Would Barkley have been a slam dunk in politics?
OPINION - Had Barkley, by no means an angel, chosen to stay the course and run for office, the scrutiny would have been magnified like nothing he had ever experienced...
Now that Charles Barkley no longer has the political aspirations to govern the great state of Alabama, looking at the political landscape over the last few years I honestly can’t blame the “Round Mound of Rebound” for believing that he was cut out for the job. Barkley no doubt noted how easily disgraced former South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford hid behind his Aesopian fable of hiking the Appalachian Trail, while in reality he was using taxpayer money to fund an affair in Argentina.
He’s obviously been paying attention as Sarah Palin lines her pockets while doing little more than updating her Facebook page, working for Fox News and galvanizing the hopes of Tea Partiers whom she has duped into believing that she is more interested in becoming their political savior than making millions.
And before you attempt to call me a bleeding heart liberal just looking to take shots at Republicans, I want to make sure not to omit Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York who spent as much time patronizing prostitutes in Washington — and has since been hired to talk about everything but this on CNN —- as he has did working for the people of the Empire State.
Barkley, for those of you who don’t know him, is a political animal and a man with a good heart. When he played in the NBA, especially toward the latter part of his Hall-of-Fame career, he talked politics with reporters almost as much as he discussed basketball, especially when reporters went ‘off the record.’
A native of Leeds, Ala., Barkley, now an NBA star analyst on TNT, spoke proudly for many years of his Republican affiliation, and in 1998 he started to speak of running for Alabama’s governorship. He leant more credence to this in 2006 when Barkley — who has since declared himself an Independent — told those attending a meeting of the Southern Regional Conference of the National School Boards Association in Destin, Fla., that his political flame had not been extinguished.
“I’m serious,” said Barkley. “I’ve got to get people to realize that the government is full of it. Republicans and Democrats want to argue over stuff that’s not important, like gay marriage or the war in Iraq or illegal immigration…. When I run — if I run — we’re going to talk about real issues like improving our schools, cleaning up our neighborhoods of drugs and crime and making Alabama a better place for all people.”
Eventually Barkley declared himself to be a Democrat, saying “I was a Republican until they lost their minds.” In 2008 he endorsed Barack Obama and again reiterated his intention to run for Governor of Alabama.
“They don’t let many black people in the governor’s mansion in Alabama, unless they are cleaning,” Barkley once said famously.
I never thought that Barkley’s run for the governorship would come to pass, nor do I believe that Alabama was or is ready to name an African-American its top public servant. There have been only three states with African-American governors and somehow I don’t see Alabama as the front-runner to become the next.
Barkley’s aspirations were understandable, no doubt because as an athlete he was exposed to the perverse relationship that exists between African-Americans and sports in this country. Where else but in sports can a black man cause thousands of white Americans in the heart of Dixie — in some cases more than 80,000 — to rise as one and shower him in adulation?
Had Barkley, by no means an angel, chosen to stay the course and run for office, the scrutiny would have been magnified like nothing he had ever experienced during his 16 years in the NBA. Never again would he be absolved of the acts of stupidity that have dotted his past and been filed under “That’s just Charles being Charles.”
When he was arrested for drunk driving in Arizona on New Year’s Eve 2008 andtold the arresting officer that he was just “gonna drive around the corner and get a b**w job” — while nowhere near the mistake that former Senator Edward Kennedy made at Chappaquiddick — I thought about some of his other transgressions and concluded he’d never have a political career of any significance.
I thought about the time he accidentally spat on the little girl in New Jersey — spit he said was intended for a heckler who had been hurling racial epithets at him — and knew this would be dragged up, as would the time he was arrested in Orlando for throwing a man through a plate-glass window in Orlando.
Who knows what other skeletons might have been shaken from his closet during a political campaign? None, perhaps. But now that we know he’s not going to run for office, we won’t have to stand around holding our collective breath.
