Requiems for Heavyweights

In Rod Serling’s classic 1956 play, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Jack Palance plays the role of heavyweight boxer Harlan “Mountain” McClintock, whose career has been ended by a savage beating inflicted by a younger boxer. He is suffering from “punch drunk syndrome” – a form of brain damage produced by blows to the head during his long career. A fight-doctor refuses to certify McClintock for another match, noting that more blows to the head could blind or even kill him. As boxing is all the crippled fighter has ever known, he is terrified of what his future might hold. During his reminiscences he utters the memorable words: “I was numbah 5 in ’52. I couldda bin a contenduh…”

I saw the 1962 film version of the drama, in which Anthony Quinn played the title character. That phrase has stuck in my memory ever since. And recent events have brought them back with respect to two actual characters whose career endings could have caused them to say the same words about themselves.

The first of the men to which I refer is the late James Earl Carter – President “Jimmy” – the peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia who won the nation’s top office by running a “moral decency” campaign in 1976. The disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon furnished the springboard for that approach. A literal Sunday School teacher – married for 30 years to the same woman, and by all accounts an exemplary man – Mr. Carter campaigned on his Born-again Christian faith and promised to restore decency to the presidency.

Aided by Democrat-leaning media, who had accused Mr. Nixon of lying to the American people as no president ever had – were they serious? – Mr. Carter swept into office on a wave of good feeling and optimism. He had the support of many Christians who were new additions to the Democrat-constituency. I recall church-going friends telling me that they planned to vote for Mr. Carter because he was a born-again Christian. My cautions about the questionable characters – some of them outright varlets – that Mr. Carter would bring into the White House with him did not dissuade my friends from supporting him.

In retrospect, it’s fair to say that President Carter did his best to follow through on his morality promises. At one point he publicly urged members of his administration who were “shacking up” – without benefit of clergy, as it were – to “make it legal.” No records indicate how many of his staff took his advice and got married, but he certainly got the horselaugh from the media on the matter.

To his credit, Mr. Carter also engineered the historic peace agreement between Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. But he only watched the parade go by as Islamic fundamentalists deposed the Shah of Iran, established radical Ayatollah-led governance, and held 53 American embassy staff members hostage for over a year. Although Mr. Carter had tried to establish himself as an ally of Muslim countries, he was unable to engineer release of those hostages.

With the hostage-matter hanging over his presidency like a dark cloud, the president put together a military rescue mission which he attempted to run, personally, from the Oval Office. Unfortunately, the remotely commanded, inadequately staffed and equipped mission concluded with the grisly spectacle of American soldiers’ bodies being dragged through the streets of Tehran. It was a political disaster.

Many historians have marked the failed hostage-rescue mission as the final “kiss of death” to the Carter presidency. Whether true or not, the entire hostage business was certainly no help to a president who seemed to be in over his head, both domestically and overseas. Danger signs were everywhere – including inside the president’s own party. In early 1980 Senator Ted Kennedy mounted a primary-challenge against Mr. Carter – an unheard-of affront to a sitting president. The president bragged like a tough guy about whupping Kennedy, but the event clearly showed his diminished support in his own party.

Despite his warnings to voters about trusting the presidency to a “dumb actor who was just reading lines,” Mr. Carter went down to a landslide defeat in 1980. Ronald Reagan won 44 million popular votes and 489 electoral votes of 44 states, versus 35.5 million popular votes and 49 electoral votes of six states won by Mr. Carter. The defeat was total, and it ended Mr. Carter’s political career.

In the 44 years following, Mr. Carter has accomplished much social good by sponsoring Habitat for Humanity – a non-profit organization which builds homes for needy people. He has generally stayed out of politics, as extremists have taken Democrats far away from the Christian principles he once campaigned on.

But individuals who knew Mr. Carter personally have indicated that he never came to terms with voters’ rejection of his try for a second term. Understanding the concerns of ordinary Americans was evidently not in his political toolkit. Long after his defeat he still believed he “…couldda bin a contenduh…”

Mr. Carter’s story reminds us of another political heavyweight closer to our time. Of course, I mean President Joe Biden, who ran as a “unifier” who would calm things down and restore normalcy to the country. He conducted a “basement campaign” on the premise that he was not Donald Trump. His jack-in-the-box, five-minute media appearances also kept voters from seeing the real condition of the 78-year-old man who promised to heal us from the wicked Donald Trump.

As voters soon found out though, Good Old Joe’s idea of normalcy and healing included uncontrolled spending, mountains of federal debt, galloping inflation and replacing 300 million gasoline-powered cars with $80,000 battery-powered models. He flooded the country with 10 million illegal aliens, shipped them all over the country, and quietly worked toward turning them into new Democrat voters. He basically turned the country upside down, until even voters and officials of his own party wondered what kind of “normalcy” we were heading for, and how it could give them another term in the White House.

Through it all, Normalcy Joe mumbled and stumbled on through his term until Democrat leadership finally pulled the plug, just four months from the election. Like the fight-doctor who wouldn’t certify Mountain McClintock for another match, party bigwigs would not let Joe run for a second term – not because it might harm him, but because they knew his (almost certain) loss would harm them. They left him in office for the balance of his term, but they pulled him off the ticket for the 2024 election.

Somehow, though, the Democrat poohbahs failed to consider how their palace coup might offend voters. They replaced Joe with a slightly dizzy California woman whose campaign of “joy” was supposed to dazzle voters with the prospect of her becoming the first female president. She was going to make politics “fun” again, while preventing the hated Donald from wrecking the country.

But it was too little, too late. Voters didn’t see a promising young candidate with fresh ideas. Instead, they saw (and heard) a giggling, leftist, west coast pol – essentially a wolf in sheep’s clothing – who looked like she would give us four more years of the same mess that Joe produced. She was supposed to draw enough votes of women and minorities to put her over the top, but those voters were wise to the game. Despite a determined media support effort, she went down to a decisive defeat – not quite on the scale of Reagan’s 1980 defeat of Jimmy Carter, but a complete victory that included an actual win of the popular vote.

This result has let Joe Biden go around the country claiming that it was a mistake for Dems to drop him off the ticket, and that he would have beaten Donald Trump again. “I couldda bin a contenduh…” was his familiar claim. But even Democrats are admitting that Joe would have suffered a defeat worse than Mrs. Harris, had he run again. The Democrats’ political “doctors” were right to decertify him. One assumes that somewhere Mountain McClintock might be nodding in agreement.

Luckily, we won’t have to listen to Joe claiming that he would have won, for the next 44 years. After all, there are some advantages to having an octogenarian in the presidency.

So RIP to Smiling Jimmy and (eventually) to Good Old Lunch-bucket Joe. We knew ye all too well, and we had had enough.