Obama and Futbol

Tonight we created a merger which I believe my yield some deep meanings, although I have yet to discover them. At first we had the television on cnn "en espanol" during Obama's speech. The President was being simultaneously translated, so that he sounded like a very deep-voiced Argentinian man. Not a bad voice for him, actually. But then we decided to listen to the speech via the internet. So I switched the television to the more important event here: Argentina vs. Paraguay. This was the last gasp for Argentina, which needed to win in order to guarantee a spot in the 2010 World Cup competition. So as Obama argued for health care, Diego Maradona stood stoically listening, not at all impressed with what was going on and, frankly, seemed quite worried. As the speech/game moved along, with high and low points, moments of pathos and moments of humor, some angry fans (was that the South Carolina representative yelling at Maradona?), many thrilled Paraguayans and liberals (the public options lives to die on another day!), I wondered whether the comparison of soccer (or, more specifically, soccer hysteria) and the health care debate might have more in common than an accident of technology. I'm simply going to hope that, if tonight's game was somehow predictive of the fate of healthcare policy, that Obama has Paraguayan blood somewhere in his lineage.