The Bill and Henry James Election

You never know—the Yankees have an improbable cushion of credibility—but I suspect that “short sample” will become one of those mocked, oft-repeated phrases. (“Shawt sample!” Mike Francesca on WFAN will snort, “How can he… that wasn’t a shawt sample! It was a flat out quit! It was total fail-yuh!”) But Cashman’s point was probably sound: a seven-game series, much less a four-game slice, is a very poor and short sample of a baseball hitter’s ability. A lot of guys just did have the bad luck to get cold at the same time—as in earlier years a lot of Yankees had the good luck to get hot at the same time. Every ball player and baseball analyst and statistician knows that this is so. But this truth runs so hard against the immutable laws of narrative, in which a season is a moral lesson in character or its absence, that it is still taboo to say it. It’s by now established that there are no hot hands—no clutch hitting, and no such thing as momentum, in sports. It doesn’t matter. The Yankees, everyone will insist, disgraced themselves because A-Rod is a quitter and Robinson Cano is unworthy of his name—and anyway, why’d they rather flirt with women in the stands then bear down and do all for the team? In a random sample, after all, someone will be lucky twice just as someone—I name no names, think green and white and football—will be unlucky for forty years. The samples in sports—a championship game, that seven-game series—are just too small in size, and too shaken by contingency, to be conclusive evidence for anything. (There’s a wonderful cartoon by XKCD that captures this truth about sports and sports-writing beautifully.)

What is true of sports narratives is yet truer, and yet still less accepted, of elections. The Bill James revolution has come to politics and polling now, thanks to Nate Silver and Nate Cohn and the rest—but not, one might say, the Henry James revolution that ought to go with it, where we stand in awe of how chance events can seem in retrospect like fated certainties. We still make primitive narratives of nemesis—we are making them today, and shall make more and more—out of what are, at heart, contingencies of accident and economic cycles. If Romney should win, we will be told that Obama’s Presidency was doomed by fatal flaws evident to all from the beginning, and all that he has done will be tainted. His isolation, his inability to reach out to his partners, his creation of hopes which could never be fulfilled, his failure to coax and wheedle and court the Congresses as Lincoln and Johnson are now imagined to have done—the result in Ohio was predestined. If, on the other hand, say, minorities in Cleveland should turn out in big numbers, and Obama wins by a narrow margin… why, then Obama will be like Lincoln, a battler who pulled it out, kept his cool, saw it through, and remade his country in his own image. What happens in the next three weeks will not just shape what happens next—it will dictate all that is said about all that had happened before. It could never have turned out any other way. The recovery that is already obviously under way—doubtless more through the cruel but inevitable up and down cycles of the market than anyone’s will, or incompetence—will become Obama’s vindication, or else it will become the Romney Recovery, and only a handful will bleat impotently that it was bound to happen anyway.

We are so addicted to these narratives that the truth that our public life is almost wholly contingent, the result of oddities and accidents that could easily have turned out many other ways, is still one that gives us allergies. It makes us sneeze. Jimmy Carter, for instance, is now a byword for failure and fecklessness; Republicans still try and get elected by mentioning this God-fearing family man’s name as Democrats once mentioned Herbert Hoover’s. Carter was always doomed; a model of a bad President, as Reagan always was a force of nature. But Carter was mostly courageous at the wrong time—he took his recession late instead of taking it early, as Reagan did—and unlucky: had the helicopters at Desert One worked, and saved the hostages, no one could have called him dithering. George Bush the Elder had in retrospect an almost magically successful Presidency: he stage-managed his Middle Eastern war with an aplomb that his son’s true fecklessness made all the more evident, and also helped usher in something that a decade before would have seemed manifestly impossible—the political (and economic and military) reunification of Germany on terms dictated exclusively by the West—and did it peacefully. Even his recession was over as we voted. It’s hard to be sorry that a once-in-a-lifetime character like Bill Clinton became President, but, after all, that could have happened in 1996, and very possibly no one would have been worse off. Indeed, had Bill Clinton been early in his second term in September, 2001, facing a crisis that called on his gift for empathy and international leadership, while forcing him beyond his often ineffectual use of power—well, it doesn’t bear thinking of. But Ross Perot’s implacable anti-Bush enmity kicked in, and he looked at his watch, and there we were.

We don’t like to hear this. We don’t want to hear it. Indeed, we refuse to hear it. “The American people decided to fire Obama,” or “the American people decided to rehire the President because they couldn’t trust Romney,” will be the clichés of the commentariat the day after. But “the American people” really have nothing to do with it. Tens of millions of American people believe passionately in either case, and the small sample that will decide is hardly evidence of some kind of uber-arching, Jungian-unconscious unanimity of opinion. That’s true even when the margin is large, in political terms. First Bush defeated Dukakis by fifty-three per cent to forty-six per cent, and the Dukakis campaign is recalled as a catastrophe—but if you were in a room of a hundred people, and called for a voice vote, and fifty-three shouted Aye and forty-six Nay, you would have no idea who had won.

People have a hard time with this simple concept because we prefer stories to uncertainties. More precisely, it’s because non-essentialist reasoning is always counter-intuitive. We want things to be always the same things, with a single inherent character from the word go. Carter was always doomed; Reagan always a force of nature.

It is always easy to confuse contingency, the truth that nothing is fated, with randomness, the idea that anything might happen. Baseball playoffs are not random in the sense that your daughter’s little-league team might win the World Series; they’re contingent in the sense that, among the reasonable candidates for winning it, no one can safely predict which one will rule. Not everything can happen—the Green candidate isn’t going to become President, and the Jets, I suspect, will not win this year’s Super Bowl. But within the realm of the possible, the actual remains more or less a mystery. We tell our public life as though it were the epic of El Cid, when in truth it is as ambiguous as “The Golden Bowl.” Shoulda, woulda, coulda … If only! … Who’da thunk it—these phrases are not the phrases of regret alone. They are also the voicings of a wider wisdom.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.