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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Democratic Red Sox fans are asked which they'd choose: A World Series or a Kerry White House. The question gives them nightmares.
Oct 15, 2004 | The cool October nights aren't providing much relief for those sweating through the anxieties of the season. Just before we hit the sack, we are pummeled by presidential debates, recent polling numbers, the Yankees-Red Sox playoff games.
To those already sneering at the comparative psychological tolls of a presidential election and a game played by grown men with sticks, I say: You have never been baseball fans, never known the gnarled poses of supplication. Defeat. Despair.
Yes, the upcoming election may be the most important of our lifetime. Civil rights, the planet's resources, America's place in the world, and thousands of lives hang in the balance. But the Red Sox have not won a World Series since 1918. Not long after that, they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees and have been paying the accursed price in flameout losses to them ever since.
The final lap of a major election, like the hours before a baseball game, comes down to blind, zinging hope that too often gets bludgeoned till it's dead. This binds the nausea of baseball fandom to the queasiness of political investment; on game days and Election Day, those who care wake up with butterflies, knowing by day's end (depending on Florida) some higher power will have etched another hatch mark in their personal win/loss columns.
So with that in mind, we called up those at the crux of the thing: dedicated Democratic Red Sox fans. In the spirit of the metaphysical deals we strike -- "I will not have another sip of this beer if we get out of this inning," "I will never complain about my in-laws again if they vote for Kerry in Cleveland" -- we asked them to make a choice. If this year they were allowed only one victory -- a Red Sox World Series or a John Kerry presidency -- which would it be?
"Oh God, you can't do this to me," was the first response of director Ken Burns ("Baseball," "The Civil War"), and he was not alone. There was a lot of moaning and groaning, mostly because, as several respondents admitted, exactly this type of Faustian proposition had already crossed their minds, and none relished the idea of addressing it.
"For a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and a Red Sox fan since 1938 at the age of 4 and a half, that is an impossible choice," said Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate and now a Northeastern political science professor, via e-mail. "I want them both to win, and I believe they will."
Presidential historian and baseball memoirist Doris Kearns Goodwin took a night -- the night of Game 1, which New York won 10-7 -- to consider the question. Because she is a television political commentator, she weighed the impact of a Red Sox victory against the impact of a presidential election, without specific reference to John Kerry. "From the moment I'm fully awake until the end of the day, I know the choice of president is more important than a Red Sox victory," she said. Goodwin's son, a Harvard graduate, joined the Army after Sept. 11, spent a year in Baghdad, and is now in Germany; he still has 15 months to serve. But, she continued, "I would suspect if the question were asked me when I first woke up in the morning or was falling asleep at night, when I'm guided by my unconscious rather than my reason, I would say that the Red Sox victory was primary. It's that moment, before you come into full consciousness..." Goodwin trailed off and then laughed. "I have dreamed for so many years about what it would be like to wake up in the morning and know we had won the World Series."
