Election losers need not despair
There’s always a somberness to the day after Election Day. Many Americans are celebrating, but nearly as many reel from the hard math of counted ballots.
The stages of grief kick in and the Scotch and vodka flow.
Things can seem pretty dire for them.
But if you’ve spent any time researching past presidential elections you know those old races look surprisingly small in the rearview mirror.
Contests that echo from 10 and 20 and 30 years ago were also, like this one, the most critical election of our generation, the crossroads to prosperity and despair.
And despair never struck. Not really.
We continue to enjoy freedom and privileges and a standard of living that much of the world envies. We’re still a magnet for hundreds of thousands of people the world over.
In a year that makes us feel feeble and small, vulnerable to a microscopic pathogen and mob violence, it’s worth remembering our past. We’ve been here before. We’ve been in times far more dangerous than these and have proven our resilience.
Donald Trump said something on Election Day that everyone right and left can agree upon. “Winning is easy. Losing is never easy.”
So we leave the celebrations to the winners and focus today on the losers. Do not despair.
The history of America’s two major political parties tell us not to.
Our long story tells us a man in black-rimmed glasses stood at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona on this very day 56 years ago and faced the national media only hours after a mountain dropped on him.
He had lost the presidency in electoral votes by 486 to 52, a complete repudiation of his small-government conservatism. Barry Goldwater didn’t dissolve in his sorrows. He stood before the cameras and said, “I have no bitterness, no rancor at all.
“... I will devote — being unemployed as of Jan. 3 or thereabouts — I’ll have a lot of time to devote to this party, to its leadership and to the strengthening of the party, and that I have every intention of doing. I want to just ask the people in this country who worked so hard in this election not to be despondent, that we have a job to do and let’s get along with it.
“There is a two-party system in this country and we’re going to keep it,” Goldwater said. “We’re going to devote our days and the years ahead to strengthening the Republican Party, to getting more people into it.”
Goldwater had little choice but to take the long view and could not have known then that the work he started would be picked up by one of his thenrivals in the GOP.
In 1980, that rival would win the White House and launch the Reagan Revolution, a half-century of GOP near dominance fueled by Goldwater conservatism.
Democrats have known similar history.
In 1988, Michael Dukakis crashed hideously as the nominee of the party. He did not connect with average Americans. He made far too many pratfalls, including wearing a tank helmet that made him the butt of jokes at the national water cooler.
One of his campaign’s biggest mistakes was choosing the 41-year-old governor of Arkansas, then a rising star in the Democratic Party, to deliver his nominating speech.
Young Bill Clinton droned on well past his scheduled 15 minutes and threatened to push the nominating vote out of prime time. Efforts to stop him were futile. Finally, House Speaker Jim Wright made a “slicing gesture across his throat,” the Washington Post recounted.
Clinton caught on. And soon started his wind-down with these words, “In closing ...” It was one of his few popular lines. The audience cheered.
An “unmitigated disaster,” his home state Arkansas Gazette called the speech. Newsweek wrote that Clinton had probably destroyed his presidential aspirations: “Old CW: president in ’96,” followed by “New CW: he’s finished.”
But Clinton wasn’t finished. He was the future. And faster than even Newsweek could have imagined.
By 1992, the cover of TIME magazine christened Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, “The Democrat’s New Generation.” Young, vital, brimming with energy, they would hold the White House for eight years.
Losing is hard to deal with. But we’re Americans and we’re hospitable. So we give losing a little time to rest its feet and cool off, but pretty soon we grow impatient and scoot it right out the door.