There was once a national election in which the outcome was, everyone thought, never in doubt. The incumbent was an accidental President, a vice president who got the job when his boss suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage less than three months into his term.
Everyone compared him – unfavorably — to the giant who had fallen. He had to make a lot of decisions, some of them unpopular. He was a Democrat, and his fate seemed sealed when his party split, and ran three different candidates for President.
Some of the big newspapers had their Election Night headline set in advance. The little man put a brave face on it, but he knew what people thought – and decided he had to face what promised to be his humiliation alone. So, in one of the oddest incidents in the history of the modern Presidency, he had two secret service men drive him to an obscure hotel and check him in under an assumed name. He ate a sandwich, and went to bed.
The next morning, the Secret Service woke him up and insisted he turn on the radio. “This can’t have happened,” one announcer said. But it had. Harry Truman had won a stunning victory. One woman sent him a telegram that said “The people have put you in your place.”
Later, when pollsters tried to figure out how they could have been so wrong, they learned that millions of people had been for Truman, but didn’t want to admit it because everyone told them they were supposed to want the other guy, a man named Thomas Dewey.
Some voters just liked sticking it to the pompous experts. The experts are, usually right. Everything I know says that Chris Smith has no chance in his Congressional primary against Elyssa Slotkin. Martin Brooks is spending maybe $35,000 in his primary; Andy Levin and Ellen Lipton will each spend well over a million dollars. But a few years ago, there was a tough congressional primary in Oakland County between David Honigman and Alice Gilbert.
They spent lavishly, beat each other’s brains out – and the voters chose instead a sleeper candidate named Joe Knollenberg, who stayed in Congress sixteen years.
Everything I know about politics says that Bill Cobbs has zero chance as a write-in candidate in the Democratic primary August 7th. Everything – except a crazy suburbanite who moved to Detroit and ran for mayor as a write-in candidate. Mike Duggan is still on the job.
It’s much more likely that miracles won’t strike this year, and Brook and Smith and Cobb will lose. But even if they do, they will have done all of us, and democracy, a service by running.
The same is true for a lady named Candius Stearns, the Republican candidate in the very Democratic Ninth Congressional District. She couldn’t be on this show today, because, as she told me, she has to work. The odds of her winning are extremely long.
But she’s out there campaigning when she can, trying to give the voters a choice on the issues. I live in her district, I disagree with her on many issues, and I may not vote for her in November. But I admire her very much for taking the race seriously, and giving us a choice.
And we need to choose to vote.
(This essay first aired on Superstation 910 AM)
-30-
