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Political pundits debate the merits of spoilers and spoilsports

By William Safire
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Sunday, Jun 06, 2004, Page 9

"Potential spoiler Ralph Nader met with potential spoilee John Kerry yesterday afternoon," wrote Mark Leibovich in The Washington Post last month.

Spoiler, a slashing word in politics, is apparently of recent vintage. When the conservative columnist William Buckley ran for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay in 1965, thereby splitting the expected vote against the Democrat, Abe Beame, The New York Times observed, "William F. Buckley Jr, the Conservative nominee, has dropped any pretense that his role in the campaign is other than that of a spoiler."

The columnist had no intention of winning (asked what he would do if he did win, Buckley replied, "Demand a recount") but wanted to build a Conservative Party in New York that would discourage Republican candidates from swinging too far left. (Lindsay won, unspoiled by Buckley's 13 percent.)

Before Kerry and Nader had their friendly and inconclusive chat, the presumptive Democratic nominee used a formulation to reporters that has traditionally been used to discourage the defection of party regulars: A vote for Nader would be the equivalent of a vote for President George W. Bush.

everyone a spoiler?

Asked about this, Nader told Judy Woodruff of CNN: "Either we're all spoilers of one another -- trying to take votes from one another -- or none of us are spoilers, because we have equal rights to run for elective office." (Because he dealt with several candidates, "one another" was correct; If his remark had been limited to two, he would have said "each other.")

I called Nader, long a libertarian ally in the privacy wars, to ask for his definition of spoiler. As the choice of nearly 3 million voters in 2000, he offered three: "A spoiler is any candidate who refuses to believe that the two largest parties own all the voters in America" and "any candidate who is perceived as drawing votes away from a Democrat, so long as this candidate is not a Republican." Finally, "with apologies to Ambrose Bierce," he submits, "A spoiler is any person who dares to exercise his or her First Amendment rights inside the electoral arena but outside the two-party duopoly."

To those who suggest his candidacy might siphon off votes of liberals from the Democratic candidate, Nader -- an iconoclast not all that hot about using e-mail -- suggests he could actually help the legions of the left. "One, by trying to galvanize the young; two, by getting many of the 100 million nonvoters to the polls; three, by helping local citizens' groups get visibility and four, by setting a model of probity and innovation." (Nobody can say the man who turned the phrase "consumer advocate" into his personal title is not innovative: He is the only candidate to refuse TV makeup.)

sports link

The word spoiler, in roughly its present political sense, may have come from sports. I recall from days in the Ebbets Field bleachers (but cannot find a citation for) its use in baseball in the 1940s to describe a hitter who, in the final inning of a game, "spoiled" a pitcher's no-hitter by getting a hit.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a 1948 item from The Baltimore Sun about boxing's Jersey Joe Walcott: "In the language of the ring he is known as a `spoiler,' the type of fighter who can make an opponent look bad but who can never look good himself."

In 1950, The Sun's sports pages applied the word to pro football: "In meeting San Francisco here ... the Colts will get a crack at their biggest `spoiler' of the past two seasons."

Political etymologists need help. Earliest use I can find -- though not quite in the sought-after sense of "vote splitter" -- is by The New York Times' Anthony Lewis in 1959, who recounted a legislative maneuver of then Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson to outfox Democratic liberals: "The senator from Texas obviously enjoyed the role of spoiler hugely."

Before that, who? Former president Theodore Roosevelt? As an independent, he outpolled his fellow Republican, president William Howard Taft, making possible the Democrat Woodrow Wilson's victory in 1912.

Send citations (the real thing, not a vague recollection like mine) to onlanguage(at)nytimes.com and win lexicographical fame without fortune.

Is this a system?

Relatedly, the word spoils has long been a staple in politics. Martin Van Buren, known for his unabashed support of the political patronage system, was nominated by his mentor, president Andrew Jackson, to be minister to England in 1832. In January of that year, senator William Learned Marcy (punching up a metaphor expressed in Congress two years earlier) spoke in favor of his fellow New Yorker's nomination, defending his patronage role with "To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy."

Senators Henry Clay and John Calhoun led the charge against Jackson's nomination of "the Little Magician" and defeated it, making a political martyr out of Van Buren and introducing the phrase spoils system to the political lexicon.

Jackson selected him as his running mate, and Van Buren (also called "Old Kinderhook,"from the name of his hometown, which some mistakenly thought was the origin of "OK") became vice president and in 1836 he became the eighth president of the US.

In his 1922 novel, The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald took Marcy's famous line and gave it a thought-provoking turnaround: "The victor belongs to the spoils."

Greek bearing

upbeat word

The Greek word philo, used as a prefix, means "love of," or at least "a predisposition for"; philosophy, for example, is "the love of wisdom."

At a luncheon last month in New York, Greece's new Prime Minister Costas was asked by journalists if he noticed a wave of anti-Americanism sweeping Europe. He replied that he was a philo-American.

Though not a fresh coinage, philo-American was such a refreshing locution that I thought it should be called to your attention.
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