Could there be a lesson in this for Americans trying to cope with their first truly messy presidential election results in more than a century? Yes, but don’t bet on them taking the lesson to heart. It’s not just that Americans are accustomed to learning on election night, or at least by the following morning, who the clear-cut winners and losers are. The real difference comes down to the contrast between people who are raised on baseball and those who grew up with football–not American football, but the sport Americans insist on calling “soccer.” I admit: this is shameless pop psychology. But indulge me here. As someone who has observed elections on both sides of the Atlantic, I’m convinced that Europeans can cope with the political uncertainty that their parliamentary system routinely subjects them to because they have football in their blood. Americans don’t have the conditioning to cope nearly as well with a situation that feels distinctly unfamiliar to them, more like football than baseball.
Football fans know perfectly well that there are three possible outcomes to a regular-season game: win, lose or tie. Granted, “sudden death” overtimes and, as a last resort, penalty kicks are now used to settle some contests, but this is limited to “knock-out competition” like decisive World Cup games. Baseball fans always leave a stadium with the satisfaction of a win or the disappointment of a loss. If the score is tied in the ninth–or normally last–inning, the game continues until one team scores the winning run. Extend that metaphor to politics, and what we are witnessing is Americans’ feeling the impact of globalization. Not globalization as it’s normally construed, which is Americanization. But globalization in reverse–for lack of a better term, the Europeanization of American politics. For Americans, this is proving to be a rough introduction to a game played by very different rules, and they are likely to turn off their TV sets tuned to nonstop “Breaking News” about the disputed election results more bewildered–and embittered–than they ever have been.
True, Americans have proved to be more patient throughout this ordeal than might have been expected. While some pundits and, of course, the Bush camp have been warning that it’s important to proclaim a victor quickly, opinion polls showed that most people have been willing to wait. But how long? An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll of Florida voters released in the middle of last week showed that 71 percent were willing to wait through the weekend. After that, all bets are off. Only 36 percent said they’d be willing to wait several weeks, and only 22 percent were willing to contemplate waiting longer than several weeks. The baseball instinct was kicking in: someone has to win, and the game needs to end.
Another significant difference between the way baseball and football are played helps explain this longing for a clear-cut result. Both games offer a mixture of teamwork and dazzling plays by the big stars, but baseball more naturally allows one player to dominate, determining the outcome. This can be an overpowering pitcher, who doesn’t allow the other team to make solid contact with the ball, or the power hitter who drills the ball into the stands for a home run. A brilliant football player like Brazil’s Ronaldo or England’s David Beckham (of Posh and Becks) can score the winning goal, but his teammates have to set him up to do so. In baseball, the batter can win the game with one swing of his bat as his teammates sit in the dugout.
Bush and Gore share the baseball instincts of their countrymen–in sports and politics. Neither was a baseball star (although Bush Sr. was the captain of his baseball team at Yale), but they both played the game growing up. George W.’s one successful business venture was as the owner of the Texas Rangers, a major-league team. They want to win, and win with a decisive swing of the bat. But neither man will experience that clean thrill; nor will his supporters. The winners will be angry that they had to fight so hard to claim what they were convinced was rightfully theirs, and the losers will be convinced that the election was somehow stolen from them. European politicians and voters, nurtured on football, are grateful for the narrowest victory; the losers more readily understand that postelection maneuvering–the equivalent of an overtime penalty kick–can determine the outcome as much as the casting of ballots.
When I covered the 1998 German elections, I roughed out three stories as NEWSWEEK International held the presses on a Sunday: the challenger Gerhard Schroder wins, Chancellor Helmut Kohl wins yet again, and “German Muddle.” As a diehard baseball fan, I always dreaded the possibility that we’d have to go with the third version, since it was such an exercise in frustration. Obviously, I didn’t have to. Now that I’m back in the United States, frustration is what it’s all about.
