What Numbers and History Have Taught Be About Elections In My Lifetime, Part 2: The Myth Of The Primary Creating Inferior Candidates

 

I have a friend I’ve known for a while. Every so often we talk about presidential politics. Like many Americans this individual is eternally dissatisfied with the leaders we keep getting ever four years. That individual thinks that the Republicans have become dominated by the far right and the Democrats by the far left. This individual has not liked any of the Presidents in the last several decades nor any of the major candidates who have run over the years.

These are opinions that many, if not most Americans share about politics today. But when I asked this person what candidate would be their ideal, that person didn’t have a ready answer. They said there wasn’t an elected official in either party that they thought was ideal with their political views on either side.

This attitude is shared by so many people I encounter on line, and it’s more prevalent on the far left then it is on the far right. I suspect that Democrats and Republicans have similar attitudes about the candidates that run every four years even before Trump became the perennial nominee. I’m certain that this is an attitude influenced by the media.

I don’t blame them for that attitude. What my problem comes down to is that they seem to be holding out for something perfect from their candidates. This became increasingly clear to me during all of the depressed attitude towards the Biden-Trump rematch over the past two years but I’ve sensed it in every single primary race leading up to the general election I’ve participated in and no doubt every one before that. There’s always an enthusiasm gap that I’ve sensed in so many people every election cycle and it wasn’t until my friend told me their problem with Presidential politics that I was able to put it into words.

There’s a historical anecdote about Lincoln during the Civil War. One of his colleagues was upset about how George McCellan, then the commander of all Union Armies, was handling the military. Lincoln, never McLellan’s biggest fan , asked who he should replace him with. “Anybody would be better” he was told. “I cannot replace him with anybody,” Lincoln said. “I must have somebody.”

That is the response that I keep thinking of every four years when it comes to the unhappiness so many people seem to have over my lifetime when it comes to the choices we get for our Presidential candidates. After the primaries come to an end, and all too frequently before they even begin, you get this attitude from the media, conservative, liberal or mainstream, from comedians on late night and from so many online commentators about how horrible these choices are, how tragic it is this is what America is faced with and we deserve something better. But whenever you ask them who or what that mystical candidate is their response is always not that far from the exchange above. The fact that they don’t have anything other than ‘anybody’ has never stopped them from being absolutely certain that individual is out there.

It’s bad enough that so many Americans are upset that ‘anybody’ is not on the ticket instead of the somebodies we have that so many of them have spent their lives refusing to vote. That many of them often then choose to complain that nothing ever changes in our country – and in many cases are the loudest voices – is even more troubling. But the most disturbing thing is just beneath the surface and that’s become particularly clear during primary campaigns.

At the core of this are two arguments involving them that among the media and experts are considered gospel The first is that the primary process has destroyed the quality of the candidates that we get as nominees. The second, which is closely related to the first, is that the system itself is so messy and complicated that it needs either a complete overhaul if not junked entirely.

In this article I intend to disprove the first ‘truth’ by using examples involving elections I participated it, a historical context to prove the fallacy in this argument and why this idea speaks more about the people who pontificate about it then any evidence in my lifetime.

Note: I’m excluding the 2016 election from this article because I intend to go into great detail about in a later one in this series.

I’m going to start this by placing this argument from the losing candidates in the three elections that immediately followed 2000. One of the arguments I heard over and over leading up to almost every bit of election coverage almost from the start of their hunt for the nomination to the moment they clinched it was that they were never given any real respect by anyone. Not the pundits, not the media, not political journalists. And that argument that always followed seemed to be that none of them were “good enough to win.”

That’s logic I’ve never gotten. They won the primaries, didn’t they? They must have been able to win over some people? That was actually part of the argument against them, and it’s the underlying part of so much of the paradox that so many people seem to have with the primary system: anyone who competes in them by definition must not be good enough to win an election. Clearly there’s something wrong with then if the primary voters have chosen them instead of that mystical candidate that so many people seem to think would be better. Who that candidate is they don’t know; they just know he’s not running. And if he was by definition, he’s not good enough. If you can follow that kind of logic, you must be either a talking head, an academic or an extremist on either political party because it’s baffling to me.

In 2004 Democratic primary voters made the unforgivable mistake of selecting John Kerry as their standard bearer. Clearly by choosing a man who was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and had won (to that point) three consecutive elections as its Senator, he had no business running for the nation’s highest office. I mean sure within two months of taking office he was part of a committee that led to the unfolding of Iran Contra, had investigated Bush’s involvement in the BCCI affair that brought down lobbyists and was one of the most liberal members of the Senate in his voter record but what does any of this have to do with being a good Democrat, much less a President. What does sponsoring 330 bills in your first 20 years in Congress have to do with being a President anyway?

In 2008 John McCain was also unforgivably chosen by the Republicans as their Presidential nominee whose only qualification, according to most talking heads, was that he was seventy-two years old. I mean how dare a man who had represented Arizona in the House before taking over Barry Goldwater’s seats in the Senate have to do with the Presidency. Sure he voted in favor of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and voted override Reagan’s veto, investigated the POW Affairs act that led to normalizing diplomatic relations with Vietnam, supported campaign finance reform which led to the McCain-Feingold bill and took on Big Tobacco. And he broke with the Bush administration on HMO reform, climate change and Gun control but he supported the Iraq War and the surge. Besides all he really did was get captured. (For the record, that’s not Trump I’m quoting. Harper’s wrote that in their argument against voting for McCain in their October 2008 issues)

And Mitt Romney? Seriously? Why should we vote for a man whose only qualification was being governor of Massachusetts for one term? I mean sure that’s as much elected experience as Barack Obama had when he ran for President in 2008 – actually it’s less because Romney didn’t first run for President until after he finished his term -  but how does being governor for one term qualify you to be President? Sure you created a health care system that was the model for Obamacare but you won’t take credit for it. (Granted neither did Obama.)

All of this is sarcastic of course but not by much. The resume of the first two men are among the most impressive of any candidate who ran for President in my lifetime, certainly more then either George W. Bush or Barack Obama when they were running for President for the first time. And they must have been convincing on the stump to win votes for primary voters. Yet somehow during this long period of primaries, they were no one’s ideal candidate for President. Mitt Romney’s a different story to be sure but his record is certainly similar to the other men who have received the nomination and won the Presidency – Jimmy Carter is the most prominent example. Yet even though they were qualified for the office in a way that many candidates who were their opponents for the nomination weren’t they always got lumped in with so many of them as being ‘inadequate’.

Which is baffling to me. Setting aside the mindset where running for President seems to mean you should be disqualified from doing so (that’s what seems to be the thinking of so many of anyone who runs for office in the first place) one of the arguments should be their qualifications to be President. But let’s just look at the records of three men who are considered by historians as among the greatest Presidents in history, all of whom were leaders of America during a national crisis.

Compared to his rivals for the Presidency Abraham Lincoln’s resume going into the 1860 convention was barely paper thin. He’d been an attorney in Illinois, a one-term Congressman (and that had ended in 1848) had served in the Illinois statehouse and had run an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Compared to most of the other major Republican contenders – among them William Seward and Salmon P. Chase – he had no business being considered anything other than Illinois’s favorite son at the Republican convention.

Woodrow Wilson’s entire elected history going into the 1912 Democratic convention was that he had been elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. He’d barely been in office a year before he began to run for the Democratic nomination. Compared to Champ Clark, the Speak of the House and a twenty year veteran of Congress he had no business competing.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had a fairly impressive resume when he ran for the Democratic nomination in 1932. He’d served in the New York Legislature, had been Wilson’s assistant Secretary of the Navy and had served as Governor of New York. All of them, however, were offices his famous cousin Theodore had held in his life before becoming President. FDR had also been nominated as James W. Cox’s Vice President in 1920 but had been part of the biggest electoral landslide in history to that point. The whole reason the 38 year old FDR was chosen was because TR had been expected to be the GOP nominee for President in 1920 and they hoped the lure of the Roosevelt name would bring his supporters to the Democrats. (It really didn’t work.) FDR was more qualified when he ran for the Democratic nomination but no one could deny much of his early career had been possible because of his last name.

There’s an argument made among talking heads today that all three of these men could never win the Presidency today. That’s a false flag argument of course because it assumes the circumstances that led to all three men winning the White House would be the kind of things that led voters to choose them in that same period. It also leaves out the fact that their names are being brought up by their reputations as President and not their qualifications as candidates for office. And in all three cases there were things that many voters today would have difficulty with.

The lengths and breadth of Lincoln and Wilson’s political experience could each have fit on a postage stamp and still have had room. Neither had anywhere the kind of records that would have gotten them a Vice Presidential nomination in recent years. FDR was more qualified to an extent in 1932 but he was viewed by many columnists as a dilettante and seeming to breezy and glad-handing in his speeches. His last name helped him with Progressives but not necessarily his own family (there was a major schism between his branch of the family and Theodore’s descendants that never healed)

And it’s worth noting that in the case of Lincoln and Wilson their greatness in the eyes of history was not viewed by the electorate. Lincoln won the Presidency with less than forty percent of the popular vote, still the smallest percentage of any winning President and was built entirely on the split in the Democrats between the North and Southern branch. Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot in the South. No one thought he could win reelection in 1864, not even him,  and there was an effort to name John C. Fremont as an alternative. Lincoln ran as a member of the Union Party which was a coalition of Republican and War Democrats. Even then he only managed to win reelection because of the multiple success on the battlefield for the Union.

Wilson only won the Democratic nomination after 45 ballots, the most of any candidate in the 20^th century. It was only because of the schism in the Republican Party between TR and Taft that he managed to win the Presidency. He got 43 percent of the vote to TR’s 26 and Taft’s 23; had the Republicans been united Wilson would have lost. As I mentioned in my first article, he barely won reelection four years later.

And for all of the enormity of FDR’s electoral wins he was as much hated by the people as he was loved by them. Many of them were Republicans, the wealthy and the media but there was just as many average citizens who hated him as well. He was referred to my so many as ‘That Man in the White House’ and it wasn’t just Republicans who felt that way. Democrats began to become hostile to him after the Court packing fight ended and many of them were not happy when he chose to run for a third term.

History judged all three of these men as great Presidents (though Wilson’s reputation has suffered in recent years) but that pays little attention to how they were viewed at the time by the electorate. (It also hides the fact that the electorate had no real choice in them as nominees for President in the first place, something I’ll get to into more detail in the next article.) And just as we can’t see history in reverse, we can’t project past candidates into the present and try to just them by today’s metric. Neither is fair but that is how so many people seem to look at it in regard to so many candidates today.

And it’s not like these men ran against unqualified candidates for the nomination either. Kerry’s opponents including Richard Gephardt, the House minority leader and a Congressman from 1977-2005 and Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander of NATO. McCain’s in 2008 including not only Romney but Fred Thompson who had been Senator from Tennessee and Republican council during Watergate as well, Sam Brownback Senator from Kansas and Ron Paul, one of the longest serving men in the House from Texas. Romney’s opponents including Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry who at that point had been elected Governor of Texas three consecutive terms (and whose last name was not Bush). You can say what you will about these men (and people will say a lot about them) but they had resumes that theoretically should have made them qualified to be President.

Yet time and again I keep hearing that the candidates who dare to run for President are ‘second string’ at best. This reached its ludicrous highpoint in my opinion when I was reading an interview of Seth Meyers in an entertainment magazine where he (along with entertainment personalities Desus and Mero) made it very clear that the Democrats had little chance of taking the White House back from Trump in 2020 because all of the candidates were the ones that were essentially ‘benchwarmers’. To be clear this article was published in January 2020 when Joe Biden was in the race.

My point isn’t that Biden proved them wrong but that they found Biden – who had been elected to the Senate six consecutive terms and had been Vice President under Obama who had won the Presidency twice – was lacking in their eyes as being a good candidate. And if a person whose been in Washington for half a century isn’t qualified to be President, then who could possibly meet that metric?

It’s for that reason I come back to where I started: the idea that somehow, somewhere in the minds of so many smart people, pundits and the electorate themselves is that every candidate who runs for office is lacking in some way. This feeling was always beneath the surface between the lead up to the 2024 election but its been there with every election I’ve participated in and always seems to be there. It’s the idea that the electorate is settling, that there are better candidates out there then the ones were getting. I might be willing to accept the latter if someone could actually come up with viable – or even unrealistic alternatives to the options we have.

But all we get is that vague term “Anybody would be better than what we have now.” That’s conceivable. But like a man who was considered unelectable himself when he ran for the nation’s highest office and now couldn’t win in today’s climate might have put it “We can not win with anybody. We must have somebody.”

In the next part in the series I will concede the current political primary system is the worst way to select a leader…except for all the others.

 

Colin Farrell IS The Penguin: A Prestige Drama in The Costume of A Comic Book Series

 

 

I’ve written on more than one occasion that the only comic book movies that had ever resonated with me are those involving Batman. I will probably go into greater detail in another article but the most pertinent at the moment is that of all the franchises the world that Batman inhabits is the only where a director can leave a mark on it that is recognizable.

There isn’t a single film in either the MCU or DC films that couldn’t have been directed by anyone at all. Kenneth Branagh and Chloe Zhao might as well have been generic directors for all the impact they left on the MCU in Thor or The Eternals. The directors are irrelevant to any Marvel film and I remain similarly unimpressed by any of the ones who’ve directed for the DCU ever since Batman Vs. Superman. Patty Jenkins is a great director but for all intents and purposes Wonder Woman could have been directed by Michael Bay for all the vision they left in. When Martin Scorsese argued that comic book film like the MCU aren’t really movies he might well have meant the fact that they leave no room for a director to put his or her stamp on them, and I doubt anyone would argue that point.

By contrast every film that has been set in the world of Batman in my lifetime has born a mark of a director and has the capability to shock us. Some do a worse job then others but even Joel Schumacher’s work on Batman Forever was far more imaginative than anything we saw Marc Webb try to do with The Amazing Spiderman series. Every version I’ve seen over the past thirty years – even the Lego version – has shown a level of creativity and imagination that I truly believe every director should try to put in their films. And it can lead to great accomplishments you wouldn’t have felt their previous work would have made them capable of: who would have thought that Todd Philips, best known for The Hangover series, could channel Scorsese in Joker and in  a way that I think even he would admire?

Aside from the Joker the villain who I believe got the most accurate and searing portrayal to this point in the Batman films (aside from Christopher Nolan’s work) was how Tim Burton portrayed the Penguin in Batman Returns. Burton was very clearly not trying to make a franchise film – something he made clearly years after the fact – but in the case of the Penguin it worked perfectly. Almost every Batman villain is unique because they have an aura of melancholy around them that almost every other villain in comic books lack. Danny DeVito’s work as Oswald Cobblepot was one of the most searing portrayals because he got to the essence of the Penguin’s tragedy: that he is an outsider who can never be invited in. I’ll never forget our introduction to him after his men have abducted Max Schreck, the billionaire industrialist who we will quickly learn is as evil as anyone in Gotham. “We’re both monsters, Max,” he tells Schreck. “But you are somehow, a respectable monster and I, as of yet, am not.”  It was clear throughout the film that the Penguin was involved in a long con but it was also clear that he was willing to be manipulated by Schreck and the city: there’s a part of him that genuinely wanted to be respected and beneath his rage was someone who was genuinely hurt when he wasn’t. We see that similar outrage in his and Batman’s final battle: “You’re just mad because I’m the real freak and you have to wear a mask!” he shouts at him and with that he gets to the core of how the difference between Bruce Wayner and really all the villains he faces is just a matter of degree.

Over the last several months I’ve managed to see Matt Reeves’s epic version of The Batman and admit that I was genuinely impressed by what he was trying to do. Reeves came far closer to Nolan’s version of Gotham than any other film maker since, particularly when it came to real world parallels that Nolan was a master at. I don’t fault the film for being too long –  that’s never a dealbreaker with me – and I got the feeling that we got a closer look at Batman and his obsessions in a way that it took Nolan three films to get to the heart of.

With all that said I had no intention of watching The Penguin even though it had been the subject of immense publicity for the last several months. I probably wouldn’t had HBO not made the decision to move several of their original shows from their streaming service MAX to HBO this past few months. Given the immense praise for Colin Farrell, an actor who I’ve always had immense respect for, I decided to watch the opening episode when it debuted on September 19^th. And from the moment I started watching I couldn’t look away.

It's now clear that the writers of The Penguin are very clearly doing something that almost no comic book TV series has tried, certainly not since Watchmen back in 2019. It seems to be using the Penguin – or as he’s referred to in the first two episodes, Oz Cobb – and his role in the film as a jumping off point to tell a different kind of origin story. The clearest parallel is how Philips is using the concept of the Joker in his movies to tell a story of insanity and crime using the bare minimums of the outline of Gotham City to tell a darker story. The writers of The Penguin are doing the same thing, using the events of The Batman to tell the kind of show that, absent the elements of a comic book, would have fit perfectly with the contours of Peak TV on any streaming service or cable channel over the last twenty years. And I mean this as a compliment.

Colin Farrell isn’t trying to be DeVito or Burgess Meredith. From the moment you see him its clear he is channeling Tony Soprano. The fact that this is essentially a story about organized crime in what is for all intents and purposes New York setting actually suits this story perfectly. The prosthetics may make Farrell have a hook nose; he may be waddling but there’s no urbane classiness here. This is a street fighter with the capability to kill at a moment’s notice and who acts both on impulse and can improvise at a moment’s notice. He’s also very aware of the precariousness of his situation and knows the games and manipulations he’s playing could get him killed if he steps a foot wrong. There’s a lot of bluster to him, but much of his masks genuine emotions in a way we rarely get to see in comic book movies – and if I’m being honest, with far too many of the prestige dramas we’ve seen over the years.

“Colin Farrell is The Penguin’. There’s no better description. The Batman films frequently give better chances for actors to disappear into roles than we usually get such is very much what we see with Joaquin Phoenix or, more specifically, Paul Dano. Farrell has always been one of the greatest actors working but this represents a different type of triumph. As someone who’s been watching him for the better part of 20 years Farrell’s greatest strength has always been playing characters with a moral ambiguity or characters who are out of their depth. His work with Martin McDonnaugh best illustrates this fact: the characters he created in the movies In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and The Banshees of Inisherin show men who are usually carried along in the company of madness. I didn’t think he was capable of playing someone who is known as one of the most notorious comic book villains in history.

What Farrell’s portrayal of Oz Cobb does is show a man who is very much a cold-blooded killer but who has the same basic desire to belong that DeVito’s version famously had. He’s more impulsive by far – in the opening minutes of the series when Alberto Falcone laughs at his dreams, he pulls a gun and shoots him without seeming to think of the consequences. But he precedes this by baring his soul in a way that is similar to DeVito’s. Oz wants respectability but he knows the options he has are limited. The best he can hope for is to be the king of organized crime. He knows it’s the hand he’s been dealt and he’s determined to play the cards as best he can.

The Penguin takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Riddler’s inspired attack on Gotham that left the city flooded and essentially a disaster area. News footage shows that the wealthy have managed to escape intact but the lower class and poor have been the once to suffer the most. There’s also the aftermath of the murder of Carmine Falcone and the gap in the Falcone family. Son Alberto was the heir apparent but Oz’s impulses have left him scrambling. So in the opening he encounters Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) who tries to steal his car and he recruits him into helping him bury Falcone’s body. Victor is terrified, understandably, but for reasons that not even Oz himself understands he decides to keep Vic alive.

Oz has to spend the first episode trying to cover his tracks and stay ahead of the game, not easy when he is barely a second level drug pusher for the family. The power grabs are being made and he is under the thumb of capo Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly getting to play someone evil rather than an antihero) as well as Dom Gigante. But his newest threat is Alberto’s sister Sofia, who was released from prison recently and is known as ‘The Hangman’

Cristin Milioti is, if anything, more of a revelation than Farrell in this series. I’ve been a fan of hers ever since she did what she could playing the title character in the final season of How I Met Your Mother and she’s been gifted in supporting roles in the second season of Fargo and Love Life. But to say she’s never played anyone like Sofia is the understatement of the year. If Farrell is trying to channel Tony Soprano Milioti is trying to channel Talia Shire in The Godfather films, a woman who started out as an innocent and ended up as ruthless as anyone else in the family. Sofia is handled with kid gloves by the capos in the family because she’s a woman but it’s clear from the moment she and Oz go out to lunch that she’s as dangerous as he is. She spends most of the first episode trying to figure out the truth about him and has him tied up and naked ready to be killed with no mercy in her heart or eyes. Much of the greatest drama in the first two episodes is watching Milioti even when she’s not saying anything: she’s more dangerous when she’s thinking than acting. Oz is clearly trying to ally with her to protect his long game but he knows just how dangerous she can be.

And I should add the entire series features the kind of character actors who have made all of Peak TV over the past decade incredible to watch. Here’s Clancy Brown in what was the last role he did before his death earlier this year as Salvatore Maroni, the currently jailed mob boss that Oz is trying to move around. Carmen Ejogo plays Eve, an exotic dancer and Oz’s sometimes lover who knows what Oz is but who trusts him in a way people don’t. Deidre O’Connell plays Oz’s mother, whose already endured the loss of two of her other sons and is now going through dementia. Oz clearly cares about her and has been lying about her still being alive in order to keep her safe.

I know that I’m watching the origin story of a villain  - a comic book supervillain to be precise -  but I feel more sympathy and empathy for Oz then so many of the other characters I’ve watched in prestige drama over the years, including Tony Soprano. Oz has a self-awareness of him that so many of these characters never did. He has a genuine respect for his crew in a way that I just never saw in so many other White Male Antiheroes did for anybody. He’s fighting for his life and he doesn’t have the brains that Walter White or Frank Underwood did or the command of money Marty Byrde did. When he talks with Vic he can be brutal and a bully in a way Walt was to Jesse Pinkman  - there’s a scene at the end of the second episode where he makes Vic bury the bodies of two men who died directly and indirectly because of Oz’s actions and then tells him to lie down in the grave with them. But in this case Oz sees it as a teachable moment because Vic’s failures led him to nearly being killed and one of the men who was killed was forced upon him by Vic’s ineptitude. Oz will do anything to survive and he knows this is a lesson that Vic has to learn or he will get killed. (That may very well happen by the end of the series; Vic as far as I know isn’t canon.)

Already The Penguin has demonstrated an appeal that goes beyond the mere comic book story. After just two episodes it has a rating of the 122^nd best show at imdb.com. Nor is this purely out of love for a franchise: critics have already been enraptured by this series and Colin Farrell’s performance has already been shortlisted as a contender for an Emmy in the Limited Series category. It more than deserves to as does both Milioti’s work and the show itself. And I know that this is going to be a one-and-done series –  this is, after all, just a link for the next Batman film -  but this is the kind of show that does not only Batman but the world of comic books itself proud. I have an idea how it will end, but I wouldn’t mind a sequel to this show. Hell next week Folie A Deux premieres.

My score: 5 stars.

 

Homicide Retrospective: How Homicide and NYPD Blue Revolutionized TV in Their First Seasons

 

There’s an argument that the seeds that would lead to the Golden Age of Television coming to fruition on HBO were planted in 1993. Few would argue that, in hindsight, it was a spectacular year for groundbreaking series.

The year started with Homicide debuting after the Super Bowl. During the fall season Frasier, the spin-off of the just departed Cheers debuted on NBC’s first lineup of Must-See-TV on Thursday. It capped a lineup of Mad About You, Wings and Seinfeld. That year Frasier would win the first of a record five consecutive Emmys for Best Comedy Series.

Less noticed was a debut of a small series on the still fledgling Fox network Friday night at 9 pm written with two basically unknown leads: David Duchovny known only for his work as a guest role on Twin Peaks and Gillian Anderson who network heads had argued with Carter was not ‘drop dead gorgeous enough’ to be a female lead. The X-Files was barely noticed that first few months on the air and barely got renewed.

But the series that drew the most attention before it even aired a single episode was a police drama whose Pilot was so controversial that creator Steven Bochco had had to use all of his pull with the network to even get it put on the schedule in the first place. Before it premiered parents groups and the religious right – who had far more power over television back then than they do today – had raised such a huge protest and outcry that they had threatened boycotts if ABC dared to air it. Many affiliates who even considered showing it received a huge notice of letters and outraged calls.

And when it finally debuted, it was watched by 22.8 million viewers easily winning its time slot. By the time NYPD Blue’s first season ended it received what was then a record 26 Emmy nominations, more than the previous leader Hill Street Blues (Bochco’s first big hit) had gotten in its first season.

I’ll be honest for much of my formative years I took a dim view of Blue particularly compared to Homicide. I didn’t watch much of it until well after it was in syndication and while I was impressed by much of the acting and writing, it always seems to pale in comparison to Homicide. Much of it may very well have been due to envy at the former show’s success: NYPD Blue was nominated for Best Drama its first six years on the air; Homicide was never even nominated once in that category. NYPD Blue seemed to have earned its place in TV lore because of how flagrantly it broke the rules in pushing the boundaries of television, something that I considered baubles compared to the way Homicide was. And perhaps most telling I had not yet become comfortable with the dialogue and writing of David Milch yet. In an early article I wrote I said: “The characters on NYPD Blue speak like they’re characters in a police drama. The characters on Homicide speak like real police.”

In the decades that have passed I have seen and in fact adore much the work of Milch as much as David Simon and Tom Fontana, the writers behind Homicide who, like Milch, would create two of the groundbreaking dramas that put HBO on the map and started the revolution. I eventually saw most of Hill Street Blues and the work that Milch did for that incredible series and I’ve written an entire episode guide for Deadwood, one of the all-time great shows. But I still have had trouble appreciating Blue years after the fact. And it wasn’t until fairly recently that I put my finger on why.

However I think we must give credit where it is due and the fact remains NYPD Blue was one of the most groundbreaking dramas in TV history. It is impossible to imagine that without it so many of the great dramas that happened in its wake – both on network television and cable – could have existed. So let’s look at Blue and Homicide in regards to their first season on the air: how they both utterly revolutionized what TV at the time was capable of, their similarities and differences in that approach, and why Homicide is far more likely to age better than Blue’s after 30 years.

Note: For the purposes of this article I’m going to consider the first two seasons of Homicide as one season. Considering that they were 13 episodes combined and that they aired during the same period as Blue’s first season, I think I can be allowed critical license.

First of all I need to make a point that a generation used to even such mild costumed dramas as The Crown and The Gilded Age coming with viewer discretion warnings and raised on TV ratings just how shocking Blue was when it debuted in 1993. There had been protests over TV episodes and shows before, but most of them had been in regard to actors behavior as well as certain taboo subjects. Some of them involved ridiculous reason (even talking about religion could get death threats) some of them darker (sex in any form was a subject of attack). But most of them involved just one or two episodes and were almost always overblown.

NYPD Blue may very well have been one of the few times in the history of television where the shock was at least understandable if not merited. This was a series which began with Andy Sipowicz yelling at the DA whose case he just ruined with bad behavior: “Ipso this, you bitch!” and grabbing his crotch. Profanities that hadn’t been heard anywhere on network television  - ‘dickhead, douchebag, asshole’ were being used every two minutes, almost all of them coming from Sipowicz who was painted as a misogynist, racist and clearly a drunk. Halfway through the episode Sipowicz is having sex with a prostitute when a gunman comes in and shoots him. There’s also nudity that went beyond the level of what network TV could get away with, mostly in terms of women, just as much men. This was not the kind of thing you saw Magnum P.I or T.J. Hooker try to do.

And there had never been a character who was essentially the lead like Andy Sipowicz, played memorably by Dennis Franz for twelve seasons and four Emmys for Best Lead Actor in a Drama. In later seasons his edge would be softened by marital bliss and numerous tragedies but when the show was at its peak (when David Milch was writing for it) he made it very clear that Sipowicz was not a teddy bear. He would curse and growl obscenities, clash with his African-American boss Lt. Fancy (James McDaniel) who thought he was a racist and who was not unwilling to use racial epithets when he saw fit. Even when he sobered up  - his character went to AA in Season 1, though he would periodically fall off the wagon when tragedy struck -  Sipowicz was not a man who was easy to like, much less be a hero.

Milch had wanted to do a show with an antihero before but TV wasn’t ready for it in the 1980s. And while the show would be willing to make clear Sipowicz was the lead, he and Bochco hedged their bets by making the central character in Season 1 the more conventionally handsome and less edgy John Kelly, played by David Caruso. Milch very quickly regretted that decision. In a book written not long after Milch made it very clear what a prima donna Caruso was on the show, even claiming that dealing with him led to his suffering a heart attack during the show’s first season. Indeed news about the behind the scenes yelling between Caruso and the show’s writers became nearly as prominent as the raves for the episodes and the controversy of what was being seen on the screen. By the time Season 1 ended Caruso either quit or was fired (it depends on who you ask) and was replaced by the more stable Jimmy Smits as Bobby Simone four episodes into Season 2.

By the time Smits arrived the entire cast was different: Sherry Stringfield, who played Kelly’s ex-wife in the first season left to star in the pilot for an unknown series called ER. Amy Brenneman, who’d played patrolwoman Janice Licalsi – who became Kelly’s lover – was written out of the series after two episodes. Both Stringfield and Brenneman have had tremendous careers in TV since leaving the show but it remains unclear if the two of them left to pursue other options or whether Caruso’s behavior became so intolerable they resigned.

Caruso tried to pursue a film career but it ended up being so disastrous that it was joke in the pilot of South Park. He eventually returned to TV and found a different set of stardom playing a very different kind of law enforcement officer on CSI: Miami.

It’s clear now in hindsight that Milch was using the profanity and nudity as draws to try and tell the kinds of stories he’d never gotten a chance to before, certainly not on Hill Street Blues. Many of them were highly serialized, playing out over several episodes or perhaps even the course of an entire season. And in many of them he was clearly willing to break the bounds of what we came to expect from police dramas. The pilot of NYPD Blue ends with Licalsi, who we’ve just met having a meeting with a mobster we know is connected to crimes – and shooting him in the chest with no apparent provocation. Milch would eventually give her one  -  in 1993 protagonists on network TV couldn’t get away with murder – but it’s not hard to see a line from this moment that doesn’t end in Vic Mackey shooting a fellow cop in the face in the first episode of The Shield nearly a decade later.

Milch spent much of his tenure of the series making clear, just as he had on Hill Street, that all of his detectives were flawed. Most of the time this played out with the male detectives but he would do so occasionally with female character. Diane Russell, played by Kim Delaney with searing intensity for seven seasons, was the best example of this. Just as much of an alcoholic as Sipowicz was she was also intensely sexual, instigating an affair with Bobby Simone not long after they first met. And there was clearly a troubled past: the insights we got into her family life showed two parents who were always fighting and constantly involved in domestic violence. Diane finally revealed that she was the victim of sexual molestation from her father, something she had never been able to face. That was something that characters just didn’t admit on television in the 1990s.

But for all the incredible performances, grit and darkness there were always troubling elements to the show that bothered me when I watched it in syndication and that in the era of reckoning with police may make an entire generation view it as unwatchable. Because while Milch was revolutionary in many ways, when it came to how he let his cops interrogate suspects he was practically a dinosaur.

The Pilot begins with Kelly, the man we’re supposed to consider a hero, showing the rookie to the squad James Martinez (Nicholas Turturro) the correct way to beat a confession out of a suspect without being caught. Future episodes will rarely be this direct with their violence but so much of Blue’s police work involves watching Sipowicz berate, bully and come as close to the verge of beating a confession out of a suspect as he can. It bothered me in my twenties, particularly in comparison to Homicide; I don’t think I could go anywhere near it today. Considering how much of it involves white detectives bullying women and minorities – and not long after everything that involved the Central Park Five that was unfolding – I can’t imagine anyone from Gen Z being able to watch it.

NYPD BLUE was the first show I remember where every single episode opened with a viewer discretion warning but I’m pretty sure it was for the language and nudity and not the plots. That was, in a sick way, the most traditional thing about Blue that it considered violence and rage against its suspects not only to be tolerated but silently approved of by the bosses. The show was offering what amounted to trigger warnings before they were formed but giving the kinds of material we see on even network TV; the violence and profanity would not even cause most teenage viewers to blink. The offensive attitude towards minority suspect, the dismissive way they are treated by the police, that would be the thing that cause protests today among viewers.

Homicide was in many ways just as revolutionary in its first thirteen episodes as Blue was but whereas Blue was all action and energy always moving forward what made Homicide revolutionary was how measured it was towards policing.

There’s no gunfire in the first episode. Every time the characters pull guns its for safety purpose and they announce themselves. (Guns don’t even go off until the third season, and a detective won’t even fire his weapon until late in Season 4.) All of the characters look relatively ordinary: there’s a woman detective but as I’ve written before while Melissa Leo is attractive she is not drop dead gorgeous the way that almost all the female leads on Blue will be. There’s no handsome leading man having sex in the pilot. There’s no leading man at all. Indeed for the first thirteen episodes while there are certain arcs where characters are used more, you’d be hard pressed to say if the show has a lead. (Frank Pembleton doesn’t begin to become the standout character until Season 3.)

The characters in NYPD Blue always seem to be agitated to the point that they are always snapping. The detectives in Homicide are agitated and angry too but the mood that you find for all the characters is world-weariness bordering on exhaustion. This is frequently masked with a dark humor bordering on theater of the absurd: our introduction to John Munch shows him trying to interrogate a suspect who can’t even seem to be bothered to come up with a credible story. Munch gets angry at him mainly at the stupidity: “I’ve been a murder police for ten years. When you lie to me, you lie to me with respect.” It’s hard to imagine Sipowicz – really any detective in Blue  - reacting to a suspect with such mockery at their own stupidity.

The other critical thing that is different about the suspects in Homicide is one that would never be seen in Blue. The criminals on Blue are at least clever enough to manipulate the detectives. From the very episode we learn what will be one of the classic lines from Pembleton: “Crime makes you stupid.” This plays out time and again throughout the pilot and so much of the series as a whole. Howard and Felton find a dead body in the cellar and the suspect actually calls the victim’s house and volunteers to come down for an interrogation. We meet a ‘black widow’ who kills her husbands for the insurance policies and tries to kill her niece three separate times. A bodyguard shoots his boss when a gunfight breaks out and one of the suspects puts his gun to his client’s head. He shoots through his boss to get to him. “Very commendable,” Munch said when he learns why.

And if NYPD Blue was famous for all speed forwards one of the most groundbreaking episodes came in ‘Night of the Dead Living’ when we spent a night in the squad room where the heat is brutal, the air conditioning is broken, and there isn’t a single murder to get the detectives out of the squad room – something they spend the night complaining about. The episode deals with domestic issues: Felton’s struggling marriage, Munch’s messy relationship with his girlfriend Felicia, Bolander trying to work up the courage to ask the new M.E. on a date. Crosetti spends the episode worried about his teenage daughter. The biggest mystery is who lights the candle at the beginning of every shift: one that the detectives don’t solve but the viewer learns the answer to. Homicide did many revolutionary episodes in its run that tweaked the format of the cop drama and sometimes that involved the fact that there are shifts when nothing happens at all.

An even more revolutionary approach was the show’s approach to confessions. In the pilot Pembleton tells the rookie Bayliss: “I’m about to embark on a job of salesmanship…But what I am selling is a long prison term to a client with no genuine need for the product.” There is no effort to bully or provoke and certainly not beat the suspect into submission. Most of the tension in Pembleton’s first interrogation is when the suspect asks for a lawyer and Pembleton has to convince him that he doesn’t need one.

This is witnessed by the rookie Bayliss who is outraged – in his mind the suspect asked for one. Pembleton reminds of the circumstances: the victim is an old man who was robbed of his car by a younger man in what was clearly a hookup.

“Okay when this gets to the DA, he’s going to claim that he changed his mind about the sex. And there’s not a jury in the world who’s not going to think Berger was a dirty old man who got what was coming to him. So the DA’s gonna plea bargain down to five years. He’s gonna do a third of that. And you think I was unfair?”

Perhaps the most iconic moment of the pilot – the one that truly sums up what is about to come – shows up in the penultimate scene. Munch, Crosetti and Lewis are bitching about the job and they notice that there’s a man whose been eyeing them and the car for a while. They’re annoyed that no one can tell they are cops. Finally Munch walks up to him: “We’re murder police. Go rob somebody else.”  No fight, no arrest, no entreaty to lead an honest life. Just a request to go away and leave them alone. They’re not going to bring this criminal in. There’s too much paperwork involved.

Homicide’s approach to police work was fundamentally different from Blue in a way that I truly believe makes it hold up incredibly well even as we have a reckoning about the police procedural. It is one of the reasons I could never tolerate not only Blue but so many procedurals that followed where cops would browbeat and abuse suspects into admitting their horrible crimes. So much of what happened on Homicide when it came to the murders they investigated was almost anticlimactic. I lost count of how many times the detectives knew who the suspect was and had enough to get him well before the episode truly began. Giardello never tolerated violence in the squad, but watching so many interrogations it would have been wasted. Why beat a confession out of someone who’s more than happy to tell you for a cigarette?

Much of the reasons Homicide seemed more authentic was because it was shot on the streets of Baltimore and was in its way as much a character as all of the detectives involved. This played out with the fact that this was by far the show with the most African-American cast to this point in TV history, something that the writers never made you think about – and that sometimes even shocked the cast members themselves.

And maybe that’s at least one of the reasons that while both shows were critically acclaimed during their runs, Homicide was watched by fewer people and received fewer awards. There’s always been a subtle racism in regards to how the Emmys and viewers watched so many of Simon and Fontana’s shows in the 21^st century compared to other almost entirely white HBO dramas – The Wire had to struggle for survival in a way The Sopranos never did and subsequent Simon dramas like Treme and The Deuce never got anywhere near the audience or awards that inferior but far whiter HBO dramas such as True Blood and The Newsroom did.

In the weeks to come I intend to begin an official rewatch of Homicide which has in the past month begun to finally stream on Peacock, one of the last great shows of the 1990s that had yet to appear on any streaming service. I look forward to revisiting it and I expect that it will still hold up. I last revisited the show roughly eight years ago (I needed it to get through the first half of the Trump administration) while I was also revisiting Blue. Homicide still brought be the same pleasure it had when I first watched it and Blue seemed even more problematic even though by then I fully appreciated the other work of David Milch and Steven Bocho. Both series were groundbreaking and both are worth revisiting. But I suspect those who watch Pembleton in the box will have far less trouble with his interrogations then they will with Andy Sipowicz’s. It was true for me twenty years ago; it’s exponentially truer now.

 

Baseball History: Why A Division Title Will Always Beat Being A Second Division Team

 

 

We are approaching October and the climax of the baseball season. And with it, as always will come the cry of that old species: the institutionalists.

The institutionalists are the kind of sports fan that is almost entirely exclusive to baseball. They are the most conservative people imaginable when it comes to sports. This might come as shock to Doris Kearns Goodwin or Bob Costas but even as someone who admires their work in baseball I can assure you that when it comes to talking about the game they love they will become as rabid an originalist as you will ever find working for The Heritage Foundation.

This is hardly new: when it ever it comes to any kind of change to baseball the lion’s share of fans have responded the way the 90 year old Republican voter is: they were against every damn one. (Except integration. That fantasy is left in the minds of certain sportswriters who work for the New York Post and even he won’t put it in print.)  I honestly think that given the chose between a change that might make baseball accessible to new fans and therefore have a future and baseball staying exactly the same and then dying out at the end of these fans lifetimes, these  lovers of the game would honestly prefer the latter.

Fans and people use such odds words to baseball they don’t use for other sports and indeed most pastimes: “cherished institution’  ‘the integrity of the game’, ‘the games glorious tradition’  I’ll be honest: whenever I hear certain announcers and columnists about pitch clocks or relief specialists destroying the game, I’m reminded of those Republican politicians who think getting rid of the filibuster would destroy the entire system of American democracy. There are more than  a few fans of the game and countless people who used to play it who talk about it as if were actually in the sepia photographs from a Ken Burns’s documentary rather than a game that is still being played. And they save their harshest blows the closer it gets to October and the World Series.

Few things will get fans of a certain age more vehement then the idea of the expanded postseason. They will talk about the good old says when the long season ended with two teams in the World Series with second place counting for nothing. They mention the same way they talk about how the postseason destroyed the pennant race, the other institution. I actually argued many years ago that the idea of the pennant race was a myth so I’d actually like to talk about another part of baseball history that’s an integral part of the game during the 20^th century  but is never talked about, certainly not with fondness.

The pennant race when it existed was almost always between two teams, three at the most. Baseball was divided between the haves and the have-nots well before free agency and there were rich teams and poor teams even within the same city. It was true in Boston during the first twenty years of the 20^th century; Philadelphia during the first thirty years of that same century and it was always true of St. Louis after Branch Rickey took over the Cardinals. When the Yankees took over their dominance of the American League in 1921 there were only one or two teams that could challenge their dominance and never for long. The National League had more parity but after a while it became a fight between St. Louis and New York and later on Brooklyn.

Even before the American League came into existence a phrase was prominent in baseball: second division. When leagues had eight teams, the first four teams in the league were in the first division and the last four were in the second division. This was given significance after 1918 when the leagues decided to give revenue from the World Series to any team that managed to finish as high as fourth place. That rarely helped many of the teams in either league manage to get a motivation to move higher and to many of those teams in both leagues after May, it was a pipe dream.

This part of baseball history will never be talked about it a Ken Burns documentary or any of the nostalgic HBO pieces we’ve seen over the decades. It doesn’t fit the standard of how good baseball was when it was played in the golden sunlight and on real grass. But for the majority of the fans of the game in so many cities across both leagues it was the reality – something that no one who lived in New York could comprehend.

And once you realize that your team is never going to get higher than sixth place and that any realistic pennant hopes will be dashed by Memorial Day at the latest the inevitable happens: attendance becomes incredibly low. Most teams in the pre-World War II era had no options then to play games to mostly empty fields in ballparks that were often crumbling. Wrigley Field is a beautiful ballpark and the fact that it manage to draw great attendance from the end of World War II until the end of the 20^th century not only without ever winning a pennant but not even coming close to it most of its time is a tribute to the Cubs fan.

Most teams of that era didn’t have that option. Few will write odes to Griffith Path, the Baker Bowl or Braves Field. With good reason. There was little fun to be had watching the games. By 1952 having one just two National League pennants in the 20^th century the Braves moved to Milwaukee. The Browns moved east to Baltimore. And the Senators as you will see went to Minnesota in 1961. Not wanting to leave the nation’s capital devoid of baseball, a new Senators team was founded. They did little better and eventually went to Texas. No one mourned these losses the way Dodgers fans mourned the move to LA but then again, it didn’t happen in New York so who cared.

And if this had to be grim for the fans, think of what it was like for the players of these teams bound to them by the hated reserve clause to have to play for empty stands for teams that never even came close to contending. George Sisler, Ralph Kiner and Luke Appling were among the greatest of all players but because they never got to the World Series few know their names. (Kiner is famous for his broadcasting career, not as much his superb play.) How Ernie Banks was so enthusiastic playing for a team that never won a pennant must have been harder than his demeanor suggested. It’s hardly a coincidence that Curt Flood decided to sue baseball when he was traded to the Phillies, a team that had won two pennants in its existence and was well on its way to setting a record for the most losses endured by any franchise in history.

Those who argue the 1950s was the Golden Age of Baseball almost solely live in New York. The Shot Heard Round the World was one of the greatest moments in baseball history to be sure but it's meaning has to be solely devoted to those who lived in New York at the time. For someone who grew up in Pittsburgh or Detroit during that same period they probably wouldn’t understand what the fuss is about and they have a point.

Now think about what has happened in baseball since the wild card race was introduced over the past thirty years:

-The Red Sox managed to break the ‘curse’ and in 2004 won their first World Series since 1918. In 2016 the Chicago Cubs finally managed to break their 108 year long curse after winning their first pennant in 71 years. Less noticed but just as significant was the fact that in 2005 the White Sox won their first World Series since 1917 after winning their first pennant since 1959.

-The Angels, having spent the first forty years of their existence without winning a single American League Pennan,t won their first World Series in 2002. The Houston Astros who had never gotten anywhere near the World Series in the first forty-three years of their existence won their first pennant in 2005. After switching to the American League they won a (tainted) World Championship in 2017. Last year the Texas Rangers won their first World Series in their 62 year history, stretching back to their birth as the expansion Senators in 1961. The Washington Nationals (formerly the Expos) won the World Series in 2019, the first World Championship DC has seen since the Senators won back in 1924.

-The Diamondbacks won the World Series four years after being created by expansion in 1998. The Miami Marlins won 2 World Series in the first decade of their existence.

-The Royals who had not won a pennant or contended for one since winning the World Series in 1985 won the American League Pennant in 2014 and the World Series in 2015. The San Francisco Giants, who’d won three pennants since they moved there in 1958, won three World Series in five years.

For all the arguments of what all the wild card berth has done to hurt the game no one talks about  what it is has done to help it and that’s offer hope in a way that baseball really hasn’t for so many smaller teams across the league in a way they never did during the years of two eight team leagues and not much more during the era of divisional play. Yes rich teams do win and do get further – the Yankees and Dodgers are prime examples of this and they may very well end up facing off this October in the World Series – but teams have hope that is less futile then it was for much of the twentieth century. Yes there are still wretched teams – the White Sox this year demonstrated that to a huge extent -  but at the very least the weaker teams across Major League Baseball can at least hold on to hope for longer.

And it gives the possibility for what has always made baseball a great sport: the possibility that anything can and will happen. On August 1^st the Detroit Tigers were in a distant fourth and looked to be facing a lost season. During the next two months they had the best record in all of baseball and clinched a wild card spot to grant them a place in the postseason for the first time in a decade.

We see variations of this playing throughout almost every division to an extent. The Yankees spent much of the summer in a horrible slump after a hot start looking like they were going to repeat last year’s collapse. Then in August and September the team got hot and on Thursday clinched the AL east over the Baltimore Orioles.

The San Diego Padres which collapsed after a promising 2022 season, have rebounded to make the wild card race in 2024. The Milwaukee Brewers won the N.L Central for the second consecutive year. Both teams have a chance to win the first World Series in their existences.

Other teams have another chance to make their own impact. The Baltimore Orioles have a chance to win their first World Series since 1983. The Cleveland Guardians could end up winning their first World Series since Harry Truman was going to lose to Dewey. And the Braves and the Mets are facing off for a chance to compete in the post season – and for the Mets in particular, it would be a hard fought war no one expected them to win.

Part of the lure of baseball, the thing that draws so many fans in year after year, is the possibility that is more likely here than any other sport: a chance a team, a player, a manager, will receive glory on its biggest stage. I fail to see how it is a bad thing if there is a better chance for more of those players to have a shot at this opportunity then before.

When he was inducted into Cooperstown Ted Williams told the masses that baseball gives every American a chance to succeed. Williams never played on a World Series winner and he considered that the most disappointing thing that ever happened to him. Baseball is a flawed institution – not even its most virulent defenders would argue otherwise  - but there is much that is good in it. And if it is to be like other American institution, it must offer more of a chance to the athletes who play it and the teams that root for them year after year to have a realistic chance at the World Series.

As a fan of the game myself I have always applauded the wild card because as someone who wants to see slights redressed and history made baseball has given me more opportunities to see that in the past twenty years than most fans in the twentieth century got in their lifetimes. I don’t live in Chicago, Boston or DC but that doesn’t mean I didn’t take in the same pleasure that their fans did when the historic World Series victories took place. That is what I love about the sport and that is why I love every October. That possibility. That hope. That wonder. I will take that over someone’s description of ‘integrity’ any day of the week and twice during this time of year.

Play ball.

What Numbers and History Have Taught Me About Elections In My Lifetime – And Lessons We’d Do Well To Learn Part 1: The Real Reason Al Gore Lost in 2000

 

There are many reasons that people who wouldn’t normally care about elections do. With me, I think it comes down to two reasons. The first has been made clear in my columns: my abiding love for American history. The second is less obvious to readers of my column but is more personal: the numbers of it.

As I’ve mentioned in a few of my articles I’m on the spectrum and I have always found, for whatever reason, a comfort in arithmetic. I can’t explain what is: maybe it’s the fact that numbers are the same no matter where you are and in a world where everything changes, you always know that the multiplication tables will always be the same. Numbers are constants and I’m always found them comforting. (That is almost certainly one of the major reasons I love baseball so much as well, considering how close math and history are aligned there.)

I should be clear though on one critical difference: when I talk about math in politics I mean things such as the numbers in Congress, the primary system and the history of elections. I do not mean polling. I admit these days I follow polling with the avidness of almost all Americans who claim to be interested in politics but as someone whose studied electoral history all his adult life I know very well that the one constant in the history of polling is that it’s an inexact science.

We are all familiar with the most famous political photograph testifying to that fact: a triumphant Harry Truman holding up a newspaper that reads: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” after he has just beaten the odds to win election in his own right. As I wrote in my series on Thomas Dewey last year much of this was due to the fact that pollsters were so certain of the result that many of them just stopped polling weeks before the election.

But before and after that famous photo, the one thing you could absolutely count on from any major pollster during the 20^th century wasn’t only that they were wrong as often as they were right but they could be spectacularly wrong. By the time I was eligible to vote in my first presidential election in 2000, I was aware of some of the most egregious blunders in prognostication in history. I’ll just give you a sample, some of which you may be familiar with, some I know you won’t be:

 

-         On Election Day 1916 the New York Times published on its front page that Charles Evans Hughes had defeated Woodrow Wilson for the Presidency even though the votes from California which hadn’t been fully counted yet weren’t in. Hughes went to bed thinking he was President and Wilson actually began making contingency plans in case of it. Two days later California went for Wilson by 1300 votes and with those 13 electoral votes Wilson had 277 to Hughes’s 254.

 

-         During the lead-up to the 1936 election, Literary Digest the first major polling operation began the polling that it had used to successfully predict the winner in every election since they’d started doing so in 1920. For weeks, their polls showed Alf Landon, the Republican nominee, comfortably ahead of FDR until in their final issue they were confident predicting Landon would win in 32 states to FDR’s 16. On election day FDR won every state but Maine and Vermont with 523 electoral votes to Landon’s 8, the greatest electoral landslide to that point in history. Literary Digest folded not long after.

 

-         During the 1944 Presidential election many believed the election would be incredibly close and that Thomas Dewey would prevail. FDR won in 36 of 48 states with 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99.

 

-         In the last week leading up to the 1960 Presidential election, the pollsters essentially looked at the polls and determined that JFK would win the Presidency in a landslide over Richard Nixon. The 1960 election was the closest to that point in history, with JFK winning by just 112,000 votes out of 67 million cast – and many considered fraudulent counts in Texas and Illinois.

 

So well before we were proliferated with the avalanche of polling the internet and TV give us on a minute by minute these days I had become very sure of something that is all the more clear in our polarized society: polling can be twisted to mean whatever the pollster wants us too.

But that doesn’t mean that we should discount math, rather that we should consider what the numbers mean. And I think that my personal experience with the facts and figures in the six Presidential elections to date I have been eligible to vote might provide some clarity to what the endless spin and pontificating can’t. And since there is so much discussion these days about the Senate as well, I think it might be worth considering what I’m come to learn from watching it closely over the past decade because there are some lessons that I think we all need to know rather than what we think we do.

I realize this can be a touchy subject, so I’m going to keep my editorializing to a minimum and focus on the figures. This will still inevitably trigger some people but at this point I know that’s practically a given. All I can say is I’ve done my homework and I’ve crunched the numbers on everything I’m going to write. The rest is up to you.

Let’s start with the first Presidential election I voted in which was Al Gore vs George W. Bush in 2000. I greeted it the same way that millions of 18-21 year olds have basically considered elections today: with a complete lack of enthusiasm. However my problems had nothing to do with partisanship (my parents were Democrats but I hadn’t decided yet if I would be one) or policy (I wasn’t old enough to really understand the difference between both parties on any major level) but history.

Because at 21 I didn’t believe in dynasties. And while the two candidates were completely ideologically different in one critical area to me there was none: both men were children of political privilege. Everyone knew who Bush’s father was, and I knew very well that Al Gore was as much a junior as W. (I’ll get to that in a minute.) I felt very strongly that candidate for the highest office in the land had to be based on more than who their father was. And I spent that entire election looking towards the period with great reluctance, something that for the record the entire nation spent all of 2000 thinking.

I don’t remember the circumstances but around October I started, purely for my own amusement, what amounted to an effort to forecast the results. I barely used the Internet back then (I know, I’m ancient) and polling was nowhere as prolific online as it would be just a decade later. My methodology was both analog and historical.

I took all the books I had showing the electoral patterns of all 50 states over the 20^th century. I focused almost entirely on the period from 1960 to 1996 as my metric, knowing that was the critical juncture. And eventually I came to the unofficial conclusion that it was going to be a very close election but that Al Gore would narrowly win.

Now because any record I have is long lost I must tell you I have no clear memory of what the final count was. What I do remember very clearly was that Florida was not part of my calculations in a Gore victory. No the reason I was sure Gore would win was because I was certain he was going to carry Tennessee.

I based this more on a historical fact of elections in the second half of the 20^th century that I’m willing to bet most casual students are aware of: in the 20^th century no President had ever won election and not carried his state of birth. Furthermore between 1960 and 1996 only one nominee of a major party ticket had ever not carried the state of his birth: George McGovern whose home state of South Dakota was lost in the Nixon landslide. Even Mondale had carried his home state of Minnesota (by a slim margin)

It’s worth noting that we were not yet in the era where the South was solidly Republican. In 1992 and 1996 the south had been split fairly evenly between both Democrats and Republicans. No doubt this was due to a Bill Clinton-Al Gore ticket, where Tennessee and Arkansas had gone blue both times. But in 1992 they had also carried Louisiana, West Virginia, Missouri, Georgia and Kentucky (though they didn’t carry now purple states North Carolina or Florida or even the reliably blue Virginia). In 1996 the ticket had lost Georgia but carried Florida and essentially carried all the other states I listed in 1992.

I remark on this because Gore was the first Democratic candidate to run for President since Mondale who didn’t carry a single state in the entire South. In many ways that is the real reason he lost the 2000 election more than anything else. One can make all of the arguments about the polarization of America one wants and I don’t deny the significance of Florida – but if Gore had carried just one of the southern states that he and Clinton had carried in both of their successful runs for President, he would have won in the electoral college and Florida would have been a footnote in Presidential history rather than the saga it became on election night and the two months afterwards.

I have no clear memory of election night 2000 other than when things started to get hazy around the time Florida went back for Bush. I remember I had classes the next night and I went to bed sometime around midnight and none of the networks or cable had yet called the election. I do remember thinking several things about the results in the immediate aftermath.

The first was that for all intents and purposes the public had basically split down the middle. You can make all the arguments about Gore winning the popular vote (and I will in due time) but half a million votes out of more than 101 million votes cast is hardly the theft that so many people have made it out to be, both at the time and all the more so in the quarter of a century afterwards. This has to be made clear in the larger point in the Congressional elections.

Essentially they were unchanged after the 2000 elections. The Republicans lost two seats and the Democrats gained one, leaving the House essentially the same. The Senate was left in a deadlock even though the Democrats did gain four seats, it was still tied 50-50. The total margins between Democrats and Republicans in both houses were, if anything, even closer: Senate Democrats got 55,000 more votes than Senate Republicans out of 73 and a half million cast and Congressional Republicans got 40o,ooo more votes than Congressional Democrats out of 93.5 million cast. The message from Americans across the country for Congress was basically the same as for the Presidency: we can’t really choose between either one of you. Whoever won in 2000 had no clear mandate from the country as to who they trusted and if Gore had won, he would have probably faced an uphill battle considering only one House of Congress was (marginally) under Democratic control and the House was still under Republican control. He would likely have as many problems throughout his first two years than We did, if not more so. I recall having at least one discussion with my father after the results in the Senate were declared that regardless of who was President, the Vice President might very well break John Adams’s record for most tie-breaking votes in the Senate. (I don’t know if that came to pass either in Bush’s years as President or in the years that followed.)

And maybe that’s why even after the Supreme Court ruled, even after the horrors of everything that was his Presidency were well underway and even to this day, I have never been able to look at George W. Bush as an illegitimate President the same way that millions of Americans have ever since. And I think it comes down to what I said at the start: Al Gore couldn’t carry his home state. I’ve always had this feeling, wrong or not, that there has to be a correlation between a candidate’s appeal to his home state and national. You can make any argument you want – and I expect them to come out of the woodwork – about how different the south is from the rest of ‘America’  but it doesn’t change the fact that Gore, like his father before, him represented the state of Tennessee as an elected official. If he could not convince him to vote for him as President, then why should we be shocked that the rest of the nation had similar problems?

In 1992 Clinton carried Tennessee with 47 percent of the vote to Bush’s 42 percent and Perot’s 10 percent. In 1996 he carried it with 48 percent to Dole’s 45 percent and Perot’s 5 percent. But in 2000 Al Gore lost his home state with 47 percent of the vote to Bush’s 51 percent. Some would argue Perot’s presence was the main reason Clinton carried Tennessee both times; there’s just as valid an argument Gore’s presence is the main reason.

For nearly a quarter of a century we’ve been told the narrative behind Gore’s loss and all of the villains: Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, the Supreme Court, one narrative even put the handling of Elian Gonzalez. (Interestingly in the world Pat Buchanan is given full responsibility but Ralph Nader is still completely absolved. Another day.) All of them involve Florida because the story is clear one.

But in all that time I still know absolutely nothing about the campaign Gore ran in Tennessee. I don’t know what presence the DNC had there; I don’t know how many campaign stops Gore made there; I don’t even know if they took it for granted or they tried at all. I do get the logic: Florida is a story that fits the Hollywood version of politics with clear villains and tragic victims. But campaigns are just as frequently lost on details that are more meaningful. Tennessee’s loss is insignificant in the narrative of 2000 because Florida being stolen is a better sound bite than the fact that your candidate lost the election because he lost the state he served.

It’s also significant, it should be added, because Florida  is a bigger state, a swing state and therefore more ‘important’ in the eyes of both parties and particularly a party that has spent the better part of the last half-century become more reliant on electoral prizes and less on smaller rural states. Florida, I should mention, was not considered a swing state and had only gone Democratic in 1976 under Jimmy Carter. Clinton hadn’t been able to carry it in 1992. During that same period Tennessee had gone Democratic more often than Florida had so you’d think the Democrats would have given at least some consideration.

And as the 21^st century has unfolded the idea of a candidate needing to care their home state has taken less significance. It hasn’t affected the Democrats: every Presidential candidate so far this century has carried their home state – though every Democratic candidate has also been from a deep blue state.

The Republicans, however, have been moving away from this for a while. Mitt Romney lost not only the state he served as Governor but the state he was born in and that his father had served as governor (Massachusetts and Michigan) and for the last three election the Republicans have nominated a candidate who lost his home state twice and is almost certain the lost it a third year in a row.

 Of course Trump’s adopted home state is Florida and it’s worth noting after the Republicans narrowly lose in 2012, they’ve won it the last two elections and may very well win it this time around. So maybe they took another lesson from 2000.

In my next article I will deal with my fascination with Presidential primaries during the first two decades of my experience with elections and why I will never be one who argues against them.