Flipping Coins

Nate Silver at 538 makes a fascinating point:

One of the truisms of political reporting is that it is exceptionally results-oriented. When a campaign wins, essentially every aspect of that campaign is deemed to be praiseworthy, and when a campaign loses, almost every aspect of the campaign is deemed to be a failure.

Think how much different the conventional wisdom would be if Al Gore had won 300 more votes in Florida. Bush's strategy of rallying to the evangelical base would have been considered a failure, as would the Rovian politics of personal destruction. But instead, because of what was essentially a mathematical coin-flip -- the vote count was so close in Florida that nobody really knows who won -- these things are considered to be standard operating practice in any competent campaign.

He goes on to relate this idea to the current situation, but even if you just look at 2000 it's a thought-provoking notion. I've been trying to think of some other essentially randomly determined events in history that, had they happened to occur differently, would have forever changed the zeitgeist. There are plenty of obvious things, like various invasions that would have come out very differently if only General XYZ hadn't underestimated the Siberian winter, etc., etc., but one of the most interesting ones, in my opinion, is a corollary to Nate's original example.

Suppose those few hundred votes in Florida had indeed tipped in Gore's favor. Don't you think that would have severely hindered the growth of mainstream anti-intellectualism, and its resonance with the red-state base? The classic image of the 2000 candidates is the dichotomy between the chummy, "have a drink with me" Bush and the standoffish, sighing, "What about Dingle-Norwood?" Gore. In the event of a Gore win, it seems like the "everyman President" archetype would have at least partially succumbed to Gore's more professorial approach in the minds of the media. It's worth noting that this contrast is being renewed with vigor this cycle; "professorial" is the catch-all word for describing Obama's demeanor, especially in debates, and on the other side Palin epitomizes the Citizen-Ruler.