The people have spoken!
Americans want our leaders to focus their attention on the really important things facing our nation. Things like bowling.
Last week, Barack Obama displayed his gutter-dusting abilities while bowling at a campaign stop in Altoona, Penn. As a crowd of appreciative onlookers gazed upon the junior senator from Illinois in awe, he flung gutterball after gutterball.
Obama finished with a score of 37 points which, ironically, is the same number as the current president’s combined SAT scores.
After hearing of Obama’s bowling skills, Hillary Clinton challenged him to a winner-take-all bowl off.
The winner, she said, would get the Democratic nomination for president.
Finally, I thought, a politician who offers common-sense solutions.
This whole divisive battle over who gets the nomination, the confusion over caucuses versus primaries, delegates versus superdelegates, could all be avoided by seeing who is best at picking up a
7-10 Mule Ear split or jumping out in front with a five-bagger.
Hillary — I’m on a first-name basis with her now, by the way — told the press she’s been a bigtime bowler since back in the day, and went absolutely Bosnian when recalling some of the alley fights she’d been in, despite some sniping from reporters in the crowd.
“I remember one time I had to challenge the great Walter Ray Williams Jr.,” she recalled.
“Old Deadeye is more a tweener than a cranker,” Hillary continued, speaking in the secret language of bowlers, “and I think my style as a ball-dropping crow hopper caught him a little off guard.”
“It was close. I picked up a baby split in the fifth and came out throwing rocks in the seventh and eighth. It was all cheesy cakes for both of us on the way home, but he edged past me with a spare when I was left with granny’s teeth in the tenth.”
The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of a bowling commander in chief.
We deserve a president who can stand on one leg while waving the other in the air, while simultaneously pushing an imaginary wall with both hands from left to right as her ball drifts over far enough to knock down the last standing pin.
We need a president who supports making Body English the official language of the National Bowling Association.
We need a president who can think on his feet, and think on his feet while walking quickly and swinging a 16-pound ball.
We need a president who respects the foul line, and won’t just laugh and shrug when he steps over it.
We need a president who owns a pair of bowling shoes. We deserve a president with such foresight; sometimes the rental counter runs out of the right size, and bowling in your socks can be dangerous.
We need a president smart enough to add up the score when you get a strike, a spare, then another strike, then eight pins, and then another strike. Those kind of math skills will serve our country well as our economy is challenged by a globally competitive world. We also need a president who can continue to keep accurate score after the fourth or fifth beer frame, when the pursuit of mathematics loses its appeal to others who are bowling with us.
We deserve a president who would wear a retro bowling shirt with his name stitched on the pocket, instead of a president with “The Decider” embroidered on the front of his military flight suit.
We don’t need a president, however, who uses one of those
special “bowling gloves,” which are almost as goofy as those leather “driving gloves” that some people wear when they want to appear cool. Those are just plain wrong on so many levels.
We also don’t need a president who uses a rosin bag while bowling. Our next president should keep it real and use the hand fan on the ball-return machine, like the rest of us.
Next issue: “That’s not my job” and other useful phrases.
