THE BELL CURVE:

This is an extremely stressful time of year. While baseball is entering its final month, football is elbowing its way onto the scene, requiring multiple decisions. And to add to the stress in 2008, we had not only the Olympic Games but also a national election to factor in.

I’m a political junkie who watches presidential party conventions from gavel to gavel. From the obsequious Larry King to endless talking heads. From speeches by the mayor of Atlanta to the governor of Montana to the potential president. From glaze over my eyes to a numbing of whatever is left of my brain.

So I’ve been struggling mightily with choices for the past week. Even though the Olympics are now happily history, I still missed critical portions of the Angels’ futility in Anaheim and Michelle Obama’s passionate bouquet to her husband in Denver by bouncing between them. I finally resolved this bad scheduling by staying with Michelle, who clearly did what she was asked to do — humanize Barack — with class and style.

Unhappily, class assuredly doesn’t win elections, especially when the party is split down the middle after a rugged primary fight. So the following night I stayed with Hillary Clinton, who laid down the party line — also with class — to her passionate followers to shape up and get behind Obama. Interviews on the convention floor after Clinton’s speech indicated she was only partly successful. A large percentage of her supporters who were interviewed were still considering refusing to vote or writing in Hillary’s name as rational options. Instead, they hit me as political suicide for their party.

Since I have a personal stake in this election, which I consider right up there among the most crucial in my long lifetime, it seems a history lesson might be useful. So, as a public service and an exercise in patriotism, I’d like to offer two examples of what happens when a political death wish prevails at election time.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was elevated to the presidency when President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. TR was enormously popular and was elected to the office in 1904 with a promise that he wouldn’t run again in 1908. He held to that promise as his choice to succeed him, William Howard Taft, won easily. But Taft crossed up his mentor and departed from TR’s progressive programs to the conservative wing of the party.

So Roosevelt took his issue to the Republican convention in 1912 and split the GOP down the middle. When Taft and the conservatives prevailed in an angry fight, Roosevelt pulled out of the party and ran on a Progressive ticket. Result: The Republican vote was split and Democrat Woodrow Wilson won a minority decision and served for eight years as president of the United States.

Now let’s move on a few years. World War I had ended in victory, women had just won the right to vote, and Wilson was in such seriously bad health that his wife was seen as running the country. The signals were clear for the Republicans to win back the White House. The biggest problem they faced was an internal split. Teddy Roosevelt died in 1919, but his progressive followers were back in the GOP, contesting in a last-ditch effort for power that brought the convention to a deadlock.

Thus was born the famous “smoke-filled room” where a group of power brokers with large bellies and fat cigars prevailed to bring about the selection of Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, long since accepted as the worst president in U.S. history — a product of a split in the party that marked the long decline of TR-style progressivism in the Republican party that is still underway today.

So in one instance, an internal split put the opposition party in office for eight years, and in another, delivered our worst president in history. A study of convention history would turn up other examples of issues that have divided delegates convening to choose a president, but would seldom find a band of losers so intractable that they would bring their party down rather than soften their position.

I heard a lot of that sort of intransigence in Denver this week. Clinton put it to them pretty straight when she asked if their support was primarily for her or for the children lacking health care — or a string of other measures the party stands for and she embraces. Just do it, she said. Get over it. So we’ll see.

Meanwhile, the baseball season will end with a World Series, the football season will blossom and an election will happen. And we can only hope that there won’t be a divided government to meet the critical needs for which these times call.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.