Precriminations

Atlantic Wire headline from Tuesday morning: "Precriminations: Dems, Expecting Loss, Lay Into Coakley."

Assigning blame for a loss that's yet to happen -- truly a concept for our times.

To begin where a lot of people have: "Precriminations" was popularized by a Dana Milbank piece in the Washington Post in February 2006 predicting whom Democrats were going to blame if they botched the midterm elections. By October, the Republicans had done a good bit of botching themselves and began their own precriminating. And a term that now seems inevitable had begun to circulate.

Milbank is sometimes credited with coining the word, but it predates him. In October 2004, the New Republic appears to have used it in a pair of online pieces speculating on whom each party would cannibalize if it lost the presidential election. I say "appears" because I have to rely on the word of these blogs; the links to TNR's Web site are dead. Fortunately, we have an even earlier mention: James Fallows, writing about the last days of the Bush-Gore race for The Atlantic's Web site in November 2000, calls it "Michael Kinsley's term." But my trail ends there; if Kinsley or anyone else used the word in public before 2000, I can't find it.

"Precriminations" isn't exactly a new concept -- infighting and finger-pointing go back forever in politics. And it shares more than a little with "pre-mortem," whose political use (as opposed to medical use) goes back decades. But holding a carnival of blame before the polls have even opened seems perfect for a 24/7 political culture where someone's always talking, predictions are mistaken for actualities, and you've got to get the stench of failure off you before the next election.

The earliest political use of "pre-mortem" I could find is the headline of an H.L. Mencken column for the Baltimore Evening Sun in October 1932. Herbert Hoover was about to get crushed by FDR, and Mencken summed up the mood among Republican solons: "The Republican grand goblins, having given up hope of reelecting Lord Hoover on November 8, now devote themselves con amore to concocting what, on less exalted levels, would be called his alibi. He will go to the block, they say, as a sacrifice to the public's notorious incapacity for cerebral functioning. He will be butchered at the polls, brutally, melodramatically and against all justice and reason, because it blames him for the Depression, and pants to punish him."

There is always bipartisan support for blaming the voters.

Anyway, if we're going to draw a line between pre-mortems and precriminations when they involve party officials, Mencken's column provides a useful contrast with the other examples quoted above. The Republican leaders of 1932 decided voters weren't buying, but they still took care not to damage the merchandise.