Let Bartlet Be Bartlet... Or Else

Just like the presidential elections of 1998 and 2002 (wait, what?) the voting public gave a Bartlet a resounding victory.

If we didn't know any better, we'd say that a lot of our voters visited us specifically to vote for Bartlet.

Bartlet vs. Tyler

Josiah "Jed" Bartlet	86 (88.7%)
John Tyler	11 (11.3%)

Actually, we feel comfortable jumping to conclusions and saying that's exactly what happened. It's not like these Bartletbaggers were sneaky about their intentions. We had quite the dramatic spike in the first two hours after the Monday's post went up.

Another look at the Bartlet Effect, 2-hour spike followed by 94 hours of relative silence.

To clarify, the term "Bartletbaggers" is not to play on the term "tea baggers." That wouldn't actually make sense. It's our attempt at being cute and working off the of the term "carpetbaggers" — Northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction to take advantage of the political situation down there. In this case, a Bartletbagger visits our site the week Bartlet is up and votes for him — implying an able-bodied man in his 50s has absolutely no chance against a slightly older man with some significant health issues — and then disappears.

Our message to Bartletbaggers: We hope you pay us a visit again before Bartlet's next match. There are 40 non-Bartlet combatants still alive in this thing who would appreciate your loyalty. If you were half as spiteful as us, you would vote every week just to prove us wrong.

Bartlet was able to get the most votes of any combatant so far, though this week's fight fell 20 votes short of tying our record for most votes in a week (Whitmore vs. Garfield — 117).

Onto Comment of the Week business:

We caught some criticism for listing Tyler's fertility as a con, making the point that raising a lot of children would take a lot out of a guy. Though, it was also pointed out that having that many kids would give a father a near-superhuman ability for conflict resolution and breaking up fights. I would hazard to guess that Tyler's slaves were usually in charge of making sure the kids behaved, which kind of nullifies the argument for pro and con.

The image of Tyler raising a polo match, however, is silly enough for us to like. Why would they allow all of those horses to run around their house?

We also enjoyed the idea of Bartlet hitting Tyler with a bike, but it goes against the rules of the Arena.

We'll see Bartlet again in the 2nd Round Nov. 21. Next week, we have our final 1st Round fight of the Marshall Bracket when Lyndon B. Johnson takes on Chester A. Arthur — two vice presidents who succeeded assassinated presidents, but only one will succeed in the 1st Round.