For everyone there is a season? Thoughts on Clinton Portis, Sarah Palin, and people in general who make the news . . .

The wheel turns, times passes, things change, people get famous and then they get less famous.

I've been "hailing" the Washington Redskins since I was a kid, sitting in our living room in Greensboro, North Carolina,  watching football with my Dad. Back then, the 'Skins were the only remotely Southern team, so I, along with a whole generation of southerners, got stuck with being Redskins fans for life.

Yesterday brought the news that the arguably perennially dysfunctional Washington Redskins front office had released running back Clinton Portis. This action may, possibly, make football sense, but I, for one, will miss him.

Why?

Not only was Clinton Portis the second leading rusher in franchise history, he was one of the few mega-good professional football players who consistently dared to appear seriously goofy. If you follow the NFL at all, I'm sure you remember the get-ups Mr. Portis wore to his mid-decade press conferences, back when he was still The Man among NFL running backs.

For example . . .

Clinton Portis a.k.a Choo Choo, the dance instructor.

Here's Mr. Portis'  alter-ego, Choo-choo the Dance Instructor, whom he introduced at a 2007 press conference. Choo Choo, according to dcist.com, a website about Washington, had . . .

. . . come to town to teach the Redskins how to relax, have fun, and of course — perfect their endzone dances. Previous students include Santana Moss and Antwaan Randel El. Choo Choo's next student: Clinton Portis. Said Choo Choo, "It took 196 yards to give me hope that I can teach the boy how to dance. I'm going to teach that boy. Choo Choo. Choo Choo, right here. I hope he gets in the end zone. I'm going to teach him. I'm going to teach him, man, I'm going to teach." He also gave updates on beloved characters from the past (they're still around; Southeast Jerome is up in heaven), and refused for most of the presser to break character or speak on Clinton's behalf.

Mr. Portis was cut for financial reasons -- the Redskins would owe him $8.3 million if he took to the field for them next season. And, the reality is, at 29 and having been injured a lot, Portis may be at the beginning of the end of his career. There's also talk that Portis is relieved to be leaving.

Whatever is really behind the Clinton Portis/Washington Redskins divorce, Portis has, as always, played it pretty cool. Reports the Washington Posts' Cindy Boren:

Portis was philosophical about the transitory nature of NFL jobs. "No one is irreplaceable...Enjoy as much as you can and when it's time for you to move on, be ready." Whether it's Keiland Williams or Ryan Torain, "another back is gonna come along and steal the hearts of fans."

Wow, is that a great curtain speech or what. Especially for an NFL player who shares a body with Choo Choo the dance instructor.

Yesterday also saw this news posted as well on CNN's website:

Palin's intensity in Iowa fading, says poll

By: CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

(CNN) – As Sarah Palin mulls a presidential bid, the former Alaska governor is getting mixed news from Iowa, the state that traditionally kicks off the presidential primary season.
A newly released poll from the Des Moines Register suggests Palin is still liked by many GOP voters in the state, but perhaps not to the degree she once was. 

The former Republican vice presidential nominee's favorability rating has slipped 6 points in the last year and a half among likely GOP caucus-goers in the state, a number that, while within the poll's sampling error, may suggest the excitement around Palin is beginning to dissipate as other likely presidential candidates have spent significantly more time there over the last 15 months. . . . And in another sign the intensity around Palin is fading in the Hawkeye State, support among GOP voters who say they view Palin "very favorably" has dropped 9 points, from 27 to 18 percent.

young Sarah Palin

It's long been hard to figure out which Ms. Palin wants to be more: President of the United States or a rich celebrity. A lot of her energy expenditure over the past couple of years points toward rich celebrity:

• her attempt to trademark her name; 
• her reality TV show; 
• her sprawling, mega-publicized book tours to promote herself and her two books, Going Rogue and America by Heart.

Concentrating on being a celebrity may be a shrewd move for the former Vice-Presidential candidate. UPI.com reported yesterday:

ROCK HILL, S.C., Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Republican activists may like Sarah Palin on the issues, but many don't want her as their presidential candidate. 

At a recent fundraising dinner of the York County, S.C., Republican Party, party stalwarts told McClatchy Newspapers the former Alaska governor lacks the experience and knowledge to run successfully, let alone govern. 

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who spoke at the event, appealed to many as "Sarah Palin with a brain," said Gail Moore of Columbia, S.C.

Ms. Palin

The San Jose Mercury News puts it this way: "Republicans still like her, but now they openly question whether she could or should be nominated for president, let alone elected."

No one disputes Sarah Palin is photogenic, sassy, a brilliant self-promoter, a crowd-pleaser among her base, which is who exactly? Anyone know? But whoever they are, way back at the beginning of this year the National Journal opined that, when it comes to political office, "how far she ultimately goes will depend on how successfully she reassures voters beyond that base that she is qualified to be president."

So why am I writing about Clinton Portis and Sarah Palin in the same blog -- besides the fact that they were both in the news yesterday? Because it got me thinking about the different reasons I keep up with people in the news..

I read about Clinton Portis because I know what his job is and I've  enjoyed watching him do it well for close to a decade. I admire his skills, grit, tireless efforts, his team play. Portis has worked hard and  consistently since he first took the field in Denver in 2002. 

Clinton Portis/Southeast Jerome

In contrast, I read about Sarah Palin, truthfully, just to see what that gal is up to now. I'm a little hazy about what, exactly she's accomplished in the political arena that's anything close to Clinton Portis' accomplishments on the football field.

Of course, I did love Clinton Portis' antics at press conferences. But I loved them most because they were stacked on top of a solid record of achievement. I enjoy Sarah Palin's antics at press conferences simply as antics. 

Perhaps both of these stars are waning in the public firmament. Certainly both shone brightly for a time for different reasons in different careers. For everyone there is a season. I find myself wondering which of them will live easier as they find themselves slipping out of the news. 

You got any ideas?

Imagine my surprise . . .

Confession time: When my Newsweek comes on Tuesdays, I tend to give it an initial flip-through back-to-front. So, it only took turning a couple of pages to come upon "Atlas Hugged," an article about Ayn Rand's new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Ayn Heller.

How cool is that, I thought, yesterday being the release date for the book.

Child of an academic that I am, I looked for the author's name and credentials and found: "Mark Sanford is the governor of South Carolina."

I actually sat and stared at the tag, right there at the bottom of page 55. Was this a weird exploitation of misbegotten celebrity or what? Of course, maybe the man writes and publishes regularly . . .

I found one other article by Mark Sanford. "Obama's Symbolism Here" was an op-ed piece he published in The State, a Columbia newspaper, on January 11, 2008, shortly before the S.C. presidential primary. And he's published one book, The Trust Committed to Me, which appears to be out of print. Sanford has a B.A. in Business from Furman and an M.B.A. from The Darden School at U.Va. Such an academic business background would certainly explain his personal interest in Ayn Rand, the patron saint of free market individualism, but it doesn't immediately make him the most qualified person to write an article attached to a new, scholarly biography of her for a national news magazine.

Of course, I read the article, and I was amused--not so much at the article, as at myself.  It was impossible for me to read what Mark Sanford had written about Ayn Rand, particularly taking Rand gently to task for her theory that man is perfectible, without both gentle amazement and amusement, a feeling that one foot had stepped through the Looking Glass, that reality had tipped gently toward the absurd. It was impossible not to think that this particular man's words were published in this particular magazine, not because of his education or his experience, but because he'd had an extramarital affair with a Brazilian woman, partly paid for by the taxpayers of South Carolina.

Notoriety, it seems, may have become our only essential credential.

But then, I guess if you need to sell magazines, a disgraced governor who is most likely facing impeachment, does make for a natural go-to guy.

FYI: Interesting op-ed piece on Afghanistan's second round of elections in today's New York Times by an extremely qualified contributor.

Informed?

Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, Harrisonburg resident and a chaired W & L Law School professor, had a busy day yesterday. He came to the station at 11 in the morning to be interviewed by NPR's Planet Money team about the economics of health care. After that he went to Clementine Cafe, a restaurant in downtown Harrisonburg, to chair an open meeting on the same subject. This morning he has an Op-Ed piece in Harrisonburg's newspaper, the Daily News Record. The subject again was the economics of health care reform.

Professor Jost knows what he's talking about. So it strikes me that, although you may certainly disagree with Professor Jost's conclusions, the depth of his knowledge and experience with health care mandates that your disagreement be backed-up by reliably-sourced facts.

The on-line Washington Post has a "Discussions" blog/column on the National Football league aptly called "The League." (Okay, I've been an unabashed--and long-suffering--Redskins fan since childhood, and I do read the sports section right after the headlines.) Today, the question asked by "The League" is this: Should NFL stars like Brendon Ayandabejo, who supports same-sex marriage, feel obligated to keep opinions private? In other words, can the bully pulpit of fame be regulated by the National Football League?

The free speech issue involved in this seems pretty clear, don't you think? As American citizens we're all entitled to say what we please as long as we don't break the law. And in this case, it actually is interesting and brave to me that a man from the macho world of football (and a line-backer, at that!) would support gay marriage. However, it did set me to wondering about the attention we, as a society, pay to celebrity opinion in a national debate as compared to the attention we pay to informed opinion such as Professor's Jost. If Mr. Ayandabejo made the statement that health care reform is just another government plot to take our freedom, would we give his opinion as much credence as we give Professor Jost's, just because Mr. Ayandabejo is famous?

Long, long ago, when I was a Charlottesville TV talk show host, I asked Peter Taylor, arguably one of our finest southern literary writers, to be my guest on the show. Mr. Taylor said he'd be delighted to do a reading, but that he'd be uncomfortable doing much talking about himself or anything else. He was a fiction writer and a teacher, he said, which did not qualify him to rant about life or politics or world affairs.

As a young man, Peter Taylor went on, he'd gone to hear Robert Frost speak. Frost's poetry, he said, had opened worlds of thought and feeling and seeing that had not been open to him before. But instead of going deeper into those worlds, Robert Frost had loosed on his audience a vitriolic right-wing harangue. Peter Taylor said he'd vowed right then that, if he ever became well enough known as a writer to be asked to speak, he wouldn't. Seemed admirable to me then, and it still seems admirable to me now.

The point I'm making in this long-winded fashion, is that fame is not really a credential for speaking out about anything other than what one is famous for. Yet fame easily draws us more pedestrian souls into its orbit. And now that everyone -- including yours truly and every celebrity on the planet -- is blogging and posting and twittering on the internet, I just think we need to be extra vigilant about whom we're hanging out with; about whom we're listening to; about whose information and, even more importantly, whose opinion we accept as valid.