Baller-in-Chief

Buckets Obama

Short version of a Twitter exchange from early this morning: Austin asked how many followers would a current President (not just Barack Obama) get on Twitter if he had a page that he actually updated himself; reader Amar suggested half-a-billion easy, with every head of state and journalist and political blogger at the front of the line.

With Obama specifically, another group of people who’d flock to his Twitter page would be basketball fans. We’ve all had it sufficiently shoved down our throats that the 44th President is a hoops junkie like the rest of us, and in the new issue of Dime, we gave him his due as one of the 50 people who will shape the future of the game and this magazine:

BARACK OBAMA, 48, President of the United States
Basketball is different from dog breeding. When the First Family chose Bo Obama, a Portuguese Water Dog, as their White House companion, analysts predicted that demand for the breed would skyrocket — dog owners would choose a pet simply because President Obama chose the same one. And surely, some people at home and abroad will pick up a basketball for the first time just to follow in the footsteps of the leader of the free world. However, Barack Obama’s greatest impact on basketball will come as a fan, not a player. His enthusiastic participation in the prediction of March Madness, the NBA Draft and the NBA Finals brings another layer of excitement and value to those events. But moreover, he’s been unbelievably accurate in his calls thus far. The more President
Obama accurately picks the outcomes of major basketball games, the more his legend grows. Here’s a guy who spends his time saving our country from its most dire economic straits seven days a week, but still manages to know everything you need to know about hoops.