Tribal Leadership

Sports Illustrated readers overwhelmingly voted Mr. Bush the better athlete and sports fan, a conclusion the magazine's managing editor, Terry McDonell, finds baffling.

"Clearly Kerry is a much, much, much, much better athlete," he said, noting that Mr. Kerry has long played competitive hockey and also regularly snowboards, Rollerblades, windsurfs and kite-surfs.

"Kite-surfing," Mr. McDonell said, "is the hardest, most radical thing to do. It's what the most extreme surfers are doing."

Mr. Bush, in contrast, was a cheerleader, and not, Mr. McDonell notes, the kind that did flips. "It's like spirit club."

[...]

Mr. McDonell puzzled over what all this shooting and fishing had to do with being leader of the free world. "Within sports, you can see leadership," he said, "but that does not mean going to a Nascar event will make you a good president."

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, said that voters have a primal need to know that a candidate is a member of their tribe. "If you're sitting around watching sports on a Sunday and you know your president is also sitting around watching sports, you're not only in intellectual sync, you're probably in some biological sync on some level," said Ms. Fisher, who is the author of "The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior."


So, a bunch of potbellied Nascar fans are voting for George W. Bush because they imagine he and they are great athletes due to the fact that they like watching other people drive cars. Is democracy great, or what?