纽约时报 政客能成为像体育明星一样的英雄吗?(4)（在线收听）

Shortly after being sworn in in January, Representative Madison Cawthorn, a freshman from North Carolina, wrote an email to his Republican colleagues, obtained by Time magazine, boasting that he had “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”

今年1月宣誓就职后不久，来自北卡罗来纳州的新议员麦迪逊·考索恩给他的共和党同事写了一封电子邮件，吹嘘他“围绕通信而不是立法来建立我的幕僚”。《时代》杂志获取到了这封邮件。

In other words, his office planned to focus its energies not on lawmaking but on getting Cawthorn on TV to fire up the base.

换句话说，其办公室计划不把精力放在立法上，而是把精力放在让考索恩上电视煽风点火。

(This is not an irrational plan: Contemporary politics is so focused on the culture war that Cawthorn will most likely accrue more clout railing about Democrats' trying to turn the country “into a Communist ash heap” than by sweating the details of legislation to, say, help small-business owners.)(这并不是一个不理性的计划：当代政治如此关注文化战争，以至于考索恩很可能会积累更多的影响力，他会痛骂民主党人试图把国家变成“共产主义的灰烬堆”，而不是为帮助小企业主等立法细节而大费周折。)In February, as Texas suffered through days of blackouts that have been widely attributed to a failure to winterize its power systems,今年2月，德克萨斯州经历了数日的停电，人们普遍认为停电是由于电力系统无法过冬。

Gov. Greg Abbott appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show to try to score political points by falsely blaming clean energy: “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” he said, while some of his state's residents were literally freezing to death.

州长格雷格·阿博特出现在肖恩·汉尼提主持的福克斯新闻节目中，试图通过错误地指责清洁能源来赢得政治加分，他说“这表明，绿色新政对美国来说是致命的，” 而他所在州的一些居民几乎快被冻死了。

During Joe Biden's short time in office, he has been praised for focusing more on governing and less on entertaining.

在乔·拜登短暂的任期内，他因更多地关注管理而非娱乐而受到称赞。

His aides advertise his diligence, catering to a post-Trump public desire for bureaucratic competence. “Joe Biden is the president — he's not a pundit,” the press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters in February, noting that Biden would not be watching or opining on Trump's second impeachment trial.

他的助手们宣扬他的勤奋，以迎合后特朗普时代公众对官僚能力的渴望。新闻发言人珍·普萨基今年2月对记者说，拜登总统不是专家，既不会观看特朗普的第二次弹劾审判，也不会就此事发表意见。

Not staring at cable news all day and spouting off on Twitter, however, is an extremely low bar by which to measure a president.

不整天盯着有线新闻，也不在推特上滔滔不绝，这是衡量一位总统的一个极低的标准。

The “under-promise/over-deliver strategy” is “working well for President Biden so far,” as the CNN White House correspondent John Harwood wrote on Twitter — but perhaps the reason Biden can afford to under-promise in the first place is that Americans have come to expect so little.

CNN驻白宫记者约翰·哈伍德在推特上写道，到目前为止，少承诺/多兑现的策略对拜登总统来说效果很好，但或许拜登首先能够少承诺的原因是美国人对他的期望太低了。

We do, however, still expect a lot of our sports heroes. Over the last few years, Lillard has been among the many to wade into politics; last summer, he marched with Black Lives Matter protesters and released a song, as Dame D.O.L.L.A., about the police killings of George Floyd and others.

然而，我们仍然期待着许多体育英雄的出现。在过去的几年里，利拉德是许多涉足政治的人之一；去年夏天，他与“黑人的命也是命”抗议者一起游行，并发行了一首名为Dame D.O.L.L.A.的歌曲，讲述警察杀害乔治·弗洛伊德等人的故事。

Efforts like these have been met with criticism from right-wing commentators like Laura Ingraham, who once admonished politically active athletes to “shut up and dribble.”

这样的努力遭到了劳拉·英格拉汉姆等右翼评论员的批评，她曾告诫在政治领域活跃的运动员们“闭嘴，专心运球”。

But athletes like Lillard recognize that it is their ability to dribble — their diligent mastering of the fundamentals of their sports — that allows them to have political impact.

但像利拉德这样的运动员认识到，他们运球的能力、对运动基础知识的勤奋掌握，使他们足以能产生政治影响。

As he told Dwyane Wade, “I know that's a part of why I've been able to get a lot of the things that I've gotten.”

就像他对韦德说的那样，“我知道这就是为什么我能得到现在很多东西的部分原因”。

This is an approach that politicians might do well to emulate. For too many, there are no fundamentals, only showboating. Maybe it's time someone told them to shut up and govern.

这不失为政客们可以效仿的一种方法。对很多人来说，毫无基础，只有卖弄。也许是时候让他们闭嘴，管好自己了。