Thesis
Pigskin politicking: The American presidency and the changing politics of sport
- Abstract:
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This thesis is concerned with the American presidency and what I call ‘pigskin politicking’, or the practice of deploying professional football and other sports for political gain. Pigskin politicking can be observed in presidential traditions that have become commonplace: phoning teams after important victories, inviting players and coaches to the White House, attending games, and more generally basking in the reflected glory of successful teams and athletes. Such practices have become so seamlessly ingrained in the American political apparatus that they have been largely overlooked in both the political and historical scholarship on the public presidency and the rise of what political scientists call the permanent campaign.
I argue that the origins of pigskin politicking can be traced to the Nixon-Ford administrations. A passionate sports fan, President Richard Nixon and his aides took entrepreneurial politics to a new and innovative level by publicising his fandom in ways that previous presidents would have considered trivial or politically unnecessary. The parallel rise of professional football and the television presidency in the late 1960s and early 1970s had lasting implications for American politics, and the Nixon administration capitalised on this convergence. Nixon’s pigskin politicking ultimately set a precedent for his successors, each of whom—at some point or another—have turned to both football and baseball with the hope of projecting a masculine ‘just folks’ image to the public. I conclude that the Nixon-Ford era marked the beginning of a transformation in presidential self-promotion and showmanship in which the world of sport played a winning role.
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Authors
- DOI:
- Type of award:
- DPhil
- Level of award:
- Doctoral
- Awarding institution:
- University of Oxford
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- Deposit date:
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2021-04-25
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Gambrell, R
- Copyright date:
- 2019
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