Lenny Dykstra and Sarah Palin.......You Can Fool Some of the People....

It is impossible for me to look and the crash and burn of Sarah Palin and Lenny Dykstra without seeing some obvious similarities.

For thos of you who are unaware, Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska in what can only be described as a bizarre press conference where she babbled incoherently about any variety of reasons for leaving office. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/07/09/2009-07-09_to_go_forward_gop_must_snap_out_of_its_sarah_palin_spell.html

Dykstra is the former Mets and Phillies outfielder who steroided his way to prominance as a player (he is named as a user in the Mitchell Report) and then somehow, by some unexplained phenomenon, managed to become an investment guru with his own column on thestreet.com!!!!!!

Dykstra advised everyone that he was an unbelievably successful businessman, managed to somehow "buy" Wayne Gretzky old house. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4145589 He has now filed for bankruptcy protection, disclosing $50,000 in assets and between $10MM and $50MM in liabilities: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4313487. (Even this appears to be false, since I believe the proper thing to do is disclose the gross value of your assets in one spot and then the liens against them in another spot -- right K? -- so if Dykstra owns Gretzky's house and it is worth $14MM and has $20MM against it, you still hve to disclose the $14MM as an asset.)

But back to the comparison. What we really need to look at are two simple questions:

1) How in the hell did Sarah Palin almost become Vice President of the United States? and
2) How in the hell did Lenny Dykstra (whom everyone thought was an idiot when a ballplayer) become a financial industry guru whom Jim Cramer once called "one of the greats" in stock picking?

A lot of the answers are the same.

1) Their Audience -- Palin appeals to rich white men because she is good looking. She has been described as hot, slutty, a MILF, a GILF, sexy-bitchy, and resembling a hot librarian or a hot teacher. Old rich guys want to do her.
Dykstra was a start athlete in two major east coast markets (NY and Philly). He was on the 1986 Mets for goodness sake. Every guy in the NY or Philly metro area wants to be friends with a 1986 Met (and it gets more unhealthy than that -- watch the Seinfeld episodes with Keith Hernandez) or a 1993 Philly.

So they both had access to rich white men who worshipped them. This is a great career boost.

2) Their Secondary Audience -- It is important to cultivate not only a rich white elite audience, but also an audience for your backstory. Thus, it helps that both have an unusual background to "sell." Dykstra -- what is he, some sort of savant? I mean, as a ballplayer he could barely put together a coherent sentence and now he is a mutimillionaire? A genius stock picker? There is an old ESPN interview where the interviewer keeps asking Jim Cramer, incredulously, "Lenny Dykstra?!?!?!" Seemingly unwilling to believe Dykstra could spell his name, let alone pick stocks.

Palin is the outdoorsman/athlete/small town girl/beauty queen who became the tough, ethically strong Governor, overcoming corrupt opponents by pure willpower. She could gut a moose and write legislation at the same time....and kick your ass in basketball.

So many people who had a chance to for Palin or pay to read Dykstra's financial advice decided, "Hey, this person is just like me! See, you don't need to go to some big name school or read books and stuff to be great. See, good old common sense wins out every time!"

3) The Race Is Not Always to the Swift...... It says in Ecclesiastes 9:11, "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

That is what everyone wants to believe. It makes your future look a lot better to believe that. But as Damon Runyon said, "The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet."

The fact of the matter is that while people wanted to believe in Palin and Dykstra, there was no good reason to do so other than hope/blind faith. Palin had kicked around various colleges, and even when she ran for VP no one at any of those schools seemed to remember anything from her. She was not a great athlete. Heck, she was probably a sub-par high school athlete, but she played Alaska small-school basketball for one year in 1982. She only had one halfway impressive job, and she quit that. Then she somehow miraculously became governor (arguably because she wass the lone GOP candidate in a very GOP state who was not at the time under some suspicion or indictment).

Dykstra? Come on. He acted like an idiot as a player because..........well.....what do you think? He was out telling people he was worth $50MM and people were swallowing it hook, line and sinker. The articles I have seen indicate that he sold his one successful venture (car washes) for about half that amount, a lot of that being "paid" in a promissory note. Any modicum of due diligence would have established that Lenny owed money on his homes, his jet, his magazine, and probably his clothes and his hair cut. When ESPN finally began investigating, it found millions of unpaid debts, numerous lawsuits, etc. These didn't all just pop up overnight.

4) "I have always relied upon the kindness of strangers." Let's be blunt here. Sarah Palin -- good looking, but give any woman who can squeak above a 6 out of 10 about $150,000 worth of clothes and makeup, put them on a diet and have them yell loudly about "terrorists" and "the real America" and you will have white male rednecks across the country unzipping their flies and heading to their mom's basement. Sarah Palin was a very medicore Governor of a tiny state. Had McCain not nominated her, she continues to be a non-entity nationwide in 2008, 2009, 2010, etc.

Dykstra -- there are a million stock pickers out there. The rumor is that Dykstra found one he liked who gave him advice on how to pick stocks and Dykstra paid the guy's son every month to do analytical charts for him. Then Dykstra read a lot of newletters and picked out his picks from the ones stated by others. Not exactly genius. But who was Dykstra's mentor/enabler? Jim Cramer. Philly guy, loved the Phillies, loved "Nails," willing to promote him to the public. Again -- someone who was not qualified to do what they were doing, placed there by an influential person.

I am sure that there are more parallels to be drawn, but the lesson I draw from Palin and Dykstra is that you really can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. With Dykstra, it looks like his efforts to fool all of the people all of the time failed. We shall see if Palin has any political capital remaining.