In search to describe anarchy of GOP race, a new favorite: 'Calvinball'

The GOP convention could turn into an event that the precocious 6-year-old of 'Calvin and Hobbes' fame would love. 

|
Andrews McMeel Publishing/PRNewsFoto
Calvin and Hobbes, but Bill Watterson.

Calvinball: A made-up sport from the beloved comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” in which the rules constantly change as the game goes along – a comparison now applied to the fractious Republican presidential race.

“Calvin and Hobbes,” for those not old enough to remember, was easily the best strip of recent decades and arguably the greatest of all time. It ran from 1985 to 1995 and featured precocious 6-year-old Calvin and his tiger friend Hobbes, who invented Calvinball after Calvin – never one to follow convention – got tired of organized sports. It had only one permanent rule: You can’t play it the same way twice. The ever-changing rules made for, in essence, an absence of any rules.

Political polling expert Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com invoked the game in comparing the chaotic and highly uncertain Republican Party race to the now far-more-predictable Democratic contest. “If the Republican race is Calvinball, with everyone making up the rules as they go along, the Democratic race is more like — zzzzzzz — golf,” Silver wrote.

But it wasn’t the first time that the sport had come up in a campaign in which pundits continually seek new metaphors for anarchy. Earlier this month, the Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins discussed the various possibilities for a brokered GOP convention. He cited the notion that if convention delegates are “unbound” by a rule change, or after a first ballot in which no candidate wins a majority, the nominating fight could spill over to the convention floor.

“There's been lots of talk about a potential unbinding of the delegates after the first ballot at the convention, but this is the first time I can recall anyone suggesting that the party's rule-makers might select a full ‘Calvinball’ option,” in which delegates are unbound from the jump by an abrupt rule change,” Mr. Linkins wrote.

And in last month’s Washington Post, David Weigel speculated about now-departed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s chances of cutting into his colleague Ted Cruz’s vote totals in the Texas primary. “In the Calvinball rules of the expectations game, that might let Rubio declare victory if he takes any delegates in Texas,” he wrote. (His Post colleague Chris Cillizza last fall compared Trump’s entire campaign to Calvinball.)

Calvinball has come up in other contexts across the ideological spectrum. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto applied it to a controversy involving a feminist academic, while Salon’s Amanda Marcotte cited it over Senate Republicans’ refusal to consider a successor to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Chuck McCutcheon writes his "Speaking Politics" blog exclusively for Politics Voices.

Interested in decoding what candidates are saying? Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark’s latest book, “Doubletalk: The Language, Code, and Jargon of a Presidential Election,” has just been released.

 

 

 

 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to In search to describe anarchy of GOP race, a new favorite: 'Calvinball'
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2016/0317/In-search-to-describe-anarchy-of-GOP-race-a-new-favorite-Calvinball
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe