Stop Being a Political Fan. Be a Citizen.

On a Sunday in June of 1951, a few days before my sixth birthday, my father drove his 1949 Pontiac from Hamden, Connecticut to Woodlawn in N.Y. where the parking was $2.00 cheaper than the lots closer to Yankee Stadium. We took the elevated train from there to Jerome Avenue. My mother was probably as avid a fan as my father, but my nine-year-old brother was particularly passionate about his team. It was important to my father that I get to see Joe DiMaggio. He actually carried me to the end of the aisle between those box seats that we couldn’t afford to the railing just before the field of play. He wanted his six-year-old to get a closer look at this important man.

The Democrats have their communist extremists but in recent years they’re no longer trying to distance themselves from these folks.

Why all of this for a baseball player? Joe DiMaggio was the man that bridged that gulf between the Italian immigrants such as my parents’ families and America, their adopted country. Baseball was, after all, America’s great pastime and “Joe D” didn’t merely play the game, he became an American icon. My parents’ strong attachment to their team was part of something larger, something particularly powerful in a “nation of immigrants.” It was years later that I realized that it wasn’t really about baseball.

There was a time when it was not very complex. My father, the self-employed cabinetmaker and carpenter loved that social security program that President Roosevelt delivered. My mother lamented the fact that FDR was never beatified. So, were they Democrats? A year after my first Yankee game both of them voted for the Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower. I don’t think either of them saw themselves as exponents of either party. Ike won World War II and the other guy, Adlai Stevenson, “he was a little wishy-washy” in my mother’s judgment. These uncomplicated and moderately educated people got it; they knew the difference between being a fan and being a citizen.

I have been a voter for a little more than 60 years and I have been evenly split at this point in my life between the two parties. The first 30 were informed not only by my mother’s influence and her favor for FDR but also by the dazzling spirit of the young John F Kennedy. “We will put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth.” He had me at the word “moon”! He was handsome, a war hero, he stood up to the Soviet Union, and he went to Mass on Sunday just the way we did. I contested nothing and went all in on the civil rights legislation as well as space travel.

Then life intervened: marriage, law school, beginning a law practice raising a family. Ronald Reagan projected clarity and strength which was as attractive to me as JFK’s boldness in the face of the menacing Soviet missiles. His economic conservativism made sense to a young entrepreneur and family man. And yet I voted for the Democrat, Joe Lieberman twice. He always was, it seemed to me a good and decent fellow.

Something has changed in the last several decades. As political people, we’re acting more as fans for our favorite team than we are as citizens. In two world wars the White House was held by Democrats, and we were guided to victory by them with the support of Republicans throughout the government. The Democrat party that saw JFK get in the face of Nikita Kruschev and force that communist bully to take his missiles out of Cuba now welcomes into their senate caucus Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed democratic socialist. The Democrat leadership made him the Chair of the Leadership Committee. A few months ago in Maine, the Democratic Party put forward a person to challenge for the available Senate seat with so much political “baggage” — much of it known, or at least knowable, before he was selected — that he had to be removed. This once great party that won me over as a young man seems to be slipping away.

Republicans are hurt by this shift in the Democrat party. All of this resonates with me because I’m not a fan of the Republican party as much as I am a concerned citizen. If we end up with only one political party having any chance at success, we’re not much better off than we are with a government dominated by a socialist strong man. Republicans will give us a better effort if they are challenged.

That challenge is what has given us the political efficiency of the two-party system. Where a majority of people in the Republican party were right of center in varying degrees, so too were the Democrats left of center, also in varying degrees. Each had to make excuses for the more embarrassing members far out on the edges of that spectrum, like that goofy uncle that lived in the basement apartment in your house. “He lives with us because there really isn’t anywhere else for him to go.” Democrats and Republicans alike have those “relatives” living in their basements and are uncomfortable when they have to introduce them to company. The problem becomes acute when that crazy uncle decides he should sit at the head of the Thanksgiving dinner table.

The Democrats have their communist extremists but in recent years they’re no longer trying to distance themselves from these folks. All across the country people are flying the Democrat banner while championing socialism and communism. If this migration to the extreme is successful in gaining control of the party but unsuccessful in gaining political power the Republicans are in a far less vulnerable place.

But I want them to be vulnerable. I want them to know that I might vote for someone like Joe Lieberman. I don’t want the choice that Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Saunders projects, to wit, between Republicans and Crazy; I want a real choice.

When we have real choices, our party (whichever one it is) becomes more responsive. When the politically empowered party announces at the meeting of the Board of Selectmen that two new police cruisers will be purchased, I want them to know that the other party is going to insist that we put this purchase out to bid instead of going to the First Selectman’s brother-in-law. The political competition provides that oversight that allows me to go about my daily life without having to examine every little detail of my elected representatives’ actions.

It isn’t that I want my party to fail but I want them to know they can lose. On that day in 1951 at Yankee Stadium my parents helped me to understand what it meant to be a fan at the ballpark. Through the years they also taught me how not to be a fan in the voting booth.

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