By last fall, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Bud Shaw had just about seen enough. He’d been watching the same leader closely for four years, hearing unfulfilled promises and hoping in vain for improvements that never came. It was time for a change.
Shaw admitted that he had seen some flashes of brilliance from this man early on, but a good leader continues to succeed, even under adversity, and the columnist’s optimism had run dry. “Nobody,” Shaw said shortly before Election Day, “ever said faith was easy to keep.”
It was a familiar refrain. The leader had asked for sweeping authority, but when he misused it, the blame lay elsewhere. He was slow to admit mistakes. The goalposts, it seemed, were always on the move.
“Comes a time when people have heard enough,” Shaw wrote grudgingly on October 16, following the latest in a series of debacles. He added, “[A]ll the king’s men and all the king’s rhetoric won’t be able to put it back together again.”
Shaw, however, isn’t a political columnist; he’s covers football. And the failed leader in question wasn’t President Bush; it was former Cleveland Browns head coach Butch Davis, who was fired a day after that column was published.
Davis, like many football coaches in recent years, had seen his popularity deteriorate quickly as the demands among the team’s supporters turned from optimism, to disappointment, to frustration, to enmity. Simultaneously, however, President Bush suffered a far more pleasant fate, despite the similarity of the circumstances. At the White House, fortunes were ruined, lives were lost, mistakes were denied, and failures were ignored — right before Bush’s contract was renewed with a lucrative four-year extension.
There are clearly two distinct standards — a rigorous and unforgiving one for football coaches and, much to John Kerry’s chagrin, a lenient and malleable one for Bush. Oddly, millions of Americans seem to expect more from their coach than their president and better performance from their favorite football team than the leaders of their country.
Indeed, accomplished coaches who fall short of excellence have never had it so rough. At the University of Florida, for example, Ron Zook compiled a more-than-tolerable record of 23 wins and 14 losses over three years. Despite taking the team to premier bowl games in each of his seasons at UF, Zook was fired before his third year was complete.
Likewise, Ty Willingham lost his coaching job at Notre Dame before the end of his third season, after going 21-15 during his limited tenure. He still had two years left on his contract, but the Irish faithful couldn’t tolerate temporary mediocrity any longer. The University of Nebraska let Frank Solich go a year ago, shortly before the end of a fairly impressive 9-3 season. Solich, at the time, had the sixth-best career record among active coaches in Division I, but it guaranteed nothing. Perfection was expected, but not delivered.
Job security is hardly better at the professional level. In addition to Cleveland’s Davis, the Miami Dolphins’ Dave Wannstedt was sacked in early November, half-way through his fourth year. A former Coach-of-the-Year winner, Wannstedt was one of only three coaches in the league to record nine or more wins in each of the three seasons preceding this one, but a disappointing year led to his dismissal.
All the while, Bush’s presidency has been burdened by a series of catastrophes and embarrassments. In virtually every area of domestic, foreign, and economic policy, this president has been burdened by dramatic failures ranging from the war in Iraq to unprecedented deficits to anemic job growth. Like the now-unemployed coaches, Bush would put his best spin on debacles and dismiss criticism as unimportant, but in the end, there was an important difference between his future and that of the laid off coaches: a bare majority of the “decision makers” (i.e., voters) asked this leader to stay on the job.
Excuses from fired coaches (injuries to key players, for example) are often rejected as insufficient rationalizations. Fans want success, not explanations for failure. Bush’s excuses, meanwhile, were widely embraced throughout his first term. Granted, the White House is clever in creating justifications for their fiascoes. No WMD in Iraq? The intelligence community’s fault. Job losses? Clinton’s fault. Record budget deficits? Osama bin Laden’s fault. Health care crisis? The trial lawyers’ fault. Frayed international alliances? France’s fault. Not enough boots on the ground in Iraq? The military’s fault. Trade deficit? Consumers’ fault.
Butch Davis, among others, tried this buck-stops-elsewhere approach and team owners showed him the door; Bush used this tack and was given a second term. There are a variety of reasons the president enjoys a more forgiving standard.
* Bush’s breakdowns are harder to quantify. Coaches’ records are impossible to conceal; they either win or lose and are judged accordingly. There is, however, no boxscore in the newspaper measuring the president’s success rate. Bush’s critics may want to consider generating one, however, when the circumstances warrant it. For example, the president insisted that the economy would create 300,000 jobs a month, every month, starting in July 2003, if Congress passed his third tax cut plan. Lawmakers obliged, but in the 17 months spanning July 2003 to November 2004, job growth fell short of Bush’s guarantees 14 times, giving the president a “winning percentage” just under 18 percent going into Election Day. Coaches with that kind of record usually run for the hills; instead, Bush ran for a second term.
* Coaches don’t have a “base.” Support for a football team is an equalizer — fans, no matter what their socio-economic background, simply want their team to excel. A coach’s “approval rating,” therefore, has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with on-the-field results. Not so in politics, where a significant percentage of the electorate will support a president based entirely on whether there’s a “D” or an “R” after his name. As a result, presidents like Bush can enjoy broad support no matter how often they fail, while even moderately successful coaches see their support wither away.
* There are no attack ads in football. The Dolphins’ Wannstedt knew his job was in jeopardy this year, but he didn’t have the luxury of calling his would-be replacement an untrustworthy flip-flopper who’d weaken the team’s defense. Bush did. The Bush campaign, through the course of the presidential race, relied on a series of TV ads, 71 percent of which were attacks on Kerry. In other words, a coach rises or falls on the success of his team, while presidents can survive by smearing their rivals.
* A coach’s “character” is irrelevant. Bush can obscure his presidential record by encouraging voters to think of him as a man of morality and character. On Nov. 4, the New York Times ran an article highlighting the views of Bush voters nationwide. Supporters described the president using words such “honest,” “decisive,” “straightforward,” and “patriotic.” Not one called him “successful,” but it didn’t matter; the election wasn’t about job performance. A football coach, meanwhile, may be the viewed as a paragon of virtue in his or her community, but if the team is falling short of expectations, personal admiration will not get in the way of fans’ desire for change.
Ultimately, it’s not difficult to see why Bush abandoned a career in professional sports to pursue politics — the burdens are less rigorous and the fans are far easier to please. What’s worse, in sports, coaches are required to talk to the media before and after games, offering explanations for the team’s performance. Bush is far more comfortable avoiding public inquiries, especially from reporters, whom he speaks to with less frequency than any president in the modern era.
Football coaches may deal exclusively with a game, whereas the nation’s chief executive deals with life and death decisions every day, but somehow the president faces far less stringent demands for perfection. Indeed, if Bush had been held to the same yardstick as any of the recently fired coaches, it’s hard to see how he would have won more than a handful of electoral votes in November.
Coaches may have the most to learn from this difference. Why put up with high standards, impossible-to-meet expectations, long hours, a critical press corps, and insatiable supporters when you can be president of the United States?