This has not been a good year for inevitability. In February the
New England Patriots, at 18-0 and one inevitable win away from
sports immortality, couldn’t quite close the deal and lost to the
New York Giants in the final seconds. Last Saturday afternoon,
Hillary Clinton — once known as the inevitable candidate —
finally conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. A few
hours later, another much-hyped front runner was finding out how
tough it is to stay in front — Big Brown, the thoroughbred who was
thought to be a shoo-in to win the Belmont Stakes, and with it the
Triple Crown. Big Brown not only didn’t win on Saturday, he
finished last.
Big Brown’s blowhard trainer, Rick Dutrow, had called the colt’s
eventual victory in the Belmont “a foregone conclusion,”
denigrating the other horses in the race as unable to keep up.
Dutrow scoffed at well over 100 years of history, in which only 11
horses have pulled off the Triple Crown feat, and much recent
history, too — in which 11 horses had come to Belmont in the last
29 years with the chance to win the Triple Crown, all falling
short. “No problem, babe,” Dutrow said, even when Big Brown
suffered a quarter crack to his left front hoof and had to lessen
his training in the week of the race. Just before post time, asked
by an ABC interviewer whether he could “guarantee” a win, Dutrow
replied in the affirmative.
The sports media wasn’t much less cautious. Big Brown’s
steroids-aided prowess in winning the Preakness and Kentucky Derby,
along with a weak field, seemed to make Dutrow’s horse a lock. Even
when Dutrow bragged that for the Belmont, he was forsaking the
horse’s monthly steroid injection to prove a point, few worried
that the colt’s performance would fall off. There’s no way to know
whether the absence of steroids, or the injury, or just a bad day,
did in Big Brown. But of course the presence of
performance-enhancing drugs has the usual effect — it muddies the
basis for evaluation. Now some are calling Big Brown a fraud.
WHILE IT WAS SAD to see the big colt being eased at the top of the
stretch by his admirable jockey, Kent Desormeaux, one couldn’t
resist some glee, too: the horse’s connections, from Dutrow to the
ownership, lack grace, to put it kindly. They dismissed the horse’s
competition and made light of the extraordinary difficulty of
winning these three races in five weeks. Above all, they showed the
telltale sign of excess pride by assuming that the outcome of a
future event can be foretold, even guaranteed. Horse and jockey
aside, Big Brown’s defeat was a plus for horse racing.
Similarly, in the political arena, Hillary’s demise was positive
in many respects, too. Removing the Clintons and their baggage from
presidential politics, even if only temporarily, is a good thing.
The post-mortems on her campaign are already well under way, but
one cause consistently cited for her demise is her decision to run
as a “front runner,” i.e., as an inevitable candidate. “It will be
us,” her operatives were given to saying whenever interview
questions became too pressing. To wit: never mind all of these
contingencies, it’s a foregone conclusion. Some say that Hillary
just picked the wrong year to run as a front runner. But in truth,
running as the inevitable candidate is never the way to win, in
politics or at the racetrack.
That’s because you must never forget that the competitive
landscape is made up of your peers who want the same thing you do.
Even if you are in fact the best in the field, you’re almost
certainly not the best by much. You still have to take the prize —
it will not be freely given. While Hillary eventually became an
impressive candidate, once her back was up against the wall, she
ran in the long pre-primary phase of the campaign as if already
anointed. Her debate answers were scripted and lifeless, geared
toward maintaining her downhill momentum. She never quite recovered
from the first slip-up of her campaign, when she flubbed a debate
question involving illegal aliens last fall. Underneath all the
hype, her campaign was brittle. She thought, and her backers
thought, that the other contenders would obediently stay behind
when she came down the stretch.
IT’S ALWAYS REMARKABLE how people who have lived to reasonable
maturity can assume that much of anything beyond death is a
foregone conclusion. In Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,
Albert Jay Nock tells of how one of his first intellectual habits
was doubt. He wrote of how, as a boy, he learned the once-common
rhyme, “In Adam’s fall/We sinned all.” His reaction was not to ask
how Adam sinned, or why the rest of us were bound up in it, but
rather: “How is it possible to know anything about it?”
Nock was a wise man, though he isn’t read much anymore. Perhaps
that’s no accident; he was a bit of a curmudgeon and had little
truck with triumphalism, a virus with which many of us are
afflicted. We would do well to remember some of his skepticism as
we head into this fall’s presidential election, which will be
shadowed by the war in Iraq, that sure thing that didn’t quite turn
out as expected. Some say the election is just about in the bag for
Obama because of the Republican Party’s woes and John McCain’s
uninspiring candidacy. Others think Obama will never be able to win
enough white voters and overcome his liberalism and radical
friends.
With Nock as a guide, I’ll guess that it will be much more
complicated, and less inevitable, than we think.
