AFTER JOHN KERRY’S come-from-behind win in the Iowa caucus, after Howard Dean flagged in the stretch, and continuing through much of the 2004 campaign, Kerry’s fans had the temerity to compare him to Seabiscuit, the great racehorse of the mid-1930’s. But one win does not make a champion, and to anyone familiar with Laura Hillenbrand’s wonderful book, and the movie made from it, it is apparent that the real Seabiscuit in the race was George W. Bush.
Bush and Seabiscuit both had patrician forebears, (Man o’ War was Seabiscuit’s grandfather), but each seemed a little less elegant, a little more common, a bit less refined. Bush was called a cowboy, as a term of derision; Seabiscuit was called a cow horse. Bush and Seabiscuit both had troubled youths, marked by bad attitude and self-destructive behavior. Both were turned around in the nick of time, Seabiscuit by his owner, his trainer, and jockey; Bush by God and by Laura. Afterwards, both of them burned up the track. Al Gore and John Kerry may have lacked the pizzazz of War Admiral, the magnificent Triple Crown winner whom Seabiscuit beat by four lengths in a match race, but they had all the arrogance of his unpleasant owner, a pillar of the eastern racing establishment who felt himself demeaned and degraded by having his horse run on the same track as this upstart from nowhere.
Once he achieved greatness, Seabiscuit was forced to run under great weights in handicap races. In the 2004 cycle at least, Bush was forced to race under the weight of the entire media complex–the New York Times, all of the glossies, Michael Moore, Linda Ronstadt, 60 Minutes, CBS, and Dan Rather (with their multiple hit jobs and forgeries), Time, Newsweek, and countless others. Seabiscuit had a habit of trying to taunt other horses, slowing down on purpose during races and workouts, giving other horses the chance to think they could beat him, before dashing off in a spurt.
“Horses all over the barn became his mortal enemies,” Hillenbrand tells us. Some horses stopped dead in the middle of workouts; a stablemate lunged at him; another horse had a near-nervous breakdown, and only recovered when trainers convinced him Seabiscuit was no longer there. It would be a stretch to assume that Bush’s occasional swoons were conducted on purpose, but his periodic runs of bad luck and underperformance seem to have had the same effect on political rivals. How much of their often insane malevolence was due to this endless frustration? Bush’s performance in the first debate was such a Seabiscuit moment, as was the brief window on November 2, when they were convinced by a batch of bad exit polls that they had wrapped up the White House. Next thing they knew, Bush was under the wire, hooves flying, and going away.
In an interview included in the paperback version of Seabiscuit, Hillenbrand says that among the plaudits she received when her book was first published were letters from both presidents Bush. Obviously, they had sensed an affinity, as with another Bush favorite, Marquis James’s The Raven, about Sam Houston, another late bloomer who pulled himself up from hard times. Similarities here are not an illusion. In the 2002 midterms, Bush won his match race, and our tough little cow horse has just aced the Santa Anita.
Seabiscuit by four.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
