Outrunning the Bear
There’s a joke that I’m sure you’ve seen a handful of times, about outrunning a bear. Here’s the version of it that Benedict Cumberbatch (as Alan Turing) tells in The Imitation Game:
There are two people in a wood, and they run into a bear. The first person gets down on his knees to pray; the second person starts lacing up his boots. The first person asks the second person, “My dear friend, what are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” To which the second person responds, “I don’t have to. I only have to outrun you.”
It’s a smart strategy in any number of competitive venues, from The Price is Right to long distance racing. Sometimes, it makes more sense to stay out of last place than it does to try as hard as one can to achieve first. It may make for good tactics, but there’s also something sketchy about it, which is why the bear joke is a little grim. On the one hand, we tell ourselves to work smarter rather than harder, but then, we also tend to believe that it’s nobler to try and fail than to play the odds.
This joke has been rattling around in my head for the past year or so, as I’ve tried to put my finger on why I find the Presidential race so dispiriting. I don’t want to turn this into yet another “What’s wrong with HRC?” thinkpiece, because I think it’s a broader problem with the Democratic Party in general. I think that there are elements among its leadership who have delighted in the extremism that’s taken over the Republicans, because they believed (erroneously and near catastrophically) that it would make it easier for them to win. Instead of trying to understand why so many people in this country are disaffected, they’ve focused on doing just enough to swing voters who are put off by Tea Party extremism.
I’m not an expert in political science. But I’ve seen a great deal of “outrunning the bear” as a rhetorical strategy in the past year, even in the face of successful candidates who have offered an alternative, both in this cycle and the last. In sports parlance, the Democrats often seem like they’re “playing not to lose,” a strategy that can easily backfire.
Whether or not it will backfire this year is still to be determined, I suppose. But settling into this strategy, when your opponent has several months to train to run faster, may be the surest path to becoming bear food.
