Scarborough said in a column on Politico.com Monday: "Barack Obama is LeBron James."
The first piece of evidence Scarborough uses to justify his proclamation is that both were blessed with remarkable skills early on in their respective careers.
"Both men were bona fide superstars who could move faster, play smarter and thrill audiences more than all other opponents in sports arenas or at political conventions," he wrote.
But in addition to noting that both Obama and James are highly-skilled, Scarborough thinks the similarities go way beyond that. He said that each has dumped loyal supporters throughout his career in order to "get into the big game."
James, of course, left Cleveland for Miami via free agency last offseason in an effort to form a super team alongside Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Scarborough sees similarities between that and how Obama acted when Wall Street spun out of control in 2008, saying that each involved turning one's back on a city that also happened to be his hometown.
"He got elected, but not before turning his back on many of the same people who made his rise possible — including the man who officiated his marriage and baptized his children," Scarborough wrote of Obama.
Scarborough also notes the lofty expectations that each rose to their new position with before failing to live up to the hype. He feels that, just as James took a back seat and folded on the big stage with a subpar performance in last season's NBA Finals, Obama continues to defer to congressmen and senators. He compares James' expectation that Dwyane Wade carry the load for the Heat to Obama's expectation that Nancy Pelosi carry the entire load regarding a stimulus bill.
"Despite both men's abundance of promise and surplus of confidence, they are now bound — not by greatness — but by their own collapse when the klieg lights burned at their brightest," he said.
But Scarborough isn't the first columnist to draw comparisons between President Obama and King James.
Neil Minkoff of National Review also compared the two in an Aug. 30 column, which was written in response to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman comparing Obama to Tiger Woods.
Friedman's comparisons were similar to Scarborough's in the sense that each columnist feels that neither James nor Obama has proved to be as valuable as the hype suggested they should be.
To conclude his column, Friedman wrote:
"We expect [Obama] to drive through traffic and get to the rim. Reagan played above the rim. Clinton drove the lane, knowing he would get to the rim or score from the line. Even if you dislike the guy, you know W. owned his presidency. He played to win. The failure of the presidency of Barack Obama is not just that he does not play to win. It is that he plays for any loss to not be his fault."
Either way, whatever your political views are, LeBron James probably isn't an athlete you want to see your president compared to. Then again, I'm not so sure Tiger Woods is either.
