Clear eyes, full heart, stop it

Huddle up, team. Take a knee.

For the past month, the Mitt Romney campaign has channeled its inner high school football coach with a new catchphrase.

On the campaign bus, on Romney-Ryan bracelets, behind the scenes at the debates, the camp has endlessly used “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” to energize supporters.

It’s definitely not the first campaign to employ a catchy phrase to excite the constituency. Think, “Yes we can.”

The problem with Romney’s use of “clear eyes” is that it’s not his own.

“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” is the rallying cry for the fictional Dillon High School Panthers of the hit TV show “Friday Night Lights.” Coach Eric Taylor uses the phrase to get his team to two Texas state championships in five seasons.

To be sure, it’s a great phrase. We have printed it on a poster in our newsroom to inspire us to observe with clear eyes and report with full hearts.

Romney’s use of the phrase has politicized an otherwise purely motivational maxim. Granted, the Obama team has also used the phrase on occasion, but Romney’s adoption has now become a centerpiece of his campaign lore, just as much as “Yes we can” defined Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Peter Berg, the creator of “Friday Night Lights” and original author of “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” fired a letter to the Romney campaign asking it to cease using his words.

“Your politics and campaign are clearly not aligned with the themes we portrayed in our series,” Berg said in the letter. “The only relevant comparison that I see between your campaign and ‘Friday Night Lights’ is in the character of Buddy Garrity — who turned his back on American car manufacturers selling imported cars from Japan.”

The author of the “Friday Night Lights” nonfiction book based on the 1988 season of the Permian High School Panthers, H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger fired back to Berg. Bissinger, a Romney supporter, has been known to pick fights with Berg over the future of the franchise.

“He has no idea what and who Romney is about. I find his letter uninformed and offensive,” Bissinger said. “Berg is just another member of the Hollywood glitterati whose idea of liberalism is making sure their Mexican gardeners get paid only several dollars below minimum wage.”

The whole debacle peaked in Monday’s final debate, when Romney alluded to the phrase when discussing Russian-U.S. relations.

“Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again,” Romney said. “I have clear eyes on this.”

No, Mr. Romney. That’s the final straw.

The great thing about “Friday Night Lights” was that it was wonderfully apolitical. The characters lived and worked and played football in a very real world but managed to tackle those real-world problems without invoking political bickering.

The joy of watching Friday night football in a small town like Dillon, Texas, is that you can put aside any political rivalries and sit in the stands on a fall evening and cheer for the hometown team.

It seems that in an extraordinarily tense political season, we need a little more of those Friday night lights and less childish bickering in national debates.

Clear eyes, full hearts.