An Analogy

I’m a football fan.  Specifically, I’m a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Why? Its not as if I have a well-formed football philosophy, and the Steelers are the best-possible match to it. I don’t really know or care much about zone or man defense, spread offense or smash-mouth. My family is from Pittsburgh, and we’ve all been Steelers fans basically forever. Nothing more to it than that.

Some years ago, the Cincinnati Bengals had a defensive lineman with the unlikely name of Kimo von Oelhoffen. I really, really disliked this guy–this was honestly mostly because he gave the Steelers hell, but that’s not what I told myself. I said it was because he was a thug, a dirty player–the kind of person who should be in jail, not the NFL. 

Then one day, a funny thing happened. Kimo von Oelhoffen’s contract with the Bengals expired, and he signed on with the Steelers… and wonder of wonders, he was no longer a dirty player. Those cheap shots he used to take? Now they were just hard, aggressive play. He’d changed more than the color of his jersey. Now that he was in the Steelers’ locker room, he’d learned to play the Steelers’ way.

Of course, Kimo von Oelhoffen had’t actually changed in the least. In fact, he wound up tearing the Bengal’s star quarterback’s ACL in a playoff game by hitting him low in a way that would have had me jumping up and down and screaming if Carson Palmer had been a Steeler. The only real difference between then and now was that now he was playing for my team. At the end of the day, I didn’t have any real football principles. I just loved that rush you get from seeing your team win.

If this is the approach that you take to politics, please reconsider whether you really ought to be voting.