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Monday, February 21, 2005 |
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The Odd Couple Not Oscar and Felix. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One was a wealthy planter, the other grew up poor in a log cabin. One was the commanding general in the war that secured American independence, the other served as a captain of volunteers in an Indian war for ninety days. One came to the presidency magnificently prepared to lead the country, the other was probably the least prepared man ever to live in the White House. One owned slaves, the other freed them.
All they have in common is a holiday–that and the fact that they were our two greatest presidents.
And even there they part company.
It’s easy to see why Washington is considered one of our greatest presidents. He was the commanding general in the war without which there wouldn’t have been a presidency or a country, leading thirteen ill-assorted, squabbling and underdeveloped colonies to victory over the world’s most economically and militarily powerful empire. So totally did he personify what the country wanted to be that the office of president was created and shaped around his attributes. At a time of no-holds-barred politics that makes today’s scene look tame by comparison, he was elected twice without opposition. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once identified a new democracy’s most perilous election as, not its first, but its second, because it is the second that tests the willingness of those who hold power to give it up. Washington relinquished power twice, once after America’s victory in the Revolutionary War, and again after his second term as president.
But Lincoln? That’s harder.
Yes, he won the Civil War and preserved the Union. But the U.S. had three times the population of the Confederacy, and an even greater economic advantage. Why did it take four years to defeat it?
And yes, he freed the slaves. But he didn’t issue the Emancipation Proclamation until two years after he took office, and applied it only to slaves held in the areas the U.S. controlled, i.e. the northern states and the few parts of the Confederacy then under Union control. And almost up until the Proclamation was issued, Lincoln continued to entertain the notion of colonization, the doomed pipe-dream that America could avoid reaping the whirlwind that was sure to follow abolition--“I tremble for my country,” wrote Jefferson about slavery, “when I reflect that God is just“–by sending freed slaves and other free blacks “back” to Africa, a possibility about as realistic as that of Ted Kennedy’s going “back” to Ireland.
In addition to his ambivalence in regard to slavery--not as to whether it was good or evil, but about the terms on which slavery might be ended–his first years as president were punctuated by hesitation and misjudgment born of his inexperience. He was, as David Herbert Donald observes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lincoln, the least prepared man ever to become president. His total public service before moving into the White House consisted of less than ninety uneventful days as a captain of volunteers in an Indian war, six years in the Illinois state legislature (after running a first campaign in which he finished eighth out of thirteen candidates), and a single term in the House of Representatives.
Lincoln’s lack of preparation was evident even before he was sworn into office. He offered the position of Secretary of War (what we now call Secretary of Defense) to Pennsylvania Senator Simon Cameron, perhaps the most corrupt major politician in the country. Within days Lincoln recognized the appointment for the blunder that it was and wrote to Cameron rescinding the offer. Cameron, however, refused to withdraw, and Lincoln went through with the appointment, which Cameron used to make the War Department, in Donald’s words, “a model of maladministration and waste.”
Lincoln’s inexperience showed again in the first years of the Civil War. He went through a series of commanding generals, including George B. McClellan, whom he fired because he refused to follow Lincoln’s orders or even to keep the president informed of his plans, only to restore him to a command a few months later, and then fire him again.
Why, then, does Lincoln belong among the greatest presidents?
One reason, of course, is that the trauma of the Civil War ended as it should have, with the seceding states restored to the Union, and slavery abolished. Americans judge by results, not by short- and middle-term difficulties. Or to put it another way, history wields a mighty air brush. History has forgiven Washington for losing most of the major battles of the Revolutionary War because he won the final battle at Yorktown. It has forgiven FDR for not entering World War when Britain was bombed, or when France was conquered, or to stop the Holocaust near its inception; and it has forgiven the unpreparedness that led to Pearl Harbor, because, in the end, after four years, the U.S. and its allies did win the war. And history has forgiven Lincoln his early mistakes because although the Civil War started badly, it ended well.
Lincoln also remains in the pantheon because of how and when he died. He died at the moment of triumph, less than a week after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Like John F. Kennedy, he would live in memory as he was at his zenith, never diminished by age, or by political combat that could not be won as decisively as war.
He would never, in particular, be tested by Reconstruction. As awful as the Civil War was–it killed about the same number of soldiers as World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined, out of a total population that ranged from a quarter to a seventh the U.S. population in the mid-twentieth century–the damage from the failure of Reconstruction burdened and lacerated the nation for more than a century, and stained it so deeply that it has still not been scrubbed clean.
Every evidence is that Lincoln would have fared better at Reconstruction than his hapless successor, the politically inept, semi-literate and bibulous Andrew Johnson. And the reasons that he might have done better, and spared the country the horror of Reconstruction and its spawn, point to the reasons that his birthday is still a national holiday.
One of those reasons is that unlike Johnson, and unlike the Radical Republican-controlled Congress that drove the punitive Reconstruction, Lincoln was at once a man of principle and a pragmatist.
A man of principle, he never compromised on the convictions that made Civil War necessary and inevitable. He refused to countenance the breakup of the Union–“Lincoln’s commitment to maintaining the Union was absolute,” Donald writes–and he would not allow any extension of slavery, a southern condition for remaining in the Union. “Let there be no compromise,” he wrote to his friend Lyman Trumbull, “on extending slavery.” “Stand firm,” he said on another occasion. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.”
At the same time, and perhaps because he had little formal education but a great deal of experience, he was thoroughly practical throughout his life. Almost all of the wonderful, although possibly apocryphal, stories that are part of the Lincoln legend emphasize this trait. There’s the one in which Lincoln asked a group of men, “If we call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?” When one volunteered, “five,” Lincoln corrected him: “No, because calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” Or the one about Lincoln, presiding over a cabinet meeting, called for a show of hands, aye and nay, over an issue. “All in favor?” All but Lincoln raised their hands. “Those opposed?” Only Lincoln raised his hand. “The nays have it,” he said.
Apocrypha aside, there’s reason to think that pragmatism would have ruled Lincoln‘s Reconstruction policy, as it ruled so much of what he did. Asked near the end of the war about how he would rebuild the broken country, he replied: “The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it–setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see; and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem.”
Other presidents have brought principle and pragmatism to their administrations, though, and their birthdays are not national holidays.
Lincoln would have brought something else to Reconstruction, something he brought to his presidency and to everything else he did: a fundamental depth and largeness of spirit that, combined with everything else, helps to explain why, a century and a half after his death, Lincoln is still, to borrow the old saw about Washington, first in the hearts of his countrymen.*
Lincoln’s generosity and largeness of spirit is all the more real to us today because it was so perfectly captured in his spare but eloquent prose. We hear it even in the uncertain, often fumbling days that began his presidency when, with war just a month away, Lincoln crossed out from his first inaugural address a stark call for the south to choose between “peace and sword,” and closed instead on a very different note:
By the time four years later that he began his second term, Lincoln had become a better president, a great president. But he ended on the same note on which he had begun, in seamless paragraphs that in the same breath assessed deserved blame and extended, if not forgiveness, and certainly not absolution, then mercy and forbearance, the very combination that could have made Reconstruction merely difficult, not disastrous.
A month and a few days later, with the war over and his fellow Republicans pressing for harsh justice against Confederate leaders, Lincoln, in the last week of his life, told a visitor from France that “it was his firm resolution to stand for clemency, and told his cabinet that there should be “no persecution, no bloody work,” in the wake of the war. The night after Appomattox, he greeted a jubilant crowd in front of the White House, and asked the military band in attendance for a rendition of Dixie, “one of the best tunes I have ever heard.”
It is that Lincoln that sculptor Daniel Chester French captured in the great, sad presence who presides over the Lincoln Memorial. It was before that Lincoln that Marian Anderson sang when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from Constitution Hall because of her race. It was before that Lincoln that a crowd of 300,000 heard Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
That is the Lincoln we remember and whose birthday we commemorate each year.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = * I can’t resist adding that the imminent return of major league baseball to Washington, D.C. will prompt the adapted revival of the parody: “Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League East.” 11:32:10 PM  comment []
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Monday, January 31, 2005 |
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Never Again...Again Connecting the Dots Never Again...Again It’s a coincidence, of course: the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, coming right after release of the film, "Hotel Rwanda," about the Rwandan genocide, both of which are occurring in the same time frame as the genocide in Darfur. It’s such a coincidence, in fact, that it makes you want to believe in synchronicity, a term invented by Jung and elegantly defined as "a meaningful, but noncausal, connection between an inner and outer event separated by time and space, but, like the Tao, a whole at some level." A simpler definition: a meaningful coincidence. Coincidence or synchronicity, all three events share several things: they all relate to genocide, they all took place without effective intervention from the community of nations, and they all occurred after sadder but wiser world leaders had vowed, "Never again." And, indeed, "Hotel Rwanda," a powerful and moving film, is unsparing in its indictment of the failure of Western countries to stop the slaughter. "If there's a lesson to be learned from ‘Hotel Rwanda,’" wrote Michael J. Kavanagh in Slate, "it's ‘never again.’ Never again will the international community stand by, will the United Nations ignore its moral obligation, will anyone let ethnic problems in Rwanda—or anywhere else—devolve to the point of mass killing." And yet after so many "never agains," it’s happening–again. In the Darfur region of Sudan, Arab militias, backed by the Sudanese government are waging a campaign of murder, rape, destruction and forced starvation against African tribal farmers and their families. Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust, from Armenia, from Rwanda? Well, yes, we have. We’ve learned that it’s damned hard to intervene effectively against evildoers ensconced in countries thousands of miles away and protected by their country’s sovereignty and force of arms. We learned it in Germany, where after recognizing Nazi genocide far too late for what it was–remember, despite our self-congratulatory memories of World War II as the good war, we went to war against Germany, not because they were conquering European countries or bombing Britain, much less because they were killing Jews, but because Germany declared war on us after Pearl Harbor; but I digress–it took us more than three years of all-out war and hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties to defeat Germany, which is what it took to stop the genocide, since Germany kept executing Jews almost until the end. We’re learning it in Iraq. Although, as in Germany, we didn’t go into Iraq to stop genocide, or for any reason connected with human rights, we’ve learned how hard and costly it is to force the government of another country out of power, which is what it would have taken if we had wanted to stop Saddam’s human rights abuses.* But of course, despite the never-agains, no Republican or Democratic administration would have gone to war in Iraq to stop human tights abuses, up to and including genocide, and no American citizenry would have supported such a war. Human rights activist and author Samantha Power is right to say that just because we can’t do everything to stop genocide in a particular country, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything. Just because we know that we won’t invade Sudan or Rwanda to stop genocide, it doesn’t mean that we can’t condemn them as genocide perpetrators before the international community, invoke the approbation of the international community, or impose economic and other sanctions. But those things take time, and while the Holocaust took years to unfold, genocide in Rwanda and Darfur took weeks and months. It would be difficult to ascertain the facts and build an international consensus in that time period, let alone for measures like sanctions to begin to bite the offender. And what if the international condemnation and sanctions didn’t work? Is it likely that any American president would back off, saying we’ve done all we can do? Is it likely we’d want him to? It’s a dilemma captured perfectly by the late Washington Post cartoonist Herblock. Back when we recognized the rulers of Taiwan as the government of China**, mainland China--the real China, "Red China" we used to call it--threatened to take over two small islands, Quemoy and Matsu, off the coast of Taiwan. The Eisenhower administration, through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, told them they’d better not. Whereupon Red China started shelling the islands. It was about that time that Herblock did a cartoon that showed Dulles and Uncle Sam, standing on islands labeled Quemoy and Matsu, and ducking beneath artillery shells flying over them. Beside them was a sign saying, "Stay out of Quemoy and Matsu–Or Else!"; the sign was riddled with bullet holes. Dulles was pointing to the sign and explaining to an angry and perplexed Uncle Sam, "It worked fine, as long as nobody asked, ‘or else what?’" Or else what, indeed. Would we have gone to war, would we go to war today, to protect Taiwan from China? Would we have been prepared–this is not a rhetorical question– to go through a war like the one in Iraq in order to save the Tutsis in Rwanda? Would we have gone through a war to save the Jews of Europe? To save the Darfur Africans? Perhaps, despite our combination of unbounded idealism and unrivaled power, there are fires in the world that even we cannot extinguish once they are burning with full intensity. As it happens, actual firefighters are spending an increasing proportion of their time responding to hazardous materials and rescue calls, and less fighting fires, according to a recent Washington Post article, in large part because, thanks to smoke alarms, sprinkler systems, fire-resistant building material and other such preventive and early-warning innovations, there are fewer fires. Maybe we and other countries should look at that model, and try to dampen combustible ethnic, religious and territorial disputes with aid and diplomatic intervention before they become fires so intense that they can’t be put out. But just as we accept that even the most free-handed attack on the roots of crime, combined with the harshest after-the-fact punishment, won’t ever stamp out all crime, we may need to accept that nothing we as a nation can do will resolve all the conflicts that lead to the kinds of horrific eruptions that we are now seeing in Darfur. The British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin thought there was something uniquely American, writes Simon Schama in the January 31 edition of The New Republic, about the belief that "there were no conflicts that, with the application of enough goodwill, money, and robust determination, could not be resolved. The world, Berlin thought, could not be converted "from what it was to what America wished it would be." [F]or Berlin [Schama writes], it was the beginning of wisdom to accept that there were a multitude of evils that were not open to resolution... Accordingly, the job of statecraft was not to liquidate those differences, for that would seldom happen, but to contain them; to find a space in which the acceptance of irreconcilability would not require mutual annihilation. Berlin’s tragic view of history is at odds with one of America’s most attractive and compelling traits, what Schama describes as "the sunlit intensity of American optimism." But if it’s true, as Fitzgerald wrote, that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," *** surely we can retain that sunlit optimism without making promises, to others and to ourselves, than we cannot keep. ============== * In fact, one of the less understood implications of the weapons of mass destruction fiasco is that it took an invasion just to find out whether Iraq had weapons of mass destructions and to discover the awful proportions of the human rights abuses Saddam perpetrated. ** Don’t ask why, it’s too complicated and, fifty years later it seems absurd, as in fact it did then. *** Of course, Fitzgerald might not have been right. George Orwell in 1984 described "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them" as "doublethink." 8:04:50 AM comment []
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Monday, January 03, 2005 |
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Don’t Just Say No Have you seen the credit card commercials starring David Spade? They’re for a card whose claim to fame is that the frequent-flyer-type points you accumulate can be used any time, on any airline, in any hotel. Spade plays a telephone answerer for the competition, one of the companies whose points are never valid for what you want to do: the time you’ve chosen is blacked out, or the hotel you want to stay at doesn’t honor the kind of points you have. Wherever you want to go, whenever you want to go, the answer’s always the same: No. "I’d like to redeem my credit card miles," says a caller, "someplace warm?" "No," Spade says. The caller tries again. "Can my miles get me to Mexico?" "No way, José," says Spade. Hawaii? "A-no-ha." L.A.? "N.O." "Who’s in charge over there?" the caller demands. "That," Spade answers, "would be our C.E.No." It’s very funny. But it’s not a political platform, at least not a winning one. The Republicans tried it for more than a quarter-century starting from the day Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in. They opposed FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and LBJ’s Great Society. They advanced no alternatives to protect the aged against the perils of aging, no remedy for poor people priced out of health care, no remedies for the injustices of segregation, no constructive response to the poverty and racism that triggered the riots of the ‘sixties. More recently, dating about to the time that the government fell into the hands of the Republicans, it’s been the Democrats who have been just saying no. Invade Iraq? No. Tax cuts? No. Rolling back tax cuts? No to that too. No, as well, both to gay marriage and to a Constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. What would they do about Iraq? Something other than what Bush did. John Kerry and the Democrats could have used Groucho Marx’s signature song from "Horsefeathers" as their campaign theme: I don't know what they have to say, And even when they've changed it It wasn’t enough in ‘04 and it likely won’t be enough in ‘08. Unless Bush’s policies go more disastrously wrong than even the most partisan Democrat would wish on the country, mere opposition–to Social Security privatization, to moving the courts even further to the right, to continued attempts to make chicken salad out of chicken...uh...feathers in Iraq–won’t be enough to keep Rudolph Giuliani or Jeb Bush out of the White House. You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and you can’t beat something with nothing. The Democrats will need to get what the Republicans have: a coherent, consistent, values-based political philosophy and the ability to state it in terms that can be understood by people who aren’t policy wonks or political junkies–clear enough, in other words, to fit into thirty-second spots. And they need to start getting it more or less now. Not only because, like any effort to convince lots of people of something, repetition is crucial. But because if the Democrats start saying it now, and keep saying it through the next election, and carry it out in their legislative positions, it will come to seem sincere–will actually be sincere–rather than just a soup of strategies cooked up to win an election. Or they can just say no. After all, just saying no won the war on drugs, right? 9:59:23 PM comment []
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Monday, November 29, 2004 |
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In the Opposition One day while I was working in a Democratic congressman's office, a young African American intern walked into the cubicle of the Legislative Director, holding a flier announcing a seminar for minority interns. Why, she wanted to know, hadn't she been signed up for this seminar?
"Well," said the LD, "on Capitol Hill, ‘minority' doesn't mean Blacks and Hispanics." "Then what does it mean?" she asked. The LD hesitated for a second, searching for the simplest way to answer. Then he said, "Minority means the Republicans."
And so it did. And so it had for a good many years and would for a good many years more. Now on Capitol Hill, minority means the Democrats.
This is a melancholy and bitter thing for Democrats to have to face. After controlling the House for all but two Congresses in over sixty years, and controlling the Senate for all but five, it was easy to think of Democratic control of Congress as the natural state of things, like Cheerios being round, or the Pope's being Catholic. And even after the Republicans won the House in 1994, the closeness of their margins–never over twenty-six seats and often smaller, compared with Democratic margins of seventy to a hundred when they were in control–encouraged Democrats to think that perhaps their majority status had just stepped out, and would soon be back.
But November 2 was the sixth straight election in which Republicans won a majority in the House, and after three elections in which their majority shrank, it was the second straight vote in which they increased their majority. The Republican margin is still small by historical standards, but it's larger than it was after the 1994 elections, and trending up.
But as hard as it is for Democrats to face the fact that they are now the minority in Congress, it's a crucial first step--like twelve-step program participants' decision to end years of denial and admit their true status–toward regaining the majority.
There was a time when members of the Congressional minority could play critical roles in shaping public policy. Wisconsin Republican Congressman William Steiger was instrumental in the passage of the legislation that created OSHA and the all-volunteer military. The civil rights laws would never have been passed without the Republican votes that made up for the opposition of Southern Democrats. Democrats controlled Congress when NAFTA was ratified, but it would never have passed if Republicans hadn't been ready to vote for what they thought was good policy even if they did hand a victory to a Democratic president.
In the ten years they've spent in the minority, congressional Democrats have emulated Steiger and the pro-civil rights Republicans of the ‘sixties, trying to play a constructive role in the legislative process even as the Republicans have increasingly locked them out.
But those days aren't these days. These days not only are Republican leaders in Congress not looking for Democratic votes, they'd rather scuttle intelligence reform legislation they like than have it pass with Democratic votes. And the bipartisan regard for the public interest displayed by Steiger and pro-civil rights Republicans helped shore up Democratic dominance and contributed to keeping the their own party in the minority.
Which may be why in the late ‘eighties and early ‘nineties the congressional Republicans changed strategies. The House Republicans of those pre-majority days are remembered for some of the cheap and often destructive tactics they employed, like calling Democrats out in televised floor speeches that were, unbeknownst to viewers, addressed to empty chambers after the close of legislative business, and inflating an ethically questionable book scheme by Speaker Jim Wright into the crime of the century.
But on a strategic level, the things they did when they were (the British term is much better than the American "minority") in the Opposition led directly to their gaining the majority. Instead of trying to become partners in a legislative process from which Wright and the Democrats had effectively shut them out, they focused on presenting an alternative vision of how a Republican America would differ from the Democratic status quo.
There were a series of things they did in the Congress that preceded the 1994 elections to draw attention to their alternative vision. But they all culminated in the Contract with America, a wish list of policy proposals and legislative process changes.
A lot of the process stuff fell by the wayside. But many of the broad policy proposals found their way into the national policy conversation, and not a few found their way into law: welfare reform, middle class tax cuts, adoption tax incentives, and balancing the budget. But that's really not the point. Nor is it the point that some of the Contract's provisions turned out not to be such good ideas, or that those that were enacted evolved considerably from the form in which they were presented in the Contract.
There are, however, three things about the Contract and the other similar things the Republicans did a decade ago that are worth remembering and emulating .
First, the Contract was broad–but not too broad. Although the Republicans drafted a specific bill for each Contract provision, the focus was not on the specifics but on the values and broad policy directions captured in the section titles: "Fiscal Responsibility," "Taking Back Our Streets," "Job Creation And Wage Enhancement," and the like. To keep breadth from becoming vagueness, each provision listed two or three specific kinds of things that should be done to further the goal–like increasing the Social Security earnings limit, decreasing capital gains taxes, and limiting punitive damages–to keep breadth from. The Contract was broad, as well, in its focus on issues that would appeal to a wide cross-section of the country. There was no mention of hot-button base-enhancers like abortion, flag burning, or affirmative action.
Second, the Contract was national, proposed en masse on the Capitol lawn by GOP House candidates and incumbents. It thus not only produced national publicity, but (you should pardon the expression) a national brand for 435 otherwise disaggregated candidacies and platforms. It gave voters in otherwise unconnected districts the sense that they were voting, not just for a single candidate who would become one of over four hundred, but for a cohesive set of values and ideas held in common.
Third... But before we get to the third important thing, a couple of caveats. The Contract and the other alternative-vision tactics the Republicans employed were not the sole cause of what happened in the 1994 election. And it is now much harder than it was then to defeat incumbent members of Congress.
The third important thing, then, to remember about the Contract is this: On election day 1994, just over a month after the Contract with America was promulgated, the word "minority" stopped meaning the Republicans. 11:31:07 AM comment []
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Friday, November 19, 2004 |
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The Swift Uplifting Rush I’m writing to recommend an article I had a very hard time getting through, about a TV program I’ll find it just as hard to watch. The article appeared in Thursday’s Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58911-2004Nov17.html) and it’s about a Discovery Channel program called Cha-Ching: Money Makers, a reality show that chronicles the efforts of families to find money for pet projects, like vacations or remodeling projects. In particular the article is about the episode that aired today, which records the efforts of the Rush family to raise money to re-do their basement. We’re interested because the Rushes are Capitol Hill friends and neighbors of ours. Mary Rush was our son Phil’s second grade teacher. Phil and Jack Rush went through school together from nursery school through the eighth grade. As the Post article makes clear, there’s a lot of Mayberry about Capitol Hill. Everybody knows everybody. And everybody knew Mary Rush. She taught your kids in first or second grade, stood on the sidelines with you watching kids play soccer or softball, or bought vegetables or flowers next to you on Saturday at Eastern Market, and volunteered in a hundred worthy causes. Her innate kindness and ironic wit were as integral a part of the Hill as the trees that shelter the streets and sidewalks. Have I given it away by using the past tense? That at age 45, in perfect health as far as anyone could tell, while overseeing afternoon recess on a sunny May afternoon, she had a heart attack and died, right there on the Watkins Elementary School playground? A year or so earlier, another much-loved Watkins teacher had died. In the line outside her funeral, which packed St. Peter’s Catholic Church to overflowing, my wife ran into Mary. They marveled at the crowd. "Do you think," Mary asked, "that we’ll get a turnout like this when we go?" Well, of course she did. A memorial service at the school spilled out the auditorium and onto the playground, where her friends, present and former students and their parents, and colleagues held candles in vigil. The funeral the next day at Capitol Hill Presbyterian drew 700 or 800, according to the Post. All I could tell was that the church, the balcony, the lobby, and the sidewalk were all full. The memorial card they passed out at the memorial service had a verse on it. I hadn’t seen it before, but a Google search gets over 15,000 hits from all over the country and the world, so it has obviously had meaning for a lot of people. That May night on the Watkins playground, it was as though it had been written just for Mary, and just for us.
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Tuesday, November 16, 2004 |
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Just Around the Corner?
The networks had barely called Ohio for George Bush before political junkies started talking about 2008. Hillary or Edwards? Sunbelt or Midwest? A governor or another Senator? Would Bush’s second term be just the beginning of a generation of Republican sway? Before either party gets too engrossed in where they’re going, it might be good to look around and see where they are, and where they’ve been. Starting a trip without knowing your coordinates is a good way to wind up going in circles. From close up, the election looks like a near replay of four years ago: one candidate with a narrow popular vote lead, the other an eyelash away in the electoral college. Last time it was the Republican candidate who finished a close second in the popular vote but first by an eyelash in the Electoral College. This time the Republican won the popular vote, while the Democratic candidate won in the Electoral College–almost. A few votes’ change in Ohio, and it could be John Kerry picking his cabinet. So wait till next time, right? A different candidate, props to people of faith, ask gays to soft-pedal same-sex marriage, and ‘08 could be the year the Democrats return to the head of the government and the Republicans return to the minority. It could well happen that way. The Republicans could lose. The Democrats could win back the White House. But history suggests that winning back the country will be a lot harder. Of the last seven presidential elections, the Republicans have won five. Of the last ten, they’ve won seven. And one of the Democrats’ three victories, Jimmy Carter’s win in 1976, hardly counts. Weighed down by the burden of Watergate, the Nixon resignation and pardon, the Agnew resignation, an unelected president Gerald Ford still got forty-nine percent of the popular vote. Bill Clinton’s two victories were legitimate, but his accomplishments in office–like the booming economy, the elimination of the budget deficit, tough-love welfare reform, and the proclamation (premature, as it turned out) of the end of the era of big government–fulfilled campaign promises that Republicans had been making for years. The Republicans’ run of the past thirty-six years looks a lot like the Democrats’ run of the thirty-six years before that. In the elections following Roosevelt’s defeat of Hoover, the Republicans mounted a breathtaking variety of presidential candidacies: a Midwestern governor, a wealthy former Democratic industrialist, a crime-fighting New York prosecutor, a sitting Vice President from a hugely popular two-term Republican administration, and an ideologically pure, choice-not-an-echo conservative. Sometimes they came close–Nixon lost to Kennedy in ‘60 by less than a percentage point–and sometimes they were swamped, as Kansas governor Alf Landon was by FDR. But they all lost. And even the single Republican hiatus, Eisenhower’s two terms in the ‘fifties, were marked by such liberal grails as public school desegregation and the most liberal Supreme Court in history. That Democratic run was in turn preceded by a period of more than seventy years and eighteen elections of which Republicans won all but four–twice to a minority president and once by less than a single percentage point. These epochs are clear enough in historical retrospect. But at any point within their duration, their beginning and ending points are far from predictable. Herbert Hoover’s landslide victory in 1928 extended an era of Republican domination that had started with Lincoln. Four years later the Depression brought the Republican epoch to an abrupt end. After LBJ’s victory in 1964, the second largest in history, it looked like the Democratic train could roll on forever. Just four years later, the Democrats were out and a new Republican epoch had begun. So predicting the end of one of these epochs, including the one we’re in, is like the problem faced by religious fanatics predicting the end of the world: There’s no knowing when it’ll come, so you’d better be ready. Nixon’s victory in ‘68, for example, was based in large part on relative ephemera, like the turmoil at the Democratic convention and the damage inflicted on Hubert Humphrey’s reputation by his term as Vice President. But it started a new Republican epoch because the Republicans were ready with a philosophy–law and order and a promise to cut spending on federal social welfare programs--that responded to (or exploited, depending on which side you were on) widespread insecurity. That small-government, tough-on-crime philosophy has sustained the Republicans ever since. Not just kept them in the White House, but in power: effective domination of public policy–setting the agenda and calling the shots. The Republican epoch turns forty at the end of George W. Bush’s term, four years past the age at which the FDR-LBJ era breathed its last. Suppose the Democrats come up with the right candidate in ‘08, and the Republicans come up with the wrong one. Suppose that the other stars and planets are in alignment. Will the Democrats be ready to take back not only the White House but the country? 4:54:33 PM comment []
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Tuesday, October 12, 2004 |
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Better Safe? In the famous "Saturday Night Live" skit satirizing one of the debates between Vice George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, Dana Carvey as Bush runs out of things to say with fifty seconds left in his time allotment, and begins to babble campaign cliches– "On track, stay the course, a thousand points of light. Stay the course"–before petering out. The moderator calls on Dukakis, played by Jon Lovitz, for a rebuttal. Lovitz grins his Dukakis grin and says, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."That’s pretty much what Democrats are asking about President Bush’s tenacious hold on the loyalty of more or less half the country’s voters. They’re running against a president who:
Running against this seemingly lethal combination of bad judgments and bad luck, Democrats can’t figure out why Bush isn’t buried under a landslide of epic proportions. They can’t believe they’re–not losing exactly, the race is much too close to say that–but they can’t believe they can’t pull ahead of this guy. That’s a problem in itself, Democrats’ inability to understand, six years after George W. Bush mounted the national stage, what it is about him that people like and value. Without knowing what about him people respond to, how can you show them they’re wrong? It isn’t that people agree with Bush’s policies. Poll after poll shows that on a fairly wide range of foreign and domestic issues, people prefer Kerry’s policies to Bush’s. So if people don’t favor Bush’s policies, and his first-term record is rife with misjudgment and mismanagement, there must be something about Bush himself that keeps his hold on half the electorate. And there is. There are two things. The first is that you always know what he thinks. It’s not just his consistency–or his stubbornness, if you prefer–although that certainly helps. It’s that on the issues that are important to him, his positions are clear, un-nuanced, and unhedged. He’s for tax cuts. Sadaam’s sins amply justified going to war to drive him from power. The law should not allow same-sex marriages. It may seem unfair that George W. Bush benefits from applying his broad-strokes-and primary-colors approach even to highly complicated issues. But it’s not unreasonable for voters to want to know what candidates think with enough clarity that they can predict what those candidates, if elected to office, are likely to do when confronted with as-yet unimagined circumstances. It may even be important enough that some voters would prefer a candidate whose views they know but disagree with to one whose views are so hedged and nuanced as to be unpredictable. And if there’s one thing they know about Bush–and this is the second thing that maintains his hold on about half the electorate--it’s what I’d call his attitude of national belligerence. Most people don’t base their vote on the examination of policy papers, or an analysis of legislation introduced, passed or defeated. They vote their pocketbooks, and they vote their hearts. This year, a lot of people are voting their hearts. And nothing strikes fear into Americans’ hearts like terrorism, not in Israel or Spain, but here at home. So a lot of people are looking this year for the candidate most likely to back the terrorists off, to show them what happens to people who assault the most powerful country on earth. Would that be the most prudent candidate, the one who would judiciously sort the evidence against our various international enemies, and exhaust all diplomatic remedies before striking back? Or would it be the toughest candidate, the one likely to shoot first and ask questions later? Did Iraq turn out not to have weapons of mass destruction, not to have conspired with al Qaeda? So what? If Saddam Hussein wasn’t guilty of those things, there was plenty he was guilty of. Maybe sometimes you have to pick out the toughest guy in the opposing gang and take him out, like Napoleon said, to encourage the others. A couple of caveats are in order. Even if I’m right about what so many find so compelling about Bush, the sentiment is hardly universal. If the polls are to be believed, the toughness pheromone that Bush gives off is working on half the electorate, but only half. If Kerry hasn’t been able to pull ahead, neither has Bush. Nor do the Democrats have a monopoly on the inability to comprehend their adversary’s appeal. The Republicans could never grasp why voters stayed loyal to Bill Clinton. They kept thinking that if people really knew the depth of his licentiousness, they’d desert him in droves. But they never did. And the Republicans never understood. Which is why they could never beat him. 3:54:46 PM comment []
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