By: Andrew Glass

John McGraw, the fabled New York Giants manager, believed many baseball games came down to a single “crunch point.” How that crunch played out, McGraw held, would determine which team would win or lose the contest.

In the months ahead, the two presumptive presidential nominees will spend tens of millions of campaign dollars coming from taxpayers, in the case of John McCain, or raised directly from supporters, in the case of Barack Obama. They will jet across the country, debating every major issue. But in the end, victory or defeat could well turn on a McGraw-style crunch. We don’t know for sure if the candidates will suffer the same fate as did three prior presidential hopefuls: Republicans Thomas Dewey and Gerald Ford and Democrat Michael Dukakis. All three appeared to hold a better than even chance of capturing the White House before the crunch broke against them.

The crunch is even more of a factor today. A media climate in which just about anything a candidate says, anywhere and to anyone, becomes fodder for the cable news networks and the blogosphere means that both McCain and Obama are susceptible to being crunched.

Take Dewey, the New York governor and GOP nominee in 1944 and 1948. In his second try, Dewey was seen as such a sure bet that pollsters stopped polling, the press focused on Dewey’s Cabinet picks, and the head of the U.S. Secret Service ditched President Harry Truman to protect the perceived certain victor.

In mounting their “whistle-stop tours,” Dewey and Truman spoke from the rear platforms of their campaign trains. On Oct. 12, after chugging into Beaucoup, Ill., Dewey’s train lurched back toward the crowd. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey said. “He probably should be shot at sunrise, but we’ll let him off this time since nobody was hurt.”

Dewey’s quip did not amuse the engineer, Lee Tindle, who told an Associated Press reporter, “I think just as much of Dewey as I did before, and that’s not very much.” Union stalwarts soon solidified their support of Truman, who had praised the “all-Democratic” train crew. On Nov. 2, Truman won 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189.

Fast forward to 1976, when Ford, the unelected post-Watergate incumbent, was holding his own against Jimmy Carter, a former one-term governor of Georgia who had emerged as the Democratic nominee.

In his second debate with Carter, Ford replied to a question about U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union by saying: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” When the reporter, Max Frankel of The New York Times, gave Ford a chance to recover in his follow-up question, Ford dug himself into a deeper hole by proclaiming: “I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” (The Soviets had stationed four divisions in Poland.)

It took two days before Ford’s advisers could persuade him to amend his debate remarks. Meanwhile, campaign coverage focused nonstop on his gaffe — underscoring the perception that Ford, a top college athlete, was a bumbler who hit errant golf shots and struck his head on doors. Carter won with 50.08 percent of the vote.

Twelve years later, Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, lost the election to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush by less than 4 percent of the vote. Dukakis was surging ahead in the polls before the candidates’ final debate, at which CNN’s Bernie Shaw asked: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

“No, I don’t, Bernard,” Dukakis replied bloodlessly. “And I think you know I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.” He went on to tell Shaw how there was no evidence the death penalty curbed crime.

That proved to be Dukakis’ crunch point. As he left the stage, he told his political adviser, John Sasso, “I blew it.”

If this year’s contest follows that form, we’ll see McGraw’s dictum proved anew with the crunch point of 2008. And on Nov. 4, we’ll know which candidate blew it this time around.

Andrew Glass is a contributing editor at Politico.

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