September 30, 2005
Bush’s Current Travails Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:15 PM EST Joshua Zeitz blogged on Wednesday that some liberal pundits, such as the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, are happily opining that the present troubles of the Bush Administration are turning the President into a lame duck if not a dead duck. Perhaps so, perhaps not. A week can be an eternity in politics, and a few bits of good news (such as a successful election in Iraq, a better than predicted situation in New Orleans, etc.) or bad news for Democrats (such as a budding scandal in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that The New York Times—surprise!—has not considered news fit to print, although its public editor is now wondering why), and the situation can look very different.
Mr. Zeitz notes that the Watergate scandal of the Nixon era—far and away the greatest political scandal since World War II—gave the Democrats only a temporary boost. He argues that Watergate was evidence that government doesn’t work and conservatives always benefit in the long term from such evidence. I disagree. I think Watergate was evidence that while men are frail and always will be, the Constitution is not frail and government did indeed work. Nixon had no option but to resign in disgrace, a historical scarlet letter he will carry forever. The Democrats reaped only temporary benefits from Watergate not because it made the people distrust government, but because the tides of history are against them and they won’t or can’t admit it yet. It is an old saying in international politics that “Great Powers shuffle on and off the stage of history noisily.” So do great political movements, including what I will call modern American liberalism. (Political labels almost always create false dichotomies, which are handy in polemics but not in reasoned discourse, so please don’t take the labels herein too seriously: liberalism, Democrats, the left, etc. are all synonyms here.) Born in the post-Civil War era, when industrial capitalism was also aborning and capital was in the saddle, liberalism made only fitful progress at first (such as with the Sherman Antitrust Act and the income tax that the Supreme Court overturned in 1895). But the election of 1896 turned out to be a watershed election, and the right half of the political spectrum would be the dominant power for the next 32 years. The Republicans only lost the Presidency in that era in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt split the party. (Woodrow Wilson, despite being an incumbent with many accomplishments and with a grave foreign situation, barely won reelection in 1916.) But the great crisis of the Depression changed everything in American politics, and the left swept to decisive power in 1932 under one of the most charismatic and talented politicians in American history. Over the next 40 years liberalism transformed the country and its social and economic system, and very much for the better. It accomplished virtually all of the goals it had set in its days before power: fairer labor laws, a social safety net, civil rights, effective financial regulation, women’s rights. It transformed the country from one of haves and have nots to one of haves and have mores, a land of opportunity for everyone such as had never before been dreamed possible. Meanwhile, the Republicans, shell-shocked at being out of power after all that time, didn’t know what to do. They felt they had a natural right to run the country and couldn’t understand that the world had changed. They were reduced to demanding a return to an earlier time, complaining that those now unaccountably in power were destroying all that was right and good about the country, and demonizing “that man in the White House.” One of the most famous New Yorker cartoons of the era showed a group of well-dressed middle-aged people telling friends to “come along, we’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.” But like all political movements, liberalism eventually ran out of intellectual steam. It had accomplished its early goals and, discovering that a secular Kingdom of Heaven had not appeared on earth, insisted on more of the same, even when the evidence was clear that more of the same wasn’t working. It began living increasingly in the past. Today, it seems for Democrats that domestically it is always 1937, in foreign affairs 1968. The civil rights movement triumphed forty years ago, but Democrats are forever screaming “racism!” when race has nothing whatever to do with the situation (such as in New Orleans). With the Democrats having nothing but old and hopelessly out-of-date ideas, Republicans finally woke up and began developing a whole series of new ideas—good, bad, and indifferent ones—to meet new problems. And they began to win elections as a result. I’m now 61 years old. Since I turned 21, my entire adult life in other words, only once has the Democratic candidate for President won a majority of the popular vote. That was in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won a considerably less than impressive 50.46 percent. When another charismatic and politically gifted man, Ronald Reagan, won the Presidency, in 1980, it was another watershed election. Because of gerrymandering and the value of incumbency, Congress remained largely in Democratic hands. Then in 1994, in one of the most remarkable elections in American history, the Democrats were swept from power everywhere. That year, except for Senator Chuck Robb defeating the controversial Oliver North in Virginia, and the iconic Senator Ted Kennedy surviving in Massachusetts, the Republicans won everything in sight from sea to sea, and they have been the unquestionable majority party ever since. And how have the Democrats reacted? Exactly like the Republicans in the 1930s. They can’t understand why they are no longer in power, believe that they ought to be (it’s amazing how many Democrats blame the people—demos in Greek, for being too stupid to vote the “right” way), demand a return to an earlier era and earlier ideas, and, most of all, demonize “that man in the White House.” The Democrats will not become the majority party again until they deserve it. They have to stop reliving past triumphs (and, paradoxically, insisting that those triumphs didn’t accomplish what they did); they have to develop twenty-first-century ideas to solve twenty-first-century problems; they need to find new leaders. Meanwhile, The New Yorker should run a cartoon showing aging but obviously prosperous hippies in a high-tech living room, talking on a cell phone and telling their friends to come on over, they’re going to turn on CBS and hiss Bush.
September 30, 2005
A Sense of History? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:40 PM EST The following item appeared last week in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchainé reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked—while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed—whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy’s question was met by his hosts with amazement. “But Monsieur le minister,” Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, “England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II.” The minister apparently was not content with this answer, which, according to the magazine, was given by the museum curator, and persisted, asking: “Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?” …According to an investigation by Ha’aretz on Sunday, the event actually occurred as described, although no official source was willing to confirm it… Philippe Douste-Blazy is considered a successful and prominent politician in France. A cardiologist by training, he served until a year ago as health minister. His visit to Israel was noted as an additional positive step in the warming of relations between Israel and France.
September 28, 2005
Victory from the Jaws of Defeat? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:15 PM EST In the wake of the federal government’s failure to quickly address the crisis wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and amid a growing sense among some that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and at home have become mired in bureaucratic corruption and legislative gridlock, some liberal pundits claim to hear the death rattle of George Bush’s political influence, an idea nicely encapsulated in a recent syndicated column by the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Jr. “The Bush Era is over,” Dionne wrote on September 13. “…Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush’s government doesn’t work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.” While George W. Bush—his legacy, his agenda—may or may not prove the great political casualty of 2005, the notion that Americans will now reject his brand of conservatism is probably misplaced. Remember Watergate. Then as now, a sitting Republican President saw his poll numbers, and those of his party, plummet. (There is a difference, of course, in the circumstances leading to each President’s declining political fortunes. Nixon was corrupt; Bush is viewed as inept.) In 1974 the Democrats swept off-year elections and racked up massive majorities in both houses of Congress. If state-by-state polls are any indication, the same may very well be true of next year’s elections. But in 1974, the Democrats enjoyed only a temporary boost from Watergate. Ironically, in the long term, it was Nixon’s Republican party—particularly its ascendant conservative wing—that benefited most from Watergate. American conservatives are a very diverse lot. Some embrace libertarianism; others endorse the politics of social control. Some are interventionists; others are isolationists. If they agree on little else, most conservatives believe that government is inherently less efficient than the private sector, that taxes stunt economic growth and hinder liberty, and that people are most free where government is small. Watergate shook the American public’s faith in government. To be sure, the credibility gap over Vietnam and other events of the sixties had already weakened Americans’ affection for their government. But it was Watergate that did the most harm to the government’s popular standing. Since the 1930s an entire generation of Americans had been lifted into middle-class comfort and security with the help of New Deal and Great Society entities like the HOLC, FHA, Social Security, the Veterans Administration, and Medicare. To some extent most middle-class Americans owed their homes, their education, their jobs, their union benefits, and their protection against illness, injury, or unemployment to the government. “After Watergate,” explained a public school teacher in the mid-1970s, it was “crazy to trust in politicians. I’m totally cynical, skeptical.” So who won? The Republican party, specifically, and the conservative movement, more broadly. The tax revolts of the late 1970s, the growth of anti-government sentiment, the great embrace of the private sector—all followed on the heels of Watergate. November 1974 may have been kind to the Democrats. But the ensuing decades have been brutal. Today we are in a similar situation. George W. Bush may very well be a lame duck President. But in the long run, he may have masterfully promoted the good fortunes of his cause. Conservatives need government to fail. When they’re in power, they sometimes seem to make sure it does.
September 28, 2005
The Forbes 400 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:15 AM EST The 2005 Forbes 400 list is out, and once again, alas, I failed to make the cut. And the cut this year is an altogether impressive $900 million. Only twenty-three on the list are worth less than a billion. A mere ten years ago, $340 million got you a spot among the American financial seraphim. In truth, the Forbes 400 list has tracked the greatest period of wealth creation in the country’s history, for it isn’t only the super-rich who have done well in the last quarter century, it’s nearly everyone. Two-thirds of American families now own their own homes, and real estate has been among the best investments in the last quarter century. The Forbes 400 list was a brilliant publishing concept, widely imitated now in other publications. But the idea didn’t originate with Forbes. Far from it. The first list of the super rich of which I am aware dates back all the way to 1845, when Moses Y. Beach, editor of the New York Sun, put out a pamphlet called Wealth and Biographies of Wealthy Citizens of New York. It purported to give the size and origin of every fortune in New York City worth over $100,000. With few sources of reliable information, such as 10K reports to the SEC, it must have been based on rumor, gossip, and supposition. But it was highly entertaining gossip and ran through numerous editions over the next decade or so. The richest man in New York in 1845? John Jacob Astor, supposed to be worth $25 million. That’s about 1/2000th of the fortune of the current number one, Bill Gates.
September 26, 2005
Debates Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:30 PM EST In today’s home-page article, “Kennedy vs. Nixon, Round One: An Upset,” Alexander Burns repeats the commonly cited point that television viewers thought Kennedy won the 1960 presidential debate and radio listeners thought Nixon won. Mr. Burns attributes this to JFK’s “superior handling of the new medium of television.” But couldn’t it just be the demographic difference between people who had televisions and people who didn’t? In addition, a correction: Mr. Burns says that vice-presidential debates began in 1988. In fact, there were vice-presidential debates in 1976 and 1984, though not in 1980.
September 26, 2005
A Thought About Dissent Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:00 AM EST My recent comments about Eleanor Roosevelt and the Bonus March seem to have incited two of my fellow bloggers to entries of their own. They were not in agreement with my views. I will not address the political issues, but I do apologize for my historical mistake. As Frederic Schwarz observed, the Bonus Marchers were not still there when FDR took office. Some of them had returned. The dissents, however, did set me thinking. I am a runner. I usually jog around the Reservoir in Central Park, and while I still thrill to the sight of the New York skyline to the south, even four years later I cannot help noticing the gap where the Twin Towers used to be. There is an irony to this hole in the cityscape, and in the entire nation. Like most New Yorkers, I never regarded the towers as icons of the city. That role was reserved for the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. 9/11, of course, changed all that. On weekends, however, I run along a country lane, quiet but not deserted, another view of America. As I round a bend in the road, there is usually a car parked in a driveway. The car wears a bumper sticker. The message on the sticker is only three words, but each time I see them, I have the same reaction. My knees pump harder, my lungs expand, and I feel a surge of energy. Even my Cairn terrier, who, like most Americans, came here from somewhere else—Scotland in her case—picks up the pace. The bumper sticker reads, “Dissent Is Patriotic.”
| 
