It may be hard to believe from my slight build, but in high school I played football. My position was defensive end or “wing” on the right hand side of the line, which is humorous because the rule was I was to never let anyone from the other team get to the right of me. That rule served me well over time. It also put me in the time honored position of blind-siding quarterbacks. I’ve found that talent to be less useful over time.
While politics is full of comparisons to sports and war, and sometimes the comparisons are a bit tired and worn, over the last few days I’ve experienced what I think is an apt comparison between politics and sports.
Playing football, you learn over time that the mental game is often as important as the physical. On any given day, a small town team like mine with good morale could beat a big city team with poor morale. And many things could break the spirit of an otherwise strong team and lead to mistake after mistake as the group got more unsure of itself. Most teams were only a few fumbles or sacks away from broken morale. And most teams were only a few sacks or recovered fumbles away from good morale.
In politics various media disasters, or good attacks, or a host of other things can have similar impacts. Consultants, managers, and/or candidates can be shell-shocked into making mistakes or just numbly sitting there. I’ll never forget talking to a Democrat consultant a while ago who said that our attacks on his candidate had caused the candidate to stop raising money, stop walking, and sit in a room by himself and do detailed math of how the campaign just couldn’t lose (it did). I once worked for a candidate who would literally disappear for days after something unforeseen and demoralizing happened, and who would reappear having had to cut another hole in his belt.
Last week you could ‘feel’ the Democrat surge. It was demoralizing to see poll after poll with Democrat intensity on the rise. It was numbing to talk to consultant after consultant, pollster after pollster, and candidate after candidate who basically had given up hope and were predicting the great deluge. Kind of like those guys in Japanese movies who just sort of give up and kneel and let the other fellow lop their head off with a sword. I was given to making dire predictions and sleeping longer than I should. And I doubled my already offensive bacon consumption.
But, like in football, sometimes their is an unexpected change in events and a different team captures the morale banner. And that’s just what happened, in my races at least, last week. The Democrats started making mistakes. For instance in the always hard-fought 78th Assembly the ‘Border Angels’ who favor illegal immigration objected to the Horton campaign’s statement in a mailer that Sherard supports drivers licenses for illegal aliens. So the TV reporters went down to Sherard HQ and asked her if she actually said she supports drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens (not a popular thing in San Diego), at which point one of her aides – old enough to know better – started denying that Sherard ever said any such thing. So the reporters called over to Coronado and asked us if we were misrepresenting Sherard’s positions. We asked them to visit the Horton website, where the taped comments had been sitting for a week…
And our pollsters started noticing an increase in Republican voter intensity all over the place. And Democrat AV voters weren’t turning them back in. And slowly, over a few days, suddenly there was fresh hope. They peaked early. And there’s still another quarter in the game. Heck there might even be some blind-sides in the making…