Conservatives concerned about unpopularity of proposed bowl games

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With Barack Obama poised to take office in a week, conservatives in congress are surprisingly wrapped up in another disaster for the Republican party as they work to recover from the disastrous 2008 elections.

“We’ve been working on a lot of things to try to bounce back before election time rolls around again,” House Minority Leader and Ohio congressman John Boehner. “But one of the great things we thought of was really increasing our presence in the sports world. See, we tried to think of ways to appeal to people in a bipartisan way, and obviously sports is a major aisle-crosser.”

A number of leading Republicans had apparently worked out a deal in principle with representatives from the BCS and NCAA to add two conservative-sponsored bowls to next year’s roster; specifically the Death Tax Bowl and Defense of Marriage Bowl.

“We talked it over with the football people, and we all thought they both sounded pretty good. We figured sticking with themes that are well-supported nationally and also appeal to our conservative base would be good,” Boehner continued. “I thought it might be better to go with ‘Anti-Death Tax Bowl,’ but our media people assured us that the term ‘death tax’ is, in itself, anti-death tax. Either way, we’re not getting the response we’d like.”

Boehner told SSNN that focus groups in both Republican and Democratic demographics have thus far responded negatively to the idea of a bowl game sponsored by any political party.

“We’ve been shocked and disappointed with the results of our focus groups, and to be honest I think the NCAA people are balking after our focus group results,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “It turns out people basically want their politics and their sports separate, which is something that we simply never saw coming.

“I mean, people really hated the idea. You should have seen the disgusted responses we got to the halftime speeches – one guy said he’d rather see a Mylie Cyrus show at halftime than have to listen to political posturing. Which in addition to being surprising was tremendously rude.”

So far no final decisions have been made, but indications are that the Republican party will have to fully fund these games and would still not be likely to attract top programs.

“BYU said they’d consider playing in the Defense of Marriage Bowl if they didn’t have any better options, but otherwise we mostly just got a lot of responses from Div. III Catholic universities who all said they’d be happy to play if they were invited,” Boehner said. “I’ll tell you this: if I knew we’d only attract the religious right with this plan, I never would have put it forward.

“I mean, hell – those are the only people we can actually count on in every election. We damn sure don’t need to throw a football party for them.”