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Politics Present and Past: A Two Part Drama

Part One: Political Summary of the Present

My favorite spectator sport occurs every four years. While I cheer my own team on, I also just enjoy watching the competition, regardless of who is competing. I speak, of course, of Presidential politics. For a political spectator, 2008 has been quite a year, and it is far from over. The main event is yet to come.

This political year will be remembered for the drama, the new, the unexpected, and the surprising reversals. A few years back, pundits began saying that voters would see the war-hero and political maverick John McCain and a brilliant, articulate, courageous woman on the ballot. Just a few months back, political talk abounded about a dream ticket with the party’s Presidential nominee having a powerful woman in the second slot. And all that happened; however, no one realized that the woman would be Alaska Governor Sarah Palin or that she would be McCain’s running mate.

The latest drama is only the most recent highlight of an action packed political year. Beginning with the Republicans, first, we had the full field of candidates, each of whom seemed to exemplify some aspect of Reagan’s legacy, but not one of whom could lay claim to being either the choice of the Republican establishment or the rightful heir to Reagan’s mantle. Just a little over a year ago, one major candidate, McCain, was fading and one promised to dazzle the field if he entered (Fred Thompson). Mitt Romney was poised, experienced, and well supported by his favorite financial backer—himself. His politically flips as the governor of liberal Massachusetts had conveniently flopped into conservative positions. Mayor Guilliani boasted a record and reputation, and he was articulate, honest in voicing unpopular positions, and nationally tested.

The Iowa caucus changed the political dynamic for the Republicans. The evangelical right rallied on a cold Iowa evening around Baptist preacher and former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee. In the strange twists and turns of politics, Huckabee’s victory in Iowa punctured the tires on the Romney machine before it got to New Hampshire where John McCain was waiting with his political bomber. The Republican Party began lining up in three camps: The evangelical social conservatives, who backed Huckabee, the economic conservatives who favored Romney, and the establishment/pragmatic/moderate conservatives who took a second or third look at McCain.

Fred Thompson threatened at one point to make a big splash into the crowded field of candidates, but he belly flopped. Rudy Guilliani, after a year of dazzling and impressive attempts to woo doubtful conservatives, chose the most insane strategy for the primaries. He would step back, let the others fight it out, and then capture the Florida primary. In other words, he would attempt to win by not competing. (His political advisors soon needed new careers.) He was history before the Florida race got underway and was less than a footnote after Florida went for McCain.

In an odd sense, religious beliefs marginalized Huckabee and Romney. Fundamentalists, evangelicals, and other elements of the social conservative religious right circled the wagons around Huckabee and gave him quite a few impressive wins and near wins. If there had been more states, like Massachusetts and Michigan, where members of the Romney family had been governors, and more states, like Utah and Idaho, with large Mormon voting blocks, Romney could have done better. McCain slid between these two candidates and carved out a series of victories in winner-take-all primaries.

Sen. McCain’s long trek to the nomination has proven to be a recapitulation of his greater biographical story. He perseveres; he outlasts the opposition; he endures; and in the end, he triumphs. We won’t know the next chapter until November.
The Democrat race was even more interesting than the Republican race. It seemed inevitable that the Democratic convention would witness the crowning of the soon-to-be Queen Hillary I. Senators Biden and Dodd, whose resumes were weighted with decades of legislative leadership, and Gov. Bill Richardson, who not only had been a governor, congressman, and cabinet member, but who also bore an ethnicity promising electoral appeal, all fell quickly and completely. The highly groomed John Edwards once again pranced upon the stage, mimicked serious political concern for the downtrodden, and for a time, seemed to attract voters. Alas, as we learned much later, he mainly attracted his highly paid filmmaker.

The bigger story was the rise, fall, second rise, greater fall, near rise, slow fall, and long, slow, too-little, too-late final rising, followed by the final fall of Hillary Clinton. Her husband, the former President Clinton, after his supposedly astounding popular victories of 43% in 1992 and 49% in 1996, proved his ever-resilient campaign appeal. Most certainly, his governing cost the Democrats control of the House and Senate in 1994 and his immorality cost Gore the Presidency in 2000, and his recklessness, innuendos, latent racism, and national stage presence wrecked his wife’s best chances. While sniper fire may not have actually endangered Hillary in Bosnia, the former President’s lip fire riddled her campaign severely in South Carolina and other states.

Of course, the biggest story remains the rise of Barack Obama. Riddled with charges about his anti-American pastor of twenty years and paltry political experiences, Obama inspired many with an oratorical skill that matches both his hero, Martin Luther King, Jr., and mine, Ronald Reagan. Just as Richard Weaver taught us that ideas have consequences, Obama taught Hillary that caucuses have delegates. Never again would a Clinton answer a three a.m. phone ringing in the White House. Perhaps that accomplishment is the best one on his resume.

Part Two: The Making of a Presidential Historian

The ups, downs, extremes, the predictable, the unexpected, the twists, and turns of the past nine months of politics reminded me of someone I miss, Teddy White. Theodore H. White was one of the most gifted political writers of his age. His popularity as a political journalist, chronicler, and commentator really took off after the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. That was an unforgettable election. Both men were young, aggressive, dynamic characters and campaigners. Both would leave unforgettable marks upon the nation and the Presidency. (Unfortunately, in separate ways, both harmed the office more than they elevated it.) Nixon carried the banner of the Republican Party of Eisenhower, while Kennedy lifted up the fallen banner of the Franklin Roosevelt Democrat coalition. Ironically, Nixon served under Eisenhower, but the two had an icy relationship. Ironically, Kennedy’s father had also fallen out with Roosevelt.

1960 was a year of political drama. Kennedy, after all, was a Roman Catholic, and Nixon, after all, was Nixon. The Kennedy family’s political machine captured the nomination. His closest rival, Senator Lyndon Johnson, was put on the ticket to help steal…oops, I mean secure, Texas’ electoral votes in the general election. Nixon managed to reconcile his major rival, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and conciliate restless conservatives in his quest for the Republican nomination. The final election results were close. The pundits and pun makers could note that the results were a dead heat, considering the posthumous Democrat voting bloc in Chicago, or one could say Kennedy won by a razor thin margin because of the slightly grizzled look Nixon displayed in the first, ever Presidential debates.

It was Theodore White’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Making of the President 1960 that best captured the drama, the candidates, the churnings of the social and political waters, and the issues in people’s hearts of that election. White did more than give a narrative documentary to the election, for he carved out a niche for himself as the premier political analyst of his time. Many reporters covered events as they were unfolding, but White delivered the analytical verdict after the voters delivered the electoral verdict.

The sequel to White’s book was written after the 1964 election. Of course, it was easy to come up with a title; it was The Making of the President 1964. That year was filled with its own distinctive political Sturm und Drang. President Kennedy had been assassinated less than a year before that election; the Vietnam War was beginning to heat up, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and the culture was reeling and rocking. An enterprising group of political amateurs, steeped in the then-supposedly obsolete philosophy of conservatism, pushed, dragged, and coaxed Sen. Barry Goldwater forward into the race for the Republican nomination. Their efforts and skills that culminated in Goldwater’s nomination are matched only by the incompetence and ineptitude of the group that replaced them to run Goldwater’s national campaign.

Theodore White surveyed the wreckage of Goldwater’s fiasco and pronounced western, ranch-style, populist, conservatism dead and buried. This shows that he was not a prophet, but at the time, what he wrote appeared to be indisputable.

White went on to write The Making of the President 1968 and The Making of the President 1972. Perhaps age slowed him down, or perhaps he or the public grew weary of the series, so he held off for a time. But in the early eighties, he wrote an account titled America in Search of Herself that summarized the elections of 1976 and 1980, in both of which Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were the main contenders.

Just recently, I started reading White’s 1968 account, and it reminded me of his skills as a writer. He had a reporter’s eye for detail and an ability to capture in a phrase, quote or anecdote some defining picture of people and events. White was, I should add, a somewhat unabashed liberal. He loved the Kennedy’s. In fact, he dedicated his Making of the President 1968 to both the late President John Kennedy and his brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was killed while seeking office that year. White’s liberal optimism while not destroyed, was certainly in anguish as he considered both the loss of President Kennedy’s vision and Sen. Kennedy’s compassion.

“Wait, stop!” some of you might be saying. “You like this writer and you admit he was a liberal?” The answer is yes. The further answer is that we must think deeply about the character and appeal of political liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s. The first point is that political liberalism tended to attract the best and the brightest writers and thinkers. (Yes, I know the exceptions and still read there, mainly Buckley’s, books.) Conservative magazine publisher Henry Booth Luce once complained that the best writers were liberals, and for that reason, his political magazine, Time, tilted far left.

Second, liberals of that era had their political faults, misguided beliefs, and big government expectations, but they were patriots. Ronald Reagan may have delivered the culminating coup d’etat to the Cold War, but he stood on the shoulders of liberal Democrats, like the Truman, the Kennedy’s, Johnson, Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson. The liberalism of the 1950s and early 1960s fractured into the rival camps of the late 1960s. Liberal radicals wounded California Governor Pat Brown badly enough so that Ronald Reagan was able to capture the governorship from him in 1966. The more radical, isolationist, leftists captured control of the Democrat Party in 1972 and denied the nomination to the older mainline liberals like Senators Humphrey, Muskie, and Jackson.

The old time liberals hated Communism and rightly so. They also, along with a coalition of Republicans, hated racism. One might disagree on sound and constitutional grounds with the Voting Act of 1964, but the alternative reality of that time with the bombing of black churches in Alabama and murder of Civil Rights workers in Mississippi was even more appalling.

In the days before Roe v. Wade, before discussions of homosexual “marriage,” before the “hate America” undercurrents of recent vintage, and before the cultural perversions of our time, political liberalism was much more attractive than now. Likewise, the political conservatism of Robert Taft or even of Barry Goldwater was less compelling than that of Ronald Reagan as he emerged in 1980 and that of his heirs.

So, I affirm again, I miss that lovable old liberal Theodore White. I wish I could look forward to him writing The Making of the President 2008. The crispness and freshness of his writing about the fortunes of candidates combined with his overviews of what was happening in the nation as a whole gave his books staying power.

The 1968 volume, my current read, includes a wide array of people and events that dominated several decades of American history. The Kennedy’s were still a force, for John Kennedy’s memory still haunted his followers and Robert Kennedy’s campaign and death raised and then dashed the hopes of millions; Nixon was redefining himself and re-emerging after a political hiatus; Eugene McCarthy was the liberal who was shaking up the establishment with a message of change that appealed to restless college students; to his far right was the populist George Wallace who both heightened the fears and reassured white working class and middle class people, especially Southerners; Nelson Rockefeller was the reluctant New Yorker who appealed to voters across the spectrum; the patient party stalwart who carried the most tattered Democratic Presidential banner ever and almost won with it was Hubert Humphrey; and the rising star on the political horizon who ultimately bested all of these others was Ronald Reagan.

Add to this cast of characters an unpopular war and an even more unpopular President. 1968 was a year of assassinations, a year of military disasters, a year of economic fears, and a year of domestic unrest. White could have never resorted to fiction and created a more exciting drama than was actually unraveling across the nation.

One minor comment in the book says a lot. White noted that September 2, 1963 was a turning point in American history, for it was that night when national news went from being fifteen minutes long to being a half hour long. How could thirty minutes possibly be filled with national news? And now, we have 24-7 news coverage.
With this barrage of news coverage, even in an exciting political year, this is a good time, to turn off the gadgets and read Theodore White’s books.

[Theodore White’s books are mostly out of print, but can be abundantly found in used books stores, in full sized, book club, and paperback editions.]