It could be described as a Christmas fable, or rather, to the contrary, it could be interpreted as a Machiavellian political calculation made in view of the 2012 presidential election. Because Barack Obama raised the telephone receiver and called Jeffrey Lurie, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, to thank him for having signed on Michael Vick to the team, only historians will (perhaps) discover the truth, if they ever take the issue into consideration.
The episode has been publicized (after prior authorization from the White House) and recounted by one of the two protagonists. Lurie admitted to Peter King, a leading journalist for NBC Sports, to having received a phone call from Obama last Monday.
The call lasted for a few minutes, during which the president lauded him for having signed the quarterback, an NFL superstar, condemned for fighting dogs, stopped [from playing football] for two years and rescued last season by the Eagles. “So many people who serve time never get a fair second chance,” the president said.
The White House confirmed the call. The president “of course condemns the crimes that Michael Vick was convicted of, but, as he’s said previously, he does think that individuals who have paid for their crimes should have an opportunity to contribute to society again.”
The star of the Atlanta Falcons, the quarterback saw his career interrupted one morning in April 2007 when police officers (who were investigating an incident of drug trafficking in which one of Michael Vick’s relatives was involved) discovered that the football champion was up to his neck in a round of dog fights.
The bets were managed by the same player, but above all, investigators learned that Vick had killed some of the dogs because they were not considered competitive enough for the fights. The judge sentenced him to 23 months in prison and the NFL suspended him from competitive sports.
After the period of punishment ended, no team wanted Michael Vick. Only the Philadelphia Eagles came forward and proposed one-year contract, afterward renewed. A winning choice, seeing how that in any case — though not at the levels of the past — the quarterback demonstrated himself to be one of the most talented players in the league.
A winning choice also by Barack Obama. But why did the president make the call? The Washington Post was not surprised that he, so attentive to social customs and facts, wanted to intervene.
After all, remember that the D.C. newspaper has in the past written about the responsibilities of fathers in raising their children; it took a stand against the unjustified arrest of a black Harvard professor; lately, it confessed to having an open position with respect to gay marriage.
Therefore, Obama’s act of highlighting of such a symbolic case, in which a public figure, a black champion, has been given a fateful second chance, seemed to him the best way of giving an indirect lesson on culture and civilization.
How many Americans (especially African-Americans) remain marginalized, unable to reintegrate or find work for their children? Rarely do they find someone able to give them confidence. Michael Vick has been the most fortunate, by virtue of the fact that he was a superstar and a public figure. His story, therefore, became for Obama a symbolic event, a positive example for the rest of the country.
This is the meaning of his phone call, for those of us who have a do-gooder vision of the event. There are those instead who are more catty and look upon what happened with very different eyes. And they think it is a mere political calculation by Obama.
The president, this reading says, wanted to send a signal to the black constituency, a group which he risks losing with his future policy of compromise with the GOP: “I am still on your side.” It is a message targeted to Pennsylvania’s “black vote,” one of the states that will hang in the balance in 2012, the year of the presidential election.
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