It has been a sad and cancer-ridden week with the passing of
conservative blogger Cathy Seipp and the news of Elizabeth Edwards.
Every now and then we are reminded that we are not masters of our
own destiny and can control far less than we imagine. Politicians
and those who follow their every move get caught up in the delusion
that every campaign can navigate successfully to victory if only
they can shape the message and the messenger just so. Six-point
plans and eight-point paradigms populate many political campaigns,
fostering the notion that a really smart candidate armed with a
savvy staff, enough money and a PowerPoint presentation can plot a
winning strategy while developing solutions to problems as far
flung as AIDS, Iraq and global warming.
Then, stuff happens. Just like real life, you can only plan and
plot so much. Candidates and sometimes their family members get
sick or die in plane crashes or just say the most outlandish
things. Suddenly all the polls, the graphs, and the schedules get
tossed up in the air. The plans go out the window and everyone has
to start anew.
If we hear someone is dropping out or not dropping into the race
the pundits and political gurus begin plotting and predicting how
the possible absence of a candidate might affect all the others and
which demographic could get parceled out to the other candidates
like children in a custody fight. Perhaps it would be useful to
stop for a moment and consider, as William Goldman once said about
Hollywood, that “no one knows anything.”
We know some things of course. Chris Dodd and Duncan Hunter
aren’t going to be President, for starters. That is to say we know
the easy stuff. But the hard stuff is, well, harder. How voters ten
months from now are going to regard John McCain or Barack Obama is
not only hard to know, it is unknowable. Life intervenes. Wars get
won or lost, other candidates wear well or poorly, and sadly people
get sick. Voters reassess the choices and newcomers enter, or not.
When reality intrudes into a campaign it should remind us how
little we know and how foolhardy it is to gaze into the crystal
ball of politics — one of the endeavors most subject to human
frailty and chance.
In our more introspective moments it should also give us some
sense of humility about governing itself. If we think we know what
will happen when we topple a vicious dictator whose sheer brutality
has contained the ethnic hatreds of generations we are sadly
mistaken, but we should not be surprised. If we think we can
predict what will occur if we now leave precipitously, we are also
deluded. For years conservatives chided liberals for imagining that
government programs, regulations and transfer payments could alter
human nature and eliminate poverty. It only seems obvious in
retrospect that the more complicated the endeavor the less we will
be able to control the outcome.
This does not mean that candidates should fire all their
consultants (there are good and distinct reasons for doing that, we
can agree), or that we should cease to do challenging things as a
nation. It does mean we should proceed cautiously, with due respect
for the law of unintended consequences and the intractable habits
of human beings. We should also perhaps grant to our opponents —
be they in another party or another campaign — that we may not
have all the answers and that we all operate with imperfect
knowledge. A little more “there but for the grace of God go I”
would be a welcome relief in a campaign season already devolving
into the hunt for the gotcha moment or quote in an opponent’s past
that might prove a disqualifying event. So before we leap at our
opponents’ misfortunes we should remember ours may be just around
the corner. You just never know what is going to happen.
