The sports cliche most in vogue this last decade or so is the
one about trying to do too much. If a baseball game comes down to
one key at-bat, say bases loaded, two outs, ninth inning, a pitcher
desperate to hold a one-run lead and a batter desperate to erase
it, then two results are possible. One is that the pitcher gets the
batter out. Reporters crowd around the pitcher afterwards and ask
him how he managed the feat. He humbly lowers his head and says: “I
just didn’t try to do too much.” In the loser’s dugout, reporters
are asking what went wrong. The batter shamefully lowers his head
and says: “I just tried to do too much.”
The other possibility is that the batter comes through with the
big hit to win the game. Clustering reporters afterward ask how the
blow was struck. He humbly lowers his head and says: “I just didn’t
try to do too much.” Across the stadium, bombarding reporters
challenge the pitcher to assay his own failure. He shamefully
lowers his head and says: “I just tried to do too much.”
Speaking of sports, an odd-couple tag team has been pounding
Barack Obama over the last two weeks, privately citing
contradictory reasons for the onslaught. On one side we have
Hillary Rodham Clinton hammering away at his putative elitism; she
sugarcoats her poison pills by earnestly asserting to fellow Dems
that she must save the party from the inevitable election loss that
would ensue upon an Obama nomination. Her unlikely sidekick is John
McCain, who tends to echo Hillary’s critique du jour. He in turn
tells his colleagues that he expects that Mrs. Clinton would be an
easier opponent to rout.
Methinks this is a case of trying to do too much on the part of
Senator McCain. It is generally good advice to politicians that
they should not be diverted into trying to interfere with the other
side in its candidate selection. More often than not, these
attempts at mischief and manipulation come back to bite one in the
end. Trying to divine the relative strengths of potential opponents
is a mystical pursuit that not only undermines good faith, it often
sabotages good works. This is a hiatus in the process where McCain
can be totally positive while the Democrat contenders are forced to
be mean; he should be building up his nice-guy cred now and let the
other guys come off as hyenas.
Those with elephantine memories might recall that many Democrats
were hoping that Ronald Reagan would win the 1980 Republican
Primary, assuming him to be a lightweight compared to George H. W.
Bush. That particular prediction ranks up there with the guys who
picked Sonny Liston over Cassius Clay and Sham over Secretariat.
This is not to say that this technique never works; McGovern was
the guy Nixon wanted to run against in 1972, and that worked out
quite nicely. Still, better not to interfere in an unpredictable
process where you are as likely to shoot yourself in the foot as
not.
Incidentally, in this particular case I think that McCain’s
chances are better against Obama. Although Obama is a more
attractive figure than Clinton by a long stretch, he brings several
wild cards to the table. There are so many things
not-run-of-the-mill about him that it is impossible to assess the
electoral impact of each factor. He has an African father, he has
lived in Indonesia, he has attended a Muslim school, he has
cultivated radical friends, including some very outrageous and
outspoken members of the clergy.
McCain’s people are receptive to the Karl Rove theory that
Clinton is more vulnerable because she has high negative ratings
and is viewed with distrust by more than half the populace. Still,
I would wager that she is more likely to beat McCain than Obama
would be, and this for a simple reason, the sort of reason that
might not appear in polls but would have real weight in the booth.
Namely, this very powerful fact: most Americans, perhaps as many as
60 percent, believe that the country ran well under Bill
Clinton.
That being the case, an undecided voter standing at the moment
of truth, with hand hovering near the lever, is likely to have a
very powerful thought: “This couple was in the White House before
and times were pretty good. Why take chances on a new guy?” When it
comes down to it, it does not really matter whose name is on the
ballot, Bill or Hillary. Although Republicans abhor this reality,
it is a fact that Bill Clinton would win a third term easily if he
could run today in the wake of George Bush’s three-dollar gas and
trillion-dollar bank collapses. John McCain, don’t try to do too
much or you might wind up with too little.
