The GOP's Run

The Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.” I would add that those who cannot remember history are condemned to be baffled by current events.

Take the Presidential election. There is a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats these days. They are mystified – utterly mystified – that the Republican candidate for President is even remotely competitive in this race, despite the widespread belief that the Bush Presidency has been disastrous. They are like Jets fans who can’t understand why, even after Tom Brady got hurt and the Patriots went with some near-sighted high school kid at quarterback, they still lost. (I could probably push this metaphor with a Favre/Obama comparison, but I don’t want to lose my international readers…)

When asked to explain why this race remains competitive, most Democrats have theories that range from the inherent racism of America to the treachery of Republican party operatives. I don’t quite buy into either of these theories but that is a subject for another day.
I will, however, explain why the Obama coronation has been delayed.

If you’re a regular reader of FreeTime, you've guessed my theory will be historical and statistical in nature. It’s really quite simple: in Presidential politics, the United States is Republican.

I was born in 1966, and there have been 10 Presidential elections in my lifetime. The Republican party has dominated those elections, even more than people realize. Here are the stats:

+ Republicans are 7-3.

+ Two of the Republican victories were huge landslides – Nixon in ‘72 and Reagan in ‘84.

+ Two others were near landslides – Reagan in ‘80 and Bush 41 in ’88. In each of these elections the Republican candidate received more than 400 electoral college votes.

+ Democrats, meanwhile, are 3-7.

+ None of those wins were landslides, or near-landslides. The most electoral votes won by a Democrat in my lifetime is 379 (Clinton ’96).

+ In two of those wins – the Clinton elections – the Democrat failed to win 50% of the vote. In fact, if Ross Perot doesn’t win 18% of the vote in ’92, George H.W. Bush likely wins reelection.

+ And in only one of those wins – Jimmy Carter in 1976 – did a Democrat win 50% of the vote. In 1975 Republican Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, a catastrophe for the Republican party. Still, Democrat Jimmy Carter only barely managed to eke out 50.1% of the vote and a 297-240 electoral college vote.
To sum up: Republicans win every Presidential election, sometimes by wide margins, unless some fluke event (Perot, Watergate) tips it to the Democrats.
The Lesson of ‘32
Of course, things change. From 1860, when Lincoln became the first Republican President until 1932, when FDR took office, the White House was nearly the sole property of the Republican party. During that 72 year period, Grover Cleveland was the only Democrat who won a head to head election against a Republican*. 72 years! That's as long as John McCain has been alive!

How did this extraordinary electoral run end? Calamity struck Wall Street, Democrats took the White House, and held it for 7 of the next 9 elections.
Hmmm...what was it that Santayana guy said?
* A little detail here...Lincoln, a Republican, chose Andrew Johnson, a Border State War Democrat, as his VP in 1864, to prepare for the healing with the South. Upon Lincoln's assassination, Johnson became President. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran a 3rd party campaign against his former VP, William Taft, which lifted Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House. Wilson won reelection in 1916. Republicans won the other 12 elections. All of which makes Grover Cleveland's accomplishment one of the great electoral victories in American history.
Update (9/25): I've gotten a few emails about the 2000 election, in which Al Gore out-polled George Bush in the popular vote. The score was 50,999,897 (48.4%) to 50,445,002 (48.4%), but Bush won the electoral vote.
But here's the thing about 2000. Putting aside the Florida debacle and the Supreme Court, the election was essentially a tie. But it shouldn't have been. The Democrats had an outgoing popular President. The country was at peace and seemingly prosperous. The Democratic nominee had an impressive record of public service from the military to the Senate, and was unencumbered by his predecessor's scandal; in fact, he was arguably the most effective Veep in history. The Republican nominee was the formerly ne'er-do-well son of a former President who had only recently entered public office.
The Dems should have won easily, as easily as Reagan's Veep won in '88. Instead, they lost on a questionable call in the bottom of the 16th inning.

Controlled Experiments

TOM BRADY'S INJURY MAY ANSWER SOME INTERESTING QUESTIONS

When Tom Brady went down in the first quarter of the first game of the 2008 season, I had two immediate reactions.

The first was: “Shoot, there goes my fantasy football season.” Only 5 days earlier, I had used the #3 overall pick in the Murray Fantasy League on Brady, hoping he’d repeat his spectacular 2008 season (4800 yards, 50 TDs). So much for that plan.

But the second was, Hmm….this is as close as you can get to a controlled experiment to test two fascinating premises:

1. Is Bill Belichick a genius?
2. Can Randy Moss make any QB great?

Chickens & Eggs – Is Belichick a Genius?
Here’s your FreeTime fun fact of the day: there are 12 Super Bowl era head coaches in the NFL Hall of Fame. 10 of them had the good fortune of coaching at least one quarterback who is also in the Hall of Fame.

George Allen (Sonny Jurgenson)
Weeb Ewbank (John Unitas, Joe Namath)

Bud Grant (Fran Tarkenton)
Tom Landry (Roger Staubach)
Marv Levy (Jim Kelly)
Vince Lombardi (Bart Starr)
Chuck Noll (Terry Bradshaw)
Don Shula (John Unitas, Bob Griese, Dan Marino)
Hank Stram (Len Dawson)
Bill Walsh (Joe Montana)

The 11th, John Madden, had Kenny Stabler. During Madden’s coaching career Stabler made four Pro Bowls*, won an NFL MVP, and twice led the league in TD passes. Stabler is arguably the best NFL quarterback not in the Hall of Fame. He was certainly better than Namath and Griese.

The 12th is Joe Gibbs. Joe Gibbs won 3 Super Bowls with 3 different quarterbacks, none of whom were serious contenders for Canton. If you want to argue Joe Gibbs is the greatest coach of the modern era, you’ll get no argument here.

Bill Belichick is also Hall-bound, and like most of the others will be joined by his quarterback. But now we get to find out – can he succeed without Tom Brady?

Remember that this isn’t the first time Belichick lost his star quarterback. In the 2nd game of the 2001 season, Drew Bledsoe went down, and Belichick was forced to turn to his untested 6th round draft pick, Tom Brady. The rest is history.

Eggs & Chickens – Does the receiver make the quarterback?
Maybe it’s not the head coach who makes the quarterback successful, or vice-versa. Maybe, just maybe, the most important guy on the field is the superstar wide receiver.

Wide receivers don’t get much love. 32 quarterbacks and 17 running backs have won an MVP, as have one defensive tackle and one linebacker. Hell, even a kicker won one (Mark Moseley, who missed 3 XPs that year) . But no wide receiver has ever been considered most valuable. (Maybe that’s why so many of them are assholes.)

And yet, there is significant statistical evidence that great wide receivers turn otherwise mundane quarterbacks into very good quarterbacks, and very good quarterbacks into great ones. Head over to pro-football-reference.com and look at the numbers for Jeff Garcia, Daunte Culpepper, Donovan McNabb, Randall Cunningham and Tom Brady.

Notice anything? All of them had crazy-good seasons when they were throwing to guys named Terrell Owens and Randy Moss – and less than crazy-good seasons the rest of the time.

Donovan McNabb has been a solid NFL quarterback who has led his team to many playoff appearances and appeared in five Pro Bowls, But his 2004 season stands out. He posted, by far, his best numbers in TD passes, yardage, QB rating, and completion percentage. It was the only full season he spent with T.O.

Jeff Garcia had 3 full seasons with T.O. He averaged 3720 yards and 28 TDs (30+ in two of them), and went to three straight Pro Bowls. He has been a sub-par quarterback the rest of his career.

Culpepper had three 16-game seasons with Moss at wideout. He threw for over 30 TDs in two of them, and made the Pro Bowl all 3. Since 2004, their last season together, he has been injured and ineffective and is now out of football.

My favorite is Cunningham. In 1998 Randall Cunningham was 35 years old, his best years well behind him, when he suddenly had a career year. Eight years removed from his last Pro Bowl appearance, he threw for 34 TDs, led the league with a 106.0 QB rating, and received his first and only All-Pro selection. Naturally, he was throwing to Moss that year.

And then there is the strange case of Thomas Edward Brady. Tom Brady won 3 Super Bowls before Randy Moss ever got to Foxboro, so he didn’t need Moss to be a great quarterback. But he did need Moss to become a great passer – which some people think is an integral part of the quarterback position.

Prior to Moss’ lining up alongside him, Brady had been a very good passer, but not a great one. He led the league in yards one year and TD passes another (with an unimpressive league leading 28). He had a very good TD/INT rate, and kept his QB rating in the mid-80’s to low 90’s. He was over 60% every year in pass completion percentage.

But he had never thrown for 30 TDs (those guys above all threw for 30+ when throwing to Moss/TO). He had only one 4000 yard season. And while he made a few Pro Bowls, he never made All-Pro.

Then Moss signed with the Patriots, and Tom Brady re-wrote the record books. Anyone with an objective mind would have to think, hmmm, Moss made him much better.

Have Fun Storming the Cassel
How will Bill Belichick do with Matt Cassel at quarterback? How will Cassel do with Moss?

He’s not the ideal quarterback for our controlled experiment because we have no benchmark to compare his performance. I’d rather it be Brian Griese or Kerry Collins or some guy who has a track record. In other words, we have no idea how good/bad Cassel is, so it's difficult to determine what kind of impact Belichick/Moss are having on him.

But consider this: in his few fleeting moments on an NFL gridiron, he has played what amounts to a full game. And it was a pretty good game: 22 of 39 for 255 yards, 2 TDs and a pick.

With Belichick coaching, Moss receiving, and the rest of that well-run machine that is the New England Patriots, I’m betting they are playing football this January.

* A quick primer on the difference between Pro Bowl and All Pro. The Pro Bowl is like the All Star game - full rosters of 45 guys from each conference are selected. Starters, reserves - plus replacements for injured players. All total, over 100 players are "Pro Bowlers" every year. All Pro is a much higher honor. Each year, the Associated Press selects one guy at every position for their All Pro team. So, Tom Brady has been selected to four Pro Bowls, but was not selected All Pro until last year. Peyton Manning, a much better passer than Brady till last year, has gone to 8 Pro Bowls and was selected All Pro three times. Amazingly, in 2006, Manning led the league in TD passes and QB rating and was 2nd in yards, but didn't make All Pro.

She Shoots...She Scores!!

Back during the 2004 convention season I thought Republicans had one huge overlooked advantage over Democrats: celebrities.

No, not Hollywood celebrities. That peculiar crowd will always provide their dubious support for Democrats. I’m talking about political celebrities. And in 2004, the biggest political celebrities in America were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudolph Giuliani, both of whom were principal speakers at the GOP convention in New York.

The Democrats didn’t have that kind of star power. There were the Clintons, of course, but they’d been around a while and Democrats were concerned Bill’s rock-star status diminished their candidate. And there was a little-known freshman Senator from Illinois who made a splash with a stirring speech. But they simply couldn’t match the firepower of Rudy, Ah-nuld, and a still-popular President.

The Republicans got a 5% bounce from their convention, the Democrats a “negative bounce” of 2%, and Bush was reelected.

This year has been different. Every ounce of glamour, celebrity power, media fawning, and rock star status has been tied to the candidacy of that little-known Senator, now the world-famous Barack Obama. Until last night. Last night, a star was born.

Sarah Palin gave a speech that rivals some of the great convention speeches of my lifetime, such as Mario Cuomo in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2004.

Rhetorically, it was nothing special. On a printed page, it wouldn’t stand up against the best speeches of Obama, Clinton or even Bush – whose speech of September 20, 2001 earned its place in history.

But in terms of delivery and political effectiveness, she hit it out of the park. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say she slapped it into the net.

In her Wall Street Journal column yesterday, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan gave the following advice to Palin:

A voter laughing is half yours, and just received a line he can repeat next weekend over a beer at the barbecue or online at Starbucks. Here is a fact of American politics: If you make us laugh we spread your line for free.

Two of Palin's lines last night - "Lipstick" and "the difference between a community organizer and a small-town mayor" - are already being spread by voters for free..

Halftime
We shouldn’t get too carried away here. It might feel like we’re at the 2-minute warning of this Presidential election, but I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s halftime (I know, I’m mixing my sports metaphors…). In terms of time, yes, it’s very late in the game. But most voters have just begun to tune in, and the next two months will be a barrage of debates, advertising and news coverage. There’s a long way to go and the score is very close.

And Sarah Palin has not even begun to be tested on the national stage. Remember that Barack Obama had months to refine his message in Iowa and New Hampshire before the nation began to tune in to every syllable he uttered. Palin will have a big spotlight and an even bigger microphone in her face from day one, and it would be shocking if she doesn't blunder at some point.

Finally, it should be noted that the famous convention speeches of Cuomo and Obama were given in losing causes.

But as Brian Williams put it so very aptly moments after Palin’s speech ended last night, “Game on.”

One of Us

In 1824, John Quincy Adams faced Andrew Jackson in the Presidential election. They were nominally of the same party (it was a brief period of single-party dominance) but had little else in common.

Adams was the ultimate American elitist. The son of a President (a Founder, no less), he went to Harvard, spoke many languages, lived and traveled extensively in Europe, and was an accomplished American diplomat. He was classically educated and could quote Ovid as easily as I quote Seinfeld.

Jackson was anything but the American elitist. Born poor, orphaned by age 14, and sporadically educated, he was the true self-made man who made his fame on the field of battle. Thomas Jefferson, speaking of Jackson’s presidential ambitions, declared him to be “one of the most unfit men I know of for the place.”

Daniel Walker Howe, in his excellent history of early 19th century America What Hath God Wrought, writes that “no one liked Jackson for president except the voting public.”

And they liked him a lot – Jackson lost the election in 1824 despite winning the popular and electoral vote, and won decisively in 1828 and 1832. (He is the answer to a good trivia question: who is the only Presidential candidate besides FDR to win the popular vote in 3 elections?)

And they liked him, in part, because he was like them. Okay, he wasn’t really like them; he was a successful general, a born leader, tougher than any man alive, smarter than the intellectual elite realized, and one of the strongest personalities in the history of American politics. But he seemed like one of them. Like most voters, he was born poor, worked hard, endured sorrow, and had no use for proper spelling.

So began one of America’s great political traditions – the attempt by candidates seem like one of us, even when they are not.

One of the Boys
George W. Bush is the son of a President, grandson of a Senator, and attended the finest schools in New England. But he emphasizes his Crawford roots and likes to be photographed eating ribs and cutting brush.

John Kerry was educated in the finest schools in Europe and New England, and spent his childhood summers on a family estate in France. But he sought out photo ops in duck blinds and spoke of no part of his young life but his year in Vietnam.

Bill Clinton had a genuinely humble background that he emphasized in his candidacies, downplaying his spectacular academic career, which included a Rhodes scholarship and, like the other two, a Yale degree.

I could go on and on. Teddy Roosevelt the Rough Rider didn’t speak of Teddy Roosevelt the Park Avenue socialite. Lincoln bragged on his axe-swinging days but downplayed his successful law practice.

The best example may be William Henry Harrison. Tippecanoe* was from a prominent political family whose father was a signer of the Declaration and who had extensive public experience and great wealth. But when his opponents in the election of 1836 claimed he’d rather “sit in his log cabin and drink cider” he adopted the log cabin and cider bottles as his images, and won in a landslide.

* This was a great time for Presidential nicknames. Old Hickory (Jackson) was followed by The Little Magician (Van Buren), Tippecanoe (Harrison), His Accidency (Tyler), Young Hickory (Jackson’s protégé, Polk), and Old Rough and Ready (Zachary Taylor). Our era gives us Dubya, Bubba, and Poppy.

All of these politicians understood that voters don’t want to hear they are smarter and/or wealthier than us. So they pretend to be like us. When we catch them doing otherwise - windsurfing, say, or being confounded by a supermarket scanner, we punish them.

But of course, we know they aren’t really like us. Don't we?

Along Came Sarah
And into our lives strides Sarah Palin. There are no Ivy League or European colleges in her past. She has no illustrious ancestors – senators or admirals or ambassadors. She did not marry the heir to a vast fortune. She does not bring to the Vice Presidency, like Cheney or Biden (both of humble origins) an extensive and impressive career in public service. She has a son in the Army and a pregnant teenage daughter. Her husband’s in a union. Aside from her stunning election as Governor less than two years ago, she has led a life that is not dramatically different from most of the women on my block – except for, you know, the ice fishing and the mooseburgers.

And suddenly American voters are being asked…do we actually want someone that close to the Oval Office who is truly and genuinely just a slob like one of us?

We’ll never know of course. Regardless of who wins, there are too many other factors – particularly the guys at the head of the ticket – that will ultimately decide this election. But we’re all going to be in a lot of Sarah Palin conversations the next few weeks, and it’ll be interesting to see what people think.

Me? I’m just hoping we come up with a really good nickname for her. I’m pushing for the Holy Hand Grenade.

Update: George Will wrote a similarly-themed piece in Newsweek. We approached it differently, but used the same Harrison example. He included this bit, though, which I loved:

" Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, [spent] 14 years as a U.S. senator from Ohio. He was a conservative representing a state whose electorate included many farmers and blue-collar industrial workers, and opponents charged that he was out of touch with such ordinary people. In 1947 a reporter asked Mrs. Taft, 'Do you think of your husband as a common man?' Aghast, she replied: 'Oh, no, no! The senator is very uncommon. He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at the Harvard Law School. We wouldn't permit Ohio to be represented in the Senate by just a common man.' In 1950, Taft was re-elected in a landslide."