The worst thing that the Party of the Second Part can come to believe about an election is that the Party of the First Part won because it cheated. This is true even when the winner did cheat, and even in those very rare cases where the cheating may have made the difference. It is true for both political and moral reasons. The most effective cheating can work only if the margin of victory is very narrow, and in such cases the outcome is largely in the hands of chance anyway. The voters have every right to be indignant over cheating, whether or not it affects the outcome, and they ought to demand that such cheating be prevented or punished. The candidate by contrast should acknowledge that his strategy has been ineffective if the suppression of few votes denies him the victory dance; whether those votes were depressed by fraud or an outbreak of influenza in a key district is a secondary matter. If he allows himself or herself to sulk, he will ignore the real elements of victory.
The moral effects are probably worse. It leaves a spiritual ulcer that only grows worse with the years. And so we have the case of one Jimmy Carter, rabbit fighter and failed President. George Will tells it well. From the Washington Post:
A quarter of a century has passed since 44 states said "No, thanks" to Jimmy Carter's offer to serve a second term, yet he still evidently thinks his loss is explained not by foreign policy debacles, such as invading Iran with eight helicopters, and a misery index -- inflation plus unemployment -- of 22, almost triple today's index. Rather, he seems to think approximately this:
Ronald Reagan won because he won the only debate. He won it not because of Carter's debate performance ("I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry . . .") but only because Reagan had Carter's briefing book. And Reagan had it because this columnist gave it to him.
The psychological importance of this story to Carter is illustrated by the fact that he persists in lying about it, at least according to Will.
Last Oct. 21, on National Public Radio, [Carter] said: "We found out later that one of Ronald Reagan's supporters inside the White House had stolen my briefing book, my top-secret briefing book that prepared me for the debate. And a very prominent news reporter was the one who took the briefing book to Ronald Reagan and helped drill him on the things that I might say if he said certain things." Asked who that reporter was, Carter replied, "It was George Will, and it was later known that he did that."
But one cannot know what isn't so, and "top secret" is a government classification inapplicable to campaign fodder. Still, Carter continues to retail -- and to embroider -- his fable. Recently in a Plains, Ga., church, he illustrated his aptitude for the virtue of forgiveness by saying that once, after columnist Will read a report of his telling his briefing book tale, Will wrote to him "asking for forgiveness."
How exactly George Will might have stolen Carter's briefing book is a question that might trouble a mind that was less troubled already. I admit being intrigued by the thought of Will, dangling above the floor of Democratic headquarters like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, his bow tie only inches above the file cabinet. The thought of Will begging Carter for forgiveness is only a little less plausible.
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