A Tough Question for George Allen

All the attention in the Bolton hearings has focused on the "conscience caucus" of Voinovich, Chafee, Hagel and Murkowski, and on Lugar. But this is also a chance to see some other senators in action, like Norm Coleman of Minnesota and George Allen of Virginia, who has been identified by National Journal as the top pick for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Neither one of these characters rises to even the middle tier of mediocrity, but there's something fascinating about Allen: He does not speak English. I mean that almost literally, in that he does not construct sentences made up of commonplace English words. Rather, he speaks entirely in a patois constructed of football metaphors. Absolutely everything is second down or third down, or five yards or ten yards or a Hail Mary. If you were unfamiliar with the basic jargon of American football (as many people are), his every word would be incomprehensible. His official photo on his web site has him holding a football. Try going through a day using a football (or baseball or basketball) metaphor for every conversation, and you get a sense of what it would be like to be George Allen.

Now I know that his father, who had the same name, was a football coach, best known for letting Richard Nixon call a play for the Redskins, and for a management philosophy called "The future is now," sort of a prototype for the Bush tax policy. I sort of assumed that the Senator played or coached in the NFL himself, but I got curious about it today. Did he? No. He played a little bit at UVA, apparently. (Of course, I worked for a guy who had a couple of championship rings and was in the Hall of Fame, and you were allowed maybe, at most, one glancing basketball reference in a speech, preferably none.)

In the course of looking this up, I came across an interview with Allen for nfl.com that includes a question from one Adam Schefter so merciless and piercing that that this guy deserves a spot in the White House press corps:

Schefter: Is there any family as distinguished as yours?

(I noticed late in writing this that Dana Millbank has already covered the Allen football-ese in February.)