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I was watching a baseball game with a friend the other day. During one at-bat, my friend remarked how much he disliked the hitter, saying that he was all about making money and was not a “team player”. I found the irony of the statement profound, considering that the same player was once beloved by my friend, when that person was a member of the team my friend supported.
One of the most common trends in all of sports is to love the players on your favorite team, thinking they can do no wrong. We set these people up to be role models for our kids, and we all love to point out what good citizens they are in addition to their athletic prowess. Hero-worship usually stops there however, as we all tend to loathe members of all opposing teams, thinking of them as two-dimensional villainous characters. Essentially, we root for laundry in sports – supporting the uniform rather than any individual player.
I believe that the same section of our brain that we use to justify this logic is also used when we think about politics. It's sad, too - considering that we should be using our whole brain when considering how to vote on the issues that have a fundamental impact on all of our lives. Based largely on your political affiliation, you likely think that the members of your party are essentially moral do-gooders who have made great sacrifices to better your quality of life. Members who represent the other party, however, are usually greedy self-promoters who put the best interests of themselves over any betterment of their country, usually at the expense of the population as a whole.
Television, radio, and the print media (as well as the blogosphere) have all picked up on this unspoken sentiment and have used it with great success. Based on the promotion of this premise, it seems that partisanship has gotten out of hand, especially over the past few years. Shows like Hardball, Crossfire, and Hannity & Colmes have created a popular format where any issue of the day is “debated” between two people whose only job is to offer talking points and insults. Even if you’re a fan of these shows (I admit they are a guilty pleasure), they really don’t fall under the format of real discussion. Rather, they devalue whatever the topic du-jour might be for that show by allowing their guests to assign all the world’s troubles to their opponent. Certain topics also lose some merit because even the most cut-and-dried issues are often given “equal time” among opponents, thus giving legitimacy to a side of an argument that really should be regarded lightly, at best.
Is this really the best we can do? Granted, I’m a Democrat, but I’d like to think that if a Republican came up with a good idea that I wouldn’t immediately dismiss it based solely upon the source. At the same time, it frustrates me to no end when someone from my party introduces a bill that immediately gets shelved because the Republican Party does not want a Democrat to get any credit for anything that might make them look good.
Sadly, this practice has not only become common procedure in Washington, it has become the primary mechanism for how the entire institution operates. It seems that the only game played in the halls of congress anymore is politics. Public service left town a long time ago. Seemingly, so did altruism. This vacancy has been filled by unproductive game-playing, mixed with self-promotion and career advancement.
Recently, GOP pollster Frank Luntz issued a playbook for Republicans to use for the 2006 mid-term elections. Even though he is a complete partisan, Luntz is a master of the use of strategic language to persuade voters into electing his candidates. Much of his work focuses on specific words to use that trigger positive emotions into voters’ minds when thinking about Republican candidates. He is also an expert on how to paint political opponents in a harsh light while not appearing to be a “negative” campaigner. One of the points he stresses most in his playbook is to use the term “bipartisan” as often as possible whenever you are stumping for votes. Apparently, we Americans love that word, and react positively to getting it drilled into our skulls.
In practice, of course, members of both parties generally avoid any sort of bipartisan action. The Democratic Party was not completely gracious to the GOP during its decades-long control of the House of Representatives, and the Republicans are more than exacting revenge now that they have control of both the House and Senate.
Being a Democrat, it hurts me to see such abuses of power against my party taking place. To combat it, I will continue to work for the promotion of Democratic candidates at the local, state, and national levels. I will do so because they better represent the progressive point of view that I hold dear. However, I hope that the candidates I choose to support will have a more even temperament than the incumbents from both sides that fill our elective offices today. Politics should be about ideas, spirited debate, and a thorough vetting process for all strategies so that the public as a whole might benefit. Politics without these ideals are just an extension of sports, only the athletes are much fatter and far less fun to watch in action.
If you want to blindly root for your side, go right ahead – but please leave that mentality to things like baseball. That way if your favorite team loses, you might feel temporarily depressed, but at least no one goes hungry.
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