman of The Ashcroft Group." No doubt Ashcroft chose himself as chairman after an exhaustive search process! Note that Ashcroft declares of himself that he "serves" as chairman, as if The Ashcroft Group were a noble philanthropy, rather than a collection of hired guns angling to convert insider access into dollar signs: The New York Times recently reported that federal prosecutors just steered to The Ashcroft Group a no-bid contract worth between $28 million and $52 million. What noble public service! Ashcroft's lobbying clients are reported to include ChoicePoint, the scandal-plagued data-marketing company.

That Ashcroft, a leading conservative when he was in the Senate, has hung out a lobbying shingle a few blocks from the White House is another example of the phenomenon of conservatives denouncing Washington just enough to get their feet in the door, then cashing in. When he campaigned for the Senate, Ashcroft regularly called Washington, D.C., the root of the nation's problems. Now that he's a moneyed capital insider himself, suddenly Ashcroft has stopped denouncing Washington. Mark Andrews, John Breaux, Conrad Burns, John Johnston and Malcolm Wallop are among other former U.S. senators who spent their political careers wagging their fingers about the evils of Washington, and are now registered Washington lobbyists, feeding at the very trough they once denounced.

Of course, Easterbrook is far from the average sports journalist, given his long career in political journalism, particularly at The New Republic. That doesn't really undermine my point though. First, most readers on ESPN probably don't know this. Also, you see it all over the place--from Keith Olbermann to Peter Gammons to Bill Simmons to Stewart Mandel to Peter King. Take King for instance. He's hardy a flaming liberal. He's a pretty centrist guy and also really patriotic. But he's also said some really nice things about Obama and has occasionally criticized stupid Bush policies in his columns over the past few years. Not hard-core criticism, but just little notes.

I imagine a lot of their readers must get red with anger when they read this stuff. I also wonder if the resurgence in sports columnists talking favorably about liberal policies reflects changes in one of the nation's bases of conservatism, the sports world.