NBA legend and Emmy-winning TV personality Charles Barkley makes a living these days saying how things might be done differently.
That mostly pertains to NBA teams and players — better defense, more passionate rebounding, getting the ball inside on occasion and doing less “load management” and more basketball-playing are some of the staples of his advice machine.
But Barkley has reached beyond his sport and achieved a kind of fame that transcends it, so he comments from time to time on more than just hoops — and people pay attention, even if the Chuckster, as he’s lovingly called on TNT, isn’t always well-versed in his subject matter.
Commenting — or as he says “venting” — on the recent U.S. election, in which Barkley supported Democrat Kamala Harris, he weighed in with a post-mortem about how President-elect Donald Trump managed to come out with the “W.”
While political consultants, frustrated navel-gazing Dems and media talking heads try their hands at explaining Harris’s failure to break through, Barkley put his assessment in simple terms.
The Dems didn’t fix the immigration problem, Barkley said, and didn’t do enough to combat inflation either. Without a game plan to fix those things, it was an uphill battle for Harris-Walz.
And Beyonce and Taylor Swift and Robert De Niro don’t bring down the price of eggs or patrol the southern border — that was the problem. Celebrities gave the Harris campaign a feel-good surface sheen, but didn’t address the roots of the challenges Americans face.
“Bringing all these stupid stars out to rally the vote, what was that?” Barkley asked on his podcast. “I love Beyonce. That ain’t gonna make me vote a certain type of way,” he said.
Chuck essentially wrote a political equation James Carville would be proud of: full refrigerator > celebrity glitz.
Barkley also isn’t holding grudges. “I wish [Trump] nothing but the best, but we lost,” Barkley said. “When you win you get to say what you want to, when you lose you need to shut the hell up.”
That’s not really the American idea, of course, that the side that loses an election must be silent. The nearly half of American voters who voted for Harris don’t lose their right to voice concerns or speak out against what the new American leadership does in their name.
Real democracy dictates that those voices still get heard. But “shut up if you lose” is the ethos in professional sports, where only the athlete on top gets the microphone.