Curt Cignetti: Nothing Is Impossible, He Should Be President

As a resident of Illinois, my vote for president hasn't mattered in four decades.

On Election Day 2024, I decided not to vote for either major party candidate for the presidency. I simply could not check a box next to any candidate for the Oval Office that did not inspire me or felt it was not important to unify a divided nation.

There was no way that I was going to leave my ballot blank.

This was not just any election.

This was the first time my firstborn son was doing his civic duty.

I needed to be able to answer him honestly when he asked me whom I cast my ballot for.

After I went through the entire ballot, only encouraged by one candidate, running for judge, I scrolled back to the top and started thinking about a person who inspires people to be their very best and has a track record of bringing people together.

At the time, my candidate was at his current job for less than a year.

But he was already showing himself to be an inspiring leader, getting the best out of the people around him. My write-in ballot was for Indiana University (IU) head football coach, Curt Cignetti.

You read that right. That Curt Cignetti.

If you know sports, then for the past few months, you've been moved by this inspiring "rags to riches" tale that has been the talk of the sports world and is being reported as the feel-good story of the year.

When I was a student at IU in the early 1990s, our football team was so bad that, if you were one of the few fans to remain in the stands after halftime, there was a good chance coach Bill Mallory would ask if you wanted to put on pads and play.

Okay, maybe not that bad.

But the sad reality back then was that after halftime during home games, each remaining fan had a row to himself. Before this year, IU had the dishonor of having the worst overall record in college football history.

I didn't need to see Cignetti coach football for two seasons to know he could achieve greatness. When I wrote his name in my voting booth, he had already taken a group of kids, none of them top prospects and definitely not a superstar, amongst them at the time, to a level of play that no Hoosier fan believed was possible.

But Cignetti made his players believe.

Cignetti would become the architect of the greatest story in college sports history.

Now that’s inspiring! Why should "We the People" settle for anything less?

Don't get me wrong – I’m not naive.

Following 30 years of political consulting, I know that the best America has to offer is not running for the highest office in the land.

If we are lucky, we may experience true greatness once in a lifetime. For me, that was President Ronald Reagan. Nobody since Reagan has truly unified our great nation.

My father likes to remind me of a news story he saw during the 1984 presidential race. A reporter asked a farmer whose farm was being foreclosed, whom he was voting for president.

"President Reagan," he replied. More than a bit surprised, the reporter asked the farmer why Reagan, especially considering the hardship he was facing.

His response, "He makes me proud to be an American."

There have certainly been segments of the American electorate that were inspired by other candidates for the White House. Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama have inspired large blocks of voters while being despised by many others at the same time.

Candidates of recent memory such as Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t exactly inspire people to vote for them.

They needed the electorate to pick them as the lesser of two evils to win the Presidency.

That is never healthy for a country.

On Election Day, 2024, I wasn’t casting a write-in ballot as a protest vote. I needed to make a statement. And not just for my children, but for myself.

I needed to remind myself that "American Exceptionalism" is real and the slogan “only in America” still means something unique and encouraging.

The story of the Indiana Hoosiers football team under the leadership of Curt Cignetti is a story that exemplifies what can be achieved in America if we work hard, work together, and believe the impossible is possible.

Paul Miller is a media and political strategist based in Chicago. His commentary has been published in New York Daily News, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Fox News, Jerusalem Post and The Hill. Follow him @pauliespoint. Read more Paul Miller Insider articles —​ Click Here Now.