Prez Throws Like Girl, Not Koufax, Media Cheers Anyway

As everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Tiger Woods has taught us, authenticity is a big thing in modern life. We want people, especially the ones we idolize or elect, to be who they say they are. We scorn the poseur (John Kerry on the hunt or wind-surfing) and value people who are real. We even say “get real” to those who are not.

Yet everywhere we look, we are surrounded by phonies, people who say they are one thing but in actuality are something else entirely. This has a lot to do with television and film, which allow people to obtain a great deal of money and fame for acting a certain way, playing a role, even in non-fiction settings. The truly disturbing thing about Tiger Woods is not that he is a carousing, fornicating athlete, but that he and his handlers so carefully crafted an image of him as something else that the public shock was profound and continuing.

Therefore when the president of the United States, who in one short year has smoothly gone back on his word about many things — transparency, democracy, earmarks, war — stepped out on the baseball mound on opening day to throw out the first pitch for the Washington Nationals, we learned a bit about his authentic self. This is a fairly unadorned, just-what-it-is standard photo opportunity that is difficult to screw up but also quite unforgiving in its bluntly ritualistic presentation.

For starters, Obama made a special point, a flourish really, of wearing a mitt and donning a Chicago White Sox cap to go with his Nationals warm-up jacket. This was a planned gesture aimed at establishing his authenticity as a legitimate fan, a hometown White Sox fan. Both new Comiskey and old Comiskey Park are located on the South Side of Chicago, the locus of Obama’s political power. However, later on during the game, in a radio broadcast booth, when asked to name his favorite White Sox player, he could not come up with anyone. What genuine fan cannot name a single player on his home team? (One thinks immediately of that Back Bay man of the people Kerry, who famously said his favorite Red Sox player was “Manny Ortiz.” ) In other words, the president is not really a White Sox fan. He just adopted that pose, as Hillary Clinton once did with regard to the Yankees, for reasons of political and electoral public relations.

His delivery of the first pitch itself was also very telling in a way that goes beyond words. Going into a full left-handed windup, practiced beforehand to achieve verisimilitude, Obama then turned to deliver to the plate and twisted into the classic girlish strangled overhand motion – as if trying to shoo away a fly, or make a shot put. This was not the practiced arm motion of someone who actually has played baseball. Why all the false set-up? What was he trying to prove? Remember when George W. Bush threw out the first pitch for the World Series after 9/11? No mitt. No fake hometown cap. He just smiled and casually burned a fastball right down the middle.

Obama’s soft feminine throw, a little puff that went about six feet high and wide (left, of course) of the strike zone actually says a lot about him. He’s a bit of a phony, deep down, and a nancy boy on the diamond. Next time he should just send out Pelosi.