"Today is groundhog day, and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen his shadow." – published in The Punxsutawney Spirit in 1886, noting the first celebration of Groundhog Day in the United States.
Earlier this week, Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his hole on Gobbler’s Knob and spotted his shadow, thereby predicting six more weeks of winter. Phil’s prediction was itself predictable—historically, the probability of Phil predicting six more frigid weeks has been about 80%. Considering that the low temperature during the six weeks following Groundhog Day tends to range from 26 to 35 degrees, Phil is generally on safe frozen ground.
Once in a while, though, events occur that even a prognosticating groundhog cannot foresee. Phil predicted six more weeks of winter in 1945 and exactly six weeks later, the temperature reached an improbable 82 degrees.
Since Phil generally makes safe bets, it's reasonable to believe that he probably didn’t wager on the New York Giants winning Super Bowl XLII, Eli Manning being named the game’s Most Valuable Player or John McCain becoming the likely Republican nominee for President of the United States. Not all that long ago, these events seemed as likely as an 82-degree day in March. The few Giants fans anticipating flights to Arizona were the ones wearing blue Krylon paint in lieu of shirts, Eli Manning wasn’t even the most valuable player in his family, and John McCain’s Straight Talk Express was waiting in the switching yard for a crew to board.
There are days when a groundhog should stay in his hole even though thousands of people, multiple television cameras and men dressed like the guy on a Get Out of Jail Free card are waiting for a prediction. Phil’s happened to arrive on the first day on October.
On October 1, 2007, the New York Giants had an uninspiring 2-2 record. On the same day, John McCain came in third in the Rasmussen Reports Weekly Presidential Tracking Poll, trailing Rudy Giuliani by 13 percentage points.
(The symmetry is interesting, and is even more interesting if you recall that the New York Giants last reached the Super Bowl in 2000 but lost both their mojo hand and the game, while John McCain led all other Republican candidates for a time in 2000 before losing his own mojo hand and withdrawing from the Presidential race.)
McCain didn't become a serious contender until the week of January 13, 2008, the same week that the Giants beat the Dallas Cowboys by a score of 21-17 and were one game away from being serious contenders to win the Super Bowl.
The last Rasmussen Reports Weekly Presidential Tracking Poll before Groundhog Day showed John McCain and Mitt Romney deadlocked with 26% and 25% respectively, followed by Mike Huckabee with 17% and Rudy Giuliani with a truly uninspiring 12%. Exactly eleven months earlier, Giuliani had been the front-runner, but this was before he adopted his own variation of the groundhog strategy. Having held a healthy lead over the other GOP candidates, Rudy Giuliani capitalized on his momentum by doing absolutely nothing.
Betting heavily on a win in Florida, Giuliani essentially ignored Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan and South Carolina, a strategy was proved to be enormously successful assuming that the objective was to ensure that someone not named Giuliani would move into the White House after the general election. It is possible to be competitive and finish second, and Giuliani did neither. Giuliani withdrew from the race on January 30 after attracting a meager 15% of Florida’s GOP voters and winning exactly zero delegates. Even Ron Paul, whose campaign staff appears to consist of two interns and a photocopier, has won five delegates to date.
When the clear frontrunner nosedives, groundhogs preferring safe bets get upset. But at least JoinRudy’08 lasted until Super Tuesday, even if pretty much no one actually joined Rudy in ’08. That is more than can be said about the presidential aspirations of Fred Dalton Thompson.
Back on September 5, 2007, Fred Dalton Thompson used his appearance on The Tonight Show to launch his bid for the presidency. Apart from being strangely timed—memo to future presidential candidates: if your strategy is to enter the race late and skip a debate in New Hampshire to appear on The Tonight Show with Jerome Bettis and Travis Tritt, remember Fred Dalton Thompson—Thompson’s announcement revealed some shortcomings of the English language, particularly with respect to verbs. To say that Thompson launched a campaign was definitely wrong, as the word implies characteristics that Thompson’s campaign lacked, such as ignition. There was speculation about a possible Thompson run—again, wrong verb—as early as April, he quit Law and Order in May, and he was expected to make a formal announcement around the Fourth of July. As anyone who has worked on an internal combustion engine knows, if there’s no spark, the Chevy is staying right where it is. Ther was no spark. Between the Fourth of July and the fifth of September, the phrase most often used when discussing Thompson’s candidacy ended with the words “…or get off the pot.”
Language matters. Saying that Thompson was “running” for President was wrong; Thompson wouldn’t have run if he had dropped a lit match on his pajamas and set himself on fire. “Walking in the general direction of the White House” might have been a more appropriate choice of verb and prepositional phrase, as Thompson successfully conveyed the energy and momentum of someone heading somnambulistically toward the refrigerator to see what might be there.
A song called “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground,” is running through Punxsutawney Phil’s mind. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Minstrel of the Appalachians, recorded it in April 1928, but the song is much older; Lunsford learned it from Fred Moody in 1901 and no one knows where or when Moody learned it.
…I wish I was a mole in the ground…if I was a mole in the ground, I would root that mountain down. Eli Manning is that mole. Rudy Giuliani, Fred Dalton Thompson and now Mitt Romney are not moles, and they are not going to root that mountain down. Mike Huckabee is that mole. He may not root that mountain down but, to his credit, if he fails, it will not be because he didn’t try.
According to the Chinese calendar, or the paper placemats in the local Chinese buffet, the year of the rat has just begun. There is no year of the mole, but if there was one, 2008 just might be the year of the mole. This idea does not appeal to Punxsutawney Phil.
A groundhog that has made the same weather prediction 97 times in 121 years prefers order to chaos, and as Punxsutawney Phil reaches for the Stoli, he wonders whether any meaning can be found in a series of events that occur through random chance.
As the Krylon-painted guys in the Meadowlands will tell you, sometimes even groundhogs get the blues.
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