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Sometimes, in politics, an evocative piece of imagery sticks and becomes something of a meme. “Democrats in disarray.” “Shattering the glass ceiling.” “Drain the swamp.”
The pithy and descriptive is beloved terrain for politicians and the journalists who cover them alike, the better to save either an audience’s attention span or column inches. A longtime former Senate staffer told me once that “going nuclear,” shorthand for eliminating parts of the filibuster, stuck around mostly just because reporters liked it.
“Lucy and the football” is one of those shopworn metaphors, trotted out through the years in all manner of political dynamics. It endures because it’s always relevant: someone is always duplicitous, someone is always a sucker.
For the Peanuts-illiterate: Lucy tees up the football for Charlie Brown to kick. He, used to this trick, refuses to kick, knowing that she’ll rip it away at the last second. She serves up some snake-oil salesman charm, ole Chuck takes the bait and down he goes, flat on his back. In the comic strip, which ran for half a century, it happened over and over and over again.
After an extensive, exhaustive search led by the country’s foremost researchers (I googled around for a while), I found that there really wasn’t one moment of political skullduggery that brought the metaphor into vogue. Over the past two decades in particular, there have been many Lucys and many Charlie Browns. Sometimes the football is bipartisan cooperation, sometimes it’s nuclear proliferation.
One early example was a 1994 Hartford Courant column by Jeff Rivers, who makes the case that even if we, the voters, are Charlie Brown, we should vote for the politicians (Lucys) who inspire us even if they let us down later.
In the Obama era, there were multiples of Lucys, veritable hordes of Charlie Browns. Former President Barack Obama himself, articles declared, played both: he was Lucy in promises unkept to progressives in 2012, Charlie Brown to the Iranian government in both 2013 and 2015.
Often, Republicans played Lucy — such as in 2010 — over promises of bipartisanship. After Politico suggested then that a narrower Senate majority “will force more White House engagement with Republicans, which could actually help restore a bit of the post-partisan image that was a fundamental ingredient of [Obama’s] appeal to voters,” Steve Benen (now a producer for Rachel Maddow) wrote in Washington Monthly:
This is a great idea, isn’t it? All the White House and Democratic congressional leaders have to do is continue to work on their policy agenda, while reaching out in good faith to earn support from congressional Republicans. Bills will start passing with bipartisan support; the public will be impressed; David Broder will start dancing in front of the Washington Post building; a season of goodwill and comity will bloom on Capitol Hill; and Lucy really will let Charlie Brown kick the ball.
Or maybe not.
It was a refrain we’d hear again almost to the letter 10 years later — from Obama himself.
“If you start getting a sense that it is just a pure power play, then you don’t want to be Lucy and Charlie Brown, where you just keep on kicking the football and not learning from experience that is going to be pulled out from under you,” Obama offered in a 2020 interview with NPR. “But I think that there is a way to reach out and not be a sap. There’s a way of consistently offering the possibility of cooperation, but recognizing that if Mitch McConnell or others are refusing to cooperate, at some point, you’ve got to take it to the court of public opinion.”
The ageless Schultz creations accompanied us into the present day, along with vivid memories of McConnell’s many Obama-era bait-and-switches.
Even in the few short months of the 2021 legislative term, wariness that Biden and his Democrats would soil their yellow and black tee shirts in the dirt in May became vindication that the President had left the Republicans eating grass by June.
We at TPM are far from immune — some may even say (not me, too humble) that we were at the vanguard of popularizing the bright-hued metaphor. A quick spelunking trip into the dusty TPM archives found all manner of politicians — especially Democrats — being Charlie Browned through the years.
In 2010, Democrats were the suckers for cooperating with Republicans on their jobs bill after watching the GOP draw out Affordable Care Act negotiations, leaving Democrats with a pared-down bill that they still wouldn’t vote for. A few years later, Democrats were considering taking a kick at the football over the decision to blow up the filibuster for Obama’s constantly stymied appointees, though they ultimately walked away.
During the Trump era, our fearless leader Josh Marshall spotted the familiar characters as Republicans decided to no longer care about the deficit in 2016 after their candidate won the White House. A year later, the press took a spill in the grass for reflexively giving former President Donald Trump credit for achievements it would later turn out he had nothing to do with.
Rushing towards the current day, the scenarios change but the characters remain the same: Democrats wound up for an almighty kick when they decided to end Trump’s second impeachment trial without calling Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) as a witness; McConnell held up a tantalizing football in his insistence that Republicans enjoy equal power on the Jan. 6 commission; Democrats battled their Charlie Brown tendencies as they navigate a two-track infrastructure plan.
Politicians come into office, and leave. Parties triumphantly conquer the White House, the House, the Senate, only to lose them later. Everyone’s talking about infrastructure, taxes, education, until they’re not. Life changes fast in Washington — but Lucy and Charlie Brown endure.
Charlie Brown: Every year she pulls the same trick on me! Well, this year it’s not going to work. This year I’m not going to be fooled!
Lucy: You thought I was going to pull the ball away, didn’t you? Why, Charlie Brown, I’m ashamed of you! I’m also insulted! Don’t you trust anyone anymore? Has your mind become so darkened with mistrust that you’ve lost your ability to believe in people?
[Charlie Brown runs, kicks and Lucy whips the ball away]
Charlie Brown: AUGH!
Lucy: Isn’t it better this way, Charlie Brown? Isn’t it better to trust people?