May 22, 2006
Men Are From Mountain View, Women Are From Seattle; or, Why John McCain Will Defeat Hillary Clinton Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:30 PM EST (Note: I picked Brother Derek in the Preakness, so there’s no reason to pay any attention to my predictions, but here goes anyway, for what it’s worth.)
According to the Regular Guy Theory of Elections, American presidential races tend to be won by the candidate who does a better job of impersonating
somebody you’d want to watch a football game with. You can trace this pattern all the way back to Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams in 1828 (and in fact, I did just that here five years ago (scroll all the way to the end)), but let’s look at the elections since World War II—and remember, this has nothing to do with the merits of the candidates, only with their images.
In 1948 Thomas Dewey was a prohibitive favorite, but he was a notorious stiff, while Harry Truman was informal as all get-out. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that Truman pulled off a last-moment upset. In 1952 and again in 1956, ever-genial Dwight Eisenhower had it all over Adlai Stevenson, for whom the word “egghead” seemed to have been invented (though in fact Eisenhower was a former college president, and you can’t get much more
eggheaded than that).
In 1960 there was no clear favorite in the affability department. JFK was more easygoing than Richard Nixon, but he also had a hard time hiding his aristocratic background, so that was a very close election. In 1964 LBJ had the advantage in folksiness and everything else; Barry Goldwater was actually quite down-to-earth, but his ideas were not right for the times (some were ahead of the times and some behind them, but very few were sound for 1964). The 1968 and 1972 elections were like 1960 in that neither Nixon nor his opponent (Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern respectively) had the down-home touch, so other factors predominated.
In 1976 Jimmy Carter seemed fresh and easygoing, giving him the edge on Gerald Ford, who was also unpretentious but somewhat on the dull side. But
after a rough four years, Carter had turned into an old scold, whereas Ronald Reagan was the master of well-gosh humility. Walter Mondale, in 1984,
was basically the same guy as Humphrey and McGovern—an intelligent, well-meaning, somewhat uptight, slightly too earnest upper Midwesterner—so
it’s no surprise that Reagan cleaned his clock.
The 1988 election may have pitted the least charismatic pair of candidates since FDR, as nerdy Michael Dukakis lost to preppy George H. W. Bush. Bush was easy prey for good ol’ boy Bill Clinton in 1992, and four years later Clinton managed to deflect a challenge from Bob Dole, who was much more like Ike than like Humphrey/McGovern/Mondale but had passed his sell-by date. And of course, George W. Bush did a much better job of positioning himself as a regular guy than Al Gore or John Kerry, not that those two offered much
competition.
So that’s why McCain will win in 2008. People appreciate how hard Sen. Clinton works and the fact that she’s less of a loose cannon than McCain, and while they know she takes most of her political positions for strategic reasons, they also understand that this indicates a welcome lack of ideological rigidity. Still, in the end she’s efficient but distant—not someone you can love. Hillary is Microsoft and McCain is Google, and Hillary’s attempts at being warm and friendly, however sincere they may actually be, ring about as true as the little smiling computer at the bottom of your screen. As weird and annoying as Google and McCain can sometimes get, in the end they’re just more fun.
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