(U-WIRE) -If you paid attention to the last presidential election, it was hard not to notice the celebrity endorsements for each candidate that punctuated rallies and various movie-awards shows. The list of Hollywood Democrats is voluminous, while Republicans from that industry, though their population is slowly increasing (or at least the closet-dwellers are becoming less timid), are still an endangered species.
In contrast, the majority of Bush's celebrity endorsers were athletes: John Elway, Lynn Swann, Karl Malone and Curt Schilling. Republicans have cornered the market in athletes as elected officials, too: Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, former Reps. J.C. Watts and Steve Largent, and Nebraska's human incarnation of the Almighty, Rep. Tom Osbourne (for good measure, Iowa's athletics deity, Dan Gable, has assisted with Republican campaigns).
What gives? If our country is virtually split down the red-blue line, why is it that so many athletes gravitate toward the Republican camp, while the entertainment figures in Los Angeles and New York are overwhelmingly liberal? At first blush, the disparities between the two factions appear scant. Certainly the members of both camps breathe in rarefied air: Both demographics are compensated handsomely for their crafts; athletes and actors alike are revered as gods by adoring fans. But the secret to the party-line divide lies not in their fame, nor in their pocketbook, but in the very nature of their respective businesses.
I submit that the essence underlying this curious phenomenon is the distinctly different arenas in which athletes ply their trade and actors theirs. The Hollywood set is covered by a press that remains, Michael Jackson notwithstanding, unanimously obsequious. Publicists control the questions their clients field, and queries based in criticism are, more likely than not, jettisoned from the interview. Contrast this with a football star facing a crowd of sportswriters after a humiliating defeat, where he must answer directly as to his own inadequacies and that of his team. While much of Hollywood's writing is effusive with praise, sports writing is generally saturated with critical appraisals of performance --after every game there is always a loser whose inadequacies will be dissected. This is to say nothing of more personal issues. Substance abuse, which can stain an athlete's legacy (Darryl Strawberry's and Lawrence Taylor's, for example), is greeted with yawns when the subject is an actor.
It is also indisputable that the best athletes in the world will inevitably rise to the top of the sports pyramid. There isn't anyone shooting afternoon hoops at the Field House, for example, who could step onto an NBA court and hold his ground. Similarly, a stroll through Finkbine on Saturdays won't turn up anyone who can hit golf balls with Tiger Woods. A successful actor, on the other hand, is to a large degree a product of his looks and good fortune, rather than raw talent and honed skill. Does anyone doubt that a stroll through the university acting department would net an individual with similar aptitudes to most of the young stars and starlets (think of the entire cast of American Pie and That '70s Show) gracing US Weekly? While actors can parlay marginal ability into a career spanning years, an athlete is reminded quickly, and very publicly, of any devolution of his game.
The thread that ties this all together is the direct competition that illuminates every sporting event. Athletes, with their failures witnessed live by millions, harbor less illusions about their unique personal insight than their brethren in Hollywood; that is, they are less inclined to believe that they see what others around them are unable to intuit. The Iraq war is a fine example of this dichotomy: Actors and musicians lined up against the war, professing war is never the answer and other cliched banalities, although nearly three-fourths of the American population at the time felt military action was indeed the answer. Professional athletes, on the other hand, earn their acclaim by dominating their competitors, and as such, would be more inclined to understand that conflict between nations does exist --and that inevitably, resolution between nations must sometimes be attained through force.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule: The sporting world has Bill Walton and Hollywood has Arnold Schwarzenegger ... or used to, anyway. But by and large, there does exist a political difference between these two realms that otherwise share so much in common.
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