c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ What are we going to do with Michael Jordan?

Anyone who reads David Halberstam’s excellent”Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made,”will have to wonder about that. MJ is more than merely the greatest basketball player that ever was. He is a charismatic leader, a brilliant salesman, a shrewd analyst of character, a quick learner, an example of how the American racial situation has changed, a symbol of America to all the world _ and one of the most fiercely competitive humans who has ever walked the face of the earth.

Even if he could have played basketball for another couple of years, he would have had to give up the game eventually. What is left for him? Car-pooling, as his wife said? Turns out, according to Halberstam, that he’s been doing that for years. Golf? Cards? How long would it take before that kind of life became BORING?

What’s left for MJ? Patently, politics. Cross out the M of MVP and make it VP.

MJ for vice president! A basketball player one heartbeat away from the White House? Not just a basketball player, but this particular basketball player. Who could vote against him? Americans have put second-rate military leaders in the White House and even a third-rate actor. The citizens of the great progressive state of Minnesota have elected a professional wrestler as their governor, a man so dumb that he utters anti-Irish slurs on the public record.

Recently both parties were competing for Gen. Colin Powell, an articulate African-American and a successful military bureaucrat, but hardly a war hero. Gen. Eisenhower was in fact not all that different from Powell, but presiding over a big war presumably made him a war hero. How that qualified him for the presidency is not altogether clear.

If one kind of hero, why not another kind?

What does MJ know about politics? I don’t know. Presumably not much. How much did generals Eisenhower or Powell know? Or Ross Perot? Or a lot of the other men who for one reason or another ended up in the White House?

MJ, however, is a quick and hard-working learner. My bet is he could pick up the information and a sense of the issues very quickly and handle questions from the media vultures with great skill.

It would be competition, an exciting new game to test his mental and verbal skills. He’d love it and do well at it. He’d get in the”zone”very quickly.

It is often said there is no adequate preparation for the presidency. Sitting around the halls of Congress does not require the skills needed to preside over the whole nation _ and to an increasing extent over the whole world. Governing a state is perhaps better preparation. Jimmy Carter, however, was pretty good at that, and he was an inept president. The bureaucratic skills required for advancement in the Pentagon are useless in the White House. Presidents learn the job by doing it _ that is if they are going to learn it at all.

Besides, vice presidents don’t have all that much to do. Theoretically they preside over the Senate which is totally BORING, but they don’t do that often. They represent America to the rest of the world, and MJ is the best there is at that. He’d have eight years to learn more about being president. I’m not sure why there was any more reason for electing Ronald Reagan president than there is for electing MJ vice president and eventually president.

We could do a lot worse. And have. And probably will again.

MJ as VP would bring new vitality and energy and drive to American politics. Any young man smart enough to learn a jump shot before he needed it, any young man who submitted to an incredible regimen of physical training to prolong his already dazzling career by a couple of years has the kind of character we need more of in the political game.

I can’t be serious, you say? I’m just trying to make a point.

As my mother would say, I’m half fun and full earnest.

MJ for VP!

DEA END GREELEY