Of Democrats and Baseball

“Is this heaven?” …”No, it’s primary season”..”Let’s go back into the corn.”

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.- B. Giamatti

I have stated on more than one occasion that I am not a "progressive".

I am a liberal. I’m a Democrat and I’m a liberal. Nothing more, nothing less.

To my way of thinking, people who call themselves "progressives" are painfully earnest people who, to paraphrase the words of Ani DiFranco, "can’t order lunch without it being political". People like that make me itch if not recoil in horror (in a roundabout way, that was my point here). I don’t sit around flipping through copies of Democracy Today anxiously taking surveys to find out whether I’m a "classical liberal" or a "Jacksonian" or an "Anarcho-syndicalist" (which would look pretty cool on a business card when you think about it). Trust me: life is too short for navel-gazing

In light of all of all of this, I suggest that you go read Lance Mannion, who boils Our Stupid Democratic Season down to this:

Concerned readers sometimes write in to ask, "Lance, how can you be a Democrat! Don’t they break your heart every single day of the week?"

Some of them.

But this is something I learned growing up listening to Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill. You’re a Democrat because you want to see certain things get done and unfortunately you need politicians to get them done and politicians are just people, often significantly flawed people. Saints become nurses and doctors and teachers and missionaries. They don’t go into politics. This is what I’ve learned on the blogosphere. The difference between Democrats and a lot of self-styled Progressives is Democrats want certain things to get done; Progressives want a lot of the same things to get done but they want a certain type of person to be the one to get them done.

I’ll tell you, that kind of person doesn’t usually go into politics, and when they do they don’t often get very far.

I’m not bragging when I tell you this, though. Pop Mannion is that kind of person, as close as you can get anyway, and I’ll tell you this too. If you’d voted for him for town supervisor, the odds are he’d have broken your heart at least a half dozen times during both of this long tenures in the job. You know why? Because he’s still just a human being. He couldn’t do everything he wanted to. He couldn’t please everybody he needed to please. He couldn’t be everything to everybody and whenever he had to choose what he could be to whom he broke a lot of people’s hearts.

In the end, what there was was what he’d gotten done, which was considerable, considering. And that’s what he’d tell you to look at. The point wasn’t who was supervisor. The point was what got done.

The point isn’t Obama. The point isn’t Clinton. The point is what is the next Democratic President going to get done, and neither one is going to get everything they want done. Either one is going to have to make choices that are going to break hearts.

Go read the whole thing.