The stories we like to hear reveal who we want to be. Those stories are most interesting (to me, at least) when they fall short of reality, because that's where we see the full context of forces and circumstances against which we flail and within which we define ourselves. Once again I'm especially enjoying the Republican primaries as an example of that, as the gap widens between the front-page story of a closely fought race and the slow, relentless accumulation of evidence that it will all turn out the way we always knew it would.
While most headlines after Tuesday's primaries focused on Rick Santorum's victories and Newt Gingrich's declaration that Mitt Romney is "no longer inevitable," this Wall Street Journal article tells the story that matters: as Santorum won Mississippi and Alabama, Romney actually added to his lead in delegates. He now claims 45% of the delegates he needs to win the nomination, with a lot of huge states coming up—Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California—in which he's bound to do well. All Santorum accomplished last night was proving that he, not Newt Gingrich, is this year's leading also-ran, which by Republican tradition makes him the heir apparent for 2016 (place your bets now).
We love turning points: for want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, and like that. The idea that there might be one moment when a man might put his hand on the seesaw of history and tip it pleases our desire to believe that we can control our own destinies, that we aren't really already rolling like snowballs down a mountain of circumstances that built up under us before we even stopped to see what was happening. In the case of this year's primaries, the underlying circumstance is that there is a large bloc of Republican voters who prudently, cautiously, and reliably rally around the candidate who is familiar to them as the pragmatic almost-centrist who has been widely declared electable in a national race. It isn't a majority, but it's large enough that when the scary ideologues and self-financed oddballs carve up the rest of the vote—which they always will—that bloc will consistently deliver the most delegates. Mitt Romney was already in that position before the first debate.
Of course we all have some power over our destinies; quite a bit, really, over what part of the mountain we roll down and what paths we take between rocks and whether we land hard or soft. But mostly, living in this big world is about learning to roll. For nearly as inevitable as Romney's victory in the primaries is his defeat in November. Allan Lichtman, with his Keys to the White House, once again plays the great spoiler of stories ("Rosebud's the name of his sled, by the way") by showing us how the circumstances have already piled high in favor of Obama's reelection. George F. Will has even announced to his fellow Republicans that they may as well give up on the White House and focus on taking the Senate. The Gallup Poll will bounce and shimmy its way onto the front pages many times, but the snowball is rolling.
I will forget that many times in the next seven and a half months, however. I will forget it almost willfully, because I will want to believe that Obama's chances hang by a thread, that the fate of our nation may turn on a single debate or a deadly gaffe. I will let my alternating panic and soaring confidence drive me in my door-knocking and phone-banking, because I will believe that that one voter whose mind I change may be the nail in the horseshoe. Such stories may not reveal the truth of how life works. But they keep us connected to it.
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