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Yahoo News’ Capitol Hill Bracket Challenge
http://news.yahoo.com/yahoo-news--capitol-hill-bracket-challenge-194634990.htmlIn March, the Capitol makes special accommodations for lawmakers and their staffs to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. Senate and House committees order that the Capitol’s cable packages include channels airing the games. The televisions in the private, members-only cloakrooms are commandeered so members can watch basketball between votes.
In my five years of covering Capitol Hill, I’m relatively confident that the most honest and real conversations I’ve ever had with lawmakers are about sports. Politicians feel less guarded talking about last night’s Kentucky game than the the buzzy political story du jour (though I’d be lying if I denied using the first kind of conversation to build a personal rapport that makes the second kind of conversation more fruitful).
Sports are one of the rare activities that make politicians people, too. In a day and age when friendships are dwindling in inverse proportion to the number of flights politicians take out of town, you can pick out some of the people who actually like each other by their sports-related ribbing.
Enter Yahoo News’ Capitol Hill Bracket Challenge. We’ve got brackets from a half-dozen members — including Speaker John Boehner of Ohio — that reveal more than these politicians’ parochial biases or sports acumen. They will also show whether Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., is correct in his assessment that no one knows more about college basketball than his colleague, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
In my five years of covering Capitol Hill, I’m relatively confident that the most honest and real conversations I’ve ever had with lawmakers are about sports. Politicians feel less guarded talking about last night’s Kentucky game than the the buzzy political story du jour (though I’d be lying if I denied using the first kind of conversation to build a personal rapport that makes the second kind of conversation more fruitful).
Sports are one of the rare activities that make politicians people, too. In a day and age when friendships are dwindling in inverse proportion to the number of flights politicians take out of town, you can pick out some of the people who actually like each other by their sports-related ribbing.
Enter Yahoo News’ Capitol Hill Bracket Challenge. We’ve got brackets from a half-dozen members — including Speaker John Boehner of Ohio — that reveal more than these politicians’ parochial biases or sports acumen. They will also show whether Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., is correct in his assessment that no one knows more about college basketball than his colleague, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
You hear that, mad and joey? "you can pick out some of the people who actually like each other by their sports-related ribbing."
Oh, and joey, look who Boner's got in the Final Four. 
