James Carville and Paul Begala pointed out this problem in their 2006 book, Take It Back:  Our Party, Our Country, Our Future:  “Republicans work the refs;  Democrats do not.”  I am willing to take their word on this point, as well as their belief that learning to work the refs will help the Democrats.

But the problem is not just that Democrats need to work harder and smarter at pushing their agenda in the media.  The more worrisome problem for Democrats and citizens in general is that these so-called media refs don’t seem to understand what referees are supposed to do.

I’ve spent most of my life on the fringes of the world of basketball, as a season-ticket-holder of a major league baseball team, as an NFL fan. I’ve seen good referees (or umpires), bad ones, and one or two that I thought were cheating.  I’ve also seen coaches and managers work the refs.  For those of us who have invested big parts of our lives in the world of sports, the give-and-take between refs and coaches is intrinsic to the games, part of a balance that keeps everyone more or less honest, that keeps the games fair even in hostile environments or emotionally-charged circumstances.

For example, most games have some kind of built-in imbalance that has nothing to do with talent, preparation or performance: home-field advantage, stirring Cinderella narratives, poignant comebacks, players or teams on the verge of making history.  The job of the ref is to push aside the drama and passion and partisanship and focus on fairness, defined as “playing by the rules.”  In these situations, “working the refs” serves to remind them what’s at stake, to remind them that it is their responsibility to be fair, to make judgments that, in the end, added up collectively, give each team a chance to win the game on its own merits, within the rules.  That is what makes the outcome of a game meaningful:  fair competition inside the rules.

The main work of the referee, then, is to protect the integrity of the game itself.

Imagine, then, the biggest game in our lifetime, in the most important sport.  Imagine that the referees in this game believe their job is to give good calls to the team whose coach “works” them faster and harder. For these refs, it doesn’t matter when the party in power claims to be the party of change.  Or when a clearly unqualified candidate is presented as more qualified than her opponents. It doesn’t matter that a man who votes 90% of the time with the unpopular incumbent claims to be a maverick.  It doesn’t matter that we are involved in two wars, that the economy is in terrible trouble, that a major American city was destroyed because the government did not fix the levees or care for the wetlands, that our dependence on foreign oil makes us vulnerable to our enemies, or that global climate change threatens the whole globe.  One team wants the refs to focus on lipstick on a pig. So they cover lipstick on a pig.

That isn’t working the refs.   Even crooked refs still know what the game is, what the rules are, and why they matter.  The mainstream media has forgotten that what is at stake in an election is our democracy.  What is at stake is the future of our children and the planet.  That the job of a free press is to protect the democracy, in this case, to protect the system of free and fair elections from those who would trivialize them, disrupt them, manipulate them or steal them.

Nobody’s working the refs.  The refs left the building long ago.