Two years ago I predicted that President Obama would be re-elected in a landslide. In the face of absolutely universal opinion to the contrary, I still feel that way. Until a few days ago I could not explain why, but then it hit me with all the force of a great metaphor I haven’t yet come up with: I have intuited a new political paradigm, an entirely novel way of thinking about presidential elections. At least, it is novel so far as I know. I haven’t researched punditry precedent here, but am nonetheless willing to take full credit. My thesis is no less comprehensive and startling than, say, than Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” which unfortunately proved to be wrong after earning him fame and huge amounts of money. We’re in that territory here. Timidly, I tested my new paradigm against the implacable facts of history, and it proved nearly infallible:



Year after year, through two centuries and nine wars, through economic booms and recessions, adjusting only for changing concepts of the principle variable, voters almost always choose the candidate they perceive to be ... cooler. Not more qualified, or more handsome, or even simply more likeable; none of those metrics reliably predicted outcomes, nor did the supposedly mighty fact of incumbency. None of those proved more reliable than an objective comparison of cool.



With only one clear exception and two more that might be arguable, the presidential winner has always been the guy with the most juice: personality, sense of self, unflappability, and a quality I’d define as “with it.” Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush the instant that he instructed the older, suspected-weenie president of the United States, during a debate, to “chill.”



That election, like a few others, featured a matchup that presented a crystal clear choice between cool and uncool. Kennedy v. Nixon was another, of course, where the vastly more qualified man lost to the vastly more cool. Likewise, Truman-Dewey, Roosevelt- Hoover and (we’ll get to this presently) Jackson-J.Q. Adams, which is where I began my research, for reasons I’ll explain.



American politics being what it is, attracting the sort of people it does, the electoral judgment often comes down not so much to who is cooler, but to who is less uncool. Before having to face the saxophone-playing Clinton, the first Bush -- a man who looked and acted like a grouchy insurance salesman -- had the astonishing good fortune to run against the biggest stiff ever to win a major party nomination. Few remember it, but Michael Dukakis started out way ahead in the polls – American knew George Bush and considered him a “wimp,” until Dukakis proved himself incapable of mustering even a thimbleful of juice when lobbed a softball question about the theoretical rape of his wife. In the end, he wound up making H.W. look like Miles Davis.



Being cool is a total-package thing, a life-story thing, and is not completely congruent with being “personable.” There are elections in which the more personable candidate lost – the dour, laconic, painfully introverted Ulysses S. Grant defeated the far more outgoing Horatio Seymour in 1868, and, four years later, the quirky, charismatic Horace Greeley. But back then – pre-TV and radio -- the public knew next to nothing about the candidates personally; their resumes and sloganeering mostly presented the person, “war hero” was the apotheosis of cool. (Until the TV era, we elected war heroes all the time, a hit-and-miss, cool-driven system that gave us excellent presidents like Andy Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt, good ones like Ike, and feebs like Zach Taylor and William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison. Cool is not always better, but it almost invariably gets the votes.)



It was sloganeering that elevated the dour, dyspeptic, James K. Polk over Henry Clay, one of the most eloquent, effective, and personally colorful legislators in American history. But Polk’s slogan – “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” – was indelibly cool. It was exactly the right slick, pugnacious tone for a young country drunk on expansion and spoiling for conflict. The choice was between that feisty little title and, um, “The Great Compromiser,” a man most famous as a conciliator. A plodder. The illusion of cool won.



The least cool man ever to hold the presidency was probably the hulking, stubble-faced paranoic, Richard Nixon. The contest between him and Hubert Humphrey was definitely one of those “less uncool” elections, and here the paradigm bends but does not break. Nixon had the cool cachet of a zombie – he’d somehow engineered a return from the political graveyard. Humphrey, a political hack who could give rousing speeches and was clearly the more likable man, fell most uncoolly silent during the debacle of the Chicago convention that nominated him.



Something similar but more dramatic happened four years later: Nixon faced George McGovern, the clear choice of young America. What could possibly be cooler than young America? It’s hard to imagine McGovern having beaten Nixon in any event, but we’ll never know because McGovern started his campaign with as dreadful a lapse of cool as we’ve ever seen. When news broke that McGovern’s newly chosen running mate, Sen. Tom Eagleton, had once been treated for depression with electric-shock therapy, McGovern declared himself “one thousand percent” behind Eagleton. It was quite a moment for cool. Alas, McGovern's support quickly fell to roughly 240 percent, and then, a few days later, when the furor did not cease, McGovern dumped Eagleton. I was 21, with hair at my shoulders and a joint in my mouth, a rabid McGovern supporter, and I remember watching that wretched skinback on TV and specifically thinking, “very uncool, man.”



The paradigm can be successfully applied quadrennially, beginning with Jackson because his was the first genuine presidential election: The first six presidents were essentially legacy hires – founding fathers filling out a tacitly understood succession.) Jackson’s very first election seemed to violate the paradigm, until you go to the numbers.



Jackson – a man so cool he had a scar on his face earned at the age of 13, when he was slashed by a British soldier after refusing to polish his boots -- lost to the saturnine incumbent John Quincy Adams in 1824. Except, it turns out he didn’t. He won the popular vote convincingly, but there were so many candidates he didn’t get a majority of electoral votes; the election went to the House, where ratty politics prevailed. Four years later, Jackson trounced J.Q. man to man, better than two to one.



Other seeming violations of the Cool Paradigm also fall under statistical scrutiny. War hero William Henry Harrison lost to phlegmatic Martin Van Buren in 1836 only because his party made a huge gamble, and lost. The Whigs ran four candidates against Van Buren – each in his region of popularity – on the hope of getting another election without an electoral majority, sending it again into the House, which they controlled. Didn’t work, though. Van Buren won a majority, though Harrison beat him one-to-one. Any doubt about who was more popular was erased four years later when the same war hero trounced the same bureaucrat in the biggest electoral landslide to that time.



In 1912, bigger-than-life Teddy Roosevelt lost to the ramrod-stiff Woodrow Wilson (“looks like an apothecary’s clerk,” TR once scoffed of his opponent) only because it was not a man-to-man race. There was a third candidate – the incumbent Republican W.H. Taft, who was LITERALLY bigger than life – and who split the Republican vote nearly in half.



One of the few times a war hero actually lost was in 1852 – for reasons of cool. The loser, Winfield Scott, was one of our country’s most successful and decorated military man. Scott’s problem is that, within and despite the cachet of the military, he was hopelessly uncool. His nickname was “Old Fuss and Feathers” because he looked like this and was a foppish fan of pomp and pageantry. Worse, at the time of the election he was well on his way to becoming a gout-plagued slab whose weight no horse could bear and who would earn the derisive title “Old Fat and Feeble”. His resume might still have carried him, unlike the horses, except he had the misfortune to be up against the handsomest man to run for the presidency – and one with a fabulous publicist. The dreadful Franklin Pierce had been college buddies with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote for his friend a campaign biography that was a beautifully written best-selling lie that turned Pierce’s ineffectuality into a strength. Pierce had not seemingly accomplished much, Hawthorne explained, because he was cool -- a man who had the strength of character and self-possession to work great feats while remaining in the background and letting others take credit; he was not for slavery, exactly; he believed slavery would eventually end of its own accord, like a bad dream. (This fawning biography, which also failed to notice that Pierce was a drooling drunk, cost Hawthorne much of his reputation and many of his friends.)



The most fascinating election to pivot on cool was that of 1884, featuring two colorless walruses – Grover Cleveland against James G. Blaine. It was the dirtiest presidential campaign ever, conducted almost completely in competing smear campaigns, since each candidate had a major skeleton. Blaine had taken bribes from the railroads, and there were compromising documents to prove it. The corpulent Cleveland had apparently fathered a child out of wedlock, with a woman of ill repute about whom little was known except the saucy, apparently damning fact that she … “spoke French.” Cleveland owned up to having slept with the lady, and accepted paternity to save the reputation of his law partner, who was probably the father but who, unlike Cleveland, was married at the time. In short, what you had in 1884 were competing scandals, of ENORMOUSLY different levels of cool. Guess who won?



Time and again, the paradigm holds. The only election where I throw up my hands is Johnson-Goldwater. By any measure, Goldwater was cooler. I offer only the feeble hypothesis that Johnson retained some Kennedy cool by proxy. But as a revered historian, I cannot prosecute that enthusiastically.