Politics & Power Quote by Jim Sensenbrenner

Baseball is doing double duty here: it is sport as soft power, nostalgia as legislation. Sensenbrenner’s line is deliberately frictionless, the kind of civic wallpaper politicians reach for when they want shared identity without shared controversy. “Has long been” and “many Americans” are the tell; both phrases pad the claim with plausible deniability. Not all Americans cherish baseball, and the speaker knows it, but the sentence performs consensus anyway. That’s the intent: to create a warm, nonpartisan baseline from which almost any policy argument can be launched.

The subtext is cultural ownership. Calling baseball “a national pastime” isn’t a neutral description so much as a vote for which stories count as American. It invokes small-town stadiums, fathers and sons, radio broadcasts, Jackie Robinson heroics, postwar confidence. It also quietly papers over the sport’s messier realities: labor fights, steroid eras, declining youth participation, and the fact that “national” can be a gatekeeping word when the nation is changing. The phrase “many Americans” functions as a rhetorical escape hatch, acknowledging diversity while still privileging an imagined mainstream.

Context matters because Sensenbrenner is a politician, not a poet. This kind of line typically shows up around ceremonial gestures (commemorations, resolutions) or when Congress wants to launder a complicated issue through something unthreatening. Baseball becomes a civic prop: a way to signal heritage, stability, and unity - and to imply that whatever comes next is simply common sense, as traditional as the seventh-inning stretch.