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Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle will debate tonight. Their back-room managers have gone public to explain the inside strategy. The idea, they say, is to reduce public expectations of how well the candidate will perform. Then it will be easier for the candidate to exceed expectations, and thus claim victory.
So Candidate A's managers work hard to reduce your expectations, to where you anticipate that on debate night, Candidate A will be disheveled and incoherent, as if he had just spent a week guzzling Mad Dog 20, sleeping under bridges and scrounging for aluminum cans.
Once the public expects that, then when Candidate A appears on the screen with his face clean, his fly zipped and his hair combed, Candidate A is an instant victor. What used to be the important thing -- what he says during the debate -- will be irrelevant to his glorious triumph.
This is a useful concept -- reduce expectations to such a low level that you can't help but do better than expected -- and it seems hardly fair that political candidates should have a monopoly on it.
For instance, everybody seems down on the Broncos this year. That's because expectations have been raised to supernal levels after two consecutive trips to the Superbowl, the signing of Tony Dorsett, etc.
An old-fashioned team might try something difficult, like scoring touchdowns during games. But the new method is easier. Dan Reeves could try it on his television show:
Well, I'll be real surprised Sunday if we don't get
called several times for having 12 or 13 men on the field.
And I don't anticipate that we'll ever have a receiver
open, which likely won't matter anyway, since our offensive
line can't help but allow sack after sack. Our third-down
conversions are scarce as hen's teeth, so look for us to be
punting a lot, providing we don't fumble first.
After that build-up, the Broncos could lose 42-0 the
next Sunday, but nobody would be down on the team. You'd
hear stuff like this: That was great, the way they went
the whole game without a single penalty for putting too
many men on the field.
Did you see that, where Elway
actually had a wide receiver open in the third quarter?
Wasn't that wonderful?
But it was better in the
fourth, when they got clear down to the 11 before they
fumbled. Five straight first downs -- I'll remember that
drive for the rest of my life.
Who will care whether they won or lost, or how they played, just as long as they do better than expected?
Another beneficiary of the reduced-expectation game would be our educational system. Thirty years ago, when federal money was available, educators gamely promised that if they were just given a bundle of that cash, then the races would live in harmony, social class structures would vanish, every child would eat good food, our scientists could launch every rocket successfully and every citizen would appreciate Picasso, Beethoven, Freud, Einstein and Shakespeare.
All that was impossible, of course, but the truth has never been a major consideration when educators see a way to get money. However, the educators could regain some public esteem if they reduced expectations. Suppose that some fall, a superintendent issued this statement:
We anticipate increased cross-cultural appreciation
in the form of gang violence in the hallways and more
physical attacks on learning facilitators in the affective
domain modules. Vandalism directed at referencing and
instructional media will also see a not insubstantial
increase, as will early departure rates among non-majoritan
segments of the student population. No increment is
presupposed in general targeted retention, comprehension
and analysis skills.
Those who took the trouble to translate that into English would realize that the superintendent expected his schools to get even worse. And so you would be highly pleased if your child didn't lose ground, drop out or get beaten during the term. You wouldn't care that your child didn't learn anything -- you'd be ecstatic because the school exceeded your meager expectations.
This looks like such a good tactic that I'm going to try it myself. Often it's difficult to come up with something clever or witty for the end of a column. So if you don't expect anything clever here, you won't be disappointed that this just ends.
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