It’s NCAA Basketball Tournament time and you know what that means; our hoops-mad president has filled out his brackets and is challenging us to beat his picks for the national championship.
“Think you got game?” That’s the question President Obama is posing to sports fans in a new, online interactive contest aimed at expanding his re-election campaign’s contact list and collecting some grassroots cash.
With the “Obama Bracket Challenge” on the campaign’s website, supporters can electronically make their picks for the 2012 NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments and see how they measure up against Obama.
The president has filled out a March Madness tournament bracket each of the past three years during an interview with ESPN’s Andy Katz. He’s expected to do so again this year, and his campaign will post his selections online.
To participate, users must provide their full name, email address and ZIP code. They’re also prompted to make a donation to the campaign after submitting their picks.
“We’ll publish a list of everyone who does better than the president here on BarackObama.com after the tournament is over,” the campaign says.
What a fabulous idea. Maybe we could expand the concept a little bit. Suppose the president were to put on his website his step-by-step plan to get the economy moving again. He could then challenge the rest of us to come up with something better.
We’d have to limit contestants to humans — no monkeys, ferrets, or Three-Toed Sloths could enter the contest. After all, we wouldn’t want to embarrass the president. And we’d have to set an age limit as well; no one under 5 can play. This, despite the fact that it is reasonably certain that a cross-eyed monkey and my three year old nephew could probably come up with something better than the president’s plans for the economy, judging by how things have worked out so far.
No matter. The ease with which Obama could be beaten at this game makes it problematic whether the White House would even try to promote it. Of course, Obama will probably do just as badly with his NCAA brackets as he has with the economy. Cold comfort, that. The difference is, Obama’s failure with the brackets only shows him to be ignorant about basketball. His ignorance and incompetence when it comes to the economy carries a little more of a penalty than simple embarrassment.
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