The luck factor in politics Chance has played an amazing role in the careers of many presidents

In the 1999 hit movie, "Any Given Sunday," Al Pacino plays a pro football coach loosely based on Don Shula. Before a playoff game, Pacino reminds his players that football, like life, is a game of inches. The coach exhorts his team to "fight for every inch" that can spell the difference between defeat and victory. This same principle applies to elections. Numerous American statesmen have risen to prominence by the narrowest of margins and by seeming random chance. What's true in football is also true in life generally: There are turning points in careers that can make a huge difference in an individual's prospects.

And random chance can have plenty of unintended consequences, triggering changes and sending individual careers spinning off in unexpected directions. Put another way, if Spiro Agnew hadn't taken kickbacks as governor of Maryland, neither George Bush would likely have ever become president.

Agnew previously had benefited from good fortune in the 1966 Maryland gubernatorial campaign, when Democrats nominated a segregationist - who had used an open-housing controversy to upset a prohibitive favorite in the party primary - causing blacks and white liberals to defect, thus allowing Agnew to win.

The vice president's resignation on corruption charges caused President Richard Nixon to nominate moderate Republican Congressman Jerry Ford in 1973 to replace Agnew. Ford's ascension to the presidency a year later brought the moderate wing of the GOP back to power.

Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller vice president and also gave a Cabinet post to an obscure former Republican congressman named George H.W. Bush, thus putting the Bush family on the track to eventual national power. A Nixon-Agnew administration would have been unlikely to appoint the elder Bush to the Cabinet because, as recent Watergate tapes reveal, Nixon and Henry Kissinger didn't think he was tough enough for a high-level job.

Jess Unruh, the former speaker of the California State Assembly, gave Ronald Reagan his toughest statewide race in the 1970 California gubernatorial election. He once compared running for office to waiting for a streetcar or bus: A candidate "had to be waiting on the right corner, at the right time, with enough change to pay the fare or the political street car would pass them by."

In short, talent, skill and good old-fashioned hard work are vital to electoral success, but almost everyone also needs a great sense of timing to get to the top. And sometimes, great timing is nothing more than sheer blind luck. Critics of George W. Bush have said he's merely been the beneficiary of such good luck. Perhaps, but he's not the first politician to be pushed forward by "the fickle finger of fate."

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo is a homegrown example of unexpected breaks. In 1982, he started out the governor's race well behind New York City Mayor Ed Koch. But then Koch gave an interview to Playboy in which he ridiculed both suburbia ("it's sterile - it's wasting your life") and rural life ("a joke").

These comments convinced a majority of the 60 percent of voters who lived outside New York City that Koch wasn't their kind of guy. Upstate New York voters went 60 percent for Cuomo, sparking his upset victory in the primary that carried him to victory in the general election.

Numerous presidents also have benefited from good luck in the conventional sense, that is, by winning cliff-hanger elections. "The Electoral College Primer 2000" by Lawrence Longley and Neil Pierce notes there have been 13 elections since the popular vote was instituted in 1824 that were so close that the shift of only a few thousand votes would have changed the outcome. Florida in 2000 became the 14th such instance.

When looking at historical voting trends, one is struck by how a shift of a few points here or there could have changed history and greatly impacted the careers of some of our most famous statesmen.

To take a most obvious case, Warren Harding defeated Herbert Hoover for the 1920 Republican nomination. If the honest, capable and moderate Hoover had presided for the first eight years of the "Roaring Twenties," he probably would have gone down as one of our better presidents. Instead, the GOP bosses chose the genial but weak Harding, whose cronies tried to steal everything that wasn't nailed down. Hoover did become president in 1928, just in time to get blamed for the worst depression in history.

Another example: It was inevitable that the Republicans would eventually recover from the Depression-era defeats, especially after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. The only question was whether moderates like Tom Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower or conservatives like Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan would lead them.

It was also probably inevitable, given California's astounding growth after the Second World War, that the Golden State would become a national power and Californians would begin to appear on national tickets. So accordingly, Dewey chose California Gov. Earl Warren for his running mate in 1948. Had Dewey not blown a big lead in the final two weeks of that election, Earl Warren would have been in line for the presidency and Richard Nixon would have remained just another politician. Instead, Nixon became Ike's vice president four years later, and the rest was headlines.

Another twist came in 1960. Theodore H. White wrote that the election of 1960 could be seen as "a series of interlocking ifs": If Nixon had sought Eisenhower's help earlier, if Nixon hadn't caught the flu (which hurt his appearance in the televised debates; he learned his lesson well and never debated another opponent again), if Nixon had appealed to black voters by supporting Martin Luther King Jr. after his arrest, if Lyndon Johnson hadn't run with Kennedy, thus holding the South for the Democratic ticket.

Also relating to 1960, if John F. Kennedy had been chosen as Adlai Stevenson's running mate in the hopeless 1956 race against Eisenhower, his religion might have been blamed for the landslide defeat and his chances for 1960 severely damaged.

Ronald Reagan's presidency was made possible by a fellow Republican's mistakes. In 1976, Reagan had almost taken the GOP nomination away from Ford, who then chose Sen. Bob Dole as his running mate to replace Rockefeller. The Ford-Dole ticket started out 34 points behind Carter in the Harris Poll.

Ford had moved into a virtual tie with Carter going into the final debate. But he stumbled in the final debate on a question involving the Soviet takeover of Poland, and this broke his momentum at a crucial time. The Republicans fell just short: A switch of a combined 9,246 votes in Ohio and Hawaii would have tipped the Electoral College vote to Ford by one state.

Had the Ford-Dole ticket won, Dole would have been the GOP nominee in 1980. It's anybody's guess as to whether Dole would have won in 1980. But we can safely say that at age 69, Reagan's last chance at the White House would have passed him by, and the '80s would've been quite different.

Bill Clinton also benefited from the luck factor and not just in his various opponents' mistakes. In a backhanded way, the Persian Gulf War in 1991 helped make Clinton president in 1992. The spectacular success of Bush I in that war spiked his approval rating to a then-record 90 percent and scared off the top-name Democrats like Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen and Sam Nunn.

At age 46, Clinton decided to gamble on a race that, at worst, could set him up for the future since no one expected any Democrat to even come close in 1992. (The Gallup Poll didn't even list Clinton as a potential Democratic candidate in the fall of 1991).

But no one foresaw the recession of 1990 lasting into the summer of 1992 and the rise of the Ross Perot vote. The Texas billionaire split Bush's base in the suburbs and cleared the way for Clinton to win with 43 percent of the popular vote, the lowest percentage for a winner since Woodrow Wilson's 41.9 percent in 1912.

George W. Bush's luck in Florida in Election 2000 is well-known: Cuban-American voters swung massively to him because of the Elian Gonzalez case, the polls closed in Tampa while hundreds of predominantly Democratic black voters waited in line, and older voting machines disproportionately failed to work in black neighborhoods.

Also, ballot confusion among core Democratic voters cost Al Gore several thousand votes in Jacksonville and Palm Beach when Bush's final margin was just 537 votes (all this in a state run by his younger brother). If the Gore team had asked for, and the Florida Supreme Court had ordered, a statewide hand recount with common standards, the U.S. Supreme Court probably would not have intervened on fairness grounds, and Gore might well have triumphed in such a recount due to the fact that so many more Democratic ballots were disqualified due to technicalities.

But "Dubya's" luck started long before the Florida recount. Had Reagan not picked his father in 1980, he probably would have remained in business (George W. lost a 1978 congressional race in West Texas). In the 1990 Texas governor's race, a Republican millionaire rookie named Clayton Williams blew a huge lead in the last few weeks against Ann Richards, thus opening the way for Texas Republicans to recruit the former president's son to take on the then-popular Gov. Richards in 1994, whom he defeated in an upset victory.

There undeniably was skill in Bush's rise. His massive gains among black and Hispanic voters in his 1998 re-election landslide set a modern Republican record in the South and made him a top contender for 2000. But fate also intervened: Most of his Republican rivals for the Republican presidential nomination - Pete Wilson, Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm - self-destructed. And the Monica Lewinsky scandal created a climate for change despite Clinton/Gore's platform of peace and prosperity.

In "The Real Majority," Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg wrote: "Because the rule is "Expect the Unexpected,' there is little real sense in playing the political what if game - except that is addictive."

Over 2,000 years ago, Solomon observed in the Book of Ecclesiastes that, "the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all." What was true then is true now.

These people never give up. Of course luck is a big part of presidential politics (and life in general), but it seem to me that if voting machines didn't work in predominantly black neighborhoods (districts run by Democrats), or if there was voter confusion in Jacksonville or Palm Beach, this is more indicative of Democrat INCOMPETENCE as opposed to Dubya's LUCK.

Furthermore, was Bush lucky that Gore lost in his own home state of Tennesee? Or was it simply Bush being more in touch with the attitudes of that state's voters?

And if you want to talk about Bush's luck, I don't think that calling the state for Gore while the polls were still open in the panhandle was very lucky. (The networks called it for Gore only about 36 days too early).

Finally, this writer conveniently ignores the efforts by the Gore team to disqualify the military absentee ballots. These votes were disqualified, not because the voters who cast them were confused or that the ballots were improperly executed, but because they did not have proper post markings. To me this does not make Bush lucky, this makes Gore evil.

Interesting hit piece.

First, the author distorts the Florida vote to perpetuate the Democrat myth of a stolen election.

Second, he ignores the fact that the people and the states elect the President through the Electoral College (it's not the popular vote of one state).

And last, he ignores the blatant voter fraud perpetrated by the Democrat party.

The author of this article is an idiot trying to appear intellectual. He has taken a chain of events and ascribed them to "luck". Luck is a random event that favored you (such as winning the lottery). All he has described is the reality of "actions have consequences".

But, then again, Democrats don't believe in this. They believe, not matter the outcome of their actions, it's never their fault. And they believe Republicans only succeed because of "luck".

There's a different word for that attitude; Pathetic!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.