thoughts induced by a handful of words from a George Will column
George Will threw out a snotty easily skipped over throw away line in a column a few weeks ago, one of those items which is of a type that I think I just may be the only person alive to stop and desire to pick a fight over. He claimed “Grover Cleveland” was the last Democratic Presidential candidate any “rational person” could vote for. It figures that Will needs to jump back to the Gilded Age to pick him out. From his conservative orientation of pining for the 1880s through 1890s pre-Progressive Era of “stillwater” governance, I simply don’t know if I can buy this assessment. I can count two Democrats he should be willing to let the public vote for. Alton Parker, the 1904 candidate is the most blatant one — even under Will’s admiration for Grover Cleveland. William Jennings Bryan re-oriented the Democratic Party, swallowing whole the Populists, in 1896. Understand the loss of the Populist Party as either a triumph for small d democracy or a defeat — absorbing the will of public support under the banner of the two party system or squashing the will of some public support — that depends on your purview. Bryan won three of four presidential nominees. And Parker won the other — a “Bourbon Democrat”, a “Grover Cleveland” Democrat, and further a candidate taking on the reviled Theodore Roosevelt.
Skip through the nominations after that. Woodrow Wilson and the man who went down to a smashed defeat upholding Wilson’s Utopian views — James Cox lie on one side. Alfred Smith out of Tammany Hall and Franklin Roosevelt lie on the other side. And John Davis sits there in between. Chosen because he irritated everyone the least, which would settle him by way of path of least resistance to something acceptible to Will. The only problem might be that he was running against — from Will’s perspective — one of the Greatest Presidents in American History — Calvin Coolidge, partaker of a lot of naps. On the other hand, the third party that ate up double digits of support and bloated Coolidge’s 51 percent popular vote margin to landslide proportions was Bob Follette and the Progressive Party, a voting total which prompted Roosevelt to suggest the course of the Democratic Party in that direction. Again, that party would be swallowed up, and again either a triumph for small d democracy or small a aristocracy.
But then Will would have to endure for his partisan side the Landon — Wilkie — Dewey — Eisenhower — and two new Nixons super-axis. In 2008, John McCain is asked to spot his variety of conservatism, pointedly mentioned by the questioner the names of Goldwater, Reagan, and (seemingly a trap) Bush, and McCain throws himself back to Theodore Roosevelt. And then suggests Lincoln. I picture George Will’s head exploding. The puzzle here is that Goldwater has been politically neutured such that liberals can point to him with a sly grin, demanding of conservatives a return to his politics and — pretty ahistorically — pining for the “Eisenhower — Goldwater Republicans”.
Witness too the billboard paid for by a group of black Republicans — all six of them — with the line that “Martin Luther King was a Republican”. This is funny because those Goldwater backers, or a portion of them, thought King was a Communist agitator. But it falls into line with a piece of tripe which comes up all too frequently. Did you know that Republicans were in greater support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats? (As well, various other incarnations.) Another message: the KKK was founded by Democrats. And, as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. All very interesting. A news article surveying a conservative action committee conference showed a strong anti-Lincoln contingency. There is a free republic message floating around there somewhere that lists off these historical party affronts — but the free republic type is also the type to tsk tsk the Democratic Party as “not being what they used to be”.
or marybe … the party of Alton Parker and John Davis.