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It's not fair; it's the score Tuesday, Jun 3, 2008 By John Brummett Hillary Clinton needs to accept that competition is about the score and that the score isn't always fair, but is always determinative. Those of us of a certain age in Arkansas still obsess on that football game against Texas for the national championship in 1969. We think we should have won, and that, in a way, we really did. But we really didn't. The plain rule was that the number of points would decide. We had 14 such points. Texas had 15. Fifteen is one more than 14. Was there a clip on James Street's long run? Shouldn't we have kicked a field goal rather than thrown for the end zone? No matter. They played the game. We did what we did. The other team had one more point when time was up. We had the senior state tennis tournament the other weekend. In our key match the outcome came down to a circumstance that is decided by a tiebreaker that, by clear and unequivocal rule, gets awarded to the team winning 10 points while also winning by a margin of two points. Our guys got ahead 7-to-2. Then somehow they let it slip away, or the other team rallied valiantly. Anyway, we lost. So we were walking to our cars and I said that 10-point tiebreakers were abominations. Most tiebreakers are decided by the team getting to seven points first by a margin of two. We got to seven first by a margin of five. So we actually won, I declared. Just call me Hillary. No, we actually didn't. We could have asked the state tennis officials to consider that the objective was to advance to the Southern sectionals and that we were actually better and that, therefore, we should be sent to the sectionals in spite of the score. And the state tennis officials would have told us to dream on. Hillary and her people can give you many compelling reasons she should be considered the winner of the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. All those caucuses that Barack Obama won were unfair, giving an advantage to his younger and more mobile supporters. Texas was an outrage, having an open vote by day that she won and then letting him come in with a mitigating caucus at night. Hillary has won most big states and swing states lately. If they had winner-take-all primaries, like the Republicans, she'd have locked this thing up long ago. The point is to nominate the strongest candidate to beat McCain, and, plainly, she is it. True. Every word. And irrelevant to the score, which is determinative, the one thing that matters. Florida and Michigan were told by rule not to hold their primaries when they did. So Hillary wants to count them anyway. That's like our trying to say that we had played that other tennis team in a recreational match a few weeks before and won, and that the recreational match should be retroactively declared official and counted. If they played the Super Bowl again, New England would win, I think. But they played it when they did and that guy for the New York Giants caught that ball off that fellow's helmet, and New York had more points and the Super Bowl trophy is not New England's, but New York's. The Chicago Cubs would have gone to the World Series if that fan hadn't interfered on that foul pop. Al Gore would have been president if that Broward County butterfly ballot had been clearer and those old folks hadn't voted mistakenly for Pat Buchanan. By week's end, Obama will achieve a majority of delegates. It won't be fair. But it will be the score. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
