Anything for a Vote

Say Goodnight, John

2008-11-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

Well, there were a lot of sweaty palms in my Democratic-minded New Jersey town, but Obama, in the end, carried it off, putting a fitting and dramatic capper on this most dramatic of election seasons. I ended up, Election Night, at a party where most present were drinking the odd concoction of ginger beer and rum, causing numerous sugary hangovers the next day, no doubt, but also leading to high spirits. Each time the CNN would call a state for Obama, applause broke out, and occasionally someone would run outside, shouting at the top of his or her lungs.
I voted for Hillary in the primaries, but over the summer and fall became impressed by the way Obama handled himself as John McCain's minions got more and more vicious in their attacks on him. My Ten Dirtiest Elections list (below) now officially includes 2008, entering in position number 10, having just pushed out the election of 1828 between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. 2008 managed to pull of this come-from-behind act due mainly to McCain's post Convention campaign commercials, which continually posed the question "Who is Barack Obama?" and answering by claiming he was a terrorist-supporter, a Muslim, a socialist--essentially, an alien. I thought it was interesting when people spoke about how honorable McCain's concession speech was. I do think the guy is personally a decent man, but you can't really run a campaign in which you use vicious slurs against your opponent and not have to take some responsibility for it. These things stick. A friend of mind, out canvassing for the Democrats in Columbus, Ohio, on Election Day, ran into a McCain supporter who claimed to believe that Obama, if he won, would insist on being sworn in with a Koran. My friend did not argue with him, overlong, because the man was holding a shovel, but it shows you what I've been saying all year--that smears glom on to the susceptible like glops of napalm jelly, and burn, burn, burn.
It is with sadness that I say farewell to the Election of 2008. Looking way back to the primaries, who can forget Mick Huckabee and his dog-torturing son, Mitt "the Mutt" Romney. John Edwards Whose Name Is Forever Mud, Bill Clinton's intemperance, Hillary's New Hampshire tears, and so much more. I want to thank everyone who bought a copy of Anything for a Vote or attended one of my talks, or emailed with questions and sometimes sharp commentary. I plan on updating the book for 2012 and something tells me that new 2008 chapter will run quite long.
I can't wait to write it.

Top Ten Dirtiest American Presidential Campaigns of All Time

10) 2008: Barack Obama vs. John McCain
There’s nothing like a black man with the middle name “Hussein” running for president to get the Republican base stirred up. Assaults on Obama included calling him a socialist, a terrorist, a Muslim, and even a Jew-hater (flyers in Florida claimed that a Holocaust in Israel would ensue if he was elected). In the meantime, Republicans attempted to “purify” voter rolls of misspelled names and wrong addresses, though Democrats suspected it was an attempt to knock off minority voters. In the end, nothing worked and Obama won a historic victory with the highest percentage of voters weighing in since 1964.

9) 1960: John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon
The charismatic young Kennedy, backed by his father’s big bucks and a political organization that would stop at nothing, may have stolen this extremely close contest by manipulating the vote in Illinois and Texas.

8) 1928: Herbert Hoover vs. Al Smith
After reading about this election, most people want to take a good shower. The Republican party of the stiff-collared candidate of Middle America, Herbert Hoover, destroyed Governor Al Smith of New York by slurring his Catholic religion in every way possible. As if that wasn’t enough, they went after his wife, too.

7) 2004: George W. Bush vs. John Kerry
Extremely dirty, and possibly pilfered, the 2004 election featured attacks on Democratic candidate Kerry’s Vietnam war service, which were as scurrilous as they were effective. Republican operatives may have stolen the vote in Ohio, putting incumbent George Bush back in office for another four years.

6) 1988: George H. W. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis
Although 1988 did not feature a stolen election—no way, even in the most honest of contests, would Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis have beaten President George H. W. Bush—it is probably one of the sleaziest and most racist on record. Dukakis was ridiculed in Republican attack ads as a wimp who had allowed a black criminal on weekend furlough to go on a rampage of rape and violence.

5) 1972: Richard Nixon vs. George McGovern
The Republican incumbent Nixon brought out all the heavy guns here—dirty tricks to sow divisiveness among Democratic incumbents in the primaries, race-baiting, IRS intimidation of Democratic bigwigs, the Enemies List, press manipulation, and, of course, the Watergate burglary by the Special Investigations Unit, aka “the Plumbers.”

4) 1800: Thomas Jefferson vs. John Adams
Way back in only the third election ever held in this country, Thomas Jefferson of the Republicans and John Adams of the Federalists went at it tooth and nail, with Republicans hiring

(more)
hack writers to attack the incumbent Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character,” whatever
that means, and Federalists claiming that Jefferson slept with slaves. The close election was
thrown into the House of Representatives, where Jefferson almost certainly made a secret deal to win it.

3) 2000: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore
Surprisingly, not the low-down dirtiest election on record, but pretty bad, with Republicans acting in a truly narrow, partisan fashion at every stage to subvert the democratic process and hand victory to George W. Bush.

2) 1964: Lyndon Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater
Not as well known as Nixon’s 1972 dirty tricks election, Johnson’s 1964 win over Goldwater featured the cynical manufacturing of anti-Goldwater stories planted with gullible reporters; children’s coloring books portraying Goldwater as a Klansman; CIA invasion of Goldwater’s campaign; and FBI bugging of Goldwater’s campaign plane.

1) 1876: Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden
This is the granddaddy of them all: a truly stolen election in which Republicans turned defeat into victory for Rutherford Hayes by counting Democratic votes as their own in three Southern states. Both parties used violence to intimidate former black slaves for their votes. And not to mention that Republicans extorted 2% of the salaries of Federal employees to aid in their campaign efforts, or that Democrats accused Hayes of shooting his mother and robbing the dead, or that Republicans claimed that Samuel Tilden suffered from a venereal disease.

Election Day notes

2008-11-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, November 4, dawned warm and grey-ish here in New Jersey, but now (1 pm) we have a little quiet sun filtering down. Last night my daughter Carson had a sleepover here with her friend Emma (both girls are 9) and the whispering and giggling went on until after midnight. My wife and I rose groggily at 6 AM--of course, the girls were already awake. No school today, so the plan was for my wife to vote, then head into NYC to work while I took the girls with me to vote. Emma's mother and father are German and Irish citizens, respectively, so Emma hasn't been with them to American polling places and wanted to see how voting works for a school report.
My wife came back after over an hour (the elementary school we vote in is just around the corner), late for work and harried. Took a long time because the one voting machine allotted to our district was down--first time this has happened in ten years--and so they had to do paper ballots. Then they ran out of paper ballots and confusion ensued until it was determined voters could use another districts paper ballots (although not another district's voting machines).
I drove my wife to the train station and she asked me why Tuesday is the appointed election day. Started in 1845, I said. The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was picked because it was a period when crops were in, but the really bad winter weather hadn't started. And voting on Tuesday generally meant you wouldn't have to travel on the Sabbath to get to your polling place.
Took the girls out to breakfast at our local diner. Quite crowded and much buzzing excitement. CNN in the background, showing Obama voting, along with his daughters. His machine (of the optical scanner variety) wasn't broken, but it took him quite a long time to fill in his ballot. Emma, who is running for Student Council vice-president at her and Carson's elementary school, asked me if Obama could vote for himself. I said not only could, but certainly did, at which point she looked quite thoughtful.
Then it was off to the polls, where, judging from what I had been hearing, I expected long lines. But actually not bad. The district 19 voting machine was not yet working--they were expecting a technician momentarily--so we had to fill out paper ballots. This was a bit disappointing to me -- I like the rush of pushing buttons behind curtains--but Emma and Carson helped me darken the appropriate circles with pencil, and off we went. Total time: 20 minutes.
Tonight...two different election parties and then we all collapse. More later.

Trick or Treat!

2008-11-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

Well, it has at last arrived, ladies and gerts, Election Day eve. Following so close upon Halloween, and having its own contingent of dirty tricks, Election Day always reminds me of that spookiest of holidays. Down the street from me in my little and solidly Democratic New Jersey town, a woman has planted several "Democrats for McCain" signs (huh?) on her front lawn, only to see them repeatedly torn down, just one local sign of election nastiness. I see that today she has planted another sign with a smiley face telling sign vandals to "smile" because she has installed a hidden camera which will catch them in the act.
Of course, it is doubtful that someone with a hidden camera would actually tell people she had one, but I appreciate the effort it takes to be a McCain supporter in an Obama town. Our children are so indoctrinated my daughter refused to "Trick or treat" at a home with a McCain/Palin sign (of course by that time she was quite satiated with candy) and her elementary school straw vote was 336 Obama, 11 McCain. But in other parts of the country where the race is a lot closer, there will be lots of tricks going on--and quite dirty ones. This election, which started out in relatively tame fashion, has now broken into my Top Ten Dirtiest American Presidential Elections list, mainly on the strength of the Republican attacks on Barack Obama over the last few weeks. While Obama contents himself with simply misrepresenting some of McCain's ideas and programs, McCain is going in for character assassination on a scale we haven't seen since Lee Atwater's "Willie Horton" attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988. Obama is a socialist, Obama is alien, Obama is a stranger--Obama will create a "new Holocaust" for Jews (as one Florida flyer put it recently) if elected.
Most polls right now have the Democratic candidate seven points up, but anyone who has followed American elections knows that tomorrow, as ghosts and spirits walk abroad across the electoral landscape, anything can happen.
Stay tuned.....

Great Wheat

2008-10-30T06:41:00.000-07:00

Well, Obama's half an hour last night was not as excruciating as it could have been. Definitely slick and well-produced and it gathered power along the way, although I am inherently suspicious of any political ad which begins with waving fields of wheat. I mean, is there not another symbol for the Republic than this one? And, as with many large-scale Obama productions, there is an odd sense of grandeur not, quite, befitting a Democratic candidate.
However, one will take grandeur, even pomp, over much of the muck being thrown around out there in these last days before the election. I have not seen the likes of it since the 1960s, when violent-minded conservative crowds assailed war protesters and liberal Democrats as unpatriotic Commies. It's both breathtaking and dangerous, but I think we may now be experiencing an earthquake: those haters out there yelling slogans, instigated by some of the nastiest Republican campaign rhetoric since 1988, are not the Silent Majority, but the Vocal Minority. The Silent Majority are voting and it looks like they're not going to vote for McCain.

Back off the Road

2008-10-29T03:40:00.001-07:00

And what a long, strange trip it's been, talking at the country's colleges about dirty tricks in American politics. From Auburn to Iowa, from Massachusetts to Wyoming, with a slide show full of campaign commercials (such as the ones Errol Morris is talking about in his informative NY Times piece today) and a desire to show people that today's election is nothing compared to what was going on way back in the distant past, such as 1988!
Flashes from the road--the Libertarian party student at Virginia Tech who set up his table full of brochures which looked like they had been printed up in the 1980s...and who wanted to go back to the old pre-1800 system of voting, except expand it to the masses, two votes per voter, one for pres, one for vice-pres. No political parties. "Wouldn't it be nice to get two people with different views into the White House?" Uh, no....
Then there were the two black women in Alabama who came up to me and warned me that my criticism of the KKK (in the Al Smith election of 1928) might stir things up. "You have to be careful how you mention the Klan around here," they said, laughing a little and shaking their heads.
Then there was getting stuck in beautiful Laramie Wyoming airport for five hours, causing me to miss my talk at Columbus State College, in Ohio, which I was really looking forward to (sorry about that, Columbus State). If you get stuck in an airport, Laramie, more of a landing strip than an actual airport, is not the one to get stuck in. But the University of Wyoming was great. Watched the last debate ("Joe the Plumber") in a student bar there with great burgers and lots of focus on what was being said. In fact, everywhere I went, kids were really into the election. There was a good deal of indignation over the current series of McCain attack ads, although at the same time, there were doubts about Obama and his lack of experience.....
Back here in my solidly Democratic town in my solidly Democratic state of New Jersey, Obama signs sprout everywhere, far more than there were Kerry signs in 2004. The Democrats, sensing victory, are pushing ahead everywhere. The campaign is getting dirtier and now may crack my top ten dirtiest elections--I will decide after election day. It isn't just the outlandish McCain attacks on Obama (next they'll be calling him Leon Trotsky) but real concerns about the amount of fighting already going on about voter registration lists, with Republicans mounting challenge after challenge to knock most Democratic voters from the rolls for technical reasons. Then there's ACORN, which has really smeared Democratic get out the vote efforts. And everywhere I went, people are afraid that by some political skullduggery there computerized votes won't count....or that there will be Florida/2000-like confusion if they are voting in a close state.
More tomorrow. I am a somewhat amazed at the Obama campaign plans to go ahead and air his 30 minute long campaign infomercial tomorrow night. In my talk, I warn against 30 minutes worth of presidential candidate talking time, citing how badly it failed for Adlai Stevenson in 1952. Naturally, Obama won't just be a talking head like Stevenson was --plenty of video and images--but this kind of thing can backfire, especially if one already considers the Obama campaign (remember the awful "seal" and the strange Grecian columns at the convention?) a tad pompous....

On the Road

2008-10-04T04:44:00.001-07:00

Back now from Springfield, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, where I spoke at Wittenberg College and University of Northern Kentucky, respectively. The students and faculty at both places were great (thanks to Nate, Maureen, Casey, Alex and Josh) as were the community members who turned out to see the slide show and hear the talk.
I did not hear rabid expressions of allegiance to either party, interestingly. People are engaged by this election, but also somewhat puzzled and stunned, waiting, like the rest of us, to see what twist or turn it's going to take next. I was traveling in the midst of the bailout debate in Congress, with the ubiquitous newspaper of the road-weary, USA Today (free on motel check-in counters) blaring out 777 point market drops and Congressional cat-fighting. People I talked to were alarmed, but not yet panicked. Still, many (especially in Kentucky,surprisingly) told me they weren't sure just who they were going to vote for and might now decide until they walked into a polling booth.
A few miscellaneous items:
Karl Rove was coming to speak at Northern Kentucky after me--I offered to stay around and debate him, but they ushered me gently out.
Should anyone want a surreal road experience, please stay in the Drawbridge Inn in Covington, KY. it's a huge, sprawling place with a medieval theme--the Crossbow Inn, Friar Tuck Hall, etc. While I was there three different conventions were going on. There was a Church of God group, lots of kids wandering around in homespun, a reunion of crew members of a Vietnam-era aircraft carrier, and a dog show. God, war, and canines--can one ask for anything more?
Next week's schedule:
Monday: Middlesex College in Bedford, MA, for a lunch talk, then down the road to UMass Boston for an evening speech.
Wednesday: University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, Sarah Palin's alma mater
Friday: Auburn University, Montgomery, Alabama
See you there...

Interesting Time

2008-09-26T03:40:00.000-07:00

The Chinese curse about living in interesting times is indeed pretty apropos right now. With the largest financial institutions crumbling around our ears, we have the sight of one presidential candidate heading to Washington to attempt to alleviate the crisis--or so he says--and another reluctantly trailing along. The first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama is scheduled for tonight, but John McCain may not show up if a bailout agreement has not been reached. And at this writing, early Friday AM, conservative Republicans are fighting the government's 700 billion dollar package as "socialism."
Well....there are few parallels for this in American electoral history. One things of Herbert Hoover and his horrendous presidential campaign in 1932, as the Great Depression sunk deeply in, when crowds followed him shouting "We want bread!" But Hoover was the incumbent. John McCain has unilaterally "suspended campaigning"--of course, he is politicking vigorously--and the last time that happened during a presidential contest was after Teddy Roosevelt was shot in 1912.
McCain's stance at this point only highlights what a wild card he is--this is a huge gamble on his part, as was his choice of Sarah Palin (whose dreadful interview with Katie Couric is making the rounds of the Internet). Unless he can show he is actually helping the country make progress in this crisis, his involvement here will be seen as grandstanding. Barack Obama, for his part, seems to be attempting to take the calmer, higher road, but once again, he risks appearing uninvolved or unengaged.
Tomorrow I will provide omments on the Ole Miss debate, if it happens. It is certainly one I think no political junkie will want to miss. The topic is supposed to be foreign affairs, but the economy--more and more seeming like a foreign affair--will certainly come to the fore.
In the meantime, I am doing quite a bit of traveling this month, talking at colleges on Anything for a Vote and elections present and past. Below is a list of my appearances. They are open to the public, so if you live near a school in question, check their website for details and come on by.

Wittenburg University, Ohio- Sept. 29
Northern Kentucky KT– Sept 30
Middlesex and UMASS/Boston - October 6th...
University of Idaho-October 8
Auburn University/Montgomery – October 10th
University of Wyoming-October 15
Columbus State Community College (OH) - October 16th
Virginia Tech- October 20
Hofstra University – October 23rd

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

I want to take a moment from campaign goings-on to comment on the tragically early death of the writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide on Friday on California, at the age of 46. Foster was a brilliant writer whose novels ("Infinite Jest" and "The Broom of the System") and collections of short stories and reportage were manic, multi-layered looks at contemporary society. Wallace was apparently deeply depressed. To show how politics never quite leaves us this election year, several commentators on Michiko Kakutani's appraisal of Wallace on the NY Times website claimed, not at all facetiously, that it was probably Sarah Palin's choice as vice-president which put Wallace over the edge. Poor taste, but somewhat understandable, since this was a writer who understood the bleak absurdity to be found in America's ability to turn anything into a brand, even a vice-presidential candidate.
Way back in 1989, as a copywriter at the Quality Paperback Book Club, I met Wallace when he was awarded QPB's "New Voices" Award for his story collection "The Girl With Curious Hair." He was so shy about receiving the $5,000 check that the editorial director had to present it to him in private. He did come to the luncheon. He was a rumple-haired young man with his arm in a sling from some mishap, and very reticent, but with a disarmingly sweet smile. In those days we had a lot of writers coming through for lunches at the book club, and many of them, from days of being on tour and answering interview questions, had become rather slick. But Foster seemed overwhelmed even by the attention paid to him by our little group of book club employees, so I can see how later acclaim may have been hard for him to handle. It's hard to hear of his death, however, because it's rare when you get such talent combined with such genuine humility.

Obama, Adlai and Reality

2008-09-10T03:28:00.000-07:00

One of Barack Obama's worst tendencies, if you're a Democrat in this election season, is to turn into Adlai Stevenson, the two-time failed Democrat candidate for president in the 1950s. Stevenson, Illinois governor, was brilliant, cool, subtly ironic, wonkish, and cared deeply--and he got his ass handed to him on a platter twice by Dwight Eisenhower, the man of whom Claire Booth Luce gushingly said: "General Eisenhower exemplifies what the fair sex looks for in a man—a combination of husband, father and son!”
Not that John McCain is any Dwight Eisenhower, but when you put the two current candidates up next to each other, some of Obama's weaknesses as a campaigner, especially his inability to shout really loud, make themselves evident. The shouting factor has become even more important since McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, whom many people love because she and her family remind them of characters on one of the long-running reality shows so popular today. They're all so easy to tag: The Special Needs Child, the Soldier, the Pregnant Teen (and Hunky Boyfriend), the Snowmobiler Husband, and, of course, the Pit Bull With Lipstick. Whereas Obama and Michelle's reality show would appear on PBS, early Sunday mornings....
Democrats can take heart, though. Obama sees the need to step it up a bit and yesterday wonderfully said that "you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig." He said he was referring to John McCain, but we all know better and, up to this writing, he has refused to apologize.
A Dutch friend of mine who lives in this country and follows American politics closely asked me somewhat plaintively at the close of the Republican convention if all American presidential contests included such personal attacks and name-calling as we had just seen. Didn't candidates just talk about the issues? I was astonished, as if he had asked me whether fish need to swim in water. How do I respond? Since almost the very beginning--let's say since 1800--name-calling has been the premiere way to address the issues. It has always been personalities as a way into politics, in our reality show challenged Republic. Once we get a tag for everyone--from that "tall, skinny wretch" Abraham Lincoln to the "Bull Moose" Teddy Roosevelt to "Tricky Dick" Nixon, we start listening.

Ah, Vice-Presidential picks

2008-09-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

...don't you love 'em? They really do so little--Sarah Palin was right to wonder last July just what the heck the office is all about--yet in campaigns they cause so much trouble. Even John Adams, our first vice-president, spent much of his time grumbling that he got no respect. And our second vice-president, Thomas Jefferson, spent most of his time undermining President John Adams.
Democrats should take care not to crow too much over Palin's family troubles, since backlash is a wonderful thing in America. But one cannot help but be reminded of George H.W. Bush's veep pick in 1988, Dan Quayle. Building on fears that vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle was not qualified to be president, the Democrats ran an ad with grainy footage of vice-presidents like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as president. The overvoice intoned: “One out of five American vice-presidents has to rise to the duties of commander-in-chief. After five months of reflection, Bush’s choice: J. Danforth Quayle. Hopefully, we’ll never know how great a lapse of judgment that really was.” The soundtrack was an ominously thumping heartbeat.
Quayle's worst damage however was in Bush's 1992 contest against Bill Clinton. Searching for an issue, he picked the lack of “family values” in entertainment. The music of rapper Tupac Shakur, for instance, had “no place in our society,” according to Quayle. Shakur was a relatively easy target, but then the V-P made the mistake of going after the phenomenally popular television show Murphy Brown. In the show, Brown (played by actress Candace Bergen) was an anchorwoman who had decided to give birth to a child out of wedlock. Quayle thundered that bearing a child alone “mocks the importance of fathers” and was an example of the “poverty of values” that afflicted television.
This was not a smart move, since even Republicans loved to watch Murphy Brown and because Quayle, weirdly, was acting like this sitcom character was actually a real person. White House staffers now decided that Quayle should actually change his tune and praise Murphy Brown for her courage in having the baby (rather than, say, an abortion). Bush saved Quayle from this humiliation, and the whole situation died when, in early June, the Vice-President visited a New Jersey elementary school and corrected student William Figueroa’s spelling of “potato,” claiming it was “potatoe.”
One of my favorite vice-presidential stories seems to sum it all up. President William Howard Taft’s running mate in 1912 was his vice-president, James Sherman, who however died on October 30, just before Election Day. Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler agreed to replace him—but only, as he told Taft, on the condition that Taft not win. Taft solemnly assured him that he would not, and indeed he lost handily to Woodrow Wilson.

Welcome to Whackyville

2008-09-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Well, who said there wouldn't be any surprises in store for us, this convention season? (I guess me, below). Certainly John McCain's pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for veep is just what the (witch) doctor ordered to perk up this unusually dull presidential race. Although Hurricane Gustav heading, with just the right touch of apocaplyse, up the Gulf Coast as I write this, has also stirred things up. (Looks like the worst has missed New Orleans, but it is truly amusing to watch Republicans scramble to look appropriately solemn as they "curtail" their convention activities and also breathe a sigh of relief that Bush and Cheney have now found other things to do.)
But back to Palin. Since Friday people have been asking me if this was an inspired or dumb choice and the answer actually is both. She will energize that conservative base and possibly bring in some voters who just want to see a little sorely needed pizazz in McCain's operations, a little juice and life. She will re-establish, to some extent, his maverick credentials. But if this turns out to be a close race, which I think it will be, she has got to have a lot of people thinking, Christ, this inexperienced person is far too close to the presidency.
Palin, of course, has given joy to liberal pundits. Maureen Dowd has written her usual snarky column , replete with mooseburger jokes. Nastier have been the rumors flying around that Palin's young son with Down Syndrome actually belongs to her seventeen year old daughter, Bristol, that the good Governor faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her. Like any smear, this has a tiny kernel of truth--turns out Bristol is pregnant, as Palin's office announced today.
A McCain staffer (anonymously) said this about the rumor: "The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama's name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change."
We'll ignore the difficulties with subject-verb tense agreement, this puzzling problem of having Obama's name "in" the blogs, and the exotic use of "juxtaposes"--it has been a bit of an overexciting time for the sleepy McCain campaign. But the statement is very amusing, coming from a member of a party that pushed as hard as it could to convince people Obama was a dangerous Muslim radical.
Will the American people want a White House that looks like a reality show? Pregnant teenagers, guys with guns, ladies with skinning knives, snowmobiles on the front lawn? Dammit, they just might.....Ladies and gents, we may just have ourselves a campaign, after all.

Surprises

2008-08-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

Matt Lauer led off the "Today Show" this AM agreeing solemnly with Meredith Vieira that, despite rumors to the contrary, there were surprises to be had at the Democratic National Convention. Turned out by surprises he meant Ted Kennedy's "dramatic" appearance, which of course could be seen coming from a mile away by everyone but, apparently, "Today's" hosts. A surprise is defined as "something nobody expects to happen," and while there were plenty of surprises in conventions past, there are few these days. I will of course eat my words if Hillary hijacks the convention and grabs the nomination, but something tells me there will be no sentence-chewing for me.
For another in my series on great convention past, let's try the Republican funfest of 1912.

In 1912, with the exception of Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms, Republican Party candidates had occupied the White House since 1860—an astonishing 44 years. But things were about to change in an especially acrimonious election that saw the Republican Party tear itself apart.
After William Howard Taft’s 1908 victory, former president Teddy Roosevelt congratulated his old vice-president on his victory and headed off to Africa for big-game hunting—the ex-President was personally responsible for killing nine lions, eight elephants, twenty zebras, seven giraffes and six buffalo. Back home, progressive Republicans had a different kind of big game in their sights: Taft, who, naturally more conservative than Roosevelt, had begun to swing back in the direction of tariffs and right-wing Republican bosses. The progressives complained that, despite his promises to the contrary when elected, he was selling out the Party to big business interests and tariffs. Taft in turn whined in a letter to Roosevelt: “It is now a year and three months since I assumed office and I have had a hard time….”
But his former mentor was not the person in whom to confide. As soon as Roosevelt returned home in 1910, he was besieged by progressive Republicans trying to convince him to run for a second full term. It didn’t take much persuasion. Roosevelt began to criticize Taft’s policies claiming that he was a pawn of “the bosses and…the great privileged interests.” Taken aback by the violence of the attack from a former friend, Taft confided to an aide: “If only I knew what the President [he continued to call Roosevelt “the President”] wanted, I would do it.”
What Roosevelt wanted became very clear in February of 1912, when he declared his candidacy for his party’s nomination for president. “My hat is in the ring!” he roared (actually coining that phrase). He also said: “The fight is on and I am stripped to the buff!”
Taft, taking up the Roosevelt’s boxing analogy, came out swinging—well, sort of, in his own, really strange, confessional way:
”I do not want to fight Theodore Roosevelt but sometimes a man in a corner comes out swinging,” the President said. “I was a man of straw but I have been a man of straw long enough. Every man who has blood in his body…is forced to fight.”
By 1912, some states had begun holding primary elections to pick their delegates, a fairly pro forma procedure until now. In what can be considered the first ever contested presidential party primaries, Roosevelt proceeded to kick Taft’s ass, nine states to one. Roosevelt even won in Taft’s home state of Ohio. But things happened very differently at the Republican convention in Chicago in June.
It may be hard for us today, in an age of carefully-orchestrated national political conventions, to understand the mayhem that went on. The very fact that Roosevelt showed up on the first day of the convention wearing a sombrero, smoking a cigar, and referring to the sitting President as “a rat in a corner” shows you how many light years 1912 is away from 2008.
But the real action happened behind the scenes. The delegates Roosevelt won in the primary elections were in the minority—Taft’s conservative political bosses controlled the Republican National Committee and made a point of lining up Taft delegates from non-primary states. In back room wheeling and dealing, they also purchased the support of as many as 200 to 300 delegates from southern states—these states would vote Democratic in a national election, but they did have Republican delegates for sale.
Roosevelt and his men made challenge after challenge when Taft’s men tried to seat these delegates; but their challenges were denied, so much so that progressives began to cry that they were being “steamrolled” (also a new coinage in 1912). Tensions ran so high that police squads were brought in and barbed wire put around the stage. Finally, when Taft ended up with a commanding lead in delegates, 561 to Roosevelt’s 107, Roosevelt and his supporters stormed out of the convention. They formed their own independent party made up of everyone from social workers, reformers and feminists to unhappy mainstream Republicans. They called themselves the Progressive Party but were known popularly as the Bull Moose Party because Roosevelt had proclaimed: “I am fit as a bull moose!”
Thus, the most successful political party of the last half century had managed to split themselves in two, not a recipe for victory, since simple arithmetic at the time showed that Democrats had about 45% of the national vote locked up already. As one onlooker said, referring to Taft and Roosevelt, “the only question is, which corpse gets the flowers?”

Dreaming on

2008-08-21T03:14:00.001-07:00

The other day's description of my little dream conversation with Obama and George Bush brought other dream sequences out of the woodwork. One friend claimed that John McCain approached him on the street and insisted he touch his skin cancer surgery scars. My friend declined. Another emailed me a startling dream he had, in which he was watching the Democratic National Convention, Hillary and Bill both on the stage together, and Hillary pulls out a gun and shoots Bill for sucking up all the attention. My friend said the networks replayed the shooting in all kinds of slow motion and different angles, as if it was an Olympic event, but nobody seemed really shocked, just fascinated.
Here is yet another rockin' convention, from 1880.
After he was elected in the contentious contest of 1876, Rutherford Hayes led America into the very heart of what Mark Twain dubbed “the Gilded Age.” A huge economic expansion was led by a few robber barons (er, industrialists) like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould, and Cyrus W. Field, but while the rich were getting very rich indeed, the poor got poorer, the disenfranchised more disenfranchised. As America surged towards the twentieth century, the country faced pressing issues—the need for child labor laws, the lack of an eight-hour work day, the plight of blacks, the rights of women, the idea of a graduated federal income tax, just to name a few. Yet the two major parties were still fighting the Civil War, a decade and a half after it ended. Like punch-drunk fighters who do not know the bell has rung, the two parties “waved the bloody shirt” and ran two heroic generals against each other for the Presidency.
Although contemporary historian Henry Adams called him “a third-rate nonentity,” Hayes had not been a bad president. He was personally honest and had attempted, although with little success, to reform the highly corrupt, patronage-ridden Civil Service. But he was hamstrung by the promises he had had to make to Democrats in order to win in 1876. Hayes’s fellow Republicans saw their President withdrawing troops from the South (troops which supported corrupt Republican carpetbag state governments), giving important positions to Southern Democrats and approving money for Southern pork barrels, all as a result of 1876. And they didn’t like it.
Hayes wisely decided not to run for a second term, which set the stage for an internal Republican Party battle which has seldom been equaled in American political history. The party was divided into two wings. One was called the Stalwarts, meaning those loyal to the old-line party of General Ulysses S. Grant, who was fishing for a third term as President. The other was dubbed the Half-Breeds—moderates who wanted reform within the party and abhorred the thought of another four years of “Grantism”—i.e., the General’s corrupt cronies dipping into the public trough at will.
As the Republican Convention met in the brand-new glass and iron Exposition Building on June 2, 1880 in Chicago, Roscoe Conkling, the powerful and vain U.S. Senator from New York, thought he had votes locked up for General Grant, who had been out of the country on a two and a half year long world tour, long enough for people to forget the scandals of his administration and look upon the gruff General with nostalgic fondness. The Half-Breeds were led by Maine Senator James G. Blaine, Conkling’s sworn enemy (who had unforgettably once called Conkling “a majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut.”).
It was personal between these two, but the fate of the party was at stake—as well as that of the nation, since most assumed the Republicans would win the White House, as they had done since 1856. (One reason why Thomas Nast had just caricaturized the Republican Party as a stolid, dependable elephant—an image which stuck.) Thousands crammed the convention halls as ballot after ballot between the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds was cast. Spontaneous demonstrations arose during the alphabetized roll calls, either for Grant or for Blaine himself for President. One woman spectator climbed a “Goddess of Liberty Statue” on the convention stage and began ripping off her clothes; she had to be pulled down and restrained.
Conkling put Grant in nomination with a fiery speech culminating in a sappy poem:

When asked what state he hails from
Out sole reply shall be:
He hails from Appomattox
And its famous apple tree.

But a new Senator from Ohio, James G. Garfield arose and nominated fellow Ohioan Treasury Secretary John Sherman, brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, a favorite of the Half-Breeds although not of the public at large, for reasons that are evident in his nickname: The Ohio Icicle. But as ballot after ballot was taken, an extraordinary thing began to happen: more and more delegates began to vote for Garfield himself, swayed by the idea of Garfield as a moderating force between the two sharply-divided factions. After 36 ballots—the most ever cast at a Republican convention, before or since—the 48-year-old Garfield became the dark horse Republican candidate for President. As a sop to the Roscoe Conkling , Chester Arthur, Stalwart machine politician from New York was chosen as vice-presidential candidate.After this uproar, the Democratic convention seemed like a puny afterthought

Wig-wammin'

2008-08-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

Woke up this AM to the strangest dream--I was standing around at a cocktail party with Barack Obama and George Bush, making small talk. Although we were indoors, Barack wore the trench coat he's been wearing in his Olympic commercials. George wore a Mr. Rogers-esque cardigan sweater. They both asked me what I was doing today and I told them I would be playing pool--I don't play pool, so the answer surprised even me. My reply caused George to let out a barking laugh and clap me on the back. Barack merely smiled and shook his head, whether at my folly or George's, I wasn't sure....
Anyway, shaking that off--and it's taken several cups of strong coffee--here is the latest in my mini-series of great national convention moments in the past. This is from 1860, one of our most important election years ever.
When the Republicans met in Chicago—at the “Wigwam” hall constructed especially for this convention in one month's time, out of pine planks—they knew that whoever they picked for President would almost certainly win that high office, because of the disarray among the Democrats. Going into the convention, the chief contender was William Seward, former governor of New York and powerful antislavery speaker, who had the backing of New York City Boss Thurlow Weed and his Tammany machinery. So sure were Seward’s supporters of victory that a cannon had been set up on Seward’s lawn in Albany, ready to blast a celebratory shot at the right time.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the convention….a guy named Abraham Lincoln appeared. Actually, Lincoln had been there all along. Former Congressman, senatorial candidate against Douglas in 1858 (Lincoln had lost, but made his bones in their celebrated debates), Lincoln was the more moderate candidate that many of the delegates were seeking. As the nomination battle heated up, dirty tricks abounded. Thurlow Weed promised the Indiana and Illinois delegations, which supported Lincoln, 100,000 dollars if they threw their votes to Seward. No deal. In return, Lincoln backers waited until Seward’s delegates were outside marching in demonstration around the convention hall, then distributed counterfeit tickets to Lincoln backers. When Seward’s men came back, they found they could not get into the Wigwam to vote.
The Wigwam was set for a rocking, rolling, reeling ride such as would not be seen again in Chicago until 1968. When the voting began, there 10,000 people inside the hall, twenty thousand screaming and chanting on the streets. One observer described the noise inside the place: “Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, plus a score of steam whistles going.” After four rounds of balloting, the vote went to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, waiting anxiously in Springfield, was informed by telegram of his victory but advised not to come to Chicago—Seward backers, many of them weeping profusely, were in such a state that it was not advisable for the new Presidential nominee to meet with them. The party’s judicious choice for Lincoln’s vice-president would be Hannibal Hamlin, Senator from Maine and a friend of the defeated Seward’s.
Lincoln would go on to defeat Stephen A. Douglas and become president--and just when we needed him.

Pigeons

2008-08-15T14:23:00.000-07:00

The conventions are coming up soon of course and while I love a good convention as well as the next political junkie I sometimes really crave a bit of the spontaneity that characterized the good old days, even if it did mean that nominees would make their acceptance speeches at 7pm--Guam time, that is.
In the next few weeks I'll be sharing my store of information about fabled conventions of the past. I thought I'd start with 1948, the year Harry Truman would run against (and upset badly) Thomas E. Dewey.
By 1948, technology had made televisions both better and cheaper, and 148,000 people nationwide had shelled out for the big black boxes. The 1948 political conventions of both parties were televised only the East Coast. In order to facilitate this, Republicans and Democrats agreed to hold their conventions in Convention Hall in Philadelphia—the Republicans in June, the Democrats a month later. For the first time in history, television cables ran all over the convention floor and batteries of hot lights arched over the stage (in the un-airconditioned Hall, the temperature at the podium was 93 degrees). Speakers wandered around wearing thick pancake makeup (women were told that brown lipstick showed up better on black and white television sets of the day, so most female orators looked like they’d just bitten into a big piece of chocolate).
But people, especially at the Democratic Convention, seemed to get it—TV was theater, TV was spectacle. When India Edwards, executive director of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, reached the podium to speak, she waved a steak in the air to demonstrate the high price of meat. The best spectacle of all, however, did not quite come off the way it was intended. At two o’clock in the morning, when President Truman reached the stage to accept his party’s nomination, a flock of pigeons was released from a huge Liberty Bell. The birds, who had been trapped all night in the hot and humid bell, went crazy and in a scene straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds,” began dive-bombing delegates, smashing into the rafters of the Hall, and flying straight into the television lights.
Truman and everyone in the Hall, after a moment of stunned silence, broke into uproarious laughter. The few people awake and still watching were privileged to see one of the most wonderful moments of live television ever recorded.

Footprints in the sand

2008-08-14T03:53:00.000-07:00

One of the great articles in my beloved New York Daily News yesterday was about what type of flip-flop Obama is wearing while he sojourns in Hawaii, giving rise to the impression that perhaps John McCain is right all along--the dude is a celebrity. Can you imagine anyone caring what kind of footwear, of any type, Old Mr. Wingtip is shod in?
The News also carried a column from Michael Goodwin, Hillary Alarmist, about the Clintons who, of course, are about to sucker poor Obama and suck the air out of the Convention. Poor guy, flip-flopping around Hawaii, while these malevolent old Boomers plot to do him in. I guess things are a bit dull lately--if you don't listen to this kind of hot air, all there is to do is tune in to the hot air announcers at the Olympics, one of whom, the other day, said about an injured American gymnast, "It's like she's gotten a tear in her wedding dress."
Yeah. Oh, but I forgot, there is Jerome R. Corsi, the guy who wrote Unfit to Command, which torpedoed Kerry's hopes in 2004. He's published another book called Obama Nation, which he hopes will to do the same to the Flip-Flop Man. Well, I said recently that Obama needs a good swift-boating to get him going, so maybe here it is (although it sounds like Corsi's book, with its tired melange of stories about drug use and Jeremiah Wright, won't be quite so inflammatory).
In its article on the book, the New York Times acted like these attack bios are a relatively new phenomena but of course they've been with us a long time. Davy Crockett, or his ghost writer, wrote one of the best of them, in 1836, claiming that Martin Van Buren wore women's clothing. You can find it on google.books, a reminder that even hacks like Corsi have nothin' on our forebearers when it comes to vitriol.
Speaking of hacks, anyone interested can hear me blather away in Bill Harnsberger's "Cheers and Jeers" at the Daily Kos, today and tomorrow. I reveal a little know and quite salacious campaign song of the 1950s, having to do with a major candidate's private parts....very shocking

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny

2008-08-10T04:51:00.000-07:00

Well, it turns out to be true, at least the part about John Edwards screwing Reille Hunter, as the National Enquirer reported way back last winter, and you wonder, once again, how a supposedly smart guy can be so stupid. Not necessarily about the affair, although that's not too smart, but about the lying and the cover-up. I mean, when will these guys ever learn? And for how long can we have politicians who compartmentalize their lives in such a way? Who of these men is a whole? One suspects Edwards is just a hole, plain and simple.
I have friends who really supported the guy, who described meeting him and being impressed by his energy and seeming empathy. But I've never understood it, because he did seem like quite a phony. Now, of course, any chance of a position in an Obama administration is down the tubes. Not only did he lie publicly about the affair, but while proclaiming loudly on "Nightline" (scheduled of course just as the Olympics are sucking up all attention--and now this convenient Georgian war!) that he would take a paternity test, he is saved from that by Rielle's adamant refusal not to have one taken. Anyone think that wasn't choreographed? Of course Andrew Young, Edwards' former aide, is claiming to be the father, so if true this means both men were screwing her, which is even seamier, although almost certainly bullshit. Add to this the fact that his national fiance chairman paid her to get out of North Carolina and it all smacks of politics, old school, the kind played way back in 1920, when the Republicans had to clean up presidential nominee Warren G. Harding's sperm trails, and thus sent at least one girlfriend packing on a long, long vacation.
Oh, well. The only consolation is that Edwards is off the public stage and we really don't have to hear about him for a long, long time now. Unless of course we read the Enquirer.

That Dollar Bill

2008-08-04T03:45:00.000-07:00

More fuss over John McCain accusing Barack Obama "playing the race card" recently of course, most of it quite manufactured. As Bob Herbert points out in his recent NY Times column Obama's remarks about "not looking like all those other presidents on dollar bills" was a direct response to attacks on him from the McCain faction, not something he had simply invented on the spur of the moment. This is not to say that the Obama campaign is entirely innocent of playing the race card--they played it against Hillary Clinton, taking her remarks about Lyndon Johnson's role in passing the Civil Rights Act and Bobby Kennedy's assassination entirely out of context--but in this case the Democratic candidate was responding to McCain advertising which smeared him.
However, there is a sense in which all this is a false issue. If Obama plays the race card--so what? Presidential candidates play the cards they are dealt. JFK played the "Catholic" card, (while pretending not to), while George Bush played the "white guy" card. Presidents and Presidential candidates from Andrew Jackson to Hubert Humphrey have played the "war" card. Obama will also be subtly playing the "age" card against McCain.
It really is all about who ends up on that dollar bill--or that ten or twenty or fifty--and getting there involves a lot of card dealing, sometimes from the bottom of the deck.

Shootin' Hoops

2008-07-30T04:01:00.000-07:00

Finally, as we reach the dog days of August, the dogs have started barking--I had lost hope for anything really nasty going on in this doldumry presidential race, but then John McCain, down about nine points in latest polls, released his lovely anti-Obama piece, which shows the Democratic candidate refusing to visit wounded soldiers and playing basketball while (presumably?) Rome burns. The ad got a lot more play than its six paid airings (as did Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" piece in 1964, which only had one paid appearance but was repeated endlessly on the news) but it remains to be seen how effective it will be, since its specifics are so easily rebutted--Obama was indeed shooting hoops, but with soldiers in Kuwait.
Still, its a promising start, and much better for McCain than scarfing down bratwurst while Obama tours Berlin. In the meantime, McCain opponents have been having a field day with homemade videos portraying him as the clumsiest and dumbest Republican presidential candidate since, take your pick, Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan. This latest is just one. So far, some 98 days from the finish line, Obama is winning handily, but it remains to be seen how he will fare under a relentless assault of nasty campaigning which, despite protests from McCain's people, is coming down the pike.

Pretty Dirty Already

2008-06-16T03:22:00.000-07:00

My apologies for not blogging more lately. I have been finishing up another book--one about castaways on deserted islands--which has placed my head in far climes and centuries. What part of me that remained in New Jersey has been dealing with the aftereffects of the severe storms which have devastated much of the county I live in, with trees falling on houses (we lost a phone line to a huge limb), power outages, and my daughter being unexpectedly out of school.
In my mental absence, the general election has been shaping up to be a nicely dirty one. Despite the fact that polls have the two candidates running neck and neck, I agree with the Politico article which quotes historians as saying that Barack Obama should beat McCain overwhelmingly. However, as we know, upsets are part of American political history--see Thomas Dewey, running against the very unpopular president Harry Truman--and anything can happen. Thus far, the dirtiest part of the campaign has focused on Michelle Obama; supposedly a tape will soon surface which will show her using the word "whitey" in an envenomed speech at her and Barack's old Chicago church.
This is most unlikely, but is clever dirty politics--as I always say, dirty tricks only work when one is playing to pre-existing prejudices in the hearts of people, and there is a great deal of pre-existing prejudice against black women who are perceived as powerful. To combat this and other smears (that he is a Muslim, that he refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, etc) Obama's campaign has started a website which categorically denies them. This isn't likely to have much effect on prejudiced hearts, but it is a sign that those around the Democratic contender know that he must fight back hard and not let the attacks acrue.
Anyway, after only a week of campaigning, a campaign which was supposed to be clean and dignified is pretty dirty already....
A word today about Tim Russert, of NBC's "Meet the Press," who died suddenly on Friday. Russert is someone I always listened to, even when I didn't agree with him, because I felt he had insight into the workings of Washington politics, so his early death comes as a shock. He and I are exact contemporaries and attended the same undergraduate school, John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio, during the tumultuous late '60s. Our politics there differed--I was far more radical in my response to seminal events like the killing of four students at Kent State University (only a few miles away from John Carroll) in 1969--but he was always an intelligent and essentially moderate and good-humored presence. It'll be hard to be commenting on a presidential campaign without hearing Russert commenting on it as well....

Let The Wild Rumpus Begin!

2008-06-04T02:50:00.000-07:00

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has finally clinched it for the Democrats, after the longest priimary season in history, after twenty debates with his opponent Hillary Clinton, after raising more money than any presidential candidate in history--and it's about time. Primary fatigue has set in in the last month with almost everyone I've spoken to, Democrat or Republican, who feel that it is now time for the two parties to turn their attention to each other.
Obama still has some house-cleaning to do re Hillary Clinton, who is now letting it be known that she will accept a vice-presidential nod. It is not often two such bitter rivals make up in this fashion. JFK and LBJ did it in 1960, although LBJ told a woman friend at the Democratic convention that “One out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” (One hopes this is not Hillary's calculation.) To me, anyway, it would seem foolish of Obama to place Hillary in this role, even if there are some fairly decent political reasons for doing so.
Almost lost in all of this so far is the fact that Barack Obama is now the first African-American major party nominee for president in American history. Once he shakes the first woman ever to get close to that job, this fact will become more and more important and will work in his favor, hopefully galvanizing Democrats to come out and vote in record numbers (which they have been doing so far in the primaries). Barack Obama will need these record numbers. Despite the dismal record of the current Administration, he is far from a shoo-in--in fact, part of Hillary's refusal to quit is that she understands that sheis definitely the better candidate against John McCain. Obama will be open to charges of inexperience, of being soft on terror, of being unable to even pick the right church to attend. Race will become an issue, although you won't see John McCain himself bringing it up.
However, Obama has a lot going for him as well. McCain is much older, allied with the Bush fiasco in Iraq--despite his current attempts to scamper away from it--and not well-loved by large portions of his own party. It may indeed be, as Barack Obama has been saying since February of 2007 and said again last night in St. Paul, time for a change. It is certainly at last time for a general election rumpus the likes of which we have never seen before. Let it begin.....

Is Ms. Clinton Crazy?

2008-05-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News, who has been writing a series of rather hysterical anti-Hillary columns, today published responses from readers who agree with his take that Clinton, in her remarks about the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination, was really talking about a possible Obama hit.
Interesting, several doctors weighed in:

"This was an encoded/unconscious death wish toward Obama. It was not even thinly disguised."
Joseph Reppen, Ph.D., ABPP
"It seems best explained as a Freudian slip."
Tom Schossau, M.D.
"It's hard to know in this campaign whether Hillary's death wish is for Obama, or herself. Whether she has a deep down self-destructive tendency, like the late President [Richard] Nixon, is hard to know, but there are similarities."
William Hogg, M.D.

I had to laugh when I read this. We are apparently now at the stage of a presidential campaign where the good doctors are tossing in "unconscious death wishes" and "Freudian slips." It used to be, before Freud was nearly completely discredited, that somberly tut-tutting shrinks like these were brought in to comment on presidential candidates whose opponents considered them beyond the pale. In the 1964 Goldwater/LBJ slugfest, a nationwide survey of American psychiatrists found that a sizeable percentage of them thought Goldwater was unfit to serve as President because he suffered from clinical paranoia. Going ever further back, in 1896, the august New York Times hired a bunch of alienists (i.e, shrinks) to comment on William Jennings Bryan's psyche. In September of that year, just as the election heated up to fever pitch, the McKinley-supporting Times published an interesting little article entitled “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” which looked at any number of the Democratic candidate’s utterances and claimed that they were not the workings of a rational mind. The Times editors also included a letter from a distinguished alienist stating that if Bryan won the election “there would be a madman in the White House.”
Not content with this, the Times interviewed several more alienists and published the results two days later. These eminent medical geniuses said Bryan suffered from megalomania, paranoia querulent (complaining too much), and querulent logorrhea (talking about complaining too much). One other “expert” simply said, “I don’t think Bryan is ordinarily crazy…But I should like to examine him as a degenerate.”
Perhaps Goodwin and the Daily News will enlighten us further about the dark recesses of Hillary's psyche by calling for a round table shrink discussion like this....

Enough is Enough

2008-05-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

Some people have asked me why I seem to take such great delight in the good old days of American presidential dirty tricks--bagmen delivering satchels full of dough in the 1880s, Al Smith being roundly dismissed as a druken papist, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon bugging their opponents campaigns.
I guess it's because these seem like real, old-fashioned, in-your-face-red-blooded-American dirty tricks, as opposed to the game of "gotcha" we've been playing lately. The whole brouhaha about Hillary's comments in South Dakota is the straw that finally broke this camel's back. To claim that she actually meant to refer to the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a way of saying that Barack Obama might be assassinated is simply idiotic and the people who believe it are either idiots or they have a political agenda. The report first came through the New York Post, which wrote that Hillary said ‘Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June,’ making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama.”
This is not the comparison she was making. She was simply referencing--as she has done before, and as others (including myself) have done before--that certain primaries have run well into the summer, including that of 1968. She was not talking about the possibility that Barack Obama might be assassinated. My irritation with people who believe this goes back to the Barack Obama supporters who have "pre-martyred" him, walking around speaking in hushed tones abut the possibility that he might be killed. This tactic makes it seems as if Obama is some holy figure, rather that the very flawed and inexperienced, although inspirational, candidate he is.
This entire Democratic primary began with Hillary and her husband being considered the smartest politicians in the universe. Now we are led to believe they are the dumbest. Somewhere in between lies the truth. In the meantime, I'll take a good bagman anytime....

At Long Last....

2008-05-16T05:35:00.001-07:00

Well, the first real salvo of the 2008 general election has been fired and I, for one, am frankly glad to see it. Like a lot of people I have gotten extremely bored with the infighting among the Democrats and even though Hillary is all but gone, I had assumed it would be some time before we got to the donkeys and the elephants going at it trunk and tail.
But our president can always be counted on, can't he? His calling Barack Obama the Neville Chamberlain of the Mideast is the beginning of a long, hot, and hopefully fun summer. In doing so, he was merely following my "Ten Top Smears" through history playbook, specifically Number 10: "You're Not Tough Enough!" which is classically used by Republicans against Democrats, sometimes to devastating effect. John McCain immediately chimed in agreeing with W., and so it seems we have a tactic going here.
Probably not a very good one, though, since Bush's policies in the Mideast have been so roundly discredited, but, still, its nice to see us heading back in the direction of good old-fashioned smears. What with the California Supreme Court overturning the ban on gay marriage, I have to say, I am rubbing my hands and chuckling....

Now THAT was a primary

2008-05-12T04:01:00.001-07:00

Although Hillary is soldiering on, it seems the end of this extended Democratic primary season is nearly upon us. Many have decried the nasty politics waged, especially by the Hillary camp, but, by comparison with past primary seasons, it was almost nothing. Some underhanded electioneering by Hillary supporters in North Carolina, where they pretended to register black voters, a few attack ads by both sides, nasty comments during debates--really, how bad was that?
It was certainly nothing compared to one of the nastiest primary campaign battles of all, which took place in 1972, an election most people remember for the Watergate bugging in June, but the winter and spring of that year were filled with trickery and vicious attacks launched by Republican dirty tricksters attempting to influence the outcome of the Democrat primary. If you think what has happened in the last three months was really dirty, keep reading...

Early in 1972, President Nixon, whose approval ratings hovered at only about 48 percent, felt that he was vulnerable to a challenge from a strong Democratic candidate.
So it became the goal of his dirty tricks managers like Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin to “foster a split between Democratic hopefuls” in the primaries. Teddy Kennedy was not a problem—the last surviving Kennedy brother had pretty much blown his presidential chances by driving a car off a bridge in 1969 and drowning the young girl with him.
Going into the New Hampshire primary in February, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 running mate, was predicted to be the big winner—in fact, most journalists had already anointed him the Democratic presidential nominee. And Richard Nixon viewed Muskie as a formidable candidate. But then strange things began happening. Suddenly, New Hampshire voters began receiving phone calls from rude black people—phone calls that came in late at night or very early in the morning—saying that they had been bused in from Harlem to work for Muskie. And then conservative editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, published a letter purportedly written by an ordinary citizen which accused Muskie of using the word “Canuck” to refer to French-Canadians. In defending himself against this and other slurs on his wife, Muskie, standing outdoors before microphones and cameras, began to cry. Or, since it was snowing, perhaps a snowflake had landed in his eye—it’s impossible to tell from tapes of the incident.
But Muskie did lose his cool, and the rap on him now was that he was unable to handle pressure. He won New Hampshire, but by a much smaller margin than predicted. Only later was it discovered that the “Canuck” letter was written by White House aide Kenneth Clawson.
Things just got worse when Muskie headed for the Florida primary. There, many voters received a letter written on Muskie campaign stationary, which said (falsely) that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving in 1967. Other letters under the Muskie letterhead claimed that prominent Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Henry “Scoop” Jackson had fathered a child with a 17-year-old girl.
No detail was too small. Posters appeared on Florida highways which read “Help Muskie in Busing More Children Now.” Ads were placed in tiny free shopper’s newsletters saying: “Muskie: Would you accept a black running mate?” And, at a Muskie press conference in Miami, someone let go a handful of white mice with tags attached to them which read: “Muskie is a rat fink.”
The person behind all this Florida mayhem was Donald Segretti, prince of dirty tricks. Segretti, whose name means “secret” in Italian, was a California lawyer who had been law school pals with several students who later became Nixon staffers—in particular, Dwight Chapin, the man who hired him and paid him $16,000, plus expenses, to wreak havoc in the primaries.
Muskie came in fourth in Florida and was finished as a candidate. Segretti’s role was discovered in the investigations after the Watergate break-in and he served four and a half months in prison for misdemeanors associated with illegal campaign activities.
After Florida, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern were the main Democratic candidates, and Nixon’s men rose to combat this. Setting up a phony “Democrats for Nixon” group (shades of Tricky Dick’s California gubernatorial run) they produced leaflets describing Humphrey as a man who, as Johnson’s Vice-President, had helped escalate the war in Vietnam. Some of the leaflets had a picture of a fish over Humphrey’s face, with the caption: “There’s Something Fishy About Hubert Humphrey.”
Partly as a result of the ill feelings caused by these fake ads, Humphrey and McGovern were unable to present a united front when McGovern became the nominee and the time came to go after Richard Nixon.

No Coronation

2008-05-09T05:56:00.001-07:00

Many of us who thought Hillary had the momentum to pull yet another surprise this past Tuesday are perhaps as surprised as the candidate herself that she was finally unable to. It is interesting that once again, as in 2004, as in 1948, poll (in this case, the ones which showed the race narrowing drastically in North Carolina) were so wrong. It appears, however, that even Hillary believed them.
There are numerous opinions on what went wrong for her --some say her support of the suspending the gasoline tax (truly a bit clod-footed for such an adept campaigner) did her in, others that the Jeremiah Wright thing had simply played itself out.
In any event, striding and beaming his way through Capitol Hill the other day, Obama now looks like the candidate, for the first time. Hillary needs to make an exit within the next few weeks, and most people think that right now she should be negotiating for a consolation prize. Vice-president? (Obama does not seem to be dismissing it outright, but a bad idea). Paying off her debts? Lots of opposition there. Making her Secretary of State? Maybe. Or maybe she can just go back to being an effective Senator from New York. Her disappointment must be great, but unlike many, I don't think "the Clinton legacy" will be smeared, either for her or Bill. Their main problem, I think, was an assumption that Hillary was going to be the certain victor. As pasts presidential candidates like Thomas E. Dewey and Richard Nixon (in 1960) could tell her, that is a big mistake.

Do or Die-- Again

2008-05-06T03:00:00.000-07:00

In this most fascinating and lengthy of Democratic primary races, it is that time again for Hillary--should she lose both Indiana and North Carolina today, she will find herself in a position where she probably needs to get out of the race. Or even if she splits close contests. It's unlikely, but possible, that she may also win both states, if Jeremiah Wright has hurt Obama as badly as many polls suggest he has.
The race has definitely been getting dirtier. There has been some scandal among Obama supporters about Hillary's pushpolling techniques in North Carolina, although they haven't yet stooped to the level of those used against John McCain by Karl Rove in 2000 in South Carolina. What is a little scarier is that a pro-Hillary group called Women's Voices Women's Votes has supposedly been robocalling black North Carolina voters and telling them their registration packets are in the mail, thus confusing many who have already registered.
In my opinion, at this point in time, despite or because of these (historically-speaking) rather tame dirty tricks, Hillary is making a strong case that she will be the better candidate against John McCain this fall. This is simply because she responds to aggression far better than Obama does. This is not about who would make the better president--a point I make over and over again is that you can do a lot of nasty things during presidential campaigns and still become a very good chief executive-- but simply about which Democratic candidate would have the best chance of winning in the fall. Of late, anyway, that would be Hillary.

"C--T is a beautiful thing!"

2008-05-02T03:39:00.000-07:00

The other day, a Baptist minister rose at a John McCain "town hall" event to ask the Republican presidential candidate if he had called his wife a "c--t" (Read and view it here at the Huffington Post). This caused McCain to stutteringly ("now, now..uh") tell the guy that such language was not allowed and the Secret Service then escorted him off the premises. The questioner's name is Marty Parrish and he claims to be genuinely concerned about McCain's temper. The alleged "c--t" incident occurred during McCain's 1992 run for Senate reelection, according to a book called The Real McCain by Democrat Cliff Schecter, the cover of which shows McCain fervently embracing another "c--t" (well, by some standards) George Bush. My study of presidential election campaigns shows this to be the first time the "c--t" word has been used in a public forum (although privately, no doubt, there have been numerous "c--ts" thrown at Hillary, and Hillary herself probably directed one or two at Gennifer Flowers in 1992). And, no doubt, Parrish, a Biden supporter, had political motivations. What disturbs me more is that there was a need to escort Parrish from the house. After all, he was not carrying a loaded gun, although I guess the c-word is considered akin to that by polite society, left or right wing. Using it should not, of course, disqualify McCain from the presidency, but it is quite amusing in that the report is probably true, given Cindy McCain's truly "c--t"-ish aspect. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. As my wife's friend Elizabeth is prone to sing out at odd moments, "C--t is a beautiful thing!" But I guess we still have to pretend it is not....

Leader of the Pack

2008-04-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

As we near North Carolina and Indiana, Obama is finally speaking out strongly against Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but unfortunately, like John Kerry before him, seems to have little idea of how to respond convincingly to aggressive tactics. Obama is still ahead and the math is still on his side, but...there is a growing sense that Hillary may somehow be able to pull this off. Dorothy Wickenden in a "Talk" piece in this week's New Yorker echoes what I've been saying on my blog--and in my book, Anything for A Vote--about the 1988 election setting the tone for twenty years worth of negative campaigning, but she and I draw different conclusions. Hillary, she believes, is stripping the bark from Barack Obama, just as Lee Atwater, Republican hit man, promised to "strip the bark from that little bastard [Michael Dukakis] and make Willie Horton his running mate."
I don't believe Hillary's actions are anywhere near as offensive as Atwater's--I don't think she has yet claimed, for instance, that Barack would release serial killers from jail if elected. Secondly, Atwater's tactics worked. Despite Wickenden's assertion that the "civility" of Barack Obama and John McCain has "lifted them above the pack," I believe that Hillary, still growling and frothing, has a definite shot at this just because she is so ready to mud-wrestle. But, as I wrote the other day, we haven't gotten anywhere near 1988-level election nastiness--1988 was the year we were letting go of Ronald Reagan and finding out it wasn't "morning in America," after all. The level of anger was very, very high--much more so than now, even with Iraq and the economy.
However, I do long for a few George H.W. Bushisms like “I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism and anti-racism” or “I’m going to make sure that everyone who has a job, wants a job.” Hillary, Barack, John--they're just too well-spoken these days....even when they're insulting each other.

Justice denied....

2008-04-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

No sooner do I weigh in on voter registration issues in Florida (see below) when the Supreme Court returns a 6-3 decision upholding the legality of Indiana's tough voter ID law, which insists that every voter produce a valid photo ID before being allowed to vote--a passport or driver's license. This was expected, but it is a shame nonetheless. The justifications for the law “should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators,” Justice Stevens wrote. This is what is known, not as blind justice, but justice with without peripheral vision. Once again, as I wrote this morning, no one has proved that voter fraud consisting of pretending to be someone else when you vote is prevalent in this country anymore. If it is, let's see the statistics. Absent those, these Voter ID laws are intended to keep poor and mainly Democratic people from voting. And they will work.

Ohio Redux?

2008-04-28T03:37:00.000-07:00

Damien Cave's scary article in the New York Times today underscores the fact that voting in Florida in the general election of 2008--if we ever get candidates for said election, that is--is going to be a hit-or-miss proposition for many people, especially Democrats. The Republican-controlled state legislature has passed laws which are akin to those on the books in Ohio in their severity. The League of Women Voters may have to pay penalties of fines of up to $1,000 if they turn in forms late. Republican Bureaucrats will scan driver's licences and compare Social Security numbers. The Times article quotes Joe Pickens, a Republican who served on the Florida House’s Ethics and Elections Committee in 2005 and 2006, as saying, with great pomposity: "Some say we err on the side of caution. I would say that’s the place we should be.”
Democrats are saying that all of this is just a way to exclude new voters, Democrats in the main, from poorer neighborhoods, who tend not to have correct ID. The same types of bureaucratic snares were set for Democratic votes in Ohio in 2004, and many people think that, because of this, John Kerry lost the election. That is debatable. What is not debatable is that Republicans have yet to actually come up with any statistics which show that fraudulent voter registration is a real issue in this country anymore.
As I have said in the past, this election will not be decided by "floaters," who travel from state to state voting numerous times for the same candidate. But, if it's down to a close one on election eve, it may be decided by Republican officials whose main goal is to keep poorer Democrats from voting.

Cry Havoc

2008-04-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it's off to Indiana and North Carolina. More and more people are claiming that Hillary's persistance is destroying the Democrats in 08, while others claim that the fight is a valid one which will in the end strengthen the party.
I do like the fact that others are coming around to what I've been saying all along, however, which is that we have only just now started to see the dirty tricks. Lisa Schiffren at The National Review’s The Corner, a conservative blog, quoted in yesterday's New York Times:

"By what reckoning has this primary fight been so nasty? So dirty? So mean? We have all seen much worse. If anything, until this past month the questions and the charges have been much too dainty. Barack Obama is a stranger to most of the electorate. It is just fine to question any and all of his associations and political views. Failure to do so is malfeasance; failure to highlight his weaknesses as a leader would be some kind of suicide pact for an opponent."

Well, the last bit is a little silly, since in these attacks most charges are either wildly exaggerated or even made up out of wholecloth--so that even strengths become "weaknesses," as we saw in the Swiftboating of John Kerry--but it's good to hear that people are finally getting it. The dirty tricks have just started and, so far in that regard, Hillary is winning, despite the kind of scolding she got from the New York Times in their finger-waving (taking a cue from Bill?) editorial, "The Low Road to Victory." In it, they claim that "voters are getting tired of [negative campaigning]; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work." Whaaa? "Demeaning the political process?" Excuse me, Pollyanna, it is the political process. And of course it works--it has worked for over 200 years, and it worked in 1896 when the William McKinley-loving New York Times hired a group of shrinks to assail William Jennings Bryan as a nut and a degenerate.
The Times ends with a cry for Hillary to "call off the dogs." Nonsense. "Cry havoc," I say, and let them slip. The fun is just beginning.

Deep in the Kitchen

2008-04-22T06:45:00.000-07:00

On the eve of this PA primary, which Hillary must really win by an impressive margin in order to have a fighting chance, both she and Obama have released new commercials attacking each other. As regular readers know, I, seemingly alone among the pundits, have not been all that impressed with the level of nastiness in this campaign so far--I mean, compared to 1988 or 1964, it's like watching two private school kids thumb their noses at each other--but now the ads are catching up to the glories of "Daisy" in '64, to the horror of "Revolving Door" and the sheer breathless hilarity of "Tank" in '88.
Hillary's new "Kitchen" ad has the makings of a classic. She brings in images from the Great Depression, World War II, 9/11, the current recession, the Iraq war and ends by quoting Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." (Politicians on the losing side of things almost always turn to Truman because of his 1948 comeback victory against Thomas E. Dewey. Doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican--George H.W. Bush claimed Truman would have "voted Republican" were he alive in that 1992 Bush-Clinton contest.)
I always say about attack ads, one, they work, despite what people claim when asked if they like them. And two, the more gratuitously absurd they are--and "Kitchen" is pretty absurd--the better they work. Tying these unrelated images together is completely ridiculous, as is tossing in a hackneyed line from a president who was often ineffectual and despised by his own party ("To Err is Truman" was a favorite line of the time). And, of course, Hillary's time in the White House was not, after all, as president.
Obama's response is a pallid ad called "He Has What It Takes," which is far too short in the visceral, gut-level image department to have any effect--it bores from the beginning, with Obama nattering on about how we are "one people, united." A nice message, but, in nice vs. nasty, nasty always wins out.

The Great White Whale

2008-04-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

The day before one of the biggest primaries of the year--and who would have guessed twelve months ago that we would still be battling it out within the Democratic party--and each candidate is "criss-crossing" Pennsylvania, as the pundits like to say, seeking votes and delegates. While I don't agree with Nora Ephron's over-simplification in a recent column that the next president will be elected by angry Pennsylvania white men, I do agree with her when it comes to not counting Hillary out. She simply does not stop coming at you. As an angry (New Jersey) white man myself, I find this both admirable and a little disconcerting, so I can understand how those PA dudes must be feeling. However, my gut instinct is that Hillary is going to win in PA bigger than expected, because Obama is, ever so slightly, back on his heels a little. Whether it was the debate commentators, Hillary, or Obama himself, with "Cling-gate," he had finally been "defined." A "narrative" has been created for tomorrow's primary, one all the media will now be following. It ain't Moby Dick, but I guess it will have to do. We'll see who gets harpooned.....

Gotcha!

2008-04-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

I think the current brouhaha over the questions asked of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the Philly shootout of a few days ago is quite amusing. Should George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson have queried these two over such trivial matters as absent flagpins or faulty Bosnia memories? Where was the substance?
Well, I say wearily, since when is substance a part of staged presidential "debates" these days? Where did anyone ever get the idea that real matters of importance are discussed in these so carefully managed events? Back in 1960, in the Kennedy-Nixon debates, moderated by the likes of Howard K. Smith, both candidates were actually asked about substantive issues and gave lengthy answers. But --aha! Since those watching on television decided that Kennedy won, simply because he looked a helluva lot better than Nixon, substance was almost entirely lacking the next time anyone even dared have another general election debate, which was in 1976, between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
Ever since, tiepins, and "gotcha's" like "There you go again!" have ruled the day. This is why most people I know can seldom watch an entire debate all the way through. It's just too painful.

Tickling

2008-04-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

I have, as readers of this blog will know, been a little disappointed in the level of dirty tricks played so far in the only active portion of this election, the Democratic primary, but last night's debate between Hillary and Obama at least aired out a certain level of nastiness. General consensus is that Obama was continually on the defensive, assailed by Hillary for his "clinging to guns and religion" remark, forcing poor Obama to say that he understood that hunting was "culturally" important (there's his inner anthropologist again!). Obama also had to defend his relationship with Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground bomber, whom he called, rather hilariously, "a guy in my neighborhood," as if the two met hanging out on their stoops sipping tallboys.
Well, we'll see if this does Hillary any good. Polls show her once-commanding Pennsylvania lead shrinking ahead of this Tuesday's primary and Obama holding a strong lead among Democrats in general, who think he can beat McCain in the fall. I think this game of "gotcha" will ultimately work against Hillary--and personally, for a lover of a good dirty trick--bags full of cash exchanging hands, sexual innuendos, really nasty smears--this is a little bit like being tickled to death. Get it on, folks, or forget about it.

The Game

2008-04-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

At yesterday's "compassion forum" (sigh) held near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as we approach the primary on April 22, Hillary acquitted herself well, going after Barack Obama for his supposedly elitist statements about the working class clinging to guns and religion and prejudice because they were bitter have-nots. Having finally gotten an issue she can strike the Teflon Obama with, she has gone to town with it, and just in time, with her once-commanding lead in PA shrinking.
But it just underscores the odd, almost Alice in Wonderland nature of this Democratic primary so far. Really, Obama's statements were not elitist--merely honest, if a bit too generalized--and I get the feeling most people know that. But by the rules of The Game (as presidential politics was being called as far back as 1796) we have to accept that she has scored some points, that Obama has committed an error.
Presidential politics is the first and greatest of our national pastimes, as I often say. In the 19th century, voter turn out was consistently in the high 70% (reaching an all time high of 82% of eligible voters in the truly crooked election of 1876). While we haven't reached that in the 20th or 21st centuries, this current contest, preliminary as it is, is really reaching out to voters. In the last few elections, the Game got kind of boring--that lost in space feeling you get when a baseball game enters the sixth inning and you know nothing, ever, is going to happen--but I am happy to see that we are all keeping score and cheering. And jeering.

Gee, I'm Sorry. I Really Am.

2008-04-09T06:51:00.000-07:00

Just back from lovely Roanoke College, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Salem, Virginia, where I had a nice time talking to members of the student body about dirty tricks in American presidential elections. My impression was that most of the kids hadn't heard about many of the election stories from our fabled and fraudulent past--no one aged 18-20 raised his or her hand when I asked if any of them knew who Willie Horton was--but everyone present seemed to feel that negative politics played a powerful role in the elections they had witnessed so far, and that the question of who was being more negative was a major debating point in the Hillary-Obama clash to date.
The students at Roanoke were very tuned in to the constant apologies going on this campaign, as well as the firings of aides who had made comments deemed insenstive. One young woman asked me if this was the first campaign where such apologies and dismissals were such a major factor, and I think, to this extent, it is. It's quite amusing really--can we really imagine Teddy Roosevelt apologizing to William Howard Taft for going him "a fathead with the brains of a guinea pig?" Or Harry Truman apologizing to Richard Nixon for telling voters they might to go hell if they voted for the Trickster in 1960?
The most recent "I'm sorry," of course, features West Virginia Senator John D.
Rockefeller IV, who said in an interview that McCain's time dropping bombs on North Vietnam did not prepare him for the everyday concerns of ordinary Americans. What is there in that to apologize for? The McCain campaign, apparently feeling they had a winner with this one, also demanded that Barack Obama, whom Rockefeller supports, should apologize as well! (And Obama did.)
All of these apologies, as well as the demands for same, are in the main insipid and politically inspired. And I predict, once we hit the general election, that they will soon stop.

An Amazon's Bosom

2008-04-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a look at the campaign of 1840, between Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren and Whig challenger William Henry Harrison, one of my favorite when it comes to the triumph of illustion over fact. I start with a quote from Thomas Elder which I think summarizes the way American politicians view presidential elections.
It also contains the strangest attack ever made against a sitting president, by a Congressman aptly named Charles Ogle.

“Passion and prejudice properly aroused and directed…do about as well as principle and reason in a party contest.”
-- Thomas Elder, Whig politician

Martin Van Buren didn’t know it when he entered the presidency in 1836, but he was a “gone Chicken” before he had barely begun—all thanks to the Panic of 1837, the worst economic recession the country had yet seen.
That this panic was partially the result of Andrew Jackson’s monetary policies made things even worse for Van Buren. Under Jackson, the United States government made millions of dollars by selling land to speculators. The government then deposited the money in Jackson’s “pet” banks—run by cronies of his—instead of the Bank of the United States, which Jackson had gutted. These local banks made large loans, often to speculators who bought even more land from the government. Add to this vicious circle high inflation, a crop failure in 1835, and a new “hard money” law which forced banks to repay money borrowed from the government in specie rather than currency and, by the summer of 1837, America’s economic life had ground to a standstill. The Panic would last for several years, forcing factories to close and sending families to beg on the streets.
The Whigs held their first national nominating convention in December of 1839, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A strange thing happened—the boisterous convention, attended by farmers, disgruntled bankers, pro-tariff and anti-tariff forces, slaveowners and abolitionists—resembled nothing more than a passionate Democratic rally. Henry Clay hoped to be the Whig candidate (a young Illinois lawyer in attendance, Abraham Lincoln, pronounced him the “beau ideal of a statesman”) but because Clay was a Mason, the Antimasons would not vote for him. The nomination instead went to Old Tip, William Henry Harrison. His vice-presidential ticket balancer was Virginia Senator John Tyler.
The Democrats knew they were in trouble when they met in Baltimore in May to pick their candidate—and thousands of Whigs were waiting for them in the streets, marching and chanting:

With Tip and Tyler
We’ll bust Van’s biler.

Well, maybe you had to be there, but it certainly got the Democrats attention. The times they were a-changin’ but there was nothing the party could do but renominate Van Buren. They balked once again at Richard Johnson, who “openly and shamefully lives in adultery with a buxom young negro,” as one anonymous letter-writer had it, but in the end, he was nominated, as well.

The Candidates

Democrat: Martin Van Buren:
Martin Van Buren was basically a fairly decent guy from a rich family with a lot of government service behind him who didn’t know how to handle an economic crisis. He was seen as the lackey of the popular “people’s President” whose vice-president he had been. The first cartoon portraying the Democratic Party as a donkey appeared during this election. Jackson rode the beast, Van Buren walked behind it, hat in hand, saying obsequiously “I shall tread in the footsteps of my illustrious predecessor.”

Whig: William Henry Harrison
Harrison, at 68, was getting up there in years, but he still inspired a great deal of loyalty as war hero. And, in one of the most successful makeovers until George Herbert Bush went from New England preppie to Texas aw-shucks oilman, this Virginia aristocrat would soon become a “just-folks” guy with a log cabin constituency.

The Campaign
The Whigs were handed a wonderful gift at the beginning of the 1840 campaign. Just after their convention, The Baltimore Republican published a remark supposedly made by a Whig backer of Henry Clay about Harrison: “Give him a barrel of hard cider and a pension of two thousand a year and, my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in a log cabin, by the side of a ‘sea-coal’ fire and study moral philosophy.”
This was meant to be an insult, but the Whigs turned it into the campaign’s greatest asset. In almost no time, Harrison became the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate, a guy who hung out with the coonskin cap boys, plowed the back forty with his own hands, and was always ready to raise a glass of cider. Forgot about Harrison’s Virginia ancestry and ownership of at least 2000 acres of land—Harrison was now a man of the people. The Whigs organized huge rallies attended by thousands of people, and held parades four and five miles long. The log cabin symbol was everywhere: there were log cabin-shaped newspapers, songbooks, pamphlets, and badges. You could buy Log Cabin Emollient or whiskey in log cabin-shaped bottles from the E.C. Booz distillery, from which we get the name booze.
The Democrats protested, mostly in vain, that Harrison wasn’t born in a log cabin, didn’t drink hard cider, and, when you came right down to it, anyway, was not even that great a war hero (Harrison, a mediocre strategist, had sustained heavy casualties in the fight at Tippecanoe). It didn’t too a bit of good. Crying “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” the Whigs charged onward. Because Democrats whispered that Harrison did nothing without his political handlers—that he was “An Old Gentleman in Leading Strings”—he was actually sent out to make a few stump speeches, becoming the first presidential candidate ever to do so. Democrats groaned that the man talked about nothing at all, but crowds gathered everywhere to hear him.

The Winner: William Henry Harrison
The popular vote was closer than some people expected it to be: Harrison’s 1,275,390 votes winning out over Van Buren’s 1,128,854, but Old Tip killed in the Electoral College, 234 votes to the President’s 60. An incredible 78 percent of eligible voters turned out.
The contest had been so vitriolic that there was no kissing and making up afterwards. “We have been sung down, lied down, [and] drunk down,” wrote the Wheeling Times. “Right joyous are we that the campaign of 1840 is closed.” The Whigs were not exactly gracious in victory. Harrison’s election, they proclaimed, was proof that voters had “placed their seal of condemnation upon a band of the most desperate, aspiring and unprincipled demagogues that ever graced the annals of despotism.”

Running off at the Mouth
A Congressman named Charles Ogle made a three-day-long speech in the House of Representatives saying that the White House was “as splendid as that of the Caesars and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion,” that Van Buren had mirrors nine feet high in which he admired himself, that he slept on fine French linens, ate from silver plates with forks of gold, and—most incredibly—that he had caused to be constructed on the White House grounds a pair of “clever sized hills” that resembled “an Amazon’s bosom, with a miniature knoll or hillock on its apex, to denote the nipple.”
This was, as Democrats and even some horrified Whigs protested, a bunch of really weird lies but the speech was distributed nationwide and further set up the dichotomy between the supposedly aristocratic Van Buren and his supposedly countrified opponent Harrison.

Mum’s the Word
The Democrats attacked Harrison for the way his handlers –among them Thurlow Weed, the brilliant Tammany operative who was managing the campaign – kept him from replying even to the most innocuous queries about political issues. Was “Granny Harrison” senile? Was he a “man in an iron cage?” The Whigs denied this, but in private the prominent Whig Nicholas Biddle cautioned “Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden [to Harrison] as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.”

We love you, Hillary

2008-03-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

In one of the most interesting turns the Democratic primary has taken, Hillary Clinton has been praised by her hated nemesis, Richard Scaife, the Chicago tycoon who went out of his way to lead the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against the Clintons in the 1990s. After she did an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper Scaife owns, he wrote that she “exhibited an impressive command of many of today’s most pressing domestic and international issues" and that her answers to reporter questions “were thoughtful, well-stated and often dead on.”
Could this be the ultimate dirty trick? Scaife's support of Clinton could turn off those who remember his salacious and scandalous attacks against Bill Clinton. He was a major backer of the American Spectator Magazine's so-called "Arkansas Project," which first brought Paula Jones' charges to the public attention and also charged that the Clinton's had murdered their top aide Vince Foster, who committed suicide in 1993.
One senses that Scaife is just eccentric enough for this not to be a ploy, in which case Hillary is now surrounded by opponents who are killing her with kindness. Obama has cleverly said recently he does not wish her to drop out of the race. But I trust politicians--and tycoons--more when they're taking potshots at each other. Killing with kindness is not their natural inclination....

Mis-Stating

2008-03-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

The Democratic candidates are now playing a hilarious little game of "gotcha," with Obama's forces attacking Hillary because of her claim to have "misspoke" when describing her imagined 1996 landing under fire in Bosnia and Hillary--a prime proponent of the "best-defense-is-a-good-offense" theory--going after Obama for, among other things, claiming that his parents had met during the Selma civil rights march in 1965 (Obama was born in 1961). Obama says he meant the civil rights movement in general. John McCain, attempting statesmanship, claimed that all candidates make misstatements, and this would include himself, of course.
None of these "misstatements"--really, hyperbole on the part of all candidates--amounts to much in the way of serious dirty politics, although Obama and Hillary are accusing each other of same. A little dirtier is the name-calling going on. Carville says Richardson is a "Judas." Clinton is accused by an Obama supporter of being "Joe McCarthy."
Still....one misses, sometimes, the really amusing verbal onslaughts, such as George H.W. Bush's sally against Clinton-Gore in 1992 (“My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than those two bozos"). We have not yet had a "bozo" insult yet in 2008, but I keep hoping. We have also not yet had a "misstatement like the one the same Bush made in his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis: : “I have worked alongside [President Reagan] and I am proud to be his partner. We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex…I mean, setbacks!”
The campaign is still young, however. Perhaps we'll get there.

Under Fire

2008-03-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not posting for awhile, but I have been writing another book, which is taking up my time from dawn to dusk, and the presidential primaries have been on a little bit of an Easter hiatus. (My new book is on castaways and sometimes the allure of being on a desert island, alone, makes me start to salivate.)
Anyway, I have had to laugh about Hillary's claim that she had to run through sniper fire after landing in Bosnia in during a 1996 visit with none other than Sinbad, the comedian, and Sheryl Crow. Video shows her proceeding in a stately fashion across the tarmac and so she has had to backpedal. She had lost her lead in polls after Obama's eloquent speech on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and this is not going to help her any. It's a shame that American presidential candidates (and presidents) always have to act like they're so brave--to avoid my Classic Presidential Slur Number 2: "You're Not Tough Enough." I believe the only president to actually come under fire during combat was Abe Lincoln, who had to duck bullets sent his way by Jubal Early's raiding Confederates in 1864, yet candidates still try to claim that combat experience is a prerequisite for the office.

"An Ass in the Shape of a Preacher"

2008-03-18T06:26:00.000-07:00

As Hillary Clinton pulls together a sizable lead in polls taken among Pennsylvania voters, it appears the brouhaha over Obama's pastor and a (now ex) member of his religious advisory panel, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, has really hurt the candidate, perhaps even worse than NAFTA did in Ohio. (Wright has called America "the U.S of K.K.K.A" and made other inflammatory statements.)
Presidential candidates and preachers have a long and checkered history which essentially states that never the twain shall meet comfortably, be they Billy Graham with Richard Nixon of Fulton Sheen with JFK.
Perhaps one of the worst conflagrations having to do with minister and politician--one that may have cost a candidate the presidency-occurred in 1884.
Republican James G. Blaine was in a tight race for the White House with Grover Cleveland--smears against Cleveland for having fathered a child out of wedlock had not quite overcome charges that Blaine was on the take--and on October 29, Blaine took his campaign to the pivotal state of New York. He came into New York with a hairpin lead in the state and on that fateful Wednesday morning sat down to a breakfast meeting at a Fifth Avenue hotel—just another rubber chicken whistle stop for the weary Blaine. Unfortunately, during the unending speechifying, a local Presbyterian minister by the name of S.D. Burchard got carried away in attacking the Democrats and called them the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” essentially slurring them as Irish-Catholic drunks. Even more unfortunately, Blaine apparently wasn’t listening and did not denounce Burchard’s intemperance when he got up to speak.
A Democrat attending the meeting took down Burchard’s words and raced to local party headquarters, where literally overnight, Democratic campaign operatives printed thousands of handbills trumpeting the fact that Blaine was a “Catholic-hater.”
In a city full of Irish-Catholic working-class immigrants, this did not sit well.
James G. Blaine lost the state by a mere 1,149 votes. Had it not been, as he later put it, for “an ass in the shape of a preacher,” he would have won New York and become President of the United States.

Well, New Yorkers are beginning to heal....

2008-03-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

One Born Every...Nanosecond?

2008-03-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

When I talk about American presidential elections and tell people about the kind of slanders politicians have bandied about for over 200 years, the initial reaction tends to be, who are you kidding? Who would actually believe that John Quincy Adams was a pimp while acting as ambassador to Russia, or that Martin Van Buren wore women's clothing or that Al Smith built the Holland Tunnel in order to secretly meet the Pope under the Atlantic Ocean, or that Michael Dukakis would really let serial killers out of jail to satisfy his liberal lust for going easy on criminals?
And what I always say is: there are always people willing to believe anything and everything.
Case in point: this afternoon I take my daughter to her gymnastics lesson and while she is out rolling and tumbling the following conversation takes place directly behind me in the observation room parents are confined to:
"There's no way that Obama guy can be in the White House," says First Woman.
Second Woman says: "You don't think he can win?'
First Woman: "I don't think he can win, but even if he does win, he can't be sworn into office."
Second Woman: "Why not?"
First Woman: "Because of the Bible. It says in the Constitution you have to take the oath of office on a Bible and he can't. Because of the Koran or whatever you call it."
Second Woman: "Oh, I forgot --he's Muslim."
First Woman: "That's right. He's Muslim and if he swears on a Bible he'll, like, burn in hell or whatever."
Second Woman: "So what are they going to do?'
First Woman: "Don't worry -- McCain is going to win. Are you kidding?"
Second Woman: "But I hear McCain's not an American...."
At this point, I tiptoed gently out of the building. If I still smoked, I would have lit up one and inhaled deeply. As it was, I just inhaled.

All The News That Gives Us Fits

2008-03-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

Well, this is the week that was, as someone used to say, and it's only Wednesday. First of all there's New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who has apparently made it his habit, for at least the past eight months, to dally with call girls from a prostitution ring called The Empire Club. This has all the trappings of a Gilded Age scandal--I mean, the "diamond ratings" for the girls, the secret arrangements and lush meeting hotels from Dallas to Florida to Washington D.C. I spoke with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune about the scandal Monday night and my remarks are recorded here in a nice article (although my name is misspelled--the bane of us Cumminses is that "g" tossed in at the end. We spend our lives crying "Cummins! No "g!"). The point of our conversation, as you might expect, is that nothing is new under the sun. However, Spitzer's downfall is astonishing. Somehow or other--and this is the interesting question--the IRS was watching his bank accounts during a "routine tax investigation" and saw large amounts of cash going out to a shell corporation through which clients of the Empire Club paid their bills. Were the IRS set on him by a political enemy, of which he has many, and in both parties? And in the meantime, where is Kristen, the young woman with whom he spent the night of Feb. 13 in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington? As a friend emailed me last night, as giddy as the stocktraders who broke out into the laughter on the floor of the Exchange on hearing the Spitzer news this Monday, "We want Kristen We want Kristen! Whips, butt plugs, and all!" (Eliot supposedly had a predilection for sex that was "not safe," according to the young woman.)
We'll see...in the meantime, the fact that he has not yet resigned only goes to show how tenaciously these guys want to hold onto power. According to news reports, his wife, Silda, is supposedly urging him to stay and fight. Supposedly. She had that Dina McGreevey look at his press conference, as if someone had just handed her a large, dripping, decapitated head--that of her husband, of course. But I have to say, like the James McGreevey "I am a gay American" scandal, which brought us out here in New Jersey out on the streets to talk to each other, the Spitzer news has become great conversation fodder. I was taking a stress test yesterday and I guess my heart must be okay because while the treadmill churned away myself, the cardiologist, and two nurses chatted nonstop about Spitzer.
In other news, there's a presidential primary going on, right? Almost forgot. As expected, Obama trounced Hillary in Mississippi, but even here Hillary lucks out a bit, as the Spitzer news has driven the Mississippi contest from the top of the fold. More interesting are the increased tensions between the two camps. My friend Diederik, a staunch Obama supporter, has been emailing me tidbits that have flown through the internet. The comedian Sinbad has contradicted
Hillary's account of a supposedly perilous 1996 trip to Bosnia, saying the only "red phone" moment was, "Do we eat here or the next place?" And there's Geraldine Ferraro's claim that Obama would not be where he was if he were not black. The Obama camp called this remark "racist" and "outrageous." Best of all were Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod's comments, which show that this campaign is ready for the big time, Anything for a Vote style.
"All this is part of an insidious pattern that needs to be addressed," Axelrod said, re Ferraro's comments and Clinton's "60 Minutes" claim that Obama was not a Muslim "as far as I know." Axelrod went on to depict Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson (whom he described "as a friend" ) as "a kind of junkyard dog."
Well, as Silda Spitzer knows to her regret, politics makes strange "friends" and bedfellows.

Good vs. Evil. Or Perhaps Not.

2008-03-10T06:41:00.000-07:00

"The unfortunate side-effect of reading this book is a complete and burning desire never to participate in any political effort at all. If you're a Republican or a Democrat, you'll be sickened by the tactics your own party has used, although not surprised by the skullduggery of the opposition. And you'll be revolted by the mutton-headed willingness of the electorate to believe any damned thing someone tells them, especially if it reflects their prejudices."
Thus speaks Marc Davidson, co-editor of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, who reviewed Anything for a Vote over the weekend. Davidson liked the book, but apparently felt that it painted a bleak picture of the American electoral process.
Perhaps, but it is also a realistic picture. While I hope reading my book doesn't keep people from the wonderfully diverse, chaotic, and insane mess that eventually elects our Presidents, it does show us--the main point I had in writing the book--that dirty tricks are a part of who we are as a people. Not only that, but politicians who "go negative" in the current parlance can be just as effective leaders as those who do not.
The great, unprecedented Obama-Hillary contest seems less about substance than about who is being portrayed as more negative--something our ancestors would have shaken their head at. Of course, you play hardball--that's the nature of the game. You may not try to spike the shortstop in the shins when you slide into second (or, if you're Ty Cobb, you may) but you do slide hard and try to knock him on his ass. But with Hillary vilified as a "monster" and Obama portrayed as a shining knight--well, are we really doing anybody any good promulgating either of these stereotypes? Calling for Obama to take the second spot on a Hillary presidential ticket is insidiously nasty--but so is demanding that Hillary release her tax returns and acting as if she's got something to hide before the fact. And yet I'll wager that both Hillary and Obama would make good, moral, tough presidents -- just as did Thomas Jefferson (who campaigned very nastily in 1800), Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and others who fought hard, rough and tumble campaigns.

The Fight Goes On

2008-03-06T06:24:00.000-08:00

Well, despite all the handwringing and worrying that the Democratic party is tearing itself apart in a protracted primary battle, I--being more of presidential election anarchist--think what has happened so far is great. I mean, it's like a seesaw play-off battle to see who gets into the World Series or an extraordinary prelim race to see who makes the Olympic Finals.
Sure, it may leave both Hillary and Obama panting and covered with sweat, but it also allows us to see what these two are really made of. Obama, finally having learned the John Kerry Lesson--one must respond aggressively to negative attacks (I hate to say I told you so, but....) has finally announced his intention to go on the offensive, while Hillary, seemingly undaunted that the delegate math is against her, is now claiming that she is on a roll that will take her to the White House.
In the meantime, we are treated to the wonderful sight of John McCain being embraced by George Bush, the man whose minions so smeared McCain's reputation in South Carolina in 2000. Ain't politics wonderful?
Upcoming for the Democrats is Wyoming and Mississippi and of course Pennsylvania. Look for the race to get nastier and nastier. Obama is not just calling for Clinton income tax forms to be released--he is asking that her "papers" (“secreted in the Clinton library," as his top aide David Axelrod amusingly puts it) be released. Let's see--in that file marked "Plan Z" must be all the nasty stuff she's keeping on herself for just such a moment. Stay tuned.....

Shattered glass

2008-03-04T06:23:00.000-08:00

Yet another Super Tuesday is upon us with the primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont. Opinions abound as to the possible outcome. Hillary may win both narrowly, or split the two states, some say. No one seems to think Obama will blow her out, as he had been doing, but there is a lot of feeling that he will at least win Texas. If so, what should Clinton do? Quit, say many, while others cry for her to push on to Pennsylvania, Mississippi, even Puerto Rico.
It's somehow fitting that these two big ones today are in states known for nasty electioneering in the form of vote stealing. The 2004 residential election ultimately came down to the state of Ohio, which George Bush won by a margin of 118,601 votes, giving him the state’s 20 electoral votes and victory.
But it has been estimated that one out of every four voters in Ohio who registered to vote and showed up at the polls did not have their votes counted.
Even worse, some writers claim that 80,000 votes that were cast for Kerry in fact were counted for Bush in a contest overseen by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who – like Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000—was co-chair of the Bush-Cheney reelection effort.
Texas has also has a rep, dating back even before the 1960 elections, when dead voters walked the land, zombie-like, casting their ballots over and over again, and some precincts had voting machines rigged to give Democrats two votes for every tug of the lever.
Not that this will happen today in a primary race, but things are getting nasty and there seems to be perception that Clinton's aggressive tactics are roughing up Obama a little, although how much remains to be seen. It's just a foretaste of the general election. Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, John Gilliom, a political scientist at Ohio University, said the candidates are still in a healthy process of "checking for glass jaws." Voters "want to know what Sen. Obama's answers are on the various questions she's been asking," he said. "They're going to be asked in a lot tougher way later on."
Quite true. My prediction for today? More shattered glass, since there will be a split victory and this incredible Democratic race will go on.

Hello, Moscow Calling!

2008-02-29T11:17:00.001-08:00

The controversial new Hillary Clinton TV spot shows children sleeping while a phone relentlessly rings and a dire voice-over narrator asks: "There's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Who do you want answering the phone?"
The answer, of course, is Hillary , but I agree with the Obama campaign that the tactic is so old it creaks. It harkens back to 1964 Lyndon Johnson-Barry Goldwater smearfest, not just to Johnson's famous "Daisy" spot, but to Johnson's style of campaigning, as well. At campaign stops LBJ would ask his audience to think really hard, which candidate would they like to see in the White House, Johnson or Goldwater? “Which man’s thumb do you want to be close to the button…which man do you want to reach over and pick up that hotline when they say, ‘Moscow calling’?”
Different generation, same scare tactics. LBJ's use of them was quite effective against Goldwater who, despite his later rehabilitation, was one scary dude when it came to making reckless nuclear pronouncements. It's Obama's inexperience Hillary is going after here, of course. It'll be interesting to see if it works.....

A Kind and Overruling Providence

2008-02-29T03:56:00.000-08:00

Below, one of my favorite little known elections, in 1844, between Democrat James Polk and Whig Henry Clay. Can any of us imagine this contest taking place today, beginning with the glee the Democrats took in the fact that William Henry Harrison died in office?

One month into his term as president, William Henry Harrison was dead of a pneumonia supposedly brought on by speaking for such a for over 100 minutes without hat or coat as he made his inaugural address on a blustery March day.
The Whigs were bereft, the Democrats joyous. So strong still were the ill-feelings lingering from 1840 that most of Democrats did not even pause for a hypocritical moment of silence for the fallen President. Poet William Cullen Bryant said he regretted Harrison’s death “only because he did not live long enough to prove his incapacity in the office of President.” And former President Andrew Jackson turned his eyes heavenward, calling Harrison’s death: “the deed of a kind and overruling Providence.”
The Whigs hopes were now on John Tyler, the first vice-president ever to replace a sitting President, the man whom John Quincy Adams tartly dubbed “His Accidency.” What transpired proved to future political generations that choosing a vice-presidential candidate is a lot like picking a spouse—after the honeymoon, things are open to change.
Once in power, Tyler started acting far more like a Democrat than the “firm and decided” Whig he had declared he was. He vetoed the Whig’s bill for a new Bank of the United States, to replace the one Jackson had gutted, and went head to head with Whig leader Henry Clay, who resigned his Senate seat in protest. Actually, all but one member of Tyler’s cabinet quit; essentially, the party disowned its own President, declaring in an extraordinary statement: “those who bought the President into power can no longer, in any manner or degree, be justly held responsible or blamed for [his actions]…”
Naturally, Tyler’s chances of being Whig candidate for President in 1844 were less than zero. He made overtures to the Democrats, but they didn’t trust him, either, and so he was left out in the cold. But he did have one surprise up his sleeve, which would seriously affect the coming election. In 1843, he negotiated a treaty to annex the slaveholding Republic of Texas (heretofore, because of the volatile slavery issue, the Texas issue had been sidestepped by both parties). But Tyler put a patriotic spin on the whole thing—if we don’t grab Texas, he proclaimed, Mexico will. Although his treaty was vetoed by the Senate in 1844, the issue of annexation was the pivot around which the election revolved.
The Whigs got together in Baltimore on May 1, 1844, and nominated Henry Clay for President. They picked New Jersey politician Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice-president, a so-called “Christian gentleman” who was supposed to balance Clay’s reputation for living, boozing, and cards.
The Democrats met a month later, also in Baltimore. Their convention was stormy, to say the least. Martin Van Buren was considered the front running candidate, but his nomination was blocked by forces which opposed his opposition to the Texas annexation. Finally, after eight rounds of balloting, James K. Polk, former Speaker of the House and Andrew Jackson protégé, was picked as a compromise candidate. The vice-presidential nod went to Pennsylvania lawyer George M. Dallas.

The Candidates

Democrat: James Polk
James who? That’s what most people in the country went around saying after the Democratic pick was announced. But Polk, former governor of Tennessee as well as House Speaker, was admired by many Democrats as a solid and loyal party member. The Whigs hated Polk. On Polk’s last day as Speaker of the House, Henry Clay had made a special trip over from the Senate to shout from the visitor’s gallery: “Go home, God damn you. Go home where you belong!”

Whig: Henry Clay
Clay had influenced American politics for 25 years as House Speaker, Senator and party leader. This was his third try for the Presidency, after 1824 and 1832, and he wanted it badly.

The Campaign

The Whigs thought gleefully went after Polk’s obscurity. Staying “on-message,” they made derisive comments to newspaper editors all over the country: “Who is James K. Polk?” they cried. “Good God, what a nomination.” They claimed that the very raccoons in the forests of Tennessee were now singing:

“Ha, ha, ha, what a nominee
Is Jimmy Polk of Tennessee!”

You couldn’t call Henry Clay obscure, but the Democrats fired back at something else—the candidate’s supposed baggage train of gambling, dueling, womanizing and, by the Eternal!, swearing. An alleged Protestant minister wrote a letter published in numerous Democratic papers claiming to have heard Clay curse extensively during a steamboat trip. A pamphlet entitled “Henry Clay’s Moral Fitness for President” claimed that Clay had violated each of the Ten Commandments with malice and lasciviousness aforethought: “The history of Mr. Clay’s debaucheries and midnight revelries in Washington is too shocking, too disgusting, to appear in public print.” Another popular leaflet “Twenty-one Reasons Why Clay Should Not Be Elected”—listed as Reason Two that “Clay spends his days at the gambling table and his nights in a brothel.”
Clay was also accused of being a white slaver (“If we cannot have black slaves we must have white ones,” he is most improbably quoted as saying). And the Democrats hammered again and again at the “corrupt bargain,” he and John Quincy Adams supposedly made to steal the Presidency from Jack in 1828.
Not a great deal of this was true about Clay, of course, but he played enough cards, drank enough liquor, and had participated in at least one duel, so some of the mud stuck. It was much harder to slander James K. Polk, a man so thoroughly colorless that his nickname was “Polk the Plodder.”
The Whigs tried to brand Polk as a man who owned slaves, in order to elicit votes from abolitionists, but this was a little tricky, since both Polk and Clay were slave-owners. The Whigs got around this by claiming it was all a matter of degree—that Polk was really “an ultra slaveholder,” in slavery “up to his ears.” In other words, much more pregnant than Clay. One Whig newspaper carried a story claiming that Polk had branded the initials J.K.P onto the shoulders of a group of forty of his slaves. This was so patently untrue that the paper was forced to print a retraction.

The Winner:
The term “manifest destiny” was not coined by New York journalist John L. O’Sullivan until 1845, but that’s what the 1844 election was all about. Polk was firmly in favor of annexation—not only of Texas, but of Oregon Territory, as well—hence his famous campaign slogan, “Fifty-four-Forty or Fight!” which referred to the northernmost latitude to which America should extend. Clay waffled on annexation, which cost Southern votes and annoyed Northerners. And there was one other factor, an effective third party outing by the Liberty Party of New York—a group of Abolitionists and radicals—who garnered 62,000 votes nationwide.
In the end, Polk beat Clay by only about 38,000 popular votes, although he bested him in the Electoral College 170 to 105.

The Nasty Personal Smear That Henry Clay Only Wished Were True.
Democrats accused Clay, an admitted lover of gambling, of having invented poker. In fact, Clay was only a superb practitioner of the newfangled bluffing card game based on the English game of brag.

Hey, Go Easy on That Stuff!
In desperation to find something to smear Polk with, Sam Houston, hero of the Texas war against Mexico, proclaimed that moderate drinker Polk was “victim of the use of water as a beverage.”

Voter Fraud, 1844 Style.
In New York City, New York bosses used their influence to naturalize thousands of Irish immigrants so that they could vote for Polk. The Whigs replied by telling the Irish that Clay’s name was really “Patrick O’Clay,” from the ould sod.
In what is probably the first floating voter fraud, a Democratic Party boss in New Orleans sent a boatload of Democrats up the Mississippi. They stopped and voted in three different places.

Peeling that bark

2008-02-26T16:13:00.000-08:00

Yet another minor Obama slander has arisen today that may give a taste of the general election to come. Introducing a John McCain rally in Cincinnati, radio host Bill Cunningham repeatedly called Obama by all three names, as in “at one point, the media will quit taking sides in this thing and start covering Barack Hussein Obama” and saying that the journalists should “peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.” Crowd-pleasing stuff, at a McCain rally. Although McCain hastened to distance himself from these remarks, it's foretaste of things to come. It's also a haunting memory from one of the nastiest elections in the last 20 years, the 1988 contest between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, when Bush's campaign manager Lee Atwater famously said, re Dukakis: "I'll strip the bark off that little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate."
The result was one of the most racially divisive elections in American history. "Stripping the bark"--perhaps William Safire can track down the derivation of that one-- never bodes well in American politics.

Turban Tornado

2008-02-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

The current dust-up over the photograph of Obama in traditional Somali dress is a sample of both how nasty and how absurd things are getting between the two camps. Sure, Obama looks ridiculous with a turban--so did Michael Dukakis with a tanker's helmet on in 1988. While it's highly doubtful Hillary ordered the photo released, it is possible someone in the campaign did. On the other hand, numerous photographs, parodies, and cackling laugh tracks of Hillary have abounded during this campaign -- did none of these come from Obama sympathizers?
Sadly for Hillary supporters, this kind of thing is one more reason why she would have trouble winning in the general election. She simply cannot defend herself from attack without her opponent making her seem shrill. The story's coming out now about Hillary's frustration with the campaign are understandable. The press had already lionized Obama and even "pre-martyred" him (see yesterday's New York Times article about the "hushed worry" over Obama's safety). And she is left to flail away. If she did release the photo, it certainly has flopped. Nothing less than a shot of the young Obama vacuuming up a line of coke will do....

The Daily Howl

2008-02-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

Just back from spending a few days vacation with my daughter at the Great Wolf Lodge -- a huge indoor water park built around a rustic Alaskan theme: fake logs, fake fireplaces, fake Wolf legends. The waterpark itself has some slides that are three stories high, where one sits on a raft as if one were running white water, and I have to say that it can be a great deal of fun to tear down these chutes in ones bathing suit while outside snow flurries through the air (we were in the Poconos, but there are other Great Wolves around the country).
Like going to Disneyworld, however, vacationing at Great Wolf takes stamina and a stuffed wallet. The park, hallways, restaurants, and gift shots were filled with families and small children; the noise level was set to crescendo. And the level of desire in the air (really greed, let's face it) was off the charts.
All sort of like presidential campaigning, right? Standing wearily in the Wolf's Starbucks early one AM, I looked down at a copy of the New York Daily News to see a picture of John McCain and wife on a factory visit in Wayne, MI, both wearing safety glasses that made them look like they were in an S/M relationship. They looked particularly grim. Why so glum, John, I wondered--then turned to read that the New York Times had a run a story about McCain having a possibly inappropriate relationship with a female lobbyist. Despite my weariness and the fact that a three year old belonging to another "Dad"-- as the Wolf calls us, as in "Dad, how many of those Magic Quest wands would you like at forty bucks a pop?" -- standing right in front of me appearing to have pee trickling down her leg -- I grinned to myself. At last, the campaign is beginning, I thought. This was reinforced yesterday by Hillary's accusation that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting her Nafta stance in flyers handed out in Ohio. "Taking a page from Karl Rove's playbook" is the line, one that rings through American history. If it's not Karl Rove, it's Lee Atwater in 1988 or William McKinley's campaign manager in 1896, Mark Harris, or some other evil genius.
But it isn't. It's just presidential politics, the wolf is howling at last. Nice.

Andrew Jackson vs. John Q. Adams: Now there was a dirty election!

2008-02-21T08:01:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing--or perhaps just because a curious boredom has set in listening to pundits speculate how Hillary is going to revive her campaign, or what Obama's "change" truly means, or just how John McCain will unite both wings of his party--here is the story of one of my favorite elections in Ameican history.

1828 really begins with Andrew Jackson’s anger.
Jackson—the six-foot tall ex-frontiersman hero of New Orleans, the man who as a boy of thirteen in the Revolutionary War received a saber slash across the head for refusing to shine the boots of a British officer, and who then survived smallpox and the deaths of his mother and two brothers and grew up to defeat not only the British in 1814, but also the Creeks, Seminoles and Spanish—well, Jackson was not a guy you wanted to make mad.
And John Quincy Adams had crossed him, big time—or so Jackson thought. So convinced was Jackson that Adams had entered into a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay to win the Presidency that Jackson’s Tennessee delegation nominated him for President in 1825, and Jackson resigned his Senate seat and went at it.
Most serious historians today feel that Adams did not bargain with Clay for the Presidency in 1824—but this was of little good to Adams at the time. Even before Jackson began running, the portents weren’t really wonderful. On his Inauguration Day, Adams had to compete for attention with a traveling circus that had come into town, not an easy thing in America in the early 1800s. Then he and his wife Louisa discovered that the Monroes had left the White House in a shambles—the furniture was so battered, the place such a horrible mess, that Louisa actually invited members of the public in to take a look, lest she be blamed.
Adams didn’t help his own case any. In his first annual state of the state message (in those days, delivered as a letter to the Congress, rather than given as a speech) Adams focused not on foreign affairs or the future of westward expansion, but…on establishing a National Observatory, a series of astronomical outposts that would be “the lighthouses of the sky,” as he put it. In this Adams was ahead of his time—in the same message, he also lobbied for a regulated system of weights and measures—but it would be akin to a modern president giving an hour long State of the Union address passionately advocating the adoption of the metric system.
Things got little better as the John Quincy Adams administration continued—the whole of it, according even to a sympathetic biographer of Adams “was a hapless failure and best forgotten, save for the personal anguish it cost him.” With cries of “Corruption and Bargain” ringing from Jackson allies in the West (who now included Adams’s own vice-president, John C. Calhoun), Adams was on the defensive at every turn. No wonder he began to feel he was surrounded by “conspirators,” that he was being tried by a “secret inquisition.” He was. A spiteful opposition in Congress thwarted him at every turn, foreign and domestic.

Finally, the Popular Vote
The era of America’s popularly elected presidents was now at hand. In the burgeoning, westward-looking new democracy, the old caucus system was dead and voting by the people had arisen. All but two states now picked presidential electors by popular vote. With the easing of restrictions on voting rights (owning land was no longer a prerequisite, although being white and a man was) more and more people went to the polls.
Presidential elections were about to become spectator sport, bear-baiting fest, gladiatorial contest and blood-letting all thrown into one.

Two Political Parties Again
Predictably, the Republican Party now split into two factions. One, which supported John Quincy Adams and his vice-presidential pick, Treasury Secretary Richard Rush, called itself the National Republicans. They were the party of the old line Republicans, the wealthy merchant classes, and the landed aristocracy.
Andrew Jackson and his running mate, John C. Calhoun, were backed by the western small farmers and the eastern laboring men. At first they called themselves the “Friends of Andrew Jackson,” then Democratic-Republicans and, finally, Democrats. This group would form the core of the future Democratic Party.

The Candidates

National-Republican: John Quincy Adams
It was possible that John Adams—now 61 years old—was running for President just for the sheer, stubborn pride of it, because the previous years had been no picnic. At one point, he was stalked by the first Presidential would-be assassin, a crazed doctor who (in a day when any citizen could, and did, just walk into the White House to see the President) talked openly about killing Adams. (Adams actually met with him and gave him a stern talking-to.) It’s no wonder that historians now speculate that Adams was clinically depressed going into the 1828 campaign.

Democrat-Republican: Andrew Jackson
The General—also 61—was probably at the peak of his powers. Driven both by his sense that the White House had been stolen from him in 1824 and by his deep, sincere, life-long desire to wrest power from the privileged and place it in the hands of the people, he envisioned himself as a president for the common man, leading with his beloved wife Rachel by his side.
Only one part of this dream would come true.

The Campaign
Well, with one party claiming to defend the nation against “howling Democracy” and the other battling “a lordly, purse-proud aristocracy” is it any wonder things soon got very, very malicious?
The campaign got underway after both candidates were nominated in September of 1827 (since each party still operated without national nominating conventions, both Jackson and Adams were put forward in a series of special state nominating conventions and mass meetings.)
Jackson had the immediate edge because, well ahead of his time, he had understood the need for party organizations in each state (“You must avail yourself of the physical force of an organized body of men,” he told supporters). Soon there were “Friends of Jackson” in all parts of the country, members of state legislatures, running newspapers, pushing for the Old Hickory, The Hero of New Orleans. These “Hurra Boys” wrote political songs, printed up pamphlets, and held barbecues and rallies for Jackson.
John Quincy Adams called the Jackson men “skunks of party slander,” but they attacked him with a will, and very effectively. “His habits and principles are not congenial with…the notions of a democratic people,” one Jackson supporter wrote. Others whispered about Adams’s “foreign wife” (Louisa was English.) When the President bought a billiard table and set of ivory chessmen for the White House he was accused of purchasing a “gaming table and gambling furniture.” Adams was called a monarchist and anti-religious, because he traveled on the Sabbath. And he was of course smeared by his association and friendship with Secretary of State Henry Clay, who supposedly owed his position to the “corrupt bargain.” (Clay was not a statesman, snarled The New Hampshire Patriot, but “a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire [Adams].”)
Adams supporters finally got organized and returned fire with a vengeance. Jackson, they said, had aided Aaron Burr when the latter conspired against the union in 1806, and had invaded Florida and nearly started an international incident. In fact, he had the personality of a dictator. Not only that, he couldn’t spell (supposedly, he spelled “Europe” “Urope”).
The Republicans also published an extremely nasty but delightfully entitled little pamphlet Reminiscences; or, an Extract from the Catalogue of General Jackson’s Youthful Indiscretions between the Age of Twenty-three and Sixty. It enumerated all of Jackson’s purported fights, duels, brawls, and shoot-outs. It also said he was an adulterer, a gambler, a cockfighter, a slave trader, a drunkard, a thief and a liar. Also, his wife was really fat (Rachel did have a bit of a weight problem).
There was very little serious examination of the issues, such as rural America’s desperately needed public works projects or tariff protection for New England manufacturers. Jackson was known for being evasive about what he really thought about anything – a fact which he tried to turn into a virtue: “My real friends want no information from me on the subject of internal improvements and manufacturies….Was I know to come forward and reiterate my public opinions on these subjects I would be charged with electioneering.”
Adams’s position was well-known—he was pro-tariff, pro-public works—but his voice was lost in the din of battle.

The Winner: Andrew Jackson
Balloting took place on different days in different states, from September to November, 1828. America’s first popular vote turned out Jackson, 647,276, Adams 508,074. The campaign had been so bitter that neither candidate made the customary post-election courtesy calls on the other (and John Quincy Adams became the second American president, after his father, John Adams, who did not attend the inauguration of his successor.)
After Jackson took the oath of office in March, the streets of Washington were filled with massive crowds of common people who had come from hundreds of miles away to view this historic day. Jackson supporters famously surged into the White House, wiped their feet on delicate rugs, broke antique chairs and ate and drank everything in sight. Thousands of dollars worth of glass and china were broken, fights ensued, and women feared for their virtue. In the end, the exhausted Jackson slipped out the back door to a local inn to get some sleep.

John Q. Adams, Pimp
As always when people really want to get dirty, they go below the belt. In this case, they claimed with utter seriousness but high absurdity that the prudish Adams, when minister to the Russian court of Czar Alexander I, had offered his wife Lousia’s maid to the Czar as a concubine. That there was a kernel of innocent truth here—Adams had quite literally introduced the young woman to the Czar—made the lie easier to swallow, and Adams was now “the Pimp.”

Andrew Jackson, Bigamist.
The Republicans really upped the ante here. Jackson’s wife Rachel had first been married to the abusive and pathologically jealous Lewis Robards, who had finally left her to get a divorce. She and Jackson, then a young lawyer, fell in love and got married in 1791, under the impression that Rachel was already divorced. She wasn’t, since Robards had delayed getting the divorce decree. As soon as he did, the two remarried.
Rachel—whom Jackson loved deeply—was now subjected to the most vicious slanders. Republicans said that she was a “whore” and a “dirty, black wench” given to “open and notorious lewdness.” “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest office of this free and Christian land,” wrote The Cincinnati Gazette. Slanders of this kind were repeated ad infinitum.
The hope was apparently that Jackson might loose his cool and challenge someone to a duel—perhaps even kill one of his tormentors. But what happened was that Rachel, who was overweight and had some health problems, took these attacks quite literally to heart. In December 1828, after Jackson had won the election, she died of a heart attack. Jackson grieved profoundly—and was as wrathful as an Old Testament prophet. At her funeral he intoned: “In the presence of this dear saint I can and do forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy.”

Most Vicious Broadside
Perhaps the nastiest political attack on Jackson was the infamous Coffin Handbill, a widely-circulated anti Jackson handbill displaying six coffins under the headline: “Some account of some of the Bloody Deeds of General Jackson.” It went on to tell the story of the six militiamen whose order of execution Jackson approved during the War of 1812. The men were the leaders of a mutiny of 200 militiamen who thought their terms of service were up. The army disagreed. All the men were court-martialed, but, except for these six ringleaders, they were merely fined. Jackson signed the execution papers and at the time there was little fuss made about it. Now, however, the coffin handbill held him out to be bloodthirsty and merciless: “Sure he will spare! Sure JACKSON yet/Will all reprieve but one – /O hark! Those shrieks! That cry of death!/The deadly deed is done!”

Most Comprehensive Why You Shouldn’t Vote for Him Statement:
This, from an anti-Jackson pamphlet, pretty much covers it all:
“You know that he is no jurist, no politician; that he is destitute of historical, political, or statistical knowledge; that he is unacquainted with the orthography, concord, and government of his language; you know that he is a man of no labor, no patience, no investigation; in short just that his whole recommendation is animal fierceness and organic energy. He is wholly unqualified by education, habit, and temper for the station of the President.”

Stolen words

2008-02-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

For political junkies it's nice to see today's Wisconsin primary important again. Wisconsin, of course, was a big state for John F. Kennedy's campaign in 1960, when they beat Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in that primary. Humphrey's people, and the press, for the most part, tried to say that Kennedy's victory was due only to the large Catholic population in the state, which enraged both Jack and Robert Kennedy. And so the Kennedy's went at West Virginia with a vengeance, spreading around plenty of Joe Sr.'s dough--Protestant ministers were a favorite beneficiary of Kennedy "donations"--and destroyed Humphrey.

By the way, it's fun too see a nice little plagiarism scandal today, with Hillary accusing Obama of stealing some juicy lines from his friend, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. It might have been nice had Obama given Patrick a little nod, but as plagiarism goes, this is chump change. I don't usually agree with Obama's "Oh, my god, these horrible mean Clintons are saying nasty things about poor,poor me!" stance, but in this case he's right to dismiss it. Politicians are not a notoriously original lot, as we know--stolen words and ideas are their currency.

Not-Quite-Presidents-Day

2008-02-18T06:25:00.000-08:00

While I realize it’s the custom for us to celebrate the lives of our most illustrious chief executives on this day, I like to observe a moment of silence for those also-rans who, er, also ran—the obscure would-be presidential candidates of history.

And so a tip of my hat to….

Lewis Cass, former Michigan governor, who ran as a Democrat against Zachary Taylor in 1848. Cass was a nice enough fellow, but his name rhymed with both “ass” and “gas.” Predictably enough, he was satirized in cartoons as “General Gass,” with cannons farting noxious fumes out of his belly and ass, or as “The Gas Bag,” with an enormous rear end, ready to lift off into the sky, hot air balloon style. It was claimed that Cass had sold white men into slavery, not true. Whigs also said that he was guilty of graft in a previous job as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, but this was false. Finally, they just gave up and called him a “pot-belied, mutton-headed cucumber,” which seemed to sum it all up….

Winfield Scott, one of the most pompous men ever to run for president—that includes Mitt Romney. Scott, who lost to Democrat Franklin Pierce in 1852, spoke to his listeners with the all unctuousness of the most politically correct twentieth-first-century Presidential candidate: “Fellow citizens. When I say fellow citizens I mean native and adopted as well as those who intend to become citizens.” When Scott heard an Irish accent he would exclaim: “I hear that rich brogue. It makes me remember the noble deeds of Irishmen, many of whom I have led to battle and victory….”

Let us not forget poor Horatio Seymour and Horace Greely, who were destroyed by Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and 1872, respectively. Seymour, a governor of New York, was so nervous at his nomination that he actually mounted the stage at the Democratic convention and declined the honor in inadvertent A-B rhyme (“God bless you for your kindness to me, but your candidate I cannot be.”), then burst into tears backstage (“Pity me! Pity me!”) before finally accepting.
Republicans gleefully seized on Seymour’s tentative acceptance of the Democratic nomination by mocking “The Great Decliner” in what became a famous little ditty:

“There’s a queer sort of chap they call Seymour,
A strange composition called Seymour,
Who stoutly declines,
Then happiness finds
In accepting, does Horatio Seymour.”

Greeley, in 1872, was a bald, rotund, atheist, vegetarian newspaperman running against a famous war hero. Need we say more? After 31 out of 37 states went for Grant, Greeley declared “I am the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office,” Shortly after the election, Greeley began to suffer from hallucinations and was taken to a private sanitarium. “Utterly ruined beyond hope,” as he wrote, he waited for “the night [to] close its jaws on me forever.” He died November 29. Grant attended his funeral…

I’d like to put in a word here for the Reverend Silas C. Swallow, Prohibition Party candidate in 1904, just because I love his name….

1904 also featured Democratic nominee Judge Alton Parker, running against Theodore Roosevelt. The extremely colorless Parker is probably the most obscure major Presidential candidate of all time. Parker—whom Roosevelt (who could be quite mean) referred to as “the neutral-tinted individual”—lacked almost any campaigning or speaking skills and spent much of his time riding off alone on his Hudson Valley farm. The best the Democrats could claim for their man was that, if elected, Parker would “set his face sternly against Executive usurpation of legislative and judicial functions.”

Another obscure candidate was Democrat John Davis who ran against the popular Calvin Coolidge in 1924. I love this quote from him: “I went all around the country telling people I was going to be elected and I knew I hadn’t any more chance than a snowball in hell.”
One or two current candidates feel just that way, I’ll bet….

Finally, a nod to Republican Alfred “Alf” Landon, Kansas governor. Not all that obscure perhaps, but I’ve always loved the guy. He ran against FDR in 1936 and lost by just a horrendously embarrassing margin—11 million popular votes, and 523 to 8, if you can believe it, in the Electoral College. Alf was a kind of rumpled, shaggy guy, a bit like his name. In one of the first uses of a candidate groomer, the Republicans hired a film director named Ted Bohn to teach Landon not to smile with his mouth hanging open, to walk slightly ahead when in a group in order to dominate pictures, and to shake hands with his chin up to give the impression of firmness. All to no avail, of course.
One of my favorite stories from this campaign is how the Republicans tried to manipulate the media, asking the Associated Press to always identify Landon in its stories with the tag “budget-balancer.”
The AP said it would, but only if it could tag Roosevelt as “humanity’s savior.”

Counting Change

2008-02-12T05:58:00.000-08:00

There's the feeling in the air that we could on the verge of something historic here, as Barack Obama pulls down the states--Washington State, Lousiana, Nebraska and Maine--and today goes into primaries in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. It is beginning to feel like excitement of 1968, when Robert Kennedy jumped into the Democratic primaries, fueled by young people desperate for a change, or 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt stepped in, also running as a candidate of transformation. Hillary in the meantime is saying that it is all a counting game--that the delegates of Texas and Ohio, on March 4, will be what she needs to carry her over the top,but politics is never simply about counting. If it was, Harry Truman would not have won in 1948.
It still isn't over yet and there are a significant number of people who think Hillary Clinton is the most qualified Democratic candidate, but numerous Democrats are making their choices on who they think can beat John McCain in the fall, and a goodly percentage of them have decided that Obama is that person.
At my daughter's elementary school yesterday, the principal told a gathering of young students that they might do well to pay attention to what was going on in the national political scene, that they were living in historic times. They are not too young to understand this. When I was ten years old, John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon (by a hair) for the presidency and even my brother and sister and myself knew that he was something different than the grey old Eisenhower, the only president we had ever known. On the morning after the election, my mother opened the bedroom door and said, rather grumpily, "Well, your friend Kennedy won." For me, that morning was the beginning of the 1960s, an extraordinary era of change.

Across the Country

2008-02-08T06:58:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not writing for a while, but I have been touring a lot in the last week promoting Anything for a Vote. Or at least taking the modern-day author's version of a tour--sitting in my bathrobe in my ancient desk chair up in my attic study talking to radio stations on the phone. Perhaps 50 in all, and my voice, a hoarse rasp, now reflects it.
But there is something wonderful about what they call a "Satellite Media Tour." Put on hold and inevitably listening to the local news for about a minute before talking to the host, one gets the sense of skimming across the country, just below the cloud cover. You hear about snow closings in New England, traffic snarls in New York, county road construction in Iowa, pouring rain in Portland. Of course, the commercials--there was Planned Parenthood in the east, Bible Belt church announcements in the West. Plus a lot of pitches for home real estate seminars, debt management, used cars, telephone sales--harbingers, perhaps, of a reeling economy.
Coming into the actual talk program there is usually a blast of rock music, a whoosh as if an airplane engine is taking off. On the more conservative stations, a particularly popular sound effect this week has been the clip of Hillary laughing, echoing endlessly, like The Wicked Witch of the West. But the hosts, whether liberal or conservative or ideologically neutral (at least professionally) were unfailingly interested and courteous, except for one national Fox radio personality whose name rhymes with "sow" and who acted like it (sorry, don't mean to insult pigs). And I had one poor host in Indiana who was horrified to learn that Davy Crockett was anything but a frontier hero of epic proportions (Davy was the Congressmen who, in 1836, infamously claimed that Martin Van Buren wore women's clothes).
But Super Tuesday had callers and hosts incredibly excited -- I have never seen so much interest in an American election campaign. Will Obama and Hillary destroy each other in their quest for victory? (There seems to be a longing in some liberal circles that the two, like squabbling spouses, unite and form one team, although there is little consensus on who would be Pres, who Vice-Pres.) Will John McCain, especially now that Mitt Romney has dropped out and Mike Huckabee made an unexpectedly strong showing, be able to placate the conservative wing of the party? On one station there was speculation about a third party run within the GOP, which caused me to relate an anecdote from 1912. Then, Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican party in two, leading one Republican to quip: "The only question is, which corpse gets the flowers." (Woodrow Wilson's Democrats, naturally, won over a divided GOP.)
Back from radio tour of the country, I can only say that we've never seen an election like this one. There is so much more to come.

At Last....

2008-02-05T06:22:00.000-08:00

Super Tuesday, Tsunami Tuesday, Historic Tuesday, whatever you want to call it, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, is here. Twenty-four states voting, 3,156 delegates at stake--the biggest presidential primary day ever. Many states are testing new voter ID laws or computerized voting systems, absentee ballots are expected to be at an all time high, since new laws in fifteen states allow for them to be cast without the voter having to provide a reason (such as illness or military service). All of this could complicate the vote tabulation, so it may be a long night before our results are clear.
On the Republican side, most observers are betting on John McCain to be bested by Mitt Romney. The Democratic side is a little bit more difficult to call. Hillary has lost her once-commanding lead, but is still powerful and many politicos think she and Obama will end up roughly even and continue to slug it out in the months to come. I think that, if there is going to be a surprise, it will be that Obama has surged far more than the polls are showing. No reason for thinking this except for gut instinct and more small anecdote: a friend of mine ordered a lawn sign from the Obama campaign ten days ago, and as of Saturday it had still not arrived -- demand was too high. Finally, he went to a local Obama HQ here in New Jersey and managed to snag one, but it was difficult. Quite often insignificant things like lawn signs can be bellweathers in tight elections.
We'll see. In the meantime, anybody with a free moment this AM, please tune into MSNBC at 10:30, where you'll find me talking with Joe Scarborough about dirty tricks present and past on a special extended Election Day "Morning Joe" show.

A Historical Moment

2008-02-04T06:26:00.000-08:00

I'm talking about last night's Giant win over the Patriots in the Super Bowl, of course. Those of us who have lived in the region for long years are still wiping the astonishment out of our eyes. It wasn't supposed to happen but it did, against a team filled with supreme talent, who also had themselves a reputation for dirty tricks.
Speaking of which, William Safire's New York Times column "OnLanguage" yesterday featured political dirty tricks and, of course, yours truly and Anything for a Vote. Read it here. Safire's researcher had contacted me a few weeks back to ask about the derivation of the phrase dirtry tricks; with the help of Oxford University Press researcher Ben Zimmer I came up with an answer. Space didn't permit Safire to use my whole reply, so here it is below.
The phrase "dirty tricks" was used in a non-political context as far back as the late 17th century, when Thomas Traherne wrote in "Christian Ethicks": "But a man that is a resolved and stable Friend,..[will] continue to serve and love his Friend, though he shews him some dirty Tricks." (This is a lesson in turning the other cheek not many a politician today could practice.)
George Washington, while still commanding general of American Revolutionary forces, wrote of a British peace proposal, "they are practising such low and dirty tricks, that Men of Sentiment and honor must blush at their Villainy, among other manoeuvres." Washington was able to run unopposed for the presidency in 1789 and 1792 and therefore missed out on some of the dirty tricks leveled at future candidates, but even he complained, by his second term, that he had become, as his vice-president John Adams so nicely put it, "the Butt of Party Malevolence."
Throughout the 19th century it became quite common for loyalists of one party to accuse their opponents of "dirty tricks" during campaign season. In this context, dirty tricks meant slanderous remarks as well as underhanded dealings. On Feb. 5, 1828, the pro-Jacksonian newspaper the United States Telegraph carried a headline accusing its rival paper, "The Intelligencer at its dirty tricks again!" And on Aug. 8 of that year, the Telegraph detailed the worst of "all the little dirty tricks lately played off by the 'moral and religious party,' (as the friends of Adams have the impudence to call themselves)."
Interestingly enough, in the 20th century, "dirty tricks" came to be applied to covert military operations. During World War II, the espionage operations of the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA) was known as "the Department of Dirty Tricks" and by the early 1950s, "dirty tricks" were primarily associated with the activities of the CIA. In the 1960s, possibly because of the pervasive cultural influence of the CIA during the Cold War years, the phrase "dirty tricks" was again used in the context of campaign activities, but now having the sense not of slanderous name-calling, however, scurillous that might be, but of secret operations meant to sabotage. The prime example of this--and the election which elevated the phrase "dirty tricks" to the public prominence it now holds, was 1972. There, Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) planned dirty tricks which included the Watergate break-in. And we find, on November 8, 1972, The Washington Post's masthead editorial:, "The Republican Department of Dirty Tricks" ("In the jargon of professional intelligence agents, this is what is sometimes known as a Department of Dirty Tricks").

Hitting the Airwaves

2008-02-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

Today and next week I hit the airwaves to discuss dirty tricks past and present-- don't you love it that Mitt Romney in Wednesday's debate accused John McCain of falsifying Mitt's ideas about withdrawing from Iraq. The quote:
“I have never, ever supported a specific timetable” for withdrawing troops."[McCain’s accusation] sort of falls into the dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found reprehensible.”
Of course, Mitt was standing in the Ronald Reagan Library at the time, with first widow Nancy by his side, but still...Ronald Reagan, saint though the Republicans would have him to be, certainly indulged in dirty tricks, which included having Jimmy Carter's private debate briefing book stolen and may have included a deal with the Iranians holdinng Amerian hostages captive not to release them until Reagan became president.
But nice try, Mitt.
Anyway, if you want to hear me talking more and more about how history repeats itself --insistently and with purpose-- in American presidential elections-- you can find me on radio across the country for the next week. Today's stations and times are:
7:35 am KLPW-AM/metro St Louis MO .
8:05 am WAQY-FM/Springfield MA-Hartford CT
8:35 am BizRadio Network/Houston-Dallas TX
9:00 am WTIC-AM/Hartford CT
9:10 am WBMQ-AM/Savannah GA 9:40 am KFRU-AM/Columbia MO 10:00am KPOJ-AM/Portland OR
10:15 am *WAXY-AM/Miami FL
10:30 am *WZLX-FM/Boston MA 11:00am *Lynn Woolley Show—statewide TX 11:40 am Traders Nation Radio-national
3:00 pm Pippin Productions-national
4:30 pm WINA-AM/Charlottesville VA

And then there were four...

2008-01-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

With the withdrawals of Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards yesterday, the American presidential primary of 2008 enters its most dramatic phase. There has literally never been one like this, with its accelerated schedule leading up to Super Tuesday and its four candidate, any one of whom could take his or her respective party's nomination.
Living in New Jersey, one of the Super Tuesday states, I am now watching campaign commercials. In the first I've seen (from the Obama and Hillary camps), Obama wins hands down--it's a powerful series of shots featuring clips from his impassioned speeches, focusing on the economy, whereas Hillary's shows rather uninspired shots of the candidate with superimposed quotes from the NY Times' endorsement of her, as if she need not speak for herself. Fairly boring stuff, although I hear there is a forthcoming spot which shows a skydiver in free fall (our poor economy) to be halted at the last moment by a parachute.
What can you say about our lost brethren, Rudy and John? Rudy, as far as I was concerned, was far more interesting to watch. His kids hated him, too many wives, really bad campaign strategy, that weird habit of biting his lips--there has never been a New York mayor as president (although Teddy Roosevelt was a former New York police commissioner) and I guess people weren't going to start now with Rudy. As for John Edwards? While he had his loyal supporters, Obama really stole any populist thunder he might have been able to unleash. I am sorry we will now not hear the end of the Edwards Love Child saga, but on the other hand, with Hillary and Obama, Mitt and John, the dirty tricks are sure to be flying fast and furious.

Sunshine for McCain

2008-01-30T06:31:00.000-08:00

Florida went John McCain's way yesterday, as he nailed Mitt Romney 35% to 30%. Poor Rudy Giuliani was a distant third, just ahead of Mike Huckabee, and is expected to endorse his pal McCain today. Rudy's campaign never did get off the ground, despite national poll numbers in the stratosphere when he began. But a combination of poor strategic thinking and the negatives that began churning against him--his kids don't like him, his ex-wives were legion, Bernie Kerik was indicated, and providing "9/11" as the answer to almost any question-- proved to be too much.
I think that in less than a week we'll know who the Republican nominee will be--when the dust settles on Feb 5. Super Tuesday, it will be John McCain.
The Democrats are a different matter. Hillary won the state by a lopsided margin, 50 to 33% but of course these delegates supposedly won't count, like those in Michigan, because they held their primaries earlier against party rules. However, if she manages to be able to seat them down the line, they will be quite useful, and it does provide her with a boost after her hard loss in South Carolina. However, it's a tight race that very well may be undecided past Tuesday.
The good news for everyone is that voter turnout was high, with one out of every 3 registered voters casting a ballot, in some counties much higher than that. In a primary, that's a good number.

Obama in a Saunter

2008-01-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

In the last week the Clinton campaign felt they were closing in on Barack Obama in South Carolina by using Bill Clinton to go after the Illinois Senator tooth and nail, but they were obviously way wrong. Barack kicked Hillary's pantsuit, winning with 55% of the vote to her 27% and Edwards' 18%. It wasn't just the black vote, as Obama garnered at least 25% of the white voters in South Carolina, as well.
This does not spell the death knell for Hillary, but the momentum Obama will have coming off such a resounding victory is going to be hard to contend with, especially in the next week, as candidates compete feverishly before the Feb. 5 Super Primary. Each has picked states that he or she needs to win in. Each will be going at it full force. We'll see if Hillary and Bill soften their tone about Obama a bit. Nothing succeeds like aggressive attack politics -- if they work. If they don't, they spatter back in the face of the attackers. Not that Obama hasn't used them himself, as I've been pointing out, only that he has so far been able to position himself as the victim of a Democratic establishment out to erase him.
Anything for a Vote note: On Friday Feb 1, you'll be able to hear me on radio stations across the country as I take to the airwaves prior to Super Tuesday for a Satellite Media Tour, talking about the book and primary goings-on. And for those of you blessed enough to reside in northeastern New Jersey, put Saturday afternoon Feb. 2 down on your calendars--I'll do a talk and book signing at 2 pm at the Barnes & Noble, 240 Rte 22 West, Springfield NJ.

Well. he might have told them to go to hell!

2008-01-23T09:03:00.000-08:00

It's fun to watch the criticism being leveled at former President Bill Clinton for taking such an active role in stumping for his wife and especially for going after Obama with both barrels firing. Today's NY Times has Obama snapping at reporters who ask him if Bill is "rattling" him and quotes David Axelrod, Obama's "chief strategist" as saying "We’re not interested in a rolling debate with a retired politician."
Dear, dear me--it's always quite funny when politicians sneeringly call other politicians "politicians." And retired, to boot! The implication of course is that Bill is not being "presidential." In fact, Obama supporter Tom Daschle comes right out and says that Clinton is "not keeping with the image of a former president." Let's see--what image would that be? Perhaps the one Harry Truman projected when he told voters in 1960: "If you vote for Richard Nixon you might go to hell!" Or Andrew Jackson ruminating after he left the White House that he should have shot Henry Clay and that it would have been nice if he had had a chance to hang John C. Calhoun. Or Teddy Roosevelt calling William Howard Taft "a fathead with the brains of a guinea pig." That kind of former President image? No, I guess Daschle means building houses or going on goodwill tours or playing golf, like a good little former President.
Obama seems likely to win in South Carolina on Saturday, but he needs to beware of acting as if he is unassailable simply because he is a black man running for president, just as Hillary cannot play the "woman" card too often. As for Bill? Well, at least, unlike his wife's opponents, he's keeping it real....

Gu-reeat Stuff!

2008-01-22T08:19:00.000-08:00

Is it not a wonderful thing to see Hillary and Obama sniping at each other, as they did in yesterday's debate? Ouch, it was nasty! Race was set aside (well, there was some discussion of Toni Morrison's comment that Bill Clinton was our "first black President," with Obama wondering about Bill's dancing style) but the two candidates accused each other of corruption, lying, and otherwise being ill-fashioned human beings. Hillary said Obama associated with slumlords; Obama repeated the Republican mantra that Hillary is really only a cut-out for Bill. And Poor John Edwards, like Jack Horner darting for a plumb, barely got a word in edgewise.
Reminds me of some of the great nasty exchanges in candidate history--most not contained in the tame debates of contemporary times, which began in 1960 and are creatures of television. Reagan telling Carter: "There you go again, Mr. President" barely measures up to some of the highly personal nastiness in American history (although in one of the 2004 vice-presidential debates I was pleased to see Edwards digging at Cheney because of the latter's lesbian daughter).
No, I'm talking about the likes of the Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates in 1858. This was during their senate race, but they presaged their presidential competition two years later. Honest Able could be quite droll; he had the habit of mocking Douglas’s rolling stentorian tones, sounding like Tony the Tiger as he satirizing the Little Giant’s “gu-reat pur-rinciple” of popular sovereignty. What popular sovereignty really meant, Lincoln would point out, was: “If one man chooses to make a slave of another, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.”
Or Theodore Roosevelt calling President William Howard Taft a "rat in a corner," or Thomas Dewey, certain of a victory which never came, telling President Harry Truman in 1948 to "keep his hands off" foreign policy. No incumbent president running here, so the candidates are taking it out on each other. We'll see who it backfires on. My guess is Hillary.....but it's great fun for a dirtytricksologist to watch.

Forty Years Ago, And Counting....

2008-01-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

Forty years ago at around this time, I was a senior at a Detroit high school avidly following a presidential race which bears more than a few similarities to the one going on right now. There was a divisive war and a charismatic Democratic candidate--Senator Eugene McCarthy, whose powerful second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary on March 12 was what helped convince the weary incumbent president Lyndon Baines Johnson to drop out of the running. Then, a few days later, Robert F. Kennedy jumped into the contest and the Democrats became a party divided against themselves.
And, as now, race was an issue. The previous summer, I had stood on my quiet block in northwestern Detroit listening to machine-gun fire and seeing smoke coming from downtown during riots which cost the lives of over 40 people, most of them black. The same thing had happened all over the country--in Newark, Watts, Harlem, Cleveland. House after house in Detroit went up for sale and white people headed for the suburbs.
Then, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis and it seemed that the world was truly spinning out of control (and by the time RFK was killed two months later, most of us were numb). Afraid of more racial violence, my high school simply let all of its (mostly white) student body out and told them to go home. I remember wandering the streets, trying to catch a bus, seeing the fear on people's faces (black and white) as they hurried down the streets.
A lot has changed since then. MLK Day is a national holiday and the fact that we have a serious black candidate for president is heartening. Unpleasant as the fighting between Hillary and Obama is as to who is the strongest supporter of civil rights (and believe me, even as they march together in an MLK Day parade today, their battle goes on, underground), there is hope of racial equality in America today, much more so than when machine-guns chattered in our cities and fires gutted the home of civilians, black and white....

Obama, Hillary--and Martin

2008-01-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

In this most exciting--and dirtiest--primary season in years, both races remain neck and neck, which is making the Feb. 5 Super-Mega-Primary Apocalypse Tuesday.
In Nevada, Hillary pulled out a win in the previously-obscure Nevada caucus--but Obama gets the most delegates--and Mitt Romney's victory there makes it two in a row for him. In South Carolina, McCain expunges the ghosts of 2000 and triumphs over Mike Huckabee, but Huckabee still looks very strong in the South.
But charges of dirty tricks are flying fast and furious. Bill Clinton claimed that Hispanic voters (who ultimately voted for Hillary) who were members of the Culinary Union (whose leadership supported Obama) had been told they could not get time off to vote unless they voted for Obama. Of course, this was denied by both the union leadership and the Obama campaign. In return, Obama aides accused the Clinton campaign of making polling phone calls which markedly used Obama's full name--Barack Hussein Osama--whenever referring to the candidate.
Most dirty tricks in America's past presidential elections focus on sexual scandal, religion or race, and race appears to be at the center of this close Democratic struggle going forward. Interesting, of course, on the eve of Martin Luther King day.....

Going South in the South

2008-01-17T06:13:00.000-08:00

The South Carolina primary, coming up this Saturday, is getting dirtier and dirtier, as an article in the NY Times attests today. It is not only the racial stuff we spoke about the other day, but the emails about Romney's Mormon religion and Obama attending a radical Jihadist school in Jakarta. Old news, but some people can't resist. The stories about the John Edwards love child seem to have died down a bit--as he has--but now come television commercials aimed directly at Mike Huckabee's supposedly lenient record on crime while Governor of Arkansas. In the fine old tradition of the Republican Willie Horton attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988, the spots (from a group calling itself Victims Voice) feature an appeal from a mother whose daughter was raped and killed by a convict Huckabee agreed to release on parole.
Some of us may find this ridiculous--turning a candidate's record around one event in which so many others have a hand is highly simplistic--but make no mistake about it, this is very powerful stuff to many voters, even if they might not admit it. No one talking to a pollster of journalist says, yeah, bring on the dirty tricks, I love 'em. But spots like those produced by Victims Voice burrow in like ticks. It's like the Swift Boat for Truth attacks against Kerry in 2004. Hard to forget them, even if you felt they were scurrilous. These attacks have (and are intended to have) a kind of populist air to them, as if it's just folks talking over the back fence, passing on the real scoop. You see it all over American history, from the first attacks leveled at John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800 to newspapers whispering that Abraham Lincoln was a secret "nutmeg dealer" (a seller of aphrodisiacs). This is why current-day candidates like Obama and John McCain, whose crucifixion in South Carolina in 2000 is legendary, are fighting back hard, McCain even posting a "Truth Squad" section on his web site to fight the attacks against him.
Should be interesting. By the way, anyone who wants to hear me discussing dirty tricks history can listen in to the Dennis Praeger Show today on KRLA in Los Angeles at 10 PST, or catch me with Jerry Doyle on his show Friday 1:15 PST on the Talk Radio network.

When in Michigan.....

2008-01-15T10:50:00.000-08:00

The Michigan primary is today, and with only the Republican votes counting--since the Democrats took away the state's delegates for moving up its primary--it looks like a tight one between Romney and John McCain. Romney may have a bit of an edge because his father, George, was a popular Michigan governor and former head of American Motors (who gave us the Rambler, thank you very much). He is not so much embracing his roots as giving them a bear hug. While I am not a big Romney fan, I am pleased, having been born and raised in Michigan, to see him extolling Vernors ginger ale, the woody elixir of the gods native to that state. Even though Vernors is now owned by a huge conglomerate--a fact Romney no doubt approves of--it is, as he said yesterday, "the best ginger ale in the world."

Race in the Race

2008-01-14T10:45:00.000-08:00

The upcoming South Carolina primary has traditionally been the place where dirty politics really come to the fore in America's presidential contest and '08 is turning out to be no exception, with the classic cat fight going on between Hillary and Obama over the black vote there. Obama alleges that Hillary gave more credit to Lyndon Baines Johnson than Martin Luther King Jr. for the 1964 Civil Rights Act--what he called "an unfortunate...ill-advised remark" was merely Hillary saying last week that "it took a president" to get the Act passed, despite King's efforts. Even John Edwards jumped in on the LBJ/Martin Luther King controversy, saying: “As someone who grew up in the segregated South, I feel an enormous amount of pride when I see the success that Senator Barack Obama is having in this campaign. I was troubled recently to see a suggestion that real change came not through the Rev. Martin Luther King, but through a Washington politician. I fundamentally disagree with that.”
Calling Lyndon Baines Johnson "a Washington politician" is like referring to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as "the former New York governor"--there is tons and tons of information that description leaves out. Edwards is not prone normally-speaking to such ludicrous misstatements--one wonders just how hard he is pushing to become Obama's running mate.
In the meantime, a prominent Hillary supporter, Robert L. Johnson, founder of the Black Entertainment Network, made a veiled allusion to Obama's youthful cokehead status, saying that while Hillary and Bill were working away for civil rights, Obama was "doing something in the neighborhood — and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book." Johnson then had the temerity to issue a further statement claiming that he was only referring to Obama's work as a labor organizer in Chicago.
All of this biting and snapping, undignified though it is, is racial politics as usual in the South, albeit with the new twist of the race being between a woman and a black man. In the presidential contest of 1844 between Jimmy Polk and Henry Clay, Polk's Whig opponents tried to brand Polk as a man who owned slaves in order to elicit votes from abolitionists, but this was a little tricky, since both Polk and Clay were slave-owners. The Whigs got around this by claiming it was all a matter of degree—that Polk was really “an ultra slaveholder,” in slavery “up to his ears.” For their side, Democrats accused Clay of being a white slaver (“If we cannot have black slaves we must have white ones,” he is most improbably quoted as saying).
As I found constantly in the writing of Anything for a Vote--anytime we think something really disagreeable is going on in current presidential politics, it pays to take a look back a century or so for a bit of perspective.

A Few Movie "Choices"

2008-01-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

Well, we have Hillary's tears yesterday, so how about a few Hillary laughs this morning? A conservative group called Citizens United has produced a 90 minute movie about Hillary (naturally entitled "Hillary: The Movie"--take a look at the trailer) which they would like to show in selected movie theaters across the nation. All well and good, but Democrats claim television trailers for the movie constitute political advertising and need, by law, to be labeled as such. A three judge panel of Federal appeal judges yesterday nearly laughed a Citizens United lawyer out of court when he tried to claim that calling Hillary a "European Socialist" is not an attempt to prejudice people into voting against her.
A ruling is still to come, but it doesn't look good for "Hillary: The Movie" trailers to run unless they are labeled as political advertising. The whole brouhaha reminds me of the trouble stirred up back in 1964, when the Barry Goldwater campaign was on the receiving end of a very dirty campaign waged by Lyndon Johnson's forces. So, naturally, it fought back. A group calling itself Mothers for a Moral America (in the later words of a Goldwater aide, a “front group” for the Goldwater campaign) made an extremely controversial pro-Goldwater film called "Choices," which showed Americans that they had a “choice” between good and evil.” On the good side, the film portrayed conservative young people having good clean fun, the American flag flying high, the Statue of Liberty gleaming in the sun, and Barry Goldwater giving impassioned speeches.
The "bad" side shown included pornographic books with names like Jazz Me Baby and Men for Sale, dances like the Twist, women in topless bathing suits, black kids dancing throwing rocks during rioting, and a speeding Lincoln Continental from which beer cans were being thrown (this latter was a knock at LBJ, who loved to drive at high speeds on his Texas ranch while tossing down a few cold ones).
The film was sold privately to local Republican groups and scheduled to air on television late in the campaign, but Democrats found out about it and raised such a fuss about its racist content that Goldwater was forced to pull it.

The Trail of Tears

2008-01-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

"Earlier in the day, after hearing from a voter who recalled his father, Mr. Romney choked up momentarily, according to a pool reporter who was present. “He was a great man, and I miss him dearly,” Mr. Romney said."
The above from this AM's New York Times. Mitt is such a copy-cat. First he adopts his "Washington is broken" theme in response to Barack Obama's call for change. And now that Hillary is opening the floodgates of tears, Mitt cries in Michigan, thinking of his father, the late Michigan governor George Romney.
Mitt reminds me a great deal of one of the justifiably forgotten candidates in American presidential history, Winfield Scott. Scott, a Whig, ran against Franklin Pierce in the election of 1852. He was a Mexican War hero who, like Romney, was tall, good-looking, and possessed of an unusually large head. But he was to put it mildly, a bit of a pompous ass. His Democratic opponents called him “Old Fuss and Feathers" for his love of ceremony (he was a man with a Napoleonic affection for a good, fancy uniform) and laughed at the way he would adapt his political stance to almost every need. Scott spoke to his audiences with the all unctuousness of the most politically correct twentieth-first century Presidential candidate: “Fellow citizens. When I say fellow citizens I mean native and adopted as well as those who intend to become citizens.” When Scott heard an Irish accent he would exclaim: “I hear that rich brogue. It makes me remember the noble deeds of Irishmen, many of whom I have led to battle and victory.” He liked to remind his Irish-Catholic listeners that his daughter, now dead, had been a nun. This was actually true, but was so blatantly pandering that most people thought it was a lie.
Scott lost to Franklin Pierce by a good margin. There is no record of him shedding a tear, but one wonders....

Neeiiggghhh!

2008-01-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

Well, now it's a horse race. The last time somebody cried in New Hampshire--Ed Muskie in 1972--it destroyed his political future. This time, when Hillary teared up in the coffee shop on Monday, it appears to have convinced some voters that she was actually human after all.
Of course, that wasn't the whole deal. Women voted for Hillary in much larger numbers than they did in Iowa, as did traditional Democrats. The Clintons have a strong history in New Hampshire. Another thing--the underdog factor. Never, ever underestimate it in American politics.
Also, Obama did something that frontrunners (including Hillary) almost always do, to their peril--play it safe. Although he pulled in big crowds in New Hampshire when speaking, he failed to add to his message or build on his momentum. Thomas Dewey did the same thing in the general election in 1948 and, although everyone remembers Harry Truman as the comeback kid of that campaign, Dewey really lost the election by being afraid to jeopardize his frontrunner status. And the polls in that campaign were as wrong as they were in New Hampshire. In 1948, Elmo Roper, a pollster as famous in his day as Gallup is in ours, had Dewey 44 to 31 per cent and announced that he was going to stop polling: “My whole inclination is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and energy to other things.” Newsweek published its own poll of fifty respected political reporters. Who would win the election? Dewey, said the pundits, 50-0.
On to Michigan (for Hillary--other Democrats are boycotting that state for moving its primaries up), Nevada, South Carolina and finally Super Tuesday on Feb 5. This race, on both sides, is one of the most exciting in memory. John McCain's victory--this one I did predict--puts him in a very strong position, but the dirty tricks are going to be coming fast and furious. Tomorrow I'll provide a sampling of the subcurrent of nastiness already attending this political season.
PS--If you get a chance, read the particularly vile and misogynistic New York Times column of Maureen Dowd's this AM. Hillary's tears, according to her, were "Nixonian" and her comeback last night a "Lifetime" channel movie.

Voter ID Laws

2008-01-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

To take a brief break from New Hampshire for the moment, the Indiana Voter ID law is before the Supreme Court this week for oral arguments, with a decision expected to be handed down by June. I have written on this issue before and am today joined by articles in both the New York Times and the New Yorker. The law states that voters must have some form of state-issued ID in order to vote, something which is seen, at least by Democrats, as an attempt to keep minority voters without passports or driver's licenses from exercising their franchises. In a stunning example of arrogance, a lower court judge had written in his opinion upholding the Indiana law: “It is exceedingly difficult to maneuver in today’s America without a photo ID (try flying, or even entering a tall building such as the courthouse in which we sit, without one)."
Yes, you can't fly without a photo id, but many poor people can't afford to do a great deal of flying. And, as for entering tall buildings without photo ID---interesting phrasing, not short buildings?--was he talking about employee ID cards? These won't get you into the voting booth in Indiana.
As I have said before, this is an extremely bogus issue which is a blatant attempt to keep Democratic voters from the polls, and it will become extremely important if Barack Obama receives the Democratic nomination. Supposedly, such ID laws help stop voter fraud, but there is absolutely no studies that have shown that voter fraud where someone uses false ID to vote is at all prevalent today. According to Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker piece: "The latest and most extensive examination of electoral irregularities, released in November by the nonpartisan research institute Demos, determined that voter fraud was “very rare,” and every other respectable study has reached the same conclusion. This is certainly true in Indiana, where legislators said they were aiming to stop “voter impersonation,” which was already a crime in the state; in the entire history of Indiana, the number of prosecutions for this offense has been zero. Nationwide, despite an attempt by the Bush Justice Department to crack down on voter fraud, there were only a hundred and twenty federal prosecutions and eighty-six convictions between 2002 and 2006—a period in which close to four hundred million votes were cast."
The largest amount of voter fraud that has occurred recently in a presidential election took place in Ohio in 2004, as I have blogged about in the past, where Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell went to extraordinary lengths to keep minority Democratic voters from the polls, using such techniques as cadging, forcing city voters to wait in long lines, and striking voters from the rolls on archaic technicalities.
If the Supreme Court upholds the Indiana ID Laws, voters beware.

An Historic New Hampshire

2008-01-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

The New Hampshire primary has been deciding presidential futures for quite over thirty years in America, but we haven't seen a race which so perfectly captures the tensions found in America today since 1968 when Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey vied for the Democratic nod. On both sides, front-runners are poised to tumble like nine-pins. Iowa could be a fluke, and probably will be for Mike Huckabee. But if Obama continues to pull ahead in polls (a 10-13 point advantage as of yesterday) he is going to find himself in a very powerful position going into Nevada Michigan, South Carolina, and then all the primaries of Super Duper Tuesday. In fact, the New York Times claims that Hillary's campaign is already writing off New Hampshire.
A shocking turn-around, leaving the Democratic candidates so winded they can barely attack each other--Hillary merely claims that Obama talks the talk but can't walk the walk, and Edwards, feisty though he is, is swinging at shadows.
Republicans too are seeing front-runners crumble, with McCain--as I, ah-hem, have been predicting--pulling to the fore. Mitt is loosing it--at one point during the Saturday night debates he basically told Mike Huckabee that the man made up facts as fast as he talked, to which Huckabee replied with a genial chuckle and head shake. There you go again.
The saddest sight may be the Clintons wandering New Hampshire--a state that made their political fortunes back in 1992, despite Gennifer Flowers--in the position of old fogeys battling off a fresh newcomer. Bill came in second in New Hampshire in '92 and called himself "the Comeback Kid." For his wife to do the same, however, she'll have to take a first.

Winning Big

2008-01-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

The people--of Iowa, at least--have spoken and Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are, for the moment, the front-runners. If history is any indicator (see Pat Robertson in 1988) Mike is the least likely of the two to remain in that position, but Obama may have real staying power.Far too early to tell who's going to win these horse-racers; in fact, the picture may not be clear until after Feb 5, when the Mega-Super-Duper twenty state bout hits. But it is extremely heartening for Democrats to see that they were able to pull off twice the turnout that the Republican did--usually Republican organizers have trumped Democrats in this regard--and that many of their workers and caucus-goers were young people. As I have been saying all along, when the general election roles around, watch out for attempts by Republicans to keep Democrat minorities, especially, from the polls by various methods such as the Voter ID laws currently awaiting a decision in the Supreme Court. Tons of Democrats voting for a minority candidate is a Republican nightmare come true.
On to New Hampshire next Tuesday. Watch for Hillary to script a comeback and John McCain to be pushed to the fore. Mitt is Mutt meat, as is John Edwards. Rudy? Well.....he is beginning to sound like a broken record. He was asked last night about the horrible 3% of the vote he received in Iowa (even though he didn't campaign much there, that's pretty bad) and he replied, "None of this worries me. 9/11, there were times I was worried."
Yeah, you weren't the only one, Rudy. Now give it a rest.

Caucus

2008-01-03T11:09:00.000-08:00

According to the New York Times today. Mitt Romney says he's as excited as kid at Christmas. Barack Obama promises only one more day of campaign commercials. Hillary Clinton is providing drivers and babysitters. John Edwards is busing all over the state. Fred Thompson says he'll quit if he doesn't come in a very strong third. And Rudy G. is paying no attention at all and is campaigning in New Hampshire for next week's primary there.
Freezing cold, pot luck dinners, town hall meetings. People gathering, casting their votes, being American. And it's all, if you'll excuse me, bullshit. The Daily Kos has a hilarious and pointed bit today on how "absurd" the Iowa caucus is. I mean, really, a nonbinding non-primary where millions of dollars have been spent over the last year just goes to show you how crazy American presidential politics continues to be.
The Iowa caucus really came to national attention in 1976 when the unknown Georgia politician Jimmy Carter won a victory there. Reforming laws had been passed in the wake of the Watergate scandals. One of them was the Federal Elections Campaign Act (which went by the unlovely acronym FECA) in which individual campaign contributions were severely capped, and candidates were limited in what they themselves could spend personally in their campaign. But any candidate who could raise $100,000 in 15 states could qualify for federal matching funds. (In 1976, the Supreme Court declared one part of FECA unconstitutional, claiming that contributions were really a form of free speech and thus protected by the First Amendment. Candidates were free to spend as much money as they wanted to on their own campaigns, unless they took part in Federal matching funds. But the Court did continue limits on individual contributions of Federal candidates and upheld the part of FECA that called for public disclosure of campaign financing.)
Because more money-strapped candidates could now qualify for Federal matching funds, the primary season got longer and longer, helped in part by the fact that more states, under pressure to make their delegate selection process more transparent, held primaries. While the Iowa caucus is not a primary, it is the earliest referendum on the presidential campaign held every four years. Along with his brilliant chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter understood that early victories in the extended primary process received a disproportionate share of attention from the press. Therefore, Carter went all out to win the obscure Iowa caucus—and the next day, the New York Times anointed him Democratic frontrunner, a position he was to keep. His running mate would be Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale.
Ever since, candidates have been freezing their butts of in Iowa this time of year, praying to be so anointed. And who will be anointed tomorrow?My guess is that Hillary and Huckabee will, but that the race will continue close and undecided through February 5, Mega Super Tuesday, when twenty states weigh in.
Anyway, it all begins this evening at 7 pm Central time.

Stuck Inside of Margaretville with the Iowa Blues Again

2008-01-02T02:48:00.000-08:00

Just back from a lovely winter stay at a friend's place in Margaretville, New York, up in the Catskills. Good food, good people, good sledding, lots of snow. Too much snow, as a matter of fact--we got socked in a few days longer than I had expected, and without television, Internet and, for a while, phones. So I am only now returning to the relative civilization of northeastern New Jersey to find that, yes, they are holding the Iowa caucuses without me.
What a wonderful race so far. God, I love primaries. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee seems to be pulling away Mitt Romney, thankfully. Not that I am a huge Huckabee fan--does he remind anyone else of Richard Nixon?--but Mitt really is such a Mutt. The two are now arguing about whether Huckabee has "gone negative" on Mitt one times too many, but, come on-- Huckabee is just using the time-honored "I'm-an-underdog-even-when-I'm-no-longer-an-underdog" tactic beloved of JFK and Bill Clinton and many others. The Nixonian part--aside from Mike's physical resemblance to the man while wearing a hunting cap--came when Mike decided not to campaign negatively then decided he wanted to, then decided he wouldn't, then showed reporters an attack ad targeting Romney. Just for the heck of it.
Nice, but no cigar. For some real primary dirty tricks, we need to look back at the 1972 primaries, which have been overshadowed by Richard Nixon's lopsided win over George McGovern and the Watergate shenanigans of the campaign itself. But, right around now in 1972, President Nixon felt that he was vulnerable to a challenge from a strong Democratic candidate. So it became the goal of his dirty tricks managers like Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin to “foster a split between Democratic hopefuls” in the primaries. Teddy Kennedy was not a problem—the last surviving Kennedy brother had pretty much blown his presidential chances by driving a car off a bridge in 1969 and drowning the young girl with him.
Going into the New Hampshire primary in February, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 running mate, was predicted to be the big winner—in fact, most journalists had already anointed him the Democratic presidential nominee. And Richard Nixon viewed Muskie as a formidable candidate.
But then strange things began happening. Suddenly, New Hampshire voters began receiving phone calls from rude black people—phone calls that came in late at night or very early in the morning—saying that they had been bused in from Harlem to work for Muskie. And then conservative editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, published a letter purportedly written by an ordinary citizen which accused Muskie of using the word “Canuck” to refer to French-Canadians. In defending himself against this and other slurs on his wife, Muskie, standing outdoors before microphones and cameras, began to cry. Or, since it was snowing, perhaps a snowflake had landed in his eye—it’s impossible to tell from tapes of the incident.
But Muskie did lose his cool, and the rap on him now was that he was unable to handle pressure. He won New Hampshire, but by a much smaller margin than predicted. Only later was it discovered that the “Canuck” letter was written by White House aide Kenneth Clawson.
Things just got worse when Muskie headed for the Florida primary. There, many voters received a letter written on Muskie campaign stationary, which said (falsely) that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving in 1967. Other letters under the Muskie letterhead claimed that prominent Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Henry “Scoop” Jackson had fathered a child with a 17-year-old girl.
No detail was too small. Posters appeared on Florida highways which read “Help Muskie in Busing More Children Now.” Ads were placed in tiny free shopper’s newsletters saying: “Muskie: Would you accept a black running mate?” And, at a Muskie press conference in Miami, someone let go a handful of white mice with tags attached to them which read: “Muskie is a rat fink.”
The person behind all this Florida mayhem was Donald Segretti, prince of dirty tricks. Segretti, whose name means “secret” in Italian, was a California lawyer who had been law school pals with several students who later became Nixon staffers—in particular, Dwight Chapin, the man who hired him and paid him $16,000, plus expenses, to wreak havoc in the primaries.
Muskie came in fourth in Florida and was finished as a candidate. Segretti’s role was discovered in the investigations after the Watergate break-in and he served four and a half months in prison for misdemeanors associated with illegal campaign activities.
After Florida, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern were the main Democratic candidates, and Nixon’s men rose to combat this. Setting up a phony “Democrats for Nixon” group (shades of Tricky Dick’s California gubernatorial run) they produced leaflets describing Humphrey as a man who, as Johnson’s Vice-President, had helped escalate the war in Vietnam. Some of the leaflets had a picture of a fish over Humphrey’s face, with the caption: “There’s Something Fishy About Hubert Humphrey.”
Partly as a result of the ill feelings caused by these fake ads, Humphrey and McGovern were unable to present a united front when McGovern became the nominee and the time came to go after Richard Nixon.
As the man said, primaries are a bitch--and then you die.

Kissing Cousins....

2007-12-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

Hope everyone had a jolly and not scowly Christmas feast, with talk of presidential politics kept to a minimum around the groaning board. We managed here in New Jersey to pull this off, with one significant exception, which was a little tiff which exploded into brief bang-up of an argument over whether or not Obama really had enough experience to be president, something I think will be the main thing tossed his way should he get the Democratic nod.
But a few deep breaths and some inhalations of turkey and mashed potatoes calmed this one down.
A few days before Christmas I spoke on the air with WAOK radio jock Shelly Wynters down in Atlanta and took some phone calls about possible dirty tricks coming up. To my surprise, one caller was quite worked-up about the fact that Rudy Giuliani's first marriage had been to his second cousin, something that hadn't even concerned me. When I said Rudy's enemies had much more to throw at poor Rudy than the "cousin thing"--both the caller and Shelly broke out laughing. It was like they were saying, "Dude, you don't know how people really think!" Another caller quizzed me closely to see if I shared his concern that George Bush would not let elections occur next November--some excuse would be made (a faked terrorist attack) to shut down the gov and keep Bush in office under martial law. Rumors like this have surfaced at different times in American history and have always been dismissed as the doggerel of far-far-far out fringe groups. However, I talked with a few friends about this later and found that there are a number of people who really believe in this as a scenario. Despite my credentials as a dirty tricksologist, it never even occurred to me, but then again, it wouldn't occur to me to marry my cousin, either.

Love Child

2007-12-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

Well, can anything top Mike Huckabee's kid torturing and killing a dog? How about John Edwards' love child. The National Enquirer is now trumpeting the alleged fact that a former campaign worker for Edwards, Rielle Hunter, is six months pregnant with his child. Edwards has been dodging affair rumors for months; if Rielle does turn out to be carrying a little Edwards, this will trump the Clinton scandals of the 1992 campaign--in fact, many blame the Clintons for spreading this particular piece of dirt, ironically enough. There is a further problem for Edwards in that the story comes with a a further note attached--political operative Andrew Young, close to Edwards, is supposedly claiming he is the father--which seems a transparent cover-up.
Of course, Rielle denies all this adamantly -- not the pregnancy, but the involvement of both Edwards and Young. Is it true? Sans DNA or incriminating photos--remember Senator Gary Hart on the yacht with Donna Rice in 1988?--who can tell. Certainly, love child smears have long been popular, indeed staples, of political smearing. They've been used against Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Clinton, of course. and John McCain, just to mention a few.
In some cases--Jefferson, Cleveland, Harding--this happened to be true. In others, not. But as I have been saying, it is all getting nastier and nastier, proving the main point of Anything for a Vote: dirty campaigning is not the exception to the rule in American presidential politics--it IS the rule.

Rough! Rough!

2007-12-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

Well it's all getting nastier and nastier, isn't it, as January 3, 2008 rolls around. No time for holiday cheer. Mitt Romney, was just profiled in the NY Times saying he was inspired by his father, Michigan Governor and 1968 presidential candidate, to run for office. George Romney, if you will remember, said that he had been "brainwashed" by Army officials during a visit to Vietnam, a bit of startling honesty which got him immediately hounded out of the race. Mitt, despite avowed father-worship, does not possess the same startling honesty. A photo sent to numerous news agencies shows him at a 1994 pro-choice fundraiser during his Massachusetts Senatorial race against Teddy Kennedy. His response is that this is old news--sure, he says, he was "pro-choice, or effectively pro-choice," then--love that little qualification--but now is is pro-life. (Effectively pro-life?) His wife wrote a presumably effective check to Planned Parenthood for $150 at about the same time. At least, it didn't bounce.
Hillary is now embarked in her "likability tour" in Iowa, which is sort of pointless. Bill is likable, she's not, except in private, where she apparently can be quite charming. Reminds one of the attempts of Herbert Hoover's Republican handlers to take His Stiffness and turn him into a human being in 1928. Pictures sent to newspapers showed him romping with a large dog. "That Man Hoover--He's Human!" the suggested headlines read. Trying to make candidates into something they aren't is always an iffy proposition. Alf Landon, making his hopeless run against FDR in 1936, was a very likable guy, but Republicans wanted him to seem more authoritative. They hired a film director named Ted Bohn—a forerunner of modern political candidate groomers—to teach Landon not to smile with his mouth hanging open, to walk slightly ahead when in a group in order to dominate pictures, and to shake hands with his chin up to give the impression of firmness. It did no good at all. As Hillary says: “There are people who will never vote for me,” she said. “It breaks my heart, but it’s true.”
The candidate who is the most fun to watch right now is Mike Huckabee. I agree with the Republican strategist who says nominating Huckabee would be "an act of suicide" on the part of the Republican Party, but the fact that someone dredged up the story that Huckabee's son, as a boy scout in 1998, allegedly helped kill a dog (by hanging it and cutting its throat?) is interesting. Huckabee, for the record, has not quite responded to the dog allegations, although he does say: "It was mangy. It was going to attack."
Sort of like Mitt?

Gentlemen, Cock Your Pistols

2007-12-17T07:16:00.000-08:00

Former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey endorsed Hillary Clinton yesterday but spent a good deal of time talking about Barack Obama's supposed Muslim religion, pointing out that his middle name is Hussein and that he has Muslim ancestors. This was supposed to be compliment to Barack and may actually have been--Kerry tends to march to the beat of a different drummer--but coupled with another bit of news coming out of Nashville leads me to wonder why Barack doesn't just challenge all those making such sweet comments about his drug use and supposed religion to a duel?
Duels have long ago disappeared from American politics, but the threat of them once continually hung over political discourse in the late 18th, early 19th centuries. In Nashville, they are looking for the body of Charles Dickinson, who was killed by Andrew Jackson in a duel. This in 1806, in a dispute over horse racing, well before Jackson first became president in 1828, but in the 1828 contest against John Quincy Adams Jackson was charged with having fought literally hundreds of duels--in reality, Jackson fought at least two, killing only one man, Dickinson, whose own bullet nearly pierced Jackson's heart. Jackson also carried a bullet in his shoulder from a shoot-out with Senator Thomas Hart Benton in a Nashville hotel in 1813, but that was less an official duel than spur-of-the-moment bang-bang.
But having the reputation of being willing to challenge someone to a duel was certainly a valuable thing for Jackson or any politician. Actually, one of the funnier dueling moments stemming from a presidential election took place in 1826. In April of that year, the hot-tempered Virginian Senator John Randolph made a speech on the Senate floor accusing Henry Clay of throwing the contentious 1824 presidential contest (so close it was decided in the House of Representatives) to John Quincy Adams—specifically, he called him a “blackleg,” slang for a cheating gambler. This was too much for Clay, who challenged Randolph to a duel.
The two met early in the morning at a deserted spot along the Potomac. They took their positions, backed up by seconds who included the aforementioned Senator Thomas Hart Benton, but a comedy of errors ensued. First, Randolph accidentally discharged his gun and had to be given another one. Then both men shot, and missed. They reloaded and Clay fired. His bullet pierced Randolph’s coat without hurting him. Randolph paused a moment, then turned – and deliberately fired his pistol straight up in the air.
“I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay,” he said, and the two men shook hands and were thereafter friendly acquaintances. Senator Benton dryly remarked that it was “about the last high-toned duel” he ever saw.

Hey, I'm Really Sorry

2007-12-14T07:10:00.000-08:00

Tis the season of forgiveness....all these apologies going on. Mike is apologizing to Mitt for saying that Satan and Jesus are bros in the Mormon religion, Hillary apologizes for Obama for comments made by her campaign chairman in New Hampshire about Obama's youthful drug use. I have to say, back in the good ol' days, no candidate would have thought about apologizing to another. Do you really think Teddy Roosevelt would say "sorry" for calling William Howard Taft "a fathead with the brains of a guinea pig." Roosevelt could be a pretty nasty guy. He also called William Jennings Bryan "a kindly man and well-meaning in a weak way...but he is the cheapest fakir we have ever proposed for president." And he suggested, when rumors arose during the 1912 contest that Woodrow Wilson had had an affair: "You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts so much like an apothecary clerk."
Now, those are insults,guys. And none of this wishy-washy, hypocritical "I'm sorry" either....

Altered Candidates

2007-12-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

Well, nice to see the "Drug Smear" rearing its ugly head in 2008--I had been expecting it, but perhaps not this soon. The Daily Kos reports that Billy Shaheen, co-chair of Hillary Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire, recently "pondered" Barack Obama's supposed drug use, saying, usefully, that Obama's mention of his drug use in high school gives "so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."
Uh-huh. And how about Democratic dirty tricks, Billy? His is a classic intraparty smear job, as the Kos points out, posing as "concern" for Obama,but really leaving the impression in reader's minds that a)Obama was a really big druggie and b)he is now a vulnerable candidate.
This is Cheap Shot 101 and--naturally--I mention it in my book as one of my Top Ten Classic Attacks in Presidential Elections. It's Number 2: "You're Drunk All The Time!"
Charges of inebriation have been leveled at candidates throughout American history. In 1852, the admittedly hard-boozing Franklin Pierce was called "the hero of many a well-fought bottle." Ulysses S. Grant, a "soak" in the parlance of the day, got his share of it too, with this little ditty sung by Democratic voters:
"I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines
The stupidest man that ever was seen.
I smoke my weed and drink my gin
Paying with the people's tin."

(The weed here is tobacco and the Black Marines referred to Grant's supposed support of Reconstruction efforts in the South.) Okay, so maybe Grant and Pierce did drink a bit, but Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1876, was called a souse and the guy was a teetotaler. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan was accused of being a drunk. He wasn't but he did enjoy relaxing rubdowns with gin, which may have led to that impression. Al Smith, who openly supported repeal of Prohibition was branded a lush who would install a bootlegger in his cabinet. And all the guy did was have a martini before dinner. Etc. Etc. It's just surprising any candidate thinks this type of thing will work, short of video of the supposed drug or alcohol abuser falling down and vomiting during a press conference. Certainly, it didn't work with Bill Clinton, who was able to get away with the hilarious statement that he "didn't inhale" and it didn't work with George W. Bush who, of recent candidates, was probably the hardest partier of them all back in the day.

"Yo, Jesus! It's the Devil! Pick up, bro!"

2007-12-12T11:04:00.000-08:00

Only twenty more days until Christmas and, no, I'm not miscounting. I'm talking about January 3, in Iowa, where, it now appears, almost anything can happen. My stocking overfloweth with discord and strife. Hillary, it is rumored (and of course it would be rumored) now has Bill working to bail her out of her downward slide ever since the Philadelphia debate last month. Obama, of course, has Oprah on his side--but will this backfire?
On the Republican side, there is Mike Huckabee, the Comeback Kid. One of the scariest things about Huckabee, as the New York Times reports, is his avowed love of Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" series of novels, Christian screeds about the end of the world and the Resurrection. One wonders whether or not Huckabee can endorse a "novelist" of this stripe and win the general election. And Huckabee is also quoted as saying 'Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the Devil are partners?" Whew -- up close, this guy is not quite so folksy and charming. I consider Mitt Romney a bit of a stiff, but it is strange that Huckabee takes this line with him. Tim La Haye's books are far scarier than anything they could dream up in Salt Lake City. But that's America for you. And. after all, eternal salvation and eternal damnation have always had their place in presidential politics. In 1960, ex-president Harry Truman firmly told voters that they "might go to hell" if they voted for Richard Nixon. And you know--he was sort of right.

Smear Your Favorite Candidate

2007-12-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

Usually political professionals are the ones who get to really dirty up the opposing candidate in presidential contests, but now you, too, can have your chance, and right from the privacy of your own home. Yesterday, my eight-year-old daughter Carson introduced me to the computer game "Presidential Paintball," which you can find on miniclips.com, the game site that is all the rage among the eight-year-old set. Presidential Paintball features Rudy, Mitt and John McCain vs. Hillary, Obama, and John Edwards in vicious paintball wars. Just pick your candidate and start firing.Carson's thoughts: "Hillary is a terrible player. Mitt is good. John McCain is way too slow."
Actually, Rudy seems the fastest, especially when firing at Hillary--he knocks her off before she can even began to press "R" for reload.
Anyway, try it out. Presidential Paintball is the most fun I've had since playing my Watergate board game--yes, I have a vintage edition of one--way back in the seventies.

Forget about Mitt -- How About That Gennifer?

2007-12-07T08:16:00.000-08:00

I was going to blog today about Mitt Romney and his supposedly landmark speech on religion, but, in my humble opinion, it turned into such a bust, such a political toeing-of-the-line--as compared to JFK's talk to the Southern Baptist ministers years ago, where the guy basically told them a)he wasn't controlled by the Pope and b) religion had nothing to do with running for President. Romney told his carefully assembled audience (JFK's group was a highly skeptical one) that since the Founders had written religion into government, who was he to change that?
Well, yeah--they also wrote in a ridiculous electoral college voting system and many of them kept slaves and George Washington hated to shake hands, preferring to bow. Mitt should start bowing on the campaign trail--George did.
Well, enough. I much prefer yesterday's Huffington Post interview with Gennifer Flowers, who was at the scandalous epicenter of Bill Clinton's run for the presidency in 1992. Flowers, today, as then, a chanteuse--she is currently working in a revue called "Bottom's Up!" in Vegas--opines that she might vote for Hillary. ("I can't help but want to support my own gender, and she's as experienced as any of the others, except maybe Joe Biden.")
We have yet to have any real sexual scandal in the 2008 race--we may get into it a bit more with Rudy G. and his "trysts" with Judy Nathan on New York city's bill while he was married to Donna Hanover. But, so far, nothing like 1992.
After getting a strong start in the primaries, Clinton's candidacy had nearly collapsed in New Hampshire after numerous revelations about his womanizing.
Gossip had swirled around Clinton in this regard for years. An Arkansas State trooper who was part of Clinton’s bodyguard swore he had heard Hillary yell one night: “I need to be fucked more than twice a year!” Republicans sleaze-meisters whispered that Clinton had had a child with a black woman. In 1990, a lawsuit (later dismissed) had been filed by a disgruntled Arkansas state employee claiming that Clinton had had relationships with five different women. Other rumors accused him of rape and of feeling up a woman in the bathroom at his own wedding.
The only sexual misconduct charge that was to stick to Clinton for the moment was that he had had an affair with singer and former Arkansas state employee Flowers of whom he reportedly said, “She could suck a mole through a garden hose.” After the “smoking bimbo” revelation in the Star tabloid—Gennifer had taped phone conversations with Clinton—the Arkansas Governor was met at every campaign stop by what his staff called “the clusterfuck:” a semi-circle of reporters with microphones shouting leading questions at him.”
But Clinton, appearing on the television news show “Sixty Minutes” with Hillary, admitted only that he caused “pain in my marriage” and thus managed to escape unscathed—as he was to do on the issues of smoking marijuana (incredibly, he said he “didn’t inhale”) and draft-dodging back in the sixties (“dodge” was perhaps too strong a word, but he had avoided military service until he lucked into a high draft lottery number).
So Clinton was indeed the Comeback Kid, although to Republicans he was “Slick Willie.” They hated him passionately and almost hysterically, the way Democrats loathed Richard Nixon. One wealthy Republican businessman in Chicago spent 40,000 dollars at the beginning of the campaign unsuccessfully digging for dirt that would torpedo Clinton. It did little good—Clinton jumped out to 13 point lead in the polls after Labor Day. Desperate Republicans strategists even asked two aides to Great Britain Prime Minister John Major, who had won despite a weak economy and poor personal ratings, for advice. (Their only suggestion, which was not taken, was to plaster pictures of Gennifer Flowers on huge billboards all over the country above the words AND NOW HE WANTS TO SCREW THE COUNTRY, TOO.)
And now Hillary is running for President. And Gennifer might vote for her. What a wonderful country we live in.

It's Getting to feel a lot like Christmas

2007-12-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

...if you love dirty political campaigning that is. I mean, here we have the old Muslim Obama slur rearing its ugly head again as well as Mike Huckabee, now that he thinks he actually has a shot at things, refusing to answer a question as to whether or not Mormonism is a cult. Loaded question, to be sure, but, hey Mike, you're supposed to be the "non-politician" in the bunch.
And speaking of Mormons, I can't wait to see what Mitt has to tell us this morning re his religion. Many pundits are recalling JFK's famous speech during the 1960 campaign, in which Kennedy went to Houston to personally address a prominent group of Protestant ministers and convincingly deny that he had any “allegiance” to the Pope. But Mitt's situation is a trifle different. For one thing, he says he will not address the issue of Mormonism head on. For another, he is the first Mormon to run for President--to some extent, Kennedy's way was made smoother by the campaign of Al Smith in 1928. Smith, the very first Catholic to run, was treated abominably by the Republicans and many people alive in 1960 had clear memories of this. Secondly, even more than Catholicism in 1928 or 1960, Mormonism has tons of superstition and prejudice associated with it--hey, it's a cult run by polygamists and all those young white guys in shirts and ties, right?
Don' know if Mitt has the dexterity to defuse this issue, especially since early excerpts of his speech don't really address it. He seems to be sticking to the high road, but let's watch and see....

Greatest Campaign Commercial of All Time

2007-12-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned the other day, there have been some truly classic presidential campaign attack ads out there -- 1988 featured "Revolving Door" and "Tank," but there probably has been none so completely effective as "Daisy," used by Lyndon Johnson's campaign in 1964. Daisy did not, once, mention Barry Goldwater by name, but it didn't need to. Everyone who saw this alarmist nuclear era smear knew just who was being talked about.
On September 7, 1964, during NBC’s top-rated “Monday Night at the Movies,’ viewers were treated to a lovely shot of a little blonde girl walking through a field. She stops to pick up a daisy, and begins pulling the petals off and counting in a high, innocent voice, “1...2…3...4," charmingly getting her numbers wrong. At the same time, a military voice begins a count down: “10…9…8…7…6” At the counting reaches zero, the little girl looks up, startled. You stare into her frozen face and…a huge mushroom cloud explodes, filling the screen. Over the mushroom cloud, Lyndon Johnson’s voices says. “There are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must love each other or we must die.”
Produced by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the ad aired only once—one paid appearance, that is. To the delight of the Democrats, newscasts continuously replayed the spot in its entirety, driving home the message and give free exposure. The more the Republicans screamed, the worse it was.
You can watch it here, courtesy of YouTube. You absolutely can't take your eyes off it.
Also, I want to throw in a plug here for another classic campaign commercial, Ronald Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" bit. Not an attack ad per se, but a glorious bit of whitebread propaganda which is quite hilarious to watch--at one point, Reagan takes credit for the fact that "6500 young Americans" will be married in a single day. (No mention that half of them would be divorced within ten years.)

December Surprise

2007-12-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

Yes, Rudy, Mitt, Mike, Fred--there is a Santa Claus! Some might think it a little early to be handing out Get Out of the Doldrums Free Cards, but I love the way this news about Iran's halting its nuclear arms program as far back as 2003 is shaking out. While certain pundits say that it makes the Bush Administration seem a little, well, foolish--a few weeks ago, they were pounding the podium and calling for war--I would agree that this is a gift to Republican candidates just before the crucial winter primary season begins.
After all, they now no longer have to defend an Administration which is already in one unpopular war and had seemed interested in entering into another one. If Republicans want, they can attack the intelligence community's vicissitudes, but they don't have the Bush war-monger anchor around their necks, particularly since the surge in Iraq appears to be calming the waters there. In my mind, this is really a devilishly clever move--has Karl Rove moved back in?-- which will improve the chances of whatever Republican makes it to the top after the bloody mauling of Iowa, New Hampshire and Super-Duper Tuesday.
More on that famous attack commercial I promised you yesterday in a few hours....

Going Negative

2007-12-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

Now as we are just one month away from the Iowa caucus, presidential races on both sides of the political spectrum are tightening incredibly with half of Iowan voters saying they could change their minds at any moment. Expect attack ads in that state and in New Hampshire to reach a frenzied peak in the next few weeks. Remember, while most people say that they dislike attack ads, they also work quite well, leaving an indelible impression in the viewer's mind.
It's also important to note that there is a difference between attack ads, and releasing negative information about your opponent. The latter is part of what democracy is all about and may even have a legitimate value. We probably did need to know, in 1972, that George McGovern's vice-presidential running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had had shock treatments and been treated for alcoholism, although certainly the intent in releasing the info was to smear the poor bastard. (Anyone remember how McGovern was behind Eagleton "1000%" and then dumped him, pronto?)
But most real attack ads are alarmist in nature, distorting the truth and intending to scare and anger the viewer. The 1988 George Bush-Michael Dukakis contest was famous for its attack ads. Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater, media advisor Roger Ailes, and political pro Ed Rollins pursued a strategy of “raising the negatives” by churning out commercials attacking Dukakis for being too liberal on drugs and crime and too much of a girly-man on defense. When he was dying young of a brain tumor a few years after the campaign, Lee Atwater apologized for only one thing: his vow to “make Willie Horton Michael Dukakis’s running mate.”
Horton was a 39-year-old black convict who, during Dukakis’s tenure as governor, had taken part in a weekend furlough program in Massachusetts. Instead of returning to prison, however, Horton fled to Maryland, where he raped a white woman and stabbed her white fiancée. The colors matter here, because the Republicans were about to make the most racist series of attacks in modern American electioneering history.
To begin with, Republicans renamed Horton. In actuality, his name was not Willie, but William. He was known to his mother, family, friends, enemies, cops and parole officers as William. Newspaper accounts of his crimes referred to him as William. And yet the Republican attack ads called him “Willie.”
What kind of attack ads?
A few samples:
•“Get Out of Jail Free Card”
Modeled after the Monopoly card and distributed to 400,000 Texas voters, this tiny mailbox stuffer read: “Michael Dukakis is the killer’s best friend and the decent honest citizen’s worst enemy.”
• “Pro-Family Letter”
This was the Maryland Republican party fund-raising letter which coupled pictures of Willie Horton and Michael Dukakis over the headline: “Is This Your Pro-Family Team for 1988?”
But the most notorious one--and here it is, courtesy of YouTube--was the infamous "Revolving Door" commercial. This stark black and white TV spot showed convicts marching through a turnstile into jail and immediately back out again. No matter that the “convicts” were out-of-work Republicans instructed not to shave for the day. The point had been made.
Things go so bad that the Bush campaign claimed in an ad that Chicago mass murderer John Wayne Gacy would be released on furlough if Michael Dukakis were elected. Even the serial killer clown was offended. Gacy dispatched an angry missive from prison: “It is an insult to the voting public that [Republicans are] exploiting the name of John Wayne Gacy to scare people into voting for George Bush.”
Tomorrow: the most famous attack ad of all time.

Fictional Characters

2007-11-29T07:03:00.000-08:00

I have to say that the Republican YouTube debate last night was much more fun than any I've watched so for for either party. How lovely when you have a retired general outing himself nationally to question treatment of gays and lesbians in the military, Rudy Giuliani accusing Mitt Romney of living in a "sanctuary mansion," the resurgent Mike Huckabee claiming that Hillary Clinton should be sent on "the first rocket to Mars," and John McCain, increasingly recovering his old form, coming out strongly against the torture known as "waterboarding," jabbing away at Mitt Romney's refusal to identify it as such. "Life is not 24 and Jack Bauer," McCain said.
Exactly--but so many people, including politicians, mistake television for reality. This happened, some of you may remember, back in 1992, as George Bush fought Bill Clinton for the presidency. Vice-President J. Danforth Quayle--and how some of us miss him!--searching for an issue, hit upon the idea of going after the quite popular "Murphy Brown Show." In the show, Brown (played by actress Candace Bergen) was an anchorwoman who had decided to give birth to a child out of wedlock. Quayle thundered that bearing a child alone “mocks the importance of fathers” and was an example of the “poverty of values” that afflicted television.
This was not a smart move, since even Republicans loved to watch "Murphy Brown" and because Quayle, weirdly, was acting like this sitcom character was actually a real person. White House staffers now decided that Quayle should actually change his tune and praise Murphy Brown for her courage in having the baby (rather than, say, an abortion). Bush saved Quayle from this humiliation, and the whole situation died when, in early June, the Vice-President visited a New Jersey elementary school and corrected student William Figueroa’s spelling of “potato,” claiming it was “potatoe.”
Wrong. But this new source of ridicule for Quayle sent the Murphy Brown controversy spiraling into the old news file.

Dueling Smears

2007-11-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post blogged Anything for a Vote yesterday in discussing whether or not the 2008 campaign is getting dirtier. The answer is, as I've said below, yeah, a bit, we but haven't seen real mudslinging yet.
I talked later with a Christian Science Monitor reporter who mentioned the rumor that the Clinton campaign was holding back real dirt on Obama, waiting for the opportune moment to use it. This put me in mind of one of the most fascinating episodes in smear campaign history, during the election of 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt and his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie both had great mud to throw at each other--but held back. Roosevelt had won by a landslide in 1936 over Alf Landon and was now going for an unprecedented third term, but he had stiff competition from Willkie, who was a former Democrat and a charismatic presence on the campaign trail.

The Great Republican Smear
Henry Wallace was Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture and a good one, too, but this liberal politician had a dreamy, spiritual side. To the horror of President Roosevelt’s men, just after Wallace accepted the v-p nod, Republicans passed Roosevelt’s chief of staff Harry Hopkins photostats of letters written by Wallace to a strange Russian mystic named Nicholas Roerich, whom the Secretary of Agriculture had befriended. In one note Wallace wrote: “I must read Agny Yoga and sit by myself once in a while. We are dealing with the first crude beginnings of a new age. May the peace of the Great One descend upon you.”
Another letter to Roerich talked about current events in a weird code: “The rumor is the Monkeys are seeking friendship with the Rulers so as to divide the Land of the Masters between them. The Wandering One thinks this is very suspicious of the Monkeys.”
Translation: the Japanese (the Monkeys) wanted to divide Manchuria (the Land of the Masters, which the Japanese had invaded) with the British (the Rulers). And Roosevelt (the Wandering One) didn’t like it.
Supposedly the originals of these letters were being held by the treasurer of the Republican National Committee in a bank vault. Did the Democrats want people to know that a whack job like Wallace was only a heartbeat away from the presidency? This alarmed the Democrats greatly, but oddly enough, at Wendell Willkie’s personal order, these letters were never used.

Was this because of…

The Great Democratic Smear
Roosevelt knew that the married Wendell Willkie had a mistress in New York, a writer and editor named Irita Van Doren, former wife of Carl Van Doren (uncle to Charles Van Doren of 1950s quiz show notoriety). As it turned out, Irita—whom Roosevelt referred to as “an extremely attractive little tart”—used to be the mistress of Jimmy Walker, flamboyant New York mayor. This liaison outraged Walker’s wife so much that Jimmy was forced to pay her $10,000 dollars each time she made a personal appearance with him.
Roosevelt wondered humorously to aides if Willkie’s wife had to be hired in the same fashion to smile at the press during campaign stops. Perhaps the story of Willkie’s girlfriend should be spread?
There is no direct knowledge of communications between Roosevelt and Willkie, but, interestingly enough, neither smear story became public knowledge during the campaign. Two wrongs may not make a right, but they can sometimes constitute a pair of gunslingers staring at each other down Main Street, each afraid to reach for his gun.

Not looking terribly snippy

2007-11-27T06:11:00.000-08:00

Did you see the picture of Bush and Gore posing together in the Oval Office during the President's obligatory photo op with the Nobel Prize winners yesterday? Were there ever two more uncomfortable men?
A picture worth well over a thousand words, but I'll only provide a few. The telephone conversation below took place in the wee hours of the morning on the day after Election Day, 2000. Gore is in Nashville, Bush in Texas. Gore, if you will remember, had conceded the election to Bush when he received the erroneous information that Florida had gone to the Republican. Now he is calling to un-concede.
Gore: “Circumstances have changed dramatically. The state of Florida is too close to call.”
Bush: “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling me back to retract that concession?”
Gore: You don’t have to be snippy about it.”
(Bush then explains that his “little brother,” Jeb Bush, Florida governor, has assured him of victory.)
Gore: “Let me explain something. Your little brother is not the ultimate authority on this.”
Bush: “You do what you have to do.”
Ah, brings it all back, doesn't?

1876 And All That

2007-11-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

Had a great conversation on radio yesterday AM with John Rothmann of station WKGBO-AM in San Francisco. We ranged far and wide over dirty American presidential elections, devoting special time to 1800, 1824, and 1876. The latter leads my Top Ten list of nasty presidential battles and is "the most stolen" election of any of the stolen presidential contests.
The above cartoon, by the famous Harper's Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast, shows the victorious but battered GOP elephant sitting at the grave of the Democrats, bemoaning: "Another victory like this and I am undone."
In 1876, Ulysses S. Grant was hungered for a third term, but the stench of scandal and cronyism hung so heavy over his administration that Republicans finally said no mas. Instead, in their convention in Cincinnati in mid-June, they chose Rutherford B. Hayes, Governor of Ohio, who would run on a platform holding elected officials to rigid standards of probity and responsibility. No one ever claimed the 53-year-old Hayes, was the most fascinating guy in the world. But he was a former Congressman and honest-to-goodness Civil War hero (four times wounded), the happily married father of seven, and just about as hard working and sincere as a politician can get and still be a politician. His running mate would be New York Congressman William Wheeler
1876 found the Democratic Party desperate for a presidential victory—after all, they hadn’t won in 16 years—and certain they could take advantage of a Republican party weakened by the series of corruption scandals that had rocked the Grant administration. They picked as their nominee Samuel J. Tilden, Governor of New York. Tilden was the Rudy Giuliani of his age–as a crusading Manhattan DA he had smashed Boss Tweed’s powerful ring of corruption and sent the Boss himself to prison. Tilden was brilliant, but you wouldn’t want him kissing your baby. He was an icy, aloof bachelor, whose penetrating intellect made even his friends uncomfortable, and who was prone to bouts of ill health. And when wasn’t really sick, he was imagining he was—he comes down in history as a man with intense hypochondria who once saw a doctor every day for a month. To make matters worse, he had taken no part in the Civil War—in fact, he had amassed millions from his railroad and iron mines during the conflict. His v-p would be the Indianan Thomas Hendricks.
Although the candidates were still not making public appearances, their political machines were percolating. Tilden began a public relations campaign to overcome his cold fish image. Hiring editors, writers and artists, he set up a “Newspaper Popularity Bureau” whose sole purpose was to manufacture a warm, loveable Samuel J. Tilden and sell him through press releases to newspapers all over the country. As the election heated up, he created a so-called “Literary Bureau,” in which teams of writers churned out anti-Hayes material, including a 750-page book which attacked Hayes for supposedly stealing money from Confederate war dead and for being a party to Grantian scandals—“wicked schemes for peculation.”
In all honesty, though, Tilden’s dirty tricks couldn’t hold a candle to those of Zachariah Chandler, the bewhiskered, bejeweled and often besotted Republican National Chairman who was also Hayes’ campaign manager. It all began with a fundraising letter sent by Chandler to Republican appointees currently holding office: “We look to you as one of the Federal beneficiaries to help bear the burden. Two percent of your salary is___. Please remit promptly. At the close of the campaign, we shall place a list of those who have not paid in the hands of the head of the department you are now in.”
After threatening his own party members, Chandler turned on Tilden, accusing him of everything from sympathizing with slaveholders to having a scheme to pay off the Confederate debt if he took office.
Naturally, the Democrats were not idle while all of this was going on—in fact, their smear campaigns showed a great deal of creativity. They accused Hayes, a genuine Civil War hero, of literally robbing the dead—of stealing 400 dollars from a Union solder executed for desertion. (Strangely enough, Hayes actually did take the money before the man was shot, but only to pass it on to his family members—a fact Hayes was unable to prove until after the election.)
But dirty tricks doesn’t even began to describe what both parties did in the South. The Republicans–the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln—wanted freed blacks to vote and thus prodded many of them to the ballot boxes at gunpoint. And the Democrats, particularly in South Carolina, started violent race riots, in some cases shooting and killing blacks who attempted to exercise their franchise. On both sides, men voted ten or twenty times, and local party bosses stood by ballot boxes, tearing up any votes for the “wrong candidate.”
In the end, however, it seems incontrovertible that Tilden won the popular vote by 250,000 (out of a total of 8,320,000 votes cast). But here the Republican political machine got to work, essentially demanding that the "returning boards" (those men who tabulated the electoral votes in each state) in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana "hold their state" for the Republican candidate. The struggle over the twenty remaining electoral votes lasted from November 8th to March 2nd, 1877. The returning boards simply threw out enough Democratic votes to swing Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina to Hayes. Democrats cried foul. Officials of both parties flocked to the South and President Grant sent Federal troops, just in case. In the end, an Electoral Commission was established, consisting of 5 U.S. Senators, 5 Congressmen, and 5 Supreme Court Justices, all of whom split evenly along party lines. With the Commission tied at 7-7, the Supreme Court Justice who had the deciding vote resigned—and a Republican justice took his place. Hayes was voted into office with 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.
. In the end, fittingly enough, this dirtiest of all 19th century elections finished with a secret dirty deal. Southern Democrats promised not to contest the Election Commission’s results if Hayes, once in office, would pull Federal troops out of the South and appoint at least one Southerner to his cabinet. Reconstruction collapsed—and the future of civil rights was set back for decades—but Hayes was awarded the presidency. March 4th, 1877, was Rutherford Hayes inauguration day, but things had become so heated—someone had already fired a shot through the window of Hayes’ home—that he had to be secretly sworn in.

A lovely Turkey Day battle

2007-11-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

Isn't it wonderful--well, I think it is, anyway--to be in the middle of an increasingly fractious presidential contest on Thanksgiving Day? To have dirty politics to entertain us as well as football. I mean, here we are, just beginning our great American electoral dinner--the food is barely set out on the table--and Obama and Hillary, napkins tucked around their necks, are really starting to duke it out. Who does she think she is, Treasury Secretary? Obama says. And what about all that secret dirt she supposedly has on me? And Hillary jabs right back, what, does Obama really think living in a foreign country at age 10 gives him a presidential perspective? While these two fight, the middle child, John Edwards, sneaks in his own digs from the other side of the table: "Now we know what Senator Clinton meant when she talked about 'throwing mud' in the last debate," his spokesman said yesterday."Like so many other things, when it comes to mud, Hillary Clinton says one thing and throws another."
And Iowa is still seven weeks away. Just think what Christmas will be like!

Thank you, Caspar

2007-11-19T12:58:00.000-08:00

As a quick addendum to the below, its nice to see that John Edwards agrees with me re Hillary's sensitivity to some of the very mild mudslinging going on in the campaign so far. On CBS's "Face the Nation" yesterday, Edwards said: "If anybody, including Sen. Clinton, thinks this is mudslinging - this is milquetoast, compared to what we're going to see next fall.''
You go, John. The Edwards campaign, if will be remembered by intrepid readers of this blog, was the only one to acknowledge receipt of Anything for a Vote. Although he just sort of generally thanked me for my "support," I have a feeling he's been dipping into it. And to use a word like "milquetoast," even if somewhat incorrectly ("milquetoast" comes from a 1920s cartoon featuring a meek and mild character named Caspar Milquetoast and is not generally used as an object) adds the crowning touch. Milquetoast? Just wait until the milquetoast really hits the fan and Hillary--and John and all the rest-- will need as much asbestos as they can get their hands on.

Asbestos and lace

2007-11-19T06:11:00.000-08:00

Spoke with Lewis Lapham on Bloomberg Radio show The World in Time yesterday (it also went out on Sirius, XM and WorldSpace Satellite. If you missed it and have any interest, you can find it on Lapham's site (laphamsquarterly.com).
It was nice to talk to Lewis Lapham, former Harper's editor and, since 2006, host of his weekly radio show and editor of Lapham's Quarterly. We are in agreement, I think, that people get a little too hysterical over some of the "dirty" politics currently being played as candidates jostle for position in the run-up to Iowa, New Hampshire, and Mega Tuesday. Hillary's claiming during the debate last Thursday that she needed an asbestos pantsuit to ward off attacks from her fellow Democrats is quite hilarious. She ain't seen nothing yet--that asbestos will soon have to change to chain mail. But if we're psychoanalyzing her I find it quite interesting that she felt she had to protect herself from toxic attacks with one of the most toxic substances around--I'm not talking here about pantsuits, which are pretty toxic, but asbestos. Check out http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=2781 for some amusing comments on this...