The Middle School Dance

Disclaimer (I’ve been using a lot of them recently): I never went to a middle school dance. We didn’t have them. I’m just borrowing the over-used analogy. Moving on:

Sports announcers love to call tournaments (specifically NCAA Basketball) “the big dance.” This strikes me as odd chiefly because dancing is seen as so feminine in American culture (although it is getting more masculine recognition with the advent of dance reality shows). But, with the death of Teddy Kennedy this past week, I decided that politics isn’t “the big dance,” it’s “the middle school dance.”
Teddy Kennedy, love him or hate him, was a master politician. One of the most liberal members of the Senate in its history, yet he had more friends on the other side of the aisle than nearly any other Democrat (unless you count Joe Lieberman or even Arlen Spekter).

Like girls and boys in middle school, Democrats and Republicans fancy themselves irreconcilably different. Why bother with them? They’re stupid and evil and don’t understand us and my mommy says to stay away from them. So, at middle school dances, most of them separate. Girls on one side, boys on the other. What ensues is generally a far cry from a dance, with the exception of the few brave souls. The few boys who think that one girl is pretty enough to risk all their little egos for will always walk away the stars of the show.

This is where the analogy ends, because in middle school that boy would be insanely happy and spend every possible second with said pretty girl who would become annoyed and realize that she really doesn’t like that boy then go home and write him a note saying that he’s a really nice guy but is weird and smells funny and she doesn’t like him anymore but still wants to be friends which will break the boy’s heart so bad he won’t talk to said pretty girl again until Senior year.

In politics, that little boy stays a hero. Because he risked his ego, something probably got accomplished (or was prevented from being accomplished) that all the little girls worship him. This was Teddy Kennedy. It’s John McCain and Joe Lieberman. It’s the men and women who decide that they can reconcile some differences; they can find a common ground where no one else can. They are the great politicians, because the gathered up enough strength to ask that girl to dance.

-jw