When Burton speaks, everyone stops to listen

AVONDALE, Ariz. -- For all the noise and chaos, NASCAR is a sport built inherently upon order. Week after week, from February to November, from Daytona to Homestead, the same routine unfolds. Team transporters enter the racetrack and line up by points position, the defending champion first. Crewmen mill outside the closed gates of the garage area, waiting for the exact moment when they're allowed to go inside and begin work. Cars line up for practice in a neat row, again by points position, again with the champion up front. It's a familiar, methodical process that's never varied from, a procedure as dependable as the sun rising over the hillside that abuts Phoenix International Raceway.

Jeff Burton fits quite easily into this routine. Like clockwork, the Richard Childress Racing driver is in the media center on Friday morning, usually the first of the top 12 drivers to fulfill their NASCAR-mandated obligations to the press. Some hate it. Some tolerate it. Some try to avoid it by scheduling sessions immediately after their qualifying lap, when noise and frustration are often at a premium. But every week, there's Burton, in a fleece or golf shirt bearing the colors of his car sponsor, ready to give smart, eloquent answers to all the pressing questions affecting his sport and the world beyond.

Like president-elect Barack Obama, for one.

"I've been watching for a long time to figure out what this country was going to do," he said. "I think it's an exciting time for our country. I think there are a lot of people that are nervous, a lot of people that are excited. And it would be that way no matter who won. To me, it's cool that in some ways I'm really excited and looking forward to what could happen in the future, and in other ways I'm really nervous about it. There are a lot of good things that I see there and there are a lot of things that concern me. I don't know. Time will tell, and we'll look back on it and determine what happened here, but I think for our country, and even for the world, it's a remarkable thing for a young guy like that with little experience to be elected president, and of course the first [black] to be elected president. That's some special stuff. That's real special stuff."

Does he enjoy it? It certainly seems so. Regardless, he's very good at it, a master of give-and-take, one of those increasingly rare drivers who understands that the media has a job to do and that the relationship between reporters and competitors doesn't have to be adversarial. No wonder some see him as a natural for the television booth once his driving days are done. But you hear rumblings that Burton, a 41-year-old native of South Boston, Va., has bigger things in mind. It's no secret that he's interested in politics, as his detailed and quite even-handed reaction to Obama's election would attest. Could we one day see a Congressman Burton? A Senator Burton? A Governor Burton? (Continued)