Mookie Wilson, Dave Roberts, Lyndon Johnson and Newt Gingrich
How Moneyball Broke Congress
The Sabermetricians in my life love to explain that there are three perfect outcomes in baseball: the home run, the walk, and the strikeout. Statistically, I’m sure they’re right, although I haven’t checked the math. But statistics can’t predict the improbable. They can’t predict Mookie Wilson’s slow roller up the first base line slipping under Bill Buckner’s glove. Baseball still has the unpredictable bounce, the thing you can’t model.
James Madison didn’t have Bill James in mind when he designed the government. The Constitution was built for compromise. But somewhere along the way, we turned Congress into Moneyball, optimized for its own three perfect outcomes.
The Home Run: The unanimous vote. Usually after a national tragedy, a performative show of unity.
The Walk: I have the votes, you don’t.
The Strikeout: The most dangerous. We both know Social Security is headed for insolvency. We both know touching it means political suicide. So we both stand there, watch the pitch go by, and do nothing.
When It Worked
Lyndon Johnson didn’t play Moneyball. He negotiated, cajoled, bullied, horse-traded, and pushed people, including his own party, to get what he wanted. And what he wanted were the big things: Medicare, voting rights, civil rights. All policies that are now foundational parts of American life and would be impossible to pass in today’s Congress. In fact, they’d never even come up for a vote.
Richard Russell taught Johnson how the Senate worked. The Georgian mentored the ambitious Texan, backed him for Majority Leader, and showed Johnson where the levers of power were hidden. They were close. Johnson owed Russell everything.
Then came 1964. President Kennedy had been assassinated. Johnson pushed for civil rights legislation. Russell led the Southern Democratic filibuster. He’d done it before and won. He had the rules, the votes, and the expectation that his protégé wouldn’t betray him.
Johnson couldn’t beat Russell inside the Democratic caucus. So he went around him. He worked with Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, let Dirksen shape key provisions, and let him claim credit. Johnson needed 67 votes for cloture. He had maybe 45 Democrats. Dirksen delivered the rest.
On June 10, 1964, the vote came: 71–29. Johnson had used Republican votes to break the Southern bloc. The Civil Rights Act passed shortly after.
Russell felt betrayed. “You’ve lost the South for a generation,” he told Johnson. Johnson replied, “I think we may have lost it for longer than that.”
It was messy. It was personal. It was painful. And it worked. Johnson sacrificed relationships, compromised on language, and crossed party lines to change the country.
A generation later, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill still operated under the old rules. They negotiated on Social Security, taxes, and immigration. Neither got everything. Both understood that the only way to get part of what you want is to give the other side part of what they want.
The Break
Then Newt Gingrich broke it.
Gingrich didn’t believe in horse-trading. He believed in leverage. He believed in scorched earth. When Republicans took the House in 1994, he brought a new playbook. Don’t negotiate. Create a crisis. Hold the government hostage. Extract concessions by turning governing into spectacle.
In 1995, Gingrich shut down the federal government over a budget fight with Bill Clinton. Then he did it again. For 21 days, 800,000 federal workers sat at home while Gingrich insisted Clinton accept Republican cuts or the government would stay closed. It backfired. The public blamed Republicans. The tactic endured.
This wasn’t a failure of negotiation. It was a strategic choice. Crisis became a weapon. Compromise became weakness. Governing became warfare. And once one side learned it, both sides eventually adopted it.
What We’re Left With
Just this week the Senate decided not to continue the subsidies on ACA premiums. We all pay. We pay morally because we’ve decided that only people with employer-sponsored health plans deserve subsidies. We pay financially because people will forego health insurance and show up at emergency rooms where they’ll receive care for free, shifting the burden onto everyone else.
Today all we get are the “perfect outcomes.” Government shutdowns. Gerrymandered districts where primaries matter more than elections. Lawmakers whose incentives reward incumbency, not policymaking. The prize for congressional service often isn’t legislation or governance, it’s a good seat on the aisle for the State of the Union.
The baseball stat-heads say stolen bases are overrated. Maybe they are. But they can’t deny that Dave Roberts stole second and scored on Bill Mueller’s single to break my heart and keep the Red Sox alive in 2004.
Stolen bases may be inefficient, risky and overrated. They’re still how you change a game. Congress, and the rest of us could use fewer perfect outcomes, and one person willing to take a lead and run.
Who’s going to steal second?