Victory Has a Thousand Fathers. Defeat is an Orphan.

Recently I have been texting with a friend of mine about the election. My friend’s preferred candidate lost and he has been trying to figure out what went wrong. He has offered up several theories, some his own and others he had run across on the internet. I’ve been no help to him since I don’t pretend to understand the American electorate. People vote the way they do for many and varied reasons, none of which are terribly predictable. But as I was texting back and forth this morning I suddenly remembered an old black and white clip from a John Kennedy press conference back in the day. He had only been President for three months and was facing the press after the embarrassing and disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco had come to light. Even though the CIA plan had been conceived and approved prior to Kennedy taking office, he took to the microphones with this gem—“Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan.”

This is self-evidently true on so many levels. Everyone takes credit for victories, but the blame for defeat is always assigned to someone else. It’s part of human nature—the selfish, prideful part. We see this in sports all the time. A relief pitcher comes in with the bases loaded and two outs and gives up a hit that loses the game. Afterwards, when he’s interviewed by the press he takes responsibility for the loss with, “I feel like I let my team down. This loss is on me.” But then, if he’s on a real team, one of the other players takes up for him by suggesting that if the rest of them had done their jobs earlier in the game the outcome wouldn’t even have been close. Of course the opposite is sometimes true. A quarterback throws a crucial interception and after the game points out an error his intended receiver made in running the route, throwing him under the bus. People grow to love the stand up relief pitcher and despise the selfish Quarterback.

Politics is no different than any other endeavor. It takes a whole lot of things to go right to win, and a bunch of things to go wrong to lose. It might be difficult to find the exact reasons things happen, but searching the facts out is essential for you to have any chance of correcting the problem. Step one of any postmortem is humility. Step two is unvarnished honesty. I have no idea what step three is but I’m thinking that if after any failure in life you are humble and honest, eventually you’ll figure it out.