In Other News, Hillary Likes Chick Flicks...

So I realize that Barack Obama really does like to play basketball, but doesn't the hype surrounding him as "the sports fan's candidate" seem a little, well, racist?

Dan Shanoff, at the very top of my reading list each morning, wrote this on Friday after the Iowa win:

Longtime readers know that I am a politics junkie. It was awesome last night at the reading as lots of people there kept checking their Blackberries and cell phones to see results from Iowa, a murmur slicing through the crowd as the news came in. As far as the superficial sports connections go: Obama's win is a win for pick-up basketball fans. (Come on: Don't you really want to see a pick-up hoops court installed at the White House?)

Offensive? No. But the last sentence starts to feel a little suspect to me. We've had presidents in the past that were tremendous athletes (Gerald Ford was the MVP of back-to-back undefeated national titles at Michigan), and we've had candidates (like Bill Bradley) who were largely defined by their athletic prowess. Even this year, Bill Richardson famously clarified his long-standing claim that he had been drafted by the Kansas City A's in 1966. However, he did play in the Cape Cod summer league (one of the best amateur baseball leagues in the country) and clearly had the talent to play professionally. The current president is probably the "fittest" president that we've ever had (fittest on the treadmill, not exactly in the Oval Office) and entered politics after owning a baseball team. So sports and presidential politics is not new -- why then the interest in Obama's high school basketball career and love of pickup games?

Brett Edwards at Fanhouse has a video that at least somewhat explains the reason for the Obama comments, but it still has that tinge of being much more about Obama being black than about Obama liking basketball.

Obama will always be the basketball fan's candidate, and we'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that he's the only one running for President from either party who has the necessary skills to represent our country on the hardwood.

In a lengthy Times article from June 2007 about Obama's love for basketball, the article flat-out admits that it's a non-issue:

Basketball has little to do with Mr. Obama’s presidential bid — in fact, he has trouble finding time to shoot baskets anymore...

I'm not really an Obama fan, so maybe I'm just grasping at straws, but I feel like it would behoove Obama -- and all of us -- to move away from "the black candidate likes basektball" and towards a discussion about Obama's political capabilities.