Okay, so lots of confusion and grief and gnashing of teeth out there over why my adopted state, Massachusetts, just elected a Republican nudie model to fill the seat once held by Ted Kennedy.
I’m gonna try to explain, but I warn you upfront that my explanation isn’t going to make you feel any better, and likely somewhat worse, and maybe even nauseous. Sorry.
Here’s what it comes down to: Sports Talk Radio.
I realize that a lot of you don’t listen to Sports Talk Radio (STR), that you have better things to do with your time, such as, well, pretty much anything.
But I do listen to STR, in particular to Boston’s dominant station, WEEI, despite the fact that I despise all the Boston teams and particularly their loathsome, whiny, self-pitying fans. (I really am just a very fucked up person.)
Still, perhaps the only redeeming effect of listening to STR on a regular basis is that you develop a good sense of what a significant segment of our citizenry is actually feeling – as opposed to telling pollsters. These are men, mostly, but also some women, who spend a lot of time in their vehicles, which transport them (often through homicidal traffic) from spirit-deadening jobs to various bars and homes, where they sit before the televised deeds of muscular supermen, rooting with the purest parts of themselves, in order to feel alive. For additional details, I refer you to Frederick Exley’s transcendentally sad and lovely novel, A Fan’s Note.
STR listeners, in other words, are what you might call “results oriented” people. In this sense, they are merely an exaggerated version of the rest of us. What they want is for their team to “come to play” and “give 110 percent” and “kick ass and take names” and so forth and so on into the great cliché-ridden-almost-eerily-self-helpish STR sunset.
They are not “policy oriented” people. They don’t really care that Scott Brown is a lightweight peddling the boiler-plate bromides, any more than they care that Martha Coakley is an experienced state-wide official. Because, to them, it’s not about governance. It’s about the game.
To them, Brown became an archetype: the fearless underdog, the scrappy rookie poised to pull the big upset. He introduced voters to his truck and worked the crowds tirelessly in a working man’s jacket and talked up his hardscrabble upbringing and his service in the National Guard. (“I’m just proud to serve and be part of the team.”)
As for Coakley, she played her given role with excruciating precision. She was sober in word and manner, appeared at very few events, and in general shunned the groveling theatrics inherent to modern politics. In response to a question about this low-key approach, she said, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”
This is not, as they say, coming to play. This is not giving 110 percent.
Coakley sealed her fate with the STR crowd when she called the former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling a Yankee fan. Schilling, who briefly considered running for the Senate seat as a Republican, is an authenticated Saint within Red Sox Nation, thanks to his role in the team’s endlessly ballyhooed 2004 World Series win. He’s also never met a microphone he didn’t like.
And so these Coakley “gaffes” were discussed endlessly, and in furious gusts, on STR, and on the right-wing radio programs that dominate the public airwaves in Boston. For the final 48 hours of the campaign, as Coakley and Obama and Clinton scrambled to rally the team, the AM dial became one continuous bellowing ad for Scott Brown. The returns spoke for themselves: Coakley got her base out – and Brown over-performed.
But I’m not just blaming the meatheads on STR for this loss. To a greater extent than anyone cares to acknowledge, the STR mindset is the true winner here.
After all, the folks at NPR and CNN et al wanted this to be a ballgame more than anyone. They’re the ones who routinely reduce our elections to sporting events, with the same incessant focus on who’s ahead and who’s behind and who dropped the ball. They routinely hype matters of astonishing superficiality rather than assessing the qualifications and intended policy of the candidates. And they will do the same thing in the midterms of 2010.
If Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress want to avoid getting bitch-slapped this fall, they’d do well to tune in to the perpetually aggrieved frequencies of STR.
What they’d learn is this: Americans want a winner, someone who projects strength and assurance and who gets shit done and doesn’t apologize for what he’s done, and furthermore who knocks the shit out of anyone who questions his methods or motives.
George W. Bush worked this mojo for eight years, until his inability to run the country became so obvious that Dick Cheney had to start shooting his friends in the face. Better strong and wrong, then right and weak, pardner.
The nutso thing, of course, is that Obama and the democrats are right. Our health care system and financial sectors were fucked by Republican-sponsored greed. We are going to get plowed by China and India if we don’t get serious about energy independence. Our foreign policy under Bush was lethally stupid and costly.
We, as a people, should be volcanically angry at anyone who says otherwise. Obama himself should be knocking the poop out of the Republicans for impeding the moral progress of this country. Every single day. He should be reminding every yammering idiot who listens to STR that he won the election and that the Republicans – along with their corporate sponsored tea-party festivals of ignorance – are nothing more than whiny losers trying to protect their special interest bacon, and that he’s going to ram the great ball of morally-sound policy down their fucking throats on behalf of his constituents until they grow the balls to stop him.
This is all very sad. The leader of a mature democracy shouldn’t have to think or behave like this. I know that. But it’s where we are as a nation – from Cape Cod to Capitola.
Game on, motherfuckers.
13 responses
It’s like the tag line in that by-the-numbers thriller: “Harrison Ford is the President of the United States of America.” Republican primary voters thought John McCain was the Harrison Ford of the movie (or Bill Pullman, who’s a fighter pilot-president), but he turned out to be completely out of his league — the Harrison Ford of just about every movie since.
Yes, yes, yes.
Steve Almond for Congress?
This is the truth. Excellent essay.
It frustrates the hell out of me that democrats are so…weak. Events have completely discredited Republican policies. It is staring everyone in the face. But democratic senators cave and cave. Then, when they lose, they think its because they weren’t conservative enough. It’s just that we can tell when they won’t stand up for what they really believe.
Another great essay about a similar theme:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200704/?read=article_rotella
Steve,
This seems almost stereotypically elitist to me. People who like sports=dumb, Democrats=smart.
Is that really your stance? I know a lot of intelligent people who like sports. Honestly, it sounds like your jumper sucked and you got swatted every time you drove the lane in high school. A better response than “Well, people who listen to sports talk radio are retards” would probably be, “It’s not that surprising that a state that elected a Republican Mormon governor would also elect a Republican senator.”
Ben, if that’s all you take away from this article, well, then you tell us a lot about yourself and your reading ability. What Steve is talking about is the idea that the horse race coverage that the press provides helps create the sports talk radio feel that comes to pervade our political discourse. Ideas don’t matter when the substance of an election is about who wins and who loses, who can take it to the hole and who’s going to get swatted, instead of which candidate is interested in the long term problems this country and the state he or she represents currently face.
Back in 2005, when Rep. John Murtha called for withdrawal from Iraq and was attacked by Dick Cheney, Murtha appeared on a political talk show and said, “Cheney’s a friend of mine, but he’s wrong.” I never forgot this comment for its simplicity and directness. Democrats need to be more direct and to make more of an effort to connect with blue-collar voters, and if that means some occasional sports metaphors, that’s not automatically a bad thing.
By the way, as a fan of both basketball and the language, I have to point out that one of the most overused phrases in news coverage – “slam dunk” – shows absolutely no understanding of the game. A slam dunk looks simple, but it isn’t–and if you miss it, you look really, really bad. In that sense, you could certainly apply it to Martha Coakley’s campaign.
hey ben. i like sports. i listen to STR. and i know defensive insecure bullshit when i hear it. howzabout you stop driving down the lane of your own rhetorical genius and focus on what you’re reading.
I’ve been in LA over 20 years, but I can’t wash the Massachusetts out of my system. Steve is right. Anyone who’s ever driven in MA or had a drink in nearly any bar in MA, would understand the sports analogy. The state is small, usually broke and suffers an entrenched infrastructure in Boston. The weather is also unpredictable and often atrocious. It makes for a certain kind of myopia in its residents.
The bigger picture of course, is that the Democrats have no clue how to function like Republicans and march in lock step on the important issues. They are grossly out of touch with their base, which used to be made up of working class, social moderates, who didn’t trust big business. They’ve fooled themselves into believing that we desire nuance and subtlety,
which is a joke in the age of “reality” programming.
I agree with Jane that a sports metaphor is not necessarily a bad thing. Reaching out to people with language they feel comfortable with is populism and for better, or worse, it is the game many voters are listening to now. Personally, I would like to see President Obama pull a Cheney and tersely tell his critics to go fuck themselves. I have a feeling that if he starts to swing the big bat, more seats would be filled in the stadium.
I supported, donated to and ultimately voted for Obama in what I considered the proudest moment I could have in a voting booth. There was no way the man was going to live up to the lofty hype we had all created, and happily bought in to. However, I never thought the man, and the party, would turn into such a gaggle of pussy footing bitches.
I couldn’t agree more that “This is all very sad. The leader of a mature democracy shouldn’t have to think or behave like this.” Yet having just lived through 8 years of the shoe being on the other foot, how else is one of the biggest clusterfucks in American history supposed to be cleaned up?
The Dems had their super majority and they pissed it away instead of telling the Right to zip it because the adults were talking. I hope this “surprising” win doesn’t lead to a scaling back of the goals of the adminstration, like the pundits are suggesting, I hope it’s taken like the opposing pitcher hitting your star slugger. They can either tuck their tails and limp back to the dugout or channel their inner Don Drysedale and take out three of the other cocksuckers. The game is clearly on and we’re about to see whose house it really is.
i’m kind of in love with nate. his post is basically what i was trying to say, distilled.
Hey Steve, I really like the piece, and I think there’s a lot of truth in it, but I don’t think A FAN’S NOTES is a novel. I think it falls almost exactly between the cracks, as regards genre.
All my best, and you owe me a copy of your pamphlet-y thing, you motherfucker.
Great write up, and hilarious (and accurate) add-on by Nate.
Dead-bang bulls-eye analysis. Well played.
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