Politicians who devolved: McCain’s forebears
Forebears of John McCain in terms of post-election late career shifts to sharpened confrontation?
The two answers given to James Fallows are Alfred Smith and, by way of his Atlantic Magazine colleage Te Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Calhoun. Odd choices, both, so far as I understand American history and these two personalities.
I believe the gubernatorial career of Alfred Smith gets tagged a bit too tightly as a precursor to Roosevelt’s gubernatorial and presidential careers. This is something of a propaganda coup from members of the Roosevelt Administration’s who wanted to make the case that the “New Deal” had its origins with the now frothing Smith. Smith’s career contains more continuities than disruptions — the curious ideological straightway took the core of Alfred Smith’s support network from the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment straight into the Liberty League. The 1932 Party Platform that had a Roosevelt speech writer remark on how to reconcile with his record with a “Don’t” was Smith and company’s creation.Â
Looking at John Calhoun, I don’t know that he was ever moderated in temperament or views. He prepared to go to war for the Southland with President Andrew Jackson over Nullification, and ended his career in 1850 throwing to the North an ultimatium to extend Slavery to the territories or… Secession. It seems a rather consistent career. If he had Nationalist predictions that let him into the John Quincy Adams and first Andre Jackson administrations, it rather ended early in his career.
The answer to Fallows’s question may lie with a large number of segregationists who sharpened their attacks as the issue came into the foreground.  Then there are some populists — the final act of William Jennings Bryan on behalf of Prohibition and Creationism — or the career arc of Tom Watson from attempting to form a bi-racial populist coalition in the late 1800s to using race as a wedge.