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player ready...Bill Bradley’s a pretty smart cookie, having graduated from Princeton and all. But even he, it turns out, can make the Vince Lombardi error.
In his concession speech after snatching a Super Tuesday defeat out of what looked like the jaws of victory a few months earlier, Bradley lamented “on one level, I agree with Vince Lombardi when he said winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Well, not quite. As one premier source, John Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” notes, the statement is “often attributed” to the late, great Green Bay Packers coach Lombardi, but the closest he came to saying anything like it on the record was in a 1962 interview when he said “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.”
Even Lombardi must have been reluctant to deny that there was any virtue in losing. Quite the contrary, surely God must have loved losers, since she made so many of us.
As for Super Tuesday’s big losers, Bradley, who was swept away in the Democratic primaries by Al Gore, and John McCain, whose hopes were crushed when George W. Bush put a virtual lock on the Republican nomination, I can think of at least five big ways in which they won while losing.
One, they gave an important voice to the voiceless. Bradley moved many, who cared enough to listen, when he related some of the stories he was gathering from society’s left-outs–a single working woman who desperately needed insurance coverage for her son, for example, or a group of inner-city kids who had witnessed shootings.
“You know what?” one little boy told Bradley, “It’s not like it looks on television.” Little moments like that speak volumes about the state of our nation–and the deep problems too few politicians care to address.
On the other side, McCain annoyed his own party’s bosses by giving a voice to disenchanted Republicans and Democrats alike who were fed up with “the status quo in Washington,” particularly the way both parties’ bosses raise and spend money.
Two, they broadened each party’s base. McCain’s colorful insurgency helped bring record turnouts in a primary poised to put the country to sleep.
Like Ross Perot in 1992, McCain touched many first-time and apathetic voters in ways neither party should ignore.
Three, they damaged, but ultimately made better candidates out of Bush and Gore. McCain, picking up where Steve Forbes left off, forced Bush to sharpen his message and think on his feet in ways required by the national stage. Bradley’s early successes in polls and fundraising forced Gore to reinvent himself in ways that not only improved his wardrobe with earth tones but also reassured nervous Democrats that, yes, Gore was ready to do battle in prime time.
Four, Bradley and McCain helped voters to examine Bush and Gore under pressure. Bradley raised the embarrassing questions others wanted to ask about President Clinton’s freewheeling approach to truth-telling. McCain forced Bush to muddle his own “compassionate conservative” message by running to the most extreme elements of the right for support. Both Bradley and McCain raised embarrassing questions about the sometimes unsavory way both parties raise money and use attacks campaigns ads to get votes.
Five, Bradley and McCain helped their parties define themselves. Neither Bush nor Gore, in their mad rush to woo middle-class suburban swing voters, was eager to grapple with such tough issues as health-care and campaign reform until McCain and Bradley forced them into it. Suddenly Bush became “a reformer with results.” Gore became an animated “underdog” determined to “debate every week” right up to the nomination.
We Monday-morning quarterbacks will argue endlessly about what might have been for Bradley and McCain. Imagine, for example, what McCain might have achieved had he not wandered off his central message of reform to engage in what sounded like a personal vendetta against attacks by Bush and Bush’s supporters on the religious right like Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Imagine what Bradley might have achieved had he been as willing to fight Gore as relentlessly as Gore fought him or to shed his heady aloofness and reinvent his image and stage approach as dramatically as Gore did.
Monday-morning quarterbacks like me will argue endlessly and tirelessly about what might have been.
But this much is certain: It is an old clich to say after an election that “the people won.” In this case, it is true. The people won, thanks to the losers.
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