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Too Much March Madness?

I think the NCAA Tournament drags on for far too long. It interferes with baseball’s opening days. It happens at the end of a long season, when the players are tired and prone to injury, not to mention at mid-term, when they have more important things to worry about, like studying and polishing term papers like normal students. And it’s clear who’s going to win anyway: each team has been thoroughly vetted, handicapped and seeded. Why, then, should a top-ranked team even bother to play a team ranked 15th or 16th? We already know who’s going to win. Right? All we really need to see is Team #1 play Team #2 for ultimate bragging rights and T-shirt sales; the rest of the teams (clearly losers) should simply withdraw and not subject us to all this March Madness. We’re so over it; let’s just declare a winner.

But that’s not the way we play the game. In college basketball, anyway, we play every official minute of every draining contest, and some of us even bet against the odds, hoping anew with each tip-off that it’s our Cinderella who will be crowned this time.

So what’s the big deal about the Democrats? Why can’t we afford them the same courtesy, let them play out their tournament on the national stage and not name the winner until the final buzzer? Why are we so sure we know the outcome when no one candidate has yet acquired the 2025 votes required? Senator Barack Obama entered the race far, far behind in the polls; at the time, Senator Hillary Clinton was seeded as the party’s sure winner. Should we have denied him the chance to compete? Should we have suggested a primary battle would be too divisive, too destructive, that it would hand victory to the Republicans? Why, then, when the tables are turned, and the brackets suggest the reverse, is there this rush to deny Senator Clinton her spot in the finals? What are we afraid of? John McCain? (You can’t be serious.)

Indeed, there’s more at stake here than bragging rights and T-shirt sales. There’s war and peace and justice and housing and health care and the economy and the environment. Seems to me these are things worth fighting for. . . to the bitter (and possibly even better) end. Anointing a loser before the game is over is a weak, defensive, defeatist strategy; the Democrats can’t afford that indulgence. Instead, they need to suck it up, put on a full-court press and play on -- to nominate a real winner, someone who should, given the state of the world and the economy, thanks to our two-term Republican President, be a slam-dunk, come November.