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I love everything Bryan Curtis writes for Grantland. His winning streak continues here as he examines about how politicians can't stop swinging at baseball metaphors.
This spring, when Harry Reid announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate, he could have picked any number of rhetorical flourishes. He could have gone full statesman, ŕ la George Washington. He could have shivved his old bęte noire, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He could have again insisted, for the hell of it, that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for a decade. But Reid, as they say, threw a curveball.
“I want to be able to go out at the top of my game,” he told the New York Times. “I don’t want to be a 42-year-old trying to become a designated hitter.”
Reid had deployed a baseball metaphor. And a rare, bipartisan caucus decided the metaphor was … really good. “That’s about the most articulate thing I’ve ever heard from Harry Reid,” the conservative writer Charles Krauthammer told me recently.
“It’s not bad,” agreed George Will. “He should aspire to be Edgar Martinez.”
Two weeks ago, Reid sat in the minority leader’s office, with hands clasped and ankles crossed, talking about the baseball metaphor in American politics. It was Seersucker Thursday in the Senate. On a muted TV, McConnell wandered the Senate floor in light-blue pastels like a man trying to give away a mint julep. “That’s not really Reid’s style,” an aide told me. Reid had opted for a plain black suit. The dark glasses he has worn since a January exercise mishap gave him the air of an aging creative writing professor. Behind Reid hung a portrait of Mark Twain, who once said baseball was the perfect metaphor for “the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!”
Did you have any 42-year-old DHs in mind when you came up with that line? I asked Reid.
“Rodriguez has surprised me, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “He’s only 40, but he’s surprised me. As far as we know, without juice.”
When Reid ventured a baseball metaphor, he joined one of the few unbroken traditions in American politics. During Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign, a political cartoon cast Lincoln as a “run” and his three opponents as “outs.” Warren Harding asked the American public to “strive for production as Babe Ruth strives for home runs.” At an exhibit at the George W. Bush presidential library in Dallas, great baseball metaphors of the POTUSes are painted on the walls as if they were choice cuts from the Gettysburg Address.
Some baseball metaphors, like Reid’s, transcend mere filler. They’re fiendishly clever or awfully strange and help us understand the labyrinthine world of politics. And some baseball metaphors — as McConnell was saying on the Senate floor that day, about a slightly different subject — constitute a “threat that is literally impossible to overstate.” These metaphors are the cheapest form of rhetorical base-covering — or, in some cases, a complete whiff. |
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