Jets fans used to chant, "Joe must go!" Until he was sacked last week, disgruntled 49ers fans logged into www.fire-nolan.com to bash the team's beleaguered head coach, Mike Nolan. Every night all across the country, sports-radio talk shows take calls from fans who claim their team could return to greatness if only they could replace the dope at the top with someone with a new approach and fresh ideas. Media types, wanting to join the party, start to play on fans' emotions by being more confrontational in interviews and columnists wonder aloud whether the coach has "lost his team."

 

Sound familiar?

 

George W. Bush is being treated by many as the head coach who has taken a once-proud football team - in this case America - from world champion to cellar dweller in just a few years. The whole team seems to be underachieving based on the perceived talent level and voters (read: fans) want a change. Furthermore, they almost don't even care what kind of change they get as long as it's different.

 

So now they've been given two choices for the new head coach. Candidate One is a long-time assistant coach who knows the game like the back of his hand, but is part of the current coach's staff so is he really going to be that different? Besides, he seems a little over-the-hill and turning this team around is going to take long hours and a lot of energy. Candidate Two has never been a head coach at any level, but he's young and seems to have some great new ideas to get the team back on track. Granted he's never really tried any of these ideas on a real team before, but he's written a couple books about football and the media loves him. He's also a great motivational speaker and is sure to get this group fired up. Everyone knows that a winning attitude is just as important as the X's and O's.

 

Problem is, we're not talking about a football team. It's not as simple as firing the next coach if he fails to live up to the hype. If this inexperienced guy fails, the damage may be permanent. How do you rollback trillions of dollars in new entitlements once they're established? How can you ever get back money taken from society's achievers and given to its laggards in the name of justice? Perhaps most importantly, how do you deal with a judiciary that's been skewed so far to the left that they think empathy with litigants is the highest virtue in jurisprudence? It might be impossible and, if it isn't, it would take a generation or more to repair. We haven't got that kind of time.

 

Barack Obama isn't a bad person, he's just wrong. John McCain, flawed as he is, knows his stuff. He's been in the trenches and through the wars, literally. He'll play the game right because he's actually been on the inside and knows what works and - most importantly - what doesn't. And any mistakes he makes are much more likely to be reversable than Obama's because McCain's natural tendency is to keep power outside Washington and in the hands of citizens.

 

America is not a football team, its a country. Voters need to stop looking at this election as fans and start looking at it as citizens. Right now it's almost like they're saying, "We want someone new and the next guy can't possibly be any worse than Bush." Some of us know better.