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HALLOWEEN, REDSKINS vs. PACKERS, AND THIS ELECTION
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Sunday, Oct 31 2004, 5:03PM
I AM ALL FOR FUN, BUT THE CRAZY PROGNOSTICATORS ON BOTH SIDES of this political race are going a bit far (and yes, I'm going to overstate my case, just for fun).
It is Halloween tonight, and soon I'll have little goblins and dwarf Dick Cheneys, George Bushes, and John Kerrys here to collect candy. Normally, this is a night when rationality can be suspended and superstition given its time on the calendar. No harm done.
However, my friend Mark Goldberg text-messaged me from a large coffee bar in Adams Morgan called Tryst here in Washington with some interesting news. He said that he was really caught off guard and confused that the entire crowd (and it's a very large place) of Washingtonians were rooting AGAINST the Washington Redskins.
I am not a football fan. I had far too much exposure to football as a kid, and I grew up in a fun but typical Republican military family which always rooted for the Washington Redskins. One of the fun battles we had inside the family each year was visiting the grandparents at Thanksgiving and watching the Redskins and Dallas Cowboys go at it. My grandparents, their siblings, and my million and one second cousins were all for the Cowboys. I have to admit I really never cared who won, but I liked the idea of perhaps one day owning a franchise.
From Mark Goldberg's comments, I just assumed that all of his Tryst coffee house mates were opposing the Redskins because of some silly notion that the Redskins were a Republican team. I think that it was Nixon who dubbed the Redskins "America's Team." In these crazy times, I could regrettably imagine that we have become such a polarized society that a funky neighborhood in Washington might be able to draw 100% Democrats who perceived the Redskins as a 100% Republican icon.
I know that this is silly, but there is a lot of silliness out there right now as we ramp up to November 2nd.
My response to Mark was: "That is what is wrong with Democrats. They always want to oppose Republican symbols, like the Redskins, and not take them over or co-opt the team."
Well, I read it all wrong. The reason for the widespread hometown opposition to a Redskins victory over the Green Bay Packers had to do with one of these old, irrational presidential outcome indicators.
"The Redskins and the Vote" ran as an editorial today in the Washington Post, and it reads:
Ever since 1936, the year before the team moved to Washington, the last home game before the election has predicted the winner. If the Redskins won, so does the incumbent party in the White House; if not, not. This rule has held good for 17 straight elections. If you needed an extra reason to watch the team take on the Green Bay Packers this afternoon, you now have one.
The article's last graf reads:
. . .there is the Halloween factor. Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the candidate whose mask sold the most has won. According to the Goldman Sachs team, Bush was winning as of one month ago. But neither candidate can match the hapless Richard Nixon. His mask outsells them both.
Here's a question. Is Karl Rove out stacking the deck and having his agents buy thousands of George Bush masks? It might be considered by some an ingeneous move.
Seriously though, the race is real close between Bush and Kerry. And just like I don't approve of the subordination of rationality to faith by anti-enlightenment religious zealots, I think that liberals and progressives who try to look at irrational benchmarks to determine this election are just as silly.
Just so you know, Green Bay beat Washington, 28-14. But Bush's masks are dominating on the streets of Washington tonight, at least by my count here handing out candy.
Still too close to call.
-- Steve Clemons
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Maybe so Steve, but still -- Greenbay won. Gotta go with hunches some time.
Darci,
One could argue that long-running, irrational correlations will always deteriorate. The law of averages would argue that this indicator will be wrong fairly soon -- meaning Bush has a better than even chance of winning if it mattered at all what the outcome of the Redskins/Packers game was.
But hey, thanks for playing. Happy Halloween,
Steve Clemons
Sorry Steve this is wrong:
"Still too close to call."
I am calling it.
No way is this country going to reelect the miserable failure to four more years of unrelenting "fubar-ification."
No way.
The USSR might cut its throat in Afghanistan but the USA will not bleed to death in Iraq.
No way.
In other words... I'd say it in bold if your dumbed down comments section would permit it:
<b>The failure stops here.</b>
Bush is gone... Dustbinned...
Mashed in a marsh by the mosh.
Bush came, Bush tried, Bush failed.
He's history.
I bet my country on it.
this is a new thing! linking to the new "cool" spots around D.C. I've seen it now on 2 or 3 different blogs recently... as a former resident of D.C. I think its great a little trip down memory lane..
Keep up the good work!
All those who are interested in an opinion:
Of course, who wins the Nickelodeon poll, the "Redskins poll" or the 7-11 coffee cup poll does not, at a rational level, correlate to the party that will win the national elections. But, one has to remember, we live in the US of A. One of the only countries in the world that predominately subscribes to creationism over evolution and Bush over the "reality-based world." While I deeply understand that that the reference to operating outside the "reality-based world" is not quite as outlandish as it superficially appears, I also realize that many of those who think less deeply than others buy into slogans, facile sylloogisms and, yes, moronic superstitions. Indeed, the military, I believe as one who has been there, preys on that lack of depth to subjugate the servants. With that said, I agree that the issue of a Redkins win has nothing to do, at a rational level, with an incumbent win or loss. Such inanity, however, does mesmerize much of the lemmings, and it could, and some would argue should, be capitalized upon by those who can. The irrationality, in short, can be used to one's advantage. So, let's use it.
Couldn't agree more about the silliness of superstitions. If you think of the hundreds of yearly events that occur before election day, it is more improbable that there *wouldn't* be at least a few events that correlate to the election. To believe these random correlations have some type of mystical power is to give power to them rather than to yourself. I was cheering hard for the Skins to win, although their loss and the upcoming election will do nothing to break the predictive streak.
If you found yourself cheering for the Redskins to lose out of anxiety, here's the best way to get rid of it: go something to get out the vote. You'll be amazed how much better doing something to improve the situation will make you feel. And it's not too late to make a difference--Monday and Tuesday are the most important days. And every vote counts into strengthening the legitimacy of Kerry's presidency.
If you live anynear near Northern Virginia, you can visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Virginia_Votes/ or
http://www.virginia4kerry.com/wst_page4.html .
Don't know what you mean by the law of averages there Steve, but I think you're implying a basic gamblers fallacy - forgetting that each event is discrete and independent, weather it be flipping a coin or a football game. So, flipping a coin and getting heads 20 times doesn't increase or decrease the chances of getting tails the next flip, and past wins or losses don't have a pull on the game today, which the redskins lost, which means (factoring in the Redsox win and dividing by Sqr.Root of pi) that Kerry wins in a friggin landslide. Thanks for the blog.
Dear Psycholinguist: You are right. I do make the mistake of the gambler at the roulette wheel knowing it has to hit red at some point. This all reminds me of a bit of black humor at RAND in the early 1980s. Hijackings were on people's minds then.
There was a RAND analyst who was afraid about flying his family across the country because of the fear of hijackers using bombs on planes. So, what he did was build a bomb and take it on the plane himself because the statistical chance of there being two bombs on the plane was so high that it just wasn't possible.
This is black humor -- and it seemed funnier in the days before the Lockerbie bombing and other terrible incidents. But you get the point.
Thanks for your great post,
Steve Clemons
One of our local papers mentioned that a couple costume shops weren't even stocking Kerry
masks - and the clerks couldn't give a reason...So the conspiracy grows even darker!
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=578096
Cubans should be freed, Bush tells Florida
President George Bush, trying to stop an erosion of Cuban-American support, came close to adding communist Cuba to the countries listed in his so-called "Axis of Evil" yesterday by proclaiming at a campaign rally that the "people of Cuba should be freed from their tyrant".
I don't think the Redskins winning or losing causes the incumbent to win or lose; I believe it's the opposite. I think the vigor and strength of the incumbent's campaign reflects upon the Redskins. More so, it is difficult for an incumbent to win unless he has had a successful record to run on; e.g. a good economy, safe people, etc. This success is thus reflected in the Redskins' preformance. Football players are often noted for their sensitivity and are simply absorbing the vibes of their hometown. When the incumbent is doing poorly, Washington suffers; as does its team.
In conclusion, there is a causal relationship here, but the Redskins' win/loss is the symptom of the incumbents' preformance and not vice versa. The Packers winning today is just more proof that Bush has failed America and will be replaced on Tuesday.
Prove me wrong, people. Prove me wrong.
King Kaufman says that, the other times that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in a presidential election year, Woodrow Wilson was elected President.
Just so you don't get blindsided come Tuesday.
Steve, this is not about Halloween but simply a little something to slip into the discussion on the last day of campaigning before the US elections. It is directed towards any morally superior Democrats out there thinking about Iraq:
I don’t know if you have seen Madeleine Albright lately on TV shows campaigning, but here is an interesting tidbit from an old "The Nation" which I think puts into stark relief what the situation was during the Clinton Administration.
"The grim question of how many people have died in Iraq has sparked heated debate over the years. The controversy dates from 1995, when researchers with a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) study in Iraq wrote to The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, asserting that sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children. The New York Times picked up the story and declared "Iraq Sanctions Kill Children." CBS followed up with a segment on 60 Minutes that repeated the numbers and depicted sanctions as a murderous assault on children. This was the program in which UN ambassador (and later Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright, when asked about these numbers, coldly stated, "The price is worth it." "
Well if our neighborhood is any indication, the next president will be Spiderman, a Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle will be the VP, and the cabinet will be populated by princesses, fifties-girls, and fairies (a la Tinkerbelle)
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